blacksmith - Slashdot User

Comment Re:broadcom soc (Score 2) 181

by blacksmith on Tuesday February 07, 2012 @10:20AM (#38953185) Attached to: First Run of Raspberry Pi Boards To Be Completed Feb 20th

There's a fair amount that's been removed from this datasheet from the full BCM2835 one - all the parts that aren't accessible from the ARM have been taken out. It wasn't that these bits were secret per se, but that it took effort to produce the edited version.

Submission + - Why the Raspberry Pi won't ship in kit form (geek.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 31, 2012 @12:23PM

An anonymous reader writes: The guys at Broadcom have released an image containing the Raspberry Pi SoC and memory chip to help explain why the tiny PC won't ship in kit form. Clearly the chips are so small and the solder blobs required so tiny, 99% of the time you would mess up doing it by hand. Add to that the fact one chip as to sit on top of the other, and if you're a millimeter out your chips are fried.

Comment Re:12 atoms? Go smaller! (Score 1) 135

by blacksmith on Friday January 13, 2012 @05:52AM (#38683826) Attached to: IBM Shrinks Bit Size To 12 Atoms

I think the word you're looking for is "symbol" rather than "bit". A bit by definition is either 0 or 1.

Comment Re:Real Ale! (Score 1) 840

by blacksmith on Tuesday June 28, 2011 @08:16AM (#36595226) Attached to: With regards to beer, I prefer it to be:

> Pity King & Barnes exist in name only now.

WJ King are run by the same family as the King from King & Barnes. The newish brewer there was at Harvey's until a few months ago.

Submission + - Hotmail tops Gmail says study (typepad.com)

Submitted by doperative on Friday May 06, 2011 @04:56AM

doperative writes: The Which? testers like the 5GB of storage space offered by Hotmail and its interface:

"It actually feels like part of the operating system," they noted, and liked the way they could group messages into conversations. Advertising was unobtrusive and they thought the spam filter good. (Gmail offers more than 7GB for free.)

Submission + - Brits Spend Over 7 Hours A Day Online

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 19, 2010 @08:25AM

An anonymous reader writes: According to an Ofcom survey of 1,138 UK participants aged 16 and above, the average person is also cramming 8h 48m of media-time into just over 7 hours of the day — not by magic, but by multitasking. Twice as many people now own and use smartphones than two years ago, equating to 26.5% of the British population. Data consumption has also increased, shooting up by 240% in 2009. What's interesting, though, is that despite the popularity of handset based email and instant messaging services like BlackBerry Messenger and Windows Live Messenger on many handsets, SMS text messaging is also up. Brits spend over 100,000,000,000 which works out at roughly 1700 messages sent by every person in the UK in the space of a year.

Submission + - Sata cable makes music sound better (malcolmsteward.co.uk)

Submitted by igorthefiend on Thursday August 19, 2010 @07:07AM

igorthefiend writes: Hi-fi journalist Malcolm Seward reports that changing a SATA cable in his NAS resulted in easily perceptible improvements to the sound produced. PC Pro begs to differ. The resulting comments caused him to close his blog for comments. Another example of audiophile snake oil?

Comment Re:If you give up the inch, they'll take the mile (Score 1) 901

by blacksmith on Wednesday June 24, 2009 @12:14PM (#28453801) Attached to: NASA Sticking To Imperial Units For Shuttle Replacement

Spirits haven't been sold in fractions of a gill for some time now. They're sold in multiples of some number of ml, although that number varies between bars - 25ml, 35ml and 40ml all seem to get used.

Comment Re:Not much carbon in hops (Score 1) 468

by blacksmith on Thursday April 02, 2009 @07:08AM (#27428153) Attached to: Is Alcohol Killing Our Planet?

Largely right, in that the hops provide hardly any sugars for fermentation. I'd like to correct one point though. The hop flowers are removed after the boil, before the yeast is even added. Spent hops are generally sent to agriculture, so the carbon cycle is continued that way.

Submission + - BBC considers catering for Microsoft users only

Submitted by pthompson on Thursday February 01, 2007 @10:30AM

pthompson writes: In a public consultation at [1] the BBC is asking for views on whether its on-demand services should be made available only to those who use Microsoft software (Question 5). I'm sure the Slashdot community won't be shy in giving their opinion of that idea...

[1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbctrust/consult/open-consult ations/ondemand_services.html

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