Just looks like the PDO's flipped back to positive to me - not exactly a mystery!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...

Sounds like a bargain in comparison to UK provider charges. Although Three offers "Feel at Home" free roaming in some places, in places where it doesn't (eg Canada), you'll pay $896 per 100MB. And no, that isn't a typo!

Calling a UK number. £1.40 per minute.
Calling a Canadian number. £1.40 per minute.
Texts to UK. 35p per text.
Texting a Canadian number. 35p per text.
Receiving calls from any number. 99p per minute.
Receiving texts from any number. Free.
Using internet and data. £6 per MB.
Using voicemail. £1.40 per minute.

http://www.three.co.uk/Support...

Seems eminently sensible to me.

Here in the UK Three already allows you to use your contracted minutes and data allowance in some countries, including in the USA, at no extra cost.

http://blog.three.co.uk/2013/1...

I'll be making heavy use of it in a couple of months when I'm heading to Seattle (and Alaska), it'll be far more convenient than buying a local SIM as I did last time I was in the USA.

I'm quite surprised that there aren't already similar agreements for people from the States visiting Europe.

It's the third one I've had - and none of them have failed. They've all become outdated long before any failures had time to pop up.

Hurrah!

The lesson here is that people who own a cool, overclockable GPU in a gaming laptop may want to overclock it. Goodness knows what came over them when they removed it, but at least they've seen sense now.

FWIW, the GM204 chip runs cool and is easy to overclock. I overclocked my 980M from 1,038 MHz (core), 1,253 MHz (RAM) to 1,228 MHz (core), 1,373 MHz (RAM) and received an 8% boost in my 3DMark scores. The GPU temperature didn't go above 70C either.

It makes a noticeable difference playing games at 3K, which is the native resolution of the panel.

For those who are unaware btw, if the chip gets too hot it'll simply downclock until it reaches a stable temperature. In some brands of laptop that happens at stock speeds, whereas others (such as the Clevo I have) have plenty of headroom. It's not the sort of thing that's going to lead to warranty repairs.

FWIW, the sort of laptops for which this is an issue (ie high-end gaming laptops) typically have graphics cards on MXM modules, they're designed to be upgradeable to the latest and greatest.

The *price* of those modules, however, means it's not something most owners will ever do...

The cheap and nasty Acer will throttle when it gets to 70C, overclocked or not.

The water outside here isn't frozen. I'm in the southeast of the UK, where we've had a generally mild, largely snowless winter - it's 8C as I write this, for example. Not that that matters, as most of us have central heating and the temperature indoors won't be anywhere near as cold as it is outside!

The 2nd-gen Maxwell chips are known to run cool and overclock well, be they laptop or desktop form (in fact, it's the same silicon - just with a few bits lopped off and a lower stock speed for mobile). A cynic would say they're removing overclocking as it'll impact on their plans to release slightly faster versions of the same chip later this year...

The 980M in my Clevo P650SG overclocks by 125MHz with ease - and it won't even hit 70C while playing games in that overclocked state either. When you're playing at 3K (there's also a 4K screen available), that extra 125MHz makes a noticeable difference.

Removal of overclocking from the drivers is irritating at best.

They *do* seem to overread compared with proper weather stations, if you look at wundermap - although that could be because they're sold more as a fashion accessory than a serious weather instrument and owners may not be siting them properly.

A Y-Cam Bullet HD 1080 takes decent quality pictures and supports FTP, but it's quite expensive as it's marketed as a security camera. It also makes a good webcam for outdoor use, such as looking into an enclosure at a wolf centre...

It's not *that* impressive - laptop i7s are 47W parts and they're doubtless *very* closely related. There are also some 37W quad-core mobile i7s, but they have low clock rates in comparison.

If you look inside one of the ZIP files you'll see there's a link to a Slovakian warez site (in particular, 3D Lemmings Winter edition). I can't verify if you can actually download from that Slovakian site though as it looks like it's subscription-based.

Yup, I know that global warming doesn't imply that my back yard will get warmer all the time. However, it's interesting to me at least that the warmest year on record here in the UK (records going back 350 years or so) coincides with the warmest year globally.

In Manley's paper it refers to a reference from 1702 of a thermometer graduated in inches. There's your answer!

Manley's paper explains how the various figures were derived. The early figures are subject to a good deal of approximation, but if you leaf through the paper you'll see various sources have been used to compile the data. By the mid 1700s records are accurate enough that no approximation is needed. Although it's a far from perfect way of doing things, it's the best we have. The CET series is the world's longest monthly temperature record series, FWIW.

"Before 1671 intstrumental readings are few; accordingly all values before 1671 have been rounded to whole degrees C. Regular thermometer readings began again in 1672. "

Here's a link to the paper on the Royal Meteorological Society's website:
http://www.rmets.org.uk/sites/...