Apple marketing at its best.

Even Apple isn't this stupid. This is an analyst trolling for attention.

And their assertions that Mavericks was the only way to get security updates for MacOS going forwards seems to be contradicted by the fact that the previous version of MacOS was security patched when Mavericks was launched.

A big part of the reason they can even get away with that claim is because Apple doesn't publish a proper software lifecycle policy. For all I do like about Apple, that's the one big thing I feel they do wrong. Mac OS X and iOS badly need a documented support policy so that it's clear how long they'll receive security updates. Is 10.7 safe? How about 10.6? iOS 6?

Throwing a wrench in all of this of course is Apple's decision to stop charging for new Mac OSes as of Mavericks. Since it's free, is it a new OS or is it just another patch for Mountain Lion? From a pricing standpoint you can get away with calling it the continuation of Mountain Lion since you don't need to pay for it. But from a technical perspective it's definitely not the same OS, and introduces new features and makes changes that can break software. To use Microsoft as an example here, they treat Windows 8.1 as a service pack for Windows 8, which is to say that they'll be ending support for Win8 in just under 2 years. So there's certainly precedent for quickly dropping Mountain Lion.

In one week will we be reading about how country X is sending an icebreaker to free the three stuck icebreakers?

From what I understand, the Polar Star is quite a bit more powerful than any of the other vessels currently involved in this event. To the tune of being able to sustain bashing through 6ft of ice, and peaking at around 21ft.

Consequently, if the Polar Star can't cut it (figuratively and literally speaking) then we're in big trouble. Ice breakers don't come much bigger. Plus Russia's big guns, their nuclear icebreakers, are more for operational endurance and speed than they are ice thickness.

"eDRAM" in this article is almost certainly an error for that reason.

eDRAM isn't very well defined, but it basically boils down to "DRAM manufactured on a modified logic process," allowing it to be placed on-die alongside logic, or at the very least built using the same tools if you're a logic house (Intel, TSMC, etc). This is as opposed to traditional DRAM, which is made on dedicated processes that is optimized for space (capacitors) and follows its own development cadence.

The article notes that this is on-package as opposed to on-die memory, which under most circumstances would mean regular DRAM would work just fine. The biggest example of on-package RAM would be SoCs, where the DRAM is regularly placed in the same package for size/convenience and then wire-bonded to the processor die (although alternative connections do exist). Conversely eDRAM is almost exclusively used on-die with logic - this being its designed use - chiefly as a higher density/lower performance alternative to SRAM. You can do off-die eDRAM, which is what Intel does for Crystalwell, but that's almost entirely down to Intel using spare fab capacity and keeping production in house (they don't make DRAM) as opposed to technical requirements. Which is why you don't see off-die eDRAM regularly used.

Or to put it bluntly, just because DRAM is on-package doesn't mean it's eDRAM. There are further qualifications to making it eDRAM than moving the DRAM die closer to the CPU.

But ultimately as you note cost would be an issue. Even taking into account process advantages between now and the Knight's Landing launch, 16GB of eDRAM would be huge. Mind bogglingly huge. Many thousands of square millimeters huge. Based on space constraints alone it can't be eDRAM; it has to be DRAM to make that aspect work, and even then 16GB of DRAM wouldn't be small.

Actually they sort of do. All major airports have industrial grinders to destroy confiscated items, though it's primarily for foodstuffs. For wood they probably hauled it away to a bigger (and proper) chipper.

CNN (Unfortunately they don't have a picture of the grinder).

Ginep. Mangosteen. Guava. Eggplant. Nance fruit. Ginger. Jocote. Grapefruit. Watermelon.

These aren't the offerings of some international supermarket. They're seized produce, destined for Customs and Border Protection's grinding machine.

Some items that need more inspection get sidelined to a nearby U.S. Department of Agriculture laboratory. Bigger items - beef, sugar cane or bags of food banned from coming into the United States - are hauled away. Everything else goes through an industrial kitchen grinder in a back room in the International Terminal.

Tonight, agriculture specialist Lauren Lewis does the honors. It's 6:40 p.m., just past suppertime.

Slipping on black gloves, she takes each piece - garlic, onions, rambutans, carrots and more - and feeds it into the whirring machine.

With that, what might have been someone's post-flight snack is reduced to mush.

All in the name of safety.

But Latinum is silver-colored...

http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Latinum

All the more reason to pay for it. Your local paper isn't going to improve in quality by having its budget cut further.

Though considering papers try to be all-encompassing, I never understood the AP complaint. It doesn't make any sense to rewrite a national story for a local paper, and would you rather the paper not include national news? These are still papers of record for their local communities, after all, so there's still a historical interest in making sure both local and national news is covered.

Correction for TFS: Readers are cheap, the media is understaffed.

All of this just goes to show that you get the news that you pay for. If you're not paying for your news, not only are you not the real customer, but you're not offering any kind of signal to the writer and publisher that rewards them for quality.

Instead you're probably drawing your news from the 24 hour news cycle, which is the epitome of low quality TFA discusses. The 24 hour cycle offers no time for quality, and being entirely advertising based means that it trends towards sensationalism in order to keep viewers watching (and the ad dollars flowing in). Blogs for that matter aren't any better for largely the same reason, as they have the same instant-publishing goals and are equally prone to sensationalism.

Real news takes time and money. Time to do research, and money to pay for staff and travel to go do that research. If the public won't pay for that, then the public won't get real news. It's as simple as that.

Which is why it's all the more important to support newspapers, which are by and large the last bastion of quality reporting and research. They aren't perfect, but they're all that's left. If you care about the news then the single best thing you can do to help quality journalism thrive is to go buy your local paper (yes, buy; not read for free on their website). Only by giving the journalists in your community a paycheck, some time, and a bit of trust, will you get quality journalism. Otherwise if you aren't paying for your news, you're getting the news that you pay for.

Leaves less of a paper trail and makes it somewhat easier to avoid paying capital gains tax on the proceeds.

Of behalf of all of the people who legitimately pay taxes on their capital gains, fuck you.

The Intellimouse Optical really is a tank. As Microsoft's "budget" 5 button mouse they went with a design that was both mechanically and electrically simple, and as such it just doesn't have too many ways to fail. The cable and the teflon pads are both strongly bound to the body, so the only real physical points of failure are the micro-switches. With enough time (and abuse) the switches under the left and right buttons can be worn out, but even that can take several years.

Without parity checking, you simply aren't addressing bit rot. Period. It could be Raid 9 Million(tm) and if all it's doing is copying the data, and not comparing it, bit rot will still proceed apace, silently eating your data. But let's say you're a good administrator that has enabled parity. Great! But there's still a problem: parity cannot restore data that has become corrupted due to bit rot -- it is a detection-only mechanism. So if you have two drives in a RAID-1 with parity configuration, as you also suggest... it will detect the file corruption, but as it cannot correct it, it will then promptly seize up and fall over dead. This is because for every N clusters written, a parity cluster is also written; This allows the array to detect if that data chunk was correctly committed; But if the data on any of the clusters within the chunk are altered later, the RAID array will only know that this chunk of data (known as a stripe in RAID), is invalid. It cannot correct it.

One quick note: a mirrored space running ReFS will do automatic checksumming and scrubbing. This isn't done for parity spaces, though I'm not sure why this is.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2012/01/16/building-the-next-generation-file-system-for-windows-refs.aspx

This is just my $0.02, but if the trolls are anything like some of the rest of us, I have to assume it's because we're tired of the constant promotion of second-rate codecs that put ideology ahead of technical concerns.

Patent-free video codecs are the ultimate case of NIH syndrome. The major patent free video codecs (Theora, VP8, etc) are largely attempts to recreate/modify existing MPEG video codecs to get around the patents of the aforementioned original MPEG codec.The end results are codecs that aren't appreciably novel compared to the MPEG codec they're going up against, and at the same time it's not even clear (from a legal perspective) whether these codecs really are patent-free, or if they're infringing on the MPEG-LA's patents anyhow. Which is not an attempt to inject FUD into any of this, it's just that there haven't been sufficient legal challenges, and in the meantime it's questionable that these codecs can be so very similar to the MPEG codecs and somehow not fall under the associated patents.

At the same time the fact that these codecs are being pushed opposite the existing MPEG codecs only fractures the market and slows the adoption of new video technologies. We end up with Mozilla and Google flailing around with alternative codecs rather than buckling down and doing what's necessary to secure the rights to use the MPEG codecs in the first place, only finally doing the right thing after they've exhausted every other option. Web browsers should have fully supported H.264 years ago.

It's the codec equivalent of generic colas. Yeah, they're similar, but they're not the same and they're not what most of us are after. And in the meantime it quickly gets tiring of being told how we're doing it wrong by buying the more expensive product. There are certain things in life that are worth paying for, and a good/novel video codec is one of those things.

Which isn't to slag the patent free codec guys entirely. The video codecs have struggled, but the audio codecs have been outstanding. Opus is a roaring success, which I credit both to the development structure for the codec - involving many parties like the IETF early on while clearly shooting for novel/new audio codec - and the technical capabilities of the engineers who designed the codec.

That may be 4 years old, but still, that's damn impressive.

What you're looking for is called the eDrive standard. It lets the OS interface with the SSD in such a way as to allow Bitlocker and other whole drive encryption methods while using the SSD controller to do the encryption.

But that's not the case though. The extremely long design cycles for CPUs (and their associated chipsets) means that Intel has been working on power consumption for years. Haswell and Silvermont made x86 extremely power competitive, and the basic designs for those families were created before Windows 7 was even released, never mind Windows 8.