... is far infrared (FIR) panels. Not the hot-element, near-infrared kind, these ones come in various sizes and colours and emit no visible light. They're also very safe – they get warm, but it would take several seconds' contact to scald yourself. Surface temperature wouldn't boil water.

Counterintuitively, they are best mounted on ceilings in commonly-occupied places, radiating heat downward. They heat the objects and people in the room, and the air mostly indirectly. The infrared light/heat bouncing around the room means you can be comfortable at an ambient air temperature about 5C lower than with traditional heating. They're common in infrared saunas and hot yoga studios, but new to the home heating market. I haven't had a full winter with mine yet, but claims of savings on the order of 40% are common.

These are more efficient and far less costly to install than radiant floor heating systems... several hundred euros per panel, plus installation.

Before you consider any heating system, however, know the differences among radiant, convective and conductive heat transfer!

For bonus points, combine with renewably-sourced electricity and other home energy loss minimizations.

As great as these advances are, perhaps the biggest news is what wasn't announced. Tim has made lots of hints this year about products in the pipeline not hinted at in the rumour mills, then teased us again today about "tripling down" on secrecy. Making Stephen Colbert their chief of secrecy is a pretty strong hint it's TV-related.

AeroFS is like Dropbox without the middleman; they control only credentials, but your content never touches their servers. It's free for up to three users, and $10/month per additional user.

I installed one of the 500GB drives several days ago, and the performance improvement is incredible. Boot times are under a quarter what they used to be with the 5400RPM drive that came with the laptop (a 2011 Macbook Pro). Application launches are virtually instantaneous. It's like a new computer.

I can't speak to the abstract "overall performance" measurements from the article (random 4K response times? give me a break)--where this drive soars is in real-world, day-to-day performance, and the improvements are phenomenal.

Repeated writes are a weak spot for SSD, and this is where a hybrid drive should offer more reliability: cache the frequently-accessed, less-frequently changed data. Should the SSD fail, the drive will fall back to the platter.

The value proposition of these drives is unbeatable--vastly improved speed, great storage capacity, dirt-cheap prices. Let's hope the long-term reliability is what it should be.

Why not? Handling raw 1080p video for an interface released in 2012 seems like a minimum to me.

This may be automatic processing, but the fact that you're aware of it means that it's not subconscious.

I keep one month's email on my IMAP server, and pop everything to my main machine.

Slashdot community, how is an anti-Apple post rated 5 Insightful, and an Apple defence post rated 0 Troll?

AeroPress makes the best coffee of any method I've tried, hands down. Benefits? Very low cost (under $40). Lower brewing temperature (85'C recommended) means less bitterness.

I've abandoned my Delonghi, and now drink coffee only at home. Everything else tastes terrible.

The obsession of some Americans with owning arms strikes much of the rest of the world as strange. It's a holdover from a revolutionary era. The net result of increased gun ownership is increased gun deaths.

Your sense of security from your ammunition is delusional.

Yes, they would be... I've looked but found none. Trade secrets!

$5.5 billion paid to developers is 70% of the total raked in, which is (5.5/70%) = $7.85 billion. 30% of that is about $2.4 billion.

It's a fantastic market Apple provides for developers, no argument there. My point is only that it's a very good little business for Apple. Personally I think 30% is a bit rich--20% or 25% would be fairer. But Apple dictates the terms--developers don't exactly have a choice if they want to develop for iOS.

$2.4 billion, 500,000 apps... are you suggesting it costs on the order of $4,800 in wages to approve an app?

I made no claims of net vs gross... but if their curation and hosting costs are even close to $2.4 billion, they're doing something very wrong!

Apple makes good money from their App store. Their earnings report for 2012 Q3 states they've paid (cumulatively) $5.5 billion to app developers, which means $2.4 billion in commissions to Apple--hardly chump change. It does look small, however, in comparison to the outrageous profits they rake in from hardware sales.

However, Apple has indeed managed to broadly slash the perceived value of software, a neat way of squeezing Microsoft. MS has seen the light, and it's why they're also going the ecosystem/integrated hardware/software route.

It does give pause about what the state of open computing will be in ten years...