AcquaCow - Slashdot User

2m Thunderbolt cables cost $50-> 0

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 05, @10:08PM

An anonymous reader writes "Look around and you’ll find that 2m Thunderbolt cables cost AUS$50, a significant jump in price over competing products like USB 3. This isn’t some sort of Monster cable-esque markup, it is part of the inherent issue with Thunderbolt. There are specific chips and firmware in the connectors, and the ability to manufacture cables involves licensing the technology. From what we have been told by contacts in the hardware industry, there are five such companies which are licensed to make Thunderbolt cables. This article looks at some issues with Thunderbolt."
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Comment: Re:Sweet (Score 1) 192

by AcquaCow on Thursday February 16, @05:45PM (#39066339) Attached to: WindowMaker Development Resumes, Has First Release Since 2006

Been using NX for years, I love it.

Wish there were some more updates to nomachine... are there any other clients out there that are more up to date?

Comment: Re:It'd better happen quick then (Score 1) 311

by AcquaCow on Wednesday November 30, @12:20PM (#38215218) Attached to: Is the Time Finally Right For Hybrid Hard Drives?

The cache on a hard disk is often used as write cache - store incoming data in cache, leave actually committing it to disk until a convenient opportunity arises.

32MB of cache doesn't take that long to flush. 1GB, OTOH...

You're forgetting that a hybrid drive would be using NAND flash vs DRAM... NAND is a NVRAM and won't have to be flushed to disk in the event of a power outage. It is persistent.

That said, they may still use a little bit of DRAM cache in the drive.

-- Dave

Comment: Re:USB Drive, SAN/NAS, LTO ... (Score 1) 680

by AcquaCow on Friday January 21 2011, @08:58AM (#34951112) Attached to: How Do You Store Your Personal Photos?

If you aren't needing to store more than 64GB of material then you could substitute "thumb drive" or "CF/SD card and reader" for portable USB drive ... solid state media will be 'safer' for long-term storage but obviously afford less space-per-dollar.

Negative. NAND flash w/o active management is NOT a "safe" storage medium, especially in larger sizes of MLC flash.

NAND cells love to flip bits/etc. just for the fun of it. Unless you have some active process to continually check bits and verify they haven't changed, I would not trust it for long term storage.

It's true that NAND is non-volatile and will store electrons for a long period of time, but there isn't too much of a guarantee that the information recorded stays in-tact for long, unpowered bits of time.

Comment: Re:Cheap (Score 1) 158

by AcquaCow on Friday October 15 2010, @07:27PM (#33914130) Attached to: AOL Spends $1M On Solid State Memory SAN

Once you factor in the total cost of ownership for a disk-based SAN eg: heat/cooling/maintenance/etc... Flash is actually pretty cheap.

Comment: Color coding = Multiplexing? (Score 1) 129

by AcquaCow on Friday July 16 2010, @10:46AM (#32926122) Attached to: Irish Gov't Invests In Color-Coded Fiber Optics

Sounds like they are just using different wavelength (wavelength = color) lasers to push multiple signals down the same strand...

This is an old idea and is already in use all over the world.

-- Dave

Comment: I'm sure... (Score 4, Insightful) 269

by AcquaCow on Wednesday May 05 2010, @09:00AM (#32096790) Attached to: GIMP Resynth vs. Photoshop Content Aware

I saw that site a few weeks ago when folks were going gaga over PS's "new" feature (GIMP Resynth has been around for a few years now)...

I'm sure Adobe has seen it, I'm sure Adobe took the time to try and make theirs better.

The question is the Adobe implementation worth the cost of PS, or is the GIMP plugin "Good enough"

That really comes down to the consumer though. I think it is "Good enough" for my needs...I can easily touch-up anything it does that I disagree with.

-- Dave

Comment: Re:I don't know about you guys... (Score 1) 94

by AcquaCow on Tuesday April 20 2010, @03:22PM (#31914328) Attached to: Lego Robot Plays <em>Tetris</em>

But THIS is why I read slashdot. All that other news stuff is just fluff.

And if you read Hack A Day, you could have read about it 5 days ago...

http://hackaday.com/2010/04/15/mindstorm-plays-tetris-for-you/

-- Dave

Comment: Re:I'll Be Damned (Score 1) 504

by AcquaCow on Tuesday May 05 2009, @08:44AM (#27829047) Attached to: Why Text Messages Are Limited To 160 Characters

That's impressive. Who's your cell phone provider and what sort of package do you need to get that deal? The carriers I know of charge 15 to 20 cents per message (although you can get a discount on the first N messages with a package).

I have Verizon and pay $4/month for 400 txt messages...

That's $0.01/message.

And anyone in the US can get that.

-- Dave

SPAM: BumpTop now has a public download. 0

Submitted by

AcquaCow

on Friday April 10 2009, @10:17AM

AcquaCow writes "I periodically check on the BumpTop project and noticed a few weeks ago that they had a private beta. I checked back again today and saw that they have a public download now available for the rest of the world. I'd write you a nice description, but the demo is much more interesting."
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