"People were bitching about games being monochrome saying that 16 color monitors were pointless back in the day."

Did not happen in my neighborhood, still own the nostalgic original monochrome PC. Less than 256 colors sucked, and 16bit color was a breath of fresh air.

"16 core CPUs just means anything less will eventually become the bargain basement processors."

Quads available Aug 2008 from intel. Dual core is there bargain basement processors today. Extrapolating on your statment (there is a lot of wiggle room in 'once software companies...'). So 9 years from now the Quad core will be the low end and 18 to 36 years from now the 16 core will be the bargain basement CPU.

It is navigation.
Navigation software working with the navigation mapping software which is the problem described in fine /. summary.

GPS is the fancy clocks floating about in space.

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<quote><p>I'm not a fan of banning them either. However, given the rate of obesity and type 2 diabetes in this country with strong evidence they are caused by our increased consumption of various kinds of sugar ("real" sugar and HFCS), I would be very much in favor of a relatively high tax on them.</p></quote>

There are taxes on sugar. It is 5x higher in the US than the rest of the world (if you are in the US)
That 5x bump in cost is one of the reasons HCFS exists in so many products. Sugar is so dammed high (already).

Deciding that you'd "very much in favor of a relatively high tax" on something you don't like is a pinheaded means of solving the problem. How about the FDA limit sugar / HCFS in products.

Tax the shit out of it and people will stop buying and dying of X (insert tobacco) related causes - ...wait we already tried that...

<quote> All RAM on PCs used to be parity RAM until Wang started suing RAM manufacturers in the 90s over its patents on parity SIMMs.</quote>

Not so.

Many had ECC. AAPL computers skipped ECC, to save money and look stupid at the same time (I made the stupid part up).

AAPL = Apple Inc., FYI

Modern i3s support ECC, not just XEONs. See below.

http://ark.intel.com/products/77480/Intel-Core-i3-4130-Processor-3M-Cache-3_40-GHz

I picked the first ARK link & the i3 supports ECC RAM.

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Gold is in the same Ohm magnitude as is Ag and Cu. Au is in third place, Ag first and Cu is second. Point being Au is a great metallic conductor. It is nearly always alloyed with other metals. Sometimes the Au alloy is a better conductor of electrons, other times less of one than is pure gold.

The softness helps, but the primary 'help' is that Au is *highly resistant to oxidization* [aka corrosion], which is a key improvement over Cu or Ag. So your point of it being soft is hardly the primary reason for the desirability of Au alloy electrical contacts.

Kind of obvious that white reflects more solar energy than do dark colors. So the point of the story is a several year old point, less ice/snow the faster the poles warm in the sun.

Imagine the stories if the opposite were happening, global cooling. The panic.

It would not run the IBM office suite of programs and was artificially limited on RAM. 'Running most PC applications' is not good enough.

The original "chiclet" style had tall, hard plastic keys which made touch-typing virtually impossible and a better keyboard was offered, but not for free.

The design limited the expansion, memory and speed of the system. For instance, with no DMA capability, the keyboard is disabled when accessing the floppy drive. Even worse, the serial port will drop data when the floppy drive is in use.

The ads with Charlie Chaplin and the M*A*S*H characters where wholly laughable. IBM was clearly out of touch.

"The problem is that if you're driving an unsafe vehicle on public roads, you're not just putting your own life at risk, but that of other drivers (and pedestrians) as well. You might be willing to take the risk of not having Electronic Stability Control and anti-lock braking, but why should the other people on the roads have to put up with the unnecessarily increased risk that you'll crash into them?"

You sir are an idiot. An idiot who drives roads with many vehicles which apparently tend to bunch up your pink panties, but you are not clever enough to realize the truth.

Sometimes ABS stops you faster than without. The key word is sometimes.

Not knowing how to drive, like ABS makes people, is unto itself unsafe. Gadgets like ABS makes a good driver less good. Less able to avoid scary crashes in to your minivan or you stumbling into the nearest crosswalk.

Seriously you are an idiot. There are affordable economical automobiles, which do not have stability control, which do not have ABS, and <GASP> have manual transmissions.

You cannot be serious.

Ever heard of heat of formation? Usually it is manifests itself as fire. Check the heat of formation for H and O atoms. It is not a small number.

Since you seem to have skipped or failed HS chemistry I will share this. At room temperatures Hydrogen and Oxygen molecules do not spontaneously form water.

Ever consider condensation from the water vapor in the atmosphere? Like what is inside HDD? It happens.

"The problem with leaking hydrogen inside a computer case when it mixes with oxygen and forms water vapor. Condensation inside a computer would not be pleasant"

Wow. Lots of non-techies reading /., but not reading about how things work.

FYI, standard spinning hard drives fail at altitude. Meaning mountain climbing in places like the Himalayas are a great place to fail a spinning HDD due to lack of what? Atmospheric air pressure!

"If less air resistance is the reasoning for using helium, why not have the drive internals run inside a vacuum? Wouldn't that be less expensive than helium as well?"

Since basically since year one of the hard drive, people learned drives needed an air gap between the head and the platter.

Read "Weld to the platters".

Mr. Bernoulli was on to something. ;)

<quote><p>the heads would crash into the platter.</p></quote>

If you'd do a bit of reading the mystery is gone.

HDD heads require an gas (air) cushion to function properly. Bernoulli principle is what it is called.

<quote><p>I've always wondered why they didn't just use a near vacuum enclosure</p></quote>

<quote><p>The shuttle was neat in a lot of ways but, as the GP said, it was a boondoggle. A re-usable space plane that has to be essentially rebuilt every time isn't worth it. Lots of big dumb rockets would have been a much better investment in space technology.</p>

<quote><p>By the way, without the Shuttle Program, the Hubble Telescope would have died long ago.</p></quote>

<p>Without the Shuttle Program, the Hubble Telescope could have been delivered by a big conventional rocket and the repairs could have been based from a disposable living pod of some kind. With the money saved by not trying to make a shuttle workable and just going with plain rockets, maybe we could have been able to afford three Hubble telescopes.</p></quote>

Bingo!

<quote>

<quote><p>The Shuttle Program, like all of the manned space programs before it, delivered an immense amount of technology development that has advanced our knowledge of materials sciences and engineering in general beyond any level before it.</p></quote>

<p>Sure it did. Can you name an example?</p>

<quote><p>By the way, without the Shuttle Program, the Hubble Telescope would have died long ago.</p></quote>

<p>And they would have been able to afford to launch <b>several</b> replacements for the Hubble in that time. Same goes for the International Space Station, involving the Shuttle drove up the cost a lot.

When I look at what didn't happen because they had an expensive Space Shuttle instead of a space program, I have to say "good riddance" to it.</p></quote>

Thank you!