The community of Great Falls, VA, experienced an odd situation during Hurricanes Irene, Isabel, and the 2012 Derecho. The local natural gas utility was unable to provide the bottle pressure required to maintain service in these areas due to the widespread installation of residential generators running on natural gas fuel.

I don't live in Great Falls but I have a propane-powered generator only because of the lack of natural gas service. One thing that's nice about propane is that it is so stable that its storage life is virtually unlimited.

That old joke about asking for a dead person's apartment was about the absurd situation called rent control. It wasn't about real estate being at a premium.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent_control

While shopping around for data center resources I was always amused by the data centers being offered on the island of Manhattan. Given the speed of light and the vast abundance of local meet-me rooms and extreme bandwidth on and off the island itself, coupled with the massive off-site capabilities established shortly after 9/11, why would I ever want to tolerate the risk and excessively high cost of a data center in Manhattan?

Especially after 9/11, the idea just seemed silly. But then I listen to DI.FM and they're one of those services that has been severely affected by Sandy for having a data center in Manhattan.

I hope it will be hardware accelerated. I have also wondered if Android's Dalvik VM took advantage of built-in hardware acceleration in ARM processors. It seems to be a waste if it's not used.

Wow, my Kindle Fire HD and Nexus 7 have higher resolution screens than that lousy disappointment Apple announced today.

This screen is marginally better than even the Nook Color.

I haven't had a need to use more than the 256 megabytes it comes with but I will probably order another upgraded version anyway.

It *is* a VM in the first place. I use the converter to move the VM from one host to another host. Sure, I can copy the files and edit the vmx files, but I should be able to use VMware Converter, which we still cannot due to the incompatibilty.

How about you update VMware Converter so it works with the current version of VMware ESXi Hypervisor?

I wasted hours building a system just to find that VMware Converter cannot target VMware ESXi 5.1. Version 5.1 has been out for a month and still VMware Converter Stand-Alone is not compatible with it.

The new Kindle Fire non-HD has 1 gigabyte of RAM and the very same processor is now clocked to 1.2 GHz. The other components are entirely the same except for the missing ambient light sensor which was never enabled on the original Kindle Fire to begin with.

You completely missed the point.
You can save a lot of money getting the Kindle Fire and the article explicitly describes how to replace the Kindle Fire OS. Did you even read the article at all?

It's not really one billion users. As any developer in any online service knows, the real figure is around 30% of the actual reported total. Still, it's no small challenge.

I'm looking in my local RadioShack and I noticed the newer Android-powered Arduino.

Since I'm not seeing Android on the Raspberry Pi, what would be the advantage of the Android Arduino over the Pi besides the much higher price and Android operating system? The Pi already has a fairly useful Debian with X Windows which I didn't see on the Arduino.

I still don't get why the New York Times is saying the hydroelectric power causes pollution.

Also, I would also add that the Grand Coulee dam wastes a substantial amount of its energy pumping water vertically to irrigate the Grand Coulee, an ancient, dry riverbed for which the Grand Coulee dam was named and the irrigatino of which was what the engineers of the dam envisioned as its true purpose with hydroelectricity being the secondary purpose.

Not surprising is that the New York Times article is now closed for commenting, requiring the gentle reader to submit a formal "letter to the editor" instead. Microsoft has already rebutted.

They are wasting hydroelectric power, which is not polluting.
The article mentions diesel generator pollution as a sort of fluff item, but the power that Microsoft is wasting is generated by hydroelectricity, and, therefore, is not polluting.

It is important not only to realize that they are wasting hyroelectricity, which is non-polluting, but more important to realize that Microsoft's much larger data center in The Dalles, Oregon, (along with Google's data center next door), are also powered by hydroelectricity. This should be noted in stark contrast to the mostly coal-fueled Facebook data centers.

This is a non-story, diesel backup generator pollution nonwithstanding.