>I wonder what a DDoS would do to it ...

Blue face of death?

I was going to just mod you up, but I figured your post would soon be at 5 anyway. (if not, mod parent up!)

Yes, you're absolutely right. Lots of bad physics and a completely incorrect conclusion in that article. If there is an improvement in the thermal interface, the heatsink should get HOTTER. All of the heat goes somewhere. That's the first law of thermodynamics... conservation of energy.

You can break it down to a thermal resistance model which is functionally equivalent to an electrical resistance model. Difference in temperature is the "voltage" that drives the flow of heat (current). The heat (current) is a fixed value. The resistances are the various materials the heat has to flow through to get to the air. It can take many parallel and series paths to get out and you can build a resistance network to calculate heat flow through each "path". One way is through the IC leads, into the board, and eventually to the air... or the most direct path is through the heat spreader, through the thermal interface material, into the heatsink and eventually to the air. If the heatsink reads a lower temperature, that means less heat is flowing through the heatsink and that heat is taking a more difficult path to get out and thus the IC junction temperature is HIGHER. That's BAD.

So yes, the math doesn't add up. The thermal interface between the IC and the heatsink should be spread so thin that the thermal resistance across it is almost negligible. Thermal grease is only there generally because it's it's much higher conductivity than air and if you don't have it, all you have is air in all of the little surface imperfections of the heatsink and heat slug on the IC. Adding solid particles to the grease only serves to hold the heatsink and IC heat slug further apart, so even if it's great conductivity, it's generally the wrong thing to do.

-S

It's time for telcos to stop being telcos and start being wireless data providers. Selling bits instead of services is fundamental to net neutrality. I know that breaks their business models, but too bad. On the iPhone, they already sell apps that use some amount of bandwidth. They shouldn't get to pick and choose the ones that affect their outdated business model. If they just sold bits and bandwidth independent of what kind of data is being carried on them, then this wouldn't be an issue and that's how it SHOULD be.

I know this isn't going to change overnight, but I fully support the FCC looking into this. It's nice to know that under the new administration they're taking a pro-consumer stance instead of pro-business stance.

-S

OK, what am I missing here? 0.5nm is 16 times smaller than 8nm. On a 2D platter, that's 256 times more dense, not 1000 times more dense.

-S

It's spring/summer now. I do most of my gaming outside on a grass field (baseball, softball, frisbee). Sometimes on pavement (basketball). Occasionally on a paved or clay court (tennis).

Step away from the display, people. Go get some fresh air.

-S

These ridiculous caps are all about cable companies protecting their becoming-outdated business model. Right now, they charge for content (HBO, various extra channel packages, etc.). Customers getting high quality video (for some definitions of high quality) from places like Hulu is eventually going to eat up the cable monopoly cash cow that Time Warner Cable currently enjoys. So how do they stop it and protect their outdated business model? Caps. Insanely low transfer caps that all but eliminate high amounts of streaming video and that protect their cable company business.

If there's a reason the gov't should step in and put a stop to low transfer caps, it's this.

-S

I yanked my photos off and I won't be putting up any more. Facebook is a reasonable place to stay in touch with friends as long as you have your privacy settings locked down, but other than that... forget it. Their backpedaling is just ridiculous. Want to make a statement? Then change the policy. Or give at least an opt-out for "No, I do not wish to grant Facebook any rights to my copyrighted materials". They can say "well, that's not really what we mean" all they want. The policy is pretty clear... post a photo or video on Facebook and they claim they can do whatever they want with it now and forever.

This is a pretty reasonable review of the various policies of social media sites. http://amandafrench.net/2009/02/16/facebook-terms-of-service-compared/

I'll continue to post my images to flickr (lower resolution of course)... but certainly not to Facebook any longer.

-S

The advent of DVD was a huge time for consumer electronics. And Circuit City tried to hijack it with their own pay-as-you-go scheme called DIVX ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIVX_(Digital_Video_Express) ), not to be confused with the video codec DiVX. To put it mildly, it pissed off legions of die-hard gadget junkies... you know, the ones who advise their friends and family about technology purchases. The way the company handled that left a bad taste in the mouths of the customers they needed most...the ones who actually buy the high-tech gizmos.

Thankfully DIVX failed, but I never forgave Circuit City for that and I never spent another cent in their stores and neither did many of my friends and family because of it. I'm not alone.

-S

The reason I don't like this is because of First Sale Doctrine. I should be able to sell these files the same way I'd sell a CD (ie, not keeping a copy). So if I sell them, and delete them, and the person I sell them to decides it's a good idea to Pirate Bay them, now what? My email address is all over the place and I did nothing illegal. Great.

So while I support Apple for going DRM free, for the time being I'll continue to buy from Amazon because they do none of this nonsense. See http://blog.wired.com/music/2007/09/some-of-amazons.html "there is no information on the tracks that identifies the customer".

So until I have a very quick and easy way of removing that info from the iTunes tracks, I won't be buying from there.

-S

Nope. Everything's fine here in New Ampst

<carrier lost>

"The ground impact without parachute protection generated a very large instantaneous G event."

Yes. Very large. Free fall from 100,000 ft will generally do that.

-S