This thing would obviously only be $2.99 + S&H if it weren't for the Microsoft tax! I'm tired of M$ driving up the price of hardware with ... interruption... whispering .... uh... I'm tired of the GOOGLE TAX!

Those are *not* Bulldozer cores! They are more similar to the lower-end Jaguar cores that are going into AMD's tablet & netbook products. They are still a major step up from the actual cores in the Cell (those SPE things are not really "cores"), but even a Bulldozer core will be more powerful than these things on a clock for clock basis.

The good news is the GPU is pretty nice for this type of system and the power consumption should be quite good, so heat won't be an issue. Definitely a huge step up from PS3 hardware, and "console ports" won't suck so bad since this thing is basically a real PC.

17 December 2008.

5 years? Might as well write a white paper on the benefits of drum memory over mercury delay lines.

The AC is dead-on right. At 25nm the endurance for high-quality MLC cells is about 3,000 writes. That's a relatively conservative estimate so you are pretty much guaranteed to get the 3K writes and likely somewhat more, but it's a far far cry from the 100K writes you can get from the highly expensive SLC chips. Intel & Micron claimed that one of the big "improvements" in the 20nm process was hi-K gates that are claimed to maintain the 3K write endurance at 20nm, which otherwise would have dropped even more from the 25nm node.

The author of the article went to all the time & trouble to do his mathematical analysis without spending 10 minutes to find out the publicly available information about how real NAND in the real world actually performs....

Obviious Troll is Obvious but... while SSDs can & do fail (just like old hard drives can & do fail), the reason for SSD failure in the real world is very rarely due to flash memory wear. Hint: If your flash drive suddenly stops working one day, that ain't due to flash wear, which would manifest as gradual failure over time.

Blah Blah Blah.

I'm well aware that the Government or hackers* could compromise Slashdot and find out who I am. I also don't care. I can also lie to you about who I am on Slashdot. Assuming you use the handle "Kenja" on any other online forums I can probably show you fun-filled research papers from people who are really good at data mining who could probably track you down with a very high probability just based on the content of your publicly-available posts and some educated cross-reference guessing. It's life, deal with it.

*Slashdot still runs on Apache 1.3 you know, and the "infrastructure" if you can call it that hasn't been updated since the late '90s. It's been compromised in the past and I feel that hackers don't bother with doing more damage because there isn't any money in it.

Controversial title but here's why: With the ability to use nicknames, you can delude yourself into thinking you have privacy when you really don't. With a real-name policy you are having your lack of privacy rubbed right in your face so you don't forget it and do something stupid under an "assumption" of privacy.

You want real online privacy? Don't use Facebook.

You think this violates the "anonymity" of the Internet? The Internet was never anonymous.. it's just that the Internet made it (and still makes it) difficult to verify that the other person at the end of the pipe is actually who he says he is and isn't lying to you. Don't confuse lack of authentication with privacy, they ain't the same thing.

At least in the U.S., trademarks come into existence by use in commerce. Registering a trademark is a good idea, but not even a requirement (which is why you see (TM) for non-registered trademarks and (R) for registered marks).

Assuming that the Python programming language and other related marks have been used in commerce *before* this other Python outfit showed up, then they don't have to worry about losing their rights to the name. Unless Europe allows for hijacking of marks simply through registration, I don't see what the Python guys should have to worry about (unless the other "python" company was using that mark in commerce before the real Python guys were).

Notice how confusing it is to name things above because of the conflicting "Python" mark? That's why there are trademarks, because if you have these name collisions it becomes difficult to accurately identify the source of the good or service.

I have this thing called a car and when it is used in an approved manner to drive down an empty road it transports me. This actually happened last Tuesday.

  We should do research on what would happen if we dropped my car from a cargo plane at an altitude of 20,000 feet and then decide if cars should be banned if there are any ill effects.

Since Slashdot won't post it for another 36 hours: North Korea just set off another nuke. The USGS has detected a 4.9 to 5.1 magnitude artificial earthquake centered at the same location as previous tests: http://inagist.com/all/301169171180433408/

You're flat-out wrong with calling the standard console "ultra-fast"

Wall-clock time to run "tree" on 152,724 files on my Arch system (repeated runs were made for each technique to ensure consistency):

      1. Using the supposedly bloated & slow Konsole under KDE: 1.8 - 1.9 seconds.

      2. Using the supposedly "ultra-fast" kernel konsole: 12.7 - 12.8 seconds.

This is new and new stuff is EVIL! We should get our pitchforks and BURN it right alongside Wayland for daring to do something different than the perfection of 1985 era technology!

Now please excuse me while I get back to ranting about how patents are the one and only cause for innovation being squelched in the modern world.

Interesting, I didn't even know it had shared-key support. I think they prefer a PKI setup and I didn't delve into all of the options in that much detail. Good call.

You could say that. In fact, it requires certificates & PKI to work. You can be a self-signing CA if you want, so there's no need to deal with Verisign/etc. if you don't want to. OpenVPN links to utilities that make it manageable to setup the CA and generate certificates for end users.

Live it, love it, use it (oh and it has commercial support too so it's not just a toy). http://openvpn.net/