True, that it's a good thing that the CPU heatsink is nearby to cool the regulator, but having it on dye also means that the CPU is nearby which seems to be a bad thing from a system stability standpoint.

Something tells me the folks at Intel have carefully considered all this and that the extra capacity the CPU heatsink now needs to keep the CPU stable is preferable to having an on motherboard Vreg, which is relatively far away from the CPU and that they can't trust to be cooled properly.

Advantages over Unison:
~This is real time syncing initiated automatically on a file change. Unison syncs when you ask it to.
~Gracefully handles more than 2 devices. Unison was designed to keep files on 2 devices in sync. This is designed to keep files on N devices in sync. This also means you have N copies of your files for potentially better redundancy.
~Speed. Here a file you're missing may be transferred from multiple hosts. In the case where you have just 2 nodes in your network it reduces to Unison speed.
~Easier setup. With Unison you have to manage SSH keys for passwordless login & router port forwards. This works with no setup at all across the internet, through NATs and even to a machine behind a corporate firewall.
Disadvantages over Unison:
~Doesn't have the robust conflict resolution features.
~Unison is open source. We have no idea what unwanted things the bittorrent binary could be doing.

I don't believe this article made it through whatever review process slashdot uses to decide if a story should be posted or not.

The pirates are aiming guns and rockets at us and we're worried about harming their eyesight with a laser? I'm pretty sure it would be justifiable to do a whole lot more than damage the vision of a pirate who was sighting up on me with a RPG.

PhD candidate doing my research in new materials for photovoltaics here.

I'm sick and tired of all this mis-reporting. These are NOT 86% efficient cells. If they were, (and they were inexpensive) it would be the greatest discovery in 50 years and it would have been all over every newspaper in the world 2 weeks ago when this paper was published.

They simply absorb 86% of light that hits them. When you say a cell is X% efficient without qualifying it, it's taken to mean power conversion efficiency [PCE] (optical power in/ electrical power out) That and dollars per watt are the numbers that really matter. Read the Nature Materials paper that drove this and you'll see that theory says this design could be up to 17% efficient. That compares unfavorably to mid to high-end commercial cells on the market today.

I'm not saying that this research is a worthless endeavor, maybe they can hit the maximum theoretically possible PCE and keep the cost down. That might have real-world impact.

The caltech news brief quotes Atwater (the PI for this research) as saying that the photons are not only absorbed, but they're also convertedto charge carriers (which is a good step). The problem he doesn't mention here is, these charge carriers loose all their energy (voltage) before they exit the cell. Solve that problem and we've got a winner.

The fundamental issue with nano-structured designs like this is the surface area of the P-N junctions in them. Large surface area means high dark current which means low voltage output. Low voltage output means low PCE. Unfortunately, nothing in this research solves that problem.