@Hacker's Challenge

It's not triggered wirelessly. I'm really not sure who started the wirelessly triggered thing, but this one isn't.

Each round has a small microcontroller inside powered by a capacitor. A few milliseconds before firing, the round's capacitor is charged and the microcontroller is given a number to count to before detonation. The microcontroller counts up and then... boom! And, that's about it.

I heard about this from a friend at a microcontroller company some 6 years ago.

(untitled)

Actually, given that it has 128MB RAM onboard, I'm sure it also does 3D tasks decently enough.

What's interesting, is that it's 1x PCIe and barely actively cooled. I bet if they tried they could fit it in an 54mm Expresscard. A slot in GPU for integrated graphics-only laptops?

@Lee Hamer

You'd be absolutely correct if it weren't for the fact that modern GPUs, like CPUs, are now fully programmable (and trust me, this is a very very good thing). The lines between CPUs and GPUs have begun to blur, and in fact Intel is planning on releasing a high performance graphics card based around 32 to 48 in-order x86 processors similar to Atom on a single piece of silicon. Based on the numbers they've given at the last SIGGRAPH conference (a technology conference devoted to graphics) it should actually be able to compete with nVidia and ATi in terms of performance, price and power consumption.

WTF, El Reg...

Beyond the simple fact that she's said many, many times that she's fine with evolution-only and that she's happy with creationism being taught at home, what the HELL are you doing writing about politics now on a fairly regular basis? And with such freaking bias! I have yet to see you run an article about ANY of Obama's many skeletons, yet you keep hammering on Palin's gaffes even when you don't have anything new.

So great one El Reg. Go after Palin, the VP choice of the republican party... while completely ignoring the idiocy of the VP choice of the democrat party. You know, the one that said "you can't go into a convenience store anymore without having a slight indian accent", or that "paying taxes is patriotic", or that he has "three degrees and graduated in the top of his class on a full ride scholarship" when in fact none of his assertions were true.

I mean, Jesus, you'd think you could be a little more "fair" by at least constantly comparing her to Obama like the rest of the press...

Hmm...

I purchased by N800 a few months ago. Tethered it to my WiMo phone and suddenly had a decent web browser... and then suddenly a dead WiMo phone. Needless to say, I'd be thrilled if it had built-in 3G.

Did I mention I loath my HTC Apache and it's vomit inducing battery life?

El Reg...

...why don't you stop with the bullshit about McCain not being physically capable of using a damn keyboard already? It isn't funny; it isn't clever. Everyone knows the whole story by now, so just stop it.

And as for the ones that say "I'm missing my arms and I'm writing this comment!"... well good for you, but how many of you are 72 again?

Aww... it wasn't that bad.

Though the first one was bizarre and kinda boring, I never saw the one in this article on TV. After watching it just now I actually thought it was pretty funny.

Offshore oil relaxation?

Give me a break! 97% of the known offshore reserves are within 50 miles! They're "relaxing" offshore drilling by allowing us to drill in 3% of the known offshore reserves... and by permanently making the rest off limits. How is that relaxation, really?

Furthermore, those punks in congress put out that 480 page bill the night before the planned vote! Nobody has had a chance to fully review it yet to see what sort of crap they packed into the fine print.

I don't have a problem with most democrats. Aside from the infanticide, I don't even have a problem with democratic ideals. But the democratic party is corrupt from the top down.

Hey Webster...

I'm all for drilling too, but there's nothing wrong with alternative sources of energy. Free market capitalism works best when there's choices. The advantage of electric vehicles is that suddenly the vehicles are decoupled from their energy source. If you want a wind powered car, go for it. Solar, sure. Nuclear, heck yeah!

And, even if you want it to still be gasoline powered it's actually more efficient to use gasoline to power a generator to charge a battery to power an electric motor than to use gasoline to power a gasoline engine.

I'll only buy one...

...if it has chrome trim and neon blue undercarriage lighting.

@BKB

More like someone didn't let you see the comments that used the black helicopter icon...

Email?

I hate it. For one-on-one communication, what can you do with email that you can't do with a cell phone and voice mail?

Email became popular in a world that only had pagers and 56k modems.

All I have to add is...

I loathed my Sansa e200r. I love my Zune 8gb w/ Zune Pass subscription.

Adverb...

...noun adverb verb adverb adjective. Conjunction noun auxiliary verb verb adjective.

What? I'm just following the same formula as you guys!

@Anonymous Coward

"Regardless of the Florida debacle in 2000, the overall election result was:

Bush 50,456,002 votes (47.9%)

Gore 50,999,897 votes (48.4%)

Result? Bush wins! That's the greatest democracy on earth for you. The entire electoral process is a crock."

John F. Kennedy won in the same way. Except unlike Gore, Nixon didn't challenge it in the courts even though he legally could have.

In both elections, the winner carried the electoral vote majority, which is all that matters in the American presidential election. Read up on our electoral process before blasting it, will ya?

Big numbers!

1x 6-core 4GHz Nehalem, 3x 48-core 2.5GHz Larrabee cards. 150 cores in a single box collectively executing a peak of 816 billion x86 instructions each second.

I sure hope the supercomputing clusters of these things decide they like us puny humans...

Vista is fine.

It's funny how some 10 years after MS were accused of spreading baseless fear uncertainty and doubt about their competitors, now idiots world-wide are spreading FUD of their own about MS's first well-written software product, Vista.

Seriously, though, Vista is fine if you'd give it a freakin' chance... and I don't mean installing it, running it for 2 days and then deciding XP is superior because you couldn't find the damn "add-remove programs" control panel menu item.

I've been using it exclusively for a year after I got my laptop and I swear, for every damn complaint you folks have about Vista I have 3 with XP. The /only/ thing you like more is that you know what issues to expect with XP.

AMD? ARM? Nope.

With 4 logical cores I imagine it'd work fine for video decoding/encoding. Just don't picture this thing on your desktop -- imagine it in a small plastic case about the size of the Wii underneath your TV.

Now to the AMD folks, that Athlon 64 2000+ is 3x the die space of the Atom they compared it to. As such the Atom should cost significantly less per chip. Given Intel's choice of such a chipset, price is probably a higher priority than performance /or/ power consumption. Nevertheless, AMD should be applauded for the 2000+. If they can produce it cheaply and still make a profit they might be able to compete with the Atom with it in some of the same markets.

As for the comment about ARM, I don't think they're who they're targeting. ARM doesn't sell processors, they license intellectual property that other manufacturers can integrate into their own chip designs. Obviously that puts Intel's Atom in an entirely different category, at least until they start integrating full wireless chipsets or selling Atoms custom ordered with areas that folks like Qualcomm can fit their own IP into.

No, Atom was designed to be a cheap x86 from the ground up, with power as a close second in terms of priority. It isn't meant to compete with ARM or AMD, but with VIA.

Can't wait...

...to replace my damn HTC Apache!

Eh.

The only thing I'm dissatisfied about with my Dell Inspiron 1420 is the fscking Nvidia 8400m time bomb garbage. Other than that, the customer service has been spot on every time I've called or used the service chat service.

Though, I paid for the best service plan they had available which makes me wonder this: how many of the PC users paid for an extended service plan compared to the Apple users? I'd be willing to bet that played some (possibly minor?) part in the overall satisfaction score as Apple users seem to be more willing to shell out for the add-ons.

Eh...

As a computer engineering student I find it depressing how many armchair OS kernel designers there are here...

And as for the UI, I have yet to hear an argument that it's "bad" that isn't correctable by way of either UI configuration or "user (re)configuration". Ever heard of the acronym PEBKAC?

@humble pie and FUD

What's with all the hate for America and Americans these days?

@John Sanders

It's called Larrabee, but unfortunately for you it'll be in the same form factor, produce the same amount of heat and consume the same amount of power as the other "insanely hot VGA cards".

As for the 'i' prefix thing, technically they had it before Apple. i386, ia-32, ia-64, etc.

A rolling of the eyes are in order

Eugh. If I'd known Michael Dell was pushing this crap I might not have purchased an Inspiron 1420 last year. I'm all for less pollution, but this greentard bandwagon has got to stop.

Flame because I, as a conservative, obviously want the planet to burn.

Wow. Just wow.

As an American, when the English forget how the language is supposed to work we're all screwed. As absolutely hilarious as this article and following comments are, there is something deeply troubling about it.

This is further proof that I am one of the very few people left that take pride in his written language. I always write properly -- even in instant messages and notes to myself.

Oh, and I (and perhaps most Americans) don't pronounce "they're" the same as "there" and "their", rather, a little like a (much less exaggerated) "they-urr".

Flames because my god, that guy needs to feel them.

SSD vs. rotating mass storage

Unless this thing is cheaper, I'd still rather just add another 80MB/sec Raptor to my array.

Mines the one with the dollah billz falling out of the pockets (not really).

Larrabee. Larrabee! *LARRABEE!!!*

Seeing as I'm turning out to be the resident Larrabee fanboy I just figured it'd be appropriate.

Exclamation point because LARRABEE!! LARRABEEEE!!!

@Corrine

Nvidia already worked out a deal to license SLi for Intel's higher-end Nehalem boards.

I say good riddance. Now Intel can do whatever crazy changes they like to the processor-chipset path (hopefully outright removing it) without anyone calling foul and starting lawsuits.

@David Webb

Wow. That game defines simultaneously defined new levels of pain, irritation, and the word "grind".

I played that game for a few months with a bunch of my friends. Worked on my red mage for a while until I unlocked one of the other classes. I can't remember which for sure, but I think it was paladin. Played with it and got to Surabaruta (or whatever that beachy area was with all the goblins). We quit when one of my friends that had unlocked dark knight was asked by the only group we could find to tank.

And that's why I don't play FFXI.

I liked the multilingual servers and the language-independent communication. I LOVED the fighting system with its' chains. I loved the FF-y environment. But I HATED the fact that there was no way to solo and even grey enemies that give no experience could hand your ass to you unless in a group, the crafting system was "for pretend", and everything was literally hours of walking apart with no means of transportation aside from the ludicrously expensive (and yet still slow) chocobos and impossibly expensive airships. At least with real jobs you get paid for the time you waste.

Hell, even Everquest had free boats (unless you started in Luclin, which was why I quit after exactly one week). Anarchy Online (my second generation MMO of choice) one upped all that with instantaneous transporters.

@Jim Coe

Economics is not a zero-sum game.

Just like to mention...

...thank you for that chart. Made my day.

"Half as much"?

Is that proper British English for saying "50% more"? I'm American so I'm not actually sure -- on our side of the pond we'd interpret it to be the same as "50% less" or just "half".

View from a yank

1. We don't get free incoming calls without spending over $100/month per line. That is most definitely considered a premium feature and is generally only advertised towards the business folk.

2. When I lived in Arizona (our 8th largest state), local calling was the entire 245,000 square kilometer region. We could call anywhere in it for as long as we wanted with our $20/month phone lines. (if you round the numbers, the UK is the same in terms of area)

3. My EvDO handset beats out most other HSDPA phones I've seen when tethered to a PC. I don't expect that trend to continue, however, but it's worth noting.

4. When you aren't talking about international travel, there is no clear advantage to either GSM and derivatives or CDMA and derivatives, other than the phone offerings and mobile operators. I personally will probably end up getting a 3G GSM phone when T-Mobile (Deutsche Telecom) finally finishes the 3G rollout as I'd like to be able to travel.

5. I'm curious about who it is they were talking to. I've yet to meet anyone at university that doesn't have a cell phone, or know how to text.

6. Also, I find text messaging to be abhorrent. Why waste the money texting when instead we can just talk via IM for free? Most decent phones have that capability now, after all. (granted, I don't have a text messaging plan, so it costs $0.35/message to send AND receive)

7. As for the TV thing, remember that we have always received our local stuff for free. Quality varies based on where you are of course but many areas get some really nice channels. Some places even get local 24hr news channels, and I imagine that'll become more prevalent with the additional bandwidth available due to the off-air digital broadcast switchover.

Matrix RAID and SLI... yayyy.

This makes me happy. Intel RAID and Nvidia SLI for all! Now if only I had the money to upgrade this fall/winter...

Smiley, 'cos I couldn't think of anything funny to say about Paris.

I thought competition was supposed to work in our favor...

Come on, Microsoft. Where's Aero Mobile? Windows CE 5 is proven and more than capable. Just give us a graphics accelerated thumb friendly front end and a web browser that shames Safari already.

I swear, I miss when companies went overkill to outdo their competition. I'm just so sick of this "the least we can do" approach that most are taking now (see Nintendo and their slightly-faster-Gamecube-with-accelerometers).

Mine's the depressed looking one saddened by the lack of willingness to compete.

Cheap storage medium for 10KB Word files?

No dirt cheap medium? Here in the states I can run down to the Staples across the street and buy a 1GB USB stick for $5 or less (£2.53, according to Google). Are you telling me you guys in the UK can't do the same?

Paris, 'cause both she and I really don't know about the pricing of flash memory internationally.

(untitled) (take that, title-requiring-comment-system!)

I can see ads in GTA. I can see ads in racing games. I can see ads in a game that takes place 200 years in the future, as long as those ads look like they're 200 years old.

Here's an idea, how about putting the ads on... loading screens! I doubt that things like "This multiplayer server has been brought to you by... Intel. The power to do more! Enjoy!" would bother people that much as long as they're completely unobtrusive to gameplay.

The thing that pissed me off was when I played Crackdown last year in single player and saw advertisements for freaking Dodge SUVs. I don't think it'd irritate me quite so much if they were futuristic looking SUVs but they weren't. Or if the police SUV were Dodge branded, that'd be fine too (in fact, I'd probably drive around saying "I'M THE JUGGERNAUT").

Paris, for thinking for a moment that SUVs have a future.

What a shame.

They could have done something much more interesting with dirt cheap 9GB dual layer DVDs and H.264.

Paris because I'd never want to see her in real high definition.

>so old hat

Old hat? Previous years tech used standard definition stuff at an order of magnitude lower bandwidth. It's still kind of a big thing, though admittedly not as much as it was.

NXP (the semiconductor spin off of Philips) just showed off a new processor at CES 2008 called the PNX5100. Each PNX5100 has 3 Trimedia 5-way 32-bit VLIW processor cores running at 350MHz. Assuming that it has 5 independent floating point multiply-accumulators inside, that's 3.5 GFLOPS peak (2 operations x 350MHz x 5-way VLIW).

For comparison, each SPE in a Cell runs at 3.2GHz and performs 4-way SIMD floating point operations. What that means is that every single cycle it can execute 8 floating point operations. That's 25.6 GFLOPS peak (2 operations x 3.2GHz x 4-way SIMD).

In short, a single SPE has just over 7x the performance of a single Trimedia processor core, and a single Cell has 8 of them.

In truth, Cell is totally overkill for this and they're probably only using it out of convenience since they just purchased Sony's Cell fabrication department. In the long run, Toshiba will likely end up using their SpursEngine with only 3 to 4 SPEs operating at somewhere between 1.5 and 2GHz, which at the low end will still be just about 4 times more floating point performance compared to the next generation NXP media processors.