Thanks for the update! Nice to hear the boycott is starting to work.

There are in fact 5 Lagrangian points; the two most generally stable (L4 and L5) are those mentioned in the article as containing the Trojan asteroids. Since the Trojans are clustered in somewhat elongated, curved areas of space surrounding the actual L4 and L5 points, it's probably best to refer to "regions" or "points" rather than "belts", which would imply a complete ring.

@Randolf

Ahhh, resistivity = specific resistance. Thanks for pointing that out -- we software folk can be pretty dangerous on the EE side!

Rather than "...the resistivity of the wire *unaffected* by its width..." surely you meant to write that the resistivity *formula* remains unaffected by its width, as the resistivity itself should vary in an inverse linear fashion with the wire's width. The neat finding here is that the resistivity formula still holds for such narrow widths.

Errr, the UX31 offers 900x1600 screens.

bitcoins

Perhaps not quite an HPC topic, but the hash calculations used in bitcoins are done so efficiently on AMD's recent VLIW GPU architectures that nobody uses nVidia GPUs (much less CPUs) to calculate them anymore.

wowza

Since this guy is willing to throw real money at pointless, poorly-thought-out "experiments", maybe I can get him to just Paypal me the cash instead.

Article from the future?

Actually, the next solar maximum is expected in 2013 rather than next year.

Bitcoin botnetters behind the times?

The current difficulty level of mining for bitcoins is so high that using standard CPUs for it doesn't make much sense. Essentially, by the time you get a result from one of your CPU-mining herd, the global mining community will already have moved on to the next problem, and your result will be "stale" or worthless.

Then again, perhaps they are only infecting machines with higher-end AMD graphics cards...

Some fact-checking, s'il vous plait

You claim "...the AMS requires more power than any feasible satellite or spacecraft built here on Earth could possibly yield. "

A wee bit 'o checking would have turned up the fact the the old Soviet RORSATs, with their onboard nuclear reactors, not only were highly effective at inducing cataplexy in Greenpeaceniks, but generated more than 2kW of electrical power, and so would have been able to supply the 2kW power need of the AMS-02.

Otherwise, congrats on the creative language use!

Nice!

Though I'm more of a software guy, your articles are kindling an urge to tinker with physical stuff - could be dangerous!

waiting for a reply?

"The data was three days old by the time Ehman spotted Wow!, meaning that if it were a message, the sender could have moved on for lack of a reply."

Unless the sender were in our solar system (within a few light-days), it wouldn't be expecting a reply within three days. In any case, they would have had plenty of disco music and bad TV to decipher...

Nice teardown

The MM5290 datasheet can be found here: http://www.alldatasheet.com/datasheet-pdf/pdf/148600/NSC/MM5290.html

Brings back fond memories of doing so many assembler runs on my IBM PC's floppies that the disks wore out! After a while, we only bought Verbatims, since they lasted the longest.

No need to be overly PC

"San José" is the city in Costa Rica, while "San Jose" is the city in Silicon Valley.

It was going so well...

Has the chase car been pulled over by the Spanish police?

err, Pentium Dual-Core CPUs ARE Core 2 Duos

Just with a bit less cache (and a bit less cachet!).

correction

The Estonian cyberattacks happened in 2007, not 1997.

faster RAM tests mostly pointless

Since data to/from RAM has to pass through the FSB on this system, and RAM run at DDR2-667 in dual-channel mode already fully saturates the 1333MHz FSB bandwidth, there's not much point in running the RAM at DDR2-800 or DDR2-1066.

honesty?

It would sure help to get the story's facts straight for a start. The BC pines are dying not from "warming", but rather from a bark beetle infestation. Such infestations have happened in the past, and will happen again in the future; causation by "warming" is far from evident.

Other widespread recent warming claims cover only the time period during which data has been collected by satellites -- a 35-year stretch of data. Of course this ends up being reported as "...(most)est in history."!

Bad news for buyers

This may explain the seeming increase in the number of notebook/flat panel displays with one or more single-pixel defects -- manufacturers are likely dropping quality standards in order to boost supply.

It's worse than "It's worse than that"...!

Dell actually offers one of their pre-configured M1530 versions with 1x1GB + 1x2GB modules (3GB total), meaning that they are selling a version where part of the RAM runs in single-channel mode.

Thus, the refusal to sell a version with only a single RAM module is purely a marketing/configuration issue, not a technical issue. However, this issue is not limited to Dell, as most notebook manufacturers seem to populate their systems with the lower-cost pair of modules rather than the single higher-cost module. To their credit, Asus sells at least some of its notebooks with only a single module, allowing for more economical RAM upgrades down the road.

Exidy ruled!

We Exidy Sorcerer owners were secure in the superiority of our "real" keyboard and 30x64 character display...