mick wrote on 01/07/11 at 22:03:17:


Nickels are larger than dimes, a little thicker and a little heavier.

Overall, if you roll a nickel and a dime, the nickel will roll longer, farther away and on a slope gather more speed.

That's why nickels win in a nickel & dime race.

It's also been scientifically disputed how pennies and quarters would fare.

It turned out that pennies are too soft, have a tendency to dent and overall prove to be a cheap investment.

Quarters are big, heavy, have a lot of momentum once they pick up speed but in a 12-15 " sprint thay are no match to the nickel.

Now, anybody care to come over for a scientific study of Euro-coin races ?  

The folks at CompuLab have been putting out ridiculously small desktop computers for a while, including the Intel Atom (and now AMD Fusion) powered line of Fit PC devices. But the company is branching out a bit with its latest. The CompuLab Trim Slice drops the x86 processor altogether for a 1 GHz NVIDIA Tegra 2 dual core ARM Cortex A9 processor.


Yes folks, it is a full bore computer complete with a hard drive


The whole thing uses an average of just 3 watts of power and has a fanless all-metal design. The Trim Slice measures just 5.1″ x 3.7″ x 0.6″


Bad news for Intel, folks are starting to label their devices "Windows 8 Compatible" now and they got no Intel Inside at all ....    Windows 8 had better not be vaporware or a flub job or its all over for MicroSoft as well.  

The quantum shift has taken place in computerdom, and those who are competitors had best have something tasty on the table to be competing with, or else be ready to go hungry.

Hewlett Packard has just purchased Palm for their fully developed ARM/Linux and 'x86 works the same operating system -- expect to see vendor customized Android like operating systems running on low end tablets and netbooks and on their "not so big box" PCs as the quick starting system -- then Windows 8 boots up at its convenience for those who must have it for business.

HP is gonna write some of the songs for this new dance -- expect their stuff to all be unified and looks the same and works faster than dog snot and LOOKS GREAT no matter what you are running it on.   Expect the same excellent HP user experience no matter what or where or how ....

HP doesn't think you can pull it off, Balmer -- you have shot too much bullshit over the years for them to stake their company on your word alone -- they have purchased their own operating system and will develop and market it along with their various new products.

You got Android setting up the yardstick for small self-contained devices like tablets and phones.   You got Google OS saying you can live in the cloud and run off your hard drive (Google OS and Android work together jest fine, same code runs in both).  You got HP saying "Same great stuff on all your HP devices" based off the Palm OS.  

You got Microsoft and Intel sitting off to the side with their thumbs up their butts asking each other "where did it all go?"

This is the year computing CHANGED big time -- and you were there.

For what I do with a computer, which is mainly writing, I wish I could go back to the old Word Perfect running on a blue DOS screen.  The letters were very sharp, easier to read than the best flat screen monitor running Windows.

Remember the old template that went across the top of the keyboard with the combinations of Alt, Shift and Ctrl plus numerals to give you the various shortcuts?  I may still ahve one around here somewhere.

Al brings up a good point -- old hardware.

The stuff you'd have throw away last year (or year before) will run these new operating systems just fine.

These are little quick operating systems, running quick, small, non-bloated software.

Microsoft didn't write this stuff -- it will all run on less than a gig of systems memory.   Most of your old hardware exceeds the required specs.

If you can get used to your new cell phone, you can get used to the same stuff running on your old outdated Wintel hardware.  Linux (the stuff living under the covers of all this new small computer excellence) simply isn't bloated like the Wintel stuff that has come up since your old hardware was new so it will run on your old leftover PC or laptop jest dandy.

And folks are recognizing that they want the same stuff on their phone and on their PC and they want the two to TALK to each other seamlessly and flawlessly and effortlessly.  Both are on the web already and cloud computing and application/data sharing seamlessly between hand held and desktop isn't far away at all ...  HP is making a big effort to sell that thought as a major sales advantage to their PCs, laptops, tablets and supported phones.

This post written on an old xp machine running linux mint -- fast and clean and virus free.  No worms or trojans or adwares or endless Windows security updates or having to defrag my hard drive or do a systems restore every other week any more for me -- I made the switch and it is good .... very good stuff.    Free too, and that's nice also.

If you are a firefox user, you have nothing much to learn -- just go to it.

After making the public commitment to support ARM chips with Windows 8 Microsoft has turned to their business buddy Intel with an odd request -- read the attached with a "why" eye noticing the need to lower the power consumption of a fat as a pig operating system in an energy competitive market.

First, Microsoft is asking the wrong people for a low power consumption solution.   Intel can do it (has done it) but it sucks juice and blows waste heat like nobody's business.  

And the cost, whoooo boy did it cost ....

Life don't sound so good for the Bobbsey Twins, does it?


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Microsoft wants Intel to develop 16-core Atom chips
Friday, January 28th, 2011, 10:00 am by Brad Linder | Tags: chips, intel, intel atom, microsoft, servers

There’s a common mis-perception that multi-core chips are always more powerful than single-core computer chips. But the truth of the matter is that while multi-core chips can be faster than their old school brethren, especially when used with software optimized for multithreading, there’s another reason to develop chips with multiple cores: They can use less power.

Without getting too deep into the math, basically a quad-core chip running at 200 MHz can offer similar performance to a single core chip running at 1 GHz under some circumstances — but it can achieve that while running at a lower voltage. And that means it uses less energy, saving money and prolonging battery life.

So a recent report from PC World that Microsoft is asking Intel to bring a 16-core Atom chip to market doesn’t mean that Microsoft thinks Intel should make its low power Atom chips insanely powerful. Rather, the idea is that Intel’s Atom platform could be even more energy efficient with 8 times more cores than are currently available.