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/Oblg. Intel, Santa, GPU

Let me answer to some of the points you make. 1/2 inch holes through the mesh..... Unnoticed. This is a picture of the mesh we implemented. Both trace width and pitch are sub millimeter. A secure microcontroller monitors the integrity of them with pseudo random signals. http://media.bestofmicro.com/I... USB and uHDMI not covered by the security mesh. As you can see in the image, the actual connectors are excluded from the mesh, any connection to the main board is covered by the mesh. So yes, you can try your luck with the USB connections. The USB ports as all physically disconnected as soon as the user is further away from the device than 10meters. So you would deal with two dead USB connections. If you move the device while the user is further away than 10meters it will force a shutdown of the Intel Subsystem. We are trying to make it really really hard to gain access to the device and your data. Thanks

Putting that PCIe logo on the box is therefore deceptive marketing and AMD should be held accountable here.

So should nVidia, perhaps?

That's what they want you to think. Even if IPMI is on a private NIC, everything on the motherboard is ultimately connected to the chipset (c216 connection map), you'll never know what kind of magic packet any of the back-doored components will respond to because there won't be any logs.

Anything from NIC1/NIC2/PCIe can activate vPro in the chipset, that has built in KVM.

These look like standard hose barbs to me:
http://media.bestofmicro.com/4/H/430433/original/radeon-r9-295x2-blown-up.png
http://media.bestofmicro.com/4/J/430435/original/radeon-r9-295x2-pieces.jpg

You can also see that the GPUs are cooled serially and not in parallel.
Tomshardware doesn't break out the GPU temps individually,
so we don't know if the second GPU is running hotter.

These look like standard hose barbs to me:
http://media.bestofmicro.com/4/H/430433/original/radeon-r9-295x2-blown-up.png
http://media.bestofmicro.com/4/J/430435/original/radeon-r9-295x2-pieces.jpg

You can also see that the GPUs are cooled serially and not in parallel.
Tomshardware doesn't break out the GPU temps individually,
so we don't know if the second GPU is running hotter.

> what more could you want in support?

Let's see, 3D Performance on a Discrete card. For all the billions they make they STILL can't make a discrete (or mobile) GPU worth a crap. Also, OpenCL on Windows, OSX, and Linux.

Meanwhile, almost everybody else in Scientific Computing is using (nVidia's) CUDA across all 3 platforms. /Oblg. Sad but true.
http://media.bestofmicro.com/V/6/233106/original/feature_image09.jpg

/Oblg.

http://www.dvhardware.net/news/nvidia_intel_insides_gpu_santa.jpg
or
http://media.bestofmicro.com/V/6/233106/original/feature_image09.jpg

How about the Tegra 3 in the Nexus 7? I see 63 fps. The Tegra 4 better use far less power. This shows that the Nexus 7 makes a good developer platform since the performance is almost identical to future phones. Here's the full article.

Chrome is good if you have a few windows you want to do something really fast or fill out forms. Firefox is better for general browsing with lots of tabs, firefox is also better at facebook games ( http://media.bestofmicro.com/K/1/309169/original/jsgamebenchwbgp7.png )

IMO whoever wrote that article is a shill, full of shit or an idiot. The article is not analysis, it's far closer to "anal-related" stuff...

Example: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-reliability-failure-rate,2923-3.html

Ultimately, the French-English language barrier was responsible for how hyped-up this information became. Sites like Mac Observer and ZDNet incorrectly reported these figures as "failure rates" based on a Google Translation.

A drive failure implies the device is no longer functioning. However, returns can occur for a multitude of reasons. This presents a challenge because we donâ(TM)t have any additional information on the returned drivesâ"were they dead-on-arrival, did they stop working over time, or was there simply an incompatibility that prevented the customer from using the SSD

But from the french retailer's stats:
Released in April 2011
http://news.softpedia.com/newsImage/French-Website-Publishes-HDD-SSD-and-Motherboard-RMA-Statistics-4.png/
Released in December 2010
http://www.behardware.com/articles/810-6/components-returns-rates.html

You will see that Intel has 0.3% and 0.59% return rates respectively.

So the difference in the return rates should tell anyone with brains that the non-intel SSDs (particularly OCZ SSDs) are crap, the Intel ones are decent. Saying bullshit like "returns can occur for a multitude of reasons. This presents a challenge" seems to be more spin than a 15krpm drive.

As for the stupid graph in http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-reliability-failure-rate,2923-9.html

Larger version: http://media.bestofmicro.com/4/A/302122/original/ssdfailurerates_1024.png

It's also shit. For most of the known period, SSDs are worse than HDDs. It's mainly his estimates/projections that show SSDs as better.

Go figure how stupid that is, it's like saying:
"Oh look, most SSDs are worse than most HDDs for the actual data we have, this means that SSDs are more reliable than HDDs"

And one wonders how many data points he actually has on the graph for SSDs, if it's just from the french retailer, I think it's two points for each drive brand/model.

I haven't been to tomshardware for a while till today. And it seems to have got even worse from the time when I stopped reading their articles because they were too crap.

You want something that's not so crap, go to Anandtech. They're not perfect, but this Tom's Hardware article makes Anandtech look like the Richard Feynman of IT reviewers.

But that's not true. Every SSD on the chart has a lower failure rate in the small section proceeding the 6 - 12 month mark.

??

Apparently we are looking at different graphs. The graph I'm looking at is the one linked in the summary above, here: http://media.bestofmicro.com/4/A/302122/original/ssdfailurerates_1024.png
In the "small section proceeding the 6 - 12 month mark" that you refer to, the highest failure rate is the light green curve, labelled "SLC SSD (Ku 2011)", while the lowest failure rate is the red curve, labeled "HDD (Schroeder 2007)".

The red HDD curve remains the lowest out to 2.5 years, which is farther out than any of the data on SDD.

Based on numbers, the study shows SSDs to be more reliable than HDDs. The best data I have seen in that article is the following:

SSDs: 1.28--2.19% over 2 years

HDDs: >=5% over 2 years

The HDD data comes from: http://media.bestofmicro.com/2/N/289103/original/google_afrtemputilization_475.png The SSD data comes from the table on Page #6.

I don't think any of this data is particularly surprising, HDDs are mechanical so the curves for failure would not be linear. The most interesting part of the article for consideration with SSDs is that SMART is going to be near useless for them. Since most failures are random occurrences in electronics which SMART isn't good at detecting, we may need better technology for detecting SSD failures.

Funny, on my 1024x660 10,1" Archos tablet, the builtin apps look quite nicely scaled.

It's not a question of scaling. It's a question of redesigning for a different screen size. In the mail app for example, the iPhone only has space to display either the message list OR an email at once. The iPad displays both.

Compare and contrast:
http://admintell.napco.com/ee/images/uploads/appletell/iphone-mail1.png
http://media.bestofmicro.com/Apple-ipad-3G-WiFi,4-F-246399-13.jpg

http://media.bestofmicro.com/2/6/238542/original/Suiting%20Up.jpg

"DO NOT TUCK YOUR PENS INTO YOUR BOOTS"

How has that sign not been graffitoed yet? The temptation

If you look at the full version of the slide, here:

http://media.bestofmicro.com/6/C/237396/original/att-q409-slide-1.jpg

One of the next 90 day fixes is "Deploy Ethernet to Cell sites to improve network backhaul".

As an NYC iphone customer I can almost forgive them for bad reception in the canyons of the city. So many tall buildings etc...

But come on, the bottleneck is also that they don't have enough bandwidth from the towers to the network?? WTF?

http://media.bestofmicro.com/2/5/181517/original/COMPLETE_02.JPG

Oh, come on. Lets compare apples to apples.

Now the fugly computer did have 4 quad core CPUs, and the Apple only had 2 quad core CPUs.

Its too painful to click through each picture and its paragraph of text, but WTF is up with the radiator thing? Oh, and $16k isn't that much for a computer. Where I work we routinely buy similar setups for $20k+, but they have 48 disks.

A scan of one email:
http://media.bestofmicro.com/0/G/156832/original/Picture%203.png
Taken from:
http://www.tomshardware.com/gallery/amd-nvidia-price-fixing,0201--4553----jpg-.html

Best line from the bunch: "We need to stop beating each other up in the OEM space".