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Technically, the "MPG" per passenger mile is lowest on an airplane. A fully loaded Boeing 747-400 gets the equivalent of 91 miles per gallon.

... or pretty much exactly the same as the new Li-ion battery-equipped Prius Hybrid

There was an article on The Register some months ago on ARM development history (can't seem to find it now), and if it's to be believed they were investigating a series of mysterious crashes in the prototype ARM CPU, and in debugging they found the power on their dev kit wasn't actually connected to the chip - it was running entirely on leakage current and if there weren't enough 1's going into the chip to provide current, it wouldn't have enough power to run.

I think you mean this article, "ARM creators Sophie Wilson and Steve Furber Part Two: the accidental chip":
http://www.reghardware.com/2012/05/03/unsung_heroes_of_tech_arm_creators_sophie_wilson_and_steve_furber/

It was an Australian camping company's shit-hole shovel, with a compact folding design and a receptacle for arse-wipe paper. All in all, a good piece of design. So, Apple are obviously going to produce their own copycat design, aren't they?

(Incidentally, the Scum (one of Murdoch's arse-wipe UK newspapers) for once failed to live down to their normal standard of reporting in the story that ElReg link to from the main story above ; they didn't pay the poor girl to pose topless and covered in shit. Or, perhaps they did, but had a rare attack of taste.)

Still have my TRS-80 CoCo. Haven't plugged it in about six years, but hey.

Apparently the TRS-80 CoCo is a totally different (and incompatible) machine to the original TRS-80 being discussed here. They're not even based on the same processor...

While I appreciate that they probably wanted to keep the brand recognition, it's slightly confusing that they reused the exact same model number on incompatible machines with entirely different architecture. You'd have thought (e.g.) "TRS-100" would be similar enough without the obvious- and incorrect- implication that both lines were part of the same family.

For what it's worth, the Dragon 32- a very close relative of the CoCo- celebrated its 30th anniversary this week.

Yep.

Philips has a television with a moth-eye coating (just that though; not a combination with other coatings as in Sony's approach) available. Just read the review this morning. Seems a bit fragile though - I wonder if this will also apply to Sony's new film (I guess it won't since that'd be rubbish on a smartphone, but TFA does not actually address it):

Amazingly, it works - but thereâ(TM)s a caveat. The filter requires extreme care, so much so that Philips supplies a proprietary cleaning solution to remove any thumbprint smudges. This fragility makes the screen a questionable purchase for those with young families.

Every single laptop. I've been through this tiresome process so many times I'm not going to bother again. As I said there may be a small window when there is nothing to make a reasonable comparison against but when there is, they are consistently undercut by the competition and for most of the lifetime of the product before the cycle repeats. They are more expensive and quite obviously so.

I'm on a waiting list to join the waiting list :(

I might have to start looking for one of the alternatives.

See the source.

Today one of the most significant features of the ARM family is its low power consumption. But that hadn't been an initial goal, according to Furber. “We designed the ARM for an Acorn desktop product, where power isn't of primary importance. But it had to be cheap. Cheap meant it had to go in a plastic package, plastic packages have a fairly high thermal resistance, so we had to bring it in under 1W.”

The power test tools they were using were unreliable and approximate, but good enough to ensure this rule of thumb power requirement. When the first test chips came back from the lab on the 26 April 1985, Furber plugged one into a development board, and was happy to see it working perfectly first time.

Deeply puzzling, though, was the reading on the multimeter connected in series with the power supply. The needle was at zero: the processor seemed to be consuming no power whatsoever.

As Wilson tells it: “The development board [we] plugged the chip into had a fault: there was no current being sent down the power supply lines at all. The processor was actually running on leakage from the logic circuits. So the low-power big thing that the ARM is most valued for today, the reason that it's on all your mobile phones, was a complete accident."

Nice article on The Register:

http://www.reghardware.com/2012/04/23/retro_week_sinclair_zx_spectrum_at_30/

Microsoft recently got this patent:
http://www.reghardware.com/2011/09/23/microsoft_contemplates_mobiles_with_interchangeable_accessories/

Now, go to http://www.engadget.com/2008/12/26/how-would-you-change-sony-ericssons-xperia-x1/2#comments and do a find in page for the word "bottom" or "pop out" ... ok read that description .. now if you scroll up to the top of the article you can see a photo of the Xperia X1 which is being talked about .. notice that a combination of the Xperia X1 and the comment exactly fit the patent of microsoft? If you read the actual patent it becomes even clearer they stole the idea from that engadget comment.

And where is the engine stored when not in use? It'll need a garage, with room to spare, equipped with a hoist.. or require a drive to a storage facility before a journey can even be started? On a more practical note there is now a diesel / electric hybrid, from mainstream car company Peugeot. It has separate drivetrains like the concept car in the article, but uses them to give the option of 2 or 4 wheel drive. http://www.reghardware.com/2012/03/06/preview_peugeot_3008_hybrid4_worlds_first_diesel_electric_hybrid_car/

Although the number of iPhone apps is amazing, the limited number of apps is the least of Windows phone's problems. With both my Androids and N900 I got most of what I needed and I've always been able to show off to iPhone people if needed. It's worth reading between the lines of Andrew Orlowski's Lumia 700 review. Remember that he's a total Microsoft Fanboi but even so, he often makes pretty perceptive comments such as the ones about fonts. The key thing is to realise that Windows Phone is designed to look good in the shop, but hasn't actually been designed to work. The terrible battery life and design make a phone you can't actually use properly. Think of tiles for example; about 8-10 fit on a screen where normally you would have 20-25 icons. This is great for display and selling where almost no apps have been installed and you are just learning which are which. Five months down the line, when you have 150-200 apps, it suddenly doesn't seem like a good trade off.

This general trade off of actual functionality for things which sell Microsoft products goes on through the design and brings us straight back to the topic; security. For example: your contacts in a Windows Phone are entirely stored on your online service, almost certainly Facebook unless you change it yourself. By design, there's no private place to store contacts you don't want shared. The first question with security is not "is this implementation done right". The real question is "who is this working for". This same user hostile attitude continues through the DRM implemenaton

When Microsoft sets up something equivalent to the Data Liberation Front, then we will be able to talk about Windows Phone as a secure operating system. Not a day before.

No, you are mistaken because you didn't read my post (or any of the posts above it). We're talking about floating point rounding irregularities that are present in ALL modern processors, not the floating point bug you're referring to.

In any case, there is a different floating-point bug that affected some AMD CPU's as well - http://www.reghardware.com/2006/04/28/amd_opteron_fpu_bug/

http://www.reghardware.com/2012/01/18/george_lucas_calls_quits_on_blockbuster_career/ He has stated no more new Star wars movies , so dont hold your breath....

It's also on El Reg - is it really that newsworthy?

http://www.reghardware.com/2012/01/31/man_builds_sinclair_zx81_historic_microcomputer_with_lego/

Nokia needs to be a major challenger for its business model to work, and Microsoft is investing a lot of money in mobile and needs more than just one or two partners with niche products to generate a return.

I think you've identified a very real reason why this whole partnership was a terrible idea: It requires one partner or the other (if not both) to get screwed. There is basically no chance of WP7 taking over the entire market. The best it can really hope for is to split the market three ways with Android and iOS, and even that seems extremely optimistic at this point. Windows Mobile, the discontinued product, is still outselling WP7, and those are the just-released latest numbers.

What is Nokia supposed to do with only a small part of a small percentage of the market? Even the entire volume of WP7 sales is probably not enough to sustain them. And Microsoft can't even let them have that, because they'll never get their market share off the floor with only one vendor who, by necessity, will itself have to continue selling and marketing non-WP7 in the interim.

Digital content on Playstation Vita is region locked. http://www.reghardware.com/2011/12/05/sony_region_locks_digital_content_on_ps_vita/

http://www.reghardware.com/2011/11/30/bbc_micro_model_b_30th_anniversary/

A slightly more informative article.

.... because running a software made by "anonymous hackers" is much more safe than original OEM version.

Except a) the hackers aren't anonymous; the guy is well known and has just taken up a job with a phone manufacturer. b) The people who write for the big companies actually are anonymous and often don't even work directly for the big companies c) most of the privacy violations we see are motivated by commercial interests which is before we even get to d) the thing about Cygenomod is that the source code is out there

c) that I mentioned above is the most important thing though. According to reviews, Windows Phone has no native contacts data store. This essentially means that you end up using Facebook (or linkedin etc) for storing data. This is a simple commercial decision which compromises the user's security in order to push forward Microsoft's partnership with Facebook and against Google+. It's very key to understand, at this point, that Microsoft's investment in Skype and Facebook tells us that the company's entire attitude to personal computing and privacy has changed. They will now do whatever they can to make up for the lost years when they allowed their own users to do more or less as they pleased.

Simply put, to have any chance of privacy at all we need something which has at most limited influence from commercial develpers and must have no influence from Microsoft.

Though you'd be forgiven for not noticing since its market share is what's technically known amongst the experts as "Ballmers Dick", or to laymen tiny and shrinking daily.

The article is vacuous, and the submitter a troll.

The comment about Best Buy was probably intended to be a reference to the companies earlier rant prior to the first fire-sale. The new tablets are designed to run MicroSoft's Windows:
http://www.reghardware.com/2011/10/28/hp_tablet_market_run/
http://www.reghardware.com/2011/11/03/hp_introduces_slate_2_windows_tablet/

The article is vacuous, and the submitter a troll.

The comment about Best Buy was probably intended to be a reference to the companies earlier rant prior to the first fire-sale. The new tablets are designed to run MicroSoft's Windows:
http://www.reghardware.com/2011/10/28/hp_tablet_market_run/
http://www.reghardware.com/2011/11/03/hp_introduces_slate_2_windows_tablet/

By a strange coincidence; the Register has a round up of four voice assistants for Android several of which are older than Siri (and so presumably where Apple copied the idea from, if we follow Apple's lawsuit logic) and several of which were better than Siri, at least in categories the register tested.

What's telling about this is how much the Apple / Microsoft press is coming out as if Siri was a big new thing. It's pretty clear that the big boys who divided up the computing market are out to get Google for disturbing the peace. This kind of false "Apple is an innovation leader" story is pretty clearly designed to play to the judges and juries in cases such as the ones about the Samsung tablets.

Can you prove that you did that?

Here is an example ok ... Microsoft recently got this patent:
http://www.reghardware.com/2011/09/23/microsoft_contemplates_mobiles_with_interchangeable_accessories/

Now, go to http://www.engadget.com/2008/12/26/how-would-you-change-sony-ericssons-xperia-x1/2#comments and do a find in page for the word "bottom" or "pop out" ... ok read that description .. now if you scroll up to the top of the article you can see a photo of the Xperia X1 which is being talked about .. notice that a combination of the Xperia X1 and the comment exactly fit the patent of microsoft? If you read the actual patent it becomes even clearer they stole the idea from that engadget comment.

Sorry if this is confusing .. if you disagree let me know.

The Toshiba AC100

You can find a review at http://www.reghardware.com/2010/11/03/review_netbook_toshiba_ac100/

"The beautifully designed and executed hardware is very close to my ideal netbook, and it's hardly an exaggeration to say that I'm heart-broken by Toshiba's cocked-up Android implementation. The best one can hope for is a firmware rescue from the open source community, although I wonder if the product will stay around long enough in these tablet-obsessed times for that to happen."

http://www.reghardware.com/2011/02/07/apple_ipad_tomorrow_people/

Looks EXACTLY like an iPad.

There's an app for that! (NSFW)

... and very timely of The Register to bring it up: http://www.reghardware.com/2011/08/18/heroes_of_tech_david_may/

hmm Perhaps the hammer is aimed quite well at the nail with this post.... Although I can't see an exit from Android for Motorola quite yet.

About 7 months ago
http://www.reghardware.com/2010/11/03/review_netbook_toshiba_ac100/
But after reading that review, or any other review elsewhere on the same product, you probably won't want to.

Well, 17 in laptops do have dedicated numpads.

But, strangely, ever so strangely, regardless of the huge amount of horizontal space 17inchers have, they add a numpad, but then delete the menu key.

That's that key to the left of the Ctrl key on most (desktop) keyboards with a picture of a menu on it and a mouse arrow. Yeah, it was added by Microsoft with their PC 95 specifications, but it's all kinds of handy.

For people who know how to type, and prefer to keep their hands on the keyboard, it brings up what would otherwise be the "right-click menu". It works in Nautilus, Thunderbird, gedit, gnome-terminal, many/most Windows programs, etc.

Anyway, different people have different ways of working. But there's no excuse to not have it on a 17 inch laptop.

I'm looking at you, Dell Studio 17, but there are others with the same disease.

http://www.reghardware.com/2010/11/03/review_netbook_toshiba_ac100/

Verdict
The beautifully designed and executed hardware is very close to my ideal netbook, and it's hardly an exaggeration to say that I'm heart-broken by Toshiba's cocked-up Android implementation. The best one can hope for is a firmware rescue from the open source community, although I wonder if the product will stay around long enough in these tablet-obsessed times for that to happen.

Indeed, the UP TO is only there because they were forced.

Now Ofcom is saying that they can't pull some "up to" figure out of their arse (which is the only place I can imagine ISPs find these numbers):
Ofcom shows average broadband speeds half advertised rate

It's also interesting to see Ofcom appear to want to get rid of "Unlimited"

The CAP is also investigating the use of the world 'unlimited' in broadband packages. Ofcom says, not unsurprisingly, it wants 'unlimited' to mean exactly that, and so "only be used when a service has no usage caps implemented through a fair usage policy".

Two infra-red sources bounce invisible light off the user's retinas. The reflected light is picked up by two cameras and the data used to calculate exactly where the user is looking.

That's from a different, albeit shorter article. That being said, I can't confirm it from Tobii's actual website.

here's the link, just in case.
http://www.tobii.com/en/eye-tracking-integration/global/">and of course, Tobii themselves.

Well, at least Norway is showing a little common sense.
The Regster's Article on Norway probing how illegal SONY's removal of the OtherOS feature is.

Maybe there will be a market for PC co-location in Norway?

No, because they are multi-touch touching another part of the screen doesn't interfere with the writing, iOS is smart enough to do things like that by default (even if it wasn't you could just pull the touch that's look like writing of the array programmatically dropping what look like accidental touches.) The iPad has other strong points that makes it good for hospitals: it is lightweight, portable, strong developer base, relatively easy to develop custom applications for, network connected and above all has a battery that lasts an entire shift worth of use.

Writing in a capacitive screen is a disaster. You need a wand like device and software which filters out extraneous false inputs like a person holding the device, accidentally brushing the screen or whatever. I don't believe for a second that the solution even with filtering would be tolderable.

As for the iPad's other attributes I'd say they're debateable. Organisations like serviceable machines which is why devices like Thinkpads are so popular. The iPad is anything but serviceable - if you break it (e.g. by letting it fall off a hospital bed) you throw it away and buy a new one.

Bullshit. You can't bring down cost by ordering a small run of custom hardware even if it is "simpler" (what does a GPS chip really cost wholesale.) Some low cost Taiwanese company would've done it by now if that were true. No one can touch Apple on price because A: they've got the market cornered on some components and B: due to their success they can order in quantities other companies can only dream of (at the moment?).

Yes and some low cost Chinese companies have already done it. You can buy Android tablets for $100 on ebay. Awful tablets but tablets nonetheless. There is ample opportunity for a functional tablets in the $200-300 range.

GPS, compass, accelerometers, rear facing camera, aluminium case, 16Gb are not critical to a tablet which is going to be used for some casual browsing, movies and email. The Archos 101 is already out and favourably reviewed. It demonstrates a perfectly functional tablet with capacitive 10" screen doesn't have to cost anything close to an iPad. Next year will see many such tablets, running Android 3.0 too.

According to this article: http://www.reghardware.com/2011/02/02/wyahoo_mail_windows_phone_7_bug/, MS asked yahoo for a non-standard IMAP implementation. This non-standard implementation is why it has excessive usage. They are getting MS to use the real standard which should fix the problem. So, if that is true, then this is still MS's fault, for again implementing a standard in a non-standard way

That means that "Android's" "30%" (just to accept your hypothetical, non-referenced number as fact)

LMGT4YLA:

It seems I read it on theregister, not here on /. And the original source is canalys. You're welcome.

http://www.reghardware.com/2011/01/31/android_rules/

I can't believe you passed up the opportunity.

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=pentalobular+screwdriver

And, in the spirit of actually being immediately helpful, The Register's article about this subject had a link to a kit with the appropriate screwdriver and replacement non-bondange-and-domination Phillips screws for an iPhone 4. Just don't take it to any Apple service outlet after that; as TFA points out, they'll undo your work and put those ridiculous screws back in.

If it ends up being anything like this
http://www.reghardware.com/2010/11/03/review_netbook_toshiba_ac100/
then no.

Powered by a nVidia Tegra 2 processor and a special version of Android.

However, reviews haven't been kind on it:
http://www.reghardware.com/2010/11/03/review_netbook_toshiba_ac100/
10/100
"The beautifully designed and executed hardware is very close to my ideal netbook, and it's hardly an exaggeration to say that I'm heart-broken by Toshiba's cocked-up Android implementation. The best one can hope for is a firmware rescue from the open source community, although I wonder if the product will stay around long enough in these tablet-obsessed times for that to happen."

http://www.techradar.com/reviews/pc-mac/laptops-portable-pcs/laptops-and-netbooks/toshiba-ac100-721195/review?artc_pg=4
2.5/5
Verdict
"If you want a device for carrying the web around with you, and you don't want a tablet and can't be bothered with a Windows 7 powered netbok, then the AC100 may be for you.
There's no denying it works and that you can browse the internet on it, but it's how it goes about doing this that most disappoints.
Especially as the AC100 could have been great, it still has lots going for it – the most crucial being excellent portability.
For us, however, the poor implementation of Android 2.1 remains a deal breaker."

You can get a basic phone from Carphone Warehouse for 99p (+ you have to buy £10 of prepaid credit from Virgin Mobile). http://www.reghardware.com/2010/11/07/carphone_warehouse_99p_phone/ , so call it £10.99 or $17.52. For that you get an unlocked phone you can use on any European Network. It won't work in the US because it doesn't support the freqencies used over there.

Or these days :

All software expands until it reaches Twitter.

which includes hardware :

http://www.reghardware.com/2010/10/15/lexmark_twitter_printer/

In other news, "pop star" Lilly Allen is suing Apple because her MacBook was hacked.

This is old news in Japan: http://www.reghardware.com/2009/01/29/kddi_3d_phone/

Actually IIRC the military liked them because they were easy to harden from EMP and NASA liked them because you could likewise harden them easily to protect from cosmic rays. considering they only quit making them in 2007 for military and Aerospace applications there must have been something about that design that made it easy to harden. Maybe the more primitive design was just easier to protect than a modern CPU? Maybe someone who knows the old arches can fill us in?

a 873-page legal claim to the "pod" mark here and earlier reported on the hilariously named iPood here (an implement to bury excrement)

The supermarkets I visit here in the UK actually tell you the cost per unit of weight or volume anyway.. a simple comparison is all that's needed. I am content with this.

Ah, so that's why Amazon now sells board games by the inch? :P