Check with your manufacturer. Some have different acceptable thresholds for stuck "On" vs. stuck "Off" pixels, since the "On" pixels are usually more annoying than the "Off" ones.
"Are the margins between a 650 and a 700 so huge that it's worth spending the time to do the soldering and remarking the processor?"
Probably. Not to long ago, I bought a K6-2 400 that was probably remarked. The metal top had apparently been ground down (unevenly) and re-stamped, plus the lettering on the ceramic borders of the chip had a little smooth oval around them, probably indicating that the original lettering had been ground off and redone.
All grades of the K6-2 are considered low end now, so I imagine the price spread between it and whatever grade it started out as was pretty darn small.
First, I'd just like to bring up the point (already mentioned by several other posters) that Doubletwist is not performing sequencing--rather, they are annotating information published by the HGP.
Given the speed with which Doubletwist has published this information, it seems to me that most of the annotation must be automated, by algorithms that identify known motifs for things such as coding regions, certain types of regulatory regions, etc..., and by comparisions of sequences to known genes to guess at the functions of these genes. It's doubtful they've done much error-checking by hand, or any research into determining the role of features not comparable to known sequences.
It seems to me that the value of Doubletwist's database is limited. Unless they have some really sophisticated algorithms no one else has, what they are actually offering would be the services of their database maintainers, plus the time that individual researchers save by not having to do the fashion and run the searches themselves.
In other news today, "The Artist Formerly Known As Prince" announced his intention to change his name to "|| || | || || | || || ||", as part of a marketing deal with online CD retailers, which will allow readers to buy || || | || || | || || ||'s records simply by scanning in his name.
Said one recording industry spokesman, "We look applaud Mr. || || | || || | || || ||'s move to make it easier for consumers to purchase his CDs". Sources claim that such industry pressure is behind the recent name changes of such young stars as Brittany Spears and Christina Aguilera to "|| | || || || || || | ||" and "|| || || | || | ||| | ||". Representatives for Ms. || | || || || || || | || denied the claims, while Ms. || || || | || | ||| | || was unavailable for comment.
That was my first thought, when I read that the posting's title was "Hyperlinks In The Meat World". But it brings up a good point. Many technologies, like VHS, DVD, and the WWW have all been assisted in achieving mass market penetration (ahem) by porn.
It might not be such a bad idea for these companies to start putting barcodes in some other sorts of publications. Just as long as the scanners are capable of reading barcodes printed on flesh-toned backgrounds;).
Here's some info from the latest issue of Nature. Their site requires a login, so I'll just post an exerpt below. The article gives a little more detail on the story, such as the actual sizes of the sequences involved.
Drosophila genome contaminated with human sequence
[WASHINGTON] Computational biologists at the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) have discovered about 150,000 bases of human DNA mixed in with the genomic sequence of the fruitfly Drosophila compiled by Celera Genomics of Rockville, Maryland, and the Berkeley Drosophila Genome Project (BDGP).
Scientists working with the data were downplaying the significance of the contamination last week. David Lipman, NCBI director, says that the figure should be seen in the context of the approximately 180 million bases of the fly genome.
Lipman adds that the errant data were in a part of the database holding 'unassigned scaffolds', not the labelled part of known fly chromosomes. "We found no evidence of any contamination in the main body of fly sequence data," he says.
Researchers at Celera and the BDGP had previously pointed out that some of the unassigned sequence might contain foreign DNA. They have requested a correction in Science, which published the Drosophila sequence last month. Gerald Rubin, leader of the BDGP, has been quoted as describing the contamination as "trivial".
I'm not surprised the error was caught so quickly. One of the first things that was probably done with the Fly data was to run a sequence matching program (Like NCBI BLAST), to compare it to the known portions of the human genome. The sequence matches would stand out, as they would be ~100% identical. That might occasionally happen for very short sequences, but exact matches with any large portions of the human genome would be highly suspicious.
I think the problem here (Besides egos and bad blood) is that some scientists are still suspicious of Celera's motives and methods, and that they wonder if sometime in the future Celera could (whether accidentally or on purpose) release corrupted data that would be much harder to detect.
See Rambus's RIMM design guide, section 8.2.1 "Mechanical Components - Heatspreader/Cover Reference Design". More info can be found on Intel's developer site, on the RIMM Module Reference Design page, under the section "Production Heat Spreader Reference Design".
Basically, RDRAM RIMMs give off a lot of heat, plus the heat is produced in a very small area. The aluminum covers are necessary to prevent hot spots. If you look at the figure 8-1 "Double-Sided RIMM Module Assembly-Exploded View", you'll see that the reference design calls for a thermal pad (Or thermal grease) between the heat spreader and the RDRAM chips.
"Spread Spectrum Clocking (SSC) is a frequency modulation technique for EMI reduction. In the latest motherboards, the master clock generator chip does not maintain a constant frequency."
As far as I know, what SSC does is jiggle the clock frequency a little, thus spreading EMI emissions out across a slightly wider range of frequencies. In other words, it gets around FCC EMI regulations without actually reducing the amount of energy radiated.
The metal plate in Rambus isn't just an EMF shield--it also functions as a heat sink, as not only do RDRAM modules run hot, the heat production is concentrated in a very small area. I'm guessing that any speed increase the mad overclockers saw in their SDRAM was due more to improved heat dissipation than anything else.
"Compare this to about a year and a half ago, when the TNT came out. "Sure, they support 32-bit color and higher texture sizes, but we have more FPS! No true gamer cares about how good their games look, they just want more FPS!"
And at the same time nVidia PR was saying, "Sure, the V3 has more FPS than the TNT, but we have 32-bit color and higher texture sizes!". When nVidia T&L was announced, 3dfx it would be a while before T&L was properly supported. When 3dfx announced the T-buffer, nVidia claimed that gamers would prefer the T&L speed boost to the prettier FSAA (Quote nVidia PR rep, who asked if 3dfx's VSA-100 stood for "Very Slow Architecture" in a public interview).
These two companies have been bashing each other constantly. 3dfx uses their "PR specialist" Bubba (His real name) Wolford (sp?), while nVidia 's attack dog is Derek Perez. Open your eyes, *all* corporate PR divisions are full of it, some are just a little better at convincing you of the contrary (As nVidia seems to have done to you).
Anyway, besides nVidia and ATI, 3dfx plans to show off a working V5-6000 (Their quad-chip card) at WinHec. There's a bunch of players that probably won't be there, though. S3 has been quiet lately (Not surprising, given that S3 is selling their graphics division to Via). BitBoys has pushed their expected release date back by an entire year. VideoLogic hasn't made any recent announcements, and STMicro's "GeForce-Killer" is still vapor.
3D hardware for the Mac market...
on
ATI Radeon 256
·
· Score: 2
Mac video hardware has definitely fallen behind the PC, with the dual-processor Rage Maxx being unable to run properly in the current Macs due to motherboard issues. So what else is out there?
Right now, 3dfx has Mac drivers and a bios flash that will allow your standard PCI V3 for the PC to work with a Mac. The drivers are beta, but the card is cheap (since you don't have to pay the Mac hardware premium), and test show it blowing away ATI's cards (In 3D, 2D is so-so). Only problem is that the V3 wasn't designed with Mac support in mind, so there are a few hardware issues that may never go away.
The V5, on the other hand, was designed to support the Mac from the beginning. The Mac version has already been demoed (Rumor has it the Mac version was ready before the PC one). Here's an article from InsideMacGames. 3dfx is coming out with PCI only at first, AGP may come later.
nVidia has announced that they intend to bring out a Mac card sometime later this year, possibly the NV15 or a varient thereof. They've released little info on this--but they did hire some director or manager guy away from Apple a few months ago.
...In other news today, Apple announced the company had filed suit against the Pacific jellyfish Aequoria victoria. Legal representatives for the company cited the gelatinous organism's rounded shape, translucent body, colorful bioluminescence, and utter brainlessness.
According to the Apple spokesman, "We believe our lawsuit is justified, as the resemblence to the iMac is obvious". No comment was available from the jellyfish, which was last seen munching on zooplankton.
So, anyone want to venture a guess as to the contests of "http://slashdot.sex"? I'm imagining photoshop-spawned pics of a certain young Miss Portman, covered in nothing but her modesty and hot grits.
Now, given the apparent number of Natalie fans around here, it might just be a viable business model (Since nowadays we have so many business models which consist of nothing more than a catchy domain name). Or then again, there might actually only be one single AC out there.
Like Firewire to add USB costs money. To be precise $ 0,25 a port. Contrary to firewire where this fee is split in 7 the fee for USB goes directly to Intel.
Are you certain about this? As far as I know, royalty-free licenses are available for the core USB 1.1 specs, and that these licenses are handled by a non-profit consortium (The USB-IF, I think it was?) that Intel set up together with Microsoft and a bunch of other big companies.
Also, I believe that Intel plans to (but has not yet officially announced) to also offer free licenses for USB 2.0.
You are hereby ordered to cease and desist!
on
eBay For Patents?
·
· Score: 2
"I already have a patent of selling patents on the internet. In fact, in my patent the place of exchange is called "The Patent & License Exchange". I guess I'll just have to put the patent up on the violator's website and see how much bid they'll put on it. Now that's meta-patent-selling-patent biatch!"
Oh yeah? Well I've got a patent on the selling of patents of selling patents on the internet! The place of exchange is called "The Patent & License Exchange Patent Exchange".
Now that's meta-meta-patent-selling-patent, biatch!
To cause damage to animal or plant tissue, electromagnetic radiation needs to either cook it by raising its temperature (lots of watts, like in a microwave or a solar reflector), or have ENOUGH ENERGY PER PHOTON to ionize it. Radio wave and microwave photons don't have enough energy to ionize or break chemical bonds in living tissue. They're less dangerous than infrared radiation (heat). UV, X-rays, and Gamma rays have enough energy per photon to ionize or break chemical bonds in living tissue.
Yes, let's talk photons. It turns out the situation is not as simple as it first seems. The energy from a microwave photon eventually ends up as heat, but you could easily argue that for every other form of EM radiation as well. The question is, what happens in the interval between the time the energy is adsorbed, and the time it ends up as waste heat?
Basically, microwaves set up a rapidly oscillating electric field in the material they pass through. Polar molecules (Such as water) experience a torque that aligns them in the direction of the elctric field, and which changes direction each time the field reverses direction. What makes water an especially good adsorber of microwaves is their network of hydrogen bonds, some of which must be broken to allow the molecules the freedom to rotate with the field (Note--hydrogen bonds break and reform all the time, it's one of the properties that allows water to flow).
Now, what happens to biological molecules is something that is not understood well. We do know, though, that polar molecules will experience forces that unlike those from normal thermal agitation, in that the forces are non-random.
In vitro, microwave energy can cause subtle but repeatable changes in gene expression and protein activity (Such of those like heat shock proteins) in ways that differ from those observed with simply application of heat. Go to PubMed and search for the term "Microwave Exposure", you'll find there is actually quite a bit of research on the subject.
"Some of these projects include supplying aid to refugees in Eritrea, searching for meteorites in Antarctica, studying the forests of Borneo, cataloging the languages of Vanuatu, and teaching school kids remotely from Central America..."
So, for these sorts of applications, $395 for 13.8 watts isn't all that bad. You have a small market, consisting of customers who have few other choices (Besides lugging around a portable generator) that are willing to spend lots of money--and I'll bet the startup costs for this business are tiny (Compared to another company with a similar business model, Iridium).
Seriously, once you take out the fact that Jenni happens to be a pretty young lady (who sometimes gets naked) and replace it with a guy, the concept looses some of it's charm (OK, maybe not for the geek girls out there).
I'm glad you included Mr. Tinklenberg's comments. As is sometimes the case with mainstream press coverage of science, the Oklahoman article is just a little too enthusiastic. For instance, the original press release at the website of the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation has the following paragraph printed in a big bold font:
"It is critical to note while this progress is an important step towards a successful treatment of Alzheimer's disease, the present Memapsin 2 inhibitor should not be mistaken as a drug itself. The Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation does not have a drug for the treatment of Alzheimer's disease at this stage of research..."
Of course, it's not entirely the fault of the press. Apart from the disclaimer, the OMRF's press release makes some sweeping declarations that you wouldn't see in a scientific paper.
Not anymore, at least with the newer CPUs. For instance, overclocking an AMD Athlon requires cracking open the protective cartridge (which is not meant to be removable), and then either doing some soldering work or using a "Goldfingers" device to override the CPU module's bus frequency multiplier locks.
As for systems that are not meant to overclock--sometimes yields have been so good Intel and AMD have had had to ship some high-speed chips to fill contracts for lower speed units. For instance, crack open the cases of certain batches of 500mhz Athlons and you'll find chips stamped with the 650mhz code.
There are actually sites out there like this giving listings of what's really inside--what fab it was made at, the process type, the production date, etc. Some sites may even be tables listing the overclocking potentials for different batches of the same CPU.
"My big complaint about overclocking CPU's is that while you can get better heatsink/fan units with thermal glue to better dissipate the heat when you overclock the CPU, what happens if the fan dies? This could result in a Chernobyl-like meltdown of the CPU, and you'll be out US$65 to US$200 for a lower-speed overclocked CPU that is now useless..."
What if the fan dies? No problem, get another fan. $10-20 for a fan and heatsink. Modern motherboards (Even the cheap $70 board I use) are equipped with a 3-pin fan header which, besides supplying your fan with power, also returns information on the fan's speed. In the event of a failure, the motherboard can sound an alarm and/or throttle back the CPU. Note that older fans that connect through a four-pin connector to the power supply do not support this feature.
As for "thermal glue", I'm guessing you mean the thermal epoxy or thermal adhesive pads (such as the glue used on some of Intel's Overdrive chips) which permanently attach the fan. Those sort of attachements are rarely found on DIY machines--Overclockers typically use bare CPUs, with (non-adhesive) thermal grease between the CPU and heatsink.
Slashdot Mirror
Check with your manufacturer. Some have different acceptable thresholds for stuck "On" vs. stuck "Off" pixels, since the "On" pixels are usually more annoying than the "Off" ones.
"Are the margins between a 650 and a 700 so huge that it's worth spending the time to do the soldering and remarking the processor?"
Probably. Not to long ago, I bought a K6-2 400 that was probably remarked. The metal top had apparently been ground down (unevenly) and re-stamped, plus the lettering on the ceramic borders of the chip had a little smooth oval around them, probably indicating that the original lettering had been ground off and redone.
All grades of the K6-2 are considered low end now, so I imagine the price spread between it and whatever grade it started out as was pretty darn small.
First, I'd just like to bring up the point (already mentioned by several other posters) that Doubletwist is not performing sequencing--rather, they are annotating information published by the HGP.
Given the speed with which Doubletwist has published this information, it seems to me that most of the annotation must be automated, by algorithms that identify known motifs for things such as coding regions, certain types of regulatory regions, etc..., and by comparisions of sequences to known genes to guess at the functions of these genes. It's doubtful they've done much error-checking by hand, or any research into determining the role of features not comparable to known sequences.
It seems to me that the value of Doubletwist's database is limited. Unless they have some really sophisticated algorithms no one else has, what they are actually offering would be the services of their database maintainers, plus the time that individual researchers save by not having to do the fashion and run the searches themselves.
In other news today, "The Artist Formerly Known As Prince" announced his intention to change his name to "|| || | || || | || || ||", as part of a marketing deal with online CD retailers, which will allow readers to buy || || | || || | || || ||'s records simply by scanning in his name.
Said one recording industry spokesman, "We look applaud Mr. || || | || || | || || ||'s move to make it easier for consumers to purchase his CDs". Sources claim that such industry pressure is behind the recent name changes of such young stars as Brittany Spears and Christina Aguilera to "|| | || || || || || | ||" and "|| || || | || | ||| | ||". Representatives for Ms. || | || || || || || | || denied the claims, while Ms. || || || | || | ||| | || was unavailable for comment.
That was my first thought, when I read that the posting's title was "Hyperlinks In The Meat World". But it brings up a good point. Many technologies, like VHS, DVD, and the WWW have all been assisted in achieving mass market penetration (ahem) by porn.
;).
It might not be such a bad idea for these companies to start putting barcodes in some other sorts of publications. Just as long as the scanners are capable of reading barcodes printed on flesh-toned backgrounds
Here's some info from the latest issue of Nature. Their site requires a login, so I'll just post an exerpt below. The article gives a little more detail on the story, such as the actual sizes of the sequences involved.
Drosophila genome contaminated with human sequence
[WASHINGTON] Computational biologists at the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) have discovered about 150,000 bases of human DNA mixed in with the genomic sequence of the fruitfly Drosophila compiled by Celera Genomics of Rockville, Maryland, and the Berkeley Drosophila Genome Project (BDGP).
Scientists working with the data were downplaying the significance of the contamination last week. David Lipman, NCBI director, says that the figure should be seen in the context of the approximately 180 million bases of the fly genome.
Lipman adds that the errant data were in a part of the database holding 'unassigned scaffolds', not the labelled part of known fly chromosomes. "We found no evidence of any contamination in the main body of fly sequence data," he says.
Researchers at Celera and the BDGP had previously pointed out that some of the unassigned sequence might contain foreign DNA. They have requested a correction in Science, which published the Drosophila sequence last month. Gerald Rubin, leader of the BDGP, has been quoted as describing the contamination as "trivial".
I'm not surprised the error was caught so quickly. One of the first things that was probably done with the Fly data was to run a sequence matching program (Like NCBI BLAST), to compare it to the known portions of the human genome. The sequence matches would stand out, as they would be ~100% identical. That might occasionally happen for very short sequences, but exact matches with any large portions of the human genome would be highly suspicious.
I think the problem here (Besides egos and bad blood) is that some scientists are still suspicious of Celera's motives and methods, and that they wonder if sometime in the future Celera could (whether accidentally or on purpose) release corrupted data that would be much harder to detect.
See Rambus's RIMM design guide, section 8.2.1 "Mechanical Components - Heatspreader/Cover Reference Design". More info can be found on Intel's developer site, on the RIMM Module Reference Design page, under the section "Production Heat Spreader Reference Design".
Basically, RDRAM RIMMs give off a lot of heat, plus the heat is produced in a very small area. The aluminum covers are necessary to prevent hot spots. If you look at the figure 8-1 "Double-Sided RIMM Module Assembly-Exploded View", you'll see that the reference design calls for a thermal pad (Or thermal grease) between the heat spreader and the RDRAM chips.
"Spread Spectrum Clocking (SSC) is a frequency modulation technique for EMI reduction. In the latest motherboards, the master clock generator chip does not maintain a constant frequency."
As far as I know, what SSC does is jiggle the clock frequency a little, thus spreading EMI emissions out across a slightly wider range of frequencies. In other words, it gets around FCC EMI regulations without actually reducing the amount of energy radiated.
The metal plate in Rambus isn't just an EMF shield--it also functions as a heat sink, as not only do RDRAM modules run hot, the heat production is concentrated in a very small area. I'm guessing that any speed increase the mad overclockers saw in their SDRAM was due more to improved heat dissipation than anything else.
"I'm not just an elder god, I'm cute too!"
"Compare this to about a year and a half ago, when the TNT came out. "Sure, they support 32-bit color and higher texture sizes, but we have more FPS! No true gamer cares about how good their games look, they just want more FPS!"
And at the same time nVidia PR was saying, "Sure, the V3 has more FPS than the TNT, but we have 32-bit color and higher texture sizes!". When nVidia T&L was announced, 3dfx it would be a while before T&L was properly supported. When 3dfx announced the T-buffer, nVidia claimed that gamers would prefer the T&L speed boost to the prettier FSAA (Quote nVidia PR rep, who asked if 3dfx's VSA-100 stood for "Very Slow Architecture" in a public interview).
These two companies have been bashing each other constantly. 3dfx uses their "PR specialist" Bubba (His real name) Wolford (sp?), while nVidia 's attack dog is Derek Perez. Open your eyes, *all* corporate PR divisions are full of it, some are just a little better at convincing you of the contrary (As nVidia seems to have done to you).
"...world+dog..."
You read the TheRegister, don't you?
Anyway, besides nVidia and ATI, 3dfx plans to show off a working V5-6000 (Their quad-chip card) at WinHec. There's a bunch of players that probably won't be there, though. S3 has been quiet lately (Not surprising, given that S3 is selling their graphics division to Via). BitBoys has pushed their expected release date back by an entire year. VideoLogic hasn't made any recent announcements, and STMicro's "GeForce-Killer" is still vapor.
Mac video hardware has definitely fallen behind the PC, with the dual-processor Rage Maxx being unable to run properly in the current Macs due to motherboard issues. So what else is out there?
Right now, 3dfx has Mac drivers and a bios flash that will allow your standard PCI V3 for the PC to work with a Mac. The drivers are beta, but the card is cheap (since you don't have to pay the Mac hardware premium), and test show it blowing away ATI's cards (In 3D, 2D is so-so). Only problem is that the V3 wasn't designed with Mac support in mind, so there are a few hardware issues that may never go away.
The V5, on the other hand, was designed to support the Mac from the beginning. The Mac version has already been demoed (Rumor has it the Mac version was ready before the PC one). Here's an article from InsideMacGames. 3dfx is coming out with PCI only at first, AGP may come later.
nVidia has announced that they intend to bring out a Mac card sometime later this year, possibly the NV15 or a varient thereof. They've released little info on this--but they did hire some director or manager guy away from Apple a few months ago.
...In other news today, Apple announced the company had filed suit against the Pacific jellyfish Aequoria victoria. Legal representatives for the company cited the gelatinous organism's rounded shape, translucent body, colorful bioluminescence, and utter brainlessness.
According to the Apple spokesman, "We believe our lawsuit is justified, as the resemblence to the iMac is obvious". No comment was available from the jellyfish, which was last seen munching on zooplankton.
"Bring on the .sex TLD!!!"
So, anyone want to venture a guess as to the contests of "http://slashdot.sex"? I'm imagining photoshop-spawned pics of a certain young Miss Portman, covered in nothing but her modesty and hot grits.
Now, given the apparent number of Natalie fans around here, it might just be a viable business model (Since nowadays we have so many business models which consist of nothing more than a catchy domain name). Or then again, there might actually only be one single AC out there.
Like Firewire to add USB costs money.
To be precise $ 0,25 a port.
Contrary to firewire where this fee is split in 7 the fee for USB goes directly to Intel.
Are you certain about this? As far as I know, royalty-free licenses are available for the core USB 1.1 specs, and that these licenses are handled by a non-profit consortium (The USB-IF, I think it was?) that Intel set up together with Microsoft and a bunch of other big companies.
Also, I believe that Intel plans to (but has not yet officially announced) to also offer free licenses for USB 2.0.
"I already have a patent of selling patents on the internet. In fact, in my patent the place of exchange is called "The Patent & License Exchange". I guess I'll just have to put the patent up on the violator's website and see how much bid they'll put on it. Now that's meta-patent-selling-patent biatch!"
Oh yeah? Well I've got a patent on the selling of patents of selling patents on the internet! The place of exchange is called "The Patent & License Exchange Patent Exchange".
Now that's meta-meta-patent-selling-patent, biatch!
To cause damage to animal or plant tissue, electromagnetic radiation needs to either cook it by raising its temperature (lots of watts, like in a microwave or a solar reflector), or have ENOUGH ENERGY PER PHOTON to ionize it. Radio wave and microwave photons don't have enough energy to ionize or break chemical bonds in living tissue. They're less dangerous than infrared radiation (heat). UV, X-rays, and Gamma rays have enough energy per photon to ionize or break chemical bonds in living tissue.
Yes, let's talk photons. It turns out the situation is not as simple as it first seems. The energy from a microwave photon eventually ends up as heat, but you could easily argue that for every other form of EM radiation as well. The question is, what happens in the interval between the time the energy is adsorbed, and the time it ends up as waste heat?
Basically, microwaves set up a rapidly oscillating electric field in the material they pass through. Polar molecules (Such as water) experience a torque that aligns them in the direction of the elctric field, and which changes direction each time the field reverses direction. What makes water an especially good adsorber of microwaves is their network of hydrogen bonds, some of which must be broken to allow the molecules the freedom to rotate with the field (Note--hydrogen bonds break and reform all the time, it's one of the properties that allows water to flow).
Now, what happens to biological molecules is something that is not understood well. We do know, though, that polar molecules will experience forces that unlike those from normal thermal agitation, in that the forces are non-random.
In vitro, microwave energy can cause subtle but repeatable changes in gene expression and protein activity (Such of those like heat shock proteins) in ways that differ from those observed with simply application of heat. Go to PubMed and search for the term "Microwave Exposure", you'll find there is actually quite a bit of research on the subject.
"Free registration required; you know the drill..."
Yup, we sure do...
http://partners.nytimes.c om/cnet/CNET_0_4_1697833_00.html
Take a look at the bottom of the page:
"Some of these projects include supplying aid to refugees in Eritrea, searching for meteorites in Antarctica, studying the forests of Borneo, cataloging the languages of Vanuatu, and teaching school kids remotely from Central America..."
So, for these sorts of applications, $395 for 13.8 watts isn't all that bad. You have a small market, consisting of customers who have few other choices (Besides lugging around a portable generator) that are willing to spend lots of money--and I'll bet the startup costs for this business are tiny (Compared to another company with a similar business model, Iridium).
Well?
Seriously, once you take out the fact that Jenni happens to be a pretty young lady (who sometimes gets naked) and replace it with a guy, the concept looses some of it's charm (OK, maybe not for the geek girls out there).
I'm glad you included Mr. Tinklenberg's comments. As is sometimes the case with mainstream press coverage of science, the Oklahoman article is just a little too enthusiastic. For instance, the original press release at the website of the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation has the following paragraph printed in a big bold font:
"It is critical to note while this progress is an important step towards a successful treatment of Alzheimer's disease, the present Memapsin 2 inhibitor should not be mistaken as a drug itself. The Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation does not have a drug for the treatment of Alzheimer's disease at this stage of research..."
Of course, it's not entirely the fault of the press. Apart from the disclaimer, the OMRF's press release makes some sweeping declarations that you wouldn't see in a scientific paper.
All you do is move a couple jumpers!
Not anymore, at least with the newer CPUs. For instance, overclocking an AMD Athlon requires cracking open the protective cartridge (which is not meant to be removable), and then either doing some soldering work or using a "Goldfingers" device to override the CPU module's bus frequency multiplier locks.
As for systems that are not meant to overclock--sometimes yields have been so good Intel and AMD have had had to ship some high-speed chips to fill contracts for lower speed units. For instance, crack open the cases of certain batches of 500mhz Athlons and you'll find chips stamped with the 650mhz code.
There are actually sites out there like this giving listings of what's really inside--what fab it was made at, the process type, the production date, etc. Some sites may even be tables listing the overclocking potentials for different batches of the same CPU.
"My big complaint about overclocking CPU's is that while you can get better heatsink/fan units with thermal glue to better dissipate the heat when you overclock the CPU, what happens if the fan dies? This could result in a Chernobyl-like meltdown of the CPU, and you'll be out US$65 to US$200 for a lower-speed overclocked CPU that is now useless..."
What if the fan dies? No problem, get another fan. $10-20 for a fan and heatsink. Modern motherboards (Even the cheap $70 board I use) are equipped with a 3-pin fan header which, besides supplying your fan with power, also returns information on the fan's speed. In the event of a failure, the motherboard can sound an alarm and/or throttle back the CPU. Note that older fans that connect through a four-pin connector to the power supply do not support this feature.
As for "thermal glue", I'm guessing you mean the thermal epoxy or thermal adhesive pads (such as the glue used on some of Intel's Overdrive chips) which permanently attach the fan. Those sort of attachements are rarely found on DIY machines--Overclockers typically use bare CPUs, with (non-adhesive) thermal grease between the CPU and heatsink.
The Register, a British tech news site, had this to say on the 2.5 ton device:
"New device not ideal for mobile use..."