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<Back on topic (sort of)> Now, this (printable nano-lasers) is what I've been waiting for to light my home. Straight out of science fiction, but looks like a few years development required yet.

Use a tiny fan / large heatsink and vent it into the living space - it's only 6W ... In Winter, even tiny gaps - let alone heat pipes - seriously degrade ceiling insulation performance. It's better not to have them at all.

I can buy GU10 CFL bulbs for AU$10-15 inc tax. Wattage ranges from 9 to 18. Decent 11W models have equivalent light output to cheap 50W halogens, the big difference is the spread is at least 110 degrees, so they're unsuitable for high ceilings or highlighting. Life expectancy is supposed to be...

They're not the primary light source, just decorative low-power LEDs.

Total BS, I'm not sure which of you is worse. The current models that I can see were released 1-2 years back, so they're probably due for a refresh (if that hasn't happened already), but that hardly makes them uncompetitive in their market. The ultralight (<1.3kg with DVD) version has a 1.2GHz...

This thread explains. From this post: I'm born in Québec, which isn't in the Canadian constitution since 1982 (or was it 1981, I never remember). Although not officially a country, Québec is also not really Canada either. Of course, I'm born well before 1981 when both Québec and Canada shared...

That would be the nub of it. On the Garmin-Asus, it's tiny and completely flush. The only way is to hold the phone the same way each time so that your finger tip can probe for it. There are flaws in the basic Android design that don't affect other platforms, eg power management, which is why I...

Keith Moon was probably the most entertaining drummer to ever wield sticks. One of the intriguing aspects of The Who was the amazing virtuosity of their 'rhythm section', with both the drummer and bassist (John Entwhistle) frequently included in the very top ranks of rock musicians. Similarly...

You're being a bit obtuse, Timwhit. No phone with a separate keypad has ever worked liked that. And I haven't had a Nokia myself for years. There used to be an emphasis on easy one-handed operation - after all, it's a bloody phone. Even the iPhone has an easy-to-press button in addition to the...

Apparently, once the display has powered down after a minute or so, default Android behavior is to require the user to press the power button to wake up the phone. Then the user has to either double-tap an icon or swipe a pattern to authenticate themselves. Then they have to choose that they...

Ouch! Stinker, do you have accident insurance?

That's pretty much a replay of my experience, with their claims that reflashing would fix it - this time. Our laws are too weak; no company should be able to get away with such repeated, blatant fraud. Good call on applying pressure to the retailer before S*ny mucked you about any further.

So, a Who fan, then?

Thinking of picking up a Garmin-Asus A10. HVGA capacitive touch screen, 1500mAh battery, 512MB RAM + 512MB SLC flash, 5MP auto-focus camera, no flash, no radio. Maps are stored in the phone so turn-by-turn navigation (walking, bus or driving) is available without data costs. It appears to...

Yes, that's what I was saying. However, I believe that has changed in the last year or two. You can finally get Gigabyte boards with the same level of components on both AMD and Intel versions.

You've often claimed this, but I've dismissed it as you comparing apples with oranges, such as an i7 with an Athlon X2, or a Core 2 with an Athlon 64. My understanding - dating all the way back to Tannin's enthusiasm for the AMD K3 - is that "snappiness" is a function of secondary cache size...

I think that's too broad a statement to be defensible. There have been some series of chipsets/motherboards for AMD CPUs that were problematic, but others have been just fine. The capacitor plague always seemed to infest AMD-CPU motherboards more than Intel-CPU ones; this was probably due at...

A330-200 has a range of 13,400 km. However, that's quoted fully loaded, whereas AFAIK the P-3C is quoted unloaded ('ferry' configuration). While searching at low altitude (600 m), fuel consumption goes through the roof. So the effective range and 'time on station' are going to be less in this...

As you may have heard, a 16-year old American girl was attempting to sail solo around the world (not the Australian one that recently finished). It all went pear-shaped in the middle of the Indian Ocean, about half way between Africa and Australia, 3700km from landfall. That has to be one of...

Hmmm, my daughter succumbed just the other day to the same source ... In my experience and in what I've read, that sounds about right. That's very true about Samsung, but in addition I feel their designs are not as polished as other major brands. Nokia is infamous for releasing the hardware...

1) Their annual summary says Dell has "poor reliability" and didn't make the top 5. :rofl: 2) Well that's a bloody good question isn't it? No, I'm not. I found an extract on some site that seemed to be talking about laptops and jumped to a possibly misleading conclusion. :oops: For what it's...

An alternative reliability survey They produce them every quarter, I've checked three from the last year or so. Asus is always in first or second place and Lenovo in the top three. Toshiba is always fourth and HP fifth. In the latest one I linked to, the Lenovo failure rate is half that of...

Well, buying the RAM elsewhere is cheating :p , but I was looking at the first one on your list, the E6410 (your simultaneous post focused on the E5410/5400). The E5410 currently has a deep discount, so I wondered if it isn't a runaway winner in terms of bang for the buck? Hmmm, I thought I...

For starters, I'm going to assume you don't hate your Dad enough to expose him to HP support. When I tried to configure the Dell and Lenovo options, they easily blew your $800 budget. LaptopMag seemed to like the Lenovo T410 a lot, and support is good. The specs I saw classified the Core 2...

You misread it, the study suggests Acer notebooks are less reliable than any other brand except Gateway or HP. Not that hard for me to believe. For me, they lose credibility with their rankings of Apple, Dell and Lenovo. It's also stupid to rate Dell this way because they sell two different...

Hmmm, you're right. It seems my declaration of the death of 16:10 was premature.

According to Table 3, MTTF for an example SRAM chip was a bit less than 6,000 years. The Arrhenius equation is just a model, and for chemical reactions at that. It's relevance to real life electronics failure rates is a moot point. The sort of failures that it predicts well are too rare to be...

I guess that depends on how high and what sort of component? I'm aware that capacitors and fan bearings have a life expectancy inversely proportional to their operating temperature. As ddrueding points out, where is the evidence that this applies to semiconductors (within normal limits...

Good to see you up and about, BTW. How's your better half?

Yeah, we have the same concept ('small medical center'), but I don't think they could be bothered setting up an I.V. line. Having said that, that's where we've gone when someone has acute vomiting/diarrhea that won't quit. They just give you a shot of Stemetil for the nausea, possibly a...

Slight omission: if you have top-level private health cover, it would make the $200 go away.

Wow, that's a bit third world, isn't it? I'm not trying to be a smart ass, I'm genuinely interested, and Pradeep has some perspective on this. In Oz, people whine about having to wait - in some cases up to several hours - to be seen in ED. However, that's after you've been triaged. If you need...

Well, that may in fact be a JEDEC standard for FB-DIMMs, although I have no idea whether or not it's mandatory.

+1

Don't get me wrong, I like Gatorade when I'm seriously overheated, say after an hour or two mowing on a really hot day. That's because the electrolyte additives mean I can drink a lot quite quickly, as opposed to plain water. But I've never needed more than one or two bottles. Vomiting and...

No, osmolarity above about 3.5g/100ml decreases water uptake. Check the proportions in Chewy's table, which is pretty similar to WHO recommendations, etc. Also, current Gatorade actually uses High Fructose Corn Syrup, not pure glucose (although perversely, that might actually help). They're...

Standard Gatorade may increase diarrhea, thanks to the high sugar (fructose) content. Excess sugar also inhibits absorption, so it's better than drinking nothing, but far from ideal if you're starting to get dehydrated.

Why worry about the RAM? Manufacturers usually quote ambient operating temperature ranges of up 65 or 70C - the chips themselves may run at up to 95C, or in come cases, even 125C! Think about it, even CPUs can be rated up to 90C. Surely everyone realizes that RAM heatsinks are just for show?

There's no such thing. Replacement may be court-ordered on a case by case basis. The TIA can only help if the phone was bought on a contract. The ACCC certainly won't help, their job is to prosecute large cases, not piddle about with individual consumers. But yes, I did call them, read their...

No doubt, but they're not even remotely comparable. Dual-core vs hex-core? These CPUs look like incredibly poor value to me. Why on Earth would you buy one? The i5-750 is the same price as the cheaper one, with twice as many (true) cores.

Good luck with that. We had two S500 units. Sony Ericsson refused my request for even a replacement phone, let alone a different model (which was my intent). They fixed it three times, on the fourth occasion we binned it. We fixed the other one at our cost, then binned it as well after the...

Really? How much? I mean, it's free with cellphone services, and it's not like it costs the Telco even one cent to provide it; if anything, it costs them to disable it.

PABXs here don't usually send a caller ID, so that's not much use to me. Also, the local loop monopoly, Telstra, actually charges $6 per month for the privilege of receiving the caller ID! I kid you not.

Interesting philosophical angle in the NY Times: Our Fix-It Faith and the Oil Spill

Based on the published specs, I don't believe it does. Usually, the most basic printers don't get PCL emulation. For instance, the CLP315 doesn't have it, but the now-obsolete CLP-350N did. Samsung explicitly mentions it as a feature on that page.

I think you're mistaken. The Samurai were not lords. Lieutenants were expected to atone, not generals. The exception was where it was used as a form of execution, for example getting rid of a vanquished daimyo to stop further disputes. Look at the head of Toyota, for example. A member of the...

So what are the markets about to do? Bounce Thursday, crash Friday? I think it's got to the point where maybe 50% of investors are wondering that. One in seven American mortgages in arrears or default is certainly an eye-opener. Only a couple of steps from Armageddon if things get any worse...

It's got nothing to do with children starving - that happens all the time. The question is whether or not the Greek economy can be re-inflated enough to be able to service the debt on an ongoing basis. The major problem with the austerity measures is not children's hunger, but how much that will...

I'm less worried about the missing nut (but it was there when I started, honest) than the fact that the car's been in a collision serious enough to break a wheel lug. It would make me wonder about brake integrity etc.

11. This happened only a week or so after management made all employees sign a declaration that they wouldn't kill themselves. They're going to fit nets around the building. This is the underbelly of Apple's profits.