Northwest at risk of megaquake like one in Chile
02.03.10
LOS ANGELES - There comes a time, 50 miles off the coast of the Pacific Northwest is a hotspot earthquake that threatens to release on Seattle, Portland and Vancouver, the persuasion of the damage that has broken Chile.
The fault has been dormant for over 300 years, but when he wakes up - tomorrow or decades from now - the consequences could be grim.
Recent computer simulations of a hypothetical magnitude-9 earthquake found that shaking could last 2 to 5 minutes - emphatic enough to cause potentially poorly constructed buildings from British Columbia to Northern California to disintegrate and severely damage roads and bridges.
Such an earthquake would also send tsunami waves intense rushing down in minutes. While big cities like Portland and Seattle would be protected against the intransigence of floods, communities of low resort may not be so lucky.
The north-west Pacific "has a geological history of hunger is exactly what happened in Chile," said Brian Atwater, a geologist from the U.S. Geological survey and the University of Washington. "This n is not a question of if but when will happen next.
Source: The Associated Press
HP to iPad fans: buy the fuller-featured Slate for the same price
18.02.10
There's a fly off the handle brewin' on the horizon, folks. Apple seems poised to set the pace when it comes to plate computing in much the same way that the company led the touchscreen handheld market with the iPhone. This things, however, rival PC companies have time to prepare — and HP is looking to put behind bars horns with Apple right out of the gate.
The HP Slate (modeled above by Microsoft big cheese Steve Ballmer) is the iPad's most unmistakeable contender at the moment. And what a contender it's shaping up to be, now that HP is looking to play ball at the same low value point that Apple has commit to. It's not official, though HP is making some noise that the house could sell its Slate — which features a full-on version of Windows 7 as well as a cellular coupling — for less than the $630 of the equivalent iPad. When you take into consideration that the iPad doesn't quirk all of the accoutrements of Apple's own OS, then HP's offer is all the more alluring.
As for other PC companies, Dell seems to muse over that a smaller tablet than the iPad, one that rides in with around a 5-inch screen, is what people de facto want. Asus and MSI are still a little shy about the whole tablet thing — first of all at the prices Apple has set — though Acer, who pledged not to get involved in iPad-pattern computing, has come out and said that it intends to bring out "iPad-like devices" and clash in the space between computers and phones.
Source: DVICE
"It's almost like when a computer's got a virus, you launder that hard drive that's what I had to do in my mind, clean my mind.
