Slashdot Mirror

HiyaPower writes: "According to recent calculations cited by this article in TheAge, the calculations that the sun would expand to a red giant and engulf the earth are wrong. It will expand, but due to the loss of solar mass over time due to the conversion of mass into energy, the earth will spiral enough further away thus avoiding the fate of Venus and Mercury. Personally I find this a great relief, I had some long term plans that I had been putting off..."

HiyaPower writes: "AMD announced today that it has started shipment of its mobile Duron line of processors. While these were supposed to have made it out the gate in 00Q4, it is nice to see that they have finally appeared. Designed around a 1.6V VCore, these processors have a power dissipation of roughly 25W at 600 Mhz, and 29W at 700 Mhz according to the tech specs. Pricing is aggressive as might be expected in this environment. The AMD mobile line has been a good one since the K6-III+ processors. Hopefully, these Durons will live up to the tradition." I bet this release is a spur to the folks at both Intel and Transmeta -- isn't it nice to watch one-upmanship at work sometimes?

HiyaPower writes: "After a lot of perserverence, John Young has finally gotten the NSA to release a pile of stuff under the Freedom of Information Act and has posted it on his Web site at cryptome. I guess that it's at least a relief to know that if you keep after these folks long enough, they will release material about 20-year-old projects. Having had a security clearance myself, I understand the need to know aspects of this sort of stuff, but still, when there is nothing that will compromise security, it's better to get it out than to have the paranoids running around feeling that you are hiding something."

HiyaPower writes: "Never let it be said that our friends in Australia are behind the times. According to this Wired article, an Australian company, NGIS, will be putting the first searchable database of the location of Australia's 13,000 public toilets on the Web. I mean there you are, far from civilization with only your trusty portable computer and you gotta go, well now you can. Now if only they could do this for working public phone booths ..." I wonder if there is a public-toilet Web ring? If not, this deserves a place of honor on it, as does the down-to-earth besttoilets.com, though I would add to its New York section the very nice restrooms at SIBL.

HiyaPower writes: "There is an interesting discussion here about the IBM Power4 chip. While it is most directly compared with the upcoming Alpha, it also has ramifications for the penetration of the IA-64 and/or Sledgehammer into the server market. Conclusion drawn is that the Alpha, etc., may be in for some very tough sledding. Now if only Apple could be persuaded to use these instead of what the article terms its "embedded controller chips...""

HiyaPower writes: "The Standard has an interesting article about the amicus filed today by some fairly heavyweight industry folks (e.g. Yahoo, AT&T, etc.). While they are a bit wishy-washy about Napster itself and the standard of "higher knowledge", they are quite concerned that the ruling in the Napster case could be applied much more broadly against isps in general. The RIAA brief is due Sept. 8, so it will be a bit before they go at this again, but this is getting beyond just the Napster vs RIAA stage of involvement in concern by company lawyers, as well it should." Seems like some appropriate self-interest is involved here -- after all, bad laws may benefit a few folks, but the reality of arbitary shuttings-down is one that large ISPs and most others don't really want in the long term. And if new technology is outlawed on the basis of its possible disreputable use, it's potential good will be blithely overlooked.