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CPU:
Prime95 (Step 2): http://www.mersenne.org/freesoft/#newusers ... Blend test for memory+CPU stability, Small FFT for CPU
Lynx: http://www.softpedia.com/get/System/Benchmarks/LinX-benchmark.shtml

Video Card:
3dmark: http://www.futuremark.com/benchmarks/

When testing the video card, listen for high pitch squealing (power issue), over heating, and symptoms like white dots appearing at random. This is not a test tool but will put some stress on the card.

You are quite incredibly stupid. Does that answer your question?

I've been modded troll for a genuine question, which suggests that I've been misunderstood; thus while normally I'd disregard you as a troll, I will instead presume that you've misunderstood too -- please explain why is it stupid to ask if this, which allegedly caused this has been fixed?

You are quite incredibly stupid. Does that answer your question?

I've been modded troll for a genuine question, which suggests that I've been misunderstood; thus while normally I'd disregard you as a troll, I will instead presume that you've misunderstood too -- please explain why is it stupid to ask if this, which allegedly caused this has been fixed?

Unless you're an internal tester, you do not have a Windows Mobile 6.5 phone. Windows Mobile 6.5 isn't even out yet. The first phones with it are slated to ship in late October.

There are people out there with hacked ROMs running leaked builds of 6.5, but you can hardly judge the final OS based on hacked ROMs running leaked builds...WinMo 6.5 is still rather crappy. WinMo 6.5.1 is getting decent, and its UI doesn't look like it was from 2001...

I'm puzzled by this self-contradictory post.

The leaked 6.5 roms are the same builds that testers are currently using, so provided which build is going to be the official WM6.5, it's fair to assume that the official one is already leaked, and you may or may not have tried it already.

The WM 6.5 builds showing up in hacked roms now are actually based on later revisions than what will come out next month. Builds 23052 and higher show off a new interface which gives a fair indication of what WinMo will look/feel like as it evolves into WM7. The "stable" WM6.5 to be released next month will likely be based on one of the 22xxx builds.

Most of the 22xxx-based WM6.5 roms I've used are much more stable IMO than the stock WM6.1 build that came on my phone.

But I understand Ballmer's frustration. WM6.5 is simply to appease manufacturers who are releasing WM-based devices that cannot wait for WM7.

It was a .NET runtime, .NET generates code therefore it doesn't work with ASLR and DEP so it opts out of DEP and ASLR, this .NET run-time was enabled on the internet zone (all the sites on the internet) in the Beta of IE8, it was disabled on the internet zone in the RTM (but left enabled for intranet zone, basically all the sites on your lan.)

http://news.softpedia.com/news/IE8-RTW-Bulletproofed-Against-NET-DEP-and-ASLR-Bypass-107728.shtml

"The final release of Internet Explorer 8 on Windows Vista blocks the .NET DEP+ASLR bypass mechanism from malicious websites on the Internet. Specifically, IE8 created a new URLAction that regulates loading of the .NET MIME filter. By default, the URLAction prevents it from loading in the Internet and Restricted Sites Zones. The .NET MIME filter is allowed to load by default in the Intranet Zone," Ness stated.

"While the Microsoft investment was important for Apple, it had nothing to do with money. The main thing Apple got out of the deal was Microsoft's commitment to continue Office on the Mac"

Actually MS threatened to cancel Office on the Mac unless they stopped shipping competing product like ClarisWorks.

"The threat of cancelling Mac Office 97 is certainly the strongest bargaining point we have, as doing so will do a great deal of harm to Apple immediately"

Not sure if still unsold iphones are somewhat in MobileMe or something like that as extra security.

It also comes with fortune and trek. You haven't lived until you've gone through the offensive quotes (fortune -o) of the fortune file or had to battle hordes of Klingons by manually entering the compass bearing that you want to fire your phasers or photon torpedoes in.

I used to have a version of Trek where I had hacked the source to give it a "borg" mode. In borg mode the incoming Klingon fire would recharge my energy reserves while filling the screen with "RESISTANCE IS FUTILE" in random ANSI colors ;) Those were the days......

http://www.downloadsquad.com/2009/08/26/free-software-foundation-throwing-a-hissy-fit-over-windows-7/
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-10318343-16.html
http://www.aeroxp.org/2009/08/fsf-violates-creative-commons/
http://news.softpedia.com/news/Windows-7-Sins-Bad-Vista-6-1-120095.shtml

Yeah, there actually has.

Agreed. I simply feel no need to peddle on warez sites. Open source, freeware as well as low cost payware are abundant enough and fill the gaps for a decently low price. Why take the risk?

http://www.versiontracker.com/macosx/
http://mac.softpedia.com/
http://www.opensourcemac.org/
http://www.macorchard.com/
http://www.macupdate.com/

I've purchased 3 apps since switching to Mac last year. VMWare Fusion, an encoding app, and another to sync my gmail calendars to OS X Mail's calendars. Everything else I've needed has been free via Open Source sites found above. Gimp and OpenOffice handle the other basics. Why would you need warez?

An alternative used by at least one bank in Australia is that when you request a transaction they send ans sms to your pre-authenticated mobile number detailing the transaction, i.e who to and how much, and giving an authorisation code that you then enter. That code only authorises that specific transaction.

That's common in Europe too. But the result has been that hacking sms in various ways has become of great interest to thieves. If they don't already exist, you can count on seeing java trojans for cells phones that silently forward SMS too.

The cause.

The effect.

Is our children learning?

While they may fall behind that mask, in an interview Blizzard stated that piracy was the major factor behind the decision: http://news.softpedia.com/news/Blizzard-Responds-to-Fans-039-Request-for-LAN-Support-in-StarCraft-II-115627.shtml

Every bloody piece of technology you own was PRODUCED with Linux, and it more than likely relies on Linux. Wanna know why? Because Linux is reliable. I maintain 38 intrusion machines, 5 extruders, and 7 sonic welders, as well as dozens of table/bench machines that rely on Linux. In the entire plant, only ONE machine runs in a Windows (NT4 SP6) environment, and it crashes frequently.

If/when you fork over half a ton of money, do you want to bring YOUR high tech gadget home, just to see a BSOD? Just for fun, Linux users can experience the BSOD. But, why?

Plastic is made from hydrocarbons, just hydrogen and carbon.

http://www.ider.herts.ac.uk/school/courseware/materials/plastics/polymer.html

There are

And bacteria which feed on propane and butane

There is even the bacterium Bacillus cereus DQ01, which has evolved the ability to feed on the hydrocarbon n-hexadecane.

I can't believe I'm doing this but... That was all the way from back in January, have you actually seen her recently?

Jessica Simpson on Media Criticism in Vanity Fair

Well, could be worse...

http://news.softpedia.com/news/AMD-Gains-Market-Share-from-Intel-113818.shtml

"According to the numbers, the overall microprocessor market revenue went to US$6.9 billion, down by 20.6% from the US$8.6 billion in the first quarter of 2008. Intel's share went down by 2.5 points to 79.1%, while AMD's revenue rose 2.3 points to 12.8%."

An ion drive is currently being used with the Dawn Mission, where the delta-v requirements are certainly as comparable to going from LEO to L-5. That mission started in 1997 (yes, it is in space right now and flying with the engine running and producing thrust right now) and it will ultimately last until at least 2015, reaching Vesta in 2011. Using that as a rule of thumb, I would expect at a maximum of a similar duration of time to get the ISS to L5... about 3-4 years if you use this comparison. I would expect it to happen much faster, and certainly not take decades.

The ISS is clearly intended to be boosted up into a higher orbit, and the hardpoints to keep the vehicle together are well understood... at least with moderate thrust velocities. I would expect accelerations similar to that provided by Progress boosters to be similar, and there are designs to put the engines directly on the ISS for altitude control. An ESA resupply module docket to the ISS and provided a delta-v that accelerated to an additional 2.65 m/s. I don't know how long that took (giving some idea on the acceleration tolerances of the ISS), but it was a conventional rocket. Surprisingly, this is nearly half of the delta-v that is necessary to get to L-5.

Using the previous example, I don't think the ISS would spend all that much time in the Van Allen belts, and to leave it unmanned for a brief period of time wouldn't be the end of the world either. This is something that certainly could happen if there was an objective to make it happen, and even just moving the ISS to L-5 as a place to "park" the structure as a historical monument to future generations rather than having it crash into the Earth causing potential damage or even death may make the effort worthwhile.

Heck, it may even be cheaper in terms of boosting the ISS to a very high altitude rather than using a similar booster to attempt a more controlled re-entry over what would be presumably an uninhabited part of the Earth like the Pacific Ocean. Sending a crew up to the ISS to perform the dismantling process, getting multiple boosters onto each ISS module, and simply trying to deal with the thing may on the whole be easier to even crash it on the Moon.

Programming is fun

absolutely, that's why people code in C#. Nothign to do with professionalism, fgood code, efficiency, and al the other bits and pieces that have been forgotten in today's rush for "developer productivity" (at the expense of end-user productivity, of course).

that's why, for example, Tomboy leaks memory like a sieve. Who cares, its fun to code note-let apps in the new language that doesn't have memory leaks anymore.

In the free software world, much of the software (not all of it, of course) is developed without financial incentive. A lot of useful stuff is written by people who are just in it because they enjoy it. This being the case, giving developers an environment they like is very important.

Also, I agree with what you have to say about efficiency - but at the same time, one can't put too much emphasis on how efficiently a program solves a program until the program is at least at the point of being capable of doing its job. This is why I believe it's sensible for people to write applications in Python or whatever, if that's what they're comfortable with. If their language choice allows them to focus on the problem they want to solve instead of the problems they don't want to deal with, then they can create something that otherwise wouldn't exist - and is thus infinitely more efficient than the alternative.

Your link regarding Tomboy... is less than compelling. The app grows to 80MB. Then what? Does it really continue growing further, or not? If there were a stress test of note creation and deletion which led to a footprint of hundreds or thousands of megabytes, that would be more convincing. It does seem pretty twisted to think we live in a world where that doesn't seem like a lot of storage space to waste any more... but honestly, it doesn't. And there's so many questions. Does the app keep an undo history? Is this a result of running a garbage-collected environment? And of that 80MB "memory footprint" (size of the process's addressable space, or what?) how much of that actually corresponds to actual resource usage (physical RAM or swap space) as opposed to memory mapping, or allocated-but-unused (and thus, unallocated) memory pages? The question of how this measurement was taken is very important, as is the question of whether the growth pattern continues up to values that actually make me care. :)

Programming is fun

absolutely, that's why people code in C#. Nothign to do with professionalism, fgood code, efficiency, and al the other bits and pieces that have been forgotten in today's rush for "developer productivity" (at the expense of end-user productivity, of course).

that's why, for example, Tomboy leaks memory like a sieve. Who cares, its fun to code note-let apps in the new language that doesn't have memory leaks anymore.

Or as this blog note says: I have to admit, however, that I admire Jo's sincerity when he makes this point: it's not the users who want it, it's the developers. It can't be denied that .NET was indeed instrumental in the development of Gnote

But who cares about the users nowadays?

$550,000, same 0-60 acceleration, MUCH higher top speed (420 mph/ 676 km/h). So what if it isn't completely street-legal ... even if the cops bought a Veyron, they'd be eating your dust ...

Have you tried Fair Use Wizard? It is pretty butt simple, and they have a free version that rips DVD to DivX so you can try it out. According to WineHQ it works on Linux with Wine as well. The full version will let you rip to Zune, iPod, hell pretty much anything. Butt simple.

If you are strictly wanting to just copy DVD to DVD and want to stick with free you can use the combo of Ripit4me which needs DVD Decrypter and DVD shrink installed. it then walks you step by step as it rips the flick and runs it through DVD shrink. But for butt simple ease of use I would just pay for Fair Use Wizard. The full version does it all and is easy peasy.

Link: http://www.softpedia.com/get/Internet/Browsers/Mozilla-Firefox-Final.shtml

It still brings up the "Thank you for testing this RC" screen though when you restart. Perhaps they forgot to change it?

Remember the Australian who had them in his archive for over thirty years? Oh wait, already covered HERE.

I agree, either it's carefully crafted FUD or a Windows weeny that just loves every proprietary UI he's accustomed to like TOAD and some others.

On the other hand I've known quite a few persons that went for the "OMG Ponies" kind of "usability": Look my iPhone's screen tilts when I turn it! and Wohow, MS Surface rocks...

It is so hard to look?

http://www.softpedia.com/get/Antivirus/Microsoft-Security-Essentials.shtml

It's not like half of the Internet didn't know the date since January.

http://www.softpedia.com/get/Antivirus/Microsoft-Security-Essentials.shtml

http://www.softpedia.com/get/Antivirus/Microsoft-Security-Essentials.shtml

Wait, CO2 is a fundamental particle now? I told you those guys at CERN would mess something up!

The amount of carbon in the world may be constant, as might the amount of oxygen. But making new CO2 is a trivial task (baking soda + vinegar, glucose + oxygen, etc etc); destroying it is slightly easier but plants seem to manage it quite well. If current research on synthetic photosynthesis goes well, hopefully we'll be able to make machines do it efficiently soon too. [1], [2]

Mozilla sat on their asses in terms of efficiency and effectiveness.

Yes and no. When FF3 originally came out, it fared a lot better compared to the competition of the time. To show you what I mean, notice the memory graph that the Mozilla people gave when they initially started preview releases of Firefox 3. Since IE8 and Chrome came out, the bar has gone up substantially. At least give a bit of time for Firefox to counter back before before calling them folks the scum of the earth.

Now maybe Mozilla can start working harder on memory leaks, multi-threading, making Firefox not suck on a Mac, and getting rid of needless bloat like the Awesome bar.

FF3 made large strides on a better Mac interface with 3.0 which is somehow forgettable now. If the interface still bugs people enough to run away from it, they should probably just be using Camino. Or would they rather be using this or this?

I think that with chrome catching on (on Windows), multi-threading has a large chance of becoming a focus in Firefox 4. If I remember, Chrome appeared from nowhere when the Firefox 3.5 development was froze so no new features could be added, let alone an architectural rewrite.

Not for I am not going to comment on the Awesome bar.

What are you talking about! Have you seen the Windows 7 UI? It is so unique!

"n there is a sign saying "you're not supposed to be able to get here" or something similar."

quick google search results:
"Go to Staunton Island. Head for Bedford Point, and bring a tall vehicle with you, like an Ambulance. Go to the parking lot that is behind some buildings in the projects (it was used in the "Kingdom Come" mission you do for King Courtney). Park your Ambulance next to the wall where the Kuruma is parked. Climb up on top of the ambulance and jump over the wall. On the other side, you'll see a sign that says "You weren't supposed to be able to get here you know". "

It's a very well-documented scientific fact that humans and other apes share a common ancestor.

Well mis-documented.

Modern genetics, biology, study of fossil records, etc. all repeatedly confirm this theory.

It would be better for evolutionists if there were no fossil record at all, because it would be easier to abide by an "argument from silence" defense than to have to counter the chorus of fossils, which loudly mock the evolutionist-inspired geologic time table found in textbooks.

The "living fossils" are especially amused at evolutionism's fossil claims: "I'm not dead yet! I think I'll go for a walk."

Moreover, they affirm the Genesis account of a worldwide Flood and provide evidence for a "young earth."

I agree until we get a better idea of the soft tissue we won't really know.

Giraffes have a very cool way of improving their circulation without just throwing a bigger heart at the solution:
http://news.softpedia.com/news/Some-Weird-Giraffe-Issues-80555.shtml

"To pump the blood high to the brain, the heart of the giraffe is very large: up to 11 kg (25 pounds). The heart pushes 60 liters of blood per minute. The muscles of the neck arteries are relaxed with each heart beat, helping the propulsion of the blood to the brain. In the neck veins, special valves impede the blood to flow back too rapidly, meanwhile preventing the emergence of a syncope (fainting due to sudden lowering of the blood pressure). At the base of the feet, where pressure is low, there is a system of capillary vessels like in humans, impeding the appearance of edemas. Like humans, the giraffe is one of the few vertebrates which is taller than longer, and NASA studied blood circulation in giraffes for creating an anti-gravity garment for astronauts."

Also horses while not having an extremely long neck also deal with circulation problems by more than throwing in a bigger heart.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circulatory_system_of_the_horse
The frog
Each hoof contains a structural component known as the "frog," which covers the deeper structure of the hoof known as the digital cushion, a vessel-filled tissue. When the horse places weight on a leg, the ground pushes upward on the frog, compressing it and the underlying digital cushion. This results in squeezing blood out of the digital cushion, which then helps to pump it back up the leg, helping the heart to work against gravity.

Nature has done some amazing and unique things with soft tissue to get around limitations. It would be so interesting to find out how dinosaurs worked and what their bodies were really like.

We need to automate the generation and production of music, and crush the music industry like a bug.

Listen to this sample. That was created with Yamaha Vocaloid. The product sells for $179.95. It's better than many singers. We're getting close.

This technology is like MIDI players, a generation later. You need the composition and instrument models. Then the player puts it all together. You can mix and match; choose a different singer or instruments. (Question: is there enough compute power in an iPhone to run this?)

If this catches on, the music industry will be crushed.

There's still a need for composers. Easy Music Composer isn't quite good enough. Yet.

I think MS needs to rethink their naming. I doubt this is what they have in mind.

Then again we're talking about the company whose CEO wants to squirt you pictures of his kids...

What about the ground breaking experiments involving insane World of Warcraft players who stay up for several days at a time?

Searching through their web site, I do not see anywhere where they claim to be able to recover data from files overwritten on a hard drive. For instance, the information available here seems to suggest that they correct mechanical problems with the drive, and then copy the drive image and work from the data there. That procedure will work for damaged drives or non-overwritten data, but it is not going to help if the data on the drive was overwritten.

Their part in recovering data from the hard drive from the Columbia is impressive -- there is a description here -- but it did not involve recovering overwritten data, and thus is no evidence in support of them being able to do so.

If this company is really capable of recovering data that was overwritten, then why don't they seem to advertise the fact anywhere?

They put out a new version of "the box" with each service pack, and you can create your own also, with slipstreaming.

From what I've read, that part of the world has strong beliefs in this type of superstition. Many of these superstitions date back at least thousands of years.

    In Iceland, a decent percentage of the population believes in gnomes, faeries, and elves (among other things)

    I have heard legend that the Shannon airport in Ireland either during construction or expansion, was delayed because a fairy circle existed in the planned construction area. Due to this, the runway was built in a different direction, so it didn't disturb the circle.

    Beliefs in superstition aren't all that bad. There are plenty of things we don't know about the universe yet. Maybe they are simple superstition for unexplained things, or maybe (just maybe) they have a basis in reality somewhere.

    I usually prefer not to bash anyone's superstitions. What if they're right. :)

      A decent percentage of Americans are amazingly superstitious too, and follow those superstitions through their whole lives. Don't believe me? Check out any local church. I'm not saying religion is wrong. It could be right. Who am I to say that it's wrong. Someday I may find out the truth (probably a few seconds after I die, I would expect).

    Before you bash the superstitions of others, look at your own.

Aren't leaks usually accompanied by rats leaving a sinking ship? If that is the case, then these leaks must have started a long time ago...

The idea is very old, and contrary to the article there are plenty of people offering similar services: http://news.softpedia.com/news/Rent-Your-Own-Supercomputer-for-2-77-per-Hour-82166.shtml, http://www.hoise.com/primeur/00/articles/weekly/AE-PR-04-00-20.html, http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/reports/4590/2/, etc.

Is their offering cheaper? Unfortunately the article didn't tell us.

You can see the new wallpaper anyway.
http://news.softpedia.com/news/Ubuntu-9-04-Beta-Screenshot-Tour-107809.shtml

Here are some screenshots for Alpha 6, but does anybody have screenshots of Beta?

Not that they will be all that different.

Intel has the largest share of the GPU market, so I'm not sure what makes you thin they can't compete .... link. Sure there hardware isn't anything to write home about, but if it can handle aero and blu-ray playback, it's more than enough for 99% of PC users...

...with algae? I'm not a biologist or ecologist, but doesn't the ocean food chain start with algae? And don't algae produce oxygen from CO2 instead of sequestering it like phytoplankton? Can't we fertilize parts of the ocean for plant growth instead?

Because of things like this, mostly: http://news.softpedia.com/news/Massive-Killer-Algae-Bloom-is-Making-Thousands-of-Victims-off-California-53468.shtml

Not so. I run the current version of Fedora. They introduced a new fast bootup and shutdown this version. I haven't timed the startup, but it's somewhere around 30-40 seconds. My shutdown takes about 20-30 seconds. (P4, 2.8GHz, 1 Gb Memory) That's the right amount of time for me to turn on the power strip for my computer, walk two feet to my cable modem and router and plug them in, turn around, walk back two feet to my computer and sit down. At this point my login screen is just showing up. The software can definitely be made for a fast boot. If your new to linux though I would recommend Ubuntu. They don't have the fast boot yet, but I believe the next release due in April will have it. I can't find the info on their site but this website shows it should be booting in about 24 seconds. http://news.softpedia.com/news/Ubuntu-9-04-Boots-in-21-4-Seconds-101885.shtml (Note: I do not recommend using EXT4 at this time. Take the speed penalty and use EXT3.)

Speaking of free space sims - try "Babylon 5: I've Found Her". It's not very well known, perhaps because it's a Windows-only game, and it's only free as in beer - not open sourced, the development team itself is (or rather, was) closed, and in general the way they developed it was much closer to how commercial game shops work than your average FLOSS project. End result is surprisingly good and professional, in my opinion.