there's no point in ordering a *spare* battery when you buy a laptop; ordering a *second* battery because you're travelling a lot might make sense. this is because LiIon batteries age, and you can only slow down the ageing by keeping them 40% charged in a moderately cool place.
LiIon batteries also lose capacity after a number of charge/discharge cycles, the number varies according to how deep the cycles are and the temperatures you reach in the process. When the battery packs are particularly expensive - think Prius and other electric cars - the battery management electronics are crucial to protecting the investment, and the batteries are never run anywhere near flat and particularly are never fully charge to prevent some cells overcharging, and the charge/discharge controlled carefully to prevent temperature rises leading to premature ageing.
thus, in conclusion, keep your laptop battery cool, don't thrash its battery, don't deep cycle it, buy a good brand so you can buy a new battery *in*the*future*not*for*storage*.
I'm surprised Cisco didn't simply buy Sun Microsystems - a reputation for making expensive, over-engineered hardware (both).
It's only a small step for Linksys to move from making NASs and media players/extenders to PCs, so I expect we'll see a Linksys version of some of the small eee desktop etc.
I don't get their maths: Cisco has boosted the memory capacity of the Xeon 5500, using a custom ASIC (Application Specific Integrated Circuit) to provide the processor with a four-fold increase in the number of memory modules it can access. This expands a UCS Xeon 5500 system from 144GB to 384GB, and also gives users the option of using more affordable memory configurations.
144 x 4 != 384
For most people the practical limit on memory is simply the price of the higher capacity DDR3 dimms - 4GB ddr3 sticks are only just becoming affordable and 8G ddr3 sticks are hugely expensive!
when I did chemistry at 6th form college (UK term, in US I suppose you'd call it senior high?), I recall doing a practical test in chemistry (titration) where you had some mystery chemicals and a colour change. the experiment was rigged so that it was somewhat like a reaction we'd already seen, but was in fact something quite different. the instructions were to make accurate measurements first, draw the appropriate graphs and *then* speculate on the mystery ingredients.
it turned out that we'd never encountered the particular reagents before, and if you did the test accurately you'd have realised it wasn't the old familiar reaction, but had to be something new - the figures would simply not add up. however, a significant number of people rejigged their results to match the known reaction and failed the test totally for two reasons, first being for failing to make accurate measurements and secondly for faking the results.
in a shock new move, Microsoft announce their development tools will require an IQ test to complete product activation.
In other news, microsoft have posted job adverts for 10,000 new developers, to replace the hordes of low grade programmers they previously hired who can't pass their IQ tests.
actually, computers can be made much more robust to viruses and trojans, however, there's fundamental problems with the x86 architecture and the way we program that are hard to overcome.
Let me take you back in time to when most computers were embedded systems. The program ran from ROM (or EEPROM) and could not be changed at all without physically switching out the non-volatile memory - in-system programming was a rarity. Moreover, many processor architectures had entirely separate executable and data spaces - you couldn't actually write to the executable memory, so even if it was flash or battery-backed static RAM, it wouldn't work. Thus no matter how corrupt the data became, it could only crash the software or make it misbehave; to restore operation you'd simply reset the CPU and everything would return to normal!
In contrast, the x86 usually boots the OS into RAM, even shadowing the BIOS into RAM (because it's faster), and it's possible to scribble all over executable code space - the obvious example being to overflow stack space to execute unauthorised code. The NX bit was added relatively recently to ameliorate these problems.
Sparc architecture has been more resilient to attack too, partly because of its relative obscurity, but mainly due to its relative immunity to stack smashing.
IE uses a low privilege renderering engine like Chrome
it's always boggled my mind that IE is used for system update... so the most "dangerous" app on your computer to access the most untrusted content on the internet is also used to download and install system updates which require the highest levels of security?!
to my mind, that's like using the same brush to clean your toilet and your teeth... but it's ok because we ensure the brush is cleaned properly each time.
if they rang her, she could charge PRS for her time in answering the telephone, and if they were on a conference phone they'd be making a broadcasting of her voice without permission.
if she wrote a letter and the PRS quoted it, they'd be breaking copyright without her permission.
you kids are spoiled. when I went to university we had to submit reports on stone tablets. boy, they sure were heavy, and if you dropped one they'd splinter and you'd have to do that one all over again. it did encourage brevity though!
cheap imported goods are temporary benefits of globalisation - wages have been rising rapidly in India and China as the people there want a bigger share of the huge profit margin. Good examples are Japan, Taiwan and Hong Kong: once, anything made there was cheap crap and each has pulled themselves off the bottom run of quality and price. This is beginning to happen in China, prices are rising. However, it's a slow process because China has a vast agrarian population to draw on who are cheap labour.
Some of the big multinationals are now looking at Africa for manufacturing and call centres, where people don't want a salary, they just want to not starve, so will literally work for just food, water and shelter.
long ago I worked at an ISP which offered UUCP accounts, and the mail failure message was very polite and apologetic, and sometimes people would email back to the uucp daemon thanking it for trying
only the other day my wife, on receiving a "sorry, I have been unable to send this email for X days" from the exim (MTA) daemon replied to it telling it not to bother any more!
as most people have observed, most consumers are running routers which aren't even ipv6 capable, let alone even have it turned on - too little ram or rom mostly. one notable exception is Apple's Airport Extreme, and many slashdotters might be interested or worried to note that they (used to be a least) are configured to create a 6-in-4 tunnel automatically!
sensible slashdot readers with consumer grade routers will hopefully have been sensible and bought ones where they can flash a linux-base OS which will do ipv6 (e.g. the wrtg54L)
many business do use consumer gear, but there's also the issue of ipv6 support in easy to use firewall software. e.g. pfSense, a fantastic opensource firewall (based on freebsd) has no ipv6 support and it's not even scheduled (bounties welcome!) for mainline development.
many consumer broadband/asdl ISPs in the UK resell British Telecom services and ipv6 isn't possible easily.
FROM: JOHNSCAMMER@MICROSOFT.COM THE DESK OF THE FINANCE DIRECTOR, MICROSOFT CORP
REF-NUMBER GWK / 7519/059741/05 UAD
BATCH -NUMBER: 316/2004/BLL.......ATTN:
SIR/ MADAM, CONGRATULATION, TO YOU,
we are pleased to inform you about the result of the winners of the microsoft share lottery, your winning ticket NO:1002-25634789-6973 with serial no:984
please remit £1000 to the following account in order to claim your prize: 12-45-89 13567890
please only contact me via the following email address xyahdsusu419@hotmail.com
foldingAtHome and seti get a lot of attention, but it's find of fun to join the willy-waving* contest at distributed.net's rc5 key-cracking test.
whenever we buy in a load of new servers, I do a quick burn-in test and fire up the key cracker to see how well the CPUs perform at basic math; a couple of months ago I managed to get to the number 11 spot using 30 machines each with dual Xeon L5420 processors. I'm hoping that our next order, probably 50 to 60 servers of higher spec, will allow me to break through into the top 6, but to get to number 1 you'd have to be google or amazon:-(
* as in, "I've got more CPUs than you, yah boo sucks" type of boasting game
Slashdot Mirror
NEW! microsoft knob7 - better and more securely stuck in place than vista-knob.
S60 has been doing this before the iPhone/iPodTouch was even a rumour within apple.
there's no point in ordering a *spare* battery when you buy a laptop; ordering a *second* battery because you're travelling a lot might make sense. this is because LiIon batteries age, and you can only slow down the ageing by keeping them 40% charged in a moderately cool place.
LiIon batteries also lose capacity after a number of charge/discharge cycles, the number varies according to how deep the cycles are and the temperatures you reach in the process. When the battery packs are particularly expensive - think Prius and other electric cars - the battery management electronics are crucial to protecting the investment, and the batteries are never run anywhere near flat and particularly are never fully charge to prevent some cells overcharging, and the charge/discharge controlled carefully to prevent temperature rises leading to premature ageing.
thus, in conclusion, keep your laptop battery cool, don't thrash its battery, don't deep cycle it, buy a good brand so you can buy a new battery *in*the*future*not*for*storage*.
neck lines accentuating breasts? surely this has the opposite effect for me - I definitely DONT want to accentuate *my* man boobs!!!
I'm surprised Cisco didn't simply buy Sun Microsystems - a reputation for making expensive, over-engineered hardware (both).
It's only a small step for Linksys to move from making NASs and media players/extenders to PCs, so I expect we'll see a Linksys version of some of the small eee desktop etc.
I don't get their maths: Cisco has boosted the memory capacity of the Xeon 5500, using a custom ASIC (Application Specific Integrated Circuit) to provide the processor with a four-fold increase in the number of memory modules it can access. This expands a UCS Xeon 5500 system from 144GB to 384GB, and also gives users the option of using more affordable memory configurations.
144 x 4 != 384
For most people the practical limit on memory is simply the price of the higher capacity DDR3 dimms - 4GB ddr3 sticks are only just becoming affordable and 8G ddr3 sticks are hugely expensive!
when I did chemistry at 6th form college (UK term, in US I suppose you'd call it senior high?), I recall doing a practical test in chemistry (titration) where you had some mystery chemicals and a colour change. the experiment was rigged so that it was somewhat like a reaction we'd already seen, but was in fact something quite different. the instructions were to make accurate measurements first, draw the appropriate graphs and *then* speculate on the mystery ingredients.
it turned out that we'd never encountered the particular reagents before, and if you did the test accurately you'd have realised it wasn't the old familiar reaction, but had to be something new - the figures would simply not add up. however, a significant number of people rejigged their results to match the known reaction and failed the test totally for two reasons, first being for failing to make accurate measurements and secondly for faking the results.
android has already been hacked onto non-google hardware using a variety of linux distros including poky, angstrom and ubuntu.
the news first broke in January at linuxdevices
OT: Hut 33 is a brilliant comedy by the BBC set during the era of code-cracking Bletchley Park http://wapedia.mobi/en/Hut_33
It takes a big man to admit his mistake. and a bigger man to make him admit it
headline: Microsoft Ban Stupid Developers
in a shock new move, Microsoft announce their development tools will require an IQ test to complete product activation.
In other news, microsoft have posted job adverts for 10,000 new developers, to replace the hordes of low grade programmers they previously hired who can't pass their IQ tests.
actually, computers can be made much more robust to viruses and trojans, however, there's fundamental problems with the x86 architecture and the way we program that are hard to overcome.
Let me take you back in time to when most computers were embedded systems. The program ran from ROM (or EEPROM) and could not be changed at all without physically switching out the non-volatile memory - in-system programming was a rarity. Moreover, many processor architectures had entirely separate executable and data spaces - you couldn't actually write to the executable memory, so even if it was flash or battery-backed static RAM, it wouldn't work. Thus no matter how corrupt the data became, it could only crash the software or make it misbehave; to restore operation you'd simply reset the CPU and everything would return to normal!
In contrast, the x86 usually boots the OS into RAM, even shadowing the BIOS into RAM (because it's faster), and it's possible to scribble all over executable code space - the obvious example being to overflow stack space to execute unauthorised code. The NX bit was added relatively recently to ameliorate these problems.
Sparc architecture has been more resilient to attack too, partly because of its relative obscurity, but mainly due to its relative immunity to stack smashing.
$ sudo rm -rf /
You appear to be trying to destroy your system.
Allow or cancel?
IE uses a low privilege renderering engine like Chrome
it's always boggled my mind that IE is used for system update... so the most "dangerous" app on your computer to access the most untrusted content on the internet is also used to download and install system updates which require the highest levels of security?!
to my mind, that's like using the same brush to clean your toilet and your teeth... but it's ok because we ensure the brush is cleaned properly each time.
sounds like this guy has been to the chewbacca school of law!
Indeed, in fact this happened in Belgium with them collectively asking for US$77M.
Eventually the two reached a settlement whereby G didn't show their cached results
a history of the case
if they rang her, she could charge PRS for her time in answering the telephone, and if they were on a conference phone they'd be making a broadcasting of her voice without permission.
if she wrote a letter and the PRS quoted it, they'd be breaking copyright without her permission.
it was probably the donkeys nearby that ratted on her, they have no taste I tell ya!
you kids are spoiled. when I went to university we had to submit reports on stone tablets. boy, they sure were heavy, and if you dropped one they'd splinter and you'd have to do that one all over again. it did encourage brevity though!
cheap imported goods are temporary benefits of globalisation - wages have been rising rapidly in India and China as the people there want a bigger share of the huge profit margin. Good examples are Japan, Taiwan and Hong Kong: once, anything made there was cheap crap and each has pulled themselves off the bottom run of quality and price. This is beginning to happen in China, prices are rising. However, it's a slow process because China has a vast agrarian population to draw on who are cheap labour.
Some of the big multinationals are now looking at Africa for manufacturing and call centres, where people don't want a salary, they just want to not starve, so will literally work for just food, water and shelter.
dammit, I use a VPN for accessing work and I've never been offered any of the drugs that they must be dealing in!
long ago I worked at an ISP which offered UUCP accounts, and the mail failure message was very polite and apologetic, and sometimes people would email back to the uucp daemon thanking it for trying
only the other day my wife, on receiving a "sorry, I have been unable to send this email for X days" from the exim (MTA) daemon replied to it telling it not to bother any more!
FX: facepalm!
as most people have observed, most consumers are running routers which aren't even ipv6 capable, let alone even have it turned on - too little ram or rom mostly. one notable exception is Apple's Airport Extreme, and many slashdotters might be interested or worried to note that they (used to be a least) are configured to create a 6-in-4 tunnel automatically!
sensible slashdot readers with consumer grade routers will hopefully have been sensible and bought ones where they can flash a linux-base OS which will do ipv6 (e.g. the wrtg54L)
many business do use consumer gear, but there's also the issue of ipv6 support in easy to use firewall software. e.g. pfSense, a fantastic opensource firewall (based on freebsd) has no ipv6 support and it's not even scheduled (bounties welcome!) for mainline development.
many consumer broadband/asdl ISPs in the UK resell British Telecom services and ipv6 isn't possible easily.
FROM: JOHNSCAMMER@MICROSOFT.COM THE DESK OF THE FINANCE DIRECTOR, MICROSOFT CORP /059741 /05 UAD
/2004 /BLL.......ATTN:
REF-NUMBER GWK / 7519
BATCH -NUMBER: 316
SIR/ MADAM, CONGRATULATION, TO YOU, we are pleased to inform you about the result of the winners of the microsoft share lottery, your winning ticket NO:1002-25634789-6973 with serial no:984
please remit £1000 to the following account in order to claim your prize: 12-45-89 13567890
please only contact me via the following email address xyahdsusu419@hotmail.com
foldingAtHome and seti get a lot of attention, but it's find of fun to join the willy-waving* contest at distributed.net's rc5 key-cracking test.
:-(
whenever we buy in a load of new servers, I do a quick burn-in test and fire up the key cracker to see how well the CPUs perform at basic math; a couple of months ago I managed to get to the number 11 spot using 30 machines each with dual Xeon L5420 processors. I'm hoping that our next order, probably 50 to 60 servers of higher spec, will allow me to break through into the top 6, but to get to number 1 you'd have to be google or amazon
* as in, "I've got more CPUs than you, yah boo sucks" type of boasting game