I keep wondering how light passenger cars got the hybrid treatment first and long-haul trucks still haven't, when the first successful experience in the field clearly pointed to the latter being the ideal candidate.
Trucks typically have a longer life expectancy than passenger cars with significantly more miles being driven annually, yet we can see trucks spewing black smog into the atmosphere all the while a fairly recent passenger car will fail an inspection if any of the rigorous emission thresholds is reached.
Seems a bit more attention on other forms of transportation would be warranted, including trucks receiving the hybrid treatment. There's also been interesting development in using gas turbines as the generators in trucks instead of ICEs.
1) I've stood directly underneath a 1MW turbine in the middle of a large wind farm on a windy day. There wasn't much noise at all, just a light whoosh... whoosh... whoosh.... I don't know where this concept that wind turbines are "terribly noisy" comes from, but it doesn't at all match my experience.
I've held a megaphone in front of my mouth and spoken into it. All I heard was my own regular voice, therefore I don't believe they work as advertised. In other words, it's all about direction.
I've also been visiting a house about 1.5km(1 mile) away from the nearest wind turbine, with the noise disturbance inside the house being at such a degree that I couldn't believe our government could let this happen. When the noise hits them, the residents can't sleep and neither would you in similar circumstances.
The issue seems to be mostly coming from the low frequency noise forming from the air pressure of the wing hitting the tower after the wing has passed. It seems to be very directed - directly sideways of the turbine.
Another contributing factor is weather. Certain conditions can cause noise that is emitted on a rising angle to curve back downwards. When these rare weather conditions are met, we've found people much father away complaining about the noise while the residents much closer had no issue with it.
Often there's more going on than immediately meets the eye.
we've all made coding mistakes, no matter how experienced we are, so the focus should not be on "who" but more on "what kind of process can we introduce so this does not happen again".
Very true. If you're not familiar with it, you might be interested in looking at "They Write The Right Stuff", an interesting piece about the reliability of software on the Space Shuttle, and the process they built to get there.
"The group's most important creation is not the perfect software they write -- it's the process they invented that writes the perfect software."
The new "bulldozer" architecture from AMD is a disaster, in just about every way. They're terrible. The charts clearly show that.
For what it's worth, AMD was, like any other technology company working on significant changes, under pressure to get a release out the door. Early releases are more technological previews than completed products. It takes several generations of incremental updates to get a new architecture to reach its performance potential, and when it comes to CPUs, relatively minor changes can have a significant impact on performance. Look at the difference with the original first generation bulldozer CPUs with piledriver, the first point upgrade.
To be fair, the first releases of the bulldozer microarchitecture were not impressive performance wise. That does not justify slamming the architecture entirely, it's immature technology that isn't there yet, but we are yet to see what it's capable of.
That is disappointing. I was hoping for some amusing inconsistencies in the spec, and it turns out that it is just a few optional elements in there to support ancient packages and which the standard recommends that you don't actually support!
Is this really the reason that the entire standards organisation is denigrated, and that this format said to be impossible to implement? That is pretty lame. Why does everyone worry about compatibility tags that date back to Windows 3.1 days when the ODF spec neglected to document the spreadsheet functions at all? If you are looking for an impossible to implement standard, then that would be a more likely candidate.
The whole point in standards is to provide compatibility between different implementations of that standard. If MS Word produces documents that qualify according to the OOXML specification, but rely on the deliberately vague parts referring to older document formats, any other implementation would not be able to process said document properly.
Further, very few tools existed in historical times where handedness mattered at all. A wrench or a hammer or a spear have no handedness. Only much later were tools invented to meet the needs of the majority or users, which is why there was a tendency to put controls on power tools on the right.
The whole thesis mistakes cause for effect, suggesting tools and games we invented had something to do with what made us what we are. Whether our ancestors threw the spear, or picked the berry right or left handed couldn't have mattered at all.
The mention of a wrench here is a perfect example of how to overlook favorable tendencies for left/right handedness. Yes, the tool itself can be used in either hand, but the direction in which nuts and screws are wound in typically favors right handed people. Similarly, scissors with no ergonomic shape to favor one hand over the other typically have the top blade on the right, which leaves the cut much easier to see if the scissors are held in the right hand.
I'm not intimately familiar with tools mankind has used throughout history, but I'd be cautious to make statements like "very few tools existed in historical times where handedness mattered at all".
As many readers have pointed out, the article is light on technical details. Based on the demonstration video on the article, it looks to me like they've come up with an algorithm to interlace models -- that is, to load and process 3D models in non-linear order. If that's the case, they could be producing simplified objects(with only enough polygons to render a pixel perfect image with a given resolution and viewing distance) from incredibly detailed models on the fly.
At 5:07 into the video is a demonstration of how games would typically show a simpler version of an object from far away and switch into a higher detailed version once the object comes closer. Their algorithm could be producing these dumbed down models on the fly, just not limited to two levels of detail but countless different variations.
The reason I called this interlacing is because it reminds me of how web sites with JPEG images would load over a slow dial-up modem back in the day. At first a blurry or pixelized version of the image was portrayed, and once the rest of the image was loaded (much later) the image had arrived at its full quality.
"It's like two people shouting messages to each other at the same time," said Levis. "If both people are shouting at the same time, neither of them will hear the other."
Given that all the stupid computers in hospitals are running windows, this threat is actually already there, and does not seem to have caused many problems so far. Yet, I'm still very anxious to see these things more and more popular.
With a year's experience working in a public hospital purchasing office I found (without searching) many critical security flaws in the processes. For example, the European Procurement Announcement agency regularly sends catalogs of EU-wide procurements in CD's that require Windows and autorun to function. The CD would start a web server off the disk and launch Internet Explorer to interface with the server. In other words, we regularly executed programs from CD's we got by mail in a very simple (and easy to replicate) packaging, on the same computers we use to make very expensive purchases (believe me, hospital equipment isn't cheap).
They behave the way they do because they are control freaks. They want absolute control over their platform. Their ultimate vision is that they'll be the source of all your media, all your apps, etc. They'll dictate how you consume stuff. Such a setup would be, needless to say, very profitable.
As for why they can get away with it, well I'd say there are two reasons:
1) Fanboyism/zealotry. Apple has had a following for a long time of people for whom they can do no wrong more or less. A non-trivial amount of these people are in the press (Macs are big in prepress work). They just love Apple and everything they do. So when something bad comes out, they find ways to rationalize it away, or ignore it.
2) For many of the Apple buyers these days, Apple is not a technology company but a fashion company. They largely won't admit it, but they buy them as fashion accessories. They are the "cool" product to own. As such they are purchased based on that alone. Whatever restrictions/costs accompany that are ok because they want to be cool. I see the same thing these days with fixed gear bikes. They are in with college kids (I work on campus and bike to work). They buy brand new, surprisingly expensive, fixed gear bikes. This, of course, makes them harder to ride up hill, but they are ok with that because fixed gear is cool, road or mountain bikes are not.
or 3) Their market share is sufficiently low to face antitrust investigations for monopolistic behavior.
People who bought iPads and iPods on the understanding that they could be used without having their location information gathered and shared now find that they *must* allow this information to be gathered and shared (I suppose you could try not updating iTunes, but then you would also have to not upgrade your OS -- OS upgrades come with iTunes upgrades -- and be prepared to be locked out of the app store, and since Apple's use of DRM prevents third parties from putting apps on your devices, you're fundamentally abandoning any hope of loading any code, even third-party code, onto your iPad and iPod).
Sounds like a class action lawsuit waiting to happen.
Had I gotten into an accident and someone looked at the black box, it would show the same thing. "Umm, he took his foot off the gas and then floored it, repeating. Probably drunk or distracted."
Not if they have any sensible sampling frequency on the gas pedal. Under no circumstances should it be possible to go from 'idle' to 'flooring' without samples from the transition between the two extremes. It would be easy to recognize a faulty sensor when its input displays changes that are impossible to produce mechanically.
While the USB memory key (in this example) could have low level software to snoop your data, how are they going to get it? Is the USB key going to open a TCP/IP or UDP connection back to their servers without tripping my firewall that a new application is trying to connect? Is my virus scanner going to get tripped that something suspicious is coming out of the key without my interaction?
Just because the cases are not obvious doesn't mean there is no potential for exploit.
Keyboards get a lot of raw sensitive data: usernames and passwords, often even accompanied with the direct URLs where the credentials apply. Now, the keyboard obviously wouldn't be able to open a TCP/IP or UDP connection to upload the data, but it could sneak time-encoded hints about pre-recorded data into your typing. While you type, the keyboard firmware could impose miniature delays that would go unnoticed by the human eye, but would in turn influence the timing of packets sent by an SSH session. Such an attack wouldn't necessitate decrypting the SSH session and it would go completely unnoticed through all your Intrusion Detection Systems and firewalls. The practicality of such an attack can be questioned, but it demonstrates non-obvious applications.
The closest equivalent I can think of for a USB memory dongle would be firmware that could recognize, say, JPEG images in FAT file systems. Any information the firmware recognizes as interesting could be steganographically watermarked into your images by the time you pull them off the dongle. In such a case, any image you upload online that came from that dongle could contain sensitive information and you'd have no idea you uploaded it.
Also most OSes are LLP64 or LP64, meaning that the default "int" still is 32bits. Thus code recompiled in 64bits will tend to approximately use the same amount of data as original code in 32bits.
True, but the instruction set architecture doubles by size, resulting in larger binaries and more executable code to fetch from memory. As an example, the ARM instruction set is 32-bit by default, but ARM processors support a 16-bit Thumb mode. The programs typically execute slower in Thumb mode but often completion speed results in a net gain when the program is being loaded from slow flash/ROM. This is a typical set-up in many embedded systems.
Linus will only think about moving from GPLv2 if Linus thinks it's necessary or beneficial, not because some pen-pusher, pundit or journo tells him to.
He couldn't move to another license even if he wanted to. The contract works both ways: you are allowed to copy, modify and redistribute their project under the terms of the GPLv2, but any contributions sent to Linux must also adhere to the same terms. Thus, the contributions are GPLv2 and, without written consent from all contributors, changing the terms(license) is out of the question. He could, of course, change the license to the bits he wrote himself since he owns the copyright to them, but they only account for a small fraction of the whole kernel.
Actually, forcing everything down is not the most efficient way to save power - at least when it comes to CPU frequency governing. Dropping the speed does in indeed decrease power draw, but dropping the speed to 50% won't save 50% from the power draw, but it does double the calculation time and prevent the CPU from entering deep sleep states. It's often more power efficient to throttle up for the calculation, finish as fast as possible, and then enter sleep state.
I couldn't agree with you more.
Besides, we have a very recent example that proves how common sense paving way for bigger earnings: mad cow disease. Who would have thought feeding cows to cows would create problems?
The farmers can't be trusted to apply common sense anymore.
You seem to be forgetting one very important aspect: hardware failure.
Harddisks fail. I've had several disks fail while under warranty, and I wouldn't be sending them in for replacement if the data on the disk wasn't encrypted. Consider a NAS with several disks in a RAID array -- replacing faulty disks isn't all that uncommon, let alone within the five year period that some manufacturers provide warranty for.
True, you can continue texting when the tower is jammed with calls, but I doubt he got disconnected because of a rapid increase of simultaneous calls. A more plausible explanation would be that he exceeded the maximum range of some 30km from the tower. It would also make sense considering that he was supposedly approaching from sea.
GSM uses time division multiplexing, which means that the "constant link between the cellphone and the tower" is infact a set of short and frequent bursts. A burst sent from a phone from further than 30km will cause the tower to receive the burst out of its allocated time slot and as a result the call couldn't be maintained.
From what I've understood, a recent major blackout in e-mail services was a direct result of the state owned ISP transferring servers from Sweden to Finland. It was done in the verge of this wiretapping law to avoid legal complications on the ISPs part. As a result, much of the e-mail traffic in the whole country were affected when other ISPs were routing mail through these servers.
Additionally, much of the Internet traffic going in and out of the country is going through Sweden. This looks pretty alarming for Finnish citizens...
While the Atom certainly delivers impressive power statistics compared to our typical laptop processors, they are still far from the level of the ARM family. A recent article on Ars Technica will explain why. ARM processors are by far the most common processor on the low power frontier and the reason seems apparent; even at 1GHz they claim to reach operational power consumption around 300mW. Now, granted, it is on a RISC instruction set, but their upcoming Cortex-A9 will support multicore and starts to sound like a very interesting alternative for a notebook processor.
Could someone drop me a message as soon as those things start entering the market?
I use the Nokia E90 for similar purposes. It features a 800x352 pixel display and you can run a version of PuTTY on it. Depending on the font size you're willing to use, it gives you a terminal size from 88x23 characters up to 160x50 with the smallest font. Combine that with the vertical split patch for GNU screen and you have a mighty useful terminal for system administration. It works quite well for me.
Depending on their contract with the hardware vendor, they might not be allowed to distribute the source. Hardware vendors typically charge $$ for specifications, which would render them unhappy if someone released their specs in C(or any other language for that matter).
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I keep wondering how light passenger cars got the hybrid treatment first and long-haul trucks still haven't, when the first successful experience in the field clearly pointed to the latter being the ideal candidate.
Trucks typically have a longer life expectancy than passenger cars with significantly more miles being driven annually, yet we can see trucks spewing black smog into the atmosphere all the while a fairly recent passenger car will fail an inspection if any of the rigorous emission thresholds is reached.
Seems a bit more attention on other forms of transportation would be warranted, including trucks receiving the hybrid treatment. There's also been interesting development in using gas turbines as the generators in trucks instead of ICEs.
So yes, a valid point indeed.
1) I've stood directly underneath a 1MW turbine in the middle of a large wind farm on a windy day. There wasn't much noise at all, just a light whoosh... whoosh... whoosh.... I don't know where this concept that wind turbines are "terribly noisy" comes from, but it doesn't at all match my experience.
I've held a megaphone in front of my mouth and spoken into it. All I heard was my own regular voice, therefore I don't believe they work as advertised. In other words, it's all about direction.
I've also been visiting a house about 1.5km(1 mile) away from the nearest wind turbine, with the noise disturbance inside the house being at such a degree that I couldn't believe our government could let this happen. When the noise hits them, the residents can't sleep and neither would you in similar circumstances.
The issue seems to be mostly coming from the low frequency noise forming from the air pressure of the wing hitting the tower after the wing has passed. It seems to be very directed - directly sideways of the turbine.
Another contributing factor is weather. Certain conditions can cause noise that is emitted on a rising angle to curve back downwards. When these rare weather conditions are met, we've found people much father away complaining about the noise while the residents much closer had no issue with it.
Often there's more going on than immediately meets the eye.
we've all made coding mistakes, no matter how experienced we are, so the focus should not be on "who" but more on "what kind of process can we introduce so this does not happen again".
Very true. If you're not familiar with it, you might be interested in looking at "They Write The Right Stuff", an interesting piece about the reliability of software on the Space Shuttle, and the process they built to get there. "The group's most important creation is not the perfect software they write -- it's the process they invented that writes the perfect software."
The new "bulldozer" architecture from AMD is a disaster, in just about every way. They're terrible. The charts clearly show that.
For what it's worth, AMD was, like any other technology company working on significant changes, under pressure to get a release out the door. Early releases are more technological previews than completed products. It takes several generations of incremental updates to get a new architecture to reach its performance potential, and when it comes to CPUs, relatively minor changes can have a significant impact on performance. Look at the difference with the original first generation bulldozer CPUs with piledriver, the first point upgrade.
To be fair, the first releases of the bulldozer microarchitecture were not impressive performance wise. That does not justify slamming the architecture entirely, it's immature technology that isn't there yet, but we are yet to see what it's capable of.
That is disappointing. I was hoping for some amusing inconsistencies in the spec, and it turns out that it is just a few optional elements in there to support ancient packages and which the standard recommends that you don't actually support!
Is this really the reason that the entire standards organisation is denigrated, and that this format said to be impossible to implement? That is pretty lame. Why does everyone worry about compatibility tags that date back to Windows 3.1 days when the ODF spec neglected to document the spreadsheet functions at all? If you are looking for an impossible to implement standard, then that would be a more likely candidate.
The whole point in standards is to provide compatibility between different implementations of that standard. If MS Word produces documents that qualify according to the OOXML specification, but rely on the deliberately vague parts referring to older document formats, any other implementation would not be able to process said document properly.
Further, very few tools existed in historical times where handedness mattered at all. A wrench or a hammer or a spear have no handedness. Only much later were tools invented to meet the needs of the majority or users, which is why there was a tendency to put controls on power tools on the right.
The whole thesis mistakes cause for effect, suggesting tools and games we invented had something to do with what made us what we are. Whether our ancestors threw the spear, or picked the berry right or left handed couldn't have mattered at all.
The mention of a wrench here is a perfect example of how to overlook favorable tendencies for left/right handedness. Yes, the tool itself can be used in either hand, but the direction in which nuts and screws are wound in typically favors right handed people. Similarly, scissors with no ergonomic shape to favor one hand over the other typically have the top blade on the right, which leaves the cut much easier to see if the scissors are held in the right hand.
I'm not intimately familiar with tools mankind has used throughout history, but I'd be cautious to make statements like "very few tools existed in historical times where handedness mattered at all".
As many readers have pointed out, the article is light on technical details. Based on the demonstration video on the article, it looks to me like they've come up with an algorithm to interlace models -- that is, to load and process 3D models in non-linear order. If that's the case, they could be producing simplified objects(with only enough polygons to render a pixel perfect image with a given resolution and viewing distance) from incredibly detailed models on the fly.
At 5:07 into the video is a demonstration of how games would typically show a simpler version of an object from far away and switch into a higher detailed version once the object comes closer. Their algorithm could be producing these dumbed down models on the fly, just not limited to two levels of detail but countless different variations.
The reason I called this interlacing is because it reminds me of how web sites with JPEG images would load over a slow dial-up modem back in the day. At first a blurry or pixelized version of the image was portrayed, and once the rest of the image was loaded (much later) the image had arrived at its full quality.
"It's like two people shouting messages to each other at the same time," said Levis. "If both people are shouting at the same time, neither of them will hear the other."
Clearly, Levis has never been to Spain.
Given that all the stupid computers in hospitals are running windows, this threat is actually already there, and does not seem to have caused many problems so far. Yet, I'm still very anxious to see these things more and more popular.
With a year's experience working in a public hospital purchasing office I found (without searching) many critical security flaws in the processes. For example, the European Procurement Announcement agency regularly sends catalogs of EU-wide procurements in CD's that require Windows and autorun to function. The CD would start a web server off the disk and launch Internet Explorer to interface with the server. In other words, we regularly executed programs from CD's we got by mail in a very simple (and easy to replicate) packaging, on the same computers we use to make very expensive purchases (believe me, hospital equipment isn't cheap).
They behave the way they do because they are control freaks. They want absolute control over their platform. Their ultimate vision is that they'll be the source of all your media, all your apps, etc. They'll dictate how you consume stuff. Such a setup would be, needless to say, very profitable.
As for why they can get away with it, well I'd say there are two reasons:
1) Fanboyism/zealotry. Apple has had a following for a long time of people for whom they can do no wrong more or less. A non-trivial amount of these people are in the press (Macs are big in prepress work). They just love Apple and everything they do. So when something bad comes out, they find ways to rationalize it away, or ignore it.
2) For many of the Apple buyers these days, Apple is not a technology company but a fashion company. They largely won't admit it, but they buy them as fashion accessories. They are the "cool" product to own. As such they are purchased based on that alone. Whatever restrictions/costs accompany that are ok because they want to be cool. I see the same thing these days with fixed gear bikes. They are in with college kids (I work on campus and bike to work). They buy brand new, surprisingly expensive, fixed gear bikes. This, of course, makes them harder to ride up hill, but they are ok with that because fixed gear is cool, road or mountain bikes are not.
or 3) Their market share is sufficiently low to face antitrust investigations for monopolistic behavior.
People who bought iPads and iPods on the understanding that they could be used without having their location information gathered and shared now find that they *must* allow this information to be gathered and shared (I suppose you could try not updating iTunes, but then you would also have to not upgrade your OS -- OS upgrades come with iTunes upgrades -- and be prepared to be locked out of the app store, and since Apple's use of DRM prevents third parties from putting apps on your devices, you're fundamentally abandoning any hope of loading any code, even third-party code, onto your iPad and iPod).
Sounds like a class action lawsuit waiting to happen.
Had I gotten into an accident and someone looked at the black box, it would show the same thing. "Umm, he took his foot off the gas and then floored it, repeating. Probably drunk or distracted."
Not if they have any sensible sampling frequency on the gas pedal. Under no circumstances should it be possible to go from 'idle' to 'flooring' without samples from the transition between the two extremes. It would be easy to recognize a faulty sensor when its input displays changes that are impossible to produce mechanically.
So even though the price at the pump is less, I'd be a fool to run E85 in even a new vehicle of this class.
Paying a little extra for something more ecologically sustainable would hardly be qualified as "foolish". Most people could well afford it.
While the USB memory key (in this example) could have low level software to snoop your data, how are they going to get it? Is the USB key going to open a TCP/IP or UDP connection back to their servers without tripping my firewall that a new application is trying to connect? Is my virus scanner going to get tripped that something suspicious is coming out of the key without my interaction?
Just because the cases are not obvious doesn't mean there is no potential for exploit.
Keyboards get a lot of raw sensitive data: usernames and passwords, often even accompanied with the direct URLs where the credentials apply. Now, the keyboard obviously wouldn't be able to open a TCP/IP or UDP connection to upload the data, but it could sneak time-encoded hints about pre-recorded data into your typing. While you type, the keyboard firmware could impose miniature delays that would go unnoticed by the human eye, but would in turn influence the timing of packets sent by an SSH session. Such an attack wouldn't necessitate decrypting the SSH session and it would go completely unnoticed through all your Intrusion Detection Systems and firewalls. The practicality of such an attack can be questioned, but it demonstrates non-obvious applications.
The closest equivalent I can think of for a USB memory dongle would be firmware that could recognize, say, JPEG images in FAT file systems. Any information the firmware recognizes as interesting could be steganographically watermarked into your images by the time you pull them off the dongle. In such a case, any image you upload online that came from that dongle could contain sensitive information and you'd have no idea you uploaded it.
Also most OSes are LLP64 or LP64, meaning that the default "int" still is 32bits. Thus code recompiled in 64bits will tend to approximately use the same amount of data as original code in 32bits.
True, but the instruction set architecture doubles by size, resulting in larger binaries and more executable code to fetch from memory. As an example, the ARM instruction set is 32-bit by default, but ARM processors support a 16-bit Thumb mode. The programs typically execute slower in Thumb mode but often completion speed results in a net gain when the program is being loaded from slow flash/ROM. This is a typical set-up in many embedded systems.
Linus will only think about moving from GPLv2 if Linus thinks it's necessary or beneficial, not because some pen-pusher, pundit or journo tells him to.
He couldn't move to another license even if he wanted to. The contract works both ways: you are allowed to copy, modify and redistribute their project under the terms of the GPLv2, but any contributions sent to Linux must also adhere to the same terms. Thus, the contributions are GPLv2 and, without written consent from all contributors, changing the terms(license) is out of the question. He could, of course, change the license to the bits he wrote himself since he owns the copyright to them, but they only account for a small fraction of the whole kernel.
Dial that speedstep down WAY low when unplugged.
Actually, forcing everything down is not the most efficient way to save power - at least when it comes to CPU frequency governing. Dropping the speed does in indeed decrease power draw, but dropping the speed to 50% won't save 50% from the power draw, but it does double the calculation time and prevent the CPU from entering deep sleep states. It's often more power efficient to throttle up for the calculation, finish as fast as possible, and then enter sleep state.
I couldn't agree with you more. Besides, we have a very recent example that proves how common sense paving way for bigger earnings: mad cow disease. Who would have thought feeding cows to cows would create problems? The farmers can't be trusted to apply common sense anymore.
Obligatory XKCD reference:
http://xkcd.com/224/
You seem to be forgetting one very important aspect: hardware failure.
Harddisks fail. I've had several disks fail while under warranty, and I wouldn't be sending them in for replacement if the data on the disk wasn't encrypted. Consider a NAS with several disks in a RAID array -- replacing faulty disks isn't all that uncommon, let alone within the five year period that some manufacturers provide warranty for.
True, you can continue texting when the tower is jammed with calls, but I doubt he got disconnected because of a rapid increase of simultaneous calls. A more plausible explanation would be that he exceeded the maximum range of some 30km from the tower. It would also make sense considering that he was supposedly approaching from sea.
GSM uses time division multiplexing, which means that the "constant link between the cellphone and the tower" is infact a set of short and frequent bursts. A burst sent from a phone from further than 30km will cause the tower to receive the burst out of its allocated time slot and as a result the call couldn't be maintained.
From what I've understood, a recent major blackout in e-mail services was a direct result of the state owned ISP transferring servers from Sweden to Finland. It was done in the verge of this wiretapping law to avoid legal complications on the ISPs part. As a result, much of the e-mail traffic in the whole country were affected when other ISPs were routing mail through these servers.
Additionally, much of the Internet traffic going in and out of the country is going through Sweden. This looks pretty alarming for Finnish citizens...
While the Atom certainly delivers impressive power statistics compared to our typical laptop processors, they are still far from the level of the ARM family. A recent article on Ars Technica will explain why. ARM processors are by far the most common processor on the low power frontier and the reason seems apparent; even at 1GHz they claim to reach operational power consumption around 300mW. Now, granted, it is on a RISC instruction set, but their upcoming Cortex-A9 will support multicore and starts to sound like a very interesting alternative for a notebook processor.
Could someone drop me a message as soon as those things start entering the market?
I use the Nokia E90 for similar purposes. It features a 800x352 pixel display and you can run a version of PuTTY on it. Depending on the font size you're willing to use, it gives you a terminal size from 88x23 characters up to 160x50 with the smallest font. Combine that with the vertical split patch for GNU screen and you have a mighty useful terminal for system administration. It works quite well for me.
Depending on their contract with the hardware vendor, they might not be allowed to distribute the source. Hardware vendors typically charge $$ for specifications, which would render them unhappy if someone released their specs in C(or any other language for that matter).