Comment Re:Are most programmes multi-processor? (Score 1) 219
As soon as virtualization is on your mind and not a laptop this makes beautiful sense.
Comment Re:True for the iPod, yes. (Score 1) 965
Are you telling me that you haven't experienced the cult. I have witnessed over and over posters being marked Flamebait anytime someone dares to have the audacity to say anything even remotely negative about Apple. I have owned 4 macs and currently own 2 amongst all of my hardware. One runs OS 6 and the other is a dual G5 with Linux. I have also experienced en mass the cult of Mac and there is a serious difference between a user and a member of the cult. Making misguided assumptions is even dumber than whatever it is you think I did.
I didn't say YOU WILL NOT, I said I don't think you will. I made a generalization about a culture. I believe that Apple is starting to develop a culture that is the opposite of open and free. People who are members are guilted into not speaking out. I believe we need to address this with our pocket books and by calling it on the table when we see it.
In this case someone believes that they can stop the way things are going at any time but they'll go ahead and wait until things get worse before they actually do anything. They won't. No one ever does.
BTW I don't live in my basement, don't have TV (or watch Star Trek for the matter), I don't game, I hack Linux, Windows, Mac, FPGAs, embedded systems, have friends, live at ski resort, and live and play outdoors everyday. If you had a point with your statement about who you are and how easy your little feelings are hurt it was irrelevant.
I call you out, as you did yourself, as an Anonymous Coward. Please fell free to change out your I-Pad at anytime.
Comment Re:True for the iPod, yes. (Score 1) 965
Flamebait is what you get whenever you say anything about Apple or its culture. The Cult of Apple, scientology, whatever. Inconvenient truth is always unacceptable.
Comment Re:True for the iPod, yes. (Score 0, Flamebait) 965
The problem is, I don't think you actually will jump out of the boiling pot. All of your friends would leave because none of them will talk to people or treat them with respect or dignity if they don't use a Mac. The tithes you've been paying to the church of Mac would all have been wasted. All of your gadgets would end up either not working or without full functionality until some other hardware or encryption hacker maybe figures out how to unlock them. I think you'll stay right there in your cult and thank the great lord Steve for the privileges he has granted you.
Submission + - impossible tech featured at CES (physorg.com)
Dr. Null writes: A booth at CES claiming to be RCA was demonstrating a cool piece of technology they call "Airenergy"
http://www.physorg.com/news182595455.html.
they claim that they can extract energy from Wifi signals to re-change mobile devices. At CES they claim that they were able "charge a BlackBerry from 30% charge to fully charged in around 90 minutes using only ambient WiFi signals as the power source," I am an Electrical engineer and I design energy harvesting antennas and circuitry for UHF RFID chips. I can attest that the claims made by RCA at CES are not even remotely possible. The average WiFi transmitter is under 0.1 watt. As calculated by the Friis RF porpagation formula; with a dipole and a patch antenna the expected maximum power received by the "Airenergy" device 10 ft away from the WiFi transmitter is under 5 millionth of a watt. A 3.3 volt 1000 mAHr battery would take 75 years to charge. At one ft away, it still takes 3 years to charge. There can be no technology breakthrough here. No improvement in conversion efficiency will make micro-watts into watts.
Why would they make such an outrageous claim that is so easily checked? I can find no mention of the "Airenergy" device on any website associated with RCA. Did RCA license their name to some fly by night company? Do they think that there will not be lawsuits when people find out that this device can't possibly do what they claim it dose?
http://www.physorg.com/news182595455.html.
they claim that they can extract energy from Wifi signals to re-change mobile devices. At CES they claim that they were able "charge a BlackBerry from 30% charge to fully charged in around 90 minutes using only ambient WiFi signals as the power source," I am an Electrical engineer and I design energy harvesting antennas and circuitry for UHF RFID chips. I can attest that the claims made by RCA at CES are not even remotely possible. The average WiFi transmitter is under 0.1 watt. As calculated by the Friis RF porpagation formula; with a dipole and a patch antenna the expected maximum power received by the "Airenergy" device 10 ft away from the WiFi transmitter is under 5 millionth of a watt. A 3.3 volt 1000 mAHr battery would take 75 years to charge. At one ft away, it still takes 3 years to charge. There can be no technology breakthrough here. No improvement in conversion efficiency will make micro-watts into watts.
Why would they make such an outrageous claim that is so easily checked? I can find no mention of the "Airenergy" device on any website associated with RCA. Did RCA license their name to some fly by night company? Do they think that there will not be lawsuits when people find out that this device can't possibly do what they claim it dose?
Submission + - In other news Conan to sell Tonight Show on E-Bay (cnet.com)
stilldead writes: In what appears to be a bold move to make some extra money off the Tonight Show before Leno comes in with something that I'm sure will be completely different it appears that Conan will be offering the show to the highest bidder on E-Bay. Of course he may end up using Craigslist instead. Now all we have to hope for is that he'll add in Triumph the Comic insult Dog and the Gaseous Weiner to really sweeten this deal.
Submission + - French anti-piracy logo uses pirated fonts 2
pla writes: Cory Doctorow reports (and
FontFeed confirms, with
better fact-checking) that the French governmental agency in charge of enforcing their new "Three Strikes" Law, Hadopi, has made
use of not just one, but two unlicensed fonts in their official logo.
One of these, "Bienvenue", exists only as a privately owned font designed exclusively for France Telecom with no licensing terms available whatsoever. Hadopi claims they never intended that version of the logo for release — Despite having registered it (complete with infringing fonts) as a trademark two months ago. For the other font used in their logo (including both the original and the replacement), "Bliss", they didn't purchase a license to use it until the very day they found it necessary to release a non-infringing replacement logo.
One of these, "Bienvenue", exists only as a privately owned font designed exclusively for France Telecom with no licensing terms available whatsoever. Hadopi claims they never intended that version of the logo for release — Despite having registered it (complete with infringing fonts) as a trademark two months ago. For the other font used in their logo (including both the original and the replacement), "Bliss", they didn't purchase a license to use it until the very day they found it necessary to release a non-infringing replacement logo.
Submission + - Xigmatek Lighter 60Gb Pocket Hard Drive Review (tweaknews.net)
An anonymous reader writes: With so many portable hard drives currently on the market, competition is fierce and consumers are always on the lookout for the best bang for the buck. The Xigmatek Lighter is a stylish, low cost option that easily stands out. Not only does it look like an actual lighter, it's not much larger than one and provides an impressive 60GB of storage that fits in your pocket.
Submission + - NVIDIA GF100 wants to revolutionize GPUs (pcper.com)
JoshMST writes: NVIDIA is late to the party with DX11-ready graphics hardware, but they are
hoping to make up for it with a very unique and different design than the
competing AMD Radeon GPUs. The GF100 GPU is
essentially the same hardware that was detailed in the
Fermi release late last year, but only now do details emerge on how the
hardware is targeted at the gaming market. A total of 512 processing cores
are combined with a new PolyMorph Engine that performs the necessary
tessellation for DX11 but in a new, less serialized manner. The chip is
going to be big and we already know that it is going to be power hungry,
but until actual products and benchmarks are revealed, the final answer
between AMD and NVIDIA this generation will be up in the air.
hoping to make up for it with a very unique and different design than the
competing AMD Radeon GPUs. The GF100 GPU is
essentially the same hardware that was detailed in the
Fermi release late last year, but only now do details emerge on how the
hardware is targeted at the gaming market. A total of 512 processing cores
are combined with a new PolyMorph Engine that performs the necessary
tessellation for DX11 but in a new, less serialized manner. The chip is
going to be big and we already know that it is going to be power hungry,
but until actual products and benchmarks are revealed, the final answer
between AMD and NVIDIA this generation will be up in the air.
Submission + - SPAM: Nano-scale Robot Arm Moves Atoms With 100% Accurac
destinyland writes: A New York professor has built "a two-armed nanorobotic device with the ability to place specific atoms and molecules where scientists want them." The nano-scopic device is just 150 x 50 x 8 nanometers in size — over a million could fit inside a single red blood cell. But because of its size, it's able to build nanoscale structures and machines — including a nanoscale walking biped and even sequence-dependent molecular switch arrays!
Link to Original Source
Link to Original Source
Submission + - Microsoft bots performing denial of service 1
at_slashdot writes: The Perl CPAN Testers have been suffering issues accessing their sites, databases and mirrors. According to a posting on the CPAN Testers' blog, the CPAN Testers' server has been being aggressively scanned by "20-30 bots every few seconds" in what they call "a dedicated denial of service attack"; these bots "completely ignore the rules specified in robots.txt".
http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/Microsoft-bots-perform-denial-of-service-on-Perl-Testers-906094.html
http://blogs.perl.org/users/cpan_testers/2010/01/msnbot-must-die.html
http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/Microsoft-bots-perform-denial-of-service-on-Perl-Testers-906094.html
http://blogs.perl.org/users/cpan_testers/2010/01/msnbot-must-die.html
Submission + - Linux kernel due early March (computerworld.com.au)
swandives writes: The Linux.conf.au is in full-swing in Wellington, New Zealand, and Computerworld Australia has an interview with Jon Corbet in the leadup to his Kernel Report. The latest kernel release is due early March and will include reversed-engineered drivers for Nvidia chipsets.
Submission + - Police in Britain arrest man for joke on Twitter (forth.ie)
An anonymous reader writes: A British man arrested under anti-terrorism legislation for making a bomb joke on Twitter. Paul Chambers, 26, was arrested under the provisions of the Terrorism Act (2006) –his crime? Frustrated at grounded flights over inclement weather, he made a joke bomb threat on the social networking site Twitter.
Comment Re:Dual-license (Score 2, Informative) 245
The only problem that MySQL is having with its licensing model is that Monty is a fucking idiot who wants to have his cake and eat it too. I'm sorry, you sold it. It's not yours any more. What you want no longer matters. Now shut up and go away.
If only life was that simple. He did not sell it to SUN, the MySQL shareholders did of which he was only one of them. Monty had not been a majority shareholder since he went for venture capital support in 2001.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MySQL_AB
Did he gain anything from the sale? Of course, but he had no real say in it.
Comment Re:water towers (Score 1) 243
I have a hard time guessing if you're trolling or not. I'm assuming you are, but on the remote chance that your question really is sincere:
The volumes involved are mind numbing. If sea levels rose even one foot, there'd be 10^14 cubic meters of water to handle.
I couldn't find a reference on the world's largest water tower, but the US largest (and those Americans do seem to like building big stuff) can hold "half a million gallons". So, if we built towers as big as that one, we'd still need about 5*10^10 of them - that would be about ten times as many as we have people in the world.
Are you beginning to see the problem?
