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Cellphones

White iPhone 4 Coming Today 195

An anonymous reader writes "Initially, the white iPhone 4 will be available in 28 countries including the US, UK, Australia, China, Japan, and Italy. It will be available for a suggested retail price of $199 (US) for the 16GB model and $299 (US) for the 32GB model with a new two year agreement through the Apple Store, AT&T and Verizon Wireless stores (as rumored earlier) and select Apple Authorized Resellers."
Image

Kentucky Man Builds Bourbon Powered Car Screenshot-sm 190

autospa writes "With fuel prices rising like crazy, a man from Kentucky came up with a solution to high gas prices. 62-year-old Mickey Nilsson, of Bardstown, Kentucky, made a bourbon-powered junk car. He got the idea from the movie Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Nilsson said that his inspiration came from a character played by Dick Van Dyke in the classic Disney movie."
Desktops (Apple)

Mac Users More Liberal Than Windows Users 638

adeelarshad82 writes "A recent survey conducted on 400,000 people — in which 52% of respondents were self-described PC (Windows) people, 25% were Mac users and 23% were neither — showed that Mac users are more politically liberal than their PC-using counterparts. 58% of Mac users were 'liberal,' as compared to 38% of PC users. Amongst other things, the survey also indicated that Mac users were, on average, more urban, younger and more educated than PC users, which could potentially be a contributing factor toward being more liberal."

Comment They should have sold OtherOS as an add-on (Score 3, Insightful) 319

The PS3 was sold as a loss leader...

Maybe they should have priced it so that it wasn't a money loser, or better yet - price it where it was, but sell the OtherOS functionality as an add-on for the difference in cost between the PS3 retail price, and the actual cost + profit margin.

Comment PS3 does make a great, if noisy space heater (Score 2) 319

Given the problem with PSN in the last few days, it appears there's no viable option left but use the PS3 as an offline gaming machine, an ordinary Blu-ray player or maybe a space heater :-)

It makes a fantastic space heater, easily rivaling the Power Mac G5 Quad I have upstairs, which can actually be used to heat the whole upstairs of our house just by having it transcode a video.

I make sure to turn off the power switch on the back of our PS3 after shutting it down, as there were many times I would come into the living room to find the PS3 running its fans at full speed and blasting out heat - hours after it had been shut down. I don't really care to know what it was doing, I just wanted it to stay "off".

Comment Those terms are meaningless (Score 5, Interesting) 244

"it’s two times as hard, six times lighter and ten times higher in tensile strength"

Well, to the materials scientists I work with, those words sound like advertising more than useful information.

Two times as hard as steel. Steel in what condition? There is a very wide variety of steel alloys, and these can be heat treated to be as whatever hardness is necessary. Find a piece of mild steel (the kind of stuff you might find at the hardware store) and try to scratch it with something hard. You can scratch it pretty easily, but try again on a piece of stainless steel cutlery and you'll probably find it quite a bit more difficult. Both are steel.

Six times lighter. Per unit volume? Ok, but how do the other characteristics compare given the same volume? Or given the same weight? The article doesn't give any real detail or any frame of reference.

Ten times higher in tensile strength - again, if you want to compare to steel you need to give the alloy grade (grade refers to composition, not quality), and the heat treatment - anyone who's bought nuts and bolts at the hardware store has noticed that these metal items are available in different strength grades even within the same basic metal family.

Those claims sound just like those given for aluminum - it's lighter (per unit volume), stronger (per unit weight), etc. But, in service, where toughness (ie. impact resistance, the ability to deform plastically before fracturing, etc), steel beats aluminum hands down.

Not that I'm a big fan of steel or anything, it's just that these comparisons are often incomplete and therefore meaningless. It's too bad the article writer didn't include any actual mechanical property values.

Comment NASCAR? Not likely this century (Score 5, Informative) 351

The reason why this is so novel is not the power of the laser, but it's size, timing and durability. It'll be interesting to see if NASCAR allows it, as efficiency is a big part of winning that closely regulated league.

Ummm... The mass-market car manufacturers abandoned carburetors for fuel injection back in 1987, yet NASCAR is still just thinking about using fuel injection maybe in 2012.

I think you can safely forget about laser ignition systems in NASCAR for a good long time after they're available in regular production cars. While NASCAR cars have been refined over the decades, they are still not using very much technology that would have been unfamiliar to a regular car mechanic in the late 1970s.

Now, if you'd said Formula 1, then that would make sense.

Comment Wrong question; wrong phone (Score 1) 93

I wonder if you'll be able to ./configure, make, make install programs written on this small computer? That would make it something worth shouting about...

The question you should be asking yourself is, "Why would I buy a product that lacks a feature that I want?"

If you want a cool looking phone, that can play angry birds, and that you can install your own stuff on, get an Android-based phone, not an iPhone.

Cell phones have been small computers for a very long time now, and have all had varying degrees of lockdown.

Heck, I had one of the first phones with a color screen and Verizon forced you to hack into it just to load your own pictures into it.

You want to get worked up about lockdown when there are other non-locked-down choices available? That's just pointless.

Iphone

Apple Logging Locations of All iPhone Users 591

An anonymous reader writes "The Guardian reports that researchers have found a hidden file on all iPhones, iPads and any computers to which they synchronize, logging timestamped latitude and longitude coordinates of the user since June 2010. A tool is available on their website to check on your own."

Comment Maybe for some models, but not all (Score 2) 206

There is a certain cutoff year where most of the pre-whatever drives are aluminum platter and the post-whatever drives are glass platter.

This does not seem to be true across all manufacturers. I dismantle all of our drives before disposal, and I've only come across glass platters in laptop drives (they seem to have been glass all the way back to the early 1990s, the earliest one I disassembled was from 1992 and had glass platters). All of the 3.5" drives have had aluminum platters, from the cheap 5400 RPM drives to 10000 RPM drives from servers.

It's possible that some manufacturers use glass platters in certain model lines of drives, but there doesn't seem to be an industry-wide changeover to glass platters. I have a stack of aluminum platters here to prove it - the most recent from a drive manufactured in mid-2010.

Comment Nope, still aluminum (Score 2) 206

Really, you have? On a modern drive?

Because modern drives have glass platters and the gunshot shatters them into millions of pieces.

A drive from the 80's and early 90's? yes.

A drive from the past few years? no.

I dismantle every drive that we are getting rid of, usually about five a year.

So far, the only glass platters have been in laptop drives. The most recent 3.5" drive was from 2010, and had aluminum platters. The laptop drives seem to have had glass platters all the way back to the early 1990s.

Privacy

White House Releases Trusted Internet ID Plan 229

angry tapir writes "From the Computerworld article: 'the U.S. government will coordinate private-sector efforts to create trusted identification systems for the Internet, with the goal of giving consumers and businesses multiple options for authenticating identity online, according to a plan released by President Barack Obama's administration.'"
Government

Judge Rules That Police Can Bar High I.Q. Scores 260

An anonymous reader writes "A Federal judge has dismissed a lawsuit by a man who was barred from the New London police force because he scored too high on an intelligence test. Judge Dorsey ruled that Mr. Jordan was not denied equal protection because the city of New London applied the same standard to everyone: anyone who scored too high was rejected." Update: 04/16 22:01 GMT by T : Mea culpa. This story slipped through; consider it a time-machine / late-April Fool's day joke, please.

Comment Look up the price of a Concorde ticket sometime (Score 1) 531

In the days of the Concorde, if you could afford to fly from NYC to Paris, you could afford to do it on a supersonic luxury jet. Everyone else had to schlep along on the ground. Now, ordinary joes can afford to fly, and they provide relentless downward cost pressure, making fast-but-ineffecient things like Concorde unprofitable.

I would like to see someone travel on the ground from NYC to Paris. At some point during the journey, a car is going to lose traction due to the depth of the water in the North Atlantic Ocean.

Concorde tickets cost three to ten times the price of a subsonic flight. To say that if someone can afford a $1000 subsonic flight, then they can also afford a $10,000 supersonic flight is just silly.

I'm not sure where you live, but in the USA the 55 MPH limit is largely gone. I've been flying on jet aircraft since the mid 1970s (at similar speeds to today's air transport), and so have millions of others, so I'm not sure what your point is. Somehow losing the peak travel speeds of a small number of travels whilst not raising the travel speeds of the masses raises the average travel speed?

Comment Thanks for the laugh (Score 2) 310

... when the Chinese president call the White House and say: "Tell Sony to drop this BS, or we will call back ALL Treasury bonds". When that day comes, DMCA will be repealed quickly, and a new patent/copyright reform will come.

Sony is a Japanese company, not American. Of all of Sony's business units, Sony Computer Entertainment America would be an unlikely choice to go after someone in China. It's entirely possible that Sony has a division located somewhere in Asia - that division might try to get the Japanese and Chinese governments involved, but it's not clear why you'd think America would be involved. Maybe you got your wires crossed a little.

Or, the USA can always print $1 trillion and pay back the Chinese. Then we will have inflation -> Civil War -> Constitution suspended -> No DMCA.

Yeah, right. I think you may be in a strange mental state where you're dreaming, but you're still able to interact with the real world. Try pinching yourself to see if you wake up.

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