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Comment Beware EFI (Score 1) 260

by ah42 (#42223403) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Best Laptop With Decent Linux Graphics Support?

I just bought a laptop myself (MSI-GT70), and the hardware (as far as I can tell) worked flawlessly with linux (even Optimus, see my above comment about bumblebee).

However, the major stumbling block was EFI and Windows Dual-Boot (I have my reasons):
No matter how I tried, I could not get any EFI bootloader to boot linux. I could get grub-efi, efi-shell, elilo, to all boot themselves, but none of them are able to boot the kernel. So I must use linux in Legacy (BIOS) mode.

Since windows is pre-installed, and the new recovery system isn't actually a proper installer (as far as I can tell. I haven't wanted to risk wiping the installation to test...), I must continue to boot windows in EFI mode.

So now my dual boot menu is actually chenging between BIOS and EFI, instead of choosing an option from the grub menu.

Comment Re:It's a very sad thing to admit, but (Score 2) 260

by ah42 (#42223387) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Best Laptop With Decent Linux Graphics Support?

I honestly have to agree with the ease of setting up Bumblebee. When I bought my current laptop online, it was advertised as nVidia graphics, and nowhere did it mention intel... so I was disappointed (and quite confused) to find X using the intel driver. I had never heard of this Optimus thing, and 5 minutes later, I had bumblebee installed, and running.

https://launchpad.net/~bumblebee/+archive/stable
Graphics

Submission + - Nvidia Unveils Ultra-Efficient Kepler GPU

Submitted by adeelarshad82
adeelarshad82 writes: Nvidia unveiled it's latest flagship graphics processing unit, the GeForce GTX 680. According to the company GeForce GTX 680 blazes through the latest titles faster than AMD's top-of-the-line Radeon HD 7970. The new architecture, codenamed "Kepler," revolves around what's dubbed an SMX, with control logic plus 192 cores—more than enough to offset the power-saving move of running at 1x graphics clock instead of 2x. The GeForce GTX 680 features eight SMX blocks (1,536 cores) running at 1,006MHz; 128 texture units; eight geometry units; four raster units; and 32 ROP units.
Games

Submission + - Nvidia's Fermi GPU architecture makes its debut (techreport.com)

Submitted by crookedvulture
crookedvulture writes: Fermi is here. Nvidia has lifted the curtain on reviews of its latest GPU architecture, which will be available first in the high-end GeForce GTX 680 graphics card. The underlying GK104 processor is much smaller than the equivalent AMD GPU, with fewer transistors, a narrower path to memory, and greatly simplified control logic that relies more heavily on Nvidia's compiler software. Despite the modest chip, Nvidia's new architecture is efficient enough that The Tech Report, PC Perspective, and AnandTech all found the GeForce GTX 680's gaming performance to be largely comparable to AMD's fastest Radeon, which costs $50 more. The GTX 680 also offers other notable perks, like a PCI Express 3.0 interface, dynamic clock scaling, new video encoding tech, and a smarter vsync mechanism. It's rather power-efficient, too, but the decision to focus on graphics workloads means the chip won't be as good a fit for Nvidia's compute-centric Tesla products. A bigger GPU based on the Kepler architecture is expected to serve that market.

Comment News from Seti@Home (Score 4, Informative) 248

by ah42 (#36135664) Attached to: Search For Alien Life On 86 Planets Begins

From the relevant thread over at Seti@Home:

"Grad student Andrew Siemion reports that new modifications to a data recorder at Green Bank that we need for our Kepler SETI observations are now complete, thanks to a huge amount of help from Paul Demorest, a former grad student and one of initial authors of AstroPulse. Our first hour of test time is scheduled for this Saturday, 17:30 EDT. We'll be observing with 450 seconds per target on 90 Kepler field stars with interesting planet candidates (~habitable zone, ~Earth size, ~Earth period, ~several planets), then do a raster scan of the entire Kepler field. " - Eric Korpela
Medicine

Young Men Who Smoke Have Lower IQs 561

Posted by kdawson from the correlation-is-not-causation dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "Science Daily reports on a study that has determined that young men who smoke are likely to have lower IQs than their non-smoking peers. In the study, conducted with 20,000 Israeli Army recruits and veterans, the average IQ for a non-smoker was about 101, while the smokers' average was more than seven IQ points lower at about 94, and the IQs of young men who smoked more than a pack a day were lower still, at about 90. (These IQs all fall within the normal range.) 'In the health profession, we've generally thought that smokers are most likely the kind of people to have grown up in difficult neighborhoods, or who've been given less education at good schools,' says Prof. Mark Weiser of Tel Aviv University's Department of Psychiatry, whose study was reported in a recent version of the journal Addiction. 'Because our study included subjects with diverse socio-economic backgrounds, we've been able to rule out socio-economics as a major factor. The government might want to rethink how it allocates its educational resources on smoking.' Prof. Weiser says that the study illuminates a general trend in epidemiological studies. 'People on the lower end of the average IQ tend to display poorer overall decision-making skills when it comes to their health,' says Weiser. 'Schoolchildren who have been found to have a lower IQ can be considered at risk to begin the habit, and can be targeted with special education and therapy to prevent them from starting or to break the habit after it sets in.'"
Mozilla

Happy 5th Birthday To Firefox 252

Posted by CmdrTaco from the they-get-bloated-so-fast dept.
halfEvilTech writes "Five years ago today, Mozilla released Firefox 1.0. Ars celebrates the occasion by taking a trip back in time to revisit our classic coverage of the original release." For fun, we dug up the oldest Slashdot Firefox story, which was a Firebird story proclaiming yet another name change from Feb '04. At least this name change stuck.
The Internet

AT&T Suggests To 300K Employees To Lobby the FCC 239

Posted by kdawson from the call-your-uncle-sam dept.
Several readers sent in the news that AT&T's top lobbyist sent a letter to all 300,000 employees urging them to give feedback to the FCC as it gears up for rulemaking on net neutrality. He even supplied talking points approved by the PR department. The lobbyist, Jim Cicconi, suggested that employees use their personal email accounts when they weigh in with the FCC. Pro-net-neutrality group Free Press has now likened Cicconi's letter to astroturfing: "Coming from one of the company’s most senior executives, it’s hard to imagine AT&T employees thinking the memo was merely a suggestion."
News

LHC Successfully Cools To 1.9K In Lead-Up To Restart 177

Posted by Soulskill from the say-your-goodbyes-folks,-the-end-is-nigh dept.
Smelly Jeffrey writes "The BBC is reporting that the LHC has had all eight of its sectors cooled to 1.9 Kelvin. Their tagline is that it is now 'colder than deep space,' referring to the CMB. LHC engineers have spent nearly $40,000,000 USD on a new system to prevent the 'quench' condition that caused the LHC to be down for warming, repairs, and re-cooling over the last year. The LHC is now cold enough to begin colliding particles in search of the Higgs Boson. High power collisions won't be started until late December, or perhaps early January. However, a low-power beam through parts of the collider could be tested as early as next week!"
Image

Lorax Construction Screenshot-sm 13

Posted by samzenpus from the goodbye-truffula-trees dept.
You can actually hear the earth cry when this thing starts up.
Privacy

Verified Identity Pass Shuts Down "Clear" Operations 171

Posted by timothy from the will-you-also-clear-the-database dept.
torrentami writes that Verified Identity Pass, operator of the "Clear" program, which allowed pre-screened passengers faster access to US airport gates, "sent out emails to its subscribers today informing them that as of 11 p.m. PST they will cease operations. Clear was a pioneer in speeding customers through security at airports and had planned on expanding to large events. The service, where it was available, offered a first class security experience for travelers willing to fork over $200 a year and their biometrics. Customers are now left holding their Flyclear cards with encrypted biometrics. The question now becomes, what happens to all that information? This is not the first time Clear has been in the news. A laptop containing customer records was reportedly missing from the San Francisco International airport recently but then turned up shortly thereafter. Another casualty of the recession's downturn in business travel."
The Internet

Submission + - Does P2P Streaming Media Have a Future? (blogspot.com)

Submitted by
shadowmage13
shadowmage13 writes: "After reading that streaming will overtake downloads, at least in music, my interest in P2P internet radio/TV has been rekindled. Years ago, there were a couple of projects showing promise, but today IceShare, PeerCast, and FreeCast have all been inactive for a long time. There are obviously technical limitations that make P2P media streaming difficult, but proprietary options exist, and I just don't see the technology taking off without an open source solution. I always thought this had a lot of potential. What happened to these projects, are there others, and does this have a future?"

Comment Re:ubuntu trouble (Score 1) 655

by ah42 (#28104741) Attached to: Ridiculous Software Bug Workarounds?

If it's the same bug I kept hitting, try this:

edit /etc/initramfs-tools/modules to include on a line by itself "ac" and then run: update-initramfs -c -k all

Short version: if the ac module is loaded, it boots fine. Something wonky in ACPI. This worked for me in 8.10, at least.

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