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Comment Re:! surprising (Score 1) 762

You haven't bought a car in California recently?

There are Prop 65 stickers on car windows already. "This car contains and is manufactured with stuff that gives you cancer."

I bought a car a month ago and that sticker didn't even make it off the lot before I took it off. One on the driver's side and one on the passenger side.

Comment Re:Burnt out (Score 1) 357

You'd have to have a hell of a lot of built-up voltage to jump through the plastic casing, through the air gap to the non-grounded metal on the PC board, and then from there across the air gap to the USB grounding shield.

It's not the direct zap from your finger, it's the induced charge.

You're negatively charged, and hold one end of the USB stick. The EM field you are generating pushes all the positive charge to the other end of the stick. Usually the USB plug.

Your stick approaches the USB port, which is neutral and/or grounded and the positive end of the USB stick discharges through whatever you plugged it into.

It is even worse with grounded materials. Bring a positive charge near something grounded, and all the positive charges run away into the ground. Unground the device when the positive charged object is still around and now your device is net negatively charged. Plug that device into something and *zap*, ESD.

Comment Re:Store small, high-value secrets (Score 2, Informative) 546

Since Perl is pretty loosely typed, Once it overflows its int type, it'll become a float type, then it'll just keep growing till it hits infinity.

Or until, in float, you run out of precision in the mantissa so that you can't fit 1 and the number in the same range. The proverbial 3000000000000000 + 1 = 3000000000000000.

For IEEE754 32 bit float, that's about 24 bits worth of float, so about 16,777,216 is the biggest for single precision float.

#include <stdio.h> int main(void) { int i; float j = 16777210; for (i = 0; i &lt 10; i++) { printf("%f\n", j); j = j + 1; } return 0; }

./a.out

16777210.000000

16777211.000000

16777212.000000

16777213.000000

16777214.000000

16777215.000000

16777216.000000

16777216.000000

16777216.000000

16777216.000000

Note the saturation at 216.

Enlightenment

Submission + - A Wife's Fight against Corruption in India (nytimes.com)

cryant writes: "Fearing for her husband's life, an IAS officer's wife in India does the un-obvious — she "Blogs" in an attempt to create a human shield through awareness over the Internet. (IAS: Indian Administrative Service — a highly coveted genre of candidates serving the highest Civil Service position's in India, something akin to the Secretary positions in the USA) From the NY Times story: "As her husband made powerful enemies, Ms. Jayashree began to fear for his life. And so she devised an unusual ploy to protect him: she blogged. In the YouTube era, she reasoned, it is harder to kill a man who has a bit of Internet renown." "In a 2005 study, it concluded that Indians pay more than $5 billion a year in bribes.""
Digital

Submission + - Dell Plugs the Analog Hole via Vista Drivers

Dr_Xadium writes: "For months, irate Dell customers whose computers ship with a Sigmatel audio chipset have complained that line-in / microphone monitoring (the feature on that lets you listen to what passing through your soundcard from an external source on your speakers (like when you run your TV through your card's input to take advantage of its 5.1 surround decoder) has been completely disabled in software, using their Vista drivers to basically remove a feature that has been a stock part of soundcard technology for almost 20 years. Dell even tried to claim that line-in monitoring was an "advanced feature" and that it wouldn't be supported on "low-end" soundcards, but quickly backpedaled. Users have resorted to using drivers from rival hardware manufacturer LG or hacking the Vista registry to try and reclaim the functionality that no one ever expected to lose. Unfortunately, the solution doesn't work for everyone, and even though the hardware itself supports monitoring, users are left in the dark as Dell continually promises to provide a revised driver which re-enables monitoring but fails to deliver, even going so far as to suggest users use the WinXP driver instead (which also doesn't work for everyone) Is Dell dragging its feet or tacitly co-operating in a plan to close the "analog hole?" Will we see more actions like this from other OEMs in the future?"
The Almighty Buck

Submission + - Toledo Police Cruisers to accept sponsorship (toledoblade.com)

Mahtar writes: The Police Dept. of The City of Toledo, OH, recently began a campaign soliciting businesses to place ads upon new squad cars for 15,000 USD per car. Ostensibly to offset the costs of a new fleet; two such 'sponsorships' buys a single cruiser. Thus far, at least two accounts — an atty. and a local retail business — have signed up. "We are probably going to go ahead and put the ads for these businesses on the left and right rear quarter panels of the new cars when they come in," the chief said. The ads themselves are 3ft. x 1ft. and will be placed next to the "911" markers. These Miranda Rights brought to you by Big Jim's Criminal Defense Madhouse. Let Big Jim save you from Big Blue!
AMD

Submission + - The Gigahertz Race is Back on

Anonymous Coward writes: "When CPU manufacturers ran up against the power wall in their designs, they announced that "the Gigahertz race is over; future products will run at slower clock speeds and gain performance through the use of multiple cores and other techniques that won't improve single-threaded application performance." Well, it seems that the gigahertz race is back on — This CNET story talks about how AMD has boosted the speed of their new Opterons to 3GHz. Of course, it the new chips also consume better than 20% more power than their last batch. The real question is: "What happens when they approach 4GHz this time?""

Feed OQO confirms Model 02 delays, EV-DO modem to blame (engadget.com)

Filed under: Handhelds, Tablet PCs, Wireless

While OQO has certainly had its share of ups and downs over the past few years -- from us calling the Model 01 the "heavyweight champion of vaporware," to literally having a market segment spring up around the devices -- things looked to be headed decidedly up with the release of the 3G-capable Model 02 at the start of the year. But as always with the San Francisco company, the transition between announcing a product and actually shipping it is proving to be a little difficult. With shipping delays stretching to 16 weeks, an OQO rep recently confirmed the problem and pointed the finger of blame: "All orders with Sprint and Verizon customers are on hold while some issues are ironed out with the WWAN product line." Engadget pal Boy Genius says his experience bears that out -- his commercially-purchased Model 02 has no software support for the supposedly-present Sprint modem, and to make it worse, the unit he received is covered in nicks and scratches, more evidence of hiccups along the OQO production line. Although we enjoy talking to the guys over at OQO, it sounds like they really need to get their ducks in a row with the Model 02. Peep the full Boy Genius rant with photos of his nicked-up Model 02 at the read link.

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