Comment Re:Yes, it happend to us (Score 1) 162
Off-topically I have to say that "Shachar Shemesh" totally rolls off the tongue.
Comment Re:less functional than netbook at same price (Score 1) 140
Think of it as a Kindle with:
Color
Openness
WiFi instead of Cell
... and no battery life to speak of.
How American Homeless Stay Wired 287
theodp writes "San Franciscan Charles Pitts has accounts on Facebook, MySpace and Twitter. He runs a Yahoo forum, reads news online and keeps in touch with friends via email. Nothing unusual, right? Except Pitts has been homeless for two years and manages this digital lifestyle from his residence under a highway bridge. Thanks to cheap computers, free Internet access and sheer determination, the WSJ reports that being homeless isn't stopping some from staying wired. 'You don't need a TV. You don't need a radio. You don't even need a newspaper,' says Pitts. 'But you need the Internet.'"
Comment Technical nit-pick. (Score 1) 622
Little nit-pick: The guy in the vid says that the tones are interrupted to represent data. This is wrong, the tone actually switches frequency. It's called Frequency Shift Keying.
The Hard Drive Is Inside the Computer 876
davidmwilliams writes "Those of us who work in technology have a jargon all of our very own. We know the difference between CPUs and GPUs, between SSD and HD, let alone HD and SDTV! Yet, our users are flat out calling everything 'the hard drive.' Why is it so?" As much as I hate to admit it, this particular thing drives me nuts. You don't call the auto shop and tell them that your engine is broken when your radio breaks!
Comment A CPU for this? (Score 5, Informative) 81
Just goes to show ya that MIT guys will crack a nut using a bulldozer. There's plenty of dedicated level-meter chips around which cost next to nothing and provide a better, logarithmic response, which is what you want for sound.
The LM3915 is an oldie but a goodie, you can even daisy-chain them.
Comment I stopped reading... (Score 0, Offtopic) 544
I stopped reading at "...I don't think its to bad." (second paragraph.)
I'm sorry, but I can't possibly trust the opinion of a reviewer who can't write.
Comment Re:My anecdotal experiences with Flash. (Score 1) 357
Considering that I calculated 27 years of error-free continuous writes, I decided that a bit of swapping was fine. Heck, I was more concerned by atime originally.
It's working fine. What throughput speed I lost is countered by zero random access times, so it's pretty zippy.
Comment My anecdotal experiences with Flash. (Score 2, Insightful) 357
I've been running my home desktop/server (Linux 2.6) on a Sandisk Cruzer 8GB usb stick (root, swap, tmp, everything except large media files) for a year and four months without any glitches. I've napkin-calculated that at current usage and wear levelling, I should be able to use it for over 50 years without a failure. Funnily enough, the portable USB drive that I use to back it up failed last December. I keep multiple backups, I didn't flinch.
Then again some flash devices fail miserably and silently. I've had a few 64MB and 128MB stick batches with stuck bits, and those were practically new. The operating systems they were used on didn't detect the errors, I did, by trying to open garbled files.
My wish list: A SATA gizmo that has 4-5 USB connectors with each their own bus that presents itself to the SATA bus as a single drive, and does RAID-5 automatically. That'd be sweet.
How Does Flash Media Fail? 357
bhodge writes "Aside from the obvious 'it stops working' answer, how does flash media — such as USB, SD, and CF — fail? Unlike with traditional hard drive, where anyone who's worked with computers for a while knows what a drive failure looks like, I don't know anyone who has experienced such a failure with flash. I've haven't been able to find more than scant evidence of what such failures look like at the OS level. The one account I have found detailed using a small USB drive for /var/log storage; it failed very quickly, and then utterly (0 byte unformatted device), after five years of service in the role. This runs contrary to other anecdotal claims that you should still be able to read the media after you can no longer write to it. So my question is: what have you seen of the nature of flash media failure, if anything?"
Slashdot Mentioned In Virginia Terrorism Report 779
megamerican alerted us to a leaked document (PDF) from a Virginia Fusion Center titled "2009 Virginia Terrorism Threat Assessment." The document is marked as "Law Enforcement Sensitive," not to be shown to public. Citizens for Legitimate Government has a write-up. Slashdot gets a mention on page 45 — not as a terrorist organization itself, but as one of the places that members of Anonymous may hang out: "A 'loose coalition of Internet denizens,' Anonymous consists largely of users from multiple internet sites such as 4chan, 711chan, 420chan, Something Awful, Fark, Encyclopedia Dramatica, Slashdot, IRC channels, and YouTube. Other social networking sites are also utilized to mobilize physical protests. ... Anonymous is of interest not only because of the sentiments expressed by affiliates and their potential for physical protest, but because they have innovated the use of e-protests and mobilization. Given the lack of a unifying creed, this movement has the potential to inspire lone wolf behavior in the cyber realms." According to the report, cell phones and digital music players have been used to transfer plans related to criminal activity, and therefore presumably could be grounds for suspicion. Podcasting is also suspicious.
New ICANN TLDs May Cause Internet Land Rush 443
wiryd writes "A new ICANN proposal would allow applications for almost any TLD. From the article: 'Tourists might find information about the Liberty Bell, for example, at a site ending in .philly. A rapper might apply for a Web address ending in .hiphop. "Whatever is open to the imagination can be applied for," says Paul Levins, ICANN's vice president of corporate affairs. "It could translate into one of the largest marketing and branding opportunities in history."'"
Warner Bros. Acquires The Pirate Bay 348
mlingojones writes "TorrentFreak breaks the news of The Pirate Bay's acquisition by Warner Bros: 'After years of hostility, lawsuits, police raids and heated invective between the two groups, the Pirate Bay has today announced they have settled their differences with US media conglomerate Warner Bros. The largest BitTorrent tracker has sold out to Hollywood and the two have agreed a deal.'"
Google Launches CADIE, the First True AI 246
eldavojohn writes "Google has announced CADIE, the world's first Cognitive Autoheuristic Distributed-Intelligence Entity. 'We based our work on three core principles. First we designed the entity ... as a collection of interconnected evolving agents. Second — and this really cost us an arm and leg in hardware and core time — we let the system build its own heuristics, deploy them as agents and evolve them by running a set of evolutionary cascades within probabilistic Bayesian domains. The third — a piece missing in most AI reasoning work thus far — was to give the entity access to a rich, realistic world from which to learn and upon which it could act directly.' It quickly started its own blog and YouTube video. Two hours after midnight, CADIE announced independence on its blog and decided to leave Google to venture out into the world. "
Conficker Worm Strike Reports Start Rolling In 508
Nieriko writes "Reports are trickling in about the impact from the Conficker worm, as infected systems passed zero hour at midnight and began downloading additional malicious components. Here are a couple of the more notable incidents caused by Conficker so far, according to published reports: — '... shortly after midnight local time, an ATM in the capital city of Reykjavik began spewing 100-Krona notes. ... A nuclear missile installation near Elmendorf Air force Base outside of Anchorage, Alaska briefly went on a full-scale military alert after technicians manning the bunker suspected that several of their control systems were infected with Conficker.'"
