95048
story
Sid writes
"Ars Technica reports that the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) XO has an anti-theft daemon in the OS that can be used to remotely disable machines, much like WGA. The Project added the kill switch at the behest of a few countries concerned about laptop theft. From the report, 'OLPC has responded to such concerns by developing an anti-theft daemon that the project claims cannot be disabled, even by a user with root access. Participating countries can then provide identifying information such as a serial number to a given country's OLPC program oversight entity, which can then disable the devices in certain scenarios.'"
95052
submission
Icarus1919 writes:
New Scientist reports that the scientist who discovered a possible fusion reaction by bombarding a solvent with neutrons and sonic waves (known as cold fusion because you don't have to deal with those sun-like temperatures and magnetic fields) has recently been exonerated of accusations of scientific misconduct Purdue University following the verification of his results by another scientist. Is cold fusion back?
95010
submission
bugg_tb writes:
The BBC is reporting on a study performed by Google engineers on regular 'off the shelf' hard drives that Google uses for caching data and how they perform and the likelyhood of them to fail. The author states: "We expected to notice a very strong and consistent correlation between high utilisation and higher failure rates. "However our results appear to paint a more complex picture. First, only very young and very old age groups appear to show the expected behaviour."
The report concludes that: there was a clear trend showing "that lower temperatures are associated with higher failure rates".
"Only at very high temperatures is there a slight reversal of this trend."
You can see the full report here