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Comment Re:Where are the raspberry Pi?? (Score 1) 92

I was allowed to order (and pay for) mine in June, after the initial bait-and-switch and then a shipping hike of more than the cost of the board itself. I finally got an order number in the low 80 thousands with a nine week shipping estimate.

Still no shipping notification, and no more updates on where they're up to in the list.

Yet, the people claiming to be in charge of this train wreck are giving boards away as prizes. Unbelievable.

Comment Re:don't buy the fucking thing then (Score 1) 760

To be fair, they state that they've changed their opinion on the repairability, and why, in the actual teardown:

Repair score: 2 out of 10

While the new iPad's design is essentially the same as the iPad 2, which we gave a repairability score of 4, we've learned a lot about the design since then. We've spent the last year trying to repair the iPad 2 with mixed success. We are awarding the new iPad an abysmal 2 out of 10, and retroactively dropping the repairability score of the iPad 2 to a 2 as well. The adhesive on the front is extremely difficult to remove without damaging the glass, making repair and end-of-life recycling very difficult.

That said, we were able to disassemble this iPad without breaking the glass - something that we did not accomplish with our iPad 2 teardown. A year of practice has made us proficient, but schools deploying the iPad for their students are going to be in for a lot of repair technician training.

The iPad is repairable, just extremely difficult. We've written a repair manual for the iPad 2 here, and repairing the new iPad will be very similar.

Comment Re:The Great Ethanol Scam (Score 1) 556

I can confirm this. I bought a secondhand 2004 Commodore VZ a few years ago and tested it on both regular petrol and e85. The economy was absolutely horrible on e85 - 15% to 20% worse with only a 1.5% price saving.

The real surprise was when the engine started running rough and fuel economy dropped a further 30%.It turned out that the deposits on the fuel lines (aka varnish) had been partially dissolved and flakes and chunks had started breaking loose, blocking several injectors. That wouldn't have been too bad, but it took some time to track down the actual fault(electrical? manifold? ECU? plugs? coils?) and a couple of the injectors were blocked open, with fuel making it's way through the engine unburnt and destroying the oxygen sensors. In the end it cost over $2k to find and fix it, including labor and parts.

With the tiny price differential between regular unleaded and e85 and my rate of use, it would take roughly 1000 years to make back the cost saving of the fuel for the repair bill, and I'd still have worse economy and no horsepower.

Comment Re:Here's an idea (Score 1) 312

Not the same spec.
When it was first announced, I was delighted. The detachable keyboard made it the perfect combination of tablet and netbook for me.
When it went on sale, there was no mention of it's mobile capabilities. Dual band, quad band, locked? No problem I thought, I'll go down to the local JB store and have a fondle, the spec will be on the box.
No, it wasn't. This wonderful device, thoughtfully designed to fit ALL my needs is WiFi only.
So, after I confirmed there was no 3G model coming, I bought a Xoom, and I've been perfectly happy with it.

Comment Re:Crayon Physics (Score 1) 158

Yes, I was running ./crayon in the correct directory. The issue is that they included several libraries in the lib32 directory but relied on most of the libraries being loaded from the host system. Run "ldd crayon" and "ldd launcher" to see that.

Unfortunately, they only included *some* of the libraries. For the most part it's not a problem, as things like libm and libcurl are fairly standalone. When they included Qt libraries, however, they didn't include *all* the Qt libraries, and the ones they included have a different version to the ones in most other systems, including mine. Qt is smart enough to detect this and complain because it's likely that the two libraries will be slightly incompatible.

This problem is due to the developer making assumptions about the target host system or not doing basic testing. Compiling a static binary is a possible solution but is sometimes not practical or technically possible.

In the end, the fix was (for me) simple and now one person has worked it out it's simple for everyone with the same problem.

Comment Re:Linux users the least cheap? (Score 3, Informative) 158

I paid US$30 (AU$28.xx), twice as much as I paid for HB2 as I intend to play all of these games - the FPS in HB2 don't interest me.

BTW, Crayon Physics fails on Debian Squeeze. My fix was to move the bundled lib32 directory to lib32.o and apt-get the standard system packages for the few libraries it then complains are missing, which are mostly SDL related. All that was left was an incompatible system libstdc++, so I re-created lib32 and copied the old version from lib32.o back. So far, it runs fine and is great fun.

Comment Re:Now all I need... (Score 1) 171

Yeah, the new servers I just received to upgrade our vmware cluster have 128G with only half the slots filled. Still 16 cores (2 x 8) per host, our limiting factor is having enough free RAM available for failover. The linux guests share ram nicely, but the windows guests are pigs.

Comment Re:Gah, Mixed Units! (Score 2) 167

No assumptions necessary. 9V is not enough to pass through skin, so the headline is obviously a throwaway line added later.

We know the power: 1/500 of 100W is 0.2W

We know the current: 0.002A

The voltage can be calculated as E = P/I = 0.2/0.002 = 100V

100V is enough to pass through some skin, especially that of the scalp.

Comment Re:Multiple issues getting bunched together. (Score 1) 203

I can buy unbranded ipod compatible 4 conductor headphones (with mic/switch) for AU$1.50 delivered from Hong Kong.

I can buy functionally identical apple branded headphones from jbhifi for $39 in store.

They're both made in China, and if China can leverage that $1.50(less postage) into jb going bankrupt, then they deserve to do so.

On the other hand, the fridge I bought this afternoon is (mostly) Australian made.

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