Comment Worst decision (Score 2) 612
Woz, what was the worst decision you've made in your life?
Comment financial sad for vendors (NL) (Score 2, Informative) 327
This won't change much in the Netherlands.
The customers get their warrany from the store they bought the product from.
So if I bought a week ago one of their cards, and it breaks in 6 months (when BFG prolly has vanished) I go back to the store, and the store has to provide the warranty.
The fact the company they send it to doesn't exist anymore is not the problem of the end-consumer. It's business risk.
Shop thus has the option to try and repair the card themselves, or they will have to replace it with a similar product.
Of course, stores won't be eager to do this/tell you.
Bottomline, in Netherlands, consumer won't get effected too much by this.
Comment monitor (Score 5, Interesting) 366
build a monitor in the drivebays
http://tweakers.net/ext/f/yH7HML9VL2L3Rk5OK5grdosF/full.jpg
full story (dutch) http://gathering.tweakers.net/forum/list_messages/1359397/0//scherm%2Cdrivebay
All credit goes to Terw_Dan here, not my mod.
Very impressive, and most useful solution of the drivebay space i've seen so far.
Apple Just Says Yes To iPhone Smoking Game 192
ZosX sends along a puff piece from Wired's Brian X. Chen: "Apple on Monday approved Puff Puff Pass, a $2 game whose objective is to pass a cigarette or pipe around and puff it as many times as you can within a set duration. So much for taking the high road, Apple. The game allows you to choose between smoking a cigarette, a cigar, and a pipe. Then you select the number of people you'd like to light up with (up to five), the amount of time, and a place to smoke (outdoors or indoors). And you're ready to get right on puffing."
Decades-Old Soviet Reflector Spotted On the Moon 147
cremeglace writes "No one had seen a laser reflector that Soviet scientists had left on the moon almost 40 years ago, despite years of searching. Turns out searchers had been looking kilometers in the wrong direction. On 22 April, a team of physicists finally saw an incredibly faint flash from the reflector, which was ferried across the lunar surface by the Lunokhod 1 rover. The find comes thanks to NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, which last month imaged a large area where the rover was reported to have been left. Then the researchers, led by Tom Murphy of the University of California, San Diego, could search one football-field-size area at a time until they got a reflection."
Supreme Court To Rule On State Video Game Regulation 278
DJRumpy sends in this quote from an AP report:"The Supreme Court will decide whether free speech rights are more important than helping parents keep violent material away from children. The justices agreed Monday to consider reinstating California's ban on the sale or rental of violent video games to minors, a law the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco threw out last year on grounds that it violated minors' constitutional rights. California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who signed the law in 2005, said he was pleased the high court would review the appeals court decision. He said, 'We have a responsibility to our kids and our communities to protect against the effects of games that depict ultra-violent actions, just as we already do with movies.'"
SCOTUSblog has a more thorough legal description of the case.
Google Street View Shoots the Same Woman 43 Times 106
Geoffrey.landis writes "Terry Southgate discovered that his wife Wendy appears on the Google Street View of his neighborhood not once or twice but a whopping 43 times. From the article: 'It seems as if the Street View car simply followed the same route as Wendy and Trixie. However, Wendy was a little suspicious that the car was doing something on the "tricksie" side. Several of the Street View shots show Wendy looking with some concern towards the car that was, well, to put it politely, crawling along the curb. "I didn't know what it was doing. It was just driving round very, very slowly," Wendy told the Sun.' The next best thing to being a movie star — a Street View star!"
Comment Re:Pick your OS flavor? (Score 1) 330
But will it run GEOS? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEOS_%288-bit_operating_system%29)
Need Help Salvaging Data From an Old Xenix System 325
Milo_Mindbender writes "I've recently gotten ahold of an old Altos 586 Xenix system (a late '80s Microsoft flavor of Unix) that has one of the first multi-user BBS systems in the US on it, and I want to salvage the historical BBS posts off it. I'm wondering if anyone remembers what format Xenix used on the 10MB (yes MB) IDE hard drive and if it can still be read on a modern Linux system. This system is quite old, has no removable media or ethernet and just barely works. The only other way to get data off is a slow serial port. I've got a controller that should work with the disk, but don't want to tear this old machine apart without some hope that it will work. Anyone know?"
Android 2.1 Finally Makes It To Droid 132
MrSmith0011000100110 writes "The lovely people over at AndroidCentral have broken the announcement that Android 2.1 is finally coming to the Motorola Droid, with actual proof on Verizon's Droid support page (PDF). I don't know about my Droid brethren, but I'm pretty excited to see the new series of Android ROMs for the Droid phone that are based on a stock Android 2.1. As most of us know, the existing 2.1 ROMs can be buggy as hell and either running vanilla 2.1 or a custom ROM; but this phone is still a tinkerer's best friend."
Mathematicians Deconstruct US News College Rankings 161
An anonymous reader writes "US News makes a mint off its college rankings every year, but do they really give meaningful information? A pair of mathematicians argues that the data the magazine uses is all likely to be at least somewhat relevant, but that the way the magazine weights the different statistics is pretty arbitrary. After all, different people may have different priorities. So they developed a method to compute the rankings based on any possible set of priorities. To do it, they had to reverse-engineer some of US News's data. What they found was that some colleges come out on top pretty much regardless of the prioritization, but others move around quite a lot. And the top-ranked university can vary tremendously. Penn State, which is #48 using US News's methodology, could be the best university in the country, by other standards."
