soapbox - Slashdot User

Comment Re:Light but lower performance (Score 1) 244

by soapbox on Saturday January 26, 2008 @01:01PM (#22194066) Attached to: In-Depth Review of the MacBook Air With Photos

Sort of... although I think thin is the expensive kicker here. The Asus eeePC is cheap and - dare I say it - a lot more portable and feature-laden than the Air (removable battery, 3 USB ports, ethernet).

I saw my first eeePC in the wild yesterday. I was impressed, and the girl using it was happy to show off the new toy*, but I was struck that there's no way I'd be typing on it for long. That keyboard is tiny. That's one thing about the Air (not that I'm buying one--my 2005 PowerBook 15" is fine for now) that I really like: the 13" screen and the full-size keyboard.

On another note, I was interested to see how Intel shrunk the Core 2 for the Air - it seems they shrunk the PCB block rather than the chip die itself, which would make shrinking it a lot cheaper overall. Very nice work though - hopefully it'll encourage them to make their chips smaller overall in future.

I agree. While I still haven't seen a nano-itx or pico-itx in person, pictures I've seen show the relative size of the CPU to the rest of the components, and certainly the PCB block shrink would benefit those guys.

*P.S. She was going to put Ubuntu on the eeePC since the stock setup was a bit too much like a PDA. If I weren't already married...

Financial Analyst Calls Second Life a Pyramid Scheme 334

Posted by CmdrTaco on Wednesday January 24, 2007 @09:56AM from the get-in-on-the-ground-floor dept.

Petey_Alchemist writes "Silicon Valley gossip rag Valleywag is carrying a story about Second Life being a new spin on the old pyramid scheme. The article, which consists mostly of selections from the report of financial consultant Randolph Harrison, suggests that not only are most people deceived about the amount of money they can make in Second Life, but also about how easily they can withdraw it. It says 'Like the paid promotion infomercials that run on CNBC, sadly SecondLife is a giant magnet for the desperate, uninformed, easily victimized. Its promises of wealth readily ensnare those who can least afford to lose their money or lives to such scam in exactly the same way that real estate investor seminars convince divorcees with low FICO scores to buy houses sight unseen with no money down.'"

A Competition To Replace SHA-1 159

Posted by kdawson on Wednesday January 24, 2007 @09:10AM from the securing-government-bits dept.

SHA who? writes "In light of recent attacks on SHA-1, NIST is preparing for a competition to augment and revise the current Secure Hash Standard. The public competition will be run much like the development process for the Advance Encryption Standard, and is expected to take 3 years. As a first step, NIST is publishing draft minimum acceptability requirements, submission requirements, and evaluation criteria for candidate algorithms, and requests public comment by April 27, 2007. NIST has ordered Federal agencies to stop using SHA-1 and instead to use the SHA-2 family of hash functions."

Submission + - String Theory Test Proposed

Submitted by Alchemist253 on Wednesday January 24, 2007 @05:18AM

Alchemist253 writes: Theoreticians at a trio of American universities have recently proposed a (non-trivial) experimental test of string theory, often called the "theory of everything." Importantly, it is possible that this test could be carried out in the not-too-distant future when CERN's latest powerful tool, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) comes online. From the article, "If the test does not find what the theory predicts about W boson scattering, it would be evidence that one of string theory's key mathematical assumptions is violated. In other words, string theory — as articulated in its current form — would be proven impossible."

Submission + - Thunderbird 2 beta 2 out

Submitted by

BadhriNath

on Wednesday January 24, 2007 @01:24AM

BadhriNath writes: "The new thunderbird 2 beta 2 has been released. The existing beta 1 gets automatically upgraded to the new beta release. Some good enhancements include the folder view upon mouse over and a bit more customization of the new mail alerts. But still the alert needs improvement so that the mail can be accessed directly from the alerts. [Or is it that I dont know where to click on the alert ??]. Overall, the upgrade from beta 1 meets expectations with some nice enhancements and bugfixes."

IBM Releases Fastest SDK For Java 6 117

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday January 23, 2007 @11:30PM from the early-start dept.

IndioMan writes "IBM is releasing an SDK for Java 6 and is sponsoring an Early Release Program to gather feedback from the Java community. Product binaries and documentation are available for Linux on x86 and 64-bit AMD, and AIX for PPC for 32- and 64-bit systems. In addition to supporting the Java SE 6 Platform specification, IBM's SDK also focuses on platform stability, performance, and diagnostics. It's tops on every benchmark."

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