Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:Verizon = US, right? (Score 1) 555

The problem isn't triband UMTS radios - if they did do exist, it doesn't matter, because NONE of the four major US mobile providers have 3G roaming agreements - not Verizon and Sprint with EVDO, and not ATT and TMo with UMTS. And, as you say, the Balkanization of frequencies doesn't help a bit.

Sprint and Verizon DO use the same EVDO bands, but of course there's no roaming agreement, so you're stuck with 1xRTT if you're roaming. A truly sad state of affairs.

Comment Re:Er... OK? (Score 2, Informative) 435

How does this do anything at all to prevent a determined cheater? If you have the genuine Microsoft-branded XBox 360 hard drive, you can open it up and it's just a plain old SATA drive inside - which you can then proceed to plug into any computer. Or if you have the Official Microsoft memory stick, there exists a way to add a USB connector - at which point it's just mass storage.

It's a money grab, plain and simple. $99 for a 60GB 2.5" hard drive with some plastic around it? Piss off, Microsoft - in the computer world, $99 will get you 500 GB in a 2.5" drive without trying. The prices on their brand of flash memory are even more atrocious. $30 for 512 megs? Again, in the computer world that's 16GB in a USB key, which is what the XBox memory stick is, with added plastic.

Comment Re:Make a brittle flywheel (Score 2, Interesting) 419

This is how modern flywheel energy storage works. The rotor is typically made out of carbon fiber or a composite thread wound around a shaft - if the rotor's integrity is lost, it turns into red-hot slag instead of leveling half a city block. Even so, most large flywheels are in a bunker underground encased in several feet of concrete. For it to be safe in a vehicle the containment vessel has to be very strong and also lightweight - which means it'll be expensive, unfortunately.

Comment Re:That might not be safe enough (Score 1) 329

Just so you know, the MBR is only 512 bytes. If you write more than that (in your case, 1024 bytes), some of the first partition on the drive will get written to. If your goal is to wipe the drive, write the whole drive with zeroes, as erasing the partition table (and even the first 512 bytes of the first partition) doesn't get rid of anything. The reason I say this is because if you ever want to back a partition table up, copying the first 1024 bytes and then writing it again to a different drive or after making changes to the first partition stands a chance of breaking the first partition on the drive - which you may not want.
As for the GP's S3 drives, the (mostly windows-only) tools available do nothing to the part of the drive that presents itself as a mass-storage USB device. They twiddle some of the firmware bits in the drive (usually through a custom ATA command). The drive then no longer emulates a CD-ROM drive's USB device ID. This, by the way, is lower-level than what anything you can do to the mass-storage part of the drive with dd can affect. The ATA commands only do it through what is presumably an ugly hack on the part of the drive manufacturers.

Comment Re:meanwhile, when I switched from my Razr to my G (Score 1) 257

I wish more vendors were like Motorola and HTC.

No, you don't. Motorola locks down their phones so they will only charge on Motorola (or motorola-clone) chargers. If you plug a Moto phone into a standard mini-USB charger, it'll give you an "unauthorized charger" message. Go ahead and try it with the charger that came with the G1 - that's what it'll tell you. Same deal if you try and plug it into a computer without the Motorola drivers (which they want to charge money for) installed. Thankfully, the G1 and other HTC phones don't give a damn what kind of charger you have them plugged into, and will even ignore the non-standard resistor on pin 4 in Motorola chargers. HTC does its own non-standard thing on pin 4, but in this case it's just to tell the phone it can pull a full amp from the charger for a faster charge.

Comment Re: 1 hour? (Score 2, Informative) 291

This is not true. Lithium-ion batteries continually lose charge, and batteries stored in a hot warehouse will typically drop flat within a year or so, rendering them useless (if the cell voltage level drops too low, the cell can no longer be charged.) The GP's figure of about 20% a year is correct for fairly new batteries stored at room temperature. A generation or two ago, Li-Ions tended to lose charge quite quickly - after as little as 6 months, a battery could be dead flat. Storage temperature has much to do with the rate at which they lose charge.
The only batteries I know of that are in common use and can be stored "however you like" and "only lose capacity when used" are lithium primary cells - not to be confused with Li-Ion batteries.

Comment Re:And we still keep paper. . . (Score 1) 546

The only problem I see is that silicone is somewhat like glass in windows; it's a slow-moving liquid which deforms with age. --Windows in old buildings have glass which is thicker at the bottom than at the top because of the glacial migration. Hm. Even glaciers move more quickly than glass does, but I seem to recall reading that V'ger's chips were failing because of this. Maybe when memory chips are made from carbon based minerals we will truly be in an age of archival-quality micro-chips.

This is not true. Glass was made via a process that made it thicker at the edges of the sheet, which was then cut into a rectangular shape and the thicker side placed at the bottom of the window to help with structural integrity.
See Wikipedia for more info.

Slashdot Top Deals

"I've seen it. It's rubbish." -- Marvin the Paranoid Android

Working...