Comment Umm.. no (Score 1) 397
The OnStar module found in most GM cars has an automotive-qualified 400MHz PPC 603e-based core and the latest versions have 16MB (or more) of flash and RAM.
A JavaScript Gameboy Emulator, Detailed In 8 Parts 62
Two9A writes "JavaScript has shed its image of being a limited language, tied to DOM manipulation in a browser; in recent years, new engines and frameworks have given JS a reputation as a language capable of bigger things. Mix this in with the new elements of HTML5, and you have the capacity to emulate a game console or other system, with full graphical output. This series of articles looks in detail at how an emulator is written in JavaScript, using the example of the Gameboy handheld: starting at the CPU, and (as of part 8) running a copy of Tetris."
1928 Time Traveler Caught On Film? 685
Many of you have submitted a story about Irish filmmaker George Clarke, who claims to have found a person using a cellphone in the "unused footage" section of the DVD The Circus, a Charlie Chaplin movie filmed in 1928. To me the bigger mystery is how someone who appears to be the offspring of Ram-Man and The Penguin got into a movie in the first place, especially if they were talking to a little metal box on set. Watch the video and decide for yourself.
Linux Kernel 2.6.35 Released 159
eldavojohn writes "Linus has announced the release of 2.6.35 for people to download and test after he found not a lot of changes between this week and last. The big features to look out for include: 'Transparent spreading of incoming network traffic load across CPUs, Btrfs improvements, KDB kernel debugger frontend, Memory compaction and Support for multiple multicast route tables' as well as various performance and graphics improvements. Linus also praised the community saying that 'regression changes only' after rc1 improved this time around and gave numbers to back it up saying 'in the 2.6.34 release, there were 3800 commits after -rc1, but in the current 35 release cycle we had less than 2000.' Good to see the process is becoming more refined and controlled after the first release candidate — hopefully there's no impending burnout."
Why Some Supermassive Black Holes Have Big Jets 111
astroengine writes "Some of the supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies have powerful jets blasting from their poles, and others have weak jets, but many don't have jets at all. Why is this the case? In new simulations carried out by astronomers at NASA and MIT, it would appear that the way in which the black hole spins relative to its accretion disk may be a contributing factor. Strangely enough, the results indicate that if the black hole rotates in the opposite direction to its accretion disk, the most powerful jets form. The region between the black hole event horizon and the accretion disk still baffles scientists, so these simulations are very speculative, but the results seem to match what radio astronomers are seeing in the cores of active galaxies. Perhaps it's time to fire up that event horizon telescope!"
MythTV 0.23 Released 214
An anonymous reader writes "After six months of our new accelerated development schedule, MythTV 0.23 is now available. MythTV 0.23 brings a new event system, brand new Python bindings, the beta MythNetvision Internet video plugin, new audio code and surround sound upmixer, several new themes (Arclight and Childish), a greatly improved H.264 decoder, and fixes for analog scanning, among many others. Work towards MythTV 0.24 is in full swing, and has be progressing very well for the last several months. If all goes according to plan, MythTV 0.24 will bring a new MythUI OSD, a nearly rewritten audio subsystem capable of handling 24- and 32-bit audio and up to 8 channels of output, Blu-ray disc and disc structure playback, and various other performance, usability, and flexibility improvements."
Comment Re:NTFS burns up drives more quickly! (Score 1) 198
Accesses don't wear flash significantly compared to writes. Heavily read pages of NAND flash do need to be rewritten occasionally, but I can't imagine this alone would ever cause a device to reach its wear limit in normal use. NTFS does write more than FAT32, so you're still correct that FAT is better for reducing wear. FAT's fault tolerance is notoriously bad though.... would you rather lose your data or have to replace a $20 usb stick (which will probably be $2 by the time you wear it out)
Comment Re:Choose NTFS for the life of your drive (Score 3, Informative) 198
Flash drives have a flash translation layer that makes the flash look like a regular disk despite having special properties. This layer handles the wear-leveling, garbage collection, and bad block detection so the standard filesystem (that was designed for magnetic disks, probably) doesn't have to consider them. Regardless of the filesystem used, the wear of the device should be related to the total amount of data written, not the location of the data.
Feed HP to sell low-cost ink (theregister.com)
Change of attitude
Michael Hoffmann, the head of the European operations of HP's printer division, has told German daily Süddeutsche Zeitung that his company is going to sell low-cost ink alongside better quality cartridges.
Submission + - 2004 vote count manipulated on GOP servers
hugecabbage writes: "The Free Press published an interesting article stating that not only did the Republicans alter the actual Ohio vote count during the 2004 presidential election, they also controlled how the tallies of those manipulated votes were disseminated over the web, affecting media and public perception of the returns as they occurred. FTA: 'There is more than ample documentation to show that on Election Night 2004, Ohio's "official" Secretary of State website — which gave the world the presidential election results — was redirected from an Ohio government server to a group of servers that contain scores of Republican web sites, including the secret White House e-mail accounts that have emerged in the scandal surrounding Attorney General Alberto Gonzales's firing of eight federal prosecutors.'"
