Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror

Comment Re:Worthless without a cooling fan... (Score 5, Informative) 276

by Piedramente (#21351227) Attached to: Lap Desks
I'd check your laptop fans and make sure they are operation and not clogged.

I had a serious heat issue with a gateway until I opened it up and used compressed air to blast away some serious dust. What came out looked akin to dryer lint. No wonder that thing was getting hot.

The cleaning helped tremendously, but I had to do it fairly often. I consider issues such as this design flaws.
Toys

New Car Sensor System Simulates Birds-Eye View 150

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the and-people-still-wont-be-able-to-parallel-park dept.
narramissic writes "Remember when you had to turn around in your seat to parallel park? Ok, maybe you still do, but if you drive a Nissan, those days may soon be behind you. The company's 'Around View Monitor system' displays a virtual bird's-eye view of the car and what's around it. Video from four small video cameras with wide-angle lenses — two mounted on the underside of the wing mirrors, one at the front under the grill and one at the rear under the license plate — is displayed on the navigation system monitor so that it appears to be a view from above the car and sonar sensors at each corner of the vehicle provide an audible warning when it is coming close to an object or person. And as if that weren't enough... the system also projects the car's future course based on the current direction of the wheels."
Supercomputing

Cracking Go 328

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the brute-force-always-a-fun-solution dept.
prostoalex writes "IEEE Spectrum looks at current trends in artificial technology to crack the ancient Chinese game of Go, which theoretically has 10^60 potential endings. Is conquering the game via exhaustive search of all possibilities possible? 'My gut feeling is that with some optimization a machine that can search a trillion positions per second would be enough to play Go at the very highest level. It would then be cheaper to build the machine out of FPGAs (field-programmable gate arrays) instead of the much more expensive and highly unwieldy full-custom chips. That way, university students could easily take on the challenge.'"
Windows

Submission + - Programs cannot be uninstalled in Vista

Submitted by
Corson
Corson writes: "I am surprised nobody seems to have reported this on /. yet. Possibly after one of the latest updates in Windows Vista, two strange things happened: first, the Uninstall option is no longer available in the Control Panel when you right-click on older programs (most likely, those installed prior to the update in question, because uninstall works fine for recently installed programs; the Uninstall button is also missing on the toolbar at the top); second, some programs are no longer shown on the applications list in Control panel (e.g., Yahoo Messenger). A Google search returns quite a few hits on this issue (e.g., here, here, here, and here) but everybody seems to be waiting patiently for a sign from Microsoft. But M$ seem to have no clue or they would have fixed it already. I am just curious how many of you are experiencing this nuisance."
User Journal

Journal Journal: My new moderation rules 2

Journal by corbettw

Thanks to several instances of getting five '-1, Overrated' mods on various posts of mine within a few minutes of each other (even when the posts in question occur days apart from each other), I've decided to fight fire with fire: whenever I get mod points, I systematically go through my friends and fans, find people who have either been modded down or don't get a karma bonus, and mod up whatever I can with '+1, Underrated'.
User Journal

Journal Journal: Hope for the hopeless 25

Journal by Marxist Hacker 42
Here's a new idea in the Global War on Terror:

IF, as I've long suspected, what's really happening is Islam's version of Europe's Thirty Years War- the wars of reformation,

And we can't let the extremists win

And our very involvement is in fact what the extremists WANT because it gives them a reason for existing
Communications

FCC Head Wants New Wireless Devices Unlocked 221

Posted by kdawson from the maybe-in-a-few-years-innovation dept.
[TheBORG] writes with news that FCC chairman Kevin Martin wants 700-MHz wireless devices and services to be unlocked. Spectrum auctions for the 700-MHz airwaves, being opened up for fixed and mobile broadband, are scheduled for early next year. "The proposed rules would apply only to the spectrum being auctioned, not the rest of the wireless business, which still makes most of its revenue from voice calls. But Martin's proposal, if adopted by the FCC, could reverberate through a U.S. wireless industry that has tightly controlled access to devices and services... Like most devices sold in the USA, the iPhone ... allows only features and applications that Apple and AT&T provide and works only with an AT&T contract. The FCC chairman said he has grown increasingly concerned that the current practices 'hamper innovations' dreamed up by outside developers. One example:... 'Internationally, Wi-Fi handsets have been available for some time,' Martin noted. 'But they are just beginning to roll out here.'"
United States

Submission + - FCC head wants to unlock wireless devices

Submitted by
[TheBORG]
[TheBORG] writes: "The proposed rules would apply only to the spectrum being auctioned, not the rest of the wireless business, which still makes most of its revenue from voice calls. But Martin's proposal, if adopted by the FCC, could reverberate through a U.S. wireless industry that has tightly controlled access to devices and services. The Apple iPhone is a prime example: Like most devices sold in the USA, the iPhone is, in industry parlance, "locked." It allows only features and applications that Apple (AAPL) and AT&T (T) provide and works only with an AT&T contract. The FCC chairman said he has grown increasingly concerned that the current practices "hamper innovations" dreamed up by outside developers. One example: Mobile devices that also can use Wi-Fi, such as a home network or airport "hot spot," for Internet access. "Internationally, Wi-Fi handsets have been available for some time," Martin noted. "But they are just beginning to roll out here.""
Businesses

Journal Journal: LED Screens: The Real Reason Why It's Difficult To Get The A

Journal by LedScreen

"In 2006 I submitted to my City Hall the request for the installation of a led screen, but it was refused. So how is possible that in other cities nearby there are screens installed?"

Dear Francis, thanks for highlighting another key aspect for the installation of a LED screen: the authorization. Before answering your question, let me clarify one thing:

Feed Techdirt: Apparently People Need A Law To Tell Them Sending Faxes While Driving Isn't A Go (techdirt.com)

From feed by techdirtfeed
We've written plenty of times about the ongoing push to ban talking on the phone while driving. Drivers that are distracted by phone conversations are undoubtedly a problem, but the real problem isn't them talking on the phone, it's the distraction. Devoting laws to make specific distractions illegal seems rather pointless, when compared to enforcing broader laws that seek to tackle poor and reckless driving in general. But, it would seem, many states would rather try to ban distractions one by one. So, in addition to talking on the phone, driving while drowsy, smoking while driving, and using OnStar or other telematics systems while driving, some New York lawmakers now looking to ban playing video games and sending faxes while driving. This illustrates the folly of these distraction-specific laws. Once legislators go down this path and begin to ban specific activities, they're in some sense obliged to try and ban every single distraction. After all, while most reasonable people would realize that it probably wouldn't be a great idea to operate a fax machine while driving -- but if it's not specifically made illegal, like talking on a cell phone while driving, it must be okay, right?

Slashdot Top Deals

The universe is an island, surrounded by whatever it is that surrounds universes.

Close