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Comment Re: It's been a while (Score 1) 191

Epson has a printer range that come with ink tanks that allows you to refill with ink and are much cheaper to run than cartridges. The printers are a little more expensive - Epson sells cartridge printers at a loss to make money on the consumables.

As for print quality, inkjet colour is far superior, and I've found the print quality to be good with the right paper.

The big advantage that lasers have is their speed - and the toner doesn't run when wet.

Comment Re:New Zealand (Score 1) 83

There's a few interesting points here though:
  • - The current cluster can't be traced back anything earlier than the frozen food storage center. This is despite extensive testing and contact tracing (yesterday there were 24K tests with 7 positive results).
  • - Genomic testing can't connect the current outbreak with the first outbreak here from three months (or so) back or with current cases caught at the border - it's new to New Zealand.
  • - The virus could have come from people on ships, true, but it's quite the coincidence that it's frozen or chilled goods specifically and not cars or electronics (which NZ imports a lot of). I doubt that sailors had opened the container to contaminate the inside - so why wasn't it furniture storage, or building materials or something else non-chilled?

Just a little food for thought. I had pooh poohed the idea of Salmon being the vector for the Beijing outbreak a while back, and I still think it's unlikely to be chilled packaging here, but it's still interesting and I'm keeping an open mind.

Comment Re:Tablet PC (Score 1) 364

I have a Galaxy Note (phone) and find it great as a carry everywhere device for making quick notes. I find it much easier to use the S-Pen to jot things down and the pen also makes it easy to scribble notes/diagrams against PDFs, photos and screenshots. If I was heading back to lectures, I would be looking at the Galaxy Note 10.1 (coming soon) as an alternative to plain pen and paper. Any sort of netbook/laptop is not an option for me - I find a keyboard slows me down and I like the ability to insert arrows and circle/highlight text etc.
United States

New York Judge Rules 6-Year-Old Can Be Sued 799

suraj.sun sends this snippet from Reuters: "A girl can be sued over accusations she ran over an elderly woman with her training bicycle when she was 4 years old, a New York Supreme Court justice has ruled. The ruling by King's County Supreme Court Justice Paul Wooten stems from an incident in April 2009 when Juliet Breitman and Jacob Kohn, both aged four, struck an 87-year-old pedestrian, Claire Menagh, with their training bikes. Menagh underwent surgery for a fractured hip and died three months later. In a ruling made public late Thursday, the judge dismissed arguments by Breitman's lawyer that the case should be dismissed because of her young age. He ruled that she is old enough to be sued and the case can proceed."
Robotics

Where's Waldo (the Submarine)? 107

stoolpigeon writes "Scientists on Florida's Gulf Coast are trying to find an underwater robot that has mysteriously vanished. The robot from the Mote Marine Laboratory in Sarasota has been missing since Monday. The robot, which cost about $100,000, was equipped with a detector to find red tide, a toxic algae bloom. The detector was valued at another $30,000. Scientists aren't sure what happened to the robot, which is nicknamed Waldo."
Apple

What To Expect From Apple's Rumored MacPad 213

Jeff writes "I decided to review the specifications of recent e-readers and mobile devices as well as the ongoing Apple rumor mill to chart out the most likely features, innovations and configuration we can expect from Apple's long awaited Newton successor/Mac Tablet which I'll call the MacPad. The MacPad will arrive in fall '09 or Jan '10, with a 10" diagonal color display, a $599 price point with a Verizon data plan, a stylus, note taking application and handwriting recognition and an e-bookstore for iTunes. Apple's biggest challenge will be convincing its huge installed base of iPhone owners that they need a MacPad too. Past failed Newtonian predictions by others are available on Slashdot and the likelihood that any of this is right can be gauged by earlier Confucian gems such as Haskin warns that Apple may be setting itself up for a failure with the iPhone."
Image

Frog Species Discovered Living In Elephant Dung 56

rhettb writes "Three different species of frogs have been discovered living in the dung of the Asian elephant in southeastern Sri Lanka. The discovery — the first time anyone has recorded frogs living in elephant droppings — has widespread conservation implications both for frogs and Asian elephants, which are in decline. Apparently the frogs feed on the many invertebrates present in elephant dung."
Oracle

Oracle Won't Abandon SPARC, Says Ellison 280

fm6 writes "When the Oracle acquisition of Sun Microsystems was announced, it was widely assumed that Oracle was interested only in Sun's software technology, and would sell or discontinue all its hardware businesses. Larry Ellison, in an interview just posted on the Oracle web site, says that's not what's going to happen. In particular, SPARC isn't going anywhere (PDF): 'Once we own Sun we're going to increase the investment in SPARC. We think designing our own chips is very, very important. Even Apple is designing its own chips these days.'"
Media

New Ads That Watch You 238

Pandanapper writes to tell us Yahoo is reporting that if you find yourself watching an ad on a video screen in a public venue, the ad may be watching you as well. "Small cameras can now be embedded in the screen or hidden around it, tracking who looks at the screen and for how long. The makers of the tracking systems say the software can determine the viewer's gender, approximate age range and, in some cases, ethnicity -- and can change the ads accordingly. That could mean razor ads for men, cosmetics ads for women and video-game ads for teens."

Comment Re:Simplest answer (Score 1) 835

It's Windows, not Ubuntu. Last time I had a "reinstall windows" problem, it took me 2 weeks to get all the software installed and configured again. I can't just tick off what I want and hit Apply.

I recently used CloneZilla to re-image a 20GB C:\ partition - took less than half an hour. Of course, that required a little foresight (to partition the drive and clone the windows partition).

The Almighty Buck

How Will Recent Financial Downturns Affect IT Jobs? 372

An anonymous reader writes "So, with the financial crisis and loss of jobs everywhere, what are the chances of getting a good IT job? I'm going to graduate this year with a BS in Software Engineering majoring in Network Security. I'll be looking for a job as a penetration tester eventually, but I hear that is hard to get right out of college so I'll be looking for a job as a Junior Network Admin or similar type of job to start off in. Is there a lack of jobs in this field? I figure computers always need fixing so they have to have some sort of IT personnel on staff to maintain the core of their business. Anyone have a good insight on this issue?"

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