mikemuch writes "When his lovely girlfriend Glenda needed a new PC, Jason Cross, who spends much of the week assembling PCs with the latest gear to test for ExtremeTech, decided he would let her build it herself. She gave him her list of needs, he came up with a part list, and then watched as she did all the screwdriver wielding herself. Despite a DOA hard drive and some mis-connected wires, everyone was smiling when it was all finished. (Slide show here.)"

johnmeister writes to tell us that InfoWorld's Roger Grimes is finding it hard to completely discount a reader's argument to only patch minimum or low security bugs when they are publicly discovered. "The reader wrote to say that his company often sits on security bugs until they are publicly announced or until at least one customer complaint is made. Before you start disagreeing with this policy, hear out the rest of his argument. 'Our company spends significantly to root out security issues,' says the reader. 'We train all our programmers in secure coding, and we follow the basic tenets of secure programming design and management. When bugs are reported, we fix them. Any significant security bug that is likely to be high risk or widely used is also immediately fixed. But if we internally find a low- or medium-risk security bug, we often sit on the bug until it is reported publicly. We still research the bug and come up with tentative solutions, but we don't patch the problem.'"

Skidge writes "Wired is running a piece showing the drastically reduced mileage ratings for hybrids after the upcoming changes in gas mileage calculations by the EPA. While the cars themselves aren't changing, plugging these new numbers in to the equation makes a hybrid much less cost effective: "The two top-selling hybrid vehicles, the Prius and Honda's Civic Hybrid, will lose 12 and 11 miles per gallon respectively from their city driving estimates." The new values come from more realistic testing; the old, over-inflated ratings were higher in part because the cars idled a lot, allowing the hybrids to completely turn off their engines. The new ratings should be more in line with what hybrid drivers are actually seeing."