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The Military

US, Russia Agree On Plan To Dispose of Syria's Chemical Weapons 256

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry has announced an agreement between the U.S. and Russia on a plan for removing and destroying Syria's chemical weapons. "Damascus will be given one week from now to give an inventory of its chemical arsenal and will have to allow international inspectors into Syria 'no later than November,' Kerry said after a third day of intense negotiations with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in Geneva." The weapons must all be eliminated by mid-2014. "If Syrian President Bashar Assad fails to meet the demands, then a resolution to enforce compliance would be sought at the U.N. Security Council, Kerry said. The action could include sanctions, and Kerry said that the U.S. would reserve the right to use military force, but Russia remains opposed to any armed intervention." President Obama said, "The use of chemical weapons anywhere in the world is an affront to human dignity and a threat to the security of people everywhere. We have a duty to preserve a world free from the fear of chemical weapons for our children."

Comment Re:Not just for professionals... (Score 1) 164

I'm surprised it's missing another point of fast cards: power saving. Even though different cards use different amounts of power for read/write operations they're all in the same ballpark because they need to respect the SD specification. As with all flash memory it usually consumes far more power when reading and writing than idling (particularly erasing/writing). So if the camera spends more time flushing the buffer because the card is slower, guess what? The camera is spending more juice in an unusable state. I consider the memory card price to be part of the overall camera package, like the carrying case. For me going with the cheap option is a bad idea, specially when you start looking at the pictures and have a couple of corrupted shots. Like a cheap carrying case that starts breaking down after some time of use.
Facebook

Facebook To Make Facebook Credits Mandatory For Games 116

An anonymous reader sends this excerpt from TechCrunch: "Facebook has confirmed that it is indeed making Facebook Credits mandatory for Games, with the rule going into effect on July 1 2011. Facebook says that Credits will be the exclusive way for users to get their 'real money' into a game, but developers are still allowed to keep their own in-game currencies (FarmBucks, FishPoints, whatever). For example, Zynga can charge you 90 Facebook Credits for 75 CityCash in CityVille. ... The company acknowledges that some developers may not be pleased with the news, explaining this is why it is announcing the news five months in advance, so it can 'have an open conversation with developers.' The rule only applies to Canvas games (games that use Facebook Connect aren't affected), and while it's games only at this part, Facebook says that it eventually would like to see all apps using Facebook Credits. It's a move that's been a long time coming — there has been speculation that Facebook would do this for a year now, spurring plenty of angst in the developer community."
Open Source

Linux Kernel 2.6.32 Released 195

diegocg writes "Linus Torvalds has officially released the version 2.6.32 of the Linux kernel. New features include virtualization memory de-duplication, a rewrite of the writeback code faster and more scalable, many important Btrfs improvements and speedups, ATI R600/R700 3D and KMS support and other graphic improvements, a CFQ low latency mode, tracing improvements including a 'perf timechart' tool that tries to be a better bootchart, soft limits in the memory controller, support for the S+Core architecture, support for Intel Moorestown and its new firmware interface, run-time power management support, and many other improvements and new drivers. See the full changelog for more details."
Games

Former Interplay Dev Talks "Disastrous" Old Star Trek Games 124

In a podcast recorded at PAX, a former Interplay developer named Thom Robertson talks about the problems he encountered while working on the company's Star Trek titles. In particular, he was the lead designer of the canceled Star Trek: The Secret of Vulcan Fury, and mentioned how incredibly ambitious initial plans for the game were. "Just one of the many reasons why that project was doomed to failure was because the team and the management had really no concept of exactly how expensive a proposition they were imagining when they set out to do it. I saw the plans. They were looking at four to six hours of created video, and they were planning on doing it at maybe a 1/20th of the budget of a Toy Story movie. Something did not connect." He also discussed how Interplay was "too close to Hollywood," and the problems they ran into while filming for Starfleet Academy The full podcast (MP3) is available from 1Up; Robertson's interview begins 42 minutes in.
Businesses

Oracle Ends Partnership With HP 45

Rambo Tribble writes "As detailed in a Reuters report, Oracle is terminating their cooperative relationship with HP in light of their anticipated acquisition of Sun. With Sun servers in house, Oracle apparently feels no need to work with HP anymore. They will 'continue to sell the Exadata computers, built in partnership with HP, until existing inventory is sold out, if customers request that model.' Oracle is much more enthusiastic about a new version of Exadata, which they developed with Sun."

Comment Scanjet 4100C deja vu (Score 1) 32

Deja Vu!
Just yesterday i repaired mine with a power supply problem. And quite a nasty problem. The metal brick the scanjet has underneath contains the main electronics PCB which has all the logic and also a second-stage power supply that generates all the regulated voltages like +5V, +12V and so on.
My brick also has +37V without load, but that's normal - it's just a transformer with a rectifier with no regulation. With the scanjet connected it's around +34V, but anyway everything is regulated so no problem with that unless it goes too high.
Anyway, the problem itself was with the PCB in the scanner, not the brick. My symptom was that the scanner sometimes turned on, sometimes it didn't, specially when moving it around. The fault: material fatigue. The trace going from the negative input from the connector got almost cut at some point. The order in the PCB is something like: negative input -> L1 (or L2, don't recall exactly) -> ferrite filter bridge -> capacitor. The cut was between the ferrite bridge and the capacitor or somewhat between that.
The fix: a simple soldered cable from the negative input on the PCB to another big ground on another part. Of course this probably renders your scanner to be non-FCC compliant or such, but anyway FCC doesn't matter here in Argentina ;-)
Works... but i wonder how long it'll last until another trace is cut...

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