Be sure to also check out the follow-up to this article, My Hard Drive Is Clicking Again So I’m Stopping It Cold When Ubuntu Boots. So you’ve switched to Ubuntu (or one of the derivative projects like Kubuntu or Xubuntu) and now you keep hearing a strange clicking noise coming from your computer every five or [...]
I’ve recently been using the Django web framework for some side projects and as usual I was impressed with it when starting out. Where this story becomes strange isn’t the beginning. It’s the middle.
After installing Ubuntu 7.10 server in a VMWare Server virtual machine on any non-PAE compliant machine (lots of laptops, anyone?) you’ll reboot and be greeted with this wonderful error message: PANIC: CPU too old for this kernel. There is a solution in launchpad.net (here) The current workaround for this: 1. Boot the server from the [...]
That moment of panic as you realize you’ve lost your USB key. What was on it? Where was I last? IronKey now has a USB thumb drive with hardware encryption, an on-board random number generator, and generates its own cryptographic keys. All data stored on the drive is encrypted using AES CBC-mode encryption. This is [...]
We’ve all been there. Your battery-powered device is working one minute and claims 75% charge on the battery and the next minute it’s dead. Most battery level indicators measure voltage only. This works because a battery’s voltage drops as it’s available energy is depleted. However, a battery’s voltage can also drop when its load increases. [...]
The Arkansas Democratic Party figured out the answer to that questions was “In the hands of a computer consultant in California.” Bill Ries-Knight bought what he believed was a brand new 120GB Seagate hard drive from eBay. When he plugged it in he was surprised to find out that it wasn’t. It was littered with [...]
“We had a situation where an employee sent a communication via e-mail that was inconsistent with our corporate policy,” said Microsoft’s Tom Robertson. “That communication had no impact on the final vote.” It seems that this Microsoft employee offered extended market subsidies and other help to cover the cost for the partner to join the [...]
Reports are that Apple is now the third largest seller of retail laptops in the US, with 17.6% of the market according to NPD. Only HP and Toshiba have larger shares. Apple laptops are now outselling Dell, Gateway, and Lenovo. This is good news for two reasons. First, it signifies that consumers may be looking [...]
Polaris IP is a company that doesn’t seem to have any products, but does hold US Patent No. 6,411,947. This patent covers systems that “comprise interpreting electronic messages with rule base and case base knowledge engines”. They are suing Google, Yahoo!, Amazon, A9, Borders, AOL, and IAC in a Texas court for infringing on this [...]
It seems when Sweden’s Working Group for deciding their vote on the OOXML standard being adopted met there were a large number of previously unseen attendees. The Swedish Standards Institute appears to be fine with people showing up and voting despite not being party to the talks leading up to the vote as long as [...]