Macbook Catches On Fire!

[via NewLaunches]

Matty from Melbourne Australia surfed the net using Safari for 30 minutes yesterday night on his Macbook, after which he close the lid put it on sleep mode and left it on the bookshelf for charging. However at 3 a.m. all hell broke loose as his girlfriend heard the Macbook hissing like a steam valve, then smoke started pouring out of it and a couple of seconds later, a very large flash fire started. On hearing her loud screams and the dog barking Matty raced to the scene.As I was running I saw a fire. At first I thought that the lamp had fallen and set fire to the curtain. As I got closer I realised it was my mac book .... burning! I picked it up and blew on it and swung it around to put the flames out. The book shelf it was sitting on was burnt and there were a couple of magazines that were on fire too. I quickly put those out and calmed down.
The battery is swollen and burnt so it's definitely the battery that exploded and caught fire. The macbook is melted on the bottom and severely charred (along with my bookshelves, books, magazines and the wall). The space bar is melted as is the track pad. The screen has been damaged a little too.Matty had purchased the Macbook in June last year and it is still under the 12 month warranty. He is looking for an efficient service center in Melbourne and is hoping that his hard drive data will be recovered.

Digital Music and the Blame Game

http://blogs.pcworld.com/digitalworld/archives/2007/03/digital_music_a.html

If you thought the skirmishes over DRM and Apple's iTunes had waned, think again. The European Union's consumer protection commissioner Meglena Kuneva recently directed some barbed words toward Apple, criticizing its use of Fairplay DRM and the closed iTunes/iPod system. This is nothing new, but it does make for an interesting companion to another report that the major music labels still don't seem to have a viable digital music strategy other than putting their music on iTunes, then complaining about it.
Like the captain said, what we have here is a failure to communicate. For those who haven't been keeping score: Kuneva (who, a spokeswoman stressed, was airing her own views) and several European countries have been speaking out against DRM in general, and iTunes in particular. Apple's Steve Jobs has pointed the finger at the music industry for requiring DRM. The music industry blames Apple for having a closed system and for locking prices.
What no one has proposed -- at least, not seriously -- is dialogue. The major music labels currently pick and choose where their tracks will go, generally releasing them on iTunes. This cuts out a quarter of the MP3-player-owning market; can you think of any other industry that deliberately ignores such a high number of potential customers?
Apple, meanwhile, quite rightly does not want to be the only one to give up its DRM scheme. All other things being equal, it would put a major dent in iPod sales.
Things would go a lot smoother if the music industry made its content available across all media, like it used to do in the analog world. Or, if Apple found some way to open up iTunes in such a way that would minimize its risk. Neither entity will do these things on their own, so they have to find a third way: sit down, bring Microsoft and the rest of the PlaysForSure community to the table, and work something out. (Apple should initiate this, as right now they're the ones with the upper hand.) Endless finger-pointing isn't doing anyone any good.

Cool cars are invented!!!

Dude, Where's My Jetpack?
2.26.2007
http://discovermagazine.com/2007/feb/jetpack-future-technologies

Flying Car
Look at your car sitting there in the driveway—sad, squat, all four tires on the pavement. You should feel sorry for your car for the same reason that you should feel sorry for yourself: You are both flightless. Optimistic drivers of the past imagined a future in which the stubby tail fins of their cars morphed into broad wings. According to the car companies presenting at the World's Fair of 1939, your driveway was destined to become a runway, the highway a skyway, and the only speed limit the speed of sound.
The first attempts at creating flying cars were fairly simple—install an airplane engine and two wings on a regular car. The first attempts were also disastrous. Henry Ford's "sky flivver" flew in 1928, but production was nixed after an unlucky pilot died in a crash. In 1956, Moulton Taylor, an engineer who earlier had helped develop the cruise missile, unveiled the Aerocar. The little yellow Aerocar could leap from the highway at 55 miles per hour and cruise up to 100 mph at around 12,000 feet with a range of up to 300 miles. The Aerocar worked fine conceptually, but it was too impractical for everyday use—a business deal for full-scale production fell through in the early 1970s. The only remaining Aerocar prototype was purchased by a fan who saw it advertised in the classifieds.
If you are averse to purchasing dangerous relics listed in obscure newspaper ads and you still want to acquire a flying car, the solution may be to let NASA take care of it. That's right, NASA gave us gooey foam pillows, dehydrated ice cream, and those shiny space blankets, and it may yet fork over the flying car. NASA scientists working on the Small Aircraft Transportation System (SATS) project are making inroads on the two main problems holding back personal air travel on a massive, nationwide scale: midair collisions and complicated piloting mechanisms.
The Moller M400 Skycar launches like a helicopter, flies like an airplane, and drives like a car; unfortunately, you still can't buy one.
NASA eschews the term "flying car," preferring "personal air vehicle" instead. Nevertheless, NASA has imagined flying cars that would humiliate George Jetson. Until their vehicle program was eliminated in 2005, the folks at Langley Research Center planned to roll out three prototypes in sequence: a small prop plane that would tuck its wings in on the highway (it shouldn't cost any more than a Mercedes-Benz); a two-seater with rear-propeller drive; and, for tight parking spots, one capable of vertical takeoff. Merely providing the vehicles would not be enough, however. If everyday people are to use them, scientists must know how to track thousands of these car-planes. And knowing is half the battle.
Collision-deterring navigation systems are key to transforming highways into skyways. Personal air vehicles will use GPS and cell phone technology to automatically broadcast information about location and speed to ground-based towers. From the ground, an automated computer system will update the flight path of every sky vehicle and provide instant directions—automatically avoiding collisions and minimizing flight time. Meanwhile, onboard sensors will detect nearby trees, buildings, and power lines. And the jackpot bonus item for the sky-car consumer: For most of the flight the human "driver" can take care of anything besides flying, like eating a whole bag of potato chips.
NASA's dream cars may be exciting (and legitimate), but they aren't available to the public right this second. So turn your attention to the Moller M400 Skycar—a partially tested prototype offered in the 2005 Neiman Marcus gift catalog. Paul Moller, a former engineering professor at the University of California at Davis, has spent all of his money and more than 40 years trying to build a flying car. The current model is a cherry-red coupe that looks as though it should be dogfighting TIE fighters outside the Death Star. The futuristic Skycar has four seats (carrying up to 750 pounds), a maximum airspeed of 375 mph, and a range of about 750 miles. On the ground, the Skycar should travel a dinky 30 to 35 mph, just fast enough to get to an empty parking lot and stun everyone with a sweet vertical takeoff. Prototypes like the Skycar have been on the verge of full-scale production for almost a century, though, and it may be another hundred years before you can score that most badass symbol of the space age, the flying car.

Intel unveils 50-watt quad-core server processors

Intel unveils 50-watt quad-core server processors Printer friendly

http://www.digitimes.com/mobos/a20070313PR200.html

Further expanding its quad-core processor family lineup, Intel has announced two energy-efficient 50-watt server processors that represent a decrease ranging from 35% to nearly 60% in power from Intel's existing 80- and 120-watt quad-core server products.
These new processors, requiring just 12.5 watts of power for each of the four cores, deliver similar performance yet set a new standard in energy efficiency, said Intel, which has introduced 11 server, workstation and desktop PC quad-core processors since November 2006.
The two low-voltage processors, the Intel Xeon processor L5320 and L5310, operate at 1.86GHz and 1.60GHz respectively, feature a unique 8MB of on die cache for faster memory data communication and run on dedicated 1066MHz front side buses. In 1,000 unit quantities the L5320 is priced at US$519 and the L5310 at US$455.
These processors can be coupled with Intel's existing "Bensley" server platform and have been designed to be "drop-in" compatible with the existing dual-core and quad-core Intel Xeon processor families.
Servers based on the new low-power, quad-core processors are designed for dense Internet datacenters, blade servers and industries such as financial services where the scale and density of servers are highly sensitive to power, real estate and cooling costs. The potential for cost savings by replacing aging infrastructure with quad-core Intel Xeon processors and deploying virtualization technology can be as much as US$6,000 per year over the lifetime of each server based on Intel's own evaluations.
In addition, these new processors represent a nearly ten-fold improvement in power consumption per core in just one and half years, said Intel.
Servers based on these new processors are expected to be available worldwide over the next few months from Acer, Dell, Digital Henge, Fujitsu Siemens, Hewlett Packard (HP), HCL, IBM, Rackable Systems, Samsung Electronics, Verari, Wipro and other companies.

AddWord Function

This code is used to test the AddWord Function


Public Class Form1
Private Sub Button1_Click(ByVal sender As System.Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles Button1.Click
Dim bSuccess As Boolean
bSuccess = AddWord(TextBox1.Text)
MsgBox(bSuccess)
End Sub
Private Function AddWord(ByVal sKey As String) As Boolean
On Error Resume Next
Static Col As New Collection
Col.Add("", sKey)
If Err.Number <> 0 Then
Return False
Else
Return True
End If
End Function
End Class

Flash memory drives now available from Intel

Flash memory isn't just for cell phones anymore. Flash drives are moving up into PCs and servers, and Intel wants to get in on the action with a new drive.
The company formally launched the Intel Z-U130 Value Solid-State Drive (just rolls right off the tongue) on Monday, promising to deliver the drives to PC and server companies as either replacement hard drives or performance enhancers. These drives aren't going to be replacing your hard drive in most situations--at least for now--but could provide a more reliable low-cost way of storing information in PCs for emerging markets, said Greg Matson, product marketing manager for Intel's NAND flash memory division.
The drives can also be used in PCs or servers to help the operating system boot faster, he said. Intel is not disclosing pricing for the drives, which range in capacity from 1GB to 8GB. But he said that the drives would cost less than half the price of a $40 to $50 low-end PC hard drive.
Intel is still planning to deliver a separate flash memory technology known as Robson along with the introduction of its Santa Rosa notebook technology, expected in the first half of this year. Robson is designed to help boost performance but was engineered specifically for a notebook.

After False Claim, Wikipedia to Check Degrees

After an influential contributor and administrator at the online encyclopedia Wikipedia was found last week to have invented a history of academic credentials, Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia’s co-founder and globetrotting advocate, called for a voluntary system for accrediting contributors who say they have advanced degrees, like a Ph.D or M.D.

The details of how Mr. Wales’s system would work are still being bandied about, and include the idea of having users fax copies of their diplomas to Wikipedia’s offices, or relying on a “circle of trust,” whereby a trusted individual would be in charge of verification. Mr. Wales said he thought that some version of his proposal would begin on the site “in a week.”
But reaction within the fiercely egalitarian Wikipedia world has not been universally favorable. Many writing on Mr. Wales’s user page seemed dumbstruck at the idea of Wikipedia spending its time to verify academic authority when the site’s motto is “the encyclopedia anyone can edit.”
Florence Devouard, Mr. Wales’s successor as the head of Wikimedia Foundation board, the parent of the many Wikipedias in scores of languages, said she was “not supportive” of the proposal. “I think what matters is the quality of the content, which we can improve by enforcing policies such as ‘cite your source,’ not the quality of credentials showed by an editor,” she added.
Mr. Wales was reacting to the public fallout from the revelation that a contributor and Wikipedia administrator named Essjay who claimed to be a tenured professor in Catholic law was in fact Ryan Jordan, a 24-year-old from Louisville, Ky. Mr. Wales said that the Essjay controversy was evidence of “growing pains” for the site, a worldwide phenomenon that has become a default research tool for nearly everyone who uses the Internet.
And while he said “the moral of the story is what makes for a good Wikipedian is not a good credential,” he added that it was important that the general public not think that Wikipedia is “written by a bunch of 12-year-olds.”

Intel Readies Power-Saving Quad-Core Xeons

David Hyun
http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,129716-c,xeon/article.html

Intel Corp. quad-core microprocessors that work at an energy-efficient 50 watts per processor will officially be on the market starting Monday, according to the company.
Each of the four cores in its new Xeon L5320 and L5310 will consume just 12.5 watts of electricity, according to Intel. The company claims the new Xeons use between 35 percent and nearly 60 percent less power than its existing 80-watt and 120-watt quad-core server products.
The L5320 operates at 1.86 GHz and the L5310 at 1.60 GHz. They both feature 8M bytes of on-die cache for faster memory data communication. In quantities of 1,000 units, the L5320 is priced at US$519 and the L5310 at $455.
The new Xeons can be coupled with Intel's existing Bensley server platform, replacing existing dual-core or quad-core Intel processors.
Intel and Advanced Micro Devices Inc. are locked in competition for dominance in the quad-core chip market, as enterprises demand more performance out of servers. Meanwhile, customers are demanding greater energy efficiency as data center electrical costs rise.
AMD in February released details of its coming new quad-core chip, code-named Barcelona, at a technical conference in San Francisco.
Barcelona, due to be released midyear, improves performance and energy efficiency over the competition and over AMD's own dual-core processor, the Opteron, which it introduced in 2003, said Brent Kerby, product marketing manager for Opteron, in an earlier IDG News Service interview.
Servers based on the new Xeons are expected to be available worldwide over the next few months from such server manufacturers as Dell Inc., Hewlett-Packard Co., IBM Corp. and others.

SEC: 3 traders toyed with Google options

David Hyun
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/computersecurity/hacking/2007-03-12-cyber-scam-stocks_N.htm

It's not just penny stocks that cybercrooks are manipulating for illicit profit.The Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday announced civil charges against three men who allegedly manipulated Google "put options" and Sun Microsystems shares after-hours as part of scams built around using stolen log-ins to break into online brokerage accounts.
The Justice Department also issued criminal indictments against the three accusing them of breaching consumer accounts at E-Trade, TD Ameritrade, Merrill Lynch and Fidelity Brokerage Services.
The SEC's complaint, the fourth since December, shows how clever cybercriminals have become in defeating security systems. "These aren't social misfits operating from Mom's house," says Paul Moriarty, director of Internet content security at Trend Micro. "These are people who are really going after this to try and make money."
Civil and criminal charges have been filed against Jaisankar Marimuthu 32, and brothers Chockalingam Ramanathan, 33, of Chenmai, India, and Thirugnanam Ramanathan, 34, an Indian national who lives in Malaysia. The trio allegedly sold off dozens of portfolios, then used the proceeds to buy positions in — and thus drive up the price — of shares and options they held.
One brokerage account holder who was a victim left for a five-day Alaskan fishing trip with a portfolio worth $180,000 and returned to find the balance at negative $200,000, according to the SEC.
FIND MORE STORIES IN: Google Securities and Exchange Commission Ameritrade Brokerage Cybercrooks can easily breach online brokerage accounts because most require just a username and password to access over the Internet, Moriarty says. Stolen log-on data for online brokerage accounts is readily available on Internet chat channels and websites, called carding forums, where cybercriminals congregate.
A typical price: 10% of the balance in the account, says Dan Clements, CEO of security firm CardCops.
While breaking into online accounts is straightforward, getting cash out takes work. Cyberthieves "sometimes strike out, or don't make all that much," says John Reed Stark, chief of the SEC's Office of Internet Enforcement. "Of all the Internet fraud schemes, these are certainly the most complex."
In this particular case, the SEC alleges that the suspects set up their own online accounts at lesser-known brokerages — ChoiceTrade, Firstrade, OptionsXpress and TradeKing — and then amassed shares in thinly traded securities, which are susceptible to wide price fluctuations.
In the case of Google, a heavily traded company, they acquired shares of a "put option," essentially a 5-cents-per-share bet that Google's share price would plummet 40% within two months. Then the fancy footwork began. According the SEC complaint the Google heist worked like this:
Several times last October, the suspects intruded into online accounts at Charles Schwab, TD Ameritrade and Fidelity Brokerage Services. They sold off the portfolios and used the proceeds to buy Google put options, briefly driving the price up as high as 15 cents per share. They then sold put options acquired earlier for 5 cents per share for double or triple what they paid. Timing had to be perfect. Marimuthu, who was arrested in Hong Kong last December, earned $26,890, while Thirugnanam Ramanathan, arrested in Hong Kong in January, made $1,800. Chockalingam Ramanathan, who's still at large, earned $3,560, the SEC complaint says.
Working together since last July, the three earned $121,500, though the cost to the affected online brokerages to make victimized account holders whole was much higher: $875,000, the SEC says.
U.S. authorities plan to seek extradition of the suspects, Stark says.

Samsung Reveals 8GB Memory Chip

Samsung Electronics on Monday said it has developed a high-density, eight-gigabyte memory chip dubbed the moviNAND which it will begin mass-producing in the second quarter of the year.
The moviNAND consists of a NAND flash memory chip and a multimedia card controller. The new product provides twice the capacity and performance of a 4GB version and will enable electronics makers to develop smaller mobile devices in a wider variety of designs.
The moviNAND follows the standards for high-density embedded flash memory applications developed by the JEDEC (Joint Electron Device Engineering Council) and MMCA (MultiMediaCard Association.)
The value of the total market volume of the new product is predicted to reach about US$4 billion over the next four years. Samsung expects the moviNAND will gain popularity with cellphone and navigator makers with its high-density, high-speed, but low-noise performance.
(englishnews@chosun.com )