Ever since the launch of the iPhone, the burning question on everyone’s mind has been: “Will it work at subzero temperatures?” We know it will blend, but will it freeze? Mikko Hyppönen from F-Secure decided to put the myth of the freezing iPhone to rest and boldly put his iPhone in the freezer. Seems the iPhone can handle cold weather just fine:
Monthly Archive for July, 2007
In most amazing news this week (last week actually, but I’ve been offline for a week) Scholastic sends TechCrunch a takedown notice for their post “The Latest Harry Potter Book Hits BitTorrent”. According to USA Today Scholastic is contacting every site that has mentioned this story and demanding it be taken down. So to tell people that the torrent for the latest Harry Potter book can be downloaded from The Pirate Bay is now copyright infringement? TechCrunch didn’t even directly link to the torrent, in fact they didn’t link to The Pirate Bay at all.
Copyright – two words combined that don’t make sense.
From the Foreign Policy blog:
If you’re not big into death metal, you might have missed a unique piece of recent political commentary in the form of a new album by Megadeth with the clever title, “United Abominations.”
If you are big into death metal, chances are that you have au contraire missed Megadeth’s latest album, because it’s not a death metal album at all. If you’re going to blog about a foreign topic (pun only slightly intended) the least thing you could do is check the facts. Megadeth has always been a thrash metal band, and there’s a big difference between death and thrash. Most death metal fans will be offended if you dare call Megadeth a death metal band.
Anyway, the folk at FP Passport are glad they don’t have to listen to the album (which tells a lot about their prejudice), because Mark Leon Goldberg over at the U.N. Dispatch already did. Sam duPont asks:
What effect will this exchange have on Megadeth fans’ opinions of the U.N.? That question was probably best answered by user “madeinquebec,” who left this comment on Mustaine’s post: I don’t care, Megadeth rulez.
Yes, we get it, that is just so funny, stooopid Megadeth fans! Judging by that one comment it would seem they believe Dave no matter what. But why should a Megadeth record affect the opinions of metal fans in the first place (as duPont seems to believe)? Did he even take a look at the rest of the comments? Most of them seem to ridicule Dave Mustaine, and quite rightly so. It’s a well known fact that Dave is seriously delusional and always has been. I think it’s very lame to attack an enemy that no-one takes seriously in the first place. But, it gets you some points nonetheless.
Many years ago, when I was fourteen and living in The Netherlands, Dave Mustaine was interviewed by a Dutch radio station and asked about his opinion on the proposed legalization of hard drugs in the Netherlands. “I don’t live here so I don’t give a shit” was his abrupt answer. What an asshole, I thought. While I’ve always had great respect for Dave as a brilliant song writer and guitar player, I’ve never cared one bit about his views on politics, war or religion. As a matter of fact that “I don’t live here so I don’t give a shit” kind of stuck to my head. Still today, whenever somebody asks me about local affairs in the USA, I always reply “I don’t live there so I don’t give a shit”. That’s my tribute to Dave Mustaine.
If you’re wondering if the integrated Nvidia GeForce 6100 on an Asus M2N-MX is powerfull enough to run Beryl:
There’s some flicker and blue lines across the screen on this video, but that’s just due to my nonexistent video editing skills.
I didn’t get a job today, although my CV was pretty impressive. There was only one problem with my CV – I haven’t done jack shit in life.
So, if you need an inexperienced and lazy worker with no sense of humour please hire me. Send your offers to late (at) finnmetal (dot) com.
Don’t bother if your company does not offer free Red Bull and unlimited coffee breaks.
Väsäsin kasaan kätevän generaattorin, tällä saa Praedor -roolipeliin luotua nopeasti ei-pelaaja-hahmoja. Hiukan karu ulkoasu, mutta toimii ja hoitaa tehtävänsä.
I busted my old piece of poo ATI 9550SE GPU. Now that was a crappy GPU. The screen would constantly flicker and jump around and do other weird stuff. That could also have been due to buggy Linux drivers, but either way it’s still a poor performance from ATI. Granted it was the cheapest GPU I could find some years ago, but still, it shouldn’t have been that bad. I was happy it was gone, good excuse to upgrade my machine!
Buying a new APG graphics card would have been kind of stupid,I’d just have wasted a lot of money on a card that I could not use with any decent motherboard later. So what the hell, lets buy a new motherboard. Oh wait, my old AMD processor will need a socket 754 motherboard. No way, I’m not going to buy a new ancient system. Wait another sec, my memory won’t be compatible either… It’s not easy to upgrade a system that is friggin three years old! The situation would be slightly better had I three years ago invested in a socket 939, but only slightly I guess.
Anyway, I decided to go for a budget motherboard with an integrated GPU. I chose the Asus M2N-MX, only 58€ @ verkosta.fi, which fared well in hintaseuranta, and they had it in stock. Newegg reviews for this board are spot on – it’s good value for your money, it comes with everything you need, but it’s got some minor problems, such as:
- Very confusing labeling for DIMM slots, but OK if you read the manual carefully.
- No locking clip for the heat sink’s retention bracket lock to clip into – but IMHO who needs that anyway? The heat sink will stay on just fine without it.
- “No mounting points near where the power cable and PATA cable plugs into the motherboard. Plugging and un-plugging those into the board causes it to flex more than I am comfortable with.” – nc3d – I could not agree more, plugging in the power and PATA cables is pretty scary with this one.
I found a couple of additional problems:
There’s no PC-speaker on the mobo! How will I be able to play Space Invaders?!?
There was a really ugly white scratch on my southbridge heat sink. Overall the product does not look very polished…
Some more pics:
If you need more connectors than this, buy another motherboard. With the M2N-MX you get no DVI, IEEE 1394, S/PDIF… just the basics. <sarcasm>Serial port is there, which is all I need</sarcasm>.
The accessories are pretty basic too, nothing fancy, just the absolute necessities. There was a case sticker, which was nice 
Here’s my AMD 64 X2 3800+ processor, not the fastest thing on the planet, but a great budget product. Got it for 66€ from Mikromaja, apparently the cheapest in Finland. Also bought some cheap memory from verkkokauppa.com. Here’s my updated machine:
Pretty leds all-over the case… Notice how the micro-ATX board is just ridiculously small for my huge case.
Everything works just fine for me with the Asus M2N-MX. Installing Ubuntu 7.04 was a breeze, although there were some problems with X settings after installing the proprietary Nvidia drivers, but not a big deal. More on that later, if I bother…
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