Linux Love - Part 7

Linux Love - Part 7: "To give you some statistics: the drive is rated for 600,000 load/unload cycles, and after 2.5 months of running Feisty I’m already at more than 56,000 load/unload cycles (and only 150 power cycles), according to the SMART data. At this rate the drive will be dead after 2.5 years, and I don’t even use this computer for more than a couple of hours each day. Are YOU affected? If you’re running Ubuntu, you should know that the only way to see the number of load cycles is by using SMART tools which aren’t even installed by default. To install them, simply run: $ sudo apt-get install smartmontools Now, to find your drive’s load cycle count, run this command in a terminal (replace /dev/sda to suit your computer configuration, /dev/hda for example if you have ata drive): $ sudo smartctl -a /dev/sda | grep Load_Cycle_Count You should see an output like this: 193 Load_Cycle_Count 0x0012 095 095 000 Old_age Always - 55380 In this example, 55380 is the load cycle count which SHOULD increase by 3-5 in an HOUR. But if it’s increasing by 3, 5 or more in a MINUTE, there’s definitely a problem. Think about it: HDD manufactures are claiming that a drive will support about 600.000 load cycles, meaning that your drive should be fine for a few years. But when the count is"

Bug In AMD's Quad-Core Barcelona And Phenom May Be More Serious Than Previously Suspected - Wolfe's Den Blog - InformationWeek

Bug In AMD's Quad-Core Barcelona And Phenom May Be More Serious Than Previously Suspected - Wolfe's Den Blog - InformationWeek: "Erratum 298 will be described as follows: 'The processor operation to change the accessed or dirty bits of a page translation table entry in the L2 from 0b to 1b may not be atomic"

San Jose Mercury News - Out of the box: Valley companies dump cubicles for open office spaces

San Jose Mercury News - Out of the box: Valley companies dump cubicles for open office spaces: "Intel's Tunmore said he anticipates 15 to 20 percent more people will work in the same amount of space. That will allow the company to provide more conference rooms, which are in such demand that they are booked months in advance, he said"

Chip problem limits supply of quad-core Opterons - The Tech Report

Chip problem limits supply of quad-core Opterons - The Tech Report: "The erratum is present in all AMD quad-core processors up to the current B2 revision. AMD has said a revision B3 is in the works and expected in Q1. One source told TR that large quantities of B3 chips might not be available until the end of Q1."