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March 02, 2017

IBM ThinkPad T40 Battery

The T570 will reportedly arrive in March with a 15.6-inch display and a starting price of $909. Expect to pay much more for a top-end model.The specification will include a range of compute and storage options, such as Intel Kaby Lake CPUs, Nvidia GeForce 940MX graphics, 32GB of DRAM, a 4K touch display option and Windows 10, plus the ability to use 16GB of M.2 PCIe-connected Optane cache â€“ when Intel ships it.Explaining the build, Torvalds wrote that "rc2 is ridiculously and unrealistically small. I almost decided to skip rc2 entirely, but a small little meaningless release every once in a while never hurt anybodyâ€.DAX (direct access for files, which reads from and writes to storage directly) drivers got the most work, with fixes from Jan Kara. Torvalds describes the rest as "trivial small fixesâ€.Since it's less than a month since the production version of Linux 4.9 landed, there's still plenty of time for the devs to catch up with the graphics, processor support, and broader laptop and mobile targets planned for 4.10. ®

The story was triggered because an anonymous source told the Washington Post miscreants had infiltrated the grid, when in fact â€“ as the story was later amended to read â€“ one Burlington Electric Department laptop was infected with Russian-attributed malware.Burlington Electric flat-out denied that its control systems were compromised. Rather, the company says in a home page statement, a single laptop was infected with malware "used in Grizzly Steppeâ€, and that machine was not connected to its grid systems.The infection was discovered in a scan after the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) distributed the signatures it associates with Grizzly Steppe, the operation that caused the late-December sensation in the outgoing Obama administration and led to 35 Russian spies getting their marching orders from the USA.Burlington Electric Department says someone in the company gave the Washington Post the incorrect information which led to the sensational but withdrawn claim that Russians hacked the Vermont grid.+Comment: Schadenfreude is all too easy at times like this, but the Washington Post's dilemma is faced by any journalist offered an infosec scoop.Last week, when the Obama administration expelled the Russian spies over interfering with the 2016 election process, it provided much more supporting documentation than is usually the case.

Even so, there were plenty of infosec people and national security experts critical that more information should have been provided. Take this, for example, from respected King's College London professor of war studies Thomas Rid:Mostly, accusations of hacks are accompanied by little or no supporting evidence of any kind. Even technical journalists are expected to work in an information vacuum, and all journalists, technical or generalist, are surrounded by a fog of vendor/consultant/analyst exaggeration.However, the speed with which Burlington Electric posted its rebuttal suggests it already knew the extent of the attack â€“ so the Washington Post had the chance to verify.There is one more point to make. While the USA has a well-integrated electricity grid â€“ the final steps to complete its interconnection were taken in 2010 â€“ Burlington Electric isn't even remotely "the US gridâ€. It's a local generation and distribution utility with fewer than 20,000 customers. A hacker â€“ even a Russian hacker â€“ would have a long way to travel from Vermont to the interconnects that constitute the national grid. ®

Even the idea that it was the work of Grizzly Steppe has been ditched in the latest from the Washington Post. The laptop had Nuetrino malware, and the rest of the scare in Burlington Electric seems to have occurred because one of the DHS's list of "suspect" IP addresses matched a connection from an employee checking Yahoo! mail, raising an alert.The testers tried out the 13-inch and 15-inch MacBooks with the Touch Bar, and the 13-inch without Ive's new big idea in laptop design. The results were frankly bizarre."In a series of three consecutive tests, the 13-inch model with the Touch Bar ran for 16 hours in the first trial, 12.75 hours in the second, and just 3.75 hours in the third," said Jerry Beilinson, Consumer Reports electronics editor.."The 13-inch model without the Touch Bar worked for 19.5 hours in one trial but only 4.5 hours in the next. And the numbers for the 15-inch laptop ranged from 18.5 down to 8 hours."The testing methodology is to power up each laptop, download a series of 10 web pages sequentially in Safari until the device shuts down, and then repeat. Display brightness is set at 100 nits and the automatic brightness adjuster is turned off.

It's not the best testing methodology in the world, but it's not fatally flawed either and shouldn't account for such a wide variation in results. Beilinson said they had submitted the test logs to Apple but hadn't heard back on a cause.Curiously, when a couple of the same tests were performed using Chrome instead of Safari then battery life improved considerably. Beilinson said the Chrome tests were insufficient to quantify the difference but that it might be something to consider for owners looking to escape the power cord.The testers used store-bought laptops for the testing, rather than those provided by Cook & Co themselves. There have been a number of reports from Reg readers about dodgy battery times and Apple's response has been to turn off the estimated battery life monitor in the latest build of macOS Sierra.We've asked Apple for comment and a laptop to try our own tests on. Unsurprisingly there has been no response. ®Updated to add on January 10, 2017
A spokesperson for Apple has been in touch to say Consumer Reports' benchmarks uncovered a web browser bug that drains the MacBook Pro's battery charge. That programming flaw has now been fixed and released via the Safari beta program. Apple also claims the magazine ran its tests in Safari's developer mode which produces unfair results due to it disabling the web cache.

Consumer Reports counters that it performs the same tests across all laptops to get consistent results and give batteries a thorough workout.ng battery life on Mac notebooks, Consumer Reports uses a hidden Safari setting for developing web sites which turns off the browser cache. This is not a setting used by customers and does not reflect real-world usage. Their use of this developer setting also triggered an obscure and intermittent bug reloading icons which created inconsistent results in their lab. After we asked Consumer Reports to run the same test using normal user settings, they told us their MacBook Pro systems consistently delivered the expected battery life.We have also fixed the bug uncovered in this test. This is the best pro notebook weâ€™ve ever made, we respect Consumer Reports and weâ€™re glad they decided to revisit their findings on the MacBook Pro.Modern laptops have a variety of sophisticated battery management techniques and settings built into both their hardware and operating system software ... Many of these settings are set by default to extend battery life. Thatâ€™s generally a good thing. But because these settings are so variable and situation-dependent, we turn several of them off during testing.We also turn off the local caching of web pages. In our tests, we want the computer to load each web page as if it were new content from the internet, rather than resurrecting the data from its local drive. This allows us to collect consistent results across the testing of many laptops, and it also puts batteries through a tougher workout.

A passenger on Flight 358, Mapboix software developer Lucas Wojciechowski, was scanning the plane for in-flight Wi-Fi when he noticed a hotspot active that appeared to be coming from a Samsung Galaxy Note 7, which have been banned from US flights because of their tendency to catch fire.About an hour into the flight the intercom clicked on and one of the cabin crew asked that if anyone had a Note 7, they should they identify themselves. After 15 minutes and no answer, the cabin crew threatened to turn on the lights â€“ it was 11pm by this stage â€“ and search all passengers until they found the device.Another 15 minutes and no phone, so now the captain came on the intercom and threatened to divert the flight to an airport in Wyoming if the owner of the banned Sammy handset didnâ€™t confess. He pointed out that as this was a nighttime flight then landing and searching everyone would be a massive pain in the backside for everyone."I don't know if you've ever been diverted at 3am," Wojciechowski recounts the captain saying. "Let me tell you, it is terrible. There is nothing open in the terminal. Nothing."

Thankfully, this seemed to do the trick and shortly afterwards the captain reassured passengers that the device had been found. It wasn't one of the flammable phones, but instead another model belonging to a moron who thought it would be a good wheeze to rename their mobile hotspot and pretend to be carrying a banned handset."The US Department of Transportation has banned the transport of the Samsung Galaxy Note 7 on board all US aircraft, and Virgin America actively informs guests that they should not bring these devices onboard," a Virgin spokesman told The Reg."As such, when our InFlight Teammates see potential evidence of this device on board, they take it seriously. In this case, there was no such device - the safety of the passengers and crew was never in question, and no flights were cancelled or delayed as a result."The crew's consternation is understandable. Not only do US transport officials take a dim view of Note 7 handsets on aircraft (particularly as there has already been an in-aircraft fire) but an in-flight blaze is many pilots' worst nightmare â€“ barring a sudden reduction in the number of wings.

While Virgin America declined to say if any action had been taken against the unfunny prankster, your humble hack hopes they make him walk home next time. ®Today, as we seek something, anything, to write in the pre-Christmas news drought, we bring you a trio of tales from the bulging On-Call inbox. Which we must say is swelling this week: it looks like some of you might not be super-busy!But we digress. First let's hear a story from "PJâ€ who told us that when he was a student, back in the 1980s, he had a job testing Telemetrix CAD machines.PJ says those machines had "a fancy screen and control box looking like a PC tower that held a number of foot square PCBs plugged into the base. The front of the box slid forward and you could lift the board out.â€One of PJ's colleagues came back from the field where he'd been asked to fix a machine in which the board kept coming out of their mountings, which of course made the machine fail.So PJ's mate stripped down the machine and found pastry flakes in the bottom and notified the client of this strange finding.

At which point he was told that the user operating that machine had been told, repeatedly, to stop warming his lunchtime pie on top of the boards.A colleague went through all the usual tests, checked logs, probed hardware to detect any faults. But nothing was awry. Next came a reformat and rebuild, but still the problem persisted. A faulty laptop hinge, perhaps? Nope.By this time Jake had seen the problem happen while the user sat down typing away in an utterly innocuous fashion.Which was when one of Jake's colleagues asked ""You don't have any metal in you or anything?""Well yes I do, actually,â€ the client replied, explaining the presence of a metal plate in his arm.And that plate was the culprit, as it triggered the magnetic lock on his laptop locking it at random.Jake says he and his mate recreated the issue by having the client wave his arm/wrist along the bottom of the laptop. Lastly, meet "Bakerâ€, who got caught up in the excitement when Christopher Eccleston helmed the Doctor Who revival. So excited that "I replaced the large cylindrical plastic tube that I never worked out what it was quite for in my standard issue IT toolkit with an evidently fake plastic Sonic Screwdriver.â€

Said implement made "the whirry noise and light up when extendedâ€. Baker made it because "one of the senior engineers was a massive Whovian and being new to the role it didn't hurt to grease a few wheels by feigning an interest in your coworkers hobbies.â€This all happened at a financial services company for which Baker provided second line support. First line support was done in-house. Together they fought a problem in a new build of the firm's standard operating environment whch did not agree with a Windows NT4 sound driver and an IE6 update.Fixing it was easy: Baker could remote in to each PC and replace the corrupt driver with a different version that made the problem go away.But first line support had to sign off on every job, so Baker had to visit each PC as well as fix it from afar. After fifteen such visits in one day, he was a bit over it.Which was when, on visit 16, he encountered a rather unpleasant co-worker."Now, this guy's a dick from twenty paces,â€ Baker told us. "He's already harassing a co-worker as I enter the floor, double checking my job sheet to see while I politely interject myself between him and the poor recently-harassed co-worker who I'm fairly certain headed to the bathroom for a good cry.â€"Immediately he's giving me shit, not missing a beat, as if somehow I'm responsible for Microsoft's coding.â€"It's been a long day of may asshats, so I decide to make myself laugh, if no one else.â€

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