Well, this is not about the John Grisham's 1996 box office thriller. It's about "your" time that you supposedly want to kill by visiting this page. Enjoy reading...

You can also read my blog here.

Do you carry your laptop when visiting the United States?

I normally carry my precious laptop when traveling to a conference or a meeting overseas. In the hotel room I can make the final modifications to the powerpoint slides. At the same time, I could use the free WiFi service courtesy of the hotel management. I can also call free using Skype and my paid Voip service. It beats the hell of the hotel phone rates!

Well now I'm shocked to read that the U.S. custom is threatening to take away my laptop whenever we enter the U.S. border. They told us to "carry only a laptop or electronic device you can afford to lose", or "hand over for an unspecified period of time". Our conference doesn't last for unspecified period of time. Well I can't afford to buy a decoy laptop whenever I want to travel to a conference so the U.S. custom can take it from me...because I can't afford to "lose" it. I'm really gonna lose it now!

Here are five factors Gurley (the PC world author of the article) says travelers should know about:

1. No evidence needed to take your laptop
2. Anything can be searched
3. Your PC might not be returned right away
4. Don't take anything you don't want to share
5. Be cooperative

For the full article, click here.

The Synergistic elements were built from the ground up to do what are called single-precision floating-point calculations--the kind of operations needed for dazzling three-dimensional graphics and a host of other multimedia tasks. The design traded flexibility--a Synergistic element is not versatile enough to run the Linux operating system on its own--for eye-popping speed. When pushed to its 5.6-gigahertz limits, a single unit can do 44.8 billion single-precision floating-point calculations per second.

In fact, the Synergistic elements are so fast that a single one could easily consume the entire bandwidth on the interconnects to the off-chip memory, leaving its siblings starved for data and stalled out. IBM and its partners had to design a special chunk of circuitry into Cell just to prevent that problem.


For the full article, click here.

There are fun stories that you read as kids...
Then again, there are other fun stories that are revised by some good people to share with you lessons in life. Life is too short for everyone of us to learn through mistakes. Why not learn from others' mistakes. It's a lot faster for us to learn.

For the full article, click here.

Tea cup Drinking tea without milk could have more health benefits. Adding milk to a cup of tea can destroy its ability to protect against heart disease, according to research.

A small German study found drinking black tea significantly improved the ability of arteries to relax and expand to keep blood pressure healthy.

But the European Heart Journal paper also found proteins in milk, called caseins, blocked this effect.

For the full article, click here.

Drinking three or more cups of tea a day is as good for you as drinking plenty of water and may even have extra health benefits, say researchers.

Tea not only rehydrates as well as water does, but it can also protect against heart disease and some cancers, UK nutritionists found.

For the full article, click here.

Have you just received your first camcorder? Here are the five things you need to know.

If you wake up feeling "bone-weary" and keep saying "I'm tired" all the time, then most doctors will say that you are suffering from symptoms of chronic fatigue and that overcoming chronic fatigue isn't difficult, provided you know the rules ...