I have an older PC lying around the house and I was thinking about different things to do with it. Then I saw this and actually considered it... for about 2 seconds.
Every time I see this, a part of my brain screams "Are you insane?!"
Check out more information about these types of PCs here: www.pugetsystems.com
While surfing the various tubes of the Internet, I happened across this entry at Gizmodo.
Can you imagine arguing with the astronauts about this? Or becoming so flabbergasted that NASA has to send a tech up to fix it? I'd go in a heartbeat.
Well, now that Bill Gates is gone, Microsoft can start making some really big mistakes.
They have decided to stop selling Windows XP.
Windows Vista is a pretty good operating system, as long as you have a brand new computer printing to a brand new printer and a brand new display. If you have any old components, like say, one to five years old, count on crashing, being down for several days and poor performance. But I'm not bitter.
Ok, if the $20,000 PC wasn't enough, Gizmodo shows me this.
Any more and I'll have to call the church group to start picketing these people!
No, not a bunny hop, a petaflop. IBM and a group of scientists have created a supercomputer that has performed a petaflop. That's 1000 trillion operations in a single second!
I wonder how long it takes to reboot...
The guys at ExtremeTech are asking if loyalty matters anymore?
Read the article here.
StopBadWare.org is a website to provide information about AdWare, MalWare and all those other "wares" out there.
They just released a report that lists RealPleayer as a BadWare. I know I have fought RealPlayer and the junk that mysteriously accumulates on a computer once RealPlayer is installed.
Check them out.
If you have tried to call tech support for your Apple products lately, you probably got an answering machine:
Your call is very important to us, but we are all at MacWorld right now. Leave a message and we'll call you back once we come down from the euphoria.I've never been a big fan of Apple and their Mac line of products. Their motto should be "You can buy better, but you won't pay more". However, this new Macbook Air might be the start of a new trend. Then I read the fine print.
Cracked.com has come up with a list of 5 things that the writers in Hollywood think you can do with a computer. It's got some harsh language, but it's still pretty funny and pretty accurate.
I can't tell you how many times I have gotten calls from people that believe these myths after seeing some movie.
Check out the list here.
USB drives or "thumb drives" or "flash drives" have killed floppy disks. These little things can hold gigabytes of data in a space no bigger than your thumb. Simply amazing.
These things have become so popular nowadays that the creative people are starting to take over their shapes in order to get people to purchase them.
These people have some interesting USB storage devices: Dynamism
I kind of like the duckie drive.
NASA has been having issues lately. Can you imagine being part of the NASA Tech Support team?
I bet astronauts don't call Houston with vague descriptions.
Can't you just hear it now?
"Houston, it looks like their might be an issue with a solar panel thingy. Should I go outside and see if I can shake it loose?"
I hate computers. Yeah, I said it and I mean it too.
If I have a tough problem that just won't go away, I have a place to turn and that is Bleeping Computer. There is so much computer information on this site as well as help for the beginner.
Check it out!
So Saturday arrives and it's quiet.
Too quiet.
Anyways, Intel is ready to release their new Penryn chip. Where do they get some of these names? Intel has come a long way in a long time. Check out their Timeline. They have gone from a processor with 3,500 transistors back in 1969 to processors with almost 600,000,000 transistors. Imagine what they will have five years from now.
Megabytes, Gigabytes, Ks, and Gs
Confusing isn't it? The megs and gigs can tongue-tie even the best of us...
Ok, I'm kidding. Tech people live and breath this stuff.
So just for fun I'm going to explain this once and for all --
A - This is a byte (bite). One byte. Any single character takes up a single byte of memory. Got that? That's easy.
Now imagine a page with 1,000 letter Rs on it. This is a kilobyte (kill o bite). The actual number is 1,024 but you can round it off without hurting anyone's feelings. So if I send you a picture of my kid that is 79KB or 79 kilobytes or 79K in size, that's 79,000 bytes. Got that? Make sense?
Now imagine 1,000 pages with 1,000 letter Js on each page. This is a megabyte (meg a bite). That's a huge jump from a kilobyte. A megabyte is 1,024 kilobytes which is 1,024 bytes, but you can round it off to 1 million bytes if you want. So that 1MB email you are about to open could have a bunch of 79KB pictures inside right? So would you rather open a 79MB picture or a 79KB picture? Yeah, you got that. Have a cookie while we jump to the next level.
Ok, so what if you put those 1,000 pages into a box and then stacked that box with 999 other boxes filled with 1,000 pages each? You would have a gigabyte (gig a bite). That's like a billion letters typed on all those pages! No one will look down on you for rounding it off to a billion even if it is actually 1,025 times 1,024 times 1,024. So your 40GB hard drive doesn't seem so small does it? 40 billion bytes? Small? Are you kidding me?
Well, what if you have 1,024 gigabytes just lying around? Well, my friend. You would be the proud owner of a Terabyte. Sounds like a trillion to me. One Trillion Bytes. Now we're talking some size. If you could travel at the speed of light, dropping a letter every mile along the way, in one second you would drop 186,000 letters or 186KB. In one year you would have dropped 6 terabytes of letters or 6TB. One year of time to go 6 trillion miles. Amazed yet?
Here endeth the lesson.
It simply amazes me the level of technology that goes into today's typical PC.
Here is a discussion about how hard drives work. Simply amazing!
Microsquish is getting ready to release SP3 for Windows XP. All I can say, is thank God.
I am so sick and tired of installing Windows XP SP2 on a brand new machine and then spending 4 hours downloading updates and rebooting.
Read more about it here at Extreme Tech.
