News and other tidbits that Chad Cloman finds interesting enough to share
The linked article is an interesting non-technical read on the history of Intel’s x86 architecture. Turns out that a significant percentage of the transistors on a modern-day chip exist solely to provide legacy support.
Link: http://news.com.com/…
Google has a huge hard-drive farm for which they frequently take (and store) state-of-health information. Researchers decided to use this database to analyze the key factors in hard drive failures. Surprisingly, they found there was “very little correlation” between hard drive failure and elevated temperature or high activity. They also determined that certain SMART parameters were good predictors of hard drive failure, but that the opposite was not true—many hard drives failed without a consistent pattern of SMART parameters. Of most interest to me was the fact that certain models and manufacturers had a higher failure rate, but unfortunately Google did not publish the specific names. The full study (13 page PDF file) is available here.
Thanks to Josh for suggesting this topic.
Link: http://news.bbc.co.uk/…
Link #2: http://www.engadget.com/…
The “Any” key has been a tech support legend for quite some time now, right up there with the CD drive as a drink holder. Some people have made fake images, and at least one company sells them. What I find most surprising, however, is that Compaq actually has a FAQ entry on the subject.
This article explains the function and history of unused keys such as Scroll Lock and SysRq. I never realized that the SysRq key is tied directly into a BIOS interrupt (although it appears to be disabled under Windows). And some programs still use the Scroll Lock key.
Wow. Not only did someone actually ask the question, but the “experts” had to look up the answer. Back in my Apple II days, if you didn’t have two floppy drives, you had to use a special program (Muffin?) to make a copy of a disk. Lots of disk swapping required.
Just wait. Next they’ll be asking, “What’s a floppy drive?”
