News and other tidbits that Chad Cloman finds interesting enough to share
Apparently, vibrations can have a significant effect on hard drive performance, even if you just shout at the drive. In one study, the researcher found that “Performance improvements for random reads ranged from 56% to 246% while improvements for random writes ranged from 34% to 88% for a defined set of industry benchmarks.”
Link #1: http://www.zdnet.com/…
(via Slashdot)
Link #2: http://storagemojo.com/…
Adobe has released Flash Player 10.1, which includes critical security updates. Adobe products are well known for their susceptibility to malicious hackers, in part because of their ubiquity. Note that you’ll need to install two copies of Flash Player, one for Internet Explorer and one for all other browsers. No, seriously.
Link #1: http://get.adobe.com/…
Link #2: http://news.bbc.co.uk/…
(via Kim Komando)
This commercial for the Cullman Liquidation Center should be required viewing for all marketing students.
Link: http://consumerist.com/…
Sony has announced its intentions to stop producing 3½” floppy disks, effectively putting an end to the medium. I remember how large the 1.44MB capacity was, when they first came out, and how much more rugged they were than the 5¼” disks (that were actually “floppy” disks).
Link: http://www.examiner.com/…
(via Kim Komando)
Here at Chad’s News, we’ve previously covered one of the problems with intermittent energy sources like solar and wind: how to store the power so that it can be used on-demand. Until that happens, the need for traditional fossil fuel plants will remain.
The linked article describes a large battery nicknamed BOB, that will provide reliable power to the town of Presidio, Texas. The battery is expensive ($25 million), and the town is small (pop. 4167), so I’m not sure how well this would work on a larger scale. But it’s a step in the right direction.
Link: http://www.inhabitat.com/…
(via Slashdot)
Seagate is coming out with a 3TB hard drive later this year, but don’t rush out to buy one, because it won’t work on your existing computer. The current hard drive addressing standard was developed back in 1980 and only allows for a maximum of 2.1TB. Back then, that was considered to be an absurdly high number that would never be reached.
Link: http://arstechnica.com/…
Audio, video, and image files are so large that they effectively can’t be used on the internet, or in portable devices like cameras or iPods, without somehow making them smaller. And while there are ways to compress files without losing any of the data (think ZIP files), most of the formats we use today, MP3, JPEG, GIF, MP4, AVI, etc., use lossy compression. A song saved in the MP3 format, for example, throws away some of the audio but does it in such a way that most people don’t notice the difference.
But repeatedly compressing the same file will cause it to lose more and more of the actual data—sort of like making a photocopy of a photocopy. This is why I don’t use Audacity to edit MP3 files, because it first converts them to the WAV format for editing then back to MP3 for saving.
The linked article shows what happens to a video that was re-saved a thousand times. The author created the original video, uploaded it to YouTube, downloaded it, uploaded it again, and so on until he had a thousand uploads. The final video very clearly shows the cumulative effect of lossy compression.
Thanks to Mike Primm for this link.
Link: http://gawker.com/…
This is really neat! Get the Scrabble app for the iPad, and you can use iPhones as the tile racks (via the Tile Rack app).
If you want to view 3D television at home it’s not necessary to shell out big bucks for new HDMI 1.4 cables. High Speed HDMI 1.3 cables, which many people already own, can support all HDMI 1.4 features except the HDMI Ethernet Channel. It’s the HDMI 1.4 protocol that’s required for 3D television.
Link: http://blogs.consumerreports.org/…
(via The Consumerist)
Here at Chad’s News, we’ve mentioned Despair, Inc. before. But they’ve outdone themselves with a new t-shirt that takes advantage of the BP oil spill. The shirt has a BP logo and says, “BP – We’re bringing oil to American shores.” This is just one parody of many.
Thanks to Josh for this topic.
Link: http://www.despair.com/…
For the geek in your life, Victorinox is releasing a Swiss Army Knife that includes a secure USB drive.
Link #1: http://www.realwire.com/…
(via engadget)
Link #2: http://www.swissarmy.com/…
An Oregon man has broken the all-time high score in Asteroids, reaching 41,336,440 points. It took him 3½ days without sleep. Go ahead and put that on your resume!
Link: http://www.wired.com/…
(via Slashdot)
