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posted by on Jun 20
 In less than a week Bill Gates will step down of his day to day??responsibilities??of Microsoft to a part time work at Microsoft. He will work full time on his charity??foundation, founded by his wife, after he steps down known as the Bill and Melinda??Gates Foundation.Gates started Microsoft in 1975 with Steve Ballmer, Gates childhood friend. Gates was chairman and CEO of Microsoft from 1986 to 2000 until Steve took over as CEO. It started with the days of MS-DOS, Microsoft first??operating??system called Microsoft Disk??Operating??System, to Windows and XBox and Microsoft Office.??Microsoft’s??Chief Technical Officer Ray Ozzie will assume title of chief software architect, and Microsoft’s CTO for advanced strategies and policies Craig Mundie will immediately take the new of chief research and strategy officer and will assume Gates’ responsibilities for Microsoft’s research and incubation efforts. Ray Ozzie and Craig Mundie will report to Steve Ballmer after Bill Gates leave.??
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Counting the days of Bill Gates
posted by on Jun 20
When looking to build something, whether it???s a computer or an engine, a desk or a chair, metal, electrical, or wood, I find it very helpful to look at the work of someone else. I don???t do this to copy their work, as I find something that I need, or want, to be different. Instead, I use what I see as a starting point, to change to my needs or tastes.
What I will do here is give the reader a few ideas of mine, to copy if they wish, or to step off from my ideas to something greater.
A while ago, I spoke of the Via PC-1 concept motherboards, and how great a start they would be for a Home Server (using Windows Home Server, for instance), or a media center, or an HTPC. It seems that for some unknown reason, the PC-1 motherboards are not available ??? with no excuses given, nor any bad reviews that would cause them to be discontinued. In fact, the motherboard was used in the Everex PC that was sold in great numbers by WalMart at Christmas. The board was a micro ATX form factor, and as such, would not fit into the smallest cases, designed for miniITX. That should not have caused problems for most, but still there seems to be no reasons for the disappearance.
 the PC-2500 platform
 the Everex PC, incorporating the PC-2500 motherboard
 the PC-3500 motherboard, no floppy connection, and a PCIe slot substituted for a 2nd PCI slot
All the above seem to be gone from the U.S. market.
So instead, why not try a miniITX board? It fits better with a set of audio and video components because of the size of the cases possible.
Intel has just come out with a board for our consideration. It uses a very low power CPU, based on the Core architecture, and comes soldered into the PCB. It only has provision for 1 DIMM, but since DDR2 memory is available in capacities up to 2GB per stick, the memory capacity is 2GB. Although the video is built in, the possibility is there for using one of the flavors of Vista on the machine, although the better choice would be Windows XP Media Center Edition.
The choice of case is critical. All components must fit, but also, the system must look good from the outside, because it is after all, part of the Home Theater.
 the Intel miniITX mainboard, using the Atom processor, a derivative of the Core architecture
  the Apex MD-100 miniITX case
The case chosen necessitates the use of a notebook-style DVD drive, so if you want to have a Blu-ray drive included another choice of case is needed. Apex has 2 other models that look approximately like the MD-100, and are only slightly larger. The Apex case is more expensive than some, but it is well built, like the rest of the line. This manufacturer has cases also sold under the name Supercase, so if you see the same model number, with the Supercase designation, it would be identical.
For this case, I would choose a notebook DVD-RW from Samsung or Toshiba, simply because of the reliability that those brands offer. If you are going with a full sized drive, in another case, I would consider the Samsung drives first, as they are very reliable, and very quiet, showing no problems with firmware glitches.
Although moving toward the highest capacity hard drive would be the move most would make, I would say that anything these days over 500 GB should get you by well. Also, since the video capabilities, and the CPU will not do 1080p Blu-ray very well, it might be a really nice dual duty system for the bedroom, functioning as a general purpose PC, along with a media server ??? I can see myself computing with a wireless keyboard and mouse, on the foot of the bed, with this being connected to a 32??? LCD.
Nice enough as a budget system, a bedroom system, or for those pampered youngsters going off to college, a dorm system. For those wanting a bit more, a PCI (not PCIe) video card can still be had, and could do fairly well ??? this could possibly carry off 1080p, if the machine was carefully set up. It would require a PCI riser card, which is available for about $25. Actually to go for the true HTPC, with DVR capabilities, of course a tuner is needed.
For every purpose but gaming, this sub-$800 PC would get the job done in style. (and as I said, you now have some ideas to build on!)
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Technorati Tags: HTPC - Intel Atom - Apex - Supercase - Samsung - PCI tuner
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New Ideas For A Media Server (or HTPC)
posted by on Jun 20
5 Things you need to know before building, buying, or repairing a computer. I have a question, why are there only 5 things I ever need to know about anything??? I wonder if there is a lot more I need to know or are the 5 things I need to know scratching the surface and not really deep enough to help me. I decided to make my own 5 things post that I am sure you will find very useful or at least interesting.
1st thing you need to know; if you are going to build your own system, think of what you will be doing with it now and in the future. Say you are a casual user and you check e-mail, surf the web and play spider solitaire or Zuma, you might think well I do not need something really powerful for that right? Well maybe right now but what happens if you decide to start doing photo editing, watch movies, play a few more newer games, or you found a good program you want to use but the new system is not powerful enough. Always think of the future when you are building a new computer, I really dislike when I spent money to build the system just to turn around and have to shell out more money to upgrade it.
1 ???? thing you need to know; when building a new system make sure you understand the specifications of the motherboard so you do not buy useless hardware that will not work with it. Also read the manual, you do not know how many times I have helped people to fix their systems because they did not read the manual.
2nd thing you need to know; if you are going to buy a new computer from a respected retailer please read up on the type of system you want before going to the store. There is a constant turnover of salespeople at major retailers and so training can be lacking. Some salespeople know less about the product you are looking for then you do so if you have any questions please try to get them answered from the manufacturer. Please do not think I am disrespecting all retail salespeople, some are really good.
2 ?? thing you need to know; stick with major OEM brands, like Dell, HP, Gateway, Toshiba, and Lenovo. Some places sell generic white box systems and sometimes they can be a mixed bag of hardware, kind of like a grab bag of stuff that could be of low quality.
3rd thing you need to know; if you plan on repairing the system you currently have, ask yourself if the system is worth repairing? If you have had the system for 4-5 years then it is better to throw it away and get a new one. The price of new computers is pretty low compared to a few years ago and so for a little more than the price to fix the old one you can have a new one that is a lot faster and will serve you for the next 4-5 years. If the problem is something you can fix then fix it yourself and save the money you would have spent for gas. The internet is your friend, if you have a computer problem you want to get fixed then search for the answer, trust me someone else out there has had the same problem you do and there may be a quick solution. If the computer is the only one in the house and you cannot use the internet, the public library has a few you can use to find the answer.
3 ?? thing you need to know; always back up everything on your computer that you want to keep. My system is backed up twice a week, who knows when that bugger is going to die on me. The reason I say this, sometimes the only answer to fixing a problem is reinstalling Windows. Software issues can be hard to track down and if you have searched the net, talked to repair people and see no other solutions except take it to a repair and spend lot of money or reinstall Windows, just reinstall Windows.
4th thing you need to know; there is no one who is right all the time. We all make mistakes and might give information that fixed our problem but will have others chasing their tail. Please weigh the information you get, and always ask for second opinions, we all know there are plenty of people with opinions ready to give.
4 ?? thing you need to know; never settle for a computer or service that just does the job. I do not know how many times I was ready to pull out my hair because someone bought a piece of hardware that was not sufficient to handle their needs or the system had subpar hardware that had a glitch I could not figure out. This causes all sorts of headaches and really makes computer people unhappy. Spend the little extra to get a good quality part or replacement so it will handle all of your needs and then some. A good deal that is pretty cheap and saves you lots of money may ultimately cost you twice as much in the long term.
5th thing you need to know; building, buy or repairing a computer can be fun and a learning experience. Do not let it be a life lesson in humility because of misinformation, a hasty decision, or not researching. We all can be enticed into making a hasty purchase only to regret it later so always be prepared will all of the information you can get your hands on before undertaking anything. I also want to add you can do anything if you put your mind to it.
I hope you enjoyed this as much as I have, until next time.
Kineo
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5 Incredible Things about Building, Buying or Repairing a PC
posted by on Jun 20
Just announced, and chronicled on Robin Harris????? column on ZDNet, Apple???s next operating system will include the Zettabyte File System, now simply referred to as ZFS.
ZFS is a 128 bit file system, which allows for expansion that is, for all practical purposes, unlimited (why it is, is beyond the scope of this article, but a very good description of the entire file system is located here [pdf] .)
This is very bad news for Microsoft, for as we all know, will never be including new technology unless forced. For business, this will be the file system desired by all IT departments, and Mac will have it. Unless the boys at Redmond have been working on this in secret, they have a lot of catching up to do.
from the article
As if Grand Central weren???t enough bad news for Microsoft, now they have ZFS to contend with. Building a reliable, high-performance file system takes years and Microsoft doesn???t have years to respond.
The formal announcement is for Snow Leopard server, which is how Apple introduces new file systems. HFS+ first arrived on a server version as well.
Who cares?
Anyone who stores data should.
Microsoft???s NTFS is 20 year old technology borrowed from DEC. Fine for small disks and puny CPUs. Not so great for today???s data intensive systems and applications.
Few people I know understand this ??? they think that NTFS is pure Microsoft, and give credit where it is not due.
Silent data corruption is common - only you don???t know it - because the corruption shows up as other problems, like missing DLLs.
ZFS: open source from Sun
ZFS is the first desktop file system with true end-to-end data integrity. Thanks to sophisticated tree-based checksums it detects and corrects silent data corruption anywhere in the data path: disks, cables, interfaces and more.
The checksums are stored with the parent block, so the file system always knows that the child block is both uncorrupted and the correct block. That???s just one of the errors that NTFS and most other commodity file systems - including the Mac???s HFS+ - are prone too.
Sun???s ZFS engineering team started working on ZFS 7 years ago as a clean-sheet design. It combines file system and volume management functionality. Instead of managing individual disks, you manage a pool of blocks. ZFS takes care of the details.
Turning up the heat on Microsoft
For all of Microsoft???s fine talk about innovation they don???t do squat unless someone else does it first. Remember IE 6? ZFS is a modern and innovative file system that solves some difficult data storage and integrity problems.
This will tend to blow the?? entire?? ???Windows 7 will be essentially a tune up of Vista????? rot, unless they wish to surrender more of the office market to Mac.
Like these:
No more Disk Warrior
Data corruption on PCs and Macs is a sad and stupid fact of life. Power failures, flaky RAM, poor grounding, (slowly) failing hard drives, driver glitches, phantom writes and more conspire to rot your data.
ZFS eliminates that. All blocks are checksummed and the checksum is stored in a parent block. ZFS always knows if the block is correct and/or corrupt. Every block has a parent block (with one obvious exception that gets special treatment), so the entire data store is self-validating. You???ll never have to wonder if all your data is correct again. It is.
No RAID cards or controllers
ZFS implements very fast RAID that fixes the performance knock-off against software RAID. In ZFS all writes are the fastest kind: full stripe writes. And the RAID is running on the fastest processor in your system (your Mac), rather than some 3-5 year old microcontroller.
Just add drives to your system and you have a fast RAID system. With Serial Attach SCSI and SATA drives you???ll pay for the drives (cheap and getting cheaper), cables and enclosures.
No more volumes
Every time you add a disk to your Mac you see another disk icon on the desktop. If you want to RAID some disks you use Disk Utility (or something) to create the volume. Slow, error-prone, confusing.
ZFS eliminates the whole volume concept. Add a disk or five to your system and it joins your storage pool. More capacity. Not more management.
Kind of like Windows Home Server ??? except that this actually works, and was built to work that way, not being a kludge put atop another way of handling storage.
Backup made easy
ZFS does something called snapshot copy, which creates a copy of all your data at whatever point in time you want. Copy the snapshot up to a disk, tape or NAS box and you are backed up.
Create a snapshot on every write if you want, so if your database barfs you can go back to just before it choked.
But that???s not all!
For in-depth treatment of ZFS see here and here. Includes links to more technical info and benchmarks.
The Storage Bits take
It would be nice if Microsoft were driving innovation and reliability, but - like General Motors - they prefer to rest of their laurels. And like General Motors, they are facing a long and painful decline if they don???t get their act together.
GM says they are proud that 1 in 4 cars sold in America are GM - but the number used to be 3 out of 5. Microsoft is rightfully proud of their 90% market share. But that share can change - as it has for IE - and they have nowhere to go but down.
As users we benefit from the competition. Kudos to Apple for bringing the latest technology to consumers.
If Mac gets this right, it will immediately own another 10-15% of the corporate market ??? that???s my own prediction, and that percentage will continue to grow, until Microsoft has their own implementation ??? reinvention of the wheel will not suffice here ??? it is nothing to be ashamed of to acknowledge that someone else got to an answer before you, it is only a problem if you fail to acknowledge, or act.
(further reading about ZFS [pdf])
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Quote of the day:
At times one remains faithful to a cause only because its opponents do not cease to be insipid. - Friedrich Nietzsche
Technorati Tags: ZFS - Apple - Sun - open source - self-healing - journaling file systems
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Snow Leopard Will Have ZFS!
posted by on Jun 19
The campaign is on. The many minions of Microsoft are setting out on their appointed tasks, to speculate on what will and won???t be in the next revision of Windows, what needs to change, and be sure that the public is no better off than they were before the project started ??? but they will be whipped into a buying frenzy.
Yesterday, I had a comment I made get removed from the queue on a post by MaryJo Foley, over at ZDNet. The article was one of the above types, speculating about the changes that would take place in the next couple of years, before the Redmond crew unleashes Windows 7 upon the buying public. The article was not terribly informative, but since not much has been released, it could not be. That is part of the problem. By engaging in constant speculation, the frenzy is maintained. Thinking that that frenzy is a bad idea, I simply posted a small statement of my thoughts at the moment. The entire comment was ???Let the FUD begin.???
Apparently this was too much truth for the lightweights at ZDNet ??? but they did get their point across ??? I will probably never comment on the posts of anyone ever again. I did go back to see if any others felt the same way, and saw that others had commented that their comments had also been removed.
I???m assuming that the free interchange of ideas is no longer welcome there, and there are more than me who have become persona non grata.
That is not the main thrust of this post, just an aside -?? thanks for the indulgence.
An article this morning on ExtremeTech titled ???How to Make Windows 7 Not Suck??? sounds at first like a diatribe from Wayne’s World - Land of Redmond, but is surprisingly well thought out. It gives the reasons in order, why Vista has failed, and what should change. Whether it will is anyone’s guess. Not to seem overly pessimistic, but a big part of the problem is that Mr. Ballmer has already said that ‘7′ will be a Vista with patches, sort of like Vista SP2, or SP3, depending on how long we have to wait.
Microsoft has never really been good at accepting criticism, of any kind, so that includes the constructive kind. It has never had to backtrack - each iteration has been more grandiose than the one before - and it had up to January 2007, served them well.
Now it is time to dial the main features back, as so many of them are bloat, and unnecessary for 90% of the users. It seems as though the biggest problem facing the designers of ‘7′ is sticking to the original design concept that Gates had for DLLs. Dynamic Link Libraries were supposed to flow freely in and out of memory, allowing the operating system to be small and compact, yet accomplish almost anything when needed. Of course, this same idea was supposed to work for application programs as well, and we can see how well that worked.
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Technorati Tags: Windows 7 - changes - updates - DLL - ExtremeTech - ZDNet - design concepts
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Windows 7 & The Mouse in My Pocket
posted by on Jun 18
The business of news is a forward thinking one, where reporting on current events brings eyes and mind on the events of the future.
The New York Times has always had an eye on the past as well, by maintaining a very careful inventory of all the output of the past. Just last month, the fully searchable content of the Times from 1851 to 1922 was made available on the web. The content comprises more than 15 million articles.
The chief software architect for the Times, Derek Gottfrid, decided that the job of maintaining all of that content was too much to do in house, Instead, the content was put ‘into the cloud’ on servers owned by Amazon. The result of this is called Time Machine, and Gottfrid states that without the help of Amazon, the project would never have been undertaken.
The trend is on its way, with big players like the New York Times buying into the idea. And there are more than enough players to accommodate those who look forward.
from Newsweek
If you thought Amazon sold only books, you probably think Google is just a search engine. Both Amazon and Google—along with Microsoft, IBM, Dell, Yahoo and other small players—have just started rolling out cloud computing services. Get used to hearing that expression. In April, Gartner Research dubbed it “the biggest buzz phrase of 2008, [but] little understood until 2009.” At its most basic, cloud computing is the ability to use software and data on the Internet (a.k.a., the cloud) instead of on your hard drive.
Ten years ago if you wanted to do something with your PC you needed to buy software and install it. The ascent of Web 2.0—to deploy an older buzz phrase—is making that practice obsolete. “Suddenly, what cloud computing allows is for businesses and individuals to use it as if it were their own. It makes computing a heck of a lot less expensive,” says tech journalist Nicholas Carr, author of “The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, From Edison to Google.”
The players like the New York Times will not be changing methods or locations quickly, so any changes in the pricing of Internet usage will not deter their efforts. The pricing will undoubtedly affect some smaller players, but hopefully these larger players will be using large quantities of these services, and will allow the ISPs and maintainers of the backbone to see the benefit of large expansion right away, This should push the idea of volume pricing, with better deals for those with large usage, and perhaps the ‘little guys’, like individuals, will be able to escape the devil of metered usage.
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Technorati Tags: NY Times - Time Machine - cloud computing - Amazon - Microsoft – Dell
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NY Times Embraces Cloud Computing
posted by on Jun 18
The number of articles concerning the changes at Microsoft gets larger each day. with the end of this month defining the end of an era, it seems that he question of whether Ray Ozzie, the man designated to guide the ship, can bring Microsoft out of the doldrums that began with the late release of Vista and continued with the many error laden updates for all of the company’s software.
In an article in NetworkWorld, the assumption is still put forth that the path that Ozzie designated a few months ago will still be the direction taken. That path is to remove some of the computing from local desktops, relocating it to the mystical realm of the ‘network cloud’.
This doesn’t seem to be any problem for the author of the article, as the changes are arranged in a neat procession for the reader. The problem with this, and possibly a very large problem for a company like Microsoft, is that the developments of the last few weeks signal a time of metered access to the Internet.
While metered access to ‘the cloud’ may be a minor annoyance to the home crowd, it will stifle the corporate user, as these machines will rack up huge costs as megabyte after megabyte is moved around in the course of the business day. This metered usage will negate much if not all the savings of the removal of local storage, and software-as-a-service.
This entire plan, with its fine details, is exactly what the large corporation faces continuously, inertia. Once a plan has been started, it becomes difficult to maneuver through small changes needed to avoid trouble when the market changes.
Ray Ozzie is someone who has always thought big – he was the creator of Lotus Notes. He developed Groove before his company was purchased by Microsoft. Will he be able to move nimbly through the changes occurring daily, to keep the Microsoft ship from running aground? The company is being pressured from all sides to compete with Google, seen as the de facto rival. Reports of the Windows juggernaut being overtaken by Google’s advertising dollars by the year 2009 must frighten those in Redmond who share the siege mentality of Bill Gates.
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Technorati Tags: Microsoft - Ray Ozzie - Bill Gates - Google - corporate inertia
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posted by on Jun 18
“Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.”
Samuel Beckett
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A Samuel Beckett Quote
posted by on Jun 18
Doing some data mining today, I was interested in what had happened to contributor George Ou, whom I had found gone from ZDNet. I guess that I should have been more observant, but then I have been spending less time on ZDNet lately, as there seems to be a dearth of news reported there these days. After all, how many stories can a person read about how great Vista really is, if we would only give it a chance.
So, while looking around, I found George’s last post for ZDNet, and then went back to Google, to see if he had landed anywhere yet.
He has - the website is called formortals.com . He shares the space with someone I am unfamiliar with, Justin James. Together they have a good, and different take on things – one worthy of your perusal if you enjoy quality writing about technology.
Check it.
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Technorati Tags: George Ou - Justin James - website - ZDNet - technology
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With Google It’s Hard to Lose People
posted by on Jun 18
Well after waiting for firefox 3 to become available for the UK which wasn’t until the late evening of download day i finally got the updated full release and am very happy with it. I’d been using the RC2 for a while and was enjoying it, i’ve been an IE guy for all the time i’ve been using the internet i wasn’t a big user of firefox until 3 was released in it’s beta form. After downloading and installing the final release i noticed the incredible change in loading speeds, i read somewhere that it’s supposed to be 7 times faster than IE and well not quite sure if it’s 7 times faster but it’s definitely a lot faster tha anything i have used for internet browsing in the past.
Like i said i am a IE guy but since installing firefox 3 i have now been using nothing but firefox for browsing, i do come across some issues but that’s mainly to do with plug-ins and add ons and things like that. As for themes, i haven’t really looked up any themes yet as i don’t think there are any available (not fully sure on that) but i’m not really interested in them as firefox looks ok to me and to be honest it’s just the speeds i’m happy with. I do have at least 10 tabs saved for opening when i open firefox and it does get a bit slow when trying to load all the content but i can understand that, i’m sure you’ve probably downloaded firefox 3 anyway and if you have then i hope you are enjoying it.
As far as i know download day was a huge success with the amount of downloads, i just hope nobody was playing around and decided to be stupid about it and download it like 10 time or something just to raise the number. As for downloading the browser well that did take quite a while but again that’s understandable with all the other people that were downloading it. So like the title of this post says, forget the fasterfox plug-in to speed things up cause i don’t think it’ll be needed for quite a while (for me at least). Thanks for reading
E-mail: ss3luke@googlemail.com
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Firefox 3 - forget fasterfox
posted by on Jun 18
The video on YouTube was amazing. Thousands and thousands of hits. The video of several people popping corn with their ringing cell phones is very interesting, and gives lots of people the impression that the emissions from cell phones are dangerous.
That is exactly the impression that the company behind the ???project??? wants planted. It will help them sell lots of their Bluetooth headsets ??? or will it?
Headset manufacturer Cardo will not be getting any of my money, as I believe that this type of misleading advertising is borderline criminal, and should not ever be rewarded.
Will you be buying a Bluetooth headset by Cardo?
full story and video
Technorati Tags: cell phone radiation - popcorn - Bluetooth - Cardo - CNN - YouTube
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Cell Phone Popcorn – Hoax Exposed
posted by on Jun 18
I went out looking for reviews on the FRS Antioxidant Health Energy Drink product that Lance Armstrong is endorsing these days and I ran across this blog where the author has set out to try every energy boosting drink on the market. This guy has contributed hours of reading material on most of the drinks claiming to safely boost your energy. If you buy the stuff, it’s probably the best objective review site you’ll find.
Speaking of objective reviews, I came across that site because I am actually researching the benefits of fish oil supplements. The body building magazines seem to endorse their usage out of hand, but I’m having a hard time finding unbiased endorsement to verify the fat burning benefits claimed in so many places. Does anyone know of a good source of unbiased information on Omega 3’s and other supplements?
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