News items and other various tidbits that Chad Cloman finds interesting enough to share with his friends.
If you are thinking of upgrading your wireless network to the (draft) 802.11n standard, perhaps it’s time to think again. There are some problems with patent ownership that have not been resolved.
Link: http://arstechnica.com/…
Seagate has announced it will discontinue manufacturing IDE hard drives by the end of the year. The interface, also known as PATA, is losing ground to the newer, faster, and more popular SATA format.
Link: http://arstechnica.com/…
Chad’s News has previously mentioned flash-based, solid state hard drives, but it’s worth noting that they’re continuing to decrease in price and rise in capacity. For now, they appear to be targeted only at laptops.
Remember the Amiga computer? It was well ahead of its time back in the late 80s, but it never really took off beyond being a niche computer for graphic artists. The brand has stuck around, however, and Amiga, Inc. has announced a new line of computers running Amiga OS. I doubt it will amount to much, but I still have a soft spot for the brand.
Link: http://arstechnica.com/…
Here at the Chad’s News network command center, we strongly believe in getting every possible bit of use out of our aging computer equipment. Hands-on exposure to new technology, therefore, is not something we often experience. Thus the need for articles such as the one below, which gives a good overview of current and upcoming display connectors. It covers VGA, DVI, HDMI, UDI, and DisplayPort, as well as some of their relative strengths and weaknesses. Definitely something to read before purchasing a monitor or video card.
Link: http://www.extremetech.com/…
(via Slashdot)
While it’s been known for some time now that computers can be cooled by submerging them in cooking oil, the linked article discusses a company trying to do this commercially with server racks. The oil doesn’t conduct electricity and is better than fans at transferring heat away from the computer components.
Link: http://www.newscientisttech.com/…
(via Slashdot)
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?”
Chad Cloman
Denver, CO USA
