Archive for the 'Technology' Category
I recently installed the 64-bit edition of Microsoft's latest OS, Vista. I thought I'd share some of my findings thus far. My system spec is as follows: AMD Athlon 4800+ X2, 2 gigs ram, Creative X-FI, Seagate Cheetah X15.3 SCSI drive, Geforce 7800GTX 256MB.
- UAC is annoying as HELL. I turned it off (thank god I can do that). I can’t even copy files from one folder to another with 2 security dialog boxes appearing first. WHAT?!
- No sound. Sucks
- Installed latest nVidia display drivers which helped. I noticed that certain graphic display elements are a little slow (especially when things move in the start bar)
- Search works really well. I feel like I’m using Spotlight for the mac (integrates with office 2007 as well which is sweet)
- The organization of the configuration of the OS seems to be pretty scattered. In other words, I feel like I have to click through quite a few pages, tabs, all over the OS to fine tune it the way I want.. They seem to bury a lot of choices so most people won’t find em. (Is this usability? No.)
- Speed-wise, it seems not too shabby for a beta OS. Definitely little slower than XP.
- I cannot figure out how to restart Vista when connected via remote desktop. The only thing I can seem to do is log out or lock the PC. So if I am in the other room and have to reboot my box, I have to walk to the physical machine, login, and restart it
- The performance monitor in Vista is AWESOME. It shows all the processes broken down into those which use the most CPU/ram/disk.. so I can quickly see which apps have been hitting my disk the most, which are reading/writing from the network the most, etc etc. It’s the best system monitor I’ve seen on any OS yet.
- Why the heck are my desktop icons so freakin big? It’s annoying. I hate big icons
- I’m having trouble getting used to the new explorer and it’s sorting. There is no “list” view anymore. The sorting of files is done in 2 columns and instead of 5 sequential files listed one after another, they alternate between 2 columns in the list. Highly annoying.
- I have Outlook 2007, firefox, AIM, Yahoo, and uTorrent open and I am at 1.8 gigs of ram used. WTF. How am I supposed to even open IntelliJ or run any kind of services like a database or application server on this?
- X-FI doesn't work so tried Audigy 2. Suprise, that doesn’t work either. Creative REALLY sucks.
- I have “My Documents” folder on another drive other than my C drive. I can’t find a way to change the default location to the new one.
- Somehow my speedy OCZ 2 gig USB key doesn’t meet the minimum requirements for using the new “ReadyDrive” feature where it caches things on your USB sticks? This key is one of the fastest out there. Not sure what’s up with that.
- I’ve used 22 gigabytes on my C drive and I’ve only installed Vista/Firefox/Office 2007 Beta 2
The NVIDIA GeForce 7950GX2 card launches today which is a 2-GPU single card design…This thing is a beast and will cost an arm and leg!
X-Bit Labs does an awesome comparison of the AMD 4800 X2, Intel Core Duo, and the Intel Pentium D 960. What is amazing is that all 3 chips are within about 5% of each other on speed but the power consumption comparison is where it gets interesting. Look at this:
John Carmack disses Playstation 3
… in an interview that the PlayStation 3 game console is not as optimal as Microsoft’s Xbox 360
NEAT! — A musical realization of the motion graphics
Treo 700p announced. YAWN!
With a weight of 180 grams, it runs on a 312 MHz Intel XScale processor and features a high-res, 320×320 TFT colour screen like the Treo 650 - up from the 700w's limited 240×240, 128MB of memory -60MB free for PalmOS apps and data-. The 700p runs PalmOS Garnet v5.4.9., and supports Bluetooth v1.2 and dual CDMA digital (800/1900Mhz) plus CDMA2000 EvDO to complete the feature set. As usual, compatibility with Office, Excel and Powerpoint files is provided via the bundled software. MultiMediaCard, SD & SDIO cards are supported, up to two gigabytes, according to Palm. The digital camera sports 1280×1024 resolution and automatic light balance, capturing video at 352 x 288.
Online nightclub for teens. What's next?
The club is a cross between MySpace.com, the Web's biggest networking site, and "World of Warcraft" a multiplayer online game. Both are successful at building Web communities, and Littlefield and his company, Doppelganger, hope they've built a hybrid.
Awesome article on the "singularity debate"
Sometime in the next few years or decades, humanity will become capable of surpassing the upper limit on intelligence that has held since the rise of the human species. We will become capable of technologically creating smarter-than-human intelligence, perhaps through enhancement of the human brain, direct links between computers and the brain, or Artificial Intelligence. This event is called the "Singularity" by analogy with the singularity at the center of a black hole - just as our current model of physics breaks down when it attempts to describe the center of a black hole, our model of the future breaks down once the future contains smarter-than-human minds. Since technology is the product of cognition, the Singularity is an effect that snowballs once it occurs - the first smart minds can create smarter minds, and smarter minds can produce still smarter minds.—Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
The "right" way to eat a Reeses Peanut Butter cup.. in New York
Thanks to BetaNews:
“Mozilla has decided to strip out a major new feature of Firefox 2.0 in order to ensure that the browser meets a Q3 2006 release target, a post in the browser’s developer forum indicated earlier this week. “Places,” a complete rewrite of the browser’s bookmarking system, will no longer be included in the release.
While Places had made it into the first public alpha release of Firefox 2.0, codenamed “Bon Echo,” it had been previously pulled before then. In announcing the decision, Mozilla’s director of engineering Mike Schroepfer said the company wanted to ensure a quality release.”Rather than rush it to market - we’d prefer to spend the time it takes to get it right,” he wrote. Schroepfer said that it was a difficult decision, but it would ensure that when released, Places would work as Mozilla intended it to.”
Wednesday News 
Get your CRITICAL security fixes now for XP
Coming Soon: Google Voice Search
“A system provides search results from a voice search query. The system receives a voice search query from a user, derives one or more recognition hypotheses, each being associated with a weight, from the voice search query, and constructs a weighted boolean query using the recognition hypotheses. The system then provides the weighted boolean query to a search system and provides the results of the search system to a user.”
I knew it! Laser beans!!
The next generation of weapons in the U.S. arsenal could be straight out of science fiction: laser beams and heat rays. And they could be ready for action before you know it.
“Age Play” in Second Life. What will virtual realities do to us?!
Latest on PS3 — Far from complete!
We are about six months from launch, and debugging should be done, prototypes and dev kits should flow like water, and all the tame magazines should already have one. The situation is rather different though, they are nowhere, and there are two related reasons behind this.
Dell’s $10,000 Renegade sold out!
Quarter of species gone by 2050!
Using several models that project habitat changes, migration capabilities of various species, and related extinctions in 25 “hotspots,” scientists predict that a quarter of the world’s plant and vertebrate animal species would face extinction by 2050.
Complete AMD Roadmap
AMD will be moving swiftly over to AM2 and introducing energy efficient processors.
Analysis on Google’s DNA
An analysis of Google’s business structure that argues that the company’s unique organizational structure gives it the flexibility to consistently transform to meet any challenge the globe can offer.
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