Category: Techie

Anything of particular interest to the techie crowd.

Preposterous claims for storage technology?

According to a story on slashdot, an inventor, Michael Thomas, claims to have solved “non-contact spintronics” and will therefore increase hard drive storage capabilities 1000 fold.  This will result in 1.2 petabyes of storage on a 3.5″ hard drive.  He expects his technology to be ready in 4 to 5 years, and to come in around $750.

To borrow a comment made many times before on many techie sites, why is all the great technology 4 to 5 years off?  I expect that like all other great technologies that are 4 to 5 years off at announcement, this will also remain perpetually just a few years away from shipping product.  I hope I’m wrong, but doubt I will be.

[tags]Hard Drive technology, Colossal Storage[/tags]

Latest version of OSx86 installable on PCs

Apple put additional security in to the latest version of OS X for Intel.  And someone has already broken that and come up with a patch allowing for an installable version.  This is the challenge of securing a digital product.  With the Internet, only one person has to break the security to make a digital product available to everyone.

What this means is that Apple’s best attempts to secure their OS have, ultimately, failed. For its best efforts, the company is unable to lock OS X to their hardware.  Without doubt, this will have profound impacts on the company’s future as running OSx86 on a PC becomes less a hacker’s trick and more mainstream.  When all it requires is the downloading of a DVD, that’s certainly the future we’re looking at.

[tags]Apple, OS X[/tags]

Interview with VMWare’s Raghu Raghuram

Here is a very cool writeup from an interview with Raghu Raghuram, vice president of datacenter and desktop products for VMWare.  The discussion covers the company’s releasing GSX server and VMWare player as free software, plans for server virtualization management, future software updates, and competing products (We’re mainly looking at you, Xen).

The future looks bright for VMware. On tap for this year are the vendor’s VirtualCenter 2 and ESX Server 3 products. New features will include the long-awaited support for 4 CPUs in a box and up to 16 Gbytes of memory rather than the current 2 CPUs and 4 GBytes per VM. ESX 2.x will add support for IP-based storage, including NAS and iSCSI, in addition to traditional SANs.

[tags]VMWare, virtualization, Xen[/tags]

The upside to ADD in the tech-world

I’ve never been formally diagnosed with ADD, but I think anyone who knows me will tell you it’s a safe bet to assume I have it. This article on the benefits of ADD in terms of working as a techie sounds about right to me.

7. Stimulus Seeking Brain.

A perfect match for the wired world, an under stimulated brain and an over stimulated virtual environment. Being an info junkie can be a good thing. Well, not always:)

[tags]ADD, techie[/tags]

Microsoft loses big name Linux developer

News from ZDNet is Daniel Robbins has left Microsoft after only 8 months. Robbins felt he was not able to work to his full potential, so he left.

“I didn’t make the decision to leave Microsoft due to concerns about the company as a whole — Microsoft has just had a string of very successful product launches and I anticipate that it will continue to enjoy great success,” he said.

“The reason I decided to leave had to do with my specific experiences working in Microsoft’s Linux Lab. Although I believe that the concept behind Microsoft’s Linux Lab is a good one, I wasn’t able to work at my full level of technical ability and I found this frustrating,” he said.

[tags]Microsoft, Linux, Gentoo, Open Source, Daniel Robbins[/tags]

Help make the world wireless

OK, you really need to know enough about your computers and security to protect yourself, but the FON project is trying to make wireless internet access available pretty much everywhere.  If you are one of the first 3000 to sign up, you can get a Linksys WRT54GL router, flashed with the FON firmware upgrade, for $25 plus shipping.  I’m already signed up, and have received confirmation that I’m in the 3000.

[tags]FON, WRT54GL, WRT54G, Wireless, Free internet[/tags]

Nintendo DS wifi details

This is realllllllly techie, and probably not of interest to either of my regular readers.  However, just in case someone out there was wondering this morning “How, exactly, can I learn more about the wireless capabilities of my Nintendo DS?” I post this link.  Read at akkit.org more of the details behind the wireless functions on your DS.

[tags]Nintendo DS, Nintendo, DS, wifi, wireless[/tags]

Drugs are good, OK?

In a twist on conventional wisdom, there appears to be some benefit from a marijuana-like drug, which can in fact spur new brain growth.  That sounds much better than the normally believed killing of brain cells now, doesn’t it?

In the stoner stereotype, pot smokers and dying brain cells go hand in hand. However, new research suggests the situation may be more uplifting than that. A drug that functions as concentrated marijuana does may spur neurogenesis, the process by which the brain gives birth to new nerve cells.

[tags]Science news, marijuana, drugs, brain cell growth[/tags]

Versora Progression Desktop

I hadn’t even heard of this application before, but it is supposed to be a tool to help migrate users from Windows to Linux.  If you are interested in how well Versora Progression Desktop works, here is a detailed review of the program and its performance.  I’d post more about it, but the site isn’t responding for me right now, so I’ve only read the first page.  But color me intrigued so far.  Once it’s back, I’ll read the rest of the review.  This could be something handy for me to point others towards in the future.

n a nutshell, Versora Progression Desktop will migrate appearance settings, sounds, input device options, and application settings such as email, web browsers, word processors, and instant messaging. In other words, it covers all the fundamentals of operating system and application migration. If you’d like to learn more, you can visit the Versora website for detailed information.

[tags]Versora, Windows migration, Linux, Linspire[/tags]