31 December 2013 | Computers, Gizmos, Spare Me! |
Oh, 2013, what a high-tech year you were!
From the general recognition (finally) that the US government was spying on everyone, everyone’s dog, and everyone’s dog’s lawn presents, to the almighty Mobile Revolution, to the 64-bit iPhone with 2X the awesome, to the complete abortion that is Windows 8/8.1…
Yes, it was a year to remember in the tech world.
Pay no attention to all those fireballs everyone was talking about.
As 2014 rolls in, I thought I would take a brief, syrupy-sweet and fluffy look at The State of Technology.
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18 April 2013 | Computers, Spare Me! |
Isn’t it awesome?! No, it’s retarded.
If I read one more article about how “the PC is dead, long live the smartphone and tablet!”, I just may have to vomit. A lot.
Nowadays, it’s smartphones and tablets that make the news the most, and not without good reason. Yes, they are capable of some pretty amazing feats. And people are most definitely obsessed and/or fascinated with touch everything.
But there are a few good reasons why I believe that the PC is far from dead. It may evolve into something new and improved, but it isn’t going anywhere unless some new “killer app” in terms of hardware comes out, and smartphones and tablets are NOT that “killer app”.
As an interesting aside, I recently ditched Windows 8 and went back to Windows 7. The reasons for this are directly related to the whole “the PC is dead” thing, and how Microsoft has gotten it all terribly wrong.
But, I digress. First up, why isn’t the PC dead?
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8 January 2012 | Computers, Energy, Spare Me! |
I hate to say, “I told you so!”, but: I told you so!
Actually, I don’t hate saying it. I’m relishing every second of this glorious moment, and I’m not ashamed to admit it.
Okay, I was ashamed for the few seconds it took me type the first sentence, but I got over it.
What the heck am I yammering about? Green hard drives, of course! You may recall a previous post I wrote:
Recently, Seagate came out and openly called “BS!” on their own green hard drive BS.
I suppose we should praise them for this, but it would have been better if they hadn’t let their marketing bozos direct their engineering department in the first place!
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7 October 2011 | Computers, Spare Me! |
Well, heck, everyone else is talking about it incessantly, so why not me, too?
Of course, there are much more important topics to be worried about, like the fact that the global economic and political situation seems to be destabilizing in numerous ways. But this is a techie blog, so we’ll forget about all that for now.
Since Jobs died, I have read far too many tributes about all the wonderful contributions he made to the tech world. Well, to be fair, he was more or less responsible for many shifts in the tech industry. Whether or not those shifts have actually benefited humanity as a whole, well… that’s a whole other ball of wax.
He was also, according to many reports, quite an ass at times. And let’s not forget about the infamous Reality Distortion Field (henceforth referred to as the RDF)…
Apple’s new lack of a its Reality Distortion Field is the primary reason why I believe that Jobs’ death is in fact the beginning of the end for Apple.
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10 August 2011 | Spare Me! |
I have to say that I simply can’t stand it any more.
I’m talking about Apple and their damned lawsuits. They are suing anyone and everyone who makes any product that even remotely resembles an iThing (gosh, I hope they don’t sue me for putting that lowercase “i” in front of the word “Thing”!).
Seriously, all computers look alike. Mostly that’s because they all use the same exact components, and they all serve the same basic function. The same is true of tablet devices and cell phones.
So how is it that Apple gets away with actually forbidding other companies from even selling their products now?
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12 April 2011 | Computers, Energy, Spare Me! |
These days, the fad is GREEN. Everything is “eco-this” or “green that”. Of course, we’re supposed to be terribly concerned about saving Mother Earth. Well, I’ve got news for you: Mother Earth is plenty capable of taking care of herself… Whether or not humankind survives her care is another question entirely. Frankly, if I were Big Mama, I’d be pretty pissed off that my occupants were continually dumping toxic crap on me and irradiating me. I don’t think I would care if they were using a certain type of hard drive or not.
But, I digress…
If you’re in the market for a new hard drive, you may have noticed that there are now tons of “green” hard drives out there. There are several reasons why you do NOT want one of these things. Perhaps the most important reason is that when you get right down to it, they do almost nothing to truly save energy – which kind of defeats the purpose of having a green drive, now doesn’t it?
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31 December 2009 | Computers, Spare Me! |
©1976, MGM
I’m mad as hell, and I’m not gonna take it any more!! (great movie, Network was…)
As if it wasn’t bad enough that Intel couldn’t write a driver that takes full advantage of the GMA500 in certain netbooks, now apparently they’ve resorted to sneakily “modifying” what “Enhanced SpeedStep” actually does.
I’m talking about the Celeron dual-core SU2300 processor in those fabulous “thin and light” notebooks that are quickly replacing netbooks so that everyone (except you) can make more money.
So, what’s the problem? The SU2300 does not have the “SpeedStep” that you think it does… which explains why no one can get it to work!
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11 July 2009 | Spare Me! |
NetworkWorld has an interesting article entitled How to use electrical outlets and cheap lasers to steal data. The article discusses a presentation that will be held at the Black Hat USA conference later this month.
The deal is that two researchers are supposedly going to demonstrate how keystrokes can be read from a remote computer using either a laser, or signals transmitted over the ground line coming from a nearby computer.
While these techniques might be interesting to know about, somehow I think we have bigger things to worry about.
Read on to see what I mean…
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