MILITANTPLATYPUS

This is a must have for me!

whateverworks.com

via boj

Do you find that USB 2.0 is not really meeting your needs, and are thinking about making the change to firewire? You might want to wait it out a bit. USB 2.0 has data transfer speeds of 480Mb/s; where firewire is at 800Mb/s. Intel is working with other companies to release USB 3.0 in mid 2008. It is showing promising speeds of 4.8Gb/s!

news.com

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The thing is, if you carefully construct an example document, you can get a compression ratio much higher. How much higher? MUCH, MUCH higher. For example, if you created a PNG image containing just one colour repeated over and over then you could easily get a 1000:1 ratio. For a text document containing 1 character repeated over and over, it’s possible to shrink 100Gb to about 6k. Think about that, it is a huge difference: 1.7e7:1.

That’s all well and good as an interesting experiment, but what does it mean for an average user? Imagine I had constructed one of those zip files that had shrunk 100Gb down to 6k and I sent you that file. If you trusted me, you might try to open it. There inlies the problem: while you can readily accept the zipped file, the chances that you have the 100Gb of free memory (including virtual memory) to accomodate the decompressed file are bloody slim. When you try to open one of these files, your computer will quickly become overwhelmed and stop responding; all of the free memory having been used up, it can’t do anything else. You effectively suffer a denial of service attack.

 

That is what we call a decompression bomb.

solitude.vkps.co.uk

• 50 Gigabytes: Library floor of books on shelves
• 5 Exabytes: All words ever spoken by human beings.
• 10 Kilobytes: Page out of an encyclopedia

jamesshuggins.com

Now I have heard everything - there is actually someone out there who likes spam, loves it in fact. Alex Dragulescu receives spam like the rest of us, but he puts his into good use. He takes the ASCII values of the words in a spam email, and converts them into art.

sq.ro

via nor

This article is a great look at how a motherboard is created, and it also takes a look at the culture at ECS China.

hardcoreware.net

via lb

A whole mess of screenshots of Vista Beta2.

It is a shame that pretty != functional

pcmag.com