Week 7: Clear

The lecture on the booting of a computer was very interesting. Learned a new acronym, MBR (Master boot record), and reminded of what POST stood for.

Unfortunately lately, the computers I've been buying always cover over the POST and so all I generally get to see is a big ACER advertisement every time I turn the computer back on. I realize it's able to be turned off, however I'm too lazy for that.

Back when I was big into overclocking my computer hardware I spent a lot of time messing with the blue BIOS screen. Generally I don't have to use it at all anymore, as college has reduced my ability to buy new parts.

Web 2.0 Project

I'm still not entirely sure I've done this correctly, however what is done is done. I went through Vuvox, x-timeline, and finally settled on onetruemedia as my story tool because it was better suited to automatically making the story more interesting. Creating an interesting presentation has never been my forté. Onetruemedia was definitely easier, however the premium feature warning, and settings were definitely annoying and left me slightly annoyed at times. However, it seems a lot of others also liked onetruemedia, so they apparently know what they're doing.

I chose formspring.me as an interaction method because it allows a quick, and anonymous response to the story, and is in a minimalist format.

http://www.onetruemedia.com/shared?p=a5f993cc56c125d146cd89&skin_id=601
is the Story.

http://www.formspring.me/ism3004 is my interaction method.

Week 6: Clear

As far as fast-paced technological advances go, I consider myself very lucky for growing up in this time period. At the core (pun alert) of this advancement are transistor-based processors. My first processor I bought was a whopping 133mhz intel. I moved onto an AMD chip that was around 1ghz, then I upgraded to an AMD 3200+, which is around when companies stopped going by the clock-speed of their processors as the main benchmark and things got a lot more confusing with naming schemes. Those are all on just single cores, and now I'm running an Intel Q6600 which has 4 cores, and is way faster than I could've ever imagined originally when I was young.

Recently they've discovered how to use graphene instead of silicon in processors and IBM made a 100Ghz processor out of it, they say 10x faster than the maximum of a silicon one! Although I've read this technology is years away from the mainstream (it always is). Eventually it's said that they can reach upto 1000Ghz on a graphene-based chip!

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9152960/IBM_details_world_s_fastest_graphene_transistor?source=rss_news

Week 5: Muddy

I feel like the book didn't really go that well into the technical parts of most of the storage devices, hard disk drives especially. While it was better covered in the lecture I was befuddled on certain questions on the quiz.

However, while I've heard of degaussing (used to love pressing that button on my old CRT monitors and see the screen go wild), I didn't realize it's application to recycle hard drives. I assumed that it rendered it useless afterwards. Also, looking up the picture of a degausser was a very interesting machine.