Daily Cup of Tech is observing a day of silence in recognition of the victims of the Virginia Tech incident on Monday, April 30, 2007. We will continue blogging on Tuesday. Make It Monday will return next week.
One thing that I often struggle with is making sure that the information that I put out each day on DCoT is good and relevant content. Sometimes I find myself falling onto the “posting just to post” trap and the results are generally less than stellar. I am sometimes so afraid of losing my audience that my quality suffers because of it.
This is not a problem that Brian Desmond deals with on his blog, which I am naming the Tech Blog of the Week! He practically refuses to update his blog unless he has something valuable to contribute. This means that, for example, over the past year he has posted about 50 times (whereas DCoT pumps that out in about a month). But the stuff that he is giving up is pure IT gold. Granted, the average home user is not going to get a whole lot out of many of his posts, but if you are a Windows network admin or work with Exchange, you definitely need to spend some quality time on his site. Here is a bit of a teaser of what he is putting out:
Just working through his website, I have already learned a pile about some topics that I would never have considered. And, he has given me a few ideas for some posts and applications as well.
Thanks to Barry H. for supporting the Release the Code Project this week. These fund help to keep DCoT up and running.
Barry H. has moved the DCoT Menu project within $30 of it’s release goal. I think that we will see this code made available any day now. If you would like to help donate toward this or other applications’ release, please feel free to donate on the Release the Code page.
Thanks, again, for your ongoing support. While small donations of just a few dollars may not seem like much to you, when enough of you get together and pool your money, it can have a big effect on DCoT. All financial support, regardless of how much or whether it is to Release the Code or help the Tip Jar, is all greatly appreciated.
I am not in the practice of posting broadcast e-mails that I receive from well-meaning friends and family but I did receive one from my mother today that I thought was interesting. These are three examples of how people had their credit card information stolen. I realize that these could very well be urban myths and I can not verify if these actually happened but they do convey a very important message: Be paranoid about your credit cards!
Here are the stories and some online resources to help you protect yourself from identity theft: Read the rest of the story…
This online generator creates your own custom unique WordPress Theme. Without any need for HTML, JS, PHP, or CSS knowledge. Change the colors, settings, layout, preview live, click “save” and download your unique Wordpress theme zip-file. Extract, upload, set, and you are done! If you have any questions or need additions email me.
I tried VLC to play some AVI files on Vista RC2. It didn’t play them properly. I can hear sound but no video showing. I remember running into similar problems on XP. I had to reduce the color from 24 bit to 16 bit. I tried to do the same on Vista RC2, but it’s a no go. Still no video.
Hitachi has just announced their new 1 terabyte hard drive. This is very exciting news because this continues to drive the cost of storage down. But, of course, there is an issue. In fact, this is really an old issue but because disk sizes are continuing to increase, we are starting to see the issue more and more.
When you plug in the 1 TB hard drive, your system shows that you only have 931.51 GB of disk space instead of the expected 1,024 GB a difference of 9.9%! The reason that you are getting less disk space than what was advertised is because of the definition of a terabyte (and a gigabyte, megabyte, kilobyte, etc. as well).
The true definition of a terabyte is 240 or 1,099,511,627,776 bytes. But, someone decided that it is easier math (and better marketing) to make a terabyte equal to 1012 or 1,000,000,000,000 bytes. Which would be fine except the computer systems understand the true definition of a terabyte and show you the information accordingly.
This has been going on for a very long time and we have even seen this in the days of megabyte sized hard drives. But, because the disks are getting to be so large, the lost storage space is starting to really become noticeable. The “terabyte” drive is “stealing” 92.6 GB (true calculation) of storage from every drive it delivers.
This will continue to occur in the foreseeable future. Here is a list of how much disk space you will be losing come the next few levels of disk space:
Unit
Lost
% Lost
terabyte
92.6 GB
9.05%
petabyte
114.5 TB
11.18%
exabyte
135.8 PB
13.26%
zettabyte
156.6 EB
15.30%
yottabyte
176.9 ZB
17.28%
Now, do I really think that the hard drive manufacturers are stealing from the consumers. No. It is simply a marketing and math thing. But, I do get calls from time to time with people asking why my new drive is showing less than it says on the box. It is just a matter of knowing.
This type of thing is on my top ten list of things that really tick me off. I hate it when people take advantage of others who just don’t know any better and then put their trust in them.
One thing that I often struggle with is making sure that the information that I put out each day on DCoT is good and relevant content. Sometimes I find myself falling onto the “posting just to post” trap and the results are generally less than stellar. I am sometimes so afraid of losing my audience that my quality suffers because of it.
I am not in the practice of posting broadcast e-mails that I receive from well-meaning friends and family but I did receive one from my mother today that I thought was interesting. These are three examples of how people had their credit card information stolen. I realize that these could very well be urban myths and I can not verify if these actually happened but they do convey a very important message: Be paranoid about your credit cards!
Hitachi has just 
…your newborn baby’s crying wakes you at night and your first thought is, “I wonder if anyone has submitted a comment on the blog?”