November 13th, 2007 Administrator
Japan always manages to come out with some of the most unique and obscure devices. And while most of them just don’t make much sense at all, I think this one actually servers a purpose. The vending machine with face recognition capabilities will be used as an aid for preventing under age people from purchasing cigarettes. While it may actually be helpful in preventing the occasional happening, there may still be people out there that will be of age and may buy cigarettes for the youngsters. I’m not discrediting the efforts of Japan, but I think it’s going to take a lot more to cut down on cigarette sales to the younger generation.
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November 5th, 2007 Administrator
Many of you may not know of the company CI Host, but they’re a data center located in Chicago, IL. And sometimes in life, some funny things happen. Then other times in life funny things happen four times. The data center that houses information for people and their associated websites and such, has been broken into four times within the past two years. After the robbers broke into the place, they not only stole some equipment but decided that they needed to also tazer and beat the guard in the data center. Maybe they’ll wise up and move instead of staying in “the hood.”
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November 2nd, 2007 Administrator
For the K-Mart shoppers of the world that were in the market for a new blu-ray player won’t be able to find one in their local K-Mart. Because of the pricing that generally comes with blu-ray players, K-Mart has decided to stop selling the devices. Instead, K-Mart is going to focus their efforts towards HD-DVD players which is slowly becoming the more dominant format. I for one don’t really care about the whole HD-DVD and blu-ray war, but if I had to choose one, it would most definitely be HD-DVD. So K-Mart, good decision. You chose wisely.
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October 22nd, 2007 Administrator
News has been released about a new hard drive from Hitachi that claims to be the most energy efficient hard drive released to date. The new Deskstar P7K500 hard drive is going to have idle and active power consumption reductions by up to 40 percent. After implementing all the right technologies, Hitachi was able to receive an Energy Star 4.0 rating for the new hard drives. Specifications for the new hard drives are expected to come in the form of sizes ranging from 250GB to 500GB with a speed of 7200 rpm.
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October 2nd, 2007 Administrator
For all of the Intel fanboys out there, news of the new 45nm processors has leaked like every other technological breakthrough does. The leak reports that the new processors are expected to release around November 12, 2007. The processors are going by the name of Yorkfield and Wolfdale and sound as though they’re going to blow existing processors out of the water. Aside from their insanely small size, they expected to be multicore processors with a total of 12MB in the L2 Cache. While I’m generally an AMD kind of guy, I have to say that these processors are giving me some motivation to build a new computer with the Intel chips. I’m sure they won’t be cheap at first but the performance on these guys would definitely be well worth it.
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August 15th, 2007 Administrator
Today, the LAX airport in Los Angeles, California left 20,000 passengers stranded as a result of a faulty NIC. No major server outage or anything, just your standard, run-of-the-mill NIC wreaked havoc in the airport. I’m betting that the tech(s) working on that case might have feel pretty stupid if fixing the issue took more than thirty minutes to resolve. Another whacky happening in the world of computer hardware, but I guess that’s technology for you.
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August 1st, 2007 Administrator
A post on Slashdot today mentioned that the governor of Ohio (Ted Strickland) has established the Ohio Broadband Council and the Broadband Ohio Network to bring high speed internet service to locations that may not currently have it. This won’t affect me as I’ve had cable for many many years, but it’s nice to see that others will be able to benefit from this technological additional to their community.
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July 25th, 2007 Administrator
I knew the day would eventually come when companies would start phasing out IDE hard drives, and I believe that Seagate is the first to make the announcement. Their plan is to no longer manufacture IDE hard drives by the end of 2007. After 2007, the company is going to focus solely on the manufacturing of SATA hard drives. I recently purchased my very first SATA hard drive and can say that it’s tons better than IDE. The cable is quite a bit small and the speed and storage options are amazing.
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June 25th, 2007 Administrator
I swear I feel like I was thinking about this recently, and now I finally have my answer. ATM were created 40 years ago. I’m a little surprised that the first one was put in London, but that’s only because I would expect someone in the US to come up with the concept since it’s a country that’s so dedicated to spending money.
From the article:
The world’s first ATM was installed in a branch of Barclays in Enfield, north London, 40 years ago this week. Inspiration had struck Mr Shepherd-Barron, now 82, while he was in the bath. The machine paid out a maximum of £10 a time. “It struck me there must be a way I could get my own money, anywhere in the world or the UK. I hit upon the idea of a chocolate bar dispenser, but replacing chocolate with cash.”
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May 11th, 2007 Administrator
So, being a subscriber to Verizon’s cellular phone service, I’m part of their “2 Every 2″ plan which means that every two years you get a new phone at a very discounted rate. This is definitely a good thing for me since my original Verizon phone had a nice crack on the front LCD screen. Well, April came and my two years had passed. Time to get a new phone. I had been wanted an LG Chocolate for some time and now was the time to make my move.
I ordered the phone on Friday and received the next Tuesday. After struggling to activate the phone online, I eventually used the activation-by-phone number and eventually got the job done. Hopefully this phone will last the next two years without getting smashed or broken somehow.
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