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The emperor’s new web we like to call it . Everyone’s talking about it and no one knows what web 2. 0 is .yes no one . if crowds have wisdom this is entirely the emperor phenominon how can no one know what it is . 68million google results for the term later you will seen no two people agreeing upon a definition. What’s worse it that all these definitions are a what of time .

Think about a google os . what web x.0.or x.3.12 . would that be . would it be a web at all . it would be more like sun’s the compute so well how about a computer 1.1.0.3. then think about our personalised web where reconnaissance agents fetch you your page same question.

The sub head in a seminal web 2.0 defining document by tim o reilly of o reilly publishing went the eeb as platform . harnessing collective intelligence. End of the software release cycle. Light weight programming models. Rich user experiences and more. A certain dmblackthorn commented . a lot of people o the interweb find this web 2.0 a bit confusing . why can’t we just call it like it is the interweb . 2.0 thumbs up for dmblckthorn!

We have only included sata hard drives this time sidelining ide completely. Ide will live on for at least a couple of years more but we want to present you the ground reality. Sata is in and ide is on its way to a speedy exit. One of the things helping the sata cause is the fact that even entry level motherboards ship with sata controllers today . granted ide drives are still being sole but the fact remains that there are very few of them and future development prospects are too dim to warrant a shootout.

Of the 21 sata drives we pitted against each other two were from Hitachi two from Maxtor four from samsung .three form Seagate and there was a large contingent of 10 from western digital. All the brands were thus represented adequately to give you as wide a perspective as we possibly can about the drives available in the market today.

FEATURES CAPACITY

The Hitachi deskstar 7k1000 with a huge 1 tb capacity was the largest internal sata drive we have ever laid our hands on. This drive featuring perpendicular recording technology featured a platter density of 250 mb the highest we have seen so far shattering the previous record of 188 set by the Seagate barracuda 7200.9 st3750640as.

When it comes to sharing your data or simply synchronizing data between your office and hom . external hard drives ply a vital role. The best thing is that you do not need to open your cabinet to transfer data just plug it into the usb port an play!

We selected 13 drives for this test. Of these two were from lomega five from wd three from maxtor one from Philips and two were from seagate.

BACKUP EXERNAL HARD DRIVES

These drives are meant for large and frequent backups . capacities start from 250gb. And the process are considerable y higher too. Most of them come with backup software of some kind and special features such as back up buttons. Fire wire ports are common too. These drives are bulkier than those in the portable drive category as they seldom need to be carried around. System administrators rather than home users are the consumers for this category of external hard drives.

There was a 250 gb lomega a 500 gb and a 1 tb drive from Maxtor three 500 gb and one 1 tb drive from wd a 250 gb drive form Philips and a 750 gb drive from seagate in this category.

Sata is the de facto standard to hard disk storage today the older ide or pata is passé. So what’s different . does it deliver what it promises . s it really worth it or is it hype?

To start with sata drives support a faster data throughput than ide drives while ide drives cap at 133 mbps sata drives begin at 1.5 gbps while sata 11 can go up to eell 3 gbpps. When benchmarked against ide drives it does show an appreciable improvement in the throughputs these numbers are therefore not just on paper you can see the performance improvement in real life scenarios such as file copying and application lading .

Sata dries feature a four conductor data cable that does not t just make it slimmer remain tangle free and enable better ventilation in the cabinet but also a lo easier to attach. Hot plug is yet another advantage offered by sata drives. This feature lets you plug or remove a a sata drive without switching off the pc. The sata controller on the motherboard must support this feature though. Another important feature of sata drives is native command queuing which it borrwos from scsi drives. Ncq improves efficency and performance . during normal reads or writes commands arrive at the disk and are executed on a fist come first served basis. This creates a mechanical overhead when the read write head had o be constantly repositioned . sata drives make use of an algorithm to determine the efficient way to execute this queue of commands to create the least possible mechanical overhead. This results in a general performance increase. This feature was initially only forum on sata 11 drives but has since been incorporated in many sata1 drives too.

History proves our species is one of incurable hoarders form precious mental to food from fuel to weapons . there is something else mankind has hoarded through the ages information. The digital era has pandered to this whim even encouraged it.

Steady advancements in drive technology have seen sharply declining prices is another significant factor . a 250 gb desktop hard drive retiles at around rs 3500 today. While a 160 gb five drive costing in excess of rs 4500 a couple of years ago Is available for as little as rs 2700 now. Price per gb is own to rupees 16.875 pet gb or .01 paisa pet mb. Larger drives have also become cheaper a 400gb drive costs under 5000 rupees now.

Serial ata has matured as an interface quickly becoming de facto for desktop hard drives. Perpendicular recording technology has emerged leading to even greater capacities due to increased areal density. The 7550 gb barrier was hit last year and this year hitachi has hit 1 terabyte the I tera byte Hitachi features a 32 megabyte cache and five platters each capable of 200 gb . though the initial cost of cramming so much data pet platter is high , acceptance in the market will cause economies of large scale production to take over.

The title is that apt because,at present importance if the internet If one want to hear songs and all,he just gets in to online music sources like in and hear music online!We like blogs and some are worth quoting here’s from NF w saunders of the university of queensland sim months ago I was desktop man I preferred my software locally installed . I wanted complete control of my machine my desktop applications my files . all that has changed and the keyword her is synchronization. Or rather no need fro synchronization. Like many people I use a word compute and a machine at home .. if like me you are a bit slow and don’t get it yet her’s the sound bite everything is in the one place”

You can guess the rest saunders is typical of those who have moved their apps to online . you can collaborate on stuff by just sending people a url you don’t need to bother with synchronization hell you don’t’t even need to buy expensive software with features you don’t need . The great thing is these online applications google’s apps come to mind first are getting better.

Web apps are not confined to tasks such as word processing witness flex an online compiler. We are close to the death of the desktop . if we can have online compilers what is to stop us from imagining photoshop online . the entire program with all its features ?nothing in the term personal computing implies the desktop why not online bandwidth willing when the uls are actually better when they are mostly free when they don’t require updates?

There are software that allow you to focus on productivity a new breed tat does away with all the bells and whistles and focuses only on utility and ease of use by providing you with the bare minimum of tools needed to do the job. If you spend long hours getting your fine gertips numb at the keyboard try out dark room. This is a software that gives you a full screen text editor . so what’s special . well it blanks out the entire screen when it is is in full screen mode and suppresses pop ups and other notifications theus ensuring it get your undivided attention . the mac variation of this tool is called write room and there’s a java based editor called jdarkroom it you are working in linux.

For those of you who like to use personal information management tools there’s tiddlywiki which acts as a personal notebook to sort these little tasks into various parts of your day . it is actually a single html file that has css and java script coke incorparated into it . when you download it and start sing he file it overwrites itself based on your preferences when you save any information to it every new entry is known as a tidtion to it .

Printers have been workhorses we all love to flog as stacks of A4 paper lying around any good office will testify to. Advancements in links and printers don’t’t just relate to faster prints . printers are now being developed to print on a variety of media Epson for example has developed printers specifically designed to print on certain surfaces and they have demonstrated this by printing on diverse materials like canvas a variety of fabrics and even papier mache.

Imagine famous words of art being recreated by printing on oil canvas equally intriguing is Epson printer’s ability to print on a variety of fabrics and other materials which are then used to create unique decors very suitable for banquet halls board rooms and such . the main advantage is the look and the design them can be changed by simple swapping rather than having aa costly redesign. Epson has also developed printers that allow capturing of live tv screens and printing then out imagine printing out recipes coupons and other snippets as they appear on your tv channels perhaps the biggest innovation is the development of a metal compound containing link that can actually be used to print directly on pcbs not more wastage in the fabrication process.

For the end user vista is just a pretty xp and in classic skin mode vista looks even more like its predecessor. This is because the way you use the computer hasn’t changed much there are no radical changes . the same apples to apple’s leopard. There have been a lot more functions added to it a lot more prettiness but nothing radically different . enter winfs.

Wndows future storage was a file system originally slated to be shipped with vista . development schedules for other products pushed winfs into the background. Currently the status of winfs is unknown and despite microsoft already announcing that they’re starting development on the next windows version codenamed Vienna there’s no word on whether winfs will find its way into its way into that. Apparently once bitten twice shy microsoft isn’t making any promises it might not be able to keep for winfs.

Enough of a history lesson it’s time to understand why we’re harping on about winfs what radical changes does it promise?

FAT16,FAT32 and NTFS store all your files as a contiguous and contours stream of bytes . this means an mp3 is stored as a chunk of data on some part of your hard drive. The os is quite dumb to what that mp3 is and basically doesn’t car. All the os needs to knew is that it should use a media player to open files called mp3

Now winfs is less of a file system and more o a relationship builder. It still sits on top of an NTFS file sstem and stores its own data on an NTFS drive but you cease to see your drive as files and folders. Think of how you get online and find information you search right? Why should items on your pc be found in any other manner?

IBM is right back into spotlight. Ibm research lab scientists have been inspired by the self assembling proes pattern found in the formation of tooth enamel seashells and snowflakes. Applaying the principle behind these scientists there have built a next generation computer chi p using a special polymer.

IBM might not be in the microchip war but is has a legacy of its won . the y have always been show stoppers with their breakthrough . ibm has made at least 10 significant breakthroughs in the past few years . recall the cell processor integrating ibm’s power architecture. The industry wide problem of transistor leakage in chips was solved by ibm in January 2007 . a special material with superior electrical qualities was used in the primary on/off switching portion of the transistors which made them more power efficient. Ibm worked with amd . sony and thshiba in partnership for this development.

In february they replaced sram with the speedy edram on the 65nm microchip to be able to increase the on processor memory using about 33 % lesser space on the chip . in April ibm with their 3d chip stacking technique showed that stacking semiconductor components vertically instead of horizontally gave performance boosts and energy efficiency.