Vista

Since installing Vista 2 weeks ago, my view on Vista have changed drastically. It is less of a resource hogging, flashy overloaded OS packed with useless features and overdone security, and more of a pleasent interface designed to utilize as many resources as possible in order to provide the best experience. All the while ensuring that all resources are still available when needed.

After installing it initially, the OS failed to run smoothly at all. It took many adjustments:

Updating Motherboard Bios (the update was actually a pre-vista release)

Installing Vista service pack 1& other updates

Disabling  search index

disabling windows defender

I wont go into detail about those since there are so many articles on the net which already cover the topic. Of course, there is the debated topic of the security messages which popup pretty much whenever you do anything. Ya, I disabled that too. Not that it slows me down, but that I’m literate enough to know what I am doing in the system, and what goes on when I do things like download and run files. Though I won’t argue that it is too much protection for the average user. The average user /is/ pretty dumb afterall.

So this is just my update. I’m running vista and it’s working extremely well. I have only had some issues with iTunes and certain dvd burning software like infrarecorder, which supposedly is Vista ready…. totally free burner works well for those who are wondering.

In conclusion Vista is a great OS. If you’re looking for a new computer now, I wouldn’t be afraid of getting the OS. If you’re currently running XP I wouldn’t reccomend upgrading unless you have a reason to, or just want the latest OS. However you must make sure you have some fast RAM, and Fast hard drive at the least. Since My harddrive is IDE not SATA 150 or 300, it runs a bit slower. This is the reason I had to disable search index and defender. Also for the full Aero effect, I would suggest a dedicated video card. Right now I’m running a 7800 on AGP and everything seems great! It doesn’t take something as powerful as a 7800 however. Just so long as it’s a dedicated video card with 64 meg of ram or more and hopefully higher than a geforce 4700.

 

All in all Vista rocks. The people who downplay the OS as being a disaster probably have not tried it for themselves on a machine which it is designed to run on. There is also a great number of people out there who generally will say and do anything just to get traffic. The net is a nasty place and most of what is popular is usually rubbish.

Fractal lighting

Very Cool Cloud video

Not just any Clouds… Noctilucent clouds!

http://www.spaceweather.com/swpod2008/24jul08/rethans1.mpg?PHPSESSID=58rj4cfk9tb3a69pdeipch2l51

Farside Sunspots Gone

Gone again. We’re back to a blank sun:
http://www.spaceweather.com/images2008/02jul08/midi_farside_blank.gif?PHPSESSID=ej3c5k2lq5uvgqg93auejioeb0

Super Elements Turn Table upside down.

No idea what they’re talking about,  but that machine in the picture looks awesome.

(it’s something about how they can now make elements heavier than they should be which results in new properties, but it’s not really new because they’ve always been able to do it, just not so purely)

Countless-Core

Yep, that’s my term: Countless-Core. That’s what I use to describe the Future CPUs.

Programming in the future will be inherantly different, it seems. With the recent news of Intel announcing hundred, or even thousand core CPU technology, programmers of the future will approach problems from a new angle.

Currently most CPU’s have a range of 1 to 8 cores. The reason for this is that we’ve reached the maximum CPU speed we can get using modern transistors, and still have an economical way to keep the processor cool. So instead of pushing limits further to their maximum limit, engineers simply added more cores. Which allows the CPU to theoretically reach higher speeds because it can do several things at once. Traditionally computers process things one at a time. If a cpu were to have 1000 cores running at 1gigahertz, suddenly you can process 1000 times 1gigahertz, or 1 terahertz! That’s an immense amount of processing power.

The downside is that it’s much more difficult to take advantage of. How do you code a program to utilize all the processors all of the time? That is the question engineers are facing right now. I would say it will be some time before all Operating systems and software are prepared to run on Countless Core systems.

It’s the moon, Over

Something that’s being blogged about alot is It’s the Moon, Over.

Basically it is the story about A man in Wales who sees an unidentified bright luminous object in the sky over the mountains, and calls the police about it. The police decide to investigate the mystery and discover that the unidentified object is really just the moon. Darn! I was hoping they’d get down there and see, you know, an alien spaceship. <sarcasm> what did they think it was?! Oh well, can’t blame them for doing their job.

But you also cannot ignore the blatent stupidity that started the whole ordeal! A person who cannot identify the moon either has such a hectic life that they can’t associate objects anymore, or they had such a terribly isolated childhood that they never learned what it was. I’m surprised they could call 911 and describe that they saw in English!

But perhaps the person is your normal average everyday Joe. And maybe this is a sign in the deacreasing interest in the skies as Stuart points out in his blog.

A better theory on the Cooler Climate

As I’ve blogged about in the past, this year has been unseasonably cooler. (it seems) Instead of blaming the condition on lack of sunspots, it could potentially be because Earth is at Aphelion. (or maybe it’s the two combined.) Aphelion is when Earth is furthest away from the Sun; Perihelion is when Earth is closest. Unless you’re a second grader, you probably know that this is not what causes the seasons. That is caused by the precession of the Earth – or Earth’s wobble. The hemispheres receive more or less warmth from the sun because they tilt and the light becomes dispersed over those regions (or concentrated when it tilts towards the Sun at the opposing hemisphere).

So if the Earth is at its closest to the Sun, it must not have a perfectly circular orbit, right?  Correct. It makes an ellipse around the sun with the closest distance at 148 million Km and the furthest at 152 Km. Which makes us at the 152 Km presently. If the Apelion lands on winter and Perihelion lands on summer we would have an extra hot winter, and an extra hot summer. However it will supposedly be several thousand years before the two will actually co-incide. For now we have summer co-inciding with the apelion. Which would, as common logic suggests, give us a cooler summer. But this is by no means exact science.

Supposedly the difference between aphelion and perihelion is  only 5% sunlight. Which can be big if one were to calculate the difference in power received in each region.  But I’m simplifying things.

Of course, if the Earth is never the same distance from the sun, how did they come up with an Astronomical Unit(AU)? Well they simply took an average, which turns out to be 149,597,870,691 ± 30m or roughly just 150 million KM. (wikipedia)

Sources:

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2008/07/04/does-the-sun-look-smaller-to-you/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astronomical_unit

Shun the Web Mail – A solution to Spam?

While registering for an account on a forum, I received a message explaining they do not allow the use of web-mail accounts for their registration:

• CadillacOwners.com does not accept registrations from non-ISP (free) email accounts like Yahoo, Gmail, Hotmail, etcetera. These accounts are:
• 1. Constantly used to spam our forums
• 2: Rarely ever checked by their owners because they’re simply used to sign up at forums and then get abandoned
• 3. Almost always suspended for non-use or run out of storage space (see #2) and bounce back and forth, causing high server load

I don’t use the ISP provided mail. In fact I forgot my login 2 years ago. To actually sign up for the account, I had to dig up an email address I have which is Hotmail (yet doesn’t actually have the hotmail domain name)

They have made the realization that web mail is usually spam, and it becomes a dead account after so long. It seems true enough. Web-mail is a menace. If it were ruled out of the equation, we’d have a very small spam problem. The only problem is that I use web-mail, My friends use web-mail, Everyone uses webmail. It’s convienient and accessable from everywhere. While my ISP does offer the same thing: who says I’ll have this ISP forever? Changing email addresses is a pain in the ass when it comes to getting everyone up to speed.

In any case, it’s releiving to know that cadillac forums will be, for the most part, free of vacant users and spamming morons. I just hope all the expert mechanics who only had web-mail were able to still somehow sign up.

Possible Sunspots

Several Possible Sunspots on the Suns farside. Link:
http://www.spaceweather.com/images2008/01jul08/midi_farside_blank.gif?PHPSESSID=j6inp97sk3t6ip8fvniblfi1h7