Coputer topics
30 years of DSP: From a child’s toy to 4G and beyond article tells that this year, as TI celebrates its 30th year in the DSP market, that long-ago question has been answered many times over. Without DSP and the advances it has enabled in audio, graphics, and multimedia processing, there would be no digital →
iFixit.org article How One Teacher Built a Computer Lab for Free tells an interesting story. The problem? An underfunded school needed computers for the classroom. Budget? $0. How One Teacher Built a Computer Lab for Free article tells how just one sixth-grade teacher got those computers at that budget. In 2007, Robert acquired 18 donated →
Some Firefox users on Windows Vista and Windows 7 are experiencing problems when viewing videos in Adobe Flash Player 11.3. This includes me. Flash 11.3 doesn’t load video in Firefox. Firefox and/or Flash Player may crash. Videos do not work correctly, I just get a black box. Adobe and Mozilla are working closely to diagnose →
Every summer we get thunderstorms, with the accompanying lightning. Last summer one ADSL modem and computer Ethernet interface I was using was destroyed by lighting. So I decided that an article on ADSL overvoltage protection would be a good idea. It took some time to get this article ready, but here it is. ADSL overvoltage →
Is preventive maintenance on data center equipment not really that preventive after all? Can Maintenance Make Data Centers Less Reliable? With human error cited as a leading cause of downtime, a vigorous maintenance schedule can actually make a data center less reliable, according to some industry experts. Is Maintenance Making Your Facility Less Reliable? article →
I have recently started to use Notepad++ more and more for my code editing (both C source code and scripts). Notepad++ is a free (as in “free speech” and also as in “free beer”) source code editor and Notepad replacement that supports several languages. The editor is a multi-Language environment that has syntax highlighting and →
Is electronics heading to be less and less hackable? DIY site iFixit has been keeping tabs on the tech world whilst providing handy self-repair guides for popular electronics. Now the site maintainers have seen trend that electronics products seem to become intentionally harder and harder to fix in recent years. The New MacBook Pro: Unfixable, →
Happy 25th Birthday, GIF. 25 years ago (on last Friday) the Graphics Interchange Format was released, and the world has never been the same again. The GIF was originally released by CompuServe to replace RLE – a file format which was limited to black and white only. But the GIF evolved over the next 25 →
I saw yesterday an interesting new web-based, graphical programming editor. Google Blockly — a Language With a Difference tells about a new Scratch-like graphical language, Blockly. You program with it by dragging and dropping code blocks onto a design surface. Blockly is written in JavaScript and runs inside web browser. All the code is free →
Linus Torvalds Splits Tech’s ‘Nobel’ With Stem Cell Pioneer. What do Linux and stem cell research have in common? Answer: They’re both considered “life-enhancing technical innovations” by the Technology Acadamy Finland, a foundation that is awarding a prestigious award called the Millennium Technology Prize in Helsinki yesterday. Linux creator Linus Torvalds (King of Geeks) and →