Recently, PsyStar appeared again on the news, this time we learnt that they only sold 768 Mac clone in a year. Since we know that Apple sold over 10 million Mac this year, why a company selling an identical product would only sold 768 unit of their product.

People Want an Apple, not a clone

The answer is simple, Psystar thought that people wanted computer with Mac OS X installed on it, it seems the data pulled by Matthew Lynde (Cornerstone Research) from Psystar account proved otherwise.

They wanted an Apple, not a Apple clone.  400 $ for a name, for an image and for this I must congratulate Apple’s marketing department for doing such a great job

Flash drives and portables hard drives are available on the market for many years by now but USB flash drives are way more used. Is Flash drives is the best choice for you? Maybe not,  portable hard drives have many advantages that users don’t know about. For the comparason, the Western Digital My Passport Essential 250 GB USB 2.0 WDME2500TN will be used because it is right in the middle of the price and the performance range of portable hard drives

Portable hard drives are as small as some phones!

With small dimensions of around of   0.6″h x 3.1″w x 5″l for  the Western Digital My Passport Essential 250 GB, it can easily fit inside a pocket . True, it is bigger then a flash drives but it is small enough for the performance it can give you back.

Bigger capacities

Portable hard drives are available is bigger format then USB keys, for instance a 32 GB flash drive is enourmous and cost more then

Cheaper Gigabyte per dollar ratio | Bigger capacities

The hard drive we are using in this comparison has 250GB and we can buy on amazon.com it at around 69$ US. If we do the calculation, you have a little more then 3.5GB per $ at this price, a 16 GB flash drive should cost you less the 5 dollar.

Also, portable hard drives are available different size like 80Gb, 120Gb, 160Gb,320Gb and 500Gb(wow).

True not everybody need so much Gigabytes but when you have it you surprisingly find new way to full it(OS, pictures, videos, games, work).

Work with usb 2.0

Before, portable hard drive needed to plug their hard drives in the wall for it to work. Now the power cord is no longer necessary, it’s taking the energy from the USB 2.0  plug of your computer so it’s perfect with your laptop everywhere.

Faster read and write then most USB keys

Yes !  For this comparison to mean something, i choose one of the fastest USB flash drive I knew about the Patriot Xporter XT Boost 32GB High speed USB (74$US). This flash drive claim it can go as fast as 200x, knowing that one x = 150Kb/s and that a Mb/b = 1000Kb/s, we can convert this value as 30Mb/s. But when we look at the speed of the WD hard drive we see that its transfer rate is of 60Mb/s, 2 times the speed a fast USB key goes.

Conclusion

I’ve been using the WD portable hard drives for 3 years now and I must say it saved me quite a lots of time. When i needed to transport big amount of data,  It was faster then burning a dvd. When i needed to do a backup  it could contain the whole backup ! Also it’s detected by windows without installing anything. By my opinion it’s the best choice someone can do.

The only reason you could prefer a USB flash drive is because you don’t need  more then 4 GB, you need something very tiny  or because you have less then a 20$ budget.

Your Choice?

My favourite example of a “Crapware” is Norton anti-virus, it spam you to install it every start-up to install the 30day trial. Theses software are simply annoying and mostly useless, they make your computer boot slower, they use your RAM , they take place on your hard drive and they are a pain to remove. They somehow remind me of an annoying roommate.

You want to remove most of the “bloatware” on your brand new pc? Well let me tell you that there is an app for that. The program up for this task is called PC Decrapifier. Just In case you couldn’t tell from the name, it was made to handle exactly this kind of situations. Just like an all exterminator, here is a list of all the crap he can get rid of.

After using the this crap removal service, you may need to replace that crap with good free software that will never expire. That’s why I recommend you http://www.ninite.com.

I hope this post helped you getting rid of all the crap on your computer.

Browser ranks

According to w3school.com Browser Statistic, the word of the browser is dominated with 2 big players, Firefox being used by 46.6% of the web surfer and Internet Explorer with 39.6%, then come in third place Google Chrome with 7.1%. However, even if it is still far from the head, Google Chrome has gotten more popular every month over the last 11 month. Being powered by Google has helped the 13 month old browser to quickly become more popular then Safari, Mozilla and Opera.

Faster JavaScript = More interactive web

Google Chrome is different from other browsers; it is optimized to execute JavaScript fast, this will make it a very good alternativebrowser for the future. To give you an overview of the difference of performance the browser gives, here is a JavaScript NES emulator ; on Firefox, Tetris works at around  6 FPS and uses 50% of my CPU and it’s too slow to play, while on Internet Explorer it is simply not loading at all. On the other hand, Chrome aces it with 60FPS and uses around 40% of my CPU. So not only is Chrome running JavaScript 10 times faster, it makes JS  also lighter on the processor .

SunSpider benchmark results show Google’s Chrome is the fastest of the top five Windows browsers at rendering JavaScript. (Lower scores/shorter graph bars are better.) www.computerworld.com/

If you need more benchmark go take a look here

Speed is essential to the future of internet especially when everybody is talking about a more social web with more interactive content. Interactive content means more JavaScript (Ajax) and we previously saw that there was a limit of what the current browser could do without lag and without hammering the processor.

Chrome is fast but is it secure?

Speed is important but so is security, Google Chrome sandbox makes surfing more secure, even thought flaws are found, there is no real threat to the files on the computer because the sand-box isolates the browser from the system . Chrome proved itself more secure than the other browsers by being the only one standing in the Pwn2Own hacker contest.

You don’t care about what security expert says? Here’s a page where you can make crash all the browsers, the only difference is how they react, Chrome is the only one to not completely crash.

Chrome’s bad points

Google Chrome doesn’t have the most user friendly interface and functionality or the customizability of Firefox, neither does it has the tons of excellent plug-ins Firefox has. Many critique complained about the fact that it was only compatible with Windows. But Chrome doesn’t even have 2 years, I’m sure that they will find way to make everything simpler and when it’s going to become more popular, plug-ins will be developed for Chrome. Also I was taking a look at Google Chrome 4 Beta and it looks like there will be a Mac and a Linux version as well.

Why will Chrome be a strong challenger in the browser wars

Having gained 3.2% of popularity over the last 8 month, Chrome has everything it needs to continue to grow. Google optimise each of their own products and services for it, and they have a LOT of products, like Google Search, Gmail, Google Map, Blogger, Google Group, etc.

Since Google’s products are used by millions of people every day Google can easily attract users to their browser.Also with the near release of Google Wave, optimised for Google Chrome, some users might find their browsers slow and heavy on Wave and then change to the only browser on witch it runs perfectly : Chrome.

Google Wave will become very popular  because of its reactivity and real-time execution(lots of AJAX), Wave will make the web evolve of the Web 2.0 to Web 2.5 : where the web looks more like a normal application and this is in what Chrome most excel with.

This year, Google announced they were adding another string to their bow, after Android, they are working on Google Chrome OS. This OS based on Linux kernel, will be focusing on the web surfing and will most likely come for free with Google Chrome installed on it. the good image of Google and its strong partner( Acer, Adobe, ASUS, Freescale, Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo and others) will make people consider it a good option .

Conclusion

The performance of a browser like Google Chrome is essential for the future use of the internet, that’s why Chrome is going to be a strong competitor in the browser war. Its a very secure browser, light, open fast and has great themes.

The more and more people will use Chrome and without knowing it, Chrome will join the fight between Firefox and Internet explorer and put some action in the browser world.

The grenade mouse

[mbs slideshow=1]

The grenade mouse

The body mouse

The body mouse

The body mouse looks weird and it must be really awkward to put your hands on it. (Warning, it can have bad breath)

The wireless car mouse

Wireless car mouse

Original and flashy they are optimised for high speed mouse speed

The sexy mouse

Stop staring at the mouse!

The NES mouse controller

For geeks that still remembers the old times, where the games were better than the graphics

The Diamante Mouse also called IMouse

Expansive and shiny it’s the only mouse my girlfriend would be happy to use.( she denies it )

The mouse mouse

This mouse lack of originality, only people with some strange taste for dead thing will dare using it.

The gun mouse

Your Boss will not take you seriously if you threaten him with it.

The Brain mouse

It makes you be more intelligent

The Ghost mouse

I call it Casper If you have pictures of other computer mouse who looks different, please leave a comment with a link on it  I might add it to the post.

Windows 7 screenshot

Here is a real screenshot of windows seven. I took it myself because most of the ones on google search were fakes. My version of windows 7 pro is a legal one I got it free from MSDNAA

Super computer of today in every house of the future?

There are relationships between the power of calculation and the number of transistors in a computer. There is also a pattern where the increase of the number of transistors in a computer depends upon the year it was made, this pattern is called “Moore’s law”, so by comparing the number of transistors in the #1 Top super computer of today [the Roadrunner] we will be able to find out how long it will take before we have such computers in our own home.

Most powerful super computer “Roadrunner”

The “Roadrunner” was bought in 2008 at the cost of 125 million dollars, it is the most powerful computer in the world according to top500.com, a website ranking the top super computers. The “Roadrunner” is used by the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) and National Nuclear Security Administration. This super computer is made with a total of 12,960 IBM PowerXCell 8i CPUs and of 6,480 AMD Opteron 2210. The 129600 core of this dream computer delivers a total of 1.71 petaflops . The IBM PowerXCell 8i contains 250 million transistors each and the AMD Opteron 2210 have around 243 million transistors. So in total, this monster of power has 481,46 billion transistors.

In how long ?

With this information, we can use Moore’s law , “ the number of transistors that can be placed inexpensively on an integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years”. If Moore’s theory continues to be true after 2020, knowing that the number of transistor in the new Intel i7 processor is 731 million, then we can calculate that we should all have a computer like the “Roadrunner” in our homes in approximately 18 to 19 years.

The future is just grandiose

At this time we can only dream of the tools that could be available to us with this kind of power. Will our every day pixelated video games end up looking more like 500 million dollars simulators? Wouldn’t it be superb to have such technology? No one can really predict what the future will look like, for instance, if you think back at what people in 1990 were saying about what would come after the millenium, you can see most of it was very grandiose.