computer

While this PC is largely uninteresting, at the moment www.accurateit.com has them for $25 shipped. They are coming with 128MB RAM, ~4GB disk, and a CMOS password. I envisioned using this system as a NAS, containing my 250GB disk. Sadly enough, this is currently my largest-capacity disk, and I have it connected to my laptop (my fastest machine, a 2.16GHz Core Duo-based HPQ mobile workstation with Quadro graphics) via USB2. Just making a high-volume data transfer between that disk and my internal drive can raise CPU consumption to as much as ten percent for sustained periods of time (although it's typically more like three to five percent.) While this is pretty minimal, it's entirely senseless. IEEE1394 has much lower overhead and superior throughput, but the connector on my system is tiny and thus annoying.

When we want to send files over the internet, we typically want to compress these files so that they take up as little space as possible. We generally also need to bundle files together. Today, the default format for doing this on personal computers is the PKZIP format, while on Unix systems we use tar to group files together, and a separate program to compress them - these days that's generally gzip or bzip2, and in olden times it was the compress program. A lot of PC users are also using the rar archiver, because for a long time it has provided the best compression.

Today, that is no longer true; the crown is worn by 7-Zip. 7-Zip is a newer archive manager which, in addition to being able to handle older archive formats at various levels (for example, it can decompress but not create rar archives, but it can both make and break zip archives) it implements the new 7z compression algorithm. This is not actually the most efficient algorithm available today, but it is the best one that has a decent application wrapped around it.

The below screen shot of DOOM for Intellivision is accompanied by some funky digital noise which I have no idea how to capture and put here from one of these emulators without installing additional software. I've installed three versions of it already. One of the emulators has an AVI capture mode on it, maybe I should try doing that. I generated the screen shot below with Nostalgia, a neat Intellivision emulator. I'm sorry about the dodgy quality, but I hit alt-printscreen a little too late, and I'd already spent too much time on this. It's not like it's really playable at these speeds anyway.