Computers

If you visit the Apple Store daily, you should have notice that the new iPods have arrived.

The first big difference is the notable colour display available on all models.

But the fancyness of the screen is not the only change. The battery life has also extended from 12 hours on 4G iPods (mine) to 15 hours on the new model.

As for the capacity, the 30GB and 40GB models have been replaced by the 60GB one, while the 20GB model is still available. This will allow bigger capacity while keeping an affordable model around.

It also seems like Apple is cutting the cost by not shipping the Firewire cable and only providing the USB2 cable.

Nevertherless, the U2 iPod is still around, now using a gorgeous (quoting Steve Job's terms on the first presentation of the U2 iPod) colour display.

Now, I do feel like I have 400 bucks to burn... ;)

Posted by Olivier Hill in Mac at 21:24 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Back in March, I had a discussion with one of my teacher. It was a course about networking and he was allegating that you cannot make two subnets out of a Class C.

My first reaction was that Classes are meaningless and he should use prefixes to describe routing. But my second thought was: what the hell is he talking about? Of course you can subnet a Class C. In prefixes terms, that's a /25.

Posted by Olivier Hill in Computers at 22:01 | Comment (1) | Trackbacks (0)

... I was waiting in line to get my blank DVD+R medias.

20 minutes it took to pay at Bureau en Gros (Staples). Why? Because their cash register system was down.

As I've been working in the computer industry my whole life, I certainly do know that a system can hang, or crash, or explode, or even catch on fire. It can be because of a power spike, a down spike, some voodoo magic, bit rotting, or even solar flares.

Computers are not reliable. It can let you down at any time. This is why we have redundant power supplies, or RAID-5 arrays. So what can we do about cash registers? Well, it is called keeping a receipt pad somewhere. I cannot believe they are unable to write or calculate taxes by hand. Maybe it is not as convenient, but it helps keeping your customers when you have a system outage.

Posted by Olivier Hill in Computers at 11:06 | Comments (2) | Trackbacks (0)

Absolutely not!

Since it is still hot and I have to wait 30 minutes before getting my haircut, I decided to waste some more time on playing with source code.

So I decided to make the blog XHTML 1.0 compliant. Well, I knew how to HTML 4.01 and I knew how to XML, so I guessed trying to put both of them together. And it just works. Some people try to convince you that standards are too complicated, this is wrong.

Posted by Olivier Hill in Computers at 11:22 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Since I had to compose some documentation for my job earlier today, I decided to finish my LaTeX installation on my Mac Mini.

Since I did start the installation process a while back, I had to see what was missing. I already had installed the LaTex Package (tetex) from fink so the only thing missing was a graphical frontend. I must admit that GNU nano is great, but it has its limitations. And since I am a big fan of syntax coloring, I had to leave my Terminal.app behind.

Posted by Olivier Hill in Mac at 20:42 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)