Wednesday, October 01, 2003

On the Techno Front.....

 
I was reading an article today about the forthcoming 64bit computers which propose to make CAD (computer aided design), video and games work much smoother and faster. Current 32 bit models can address 4 Gigs of Memory (the average home user can get by quite nicely at the moment with 1/2 Gig of Memory). Well 4 Gigs of memory is nothing - moving to 64bit means your computer can address 16 exabytes of RAM (there's a new word for me - an exabyte!). How much is 16 exabytes? A mere 16 billion gigabytes! I wonder how I am going to afford a 1 billion gigabyte chip? :) It was bad enough to buy 1/2 of 1 gigabyte! Of course, there is no OS (operating system) built yet that can use 64bit, but that's coming.

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Turning to inkjet printing, noticed that PC World had an article abut inkjet printing by the guru of inkjet testing - Henry Wilhelm (Sep 2003). Those cheapie aftermarket inks I buy? One of them - a Rainbow branded ink is good for about 1 year on an Epson C82 vs Epson's 92 year cartridges! Carrot Ink (which I've also used) was good for about 4 years on a Canon S9000 vs. Canon's 27 year cartridge. So if you're planning on printing quality photos that are going to last a while, guess you'd better buy the real stuff. Or move to dye sub, a different process alltogether. I have found though that for printing in general, these inks have worked pretty well, but they do clog my Canon S300's printheads and do start to streak. Unfortunately the S300 is an ink hog, so I will have to find a printer that works better and is much more economical on ink.

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You a news junkie? Rather than going to all those different web sites, why not have all the headlines delivered to you in one place? That's what RSS feeds are all about. They give you the headlines and enough info to decide whether you want to click on it and read the entire article. I've mentioned before about downloading a copy of Feed Demon to view all these. Feed Demon even includes a browser inside itself with tabbed browsing - and it's free! Most sites have an XML tag (look at DP Review and you'll notice the small xml tag at the top right of the page.. Just right click on it and select "copy shortcut" and then back in Feed Demon, you can create a new channel for DPReview that lets you capture all of DPReview's latest news without having to go to the actual web site. You can create Groups as well, like a Photography Group. Sometimes the little orange tag will say RSS instead of XML - you still use the same procedure. Pretty cool and a news/info junkie's dream!

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