Tag: Computers

☐ BLUDBATH.T?

Synetech 1 Comment

In one year of high school, we learned the Turing programming language. One of my classmates found a violent hang-man game made in Turing on the Internet. It was quite the hit in our class for several reasons. Unlike most of our own apps/games, it had graphics, and good ones too: it used pre-drawn TIM files instead of simple vector drawing (like my tic-tac-toe game, which to be fair wasn’t too bad at all). It also used the mouse for input. Neither of these were part of the course, and the mouse wasn’t even in the text book—school has a tendency to focus on boring fundamentals instead of the fun stuff. 🙁 Plus, it had all that violence (there were a few Mortal Kombat-style ways that the character would die, prompting us to try to lose more than win).

Anyway, I did not get a copy of it, and have looked everywhere but cannot find it. Does anyone know where I can find it? I think it had the filename BLUDBATH.ZIP or something like that.

☑ Local Blogger Replacement

Synetech 2 Comments

I opened a Blogger account a while back and created several blogs under that account. I really like it, but I am trying to move away from hosted services and store blogs, forums, wikis, etc. locally.

Unfortunately, I have yet to find a blogging system that I can download and run on my system that is like Blogger. The best candidates I have tested are WordPress and TextPattern, however neither seems to have the simplicity or multi-blog capability of Blogger.

So basically, I am looking for a blogging system that can be locally hosted that can host multiple blogs under a single account (dashboard).

☐ Heatsink Smoothness Meangingless?

Synetech Leave a comment

Most computer cooling guides state that it is important for the bottom of the heatsink to be as shiny and smooth as possible to get the best and most contact with the surface of the CPU, and also to prevent air pockets and bubbles of thermal compound. To get this super surface, they endorse lapping and buffing the heck out of the bottom of the heatsink with finer and finer materials.

Why then is the surface of the CPU itself the opposite? Why is it that the surface of the CPU is rough like brushed steel, and has words and markings engraved on it? Does this not totally nullify the point of having a smooth, shiny surface? Are we supposed to buff the CPU surface until it is smooth and the markings are gone?

☐ Why Wait to Degauss Again?

Synetech Leave a comment

Why does pretty much every document that mentions the deguass function of monitors tell you to wait about 15 minutes before degaussing again? Does this mean that you must also wait around 15 minutes before turning off/on a monitor that automatically degausses when turned on.

Speaking of degaussing, what happens if a monitor is exposed to a magnetic field that is stronger than that created by the degaussing mechanism? Do you need to use a more powerful, external degausser, or will it be fixed over time because the degausser reduces the deviation by a bit each time it runs, until the deviation is within the degausser’s normal fixable range?

☐ Hard Drives Are the Bottleneck?

Synetech Leave a comment

Can someone please explain something to me? When did optical drives become faster than hard drives? When you burn a CD or a DVD, the hard drive is apparently the bottleneck. That is, success depends on whether or not the data can be pulled off of the hard drive fast enough. Of course these days, they have underrun prevention technologies to avoid a failed burn if the hard drive cannot spit out the data in time, but those are not the magic bullet cure that they would appear at first glance.

My point is that hard drives are clearly faster than optical drives and any test will show that. You can do performance tests and they all show that hard disk drives have lower latency, lower seek times, higher data rates, and faster throughput than optical drives.

Yet, when you watch a disc being burned, the hard drive light is pretty much solid on, while the optical drive light blinks slowly.

These points are contradictory. Hard drives are faster than optical drives in both reading and writing and yet optical drives can seem to burn faster than hard drives can seek.

What’s going on? Can somebody explain this paradox to me?