Penultimate Reality

With the launch of Vista finally upon us, there’s no better time to discuss performance. I still haven’t had an opportunity to use Vista myself, but there’s plenty of discussion to be had on the topic nonetheless. A while back, over at ThePCSpy.com, Oli Warner wrote a series on different utilities and programs you might find on your PC running Windows and how much they each slow the machine down.

Ultimately, he found that a wide-variety of common programs are quite the resource hogs, with Norton Internet Security being the worst offender, bar none. This sparked a bit of discussion about these programs, which ultimately led to Matt Thompson compiling a list of recommended free alternatives to various common programs, with the implication being that they’re lighter.

The list in general is a good start, but I think that it’s as much a list of good free (in either sense) software alternatives, as opposed to necessarily lighter alternatives. As I’m sure many of you are aware, I do run Linux as my primary operating system, but I do have experience maintaining several Windows machines, so I’m willing to contribute a bit to this discussion.

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Yet another salvo has been fired in the constant battle between Microsoft and the major Linux companies as to which operating system better fits the bill for business purposes. In this case, Novell has set up a web site that compares SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop to Microsoft’s upcoming Windows Vista. I took a gander at the white paper, and here’s what I found:

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As I’m sure many of you are no doubt aware, both light and matter exhibit characteristics of both waves and particles, in what’s known in the physics world as wave-particle duality. The consequence of this perhaps somewhat eerie concept is that light can be observed as a particle, the photon.

But what does this brief quantum mechanical lesson have to do with technology? Well, several articles have recently been written discussing a team of researchers at the University of Rochester, and their recent work into storing an entire image on a single photon. This particular article’s title, Ultra-Dense Optical Storage — on One Photon immediately brings to mind images of amazing new storage devices, capable of storing exabytes in a single cube.

It seems there’s a long way to go, still. A lot of neat scientific research, when reported to the general public, gets sensationalized, to get more people interested. What this particular group has done, however, is nonetheless impressive, managing to slow down light while allowing it to retain the information it carried. This could be the first step to fast optical computers or ultra-dense storage devices in the future.

While the concept sounds neat, I’m thinking it’ll be several years or even a couple of decades before the technological developments that occur as a result of this research make their way into consumer products. It’s an unfortunate reality that things take quite some time to go from the lab to the store shelves. Still, it’s another idea to think about as far as the future of storage that I’ve written about previously.

Every time I post a new article to Penultimate Reality, I feel it’s appropriate to update the world about the matter by posting here. For the first time since the last redesign, I am adding not just one, but two new articles to the site, both relating to emoticons and their use on the Internet.

The first article is one I wrote nearly five years ago, xD or XD: The Eternal Question, which makes an admittedly biased case for the use of “xD” over “XD”. When I last redesigned Penultimate Reality, I removed the article, only to learn later that it was more popular than I expected, so I’ve re-added it to the articles section of the site. However, it is quite old, and it doesn’t particularly reflect my feelings on the matter anymore. As such, I’ve revisited the subject in my new article, Exdee Revisited. This new article looks at the matter from a more enlightened perspective, at least the way I see it.

In any case, just don’t use the article as an excuse to overuse emoticons. Some people I’ve interacted with use them so frequently at the end of their sentences, they may as well be punctuation. And I really don’t need to type “. xD” at the end of every sentence—just the period (or full stop, as may be) is well enough for me. Anyway, take a look, and I hope you enjoy it.

(This is the seventh, and final part of a multi-part series. To review the other parts, please visit the Web Design archives.)

At this point, you may feel like you’re finally finished with your site. After all, you’ve got loads of great content, your web site is easily accessible to anyone on the Internet, and the visitors are starting to trickle in. What more could there possibly be? Perhaps unfortunately, quite a bit. Even the best site will eventually fall apart if not properly maintained. For this reason, web sites are rarely the type of thing you can simply set up and forget about. The amount of work needed may be small, of course. Ultimately, there are a few general categories of maintenance-type activities you should concern yourself with.

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I recently received a new watch as a gift, and as part of the recent month, had done some research on the features available on modern watches, especially those produced by Casio. Some features, like temperature sensors, have been around for a few years. But there are a plethora of features that are a bit more recent.

Perhaps the most useful is that many such watches are capable of synchronizing themselves each day using a radio signal. Other ones use solar energy to recharge the battery, enhancing battery life to over ten years, in some cases. If that’s not enough, there are a wide variety of sensors like compasses, temperature sensors, barometers, altimeters, and even depth meters for the divers out there.

I suspect it won’t be long before we not only have watches that tell time, but allow you to control it as well, among other things, like doing your laundry, cooking your meals, and walking your dog.

(This is part VI in a multi-part series. Before continuing, I suggest you read or review the earlier parts, easily accessible via the Web Design archives.)

Now that you’ve made it to this point, the hardest part is done. Coming up with interesting content and subsequently organizing it and making it appear attractive to look at is a time-consuming and difficult task. What remains in the process of building a web site, however, is some logistic and maintenance work. The first task that faces you in your quest to build an Internet empire is deploying the web site onto the World Wide Web, and that’s the task we’re going to take a look at today.

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