Month: April 2009

General

64-Bit

By on Thursday, April 16, 2009

64-bit processor technology has been with us for quite some time. The first 64-bit processor, the MIPS R4000, came out in 1991. Back then they were expensive and relagated to server duty. Intel’s first 64-bit processor, the Itanium, came out in 2001 followed by AMD’s Opteron/AMD64 in 2003 starting the move to mainstream computing.

Now, the technology is practically everywhere, even desktops and laptops, with the Intel and AMD having multiple 64-bit processor families. And yet a lot of people still don’t know this. They have this impression that all desktops are 32-bit and only servers are 64-bit. But that’s not the case anymore.

Oh, and if  you do have a 64-bit machine, do install a 64-bit OS,  so you can harness your machine’s full potential. You wouldn’t want to have 8GB or RAM onboard only to find that your OS can’t use it.

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General

2009 April 11 El Pinoy, Anilao, Batangas

By on Sunday, April 12, 2009

Finally went diving again after a long dry spell. I had no planned activities for the Holy Week so I invited Vinz for a dive and off we– Vinz, his girlfriend, Michelle and I– went. We went to this resort owned by Mike, a friend of Vinz’s girlfriend. It was a small, non-commercialized dive resort. We were joined by Mike’s wife and his in-laws so we had to take two boats to some sites near Dive and Trek where we dived while the ladies stayed on the boats. The dives were nothing spectacular but it was just good to be underwater again. Maybe I’m not ready to swap my dive gear for a surfboard just yet.

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General

NetTop Without The Net

By on Friday, April 10, 2009

The government has this initiative called the “NetTop ng Bayan” which is an effort to increase the affordability of PCs. NetTops are a type of relatively low-power desktop computers designed for performing basic tasks such as surfing the Internet, accessing web-based applications and rich internet applications, document processing and audio/video playback etc. Like netbooks, you can already use office applications and even play some games though you can’t carry them around as conveniently.

But to unlock the full use of nettops, you should have an Internet connection (that’s why it has the word “net” in the first place :P). But, unfortunately, our subscription rates are quite expensive. Typically this would vary from P800 ($16) for a 384 Kbps connection to P3000 ($60) per month for a 3 Mbps connection. So in a year, a nettop with connection charges doesn’t look so affordable anymore.

In Japan, for $60 you can already get a 160 Mbps. That’s 50x the speed! We can only hope for those speeds and prices. Maybe there’s going to ba a “Net Connection ng Bayan” or something otherwise it’s just going to be “Top ng Bayan”.

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General

Disabling fring Auto Start

By on Friday, April 3, 2009

This morning, my phone’s battery ran out so, on the way to work, I charged it with my car charger. As soon as it accumulated a sufficient charge, I turned it on and continued merrily on my way.

Then when I reached the parking lot, I noticed that fring was on! I checked the data connection counter and found that I had been online without my knowledge for almost 30 minutes. I quickly disconnected. Good thing Globe has recently lowered their wireless data rates to P5 for 15 minutes.

Still, I definitely don’t want a repeat and wake to discover that I’ve been online for hours and hours. I didn’t immediately found a way to turn off the auto start feature. But finally, after a quick search on the net, I found that the switch can be found in fring->Options-> Settings->Personalize->’Automatic Start’. No more auto start!

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