My friend got a supercomputer

Actually, no. But compared to my dinosaur, it is a supercomputer. Here are the specs:

• 3 Ghz AMD Athlon 64 FX
• Asus motherboard
• 2 GB RAM
• GeForce FX 5700 128MB (which he's going to upgrade to a 6800 Ultra in a few months)
• Windows XP Professional 64-bit
• 15" LCD Monitor

It was his birthday today and he called me and another friend over. I got my first peep at Doom 3 on his new computer. Even with all that Windows still flashed a "low memory" warning after we quit Doom 3. And Unreal Tournament 2004 looked absolutely stunning, with all the graphics set to high. I envy people with such great computers.

Time for some more tech news. Here's an article about a new data storage technology that stores a terabyte of data on a disk the size of a CD. This brings some pretty interesting conclusions. CDs lasted from approximately 1995-2003/04. DVD's have started taking over from 2003 and already the Blu-Ray format is about to make its debut. Considering that at the earliest this new disk will be available in 2010, that means that the time a particular format stays in vogue, is gradually decreasing. Should we start saying good bye to our hard disks? Hmmm...

And to top it all off, Spread Firefox has started its second publicity campaign after reaching 2 million downloads in 10 days. This time around they want 10,000 users to sign up at the Spread Firefox site. You get yourselves a Drupal ID, a simple free blog and a few other goodies that come with being part of an online community. To sign up just go spreadfirefox.com. This campaign is going a bit slow, so please direct everyone you know to this entry (or the site itself), and help spread the fire.

Microsoft does it again

I found this little piece of news. Basically it says that Microsoft is going to start charging for its service which allows its MSN and Hotmail users to download their e-mails off the servers to Outlook Express and Microsoft Outlook. And there we have it folks, one more example of Microsoft joining the dark side. They say that their doing it to stop spammers. But we all know that its just another scheme to make some more money at the expense of the free Net. Though the charge isn't too much and only about 5% to 10% of MSN and Hotmail users actually use the service, it is none the less, just a bit annoying.

So folks if you're still on a Hotmail or MSN e-mail, I do suggest you get off it. I suggest that you try Yahoo! or even better, Gmail, if you can get someone to give you an invite. And while you're at it you might want to try out the Mozilla Thunderbird e-mail program. Believe me, it rocks. And with a few third party programs like gPopper or YahooPOPs you can use or Gmail or Yahoo accounts just like a standard POP account. Good luck, and see you later.

Busy holding Orion's Arm

I've been pretty busy for the last few days writing up some articles for this Wordbuilding project that I'm a part of called Orion's Arm. It's hard sci-fi so I suggest you only go there if you're the geeky type. If you happen to go there and do like it, please leave a comment.

I was looking around my history and I found the blog that led me to discover w.bloggar, my blogging tool. Here's the link. Unfortunately, he doesn't have trackback so I can't trackback to him. Anyway, I'll leave him a comment. By the way, I'm using Haloscan trackback, for those of you who are interested. Use the link on the Links panel. Also the first button links you to the site for the Mozilla Firefox browser, for those of you who are still stuck on IE.

Nothing else interesting to talk about today. I'll keep you posted on how my articles at Orion's Arm go, and maybe I'll put up some links.

Me, Myself and Mine

Well, enough of my blog. Now a little bit of me. My profle on the right says all that I have to say about myself. I've had my computer for about 3 years now. It's an old Pentium 3 550Mhz with just 128 MB of RAM. I've got an Epson Printer and a Sony CD-RW drive.

My software isn't much to brag about, but I like it. Windows XP SP1, with Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird as my browser and e-mail app respectively. But I'm hoping to get Red Hat Linux soon. By the way, I was among the first 200,000 to get the Firefox 1.0 PR version. This amazing little piece of software has racked up 2 million downloads in ten days. Microsoft, watch out. I've just dound this great blogging tool called w.bloggar which lets me write my blogs offline and then post without ever coming to the site. Besides this blog, I also write a personal diary with Diary Defender, which is undoubtedly the best diary software I've come across.

That pretty much does it for today. As you can see, I'm quite a techno-geek, so be prepared for some techno-stuff in the days to come.