Category Archives: Tech News

Mechanical Computers Rise Again?

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Here is an interesting article I ran across, talking about new designs for mechanical computers for use is high stress situations where normal computers can’t quite take the abuse.  Kind of interesting how the pendulum seems to be swinging back now.  I have seen this many times over the years, where one technology fades out in favor of another, only for it to come back in one form or another in the future.

One example (in my opinion anyway) would be mainframes that got replaced by minis, and commodity servers.  These are now getting consolidated and replaced by virtual servers, which is one big server or many servers that act as one to run all of the virtual servers.  Isn’t that pretty much what mainframes did?  Aah, the cycle continues!

Linux versus Windows on System Calls

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I found an interesting article on the Interweb today, based on something a peer told me during a service call. It has to do with the differences between how system calls are handled between Linux and Windows performing the same task, in this case, serving up a single web page with a single image. The fellow comparing the two even provided pictures that map out how the different operating systems map those calls, or more simply what is going on under the hood when the system does what is asked of it.

This is a short article, but is a great example of some fundamental differences between Linux and Windows, that are deeply entrenched in the source code levels, This is also a shiny example of one reason why Linux outperforms Windows in most cases (that’s been my experience anyway), and why Windows is harder to secure.

Before I provide linky goodness, let me make a disclaimer. I am not bashing Windows or Microsoft with what I said above. The performance observation is just that, my observation based on my experience. The issue of securing Windows is the same, I am not saying you can’t secure Windows, it’s just a lot harder.

Now, on to the show, take a look and let me know what your thoughts are!

More on RSS

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Well now, I got some good info recently, and I felt it was my duty to share with everyone.  I have been a fan of and tinkerer with RSS feeds for years now, so how I missed this one I have no clue.  Regardless, after my last post about “What is RSS?“, my friend Mack mentioned Google Reader in the comments of that post.  Ok, I must be living under a pretty large rock, because despite all of the Google services I use day to day, I had never heard of Google Reader.  I have been using a program called ShardReader as an RSS aggregator on my computer, but hadn’t thought about a web based implamentation.

Actually, say I hadn’t thought about a web based version is not true, I wrote some (IMHO) pretty cool PHP code to categorize, list and display multiple RSS feeds in one place years ago.  However, this was for the purpose of displaying that information to my website visitors, I never thought about using it for myself.

That being said, there is nothing wrong with SharpReader, or any software that works for you.  However, I had to write up something about Google Reader because of the beauty that it is in fact web based.  I came to realize that it’s beautiful because now I can take my feeds with me wherever I go.  If I have access to a web browser, and a few minutes to kill, I can catch up on my news (I am a news junkie you know).  I was able to get started with no fuss using my gmail email account.  Best of all, I can still use SharpReader when I feel like it, and I was able to export my feed list to a standard OPML file from SharpReader, and import it right into Google Reader.  Now that is exactly how open standards are supposed to work!  Good job guys!

So, if you are looking for a very good RSS news reader, plus one that you can use anywhere (even off-line now!), check Google Reader out, I have been genuinely impressed and I bet you would find that you like it.