1.5TB HD from Seagate

Things are looking good in terms of storage, Seagate making a long jump from the previous 1TB HD available on the market to their new 1.5TB HD for desktops. The Barracuda 7200.11 uses 4 platters and a SATA interface of 3Gbit/s, delivering nearly 120MB/s. They also released a HD for notebooks of 0.5TB using their well-known PMR (perpendicular magnetic recording) technology.

As I was saying, things are looking good in this area, considering also that Hitachi anounced a 3.5-inch, 5TB hd by 2010. They also say that two of these would be equal to the brain-storing capacity. I am skeptical about there exact measurements on our brains but…still nice

How Microsoft spies on us

There are some hidden files in which Windows keeps information about what we’ve done on our PC’s. For example: Windows does not really clean your IE history even after you instructed it to do so, and it does not erase your mail even if you deleted it from Outlook.

How it’s done

The information is usually stored in “index.dat” files, which are contained in folders named “name.ie5″ (ex: Content.ie5, history.ie5, etc). They appear hidden because of some instructions kept in the “desktop.ini” files contained in the name.ie5 folder and the parent folder. This way, they cannot appear in Windows Explorer (even with the “show hidden files” attribute enabled), in searches, nor in MS-DOS after a proper directory listing. An example:

1. Open a Command Prompt window (start->run->cmd)
2. Change directory to WP:\Documents and Settings\User\locals~1\tempor~1 (where WP=your Windows Partition and User=your username)
3. List the contents of the directory by typing “dir”. As you can see, no directory in the “name.ie5″ form appears in the listing.
4. Type “desktop.ini” to open this file. As you can see it contains some text:
   [.ShellClassInfo]
   UICLSID={7BD29E00-76C1-11CF-9DD0-00A0C9034933}
5. Now change directory to “Content.ie5″ (you can see it accesses it even if it doesn’t appear in the directory listing).
6. Again, open the “desktop.ini” files which belongs to this directory. As you can see, it again contains the information:
   [.ShellClassInfo]
   UICLSID={7BD29E00-76C1-11CF-9DD0-00A0C9034933}

Desktop.ini files contain information that customizes certain aspects of the directory it belongs to; in this case, the UICLSID attribute with the given value cloaks the folder in Windows Explorer. In other files, desktop.ini may contain another attribute, CLSID, which makes the “Search” utility not to look in these folders. To see for yourself, simply delete the “desktop.ini” files and you will see that after that the directory will normally appear in Windows Explorer and in searches.
But, deleting them isn’t enough because Windows reconstructs them at every boot. So,delete everything in the file except the [.ShellClassInfo] line; this will fool Windows into thinking they’ve still covered their tracks.

now you see it,now you don’t

puppy eyes

Smoking kills

1.2 m tall aliens - videos

Yap. “Not another one”, you’ll say…but this time it’s different!

Jeff Peckman(the man in the photo) sustains he has videos with 1.2m tall aliens that he’s going to share!
But that’s not all! He is asking the city council to create a commission dealing with space aliens: the Extraterrestrial Affairs Commission; that’s very good,what happens if you’re on the road and an alien BANG! jumps in front of you? you call the EAC!
I have all the reasons to believe this man’s statements. Here are some of them:

• he’s 54; he’s single ; he lives with his parents
• look at his face ; he seems like an onest citizen,with no mental disorders at all
• in the past, he requested the city council several things, among which was “to implement stress-reduction techniques”
• the city didn’t approve his request - and the absence of “stress reduction techiques” may have serious effects on his health

Sorry for his parents though.

Earth Trek’s 90-805R Mini Projector - The World’s Smallest Non-Embedded Projector

Earth Trek’s 90-805R Mini projector measures in at 105×58x25mm and weighs only 160 grams. Small enough to fit in your pocket, the 90-805R Mini can project a 22-inch diagonal image and somehow has enough room to stuff in an SD/T-Flash card slot, a lithium ion battery, a speaker, and an MP4 player.

Microsoft Chief Software Architect-Ray Ozzie: Open source is the greatest threat to Microsoft

No shit. It’s about time you Microsoft fellows realized that. Sorry for you guys though,I wouldn’t want to be near when you’ll find out that Google is catching up on you too! :O
I know,the news surprised me as well!
P.S: maybe you didn’t have this in mind but…

Microsoft	Open Source
costs a lot of cash	it’s for free
cannot be modified,copied or distributed	can be modified,copied,distribuited (in fact it is even encouraged to do that)
Errors(and lots of ‘em),system crashes,blue screen of death - have to wait a couple of years for the next stable version when these errors are fixed, but obviously others appear	Most bugs exist in the beta version(but then again it’s beta!),quickly repaired by the open-source community
Maybe 1000 programmers	1000 times more
etc	etc

Internet Evolution

Ever wondered what’s the evolution of number of websites on the Internet?
As you can see, the graph goes wild after 2000,when probably german film makers noticed the advantages of the Internet: it’s simple,it’s free (almost) and it can store all their pornish/fetish/hardcore movies attracting visitors by their “only for 5$ a year you could have all the porn you want” ads,which is of course a lot cheaper than hotline or cable channels of this type.
Apparently, it worked rather well for them, as today 28,258 Internet users are viewing pornography every second and the budget spent every second on pornography is $3,075.64.Oh, and the sales made from Internet pornography reach $97.06 billion.
So finally,here’s the leading nations in masturbating:

Sorry, i think i got a little furious there and went off-topic with boring stuff; returning back to the Internet’s beginnings:

Number of websites, Dec 90 to Jan 96

Date	Number of websites
Dec 90	1
Dec 91	10
Dec 92	50
Jun 93	130
Sep 93	204
Oct 93	228
Dec 93	623
Jun 94	2,738
Dec 94	10,022
Jun 95	23,500
Jan 96	100,000

Wondering what’s that first website in 1990? Here it is

Yummy