Month: August 2006

Whenever I go to Mercury Drug, I think of Native Command Queuing

Hey cool, my article about SATA came out on the PCMag.ph site.

I wrote this very technical article for the January 2006 issue, and I really enjoyed writing it as I learned a lot about Serial ATA (SATA) and consequently, Parallel ATA (PATA), the technology it’s supposed to have replaced. It’s basically a geek’s dream.

The most interesting factoid is the ATA naming schema used by the technical committees in charge of creating standards for hard disks over the years, vis a vis how the manufacturers named them, which is completely different and ultimately made to confuse the market, making it appear their products had improvements where there wasn’t any. Also another revelation: if it wasn’t for SATA II, hard disk technology would be pretty much the same as 5 or 8 years ago, the main difference being only in capacity, but certainly not speed.

Continue reading Whenever I go to Mercury Drug, I think of Native Command Queuing

What is wrong with teens these days?

Lone Mage posted this today, where he finds something wrong about this link:

Teenagers who listen to music with explicitly sexual lyrics start having sex sooner than those who prefer other songs, a study found.

Whether it is hip-hop, rap, pop or rock, much of popular music aimed at teens contains sexual overtones. Its influence on their behavior appears to depend on how the sex is portrayed, researchers found.

Songs depicting men as “sex-driven studs” and women as sex objects, and with explicit references to sex acts, are more likely to trigger early sexual behavior than those where sexual references are more veiled and relationships appear more committed, the study found.

Continue reading What is wrong with teens these days?

Thoughts on: “People seen as the Achilles’ heel of computer security”

From here:

LAS VEGAS–The most vexing weakness in computer security is not in the hardware or the software, it is in the people who use the machines, according to top hackers and cyber safety specialists.

“It really is more of a human problem than a technical problem,” Dan Kaminisky of Dox Para Research said at the world’s premier hacker conference, DefCon, which ended in Las Vegas on Sunday.

Some things come to mind here:

  1. Knowing that people are the main risks, shouldn’t technology then adapt itself to avoid such pitfalls?
  2. What is technology’s purpose anyway? A lot of people have forgotten the forest that the trees make up. The main purpose of technology is to help people, and if their security is jeopardized while using it, then technology is failing.

    3. Continue reading Thoughts on: “People seen as the Achilles’ heel of computer security”

Girl fired via text

A yawner of a news article From Yahoo:

LONDON (AFP) – A company has defended its decision to sack one of its staff by text message, claiming it was keeping in touch with youth culture. Katy Tanner, a 21-year-old sales assistant, received the message while she was off work with a migraine, the South Wales Echo newspaper said Friday.

The text message said: “We will not require your services anymore…Thank you for your time with us.”

“I don’t think it’s right to just text someone. At least they should have talked to me face to face,” Tanner said.

From the looks of it, it’s more likely she’s peeved because she was fired, and not necessarily that she was fired via text. I mean, what if she was promoted instead? Would she have felt it was inappropriate then?

Continue reading Girl fired via text

Bionic Bio Page By Bioman

Just made a bio area at the sidebar, and am making this post so that I’d have a page where people can leave comments on. Decided to name it that way just to see how many times I can say ‘bio’ in the title, without resorting to ‘biology’, which I don’t like because I almost flunked it in High School. I mean, who flunks in high school?? Continue reading Bionic Bio Page By Bioman

Movie Quotes To Remember Just Before Shooting Someone

“This is what’s going to happen,” she says. “This is what’s going to happen. I will put a round precisely through your medulla oblongata, which is located at the base of your brain, straight through a point mid-distance between your upper lip and the bottom of your nose and you will be dead from the neck down. Your finger won’t even twitch. Do you believe that?”

Continue reading Movie Quotes To Remember Just Before Shooting Someone

Miami Vice

There are many ways Miami Vice could have sucked. They could’ve dwelled on the past. The espadrilles and white blazers. The classic Ferraris and the flashy guns.

The boats, the music, the fashion, all of which Miami Vice had a great impact on in the 80s. Any of which could have been the basis for a movie, considering that many movie remakes these days are willing to work with anything no matter how shallow. It could’ve even gone the Starsky and Hutch comedic route, and it’d still probably be a hit. Besides, you already had Jamie Foxx there, playing Det. Rico Tubbs, which used to be played by Philip Michael Thomas, whose Hollywood star went kaput after the TV series. Foxx would’ve had us rolling on the floor laughing our guts out with material like that.

Instead, Michael Mann wrote the single most stylish, exciting movie I’ve yet to see this year, and the only one I wouldn’t mind seeing over again.

Continue reading Miami Vice

RV – Runaway Vacation

There’s not much to say about RV – Runaway Vacation, so maybe doing it bullet point style I’ll make it more readable:

  • First Robin Williams film I’ve seen after quite a while.
  • Starring pop singer ‘JoJo’ Levesque who’s fast becoming a star and who did fairly well with her role, so fans would definitely want to see her in this one.
  • Basically a story about the chief character’s (Williams) attempt to try and get his dysfunctional family to spend time together via a cross country trip in an RV (recreation vehicle), while at the same time trying not to miss an important presentation to merge an upstart soda company with his bigger company, run by tyrant boss Will Arnett, all the while not telling his family about it.
  • I’ve not seen Adam Sandler’s Click yet, but I presume the story is more or less the same.
  • It isn’t particularly clear why he doesn’t want to tell his family that he is trying to do both things at the same time, albeit this is the main detail in the plot that puts him in all the funny situations. Williams is constantly battling time, gadget misfirings, traffic, and his family’s wailings to try and do both.

    • Continue reading RV – Runaway Vacation