I was reinstalling my sisters PC the other day and I elected to backup her data onto a USB storage pen. We opted for an 8Gb stick in PC world, and I think we paid about £12. I noticed, when the device was plugged in, that the available data size was not the full 8Gb. Obviously, this is because in the data storage industry a Kilobyte is measured as 1000bytes, not 1024, as has been the practice ever since I bought my first HDD (which was a whopping 40Mb drive!)
But, when you think about it isn’t this a little short sighted considering the issue this generates as we begin to use larger and larger data sizes. For example, when this was applied to Kb and Mb the difference was far less in evidence, as we begin to use Terabytes, Petabytes and eventually Exabytes this disparity between the advertised size and the usable size also manifests itself exponentially. The end result is that my shiny new 8Gb USB memory stick has a usable capacity of only 7.59Gb :-\
Extending this example to an 8Exabyte storage device (which had a perfect 8,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes of space) the usable area would only in fact be 6.94Xb ! I think people will start to think hang on I paid for 8 and i’m now only getting only 6.9 ???
(If you want the full excel sheet including the hidden Giga, Mega and Kilo columns please just drop me a mail)
I wonder when the Industry will adopt the true 1024 factored scaling as standard?…
After the redesign of the social networking website giant Facebook went live on the 14th of March, the entire blogosphere as well as the users went berserk. The initial reaction was totally negative, with forums and groups on facebook itself showing negative poll results. ( In a poll on a ” Hate the New Facebook Look” group, out of 800,000 members who participated in the poll, 94% gave a thumbs-down to the new design, and only 5% liked it) The new design is being termed as “Twitter-look-a-like”, and indeed with the new news stream on a users home page showing updates which is very much like Twitter’s own followers page, there are some similarities between the two. No one can deny that Facebook is certainly bothered by the phenomenon that Twitter is turning out to be. And certainly because of CEO Mark Zuckerberg failed to buy out Twitter, Facebook’s new mission seems to be undermining Twitter.
But now almost after a week, when the smoke has faded away and users have already got accustomed to the new look or redesign of Facebook, here’s some reason to cheer up. Here are 5 reasons why I like the new Facebook and possibly you could as well.
1. The News Feed can be filtered.
In the Home page, where we see the Twitter Like feed of the activities of the friend of a user, it displays all the activites of friends. This display can be filtered as well, based on Filters available, such as : Photos, Links, Videos etc. I have some more filters in my profile viz. YouTube, Twitter, Flixster, LivingSocial etc. If you have grouped your friends ( I have grouped them such as :-Social Network Contacts, University, School, Work etc.), then the NewsFeed could also display feed from only the members of those group.
Category : how to
Tags: hacks, HD, YouTube
This might seem as a repost of my previous articles on HD videos [article1, article2, article3 and article4 ], but there have been some changes made to HD as well as HQ videos on YouTube. So this updated article was necessary.
We all have been absolutely enjoying at the HD resolution videos on YouTube. At 1280X720 resolution, these videos have better picture quality than DVD. ( Of course, not all videos uploaded on YouTube who claim as HD are truly HD. Some of them are upscaled versions –which means their resolution has been increased, but that means, it would be similar to a video of lesser resolution being viewed in full screen. )Anyway, recently YouTube updated its pages, and now HD as well as HQ videos are embeddable, and hence viewers can view HD as well as HQ videos on any website/blog where YouTube videos are embedded. But this means, that the previous search keyword to find YouTube HD and HQ videos ( see article: where the search keyword in Google is site:youtube.com “watch in normal quality watch in hd”, it would no longer show all the HD videos, but would only show those videos which has “watch in HD” in the title.)
So searching for HD videos on YouTube has now to be done with traditional search methods using keywords like HD music, HD trailers, 720p music etc.
_Downloading HD Videos from YouTube
Fortunately the Javascript Link still works. I am reposting it here.
First things first, UNDO SEND. Really? Yes! This could be handy when you make some silly mistakes in email and you discover them immediately, but won’t serve you for mails which are long gone. It won’t help you to undo the harm of sending the longest hate mail that you sent last week, and now you don’t want to be held responsible of calling your friend a #$%^&@. Undo send is a new GMail Labs addon which on activation, will show a link of Undo till 5 seconds of sending an email. So, a window of 5 seconds is given for you to get back the shot arrow. Not bad eh! And as Michael Legett says in the GMail Blog Post, if the browser crashes or is closed within those 5 seconds, the mail will be still sent.
More new news, is that GMail now has enabled YouTube, FLickr, Picasa and Yelp preview within mail. Before it was Youtube windows which was enabled in GMail chat. And now, we can preview all these links from a Flickr or a Picasa Gallery to Youtube videos, right in your inbox. No need to go elsewhere. So share your links more and more. [ via GMail Blog ]
I regularly spend a few hours a day on G-Mail video. I love it, IMHO it’s by far the best free IM/Video combo available at present. But… but, but, but – is it just me or are the video crashes becoming more frequent? One second you’re talking and the next the video window has just disappeared leaving you with just the text IM window….?#!
I’ve also noticed that the speed at which an ‘instant’ message appears has been decidedly non-instant over the past few days? it can be rather frustrating to the flow of a conversation or maybe I just need to upgrade my precognition chip!
What do you think… let me know…
[ Image Courtesy: gaharoni ]
Category : google
Tags: gmail, google, hacks
Okay said and done in the title itself. GMail just got rid of the one thing which has been irritating me for so many years of my using GMail. Multi-Select Attachments is here. From this day onwards, if you want to select multiple files to attach, you don’t need to attach them individually. Gone are the days of zippping multiple files into an archive, just because you want to send them through GMail. Now all you need to do is browse for the files, and select all of them, and UPLOAD. Voila!!!! Read the full article on GMail Blog here.
Also new is the flickr-ish upload Progress bars which indicate whether your selected attachment file has been completely uploaded yet or not. Great going GMail. There you go!! Few more reasons to love your all improved GMail. What more do you want from it? Ask away.
Also new in GMail is the introduction of the new Import/Export functionality of Filters. To use it, turn it on from the Labs tab under Settings, and from the Settings > Filters page you can download a file containing some or all of your filters or upload a file to create a set of filters all in one go.
Read the post on GMail Blog, on what else you could do with this new functionality which include stuff like downloadinf filters on POP and IMAP, Sharing Filters et al.
