Practical Technology

Up-to-date computers now include external ports that, in theory, can handle data at rates of up to 5 Gigabits per second. But which is better? If you’ve been in the computer business for any length of time you can probably painfully remember when serial RS-232 ports could barely handle 28 Kilobytes per second. And, adding [...]

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Ever get tired of Windows people proclaiming how their operating system has device support for this, that, and the other thing and Linux doesn’t? Well, now you have a perfect come-back. The newest, fast interface, USB 3.0 is out and only Linux has native support for it. Linux started supporting USB 3.0 in the September [...]

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If you’re like me, you’ve taken to carrying important data on USB sticks or flash drives. They’re handy, you can use them on any PC, and with built-in encryption even if you lost them it was no big deal. Bad news: It’s now a big deal. The German security company SySS GmbH discovered that many, [...]

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You can’t make stuff this bad up. Many T-Mobile Sidekick smartphone users lost all their contacts, calendar entries, photographs, you name it, when Sidekick’s back-end software provider Microsoft, Danger, went down. Danger turned out to be an all too apt name. Sidekick users use the Danger servers to synchronize their smartphone’s content with a cloud-based [...]

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I’m old enough to remember when some of the first hard drives, such as the IBM Winchester-two disks with 30MBs each, hence 30/30, thus Winchester after the 30/30 rifle-showed up. I can also recall using cassette-tapes and 8-inch floppy disks on PCs. I’ve met people in their twenties who are unclear about what cassette-tapes are [...]

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