15 April 2008

100 exabytes of data

An exabyte is a billion gigabytes. It is believed that Google has 100 exabytes of data. There's a good article at Tech Republic that makes sobering reading and suggests that the sheer size and potential influence of Google and their developing applications may force governments to take action and the world according to Microsoft looks like changing quite significantly in the next couple of years.

Worth a read if your into this sort of thing. Link here.

And it was only today I learned (from a student!) that the word for 1000 terabytes is perabyte.

11 April 2008

Really slow typing

As if poor old Vista users haven't enough problems, here's another for those who may be using a keyboard that uses a PS/2 socket (i.e. not a USB connection).

It seems that in the upgrade to Vista some vital bits of code were left out and systems will return to s default setting that, for reasons best known to themselves, shows the characters typed 12 milliseconds after hitting the key. Now 12ms may not sound long but it will result in you valiantly typing away and the letters appearing in a delayed fashion that can be quite odd.

In some cases it may also appear that the lovely new and zippy processor you have isn't coping well at all with a simple task and your computer may even freeze. (Remember those days? Well Vista brings them back!)

All this can be fixed, though, so don't panic. I would be inclined to get a new keyboard - you've probably worn out the E and backspace keys by now or scratched off bits of the N. However, if you want to adjust the settings to put things right there's a bit of Registry editing to do. Write to me for details.