Flippin the Bits

While we all wait on hard drives with Perpendicular Recording that could increase data storage by up to 10 times, Seagate has some good news. They just announced that they have produced a desktop HDD with the traditional longitudinal recording method that stores up to 160GB on a single 3.5" platter. The drive sells for about $90 right now. Due to it's single platter, it will have lower noise levels and power consumption. This is good, I for one am sick of noisy hard drives. My most recent Maxtor SATA drive is noisy as hell. I can here it grinding whenever my gaming PC loads anything. In my experience Seagate and Western Digital drives have been much quieter. Anyway, on the subject of Perpendicular recording Hitachi has this hilarious Flash video about it. I must say, this is the first time that I have seen a HDD manufacturer have any bit (no pun intended) of humor.

In other news, I recently upgraded to Firefox1.5 and I'm quite happy with it. I hear 2.0 is not far away, and implements some cool new features. My only complaint about 1.5 is that my favorite theme, Lila, has not been updated for 1.5, and I've been using Lila since way before the 1.0 release. I hope it is updated soon. Another theme I wandered across while composing this is BlackJapan, which is quite nice if you like darker themes. And for all you slackers out there.... UPGRADE NOW!!!!

As for daily life, school is over for the semester, and it looks like it will be back to Ivy Tech for another semester due to a problem with which classes I need. Before this semester I sat down with my counselor to make sure I was going to be finished with my associates after this semester, and we thought we had everything taken care of. Last week he called me up asking when I was going to sign up for classes, to which I told him I was not. He informed me of the bad news, and now I must take one physical science to graduate. Since I will be there for one class I figured I might as well go ahead and take another. I choose the advanced OS Linux course over a digital photography class because my favorite instructor will be teaching it, Plus I need to beef up on my Linux knowledge.

I guess I'll end today with a quote...

For a list of all the ways technology has failed to improve the quality of life, please press three.
- Alice Kahn