Computers Category Archive

Advances in Computer Cooling Systems

3 Replies Jonny Hankins

A few months ago I wrote an article about electricity use in data storage centres, and I want to continue on that theme today. This week Intel announced the results of a year long experiment that involves immersing computers in mineral oil to cool them.

It turns out that the reason these centres use so much electricity is the need to cool the machinery. As this article points out some companies have had the brilliant idea of building their facilities in cold places, so that they can just leave the doors open or use cold seawater to cool the plants, but obviously this does not suit all business plans.

Intel have been immersing their machinery in mineral oil in an attempt to save on electricity. Oil is a better conductor of heat than air so works more efficiently. You just have to remove the fans from the casings and drop the machines in. At the end of this 1 year experiment they found no problems in the machinery due to the immersion. Report in the article linked above.

Computers submerged in mineral oil which acts as a cooling agent

Intel’s experimental oil cooling system

This certainly gives a whole new meaning to the idea of a think-tank.

An organization called Sandia have another idea called a fan-less heat sink. This is a rotating wheel covered in fins that cuts out the use of the fan. They claim that this system is also much more efficient than the old fan system and is not affected by dust as the centrifugal force generated during its use throws it all out. There is an article explaining it here and for a technical explanation see their company website.

If you want to go one step further how about laser cooling? Researchers at Nanyang Technological University have been working on this idea in the hope that they will be able to build microchips that actually cool themselves. Their press release talks about the end of compressors in fridges and air conditioners, a dramatic advantage in energy waste and an end to noisy fans. All published in this month’s Nature science journal.

If all of this has wet your appetite you could try to convert your old computer to a water cooling system. Rather expensive commercially available solutions are available but this blog demonstrates how you can do it all in your own home using just a few things you can buy at your local hardware store. I would recommend that you do not use the computer you are using now though and that you save anything you might want to see again onto another hard drive!

I take no responsibility for damage incurred.

Stop using Internet Explorer

9 Replies Christopher Roberts

This post was going to be entitled “Why you should stop using Internet Explorer” however I didn’t think that was a strong enough title, so I changed it to the direct instruction you see above this text: Stop using Internet Explorer.

You have a choice. You can use Google, Bing, Yahoo! or Ask. You can buy Windows, Mac OS, Chrome OS or Ubuntu. You can go with Apple, Samsung, Sony or RIM.

Although Google dominate the search market, there are still many other search engines out there. Microsoft dominate the computer market, but you can still choose from a [reasonable] selection of other, popular operating systems. You could argue that Samsung now dominate the global smartphone market, but there are still many other companies you can go to to get a smartphone.

You also have a choice as to what browser you use. The internet is arguably now the main function for any computer, so surely you should devote some time then to choosing which browser is right for you?

If you have tried more than three different browsers before, for a considerable length of time and have after weighing up all the pros and cons of each, have chosen your favourite, well done you. If you haven’t, read on.

If you are using Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE), stop. Okay, well you can finish reading the article, but then stop using it. A simple instruction, which could do wonders for your internet experience.

Reasons To Not Use IE

There are many reasons not to use IE. Here is a list of what I think are the strongest arguments against the heavy, slow and outdated browser.

Lack of Security

IE seems to constantly be in the news for its security issues. Much of the malware out there on the internet is only made possible by bugs and holes in Internet Explorer! Need proof? Check out this section of IE’s Wikipedia page.

Speed!

In recent years Microsoft have been really working on making Internet Explorer faster, and IE 9 is much faster than IE 6 or 7 were; granted. That said, it is still much slower than the competition. For example, loading Technology Bloggers from cold (hard refresh) in Firefox, Chrome and Safari took 3 seconds, Opera took 4, while Internet Explorer took 7 seconds.

Lack of Features

Without a doubt, for features, add-ons and extensions, Firefox and Chrome are miles out in front. Safari and Opera also have a reasonable number of things you can add to your browser to customise/improve it, but Internet Explorer has only really started to embrace such features since IE 8. Apart from toolbars, Flash, Adobe Reader etc. IE 6 didn’t really do add-ons.

Inconsistency

Social buttons badly rendered by IE

How IE rendered the same code (our social buttons) on three separate page loads – neither is correct.

Take a look at the three images to the right.

Each of the images is a different variation of the social buttons on our sidebar that IE rendered. The screen size remained the same, and the loads were seconds apart.

IE managed to render three completely different versions of the same code. How does that work?

In the first image it didn’t even attempt to load the social buttons before declaring it was finished. It took a better shot in the second image, whilst in the third image it didn’t bother loading Twitter and threw Google+ to the bottom. Why?

Upon loading the blog in Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera, I saw the exact same result. Each browser displayed them as they are meant to be displayed, every time – Internet Expolorer didn’t.

Lack of Compatibility with Modern Code

Code is advancing all the time, and a good browser will keep up to date with changes, and make sure it is able to interpret and display modern CSS, HTML, PHP etc.

When the blog snows at Christmas, IE doesn’t show that, IE also doesn’t like the ‘modern’ code which makes our search box work, or the code we use to add shadows to text.

Lack of Compatibility with Older Operating Systems

IE 9 doesn’t work with Windows XP, or any Mac OS or Linux system. Only Vista, 7 and 8 support IE 9. IE 10 only works with Windows 7 and Windows 8. According to StatCounter, in the last 6 months, 26.55% of all computer users used XP, whilst 7.13% used Vista and 7.46% use MacOSX – that’s 41.14% of the market that Microsoft are isolating straight away, and Windows 7 and 8 don’t even own all of the 58.86% share of the market that is left!

Advertising Campaign

Microsoft have recently undergone a quite extensive advertising campaign for IE, to try and shake off its bad reputation. They state how ‘lightning fast’ it is compared to how it used to be, which I can’t dispute. What they don’t however say is how it compares to Chrome or Opera. They also try to reassure users that it is now secure, although that is still debatable!

Which Browser to Use?

There are loads of web browsers out there, check out this handy Wikipedia comparison table to see.

Below is a map showing in 2013 so far, which internet browser is the most commonly used by country.

Top browser by country - 2013

Browser popularity by country. The colour of the country is the colour of the most used browser – see legend.

Personally I would advise using either Chrome or Firefox. If you have a relatively standard, or slow PC, then Chrome is probably best for you. It is light, simple and fast.

I still think that Firefox had more functionality than Chrome, and it is my personal favourite. If your PC is usually pretty quick and of a reasonable spec, then I would recommend Firefox.

Chrome is owned by Google – a multinational corporate giant – whilst Firefox is non-profit and open source.

Hackathon Season is Upon Us

2 Replies Jonny Hankins

The use of the term hacker used to be derogatory, conjuring up images of someone cackling like a Witch, hunched over a computer as they steal some poor unsuspecting fool’s bank details. This is changing though, and the present use of the word is much broader and less critical.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a post about Aaron Swartz, and many see him as “a hacker for good”. He was greatly revered and respected in the Internet world and considered a programming genius by many.

Also today many Internet companies offer prizes to hackers who can break their security systems, so that they can then repair the weaknesses, all done more or less in secrecy obviously.

Here last week in Cambridge Massachusetts MIT held a Hackathon. The prize for the best “hack” was $1500 dollars, with plenty of runner’s up prizes too. And it is sponsored by Techfair, who organize a large business fair.

People from tech companies are invited to the hackathon to meet the ‘contestants’. It is in fact a job fair too, but as the website says don’t bring a CV, we just watch to see what you can do. There are tech talks and mini lectures, all above board as you can see from the website here.

A Hackathon

Inside a Hackathon

And this 20 hour marathon is neither the only nor the biggest hackathon in the USA. In January the Foursquare hackathon took place in New York City. The website has a link to all of the submitted hacks, and they are possibly nothing like you imagine. They are websites that can tell you how long you might have to wait in a certain restaurant, tell you NASDAQ values or help you influence the choice in music played around you, and that is to name just a few.

All this is organized with the help of Hacker League, as they say on the website you can “trust Hacker League to handle hackathon planning and organization” because they “power Hackathons”.

The biggest is in Pensylvania and is called PennApps (presumably after the University). Their January event attracted more than 450 students from 40 universities from all over the world, their prize being $4000 and a visit to Google HQ to demonstrate their work.

So the use of the word “hack” has clearly taken on a different meaning.

As many of you might know my work at the Bassetti Foundation is all about responsible innovation.  If we take case 1, writing code to steal bank details or destroy somebody’s reputation by getting into their email account, we might see this as irresponsible. But case 2, improving security, breeding entrepreneurs and innovation using the same skills and through the same actions by the same people, might be seen as much more responsible and in fact is promoted by organizations, businesses and universities.

It doesn’t look much like hacking to me though.