Tuesday, April 29, 2008

ausTech news Episode 91: HARD DISK DRIVE SPECIAL

Episode 91: Hard Drive Special

This episode I go through what Makes a Hard Disk Drive tick, and show you what to look for and some golden rules in looking for one both today and in the future. Take note!

Also, Zeptos plans for a power rig of a gaming laptop.

Besides the large special on Hard Drives, A free game (trackmania nations forever), and a Video that you just can't miss if you liked the Animatrix series.
Remember you can always subscribe by clicking the podcast icon in the top right, or by putting this link into your iTunes/podcast program: http://feeds.feedburner.com/AustechNews - Its easy and free to subscribe, and gives you the show as soon as we make them!



You can have a listen using the player here:




If you'd like, you can download this show straight away (34:43, 19.8mb), by clicking here (if you get a prompt, you want to save it to your computer)

Lastly, we are also on digg, if you would like to vote for us on there!:
http://digg.com/podcasts/ausTech_news


Shownotes:

A new raptor hard drive claws away
storagereview.com - review

Battlefield heroes trailer and info
gamespy.com -source
Beta: may 6th, Client download is 250meg! Customization wahoo

COD4 Map Pack: 10 Million in 10 days
au.xbox360.ign.com - source
Now out on Ps3

Zepto brings out the punches
A growing Laptop company, Zepto just unveiled the first of a few new additions to its laptop line. This one is called the Notus, and is a 12inch Laptop that boasts Spill and Drop resistance, as well as a solid 8 hour battery life. Woohoo!
Free Image Hosting at www.ImageShack.us



Video of the week:
Batman: Gotham night Trailer
You have to see this to believe it - its like the Animatrix, albeit for the
Batman series. Excellent music score too!
Go watch on youtube

Tip of the Week:
Free game: Trackmania Nations forever
trackmania.com



Tip of the week:
Hard Disk Drive Special
Hard Disk Drives are still currently the most dangerous, volatile and fragile part of a pc (short of a cpu with no fan I guess) - but without it we wouldn't be where we are today, because it holds all of the information and data we get. It's given the computer a personal face, by allowing people to put much more redundant stuff on theirs, to customize their system.

Inside, a needle seeks across a platter which looks like a tough cd and is called a platter. The platter is what holds all your stuff, and the speed and capacity of your hard drive depends on it. To make the seek time lower, drive makers can up the rotational speed (a bit like how cd burners go at different speeds), Beginning at 5,400rpm, to the common desktop speed of 7,200, on to 10,000 and even 15,000rpm. To increase the amount of stuff you can hold, pack the magnetic data tighter (such as perpendicular recording where the bits are turned sideways), or have more platters. The Hitachi Deskstar out at the moment in 1 Terrabyte for example, has 5 Platters, each with 200gig. Note that a hard drive head must never touch the platter surface, or it can do some big damage the surface. On earlier models, drives that made physical contact would shatter in places and be pretty dramatic. The actual head itself must be extremely close to the surface to be able to correctly pick up the magnetic pattern, so its a delicate balance held up only by a thin pocket of air. To put it another way, if you were to scale up the inside bits of a hard drive, so that the platter was the size of the world - the seek head would be similar to the eiffel tower. Now imagine that tower, with the current technology we are using today, to be used in a hard drive would have to spin at a height of less than one inch from the ground. Or according to the IDEMA hdd industry back in 1999, flying a 747 plane .63mm height off the ground. so you can see why these parts are extremely fragile, but in todays world are for the most part able to last many years with good care.

So having said all that, it should be more obvious why people say to not move your case while its on, or especially not to bump it - you don't want a broken platter now!

Choosing a hard drive for your computer is fairly easy these days, and comes down to three major companies: Seagate, Western Digital and IBM. Maxtor was bought by Seagate, and Raptor drives, were bought up by western digital a long time back, and are regarded as one of the no holds barred fastest drives you can buy for the moment.

Although you can look up reviews for HDD's and I recommend it, when you are tightly pressed for time, most drives perform similar, but there are a few specs to keep an eye on.
Seek Time is how long it takes from the PC saying "hey get this", to the HDD spinning to that part of the platter. Common times are between 6 to 8milliseconds, Although really compared to the other factors its probably the last part you should be looking at.

Next up is the cache size. This is a small ram buffer on the disk, to help get recent files much quicker. Naturally a bigger one helps, but you can obviously only buffer stuff you've already asked for, so the benefits are more for getting the same file again and again. 8meg is common and good, 16meg is a sweet spot. This isn't to be confused with Hybrid Hard Disks, which tend to have upwards of 256meg as a cache - these are a bit of a hybrid (duh) between solid state disks and traditional ones.

Most important though, and I can't stress this enough, is the cost to size ratio. This is how much the drive costs, compared to what you are getting. Taking a recent look at the MSY Price list, a 500 Gig Western Digital Hard Drive is worth $102. If you take the price, and divide it by the capacity, you can work out how much you are paying per gigabyte. In this example, you pay about 20cents per gig. A 1 Terrabyte (1000gig in HDD world) Western Digital is worth $256 or 25cents, making it a good buy for the value and large amount of space you get. On the not so good side, a Seagate 160gig Drive, is $62. That makes it over 38cents per gigabyte. So although you save in the short run $40, you get burned by a higher cost per gig, and the worry of needing to purchase an extra disk in the future if you fill that one up (and possibly moving everything to it). Personally, the sweet spot for HDD's and what I recommend are 500 and 750gig drives, although I love the headroom terrabyte drives are.

Oh and almost forgot - if you get a choice between IDE and SATA as a connection type, always go for SATA. This is because the cables are much smaller and easier to route through your case, and they also allow for more headroom for your hard drive to go faster (will be taken advantage of in the future)
The future looks to eventually replace HDD's as we know it, with Solid State Disks that essentially use flash memory and no moving parts to get rid of most of the downfalls of a mechanical medium. This also means seek times don't exisist anymore, and battery life will increase due to the lower power drain. Currently though, their extreme price ($15 a gig) and small capacities (again, a top of 64gigabytes vs terrabyte for a HDD) make them not practical.

Having talked all about this storage space, an important issue is backup. In short, the bigger a hard drive, the more you can lose. One thing I've learned is to never trust one too much, as they can fail anytime, without much warning. So, in a future episode I'll go through how you can effectively back up, and avoid the potential for some major heartache.

Hope you enjoyed my write up :)


Our email address is austechnews@gmail.com . However feel free to leave a voice mail for feedback and comments on the show as well. Thanks for supporting the show and listening to it!

Wednesday, April 23, 2008

ausTech news Episode 90: CAPTCHA GOTCHA

Episode 90: Captch-a gotcha!

As grand theft auto IV comes closer and closer to being released, a review pops up on the internet... we have a look behind it. As well as that, a bit of a special on using your Asus EEE pc to its potential, and two gaming videos that will make you laugh.

Remember you can always subscribe by clicking the podcast icon in the top right, or by putting this link into your iTunes/podcast program: http://feeds.feedburner.com/AustechNews - Its easy and free to subscribe, and gives you the show as soon as we make them!



You can have a listen using the player here:




If you'd like, you can download this show straight away (34:46, 19.8mb), by clicking here (if you get a prompt, you want to save it to your computer)

Lastly, we are also on digg, if you would like to vote for us on there!:
http://digg.com/podcasts/ausTech_news


Shownotes:

Microsoft Surface tech seen in wild
gizmodo.com - source

GTA IV Review scanned on the net
gtagaming.com - scans

Captcha now gotcha'd
Discussion: Security wise, how can you tell if im a bot?
slashdot.org - source
arstechnica.com - source
thepcspy.com - the kitten authentication method

Tip of the week
eeexUbuntu for your Asus eeePC
A lot of people grab their little eeePC, and the first thing they do is to try and make themselves familar, and install Windows. Well, for a screen with a low vertical resolution, making dialogs too large, I recommend a operating system that works better with it. That system is eexUbuntu.

Download it here: wiki.eeeuser.com
You'll find it extremely easy to install, and even a hardened windows user will have plenty of fun with how easy it is to install a program or game, and take advantage of it. For example, the EEE runs Compiz very well ( youtube video showing it in action here ).

Games mentioned on the podcast:
Tremulous - link
A 3D Shooter based on Enemy Territory
To install using eeeXubuntu for your eeePC:
sudo apt-get install tremulous
(use the terminal, in Accessories)

Warzone 2100 - link
A 3D Shooter based on Enemy Territory
To install using eeeXubuntu for your eeePC:
Click on this link to download the .deb file. It will give you the option to install it :)
Once installed, these games will appear in the games menu
This game was also Tip of the week in
Episode 74 of ausTech news




Video of the week:
Meet the Scout
Valve deliver the goods with another cartoony,
funny Team Fortress 2 Charecter video.
Go watch on shacknews

Video of the week two!:
Battlefield Heroes Parody
A jab at EA's employment mixed with the recent Battlefield Heroes video.
Go watch on Planetbattlefield

Our email address is austechnews@gmail.com . However feel free to leave a voice mail for feedback and comments on the show as well. Thanks for supporting the show and listening to it!

If you have time, be sure to visit back and see what time we will be going live for next episode this Sunday, thanks to gamestah.com

Sunday, April 20, 2008

Episode 90: Live tonight!

Just a reminder that ausTech news will be live like the last few weeks, thanks to Gamestah.com tonight. Expect a starting time approximately 9pm AEST/Melbourne time.

Jump on the irc channel at irc to do any shoutouts or give any feedback while the show is live. Although IRC may sound scary, its not. If you don't have mirc or xchat, Here is a web tool to help you get on.

http://www.mibbit.com/ - Web based IRC client
When you go there, the main information that you need is that we will be on irc.gamesurge.net (that is the server), and the channel will be #gamestah . You can choose any nickname you'd like, of course.

Monday, April 14, 2008

ausTech news Episode 89: LCD SCREEN SPECIAL

Episode 89: LCD SCREEN SPECIAL

Look forward to a large cast in the live room (thanks to http://gamestah.com ) tonight, and on the boiler we talk at length on what to look out for when getting a LCD Screen for your computer. Grand Theft Auto IV reveals its Multiplayer options and we talk about that as well.
And more!

Remember you can always subscribe by clicking the podcast icon in the top right, or by putting this link into your iTunes/podcast program: http://feeds.feedburner.com/AustechNews - Its easy and free to subscribe, and gives you the show as soon as we make them!



You can have a listen using the player here:




If you'd like, you can download this show straight away (1:16:08, 34.7mb), by clicking here (if you get a prompt, you want to save it to your computer)

Lastly, we are also on digg, if you would like to vote for us on there!:
http://digg.com/podcasts/ausTech_news


Shownotes:

Australian police refuse to be fined for piracy, claims problem is "too widespread"
techdirt.com - source

GTAIV's multiplayer
kotaku.com - source

Gears of War 2 information
gamecenteronline.net - source

Techcrunch - or how twitter is going to rock
techcrunch - source
As well as a big discussion by the crew on this episode.

Tip of the week:
Nokia Mosh
A social application built for mobile phones. You can find a lot of freeware and useful
phone applications on here, if you'd like to beef up your phone.
And no, its not just ringtones!
nokia mosh's website



Video of the week:
Grand Theft Auto IV
GTAIV looks like it has some funny Video versions of their funny radio ads...
Check out two of them here, including one about a singles Club with guns.
shacknews.com - streaming links


Our email address is austechnews@gmail.com . However feel free to leave a voice mail for feedback and comments on the show as well. Thanks for supporting the show and listening to it!

Tuesday, April 08, 2008

ausTech news Episode 88: GTA IV - Kid Edition

Episode 88: GTA IV - Kid Edition

We have a lot more people in the live show thanks to Gamestah, and cover the very real issue of GTA IV being an edited version come launch day for us. Should we be worried? Also, Creative show their true colours in attempting to smack down a author that fixed problems with their drivers.


Remember you can always subscribe by clicking the podcast icon in the top right, or by putting this link into your iTunes/podcast program: http://feeds.feedburner.com/AustechNews - Its easy and free to subscribe, and gives you the show as soon as we make them!



You can have a listen using the player here:




If you'd like, you can download this show straight away (50:12, 28.7mb), by clicking here (if you get a prompt, you want to save it to your computer)

Lastly, we are also on digg, if you would like to vote for us on there!:
http://digg.com/podcasts/ausTech_news


Shownotes:

Creative tried to smack down a guy trying to get drivers working for vista
Creatives original smackdown
And... Daniel's Reply

Breaking news: Q3 on the Ipod touch
engadget - source

N-Gage gaming service is now live
n-gage.com - official site

X-fire oddness
x-fire.com - competition page

GTAIV Has been watered down for Australia!
joystiq.com - source

Tip of the week:
Write caching on your HDD Is disabled by default on Vista. This is because it feels that
although you may have screwed your hard disk into place in your desktop, that you might still take it out. While it's on. And While your copying a file across. As a result, it will turn write caching off, slowing down file access, especially for often used files. Re-enable it easily with this short guide.
ocmodshop.com for the win


Video of the week:
Teamfortress 2 with your girlfriend
Ever wondered how your girlfriend might take jumping in to play your favourite FPS game?
This is a funny (and real!) take on it, and I think she done well :)
Internode forums link, with Youtube inside

Video of the week #2:
Top 10 Star Wars Videos
2 For the Price of 1! (?? - me), This is a recap of the funnies that have been
happening with Star Wars. A lot have been seen before, but are still very funny.
If you want to skip to the one that made me cry from laughing,
Try video #3: Darth Vader being a smartie.
dayofthejedi.com - video list



Our email address is austechnews@gmail.com . However feel free to leave a voice mail for feedback and comments on the show as well. Thanks for supporting the show and listening to it!

Tuesday, April 01, 2008

8bitNews - Episode 87.1: BBS Boards!!

NEW SHOW: 8Bit News



We've decided to target a more niche market now for our show, and have decided to go in the 8Bit console market. Tune in and listen to reviews of the greatest hardware, and this weeks exclusive review of Mayhem in Monsterland. MikeJ jumps in with me, and gives his opinion as well. We also answer a pen pal mail from a "uniquely named" charecter as well.


You can have a listen using the player here:




If you'd like, you can download this show straight away (16:44, 15.1mb), by clicking
here (if you get a prompt, you want to save it to your computer)

*UPDATE - EPISODE NOW OUT!*


Alternatively, Mail us eleven (11) 3.5 Floppy disks to our office in a self addressed envelope, and we will happily compress it onto them for you. We realise how long it may take to get files, so we offer this as a server to help you listen to our show.

Lastly, we are also on digg, if you would like to vote for us on there!:
http://digg.com/podcasts/ausTech_news


Words and Links to the Internets:

Review: Mayhem in Monsterland
This game is cutting edge for the best value console out there, the Commodore 64.
No bbs address :-( just a web address

got light?

Look this link you can click on! Hyperlinks are the way of the future!

Tip of the Episode:
Connection speed and Bandwidth checker, for when you need to see how
fast your modem has connected!
No bbs point :-( just a web address for netfor2.com

Picture of the week:
No picture this week, I'm sorry :( I couldn't wait for it to download.



Again, we are trying email instead of pen pal mail, and that email address is austechnews@gmail.com . We look forward to hearing from you soon!