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News & Views |
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The soothing sounds of silence
Be kind to your servers or they may just decide to slow down and pout. We discovered several years ago that some servers, when placed into racks with extremely noisy fans performed poorly. After a bit of research, we discovered that there is a correlation between drive vibration and degraded performance.
There is now a video on YouTube that shows exactly this. An IT "professional" used a program to monitor disk latency and then he yelled at his drives. There was a large, measurable performance drop.
This is, of course, an extreme case. It does, however, illustrate a very interesting point: low frequency sound near your hard drives will tend to slow down your computer's performance. The louder the sound, the slower the performance. So do yourself and your company a favor. Treat your servers kindly and, if you must play music, pick some soft, classical or smooth jazz. Your computer will thank you.
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What is Design and Technology ?
Pace Computing provides professional graphic design services for your web site and marketing needs. We offer general design work, business cards, brochures and magazine layouts. We can even help you get your web site ranked higher on search engines through our proprietary Search engine optimization (SEO) services.
We also offer technical services from basic home computer repair to advanced network system management with support for all versions of Windows, Linux, DOS, Unix, BSD and Mac. We can handle your wiring needs and we have the ability to design and build your network from the ground up.
 For those who need custom programming, we can write the software that you need. We use standards based programming and we can handle Perl, PHP, MySQL, MS SQL, C, C++, HTML, XML, Javascript and AJAX among other languages and standards. Our scratch written software is all based on LAMP programming and offers multi-user, network interfaces with secured communication, even across the Internet.
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Hot Topics |
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Windows 8, in the pipeline
Microsoft is working on the successor to Windows 7, called Windows 8. Following the lead of Apple, Microsoft is merging their desktop interface with the Metro UI interface from their phone line.
Apple has already done this with OS X Lion and Ubuntu Linux has already made a similar move with the Unity Desktop. So, it appears that all the Operating System manufacturers are moving to a
unification of phone, tablet, netbook and PC interfaces.
We took a look at Windows 8 and, unfortunately, we weren't impressed. The controls
are
hidden away. Sometimes you need to left click,
other times right click. Also, the controls are not in the same locations in the interfaces. This leads you to operate the system like you have A.D.D. Left-right-up-down. Down and back, now up and
back. In my opinion, no one at Microsoft is really looking at ease of use and economy of movements.
Another pet peeve of mine is the hidden control system. In order to attain the very clean,
sleek look of the Metro UI, Microsoft removed clear navigation controls. This forces the user to poke around to see if they can find the controls. Not very clean.
Microsoft has followed
Apple's IPad lead and banned Flash from the Metro UI interface. This leaves you hanging on many web pages with a useless message telling you to install Flash. You can get to the Windows 7 style
desktop and use Flash there, but you have to exit the Metro UI interface, start a different web browser and surf there. Running under the old style desktop is just as frustrating. Every time you
click the Start button, back to the Metro UI
you go. Stacking Metro UI program windows with
regular program Windows can't be done. All you can do is display two windows at a time with one minimized to such a degree that it can't be read.
All-in-all, I believe Windows 8 will be
heralded as one of the worst interfaces every released. It is, however, great if you just casually surf the net.
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