Wilson Ng
Wired Desktop
I WENT over some computer specs recently when I noted that one of the HP Notebooks was already USB 3.0-capable.
The “SuperSpeed USB” 3.0 is a new standard that offers backward compatibility with old USB 2.0 devices while attaining theoretical speeds of up to 10 times faster.
USB 2.0 has a theoretical maximum speed of 480 mbps or megabits per second. While that may sound fast, it still took me close to an hour to copy a hundred or so gigabytes. USB 3.0 promises speeds of up to 5 gigabits. USB 2 was named hi-speed, but our requirements also grew, so that after eight or so years, we needed more.
That’s how USB 3.0 came to be. It is now nicknamed Superspeed.
This will be very convenient if you handle a lot of music or videos. Of course, the other bottleneck is still the device itself. If you are copying from or to a solid state hard drive, or RAID drives, it will be faster than as single drive.
Soon, new motherboards or new controllers will sport that logo and will enable you to get that speed.
Meanwhile, if you are very active in Facebook, there is an innovation that really got me excited.
I have a Blackberry that automatically gets my latest email and in order to also know what happens in the social network, I set it up so that if there are new status updates that I tagged or somebody sent me a message or tagged a picture of me or wants to be my friend, then I can be notified through email even if I am not logged into Facebook.
The problem previously was that you could read the updates but not reply. To reply, I had to go to my notebook , click on the link provided, log in to my account and then reply through its messaging system.
Now, it is possible to immediately reply through email.
When somebody sends you a message through Facebook or makes a comment or posts, the notification is emailed to you and it will contain the code that will identify the message.
You can just reply to the email and your reply will be posted as an additional comment to the post in FB. It’s that easy!
Why did Facebook do this? Well, Facebook has become so popular and so engaging (with over 350 million members), that it is recognized that a lot of people waste time on it. It is increasingly being banned in many companies.
Being able to read and respond through email may be a good way for its members to stay engaged.
Well, that gives you more time to do Facebook, although you have to be careful.
An Englishman was sentenced for murdering his wife. The reason ? The wife, Sarah Richardson had separated from her husband and in her Facebook page, she updated her relationship status to single. According to witnesses, Edward, her husband, saw her Facebook update and rushed to her parents’ house, smashed the window, forced his way into the house, and stabbed his wife.
He then tried to stab himself and somehow failed. At any rate, the last update I read was that he was sentenced to at least 17 years in prison.