I was registering at a web site the other day, and it asked for an 8-character password. I used Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs…

insert rimshot>

A form of this was the first prize winner at the Scottish comedy championship… it’s not my fault!

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Macworld has a very interesting article, excerpted from Computerworld, that tells us just how far the hard drive has come from it’s beginnings… and how close to the end of life it may be.

Starting in the 1950′s, with drives from IBM that were the size of two refrigerators (one for the platters, one for the data processing unit) and weighing tons and stored 5 million characters. It was literally a “model T” of hard drives… about as sophisticated, technologically, and about as fast, compared to drives of only 10 years later. Compared to todays drives, which can be had for as little as $60 for 1 TB of storage, the drive unit in the IBM RAMAC 305 was a wheelbarrow!

In the mid-1950′s, when the RAMAC unit was state of the art, it took up most of a room, and it’s drive could store about 5MB of data, and had an input/output data rate of about 10 kilobytes per second, and cost $200,000.

Remember that 1 TB hard drive that sells for $60? That much storage would have been worth $1 trillion in the 1950s. Back then storage cost $1.0 per byte!

The article also tells about the Computer History Museum exhibit telling the story of computing from the abacus to the smart phone. The exhibit will be in “a 25,000 square foot facility with 19 galleries, three state-of-the-art digital theatres and 1000 artifacts.”

Follow-up:

Macworld also has a slide show of the history of hard drives here.

If you’re curious about the history of computing and about hard drives, check out the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. Directions can be found here.

Computer History Museum
1401 N Shoreline Blvd.
Mountain View, CA 94043
650.810.1010

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Hey, we got a whole new look! Do you like it?

Please let me know if you like the new Thesis theme… If no one likes it, I’ll be sad…

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When I started writing this blog, I seemed to have lots more time than I find now, and I’ve not been posting nearly as often as I’d like. When something important comes up, I get something up, but days go by without a post.

I want this to be a good resource for Mac users, particularly business users, so will be inviting business professionals I know and respect to submit articles. These will be helpful to anyone in business, and many who are not, but can use tips relating to financial, real estate, goal-setting, legal and more.

Please comment on these articles, as they come up, and please comment on the blog in general. It’s something I want to do for you, not for me, and if no one is listening, I’d just as soon take time off!

Charles

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This just in from Elinor Mills, on C/Net News.com:

A new type of Internet-based attack is spreading in which Flash-based ads seize control of a Web surfer’s clipboard and paste in a link to a malicious site in the hopes that it will be spread from there into e-mails, blogs, and instant messages.

The ads have been spotted on MSNBC.com, Newsweek.com, and Digg.com, and victims have reported on numerous forums and blogs that they appear to be fake alerts that a virus has been detected on the computer and offer to clean it up, according to antivirus vendor Sophos.

The malicious link, which includes “xp-vista-update” in the URL, is copied into the clipboard and can not be over-written by copying new text to the clipboard. Users must reboot the computer to remove the link, The Register reports.

The malware appears to affect Mac, Windows, and Linux machines and Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Safari browsers, according to ZD Net’s Zero Day blog.

Chris Thornton, who created the “ClipMate” clipboard extender for Windows, gave an interesting description of the situation on his Clipboard Extender Dot Com blog:

“Someone wrote a little piece of Adobe Flash code to copy text to the clipboard. Then they put it in a loop, to do it once a second. Then they put it in an innocent-looking flash-based banner ad, with their harmful URL as the payload. Then they signed up for some advertising networks, and submitted their bad ad, presumably paying considerable $$$ to get it featured on sites that you and I visit regularly, such as MSNBC and Digg. And when someone has this ad loaded, they can copy all they want, but everything they paste will be just that URL. So if you are writing an e-mail to Aunt Millie, telling her to look at your eBay auction located at (paste), or to download Picasa to organize her photos – download here (paste), she’s going to get the virus when she visits the bad site.”

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I haven’t passed away… really, I was just sleeping (Monty Python reference).

It’s been an interesting 6 weeks, what with the new 3G iPhone coming out, lots of new software released, Apple and AT&T joining forces for a rollout as poorly handled as any I have ever heard of… Interesting indeed.

I intend to be posting more this week, and to get back in the groove, if anyone is reading these odd bits and pieces. Hey, if you are, let me know!

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I can’t believe it’s almost 2 weeks since my last post. There hasn’t been too much exciting stuff happening… right! Mostly, I’ve been tied up with new projects. Will try to keep nose to grindstone a little better from here out.

I’m consulting on a Web site rebuild for a medium sized company, and when it’s closer to completion, I’ll provide links and info. It’s an interesting project, involving Flash, lots of new pages and departments, streaming video, etc.

Another project is the possible development of a tool for business users, a web application that will be of benefit to small businesses and sole propriaters.

With my regular consulting and web design work, I may get stretched a bit thin for a while, but will do my best to keep helpful info available for Mac users, and to keep this blog up and running.

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I didn’t do an April Fools blog. What a wasted opportunity!

Between my birthday, taxes and the general workload, April is a full month for me. I’ll try to keep up with the blog, and bring you some kewl stuff this month. Help me out, send me comments or news, please!

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No posts for the past week, but not because I don’t care. A crushing week, is all. Look for more today and onwards…

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I hope to use this blog to provide Macintosh news and information on a regular basis from now on. There’ll be a bit of experimentation for the next little while, but bear with me. It should be well worth it.

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