(Approx. 1,083 words)

The New, The Best, and The Worst 
March 2008
Collected by Pim Borman, Webmaster, SW Indiana PC Users Group, Inc
http://swipcug.apcug.org/
Swipcug(at)gmail.com

Obtained from APCUG with the author's permission for publication by APCUG member groups.

Good, Bad, or Who-Needs-It?

Penryn
With the introduction of Intel's Penryn Core 2 Duo and Extreme CPUs Moore's Law stays right on track. Thanks to further miniaturization to 45-nanometer elements, the chips have significantly lower power consumption, a feature that will be even more desirable in the five new Penryn-based CPUs for laptops that have now been released. The new Penryn-based systems are not significantly faster than systems with Intel's previous-generation processors, but outstrip those with the currently fastest AMD chip, the 2.2 GHz 9500 quad core Phenom CPU. Intel has introduced a new instruction set for the Penryns, called SSE4, that can greatly speed up applications written to work with it. That may take a while yet. Adobe is updating its next version of Premiere Pro video editing with SSE4 support. (PC World, March 2008)

Only two years ago I bought a new desktop screamer using the then-tops AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual-Core processor. My pride in the new system didn't last long, as usual, as the AMD CPU was left in the dust by new Intel processors. Nevertheless, I doubt that even now my run-of-the-mill programs  make use of all the special capabilities of the dual-core CPU. Photo editing with Adobe Photoshop Elements or The Gimp happens instantly, faster than I can think of what to do next. So who needs any more power?

PC World's 25th anniversary issue (March 2008) quotes from the March 1991 issue: 
"These five screamers are amongst the fastest - and the costliest - systems you can buy. We pick the best of the lot and answer the obvious question: Who needs this much power? - We reviewed four blazing 486 PCs in the March 1991 issue, starting at $8300, and decided that they were simply too fast for most people."
Famous last words!

False Firefox Fix
Usually I don't pay attention to application software tips, such as keyboard shortcuts for common actions. The most important ones I already know, and the obscure ones are not worth the effort remembering. Therefore I would normally not have paid much attention to an article in the January issue of PC World by Lincoln Spector  about undocumented Firefox tips. What caught my eye was that, according to the author, Firefox is optimized for dial-up connections, and one of the tips concerned changing its settings for broadband. 

Firefox has dozens of hidden configuration settings that are not readily available to the ordinary user, for obvious good reasons. They are stored in HTML documents that can be accessed by typing about: config in the address bar of the browser. The article suggests that you back up the configuration file before you fiddle with it, and shows how to do that.

Following the instructions, I turned network pipelining and network proxy pipelining on (set their values to "true"), increased the network pipelining "maxrequests" to 15 (up from 4), and entered a value of 0 for a new integer nglayout.initialpaint.delay. After restarting Firefox I tried it out. It seemed to perform with alacrity, although I couldn't have sworn that it was faster than before.

Looking for background information on Firefox configuration, I found a June 2006 article on the PC World Web site by the ever knowledgeable Scott Spanbauer on the about: command to access hidden information. Specifically he mentions about: cache that gives access to an enormous file listing the URLs accessed in the past. Handy to find some old data or revisit a Web site without logging on.

Anyway, Spanbauer's article provided a link to Mozilla's about:config FAQ site (http://find.pcworld. com/53066). I took it from there and found out that the suggested settings to optimize Firefox for broadband were either irrelevant or actually retarding downloads. Turning pipelining on is not always supported by all servers and may therefore cause crashes. The value "maxrequests" has a maximum value of 8; higher values than that default to 8. Setting the delay value too low actually slows down the download; its preferred value is the default 250 milliseconds (about the blink of an eye). So much for helpful tips. I reset the parameters to their original values and left it at that. Don't believe everything you read!
Fatalyzer

Wondering if your dieting and exercising is doing any good? Fret no more! Soon you'll be able to take a fatalyzer test to see how fast you are burning off fat. Based on technology developed by Dow Chemical, and under development by a start-up company Kemeta (http://kemeta.com), a hand-held breathalyzer detects acetone in your breath that results from metabolizing body fat. This is a more accurate measure of how effective your dieting and exercising efforts are, eliminating the influence of fluid and muscle fluctuations (Chemical and Engineering News, 1/28/2008, http://snipurl.com/fatalyzer). The results are shown in terms of pounds of body fat lost per week.

It might motivate the dieters stronger if the unit also indicated how much fat was added to their hips by that pizza they just ate. And with the run-away popularity at the recent Toy Expo of digital doggies that can sit up and beg or fart on command, maybe the next product ought to be a doggy robot with a nose capable of detecting drugs, explosives, lost children and misplaced car keys. That should be a bestseller for sure!

All a-Twitter?
"Twitteris a free networking  blogging that allows users to send 'updates' (or 'tweets'; text-based posts, up to 140 characters long) to Twitter website, via short message service, instant messaging, a third-party application such as ."

That's how Wikipedia describes the latest rage in digital jabbering (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Twitter). presidential candidates use the service constantly, undoubtedly hoping to reach younger voters. Find out what Barack Obama (http://twitter.com/BarackObama) Hillary Clinton (http://twitter.com/HillaryClinton) up to. Ron Paul (http://twitter.com/RonPaul2008) to be the only Republican who twitters. John McCain is noted by his absence. 

As the Twitter site (http://twitter.com)puts it,
"Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?" 
Indeed. 

Thanks to The Economist (Feb.2, 2008) for enlightening us about this service.

This article has been provided to APCUG by the author solely for publication by APCUG member groups. All other uses require the permission of the author (see e-mail address above).