Archive for the ‘Technical’ Category
How much is an old computer worth?
Posted in Technicalon Feb 6, 2009
Flickr Stock Photo
Occasionally I get asked how much a particular used computer is worth. Because computer technology continues to increase at a steady rate, computers loose their value quite quickly.
My general rule is that a computer looses about 30-50% of its value every year. A computer which was purchased at the store for $1000 might be worth somewhere around $300 two years later. Particular brands and technologies may loose value faster or slower, but generally, all computers loose their value quite quickly.
For this reason I recommend that no one ever buy a computer with the intent to sell it to someone else later.
I also recommend to most people that they do not buy more computer than they need right now. This means that you shouldn’t buy excessively more memory, speed, or storage because you intend on needing that extra capacity in a year or two. Ignoring this advice, people could buy too much computer that would be worth half as much when they actually need to use it all.
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- Tags: computer, financial, question, worth
GDocsUploader 1.3 released
Posted in Technicalon Dec 17, 2008
About a year ago I started a little programming project to upload documents to Google Docs. I wrote a little program for Apple OS X called GDocsUploader to support drag-and-drop uploading of documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and photos.
Today I released an updated version of the program. In addition to bug fixes, this new version supports video uploads to Picasa. Additionally, this new version makes it much easier to upload multiple files at the same time.
You can download the new version from the Google Code project site.
Read the rest of this entry »
BYU’s supercomputer is too slow
Posted in Technicalon Nov 18, 2008
Twice a year a list of the top 500 supercomputers is released. BYU’s supercomputer, named Marylou4, was once ranked as high as 45 on the list. As of last June, Marylou4 fell in rank to 274.
The most recent listing doesn’t even include a BYU supercomputer. Marylou4 is too slow to make the list.
So there you have it: BYU no longer has a top-500 supercomputer.
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- Tags: BYU
Last June, Google and Yahoo announced a partnership where Yahoo would use Google Advertising on its site to increase revenue. Yahoo would raise some much needed cash from the more effective advertising, while Google publishes its ads on a very large site. Currently Yahoo uses its own advertising framework which is less effective.
However, today we learn that the deal is going bust because too many government regulators and advertisors had concerns that this agreement would give Google too much of an advertising monopoly. Read the rest of this entry »
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- Tags: adwords, Google, monopoly, Yahoo
Saving laptop power by dimming display
Posted in Technicalon Nov 4, 2008
I use a modern HP Compaq laptop for business use. Recently, I installed Kubuntu 8.10 on it with KDE 4.1. One of the features of the power monitoring task is that it can tell you how much power your laptop. Power is measured in watts, just like lightbulbs.
When I’m casually using my laptop, it uses between 16 and 21 watts. I played around a little with the display brightness controlls, and I found that as much as 25% of the laptop power is used by the display backlight. When the display brightness is all the way down, my laptop uses 16-17 watts. When the display birghtness is fully bright, it uses about 20-21 watts. Read the rest of this entry »
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- Tags: environment
Growth of the Internet
Posted in Technicalon Oct 28, 2008
On the LDS Media Talk Blog, there was a post about the growth of the Internet. I wondered if the growth has been increasing or decreasing, or if it is reaching a plateau.
To answer that question, I decided to plot the numbers on a logarithmic scale:
Using a logarithmic scale, it is easy to see the rate of growth. As you can see, up until 1997 there was a very substantial growth. In 1996, for example, the Internet grew by 900%. Between 1998 and 2001 growth slowed so that it only (on average) doubled in each of those years. Since then, we’ve established a slower, yet still substantial rate of doubling only every two or three years.
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- Tags: Internet
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