View posts tagged "computers"

The original IBM PC Compatible computers of the 1980's used a firmware standard known as the BIOS, which stands for "Basic Input/Output System." Despite its age, many computers of today still use this ancient system, and due to its ubiquity, "the BIOS" has become synonymous with any low-level configuration utility. The BIOS has its fair share of limitations though, since it runs in 16-bit processor mode and can only address about 1 MB of memory.

Posted on 6/19/2010 12:23 AM |

Everyone around me seems to be using a Mac. Some of my friends switched and are now die-hard Apple fanboys. But do Macs really never get viruses, never crash, always work beautifully, better for multimedia, and are they worth the premium? Do you even NEED a Mac to experience Mac OS?

Some of the things people say about Macs are downright wrong; others have truth to them but are exaggerations. Still others are completely true. Some of them are facts, others opinions.

"PC" means [...]

NPS Obsidian Alpha 1 represents the culmination of several weeks of work on the existing Milestone 3 code. This release is not yet feature-complete, but it has most of the features used on an everyday basis – zoom, pencil and brush, resizing functionality, and filters.

Please download Milestone 3 here.

NPS codename Obsidian, Milestone 3, was released today. Milestone 3 shares the same UI appearance as Milestone 2, but also boasts more features. Most toolbox items are now at least partially functional, including rectangular selection, brushes, shapes, airbrush, zoom, and flood fill.

The NPS Color Picker dialog in NPS 3.0 will follow the tradition from early versions of NPS in its general appearance, though its look will be updated. More color selectors will be added, potentially including a Ph [...]

NPS codename Obsidian, Milestone 1, was released today. The Milestone 1 release (version 3.0.15, build 253) is a fairly significant step in the history of NPS, as this is the first build from the Obsidian codebase to be released to the public. The Obsidian codebase is written from scratch using VB.NET (VB 2008), and does not contain any code from the RatTamer-Lagoon codebase (which is written in VB6).

The user interface in Milestone 1 is more or less functional, and a few tools (specifically th [...]

About a week ago, I installed Windows XP on my old ThinkPad 560. This laptop was my first working computer, which I obtained about 4 years ago. It originally came with Windows 98, which ran fairly slow. The laptop has a 133mhz Pentium processor, 40MB of RAM, and a 2GB hard drive.

I decided to try my luck at installing XP on the thing – after all, I don't use it any more, and I might as well prove a point to the 20 or so people who have told me that XP would never install or on something t [...]

For the past month, I have either been busy with school, or busy with something else, and I more or less neglected to post anything on my blog. But here it is... the long-awaited February blog post.

If you haven't already noticed, I've added a few things to my website. Most notably, Computer Bloopers. I have been collecting somewhat humorous computer-related incidents that I have experienced for several years now, and am now putting some of them onli [...]

A few days ago, I installed the Windows 7 Beta on my physical machine. I am impressed by the ease with which it installed, as well as the additional functionality added to it; however, it's still not perfect.

Installation was fairly straightforward, and very similar to Vista's. I deleted my old installation of XP Professional (which I never used) and installed Windows 7 in its place. After the installer finished, 2 new entries were added to the Windows Boot Manager [...]

The Windows 7 Beta is out, and I finally managed to get my hands on a copy. I installed it (unactivated) in a virtual machine, but plan to install it on my physical machine as well, in order to use all of its features. I will update my blog once I do that.

As you probably know by now, the beta was supposed to be released yesterday. However, Microsoft's servers couldn't handle the heavy demands, and the official download link did not appear until about noon today. I tried downloading vi [...]

My 2-year-old computer was getting a bit slow, as I now run a lot of programs simultaneously. For Christmas, I received an AMD Athlon 64 X2 5000+ and 2GB of RAM, which was a welcome upgrade.

Here is a screenshot of Task Manager before I upgraded:

The RAM installed without any problems (at first). It took a good amount of force to snap the DIMMs in place, but the RAM worked. Vista instantly recognized [...]

Well, it's been a hectic week, preparing for the launch of my site. Writing code, debugging, and making last-minute improvements. Then, uploading everything to the server, only to find out that MySQL isn't working quite the way I expected... but the site is finally up and running. What a relief.

I'd like to start off my blog by introducing myself. My name is Lyosha, known online as Nookkin or, less commonly, "Nookkin' OR 1=1;--". I'm 16 an [...]