The editors at PC World are running a contest through the end of the month offering some lucky reader a “dream” PC. This is a custom desktop machine they thought up that would cost about $30,000 to build.

As usual, I ambled through the description of this computer and thought to myself, what the heck is this stuff?!

So I’m going to spend a few blog entries dissecting some of the more interesting components from the list.

First up, the system will contain two OCZ Technology 64GB internal solid state disks. What stopped me was the price tag: $3,000. Holy-moly! That means each disk will be $1,500. Could a drive really be worth that much?!

Why is the OCZ worthy of going into a dream PC? Here are the company specs:

• Read up to 58MB/second (very fast compared to a traditional hard drive, which has mechanical parts to it)
• Write up to 35MB/second (same here)
• Slim 2.5″ design (making it small enough for a notebook computer)
• Lightweight 77g (less than 3 ounces)
• Low power consumption (which means your notebook battery will last longer)
• Shock resistant 1500G (which makes it durable for hauling around)
• High-capacity 64GB (not a bad size for a drive, but I can see why PC World plans to double that)
• RAID support (makes sense when you have two drives in the machine)
• MTBF 2 million hours (always just an estimate, but this particular meantime between failures equates to about 228 years; expected when you don’t have any moving parts)
• 1 year warranty (you’d think the company would go longer than this if they really believed their own hype about durability)

One other advantage of the solid state drive. They’re the Prius of the drive world — incredibly quiet even when they’re in operation.

Of course, there’s that price. That’s the primary disadvantage. The cost is about $18 per gigabyte vs. $2 or less for a hard drive. The new MacBook Air notebook has an optional solid state disk that adds just about $1,000 to the price.

Considering that solid state drives are real plus for notebooks but offer a lot of benefits that are sort of irrelevant to desktop machines, classify this particular feature as truly dream-machine worthy.

Sometime ago I mentioned the Creative Zen V Plus (see Get them while you can) as a previous generation good MP3 player at a decent price.

Another “good deal” is the popular but underrated SanDisk Sansa e200 series of MP3 Players. SanDisk media players are usually quite competitively priced, and this one can be found at bargain prices. SanDisk also still sells it from their website. The Sansa View, possibly intended as a replacement, is larger and heavier than the Sansa e200 series.

The e200 series is available in capacities from 2GB to 8GB. The rather confusing model numbers indicate the capacity: e250 is 2GB, e260 is 4GB, e270 is 6GB and the e280 is 8GB. The Sansa e280 was the first 8GB flash player available. The best values are probably for the 4GB and higher models. The e200s have microSD expansion card slots, so they can be expanded by up to 2GB. It is about the size of the second generation iPod Nano, but thicker. It is small enough to fit easily into just about any pocket.

One thing I like about this player is that it supports MSC (Mass Storage Class) and well as MTP (Media Transfer Protocol – Windows Only) USB modes. MTP mode requires using Windows Media Player or the Rhapsody software, but in MSC mode the player appears as a drive on your computer and you can just copy music files to it. This also means that it can be used with Mac and Linux PCs. The player has an FM Radio, which you can record from, voice recording and video playback – although at only 15 fps. All videos have to be converted by the SanDisk Media Converter to play on the 1.8 inch, 220 by 176 pixel resolution screen.

This is one of the few MP3 Players available today which has a user-replaceable battery. Instead of having to crack open the player and void the warranty, there are 4 screws on the back to remove the back plate and reveal the battery compartment.

Of course one of the advantages of buying a player like this over two years after it has been released is that most of the bugs have been ironed out with firmware updates.

My spouse is a cautious person. She’s the one who makes sure our life insurance policies are paid up. She dragged me to the hardware store to pick out a fire safe for the valuable documents. She foists vitamins on me in the morning. In other words, she always believes the worst could happen. And as Clare Booth Luce once said, “I’ve found that the difference between an optimist and a pessimist is that the pessimist is generally better informed.” In other words, my spouse is smarter than I am.

In that spirit, I think I’ve found the perfect birthday present for her: the Sentry Waterproof 160GB Hard Drive. This tough puppy lives inside a case that’s immune to dust, dirt and moisture. It’s been certified to handle 30 minutes at up to 1,550 degrees of heat and a full 24 hours of submersion in water.

You hook it up to your computer via a USB 2.0 cable and it automatically synchs files between the computer’s drive and its drive. Security features on the drive itself include password protection and encryption.

And should your drive ever experience fire or water damage, the company says it will attempt to recover your data free of charge and send you a new unit. I don’t exactly know the details on that, but it sounds reassuring, which is usually sufficient for an optimist like me.

Wonder if they offer gift wrapping…
 

What Desktop Operating System are you running now, and which one will you be running in a year’s time?
If you are planning to buy a new computer and are one of the majority of Windows users, after June this year you may not have much choice. Well, of course you will have a choice, but it would be one of the six editions of Windows Vista, or another OS. Currently Microsoft has a cut-off date of June 30 this year for Windows XP. After that you will not be able to buy a new computer with Windows XP pre-installed. This is quite short-sighted considering that Windows XP stills outsells Vista, especially in corporate sales.

InfoWorld launched a “Save XP” campaign earlier this year, and almost one hundred thousand people have signed the petition.

Apart from general resistance to change, what is the problem with Vista? Incompatibilities with hardware is the most common thing I hear about. Then there is a more serious problem: Vista is more secure than XP, but not as stable. This should be fixed in a Service Pack but Vista Service Pack 1 came with some nasty problems, not the least among them being to cause several programs no longer to run (one of them was the New York Times Reader).

Personally, I know I can’t delay getting a PC pre-installed with Vista for too long, because I still want to have the option of going back to Windows XP if I really need to.

Computerworld recently ran a fascinating review of a bunch of USB flash drives with built-in security. That’s a good thing to think about. You might use these little devices to keep all kinds of valuable data – and they’re easy to misplace. I do it all the time. That’s why security is so important on these devices. The idea is that for a bit more money, you can ensure that whoever finds your lost USB drive won’t be able to do anything with it or its content.

The reviewers use Pricegrabber.com to provide pricing information about each of the seven drives they evaluate.

On that topic, the least expensive model tested was the 1GB Corsair Flash Padlock, which also is available in 2GB and 4GB versions. Unlike the other USB drives considered, this one uses a combination lock to secure its contents. (Out of the package, it comes unlocked and can be used as a standard device without security.) Interestingly, reviewer Lucas Mearian includes a sidebar that describes his attempt to remove the padlock and access the data. Yes, he succeeds!

The most expensive USB thumb drive evaluated was the 8GB Kingston DataTraveler Secure, which also comes in lower capacity editions. It offers 256-bit AES hardware-based encryption. From the description in the article, this one sounds like it’s probably a government favorite. Just look at that straight-as-an-arrow gray body! In fact, the word, “fortress,” is used at least once to describe it in the review.

I’m not going to divulge the ending of this particular drama by telling you which drive comes out on top. Let’s just say that layering in security matters. The more ways you can use to keep prying eyeballs out of your stuff, the safer it is. Plus, you don’t have to spend a fortune but you do have to spend a bit to play securely when it comes to flash thumb drives.

Acronyms aren’t exclusive to technology, but technology seems to generate them at an alarming rate.

One of the first acronyms I was exposed to in my IT (Information Technology) career was COBOL - COmmon Business Orientated Language. It didn’t take long for me to get bored with programming in COBOL. Many years and a few programming languages later, I could still pick up the language again in a couple of days, it is one of those things you can’t forget, no matter how much you try. Little did I know then that I would eventually be developing in Visual Basic - BASIC being an acronym for Beginner’s All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code, which explains why many BASIC compilers are named with the word BASIC in Capitals, for example BCX BASIC, QuickBASIC and PowerBASIC.

The latest version of Visual Basic is included in Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Standard.

Another industry which seems to generate acronyms is the mobile phone industry. The mobile phone technology which the Apple iPhone uses is GSM, which stands for Global System for Mobile communications. There are about 2 billion GSM mobile subscribers worldwide. GSM phones use SIM (Subscriber Identity Module) cards. The other mobile phone technology with a large base in the United States, CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access), makes use of an ESN (Electronic Serial Number) instead of a SIM Card. CDMA has over 400 million mobile subscribers worldwide.

This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to acronyms in programming and mobile phones.

If you could see under my workspace right now, you’d understand why I shudder to think my family has a house bunny. If you weren’t aware, rabbits are notorious for eating cords — as in power cords, cables, phone lines, electrical lines and shoe laces. She hasn’t gotten into my office, but that’s only because I work upstairs and she hasn’t learned how to climb stairs yet.

But the sad fact is that I have too many cords in my life. That’s why the Chargepod appeals to me.

This 6-way charging device allows you to charge multiple cell phones, PDAs, headsets, mp3 players, and other mobile devices with a single power cord. According to the company, the Chargepod uses voltage regulator technology and interchangeable power adapters to safely charge all of your mobile devices.

The bundle comes with an AC adapter and a car charger, as well as these device adapters: MUSB-0001 for universal mini-USB/Blackberry/Motorola/Callpod/Garmin/Other; CHUA-0011 for Apple iPod/iPhone/Touch/Shuffle female USB; CHUA-0016 for Sony PSP and Reader/Creative Labs/Kodak; SMSG-0003 for Samsung mobile phones; NDC2-0001 for Nokia mobile phones and Bluetooth headsets; and PTRA-0001 for Palm Treo mobile phones, LifeDrive, and Tungsten models.

Don’t see your devices on the list? The company sells other adapters direct.

If you do a search for “MP4 Player” on Pricegrabber.com, the search results return the iPod Touch, the iPod Classic, the Zune second generation, and many other devices we would call MP3 players. This is not a mistake, as searches for “MP4 player” on other sites turn up the same thing. So what gives?

Based on an article entitled “Chinese MP4 player” in Wikipedia, and research on some other websites, there seem to be two definitions of MP4 Player:

The first, the broader definition referred to above, refers to an MP4 Player as the successor to the MP3 Player. The MP4 comes from the capability of these players to play MPEG-4 video. In addition to playing videos, MP4 players may have extra features such as video games, FM radio, voice recording and even video recording. These devices are also more commonly known as Personal Video Players (PVP), Portable Media Players (PMP) or Digital Media Player (DMP).

The second definition refers to Portable Media Players made in China. The Dane-Elec Meizu 8GB Portable Media Player is a good example of an MP4 Player. Other (not so good) examples are the numerous cheap knockoffs of iPods made in China, and referred to as “MP4 Players”.

Frankly, I prefer the term Portable Media Player, simply because it is descriptive, and does not include a number which can (and will) be incremented. Yes, there are already “MP5 Players” and “MP6 Players“, and the occasional “MP7 player“. I gave up Googling these after finding the MP7 Player…

I’m going to let you in on a new technology that’s truly brilliant, absolutely useful and which we’ll probably start seeing in more and more audio products with time — and luck. WiseAudio is a personal optimizing sound system. It was developed by a Korean company, and the idea is that it will tune your audio devices to work most effectively with your specific hearing.

I know that my hearing is shot. Too many headset sessions with Dreamboat Annie has impaired my ability to hear really low and really high sounds. Plus, my spouse. I don’t hear her so well either (but that may be for other reasons — I haven’t established a cause yet). Imagine what a generation or two of earbud-wearing youth will be like in 30 or 40 years. The term, “Eh?” won’t just be for Canadians anymore.

WiseAudio makes a test available on its website (down at the moment, but it’ll be back up soon). As you hear a sound in your headset, you press the spacebar. In that way, it gauges the degree of impairment present in each ear and determines the type of hearing loss you have. It uses that data to come up with prescribed settings for your audio devices that will a) make the sound quality tuned specifically for your hearing; and b) prevent further damage by exposing your hearing to limited thresholds of sound.

The next step in all of this is for WiseAudio to sell its technology to the people who make MP3 players, game devices, computers, mobile phones and car audio — anybody who has a chance to mess with our ears. We’ll plug our WiseAudio measures into the device and it’ll use that information to automatically tune itself for our hearing. (No word yet on how to settle car arguments.) Can you hear me now?

My first interaction with a computer program of any kind was firmware. It was part of an embedded system to do some calculations for fuel delivery at a pipeline depot.

After some research on the subject, I realized that I was confusing firmware with embedded systems. The software written for embedded systems is often called firmware. Okay so what is an embedded system? You come into contact with them just about every day – one example is traffic lights. Another would be a digital watch or an MP3 Player. Of course my favorite piece of hardware with an embedded system is a PDA. The software inside of the embedded system, the firmware, can be updated. Just think of updates to iPods – those are firmware updates. Admittedly some of this is boring geek stuff, but we are surrounded by it. Even if you have an analog watch (hello Rolex!) then most likely you have a smartphone which has an embedded operating system running on it.

Often I think of firmware as software which the software engineers don’t want you to mess with, like the firmware of the Apple iPhone. The closest I get to playing with firmware is installing Rockbox, open source replacement firmware for MP3 players, onto an old MP3 player.

The Sony mylo COM-2 PDA - it’s got firmware!