Mashed Articles

Writen by Jacob Loeb

Take out four credit cards from your wallet. Stack them and hold them in your hand. Apple’s iPod nano http://www.powermax.com/cgi-global/generate_css_temp.cgi? i=PM_MP_IN&t=The+iPod+nano is about the same weight and half an inch less wide than that stack of cards. Now put three cards back in your wallet and use the remaining card to go buy yourself a nano.

The nano’s introduction should not be misinterpreted as just another iPod in the lineup. It is, in fact, exactly what the iPod should have been in the first place: a flash-based jukebox with a long battery life and stunning color screen. This new iPod is not a smaller version of another iPod, or combination of any other two iPods. The user interface is the same (which has always been iPod’s strength) but that’s it. The differences here are under the skin, most notably with the screen.

Color screens are not new to iPods, but the way you see the color is. The nano’s 1.5-inch color LCD has a blue-white LED backlight. LEDs achieve full brightness faster than standard LCD backlights. This is particularly useful because iPods turn on and off their backlight often to save battery power. The number of seconds this saves you per day is not going to give you an extra hour of sleep at night. But the LCD’s quick start up allows your eyes to focus near instantaneously, which makes using the nano feel that much faster. LEDs produce brighter light than other backlights without washing out the image. That gives the nano screen a deep bright color. Over all the nano’s LCD is the best I have seen in the 1-inch to 3-inch size.

Another difference from previous iPods is the nano’s lack of FireWire support. Although iPods have come with only USB 2.0 cables for some time, they have always supported syncing through a FireWire cable. The iPod nano is the first to be USB only. When you connect a nano via a “FireWire to Dock Connecter” cable it displays a message that this is a USB only device. It will still charge off the FireWire cable but no file transfers can be done. If your computer has only the older USB 1.1, the nano will still sync with iTunes but you are stuck moving files over at an extremely slow speed.

Amazingly, the nano has no moving parts except the click wheel. This was done by using flash memory for song storage. Every iPod ever made has had flash memory, but it was used on most iPods as a data buffer. Song data was pulled from the hard drive and stored in the buffer for skip protection. However, iPod hard drives are very slow and can cause delays when loading a song off the drive. So Apple also uses the buffer to preload songs, so you don’t hear a pause between songs. Of course, not every song is in the buffer so sometimes there are pauses between songs. Changing songs in the nano, however, is faster than with hard drive based iPods because it has one big buffer. An added benefit of using flash memory is a significant reduction in weight.

The small size and weight of the iPod nano is its best feature. It slips into a shirt pocket without being felt or seen. The difference between the nano and its hard drive based brothers is equal to the difference between the brick sized analog cell phones of the 1980′s compared to the cell phones of today. A close second place feature is that it comes in black. When Apple released the third generation of iPods, they photographed it in the shadows. The picture made it look black and it looked good in black. Almost every person that walked by that poster asked when could they get a “black one.” After a couple of years, Apple finally realized “U2″ fans were not the only ones who like black.

The iPod nano is the only product I have ever ordered the day it was released. I saw instantly it possessed all that had been missing from the iPods that came before it, and at a spectacular price. I just couldn’t wait another day… so what are you waiting for?

PowerMax’s http://www.powermax.com/ resident Mac expert, Jacob Loeb, has been using Macintosh computers professionally since 1990. He founded a pioneering Mac based DVD production company and later worked as an IT administrator for several Portland, Oregon companies. Over the last four years Jacob has retained a top Apple Product Professional ranking. As a PowerMax technician he’s repaired, trouble shot, and tested every model Mac we sell.

Writen by Ihab Sarsour

A cathode ray tube or CRT, is traditionally used in most computer monitors and the advent of plasma screens, LCD , DLP, OLED displays, and other technologies. As a result of CRT technology, computer monitors continue to be referred to as “The Tube”.A CRT works by moving an electron beam back and forth across the back of the screen. Each time the beam makes a pass across the screen, it lights up phosphor dots on the inside of the glass tube, thereby illuminating the active portions of the screen. By drawing many such lines from the top to the bottom of the screen, it creates an entire screenful of images.

A Liquid crystal display (LCD) is a thin, flat display device made up of any number of color or monochrome pixels arrayed in front of a light source or reflector. It uses very small amounts of electric power, and is therefore suitable for use in battery-powered electronic devices.

A plasma display is an emissive flat panel display where light is created by phosphors excited by a plasma discharge between two flat panels of glass. The gas discharge contains no mercury a mixture of noble gases (neon and xenon) is used instead. This gas mixture is inert and entirely harmless.

The glass panels seem to be vacuum sealed, because when they are broken the plasma breaks up, seemingly from the addition of air to the space.

Surface-conduction electron-emitter display (SED) is a flat-panel, high-resolution display. Some SEDs have a diagonal measurement exceeding one meter (approximately 40 inches). The SED consists of an array of electron emitters and a layer of phosphor, separated by a small space from which all the air has been evacuated. Each electron emitter represents one pixel. The SED requires no electron-beam focusing, and operates at a much lower voltage than a CRT. The brightness and contrast compare favorably with high-end CRTs. Prototype electron emitters have been developed with diameters of a few nanometers. SED technology can offer unprecedented image resolution.

Digital Light Processing (DLP) is a technology used in projectors and video projectors. In DLP projectors, the image is created by microscopically small mirrors laid out in a matrix on a semiconductor chip, known as a Digital Micromirror Device (DMD). Each mirror represents one pixel in the projected image. The number of mirrors corresponds to the resolution of the projected image: 800×600, 1024×768, 1280×720, and 1920×1080 (HDTV) matrices are some common DMD sizes. These mirrors can be repositioned rapidly to reflect light either through the lens or on to a heat sink .

An organic light-emitting diode (OLED) is a thin-film light-emitting diode(LED) in which the emissive layer is an organic compound OLED technology is intended primarily as picture elements in practical display devices. These devices promise to be much less costly to fabricate than traditional LCD displays. When the emissive electroluminescent layer is polymeric, varying amounts of OLEDs can be deposited in rows and columns on a screen using simple “printing” methods to create a graphical color display, for use as computer displays, portable system screens, and in advertising and information board applications. OLED may also be used in lighting devices. OLEDs are available as distributed sources while the inorganic LEDs are point sources of light.

Ihab Sarsour Want to know more about computer hardware? Check it out at: Computer Hardware

http://www.easycomputerway.com

Writen by Ken Marlborough

The cheapest type of RAM is dynamic RAM because it uses traditional technology as opposed to static RAM, which is expensive and uses advanced methods to store and retrieve temporary information. Dynamic RAM has capacitors that act like vessels that store temporary information for the CPU to use as and when required. This makes them cheaper as compared to static RAM that is expensive because it does not use the same technology as a dynamic RAM.

RAM chips are available in the market within a price range of $4 to $400, depending on its make, brand, upgrade, and type. The modern computer usually uses dynamic RAM that is at least 128 MB in size. This RAM race started in the 1990s when 2MB of RAM were used. However, technology has improved in leaps and bounds since then, and today using less than 128 RAM would be not advisable, as the speed and efficiency of the computer will be dramatically affected.

SIMM RAM is the oldest and cheapest of them all but can only be used with old machines and is not compatible with newer ones. It is available for less as $5 and can be bought on the Internet. A memory upgrade is the most cost effective method of improving a PC’s performance, and memory upgrades are very simple to install and require no configuring at all.

A 4 MB 30pin 60ns 3-chip SIMM RAM with a tin lead and a 2-piece 2 MB x 8 chip and logic parity is priced at $7 to $8, whereas a Cisco 16 MB Catalyst 8000 Flash SIMM can cost up to $89. The price of a RAM chip depends upon the number of nanoseconds, the brand, type, megabytes, and other such factors. The price of RAM also depends upon the type of computer that a person uses. This is because an older computer will usually use a 2 to 8 MB RAM, but a newly bought computer will need a 128 MB RAM in order to function efficiently.