How many of you have ever wondered about how a song played on, say, the Martian surface would actually sound? Assuming you pressed the “play” button on a Hi-Fi audio system, would Bach’s famous “Toccata and Fugue in D Minor” sound the same as on Earth, as you would expect? Scientists say that no, it would not, and explain why. Just like the outer space causes sound to travel with extremely high difficulty, because it lacks a proper propagation medium, so does the less dense atmosphere of other planets.
This is why, in the Martian atmosphere, for instance, you would barely hear anything at all, let alone perceive every note or, even less likely, enjoy the richness of Bach’s music. “Sound doesn’t travel very far on Mars,” explained Amanda Hanford, an acoustics doctoral degree candidate at Penn State University. Read the rest of this entry »
Users of AVG 7.5 and 8.0 should be on the alert for a false positive Trojan virus warning after downloading an update on November 11th. It concerns the legitimate Windows system file user32.dll, which AVG wrongly identifies as infected and advises that it should be deleted. Don’t do it!
If you do Windows will not load after a reboot. Apparently it only affects the Dutch, French, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish language versions of Windows XP and AVG has published a rescue plan. It involves running the XP Recovery console, which means you need an installation disc. Of course not all PCs come with one, in which case AVG has come up with a downloadable utility that should fix the problem. Read the rest of this entry »
Microsoft already proved that on the same system configuration Windows 7 would boot a few seconds faster than Windows Vista. But fact is that the evolution from Vista to Windows 7 is not limited to the boosted startup times. In this context, at the Windows hardware Engineering Conference in Los Angeles, Mike Angiulo, General Manager, Windows Planning and PC Ecosystem Team for Microsoft, and Jon DeVaan, Senior Vice President of the Core Operating System Division, revealed Windows 7’s superiority compared to Vista also in terms of memory usage and graphics performance.
“Once we’re even booted we’ve done a lot to improve the memory usage, and the graphics performance. This graph that you see on the screen here shows how in Vista we scale linearly with the number of open windows, so that’s the amount of memory that’s consumed by the system as you open more Windows. Read the rest of this entry »
Windows has a number of diagnostic and system monitoring tools built in but this one, called System Explorer puts everything you need to know about your computer, and what’s it doing now, and in the past, into one very convenient and easy to use package. Here’s just a taster of what it can do. You can view information about running processes, startups, Explorer, IE Add-ons, uninstallers, drivers, services, connections and open files. You can check which programs and files were opened, and when, take snapshots of your Registry and later compare them if something has gone wrong to see what’s changed. It uses fewer resources than the Windows utilities and there’s even a portable version that you can run from a pen drive. Try it, get to know it and one day it could save you a lot of time and trouble if your PC throws a wobbly…
You may recall that back in March we ran a story about messrs Microsoft, Google, HP, Intel and others campaigning to use the so-called ‘white space’ or gaps between broadcast television channels for high-speed broadband. Well, the White Space Coalition, as it’s known has just received the thumbs-up from the US Federal Communications Committee (FCC). The new spectrum will be unlicensed and it promises much greater range than current Wi-Fi systems, opening up the possibility of taking broadband to remote areas not served by existing cable or phone systems. The FCC says that the technology will be closely regulated and strictly policed; to avoid interference with TV broadcasts but coalition members have worked hard to prove that the system works and their efforts have been rewarded. Read the rest of this entry »
How many of you have ever wondered about how a song played on, say, the Martian surface would actually sound? Assuming you pressed the “play” button on a Hi-Fi audio system, would Bach’s famous “Toccata and Fugue in D Minor” sound the same as on Earth, as you would expect? Scientists say that no, it would not, and explain why. Just like the outer space causes sound to travel with extremely high difficulty, because it lacks a proper propagation medium, so does the less dense atmosphere of other planets.
