Warning: squirrels.

This explains EVERYTHING!

Click the image to see the complete cartoon

Hard drive price forecasts: HDD cheaper than SDD for the next several years

I nabbed this image from an Engadget article on Wednesday.  It's from a presentation by South Korean electronics conglomerate Samsung on where they expect hard drive prices to be over the next three years.  The graph looks kind of complicated, but it's actually pretty simple.  Platter-based hard drives [represented by the red line at the bottom of the graph] currently cost about US$1.40 per gigabyte and Samsung expects that price to drop to $0.60 per gigabyte in 2010.  So a 120 GB hard drive currently costs approximately $168 [120 x $1.40] but  will cost approximately $72.00 in 2010.  Long story short: Expect bigger, less expensive hard drives in the future.

The rest of the graph shows where Samsung expects solid state, flash memory based hard drives to be priced over the next three years.  The good news about solid state drives [SSD] is that they have no moving parts, they don't use a lot of electricity, and they are so fast you'd swear they were being chased.  The bad news is that SSDs are still ridiculously expensive.  At $7.50 per gigabyte, a 120 GB SSD currently costs $900.  Ouch.   But SSD's price per gigabyte is expected to drop over the next few years, although no one really knows by how much.  One model [or computing law] says that SSDs will cost $2.50 per GB in 2010, another law says the price will be as low as $0.90 per gigabyte.  Long story short [part 2]: SSD prices should drop to current hard drive prices in three years ... but platter-based hard drives will still be cheaper.  That said, I can't wait until SSD prices have dropped to the point where I can afford to put one in my laptop.

Story and image source: Engadget

Podcast: How to secure a wireless connection

This is the last podcast for a while.  Here is a recording from last Wednesday's Steve and Johnnie show where we talked about how to secure a wireless internet connection.  Enjoy.

I hate Pachelbel's canon in d!

There are exactly two things in this world that I absoltutely HATE with every essence of my being: comic sans font and Pachelbel's canon in D.  It is nice to know that I am not alone in my loathing of the latter.

Podcast: The Joyce Hatto hoax

Another podcast.  Back in February, Steve and Johnnie asked me to talk about the Joyce Hatto hoax.  If you haven't heard about Joyce, trust me: you'll love this story.

Podcast: How to use blogs

I have another short podcast for you.  A few weeks ago, Steve and Johnnie asked me to explain what blogs are and how they work -- how to leave comments, what "permalinks" are, etc.  You can find the audio from that segment on WGN Radio's website.

BREAKING NEWS: I are a college student!

Well, it looks like Christine is going to be marrying a "doc-tah": I've been accepted into the Ed D program at USC.  :)

New theory on global warning. Wait, WHAT?!

Source: The Goat [via J-Walk]

MIT OpenCourseWare / OCW Search

Tourbus readers know I have been a fan of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s OpenCourseWare project for quite some time. Back in April of 2001, MIT announced the ground-breaking, ambitious, and some would say unrealistic 10-year goal of posting the materials for all of its courses online.  Syllabi.  Course calendars.  Lecture notes.  Assignments.  Exams.  Everything. Available to the entire online world.  No charge.

Five years and 1,800 courses later, I’m still a fan. As are several other institutions of higher learning who have followed MIT’s lead and are now posting their own course materials online.  In fact, there are now so many free, online courses that finding the right course for you can involve a bit of cybersleuthing.   

Or you could just go to the OpenCourseWare finder.  If you've used some of the more advanced features inside of Apple's iTunes music store, you already know how to use the OpenCourseWare finder.  And if you've never used iTunes, well ... the OpenCourseWare finder is just like the advanced features inside of Apple's iTunes music store.  :)

Seriously, though, just choose and subtopic in the tag browser and the OpenCourseWare finder shows you, at the bottom of the page, a list of OpenCourseWare courses that discuss that topic.   Click on the course's title to be taken to the course's homepage.  The OpenCourseWare finder doesn't search through all of the world's free, online courses, but it does include courses from

• Carnegie Mellon University
• Foothill De-Anza Community College
• Johns Hopkins School of Public Health
• Tufts University
• MIT
• Utah State University

So, does this mean you can now get a free, online degree from MIT? Not on your life, Chester! While educators are encouraged to borrow MIT's course materials for their own curricula, and while everyone in the world is encouraged to use the OpenCourseWare materials for self-study, MIT has absolutely no plans to offer credit for the online versions of their courses.

Besides, what makes MIT MIT isn't its course documents. Covalent bonding works the same in Cambridge as it does in Irvine, and the second derivative of 2x² is the same along the banks of the Charles River as it is at the confluence of the 5 and 405 freeways. What makes MIT MIT -- and what makes MIT worth $33K a year -- isn't its course documents. It's its faculty. And that you can't put online.

Two screencasts -- which do you prefer?

I mentioned this on Website Wednesday Night on WGN Radio a few moments ago.  I created two screencasts -- one with TechSmith Camtasia and one with Adobe Captivate.  If you have a free moment, can you please take a look at both and tell me which one you prefer?  You can ignore the content; I'm more interested in knowing which video you think is more usable/accessible.  Thanks in advance.

• Camtasia screencast
• Captivate screencast