Ryne Corp Tech

12 Things You Probably Didn’t Know About
Computers.

They book our hotels. They buy our books.
They bring us the latest TV. They tell us
where we are when we’re lost. In short,
modern computers do everything. You
might think you know a lot about them.
However, here’s some facts we’re willing to
bet you don’t know.

01
Over 6,000 new computer viruses are
released every month. So, y’know: sleep
tight.

02
The first computer mouse-waaaay back in
1964- was designed by a chap called Doug
Engelbert, and constructed out of wood.
Yes, wood.

03
The average human being blinks around 20
times in a minute. A computer user blinks
only 7!

04
The very first electro-mechanical computer
was called the Z2, and was developed back
in 1939. The same year was broke out. Not
that we’re paranoid.

05
It’s estimated that by the end of 2012, there
will be a rather ridiculous 17 billion devices
that connect to the internet.

06
The internet might be a veritable feast of
information, but in actuality five in six
online pages are focused with, er, adults in
mind.

07
Over one million domain names per month
are registered online. That’s a lot of
internet, right there.

08
Facebook boasts over 800 million users.
Were it a country, it would be the third
largest in the world behind India and China.
See? It’s not just your addiction.

09
The first hard drive in history was created
by Seagate in 1979, and could take a grand
total of 5mb-the equivalent of one song in
mp3 format (and a shortfish one at that).

10
If you find wiring for a plug difficult, spare a
thought for those responsible for the nVidia
GeForce 6800 Ultra, which contains a quite
ridiculous 222 million transistors.

11
Organised crime syndicates are responsible
for 20.70% of online viruses. Not quite the
actions of Don Corleone, but still something
to think about.

12
The original engineers who designed the
IBM PB were nicknamed ‘The Dirty Dozen’.
That explains fact 6, then.
Engaging

6 things you didn't know about your computer/laptop:-

It's a ritual across the globe: somewhere
between sticking the kettle on and
complaining about last night's match, you'll
probably hit the button on your ageing
company PC and wait while it slowly thinks
about turning on. Rather than take it for
granted, though, it's worth taking a couple
minutes to realise a few of the things that
your poor robot slave does without you
ever knowing.

1. Bits, Bytes, and Size
Next time you complain about the pitiful
memory capacity of your old 8GB iPod
Touch, it's worth remember what makes up
eight whole gigabytes. Computer science
grads will know that in every gigabyte,
there's 1024 megabytes; 1024 kilobytes in
a megabyte, and 1024 bytes in a kilobyte.
Breaking it down to the lowest level, you've
got 8 bits in a byte.
Why does that matter? Because on a flash
drive, each bit of data is made up of eight
separate floating gates, each comprising
two physical transistors, which can basically
record themselves as either a '1' or a '0'.
(Want to be impressed ever further? Each
floating gate actually relies on quantum
mechanics to work.) That means that an
8GB iPod Touch – the one you were
laughing at a minute ago for being puny –
has, according to my back-of-the-napkin
maths, 549,755,813,888 individual gates
arrayed inside that svelte aluminium body.
Mighty clever engineering indeed.

2. Everything you see or
hear on the internet is
actually on your
computer
All your computer-whizz friends probably
delight in telling you how having a 'library'
of videos is so 2008, that no-one torrents
any more, it's all Netflix and iPlayer and
'The Cloud', whatever that means. But, you
might want to remind them: every time
you stream a video or the week's latest Top
40 off the web, it's actually, technically
playing off your computer.
See, every internet media file has to make
a local copy of itself on your machine, first.
Ever wondered what that white buffering
bar means on YouTube or Netflix? It's the
amount of video that's been copied to the
local cache, a.k.a. the amount you can still
watch if your internet decides to up and
die.

3. The distance data
travels
A quick experiment for you: click this link,
which should take you to Wikipedia. With
one click, you've just fetched a bunch of
data from servers in Ashburn, Virginia,
about 6000km away. Your request has
travelled from your computer, through a
local Wi-Fi router or a modem, up to a local
data centre, from there onwards (under the
Atlantic Ocean, if you're in the UK), all the
way to Virginia, and back again – in around
0.1 of a second, depending on how good
your internet connection is.
By comparison, your body takes around
0.15 of a second for a signal to pass from
your fingers, up your spinal cord to the
brain, and back down again.

4. Counting Starts at
Zero
At a base level, every computer's just a
really big, complicated calculator. But
thanks to the way its intrinsic circuitry
works – with lots of little logic gates that
are either 'on' or 'off' – every action that
takes place at a base level is happening in
binary, where things are either a 1 or a 0,
with no shades of grey in between.
This actually translates up to a neat bit of
programming trivia – in the computer
science world, all counting (with the rather
notable exceptions of Fortran and Visual
Basic) starts at zero, not one.
It actually makes a lot more sense – ever
thought about why the 20th century refers
to the 1900s? It's because when historians
decided on the dating system, they weren't
clever enough to call the very first century
(0-99AD) the 0th century. If they had, we'd
probably have far fewer confused school
children the world over.

5. The work that goes
into a Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V
One rather under-appreciated fact about
solid state drives (SSDs), regarded as the
gold standard for fast, reliable storage, is
the amount of copying they have to do.
When you want to copy some data from
one bit to another, it's not just a matter of
shuffling the data from one part of the
drive to another.
Because of the complicated way a SSD
works, over-writing a block of old data with
some shiny new data isn't as simple as just
writing the new stuff in with a bigger,
thicker Sharpie. Rather, the storage drive
has to do some complicated shuffling
around.
In practice, this can mean that writing a tiny
4KB file can require the drive to read 2MB
(that's thousands of times more data that
the 4KB file you're trying to write), store
that temporarily, erase a whole tonne of
blocks, then re-write all the data. It's rather
labour-intensive, so think before you juggle
your files around next time.

6. Code isn't as clean as
you think
The majority of us put faith in bits of
technology you don't quite understand – be
it committing your life to a 747, or your
dirty pics to Snapchat's auto-delete. When
you do you generally tend to assume that
the code's been scrupulously examined by
teams of caffeine-fuelled programmers,
with most of the niggling little bugs found
and nixed.
The truth seems to be quite the opposite.
One Quora user pointed out that buried
within the source code for Java, one of the
internet's fundamental bits of code, is this
gem:
/**
* This method returns the Nth bit that is
set in the bit array. The
* current position is cached in the following
4 variables and will
* help speed up a sequence of next() call in
an index iterator. This
* method is a mess, but it is fast and it
works, so don't f*ck with it.
*/
private int _pos = Integer.MAX_VALUE;
It just goes to show that even programmers
rush things to get home for the next
installment of Game of Thrones
sometimes.