How do you know your computer is doing a lot of work?  Most of the time the key indicator is hard drive heads clattering away ever so often as information is written and read from the drive. Well, as we move to 64-bit operating systems with more and more RAM and solid state hard drives the computer's operation will become virtually silent.  No longer will you know when the information is being paged out or your anti-virus software is chugging away aside from the system monitors and performance logs.  The silent laptop is kind of exciting and eerie at the same time.

The other crazy things is having a 17inch laptop with screaming specs last on battery longer than 7 hours.

Wow, this has been a pretty crazy week.  I’ve been completely swamped at work.  Rebecca got back into town Monday night, and started school Tuesday night.  I’ve been working like crazy the last three weeks to get things ready for the multiple deadlines that we’ve had at work, but this week also had a bunch of interesting things happen in the news.

• President Obama has his inauguration.  The Justice of the Peace jacks up the oath which brings up questions as to whether Obama can be official called the President.  This has lead to people saying that Biden was president.
• Heartland Payment Systems announces one of the largest Data/Security breaches in history the day of the inauguration. Millions of credit card numbers and account information stolen by a sniffer within their own system.
• Microsoft contributes to the Apache SOA project Stonehenge.  The sample looks very interesting.  It’s on my to-do list to download and experiment with.
• Viz launched their Naruto anime subs last week on Hulu, and this week marks the first new one that hadn’t already been subbed by most of the fan groups. Viz is supposed to launch the sub episodes the week after the episode originally airs in Japan.
• A bunch on the media is starting to pickup and examine Windows 7 with very positive reviews.
• Microsoft announced that it will laying off 5000 people and cutting $1.5 Billion in expenses.  That’s 300K by individual they let go, so it’s obvious they are cutting more programs than they are cutting people, but it is still a huge deal.
• Intel shuts down four plants and lays off 6000
• Steve Jobs takes a leave of Absence.
• Seagate announces flash update to prevent the 7200.11 drives from bricking on some systems.  The new flashed caused some drives to brick…  They are offering data recovery services for free though.
• Tests for a new cloaking device have begun.