stwiener's blog: Hardware Questions

October 01, 2006

<h1>Hardware Questions</h1>

These are our group members:

I always have been annoyed when using my home computer that uses a dial-up internet connection. It is significantly slower than my wireless connection that I receive on campus with my laptop. Why are there such speed differences between internet connections, broadband vs dial-up speeds, and also wireless? The website that sparked our interest with this question is: internet connections

I was watching a Mr. and Mrs. Smith on a DVD the other day, and I started reading the back cover, where all of the technical information is listed along with the description of the movie. The DVD I watched used MPEG-2 format. What does this mean? How does this affect what I am watching? How does it work? Then I started search for the DVD online (I wanted to buy it…I had rented it) and I came across a website selling the DVD for European countries. I know that DVD players in Europe are not compatible with DVD players in America, and the DVD still uses MPEG-2 format. That leads me to another question…why aren’t DVD players compatible from country to country? Furthermore, I know that there are some specialized DVD players that work with everything. What makes this possible?

For the first time this year, my apartment is using wireless internet. We were having trouble installing the wireless router, so we went to the website www.linksys.com. There I learned that the router has firewall capabilities. Can the firewall for my computer come from an outside source? I thought the firewall had to be installed on my individual computer for it to work? How does a firewall work?

I was looking at mp3 players, and as I was browsing through the options, I came across two differnet types of memory storage. What is the difference of a flash drive and a hard drive? What are the advantages and disadvantages for each of them?

Once hearing about the new technology in video watching, called Blu-ray, we were immediateley curious as to how this will be better than the standard DVD player. We looked up the Samsung Blu-ray High Definition Disc Player on Bestbuy.com. We are curious about how the Blu-ray is capable of having five times greater resolution than a DVD? Also, it says in the advertisement that it has built-in decoders for next-generation Dolby Digital. What exactly is a built-in decoder?

I was on the apple website (http://www.apple.com/), looking at the new ipods, when I came across the new laptops available. The apple pro laptop looks very enticing because it had so many amazing features. There was a list of techniques that the Mac pro could perform, and in this list there was an article titled The (Hidden) Glyphs Palette. I havce no idea what a glyph is. Why is having glyph capabilities important? Does it enhance the performance of the computer, or is it a special feature used to attract artistic users to this computer?

When surfing the internet, I have come across HT technology in many different places. From desktops, to video game systems, to servers, everything uses HT techonolgy! What does it do? What enables it to be used in such versatile ways?

While looking through articles on de.lic.ious.com, we came across a website on Webtools. This website claims to provide the most useful computer tools for college students, and it mentioned PDFs. We were wondering what a PDF is, and how would a website that converts documents into PDFs help college students?

I was tagging websites for the term project, and I came across a website about bandwidth. What is bandwidth? Does it affect the speed of my internet?

New types of television technology are coming out each day. What is the difference between an LCD panel and a plasma flat panel? Is the main difference the amount of pixels?

Posted by stwiener at October 1, 2006 02:38 PM