Big Hard disk companies skimp over providing data

I wanted to buy an external hard disk drive and had a tough time finding basic data to compare and choose the product. I wanted to buy among the big hard disk drive companies Western Digital and Seagate products, but their information on their website is grossly inadequate.
They provide so many varieties in the segment of portable external hard disk but do not provide sufficient information to distinguish one from another within this category.
Have a look at the information on their websites:

First, the real idea of portable is missing. I was looking for the dimensions of the products.
Second, the weight of the product is missing.
Third, their backward compatibility to the old operating systems is also missing. Will they work with Windows Vista? I cant say.
Fourth, what technology are they using? Are they mechanical or solid state devices?
Fifth, at what speed do they run? 5400 rpm or 7200 rpm? The faster they run, the hotter they get.
Sixth, WD speaks about the backup software in it. But what is the difference between these? Where am I supposed to look for it?
Seven, what is the power consumption of these hard disks? There should be some examples or range of numbers. Nothing is available.
Eight, I have seen some external hard disks being connected to laptops with two usb drives in the past as they need more power to run. I cant make out whether they need single USB or two USB ports to run.

Some of these are very technical, but some are very basic for usability and trade offs while buying a product.
The sad part is not only are these available on the website, these are also not available in the outer box of the external portable hard disk I bought. WD fortunately had the OS compatibility printed on it.

Hard disk companies talk of providing TBs of data but skimp on providing even some basic bytes of important data.

Addiction of Internet

eEtiquette

With so many more communication channels open today to communicate, there are a number of questions that come to mind when we have a task at hand to complete or while selecting the mode or how to use them.
The below website has a number of good etiquette practices that should be followed for better communications.
http://eetiquette.com/

Digital Name hijackers

There is only a very limited number of common names and english words in this world. And the first movers (that is our generation) is lucky to get a name for ourselves so easily. Say an email account of your precise name you want or the blog site or the website with the right words to describe your blog. Some in our generation aren't all that lucky also. I also am a victim of Digital name hijacking. After quite some time of thinking when I started my blog, I wanted my blog site to be named "thinkdifferent.blogspot.com", as I felt it was appropriate at that point of time. But that name was already occupied. Being occupied is not hijacking, but the creator of that blog just had one or two blogposts in all for years together. And thats what I call Name Hijacking. No use for anybody and still permanently occupied not allowing anyone else to use it either.
The same has been used as a great business model to make money by several people. Domain name sitters/hijackers get all the probable names of upcoming companies/organisations  or organisations that don't have an online presence till now registered and then demand a ransom to let go of these names to the companies. There is good amount of money to be made in this business and knowledge of SEO(search engine optimisation) can only help this business model further. All this business model needs is some students with idle time and some pocket money with some imagination. Well, I guess this post is a rant starting somewhere and ending somewhere else(probably due to the background songs and simultaneous chatting).

Being Computer savvy

Being computer savvy means being able to do all the regular things and even some irregular things given some time on the computer. The key trick to being computer savvy is just two things. One, having some computer savvy friends and the other, having a good searching skill (in short googling). The first involves taking about your problems with your savvy friend and the his/her telling you of a similar problem they or someone they know faced and how they resolved it. It also involves enthusiatically discussing you about the latest happenings/developments/updates/new softwares/new functionalities - basically arming yourself with knowledge.

The second part, "googling", seems simple for a newbie, but an experienced person knows how difficult it is to get when you are looking at a particular thing from a particular view. That is the art of searching. One needs to think like the code or the machine on what keywords it would have stored for the searches and with which keywords would you hit the right link/topic. Yes, it is a kind of trial and error, more appropriately put, it is an educated and calculated guess. Being creative helps. Giving alternative keywords, adding descriptions, country location, authors name, popular news sites, etc are all the right moves/filters to get the thing you need. Somehow, this is a skill that is not taught or even recognised by anyone despite its needs being immense. Only a manager/friend will know the benefits of having a person who is super fast in getting you the right information immediately by "simple" googling.

Paratrooper experience counts

With terrorists thinking of using low end tech and newer ways to attack public places, who knew that experience of playing that early 1990s game of Paratrooper on Windows computers would be so much valuable.

http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/politics/nation/Lashker-paragliders-target-CWG/articleshow/6489373.cms

Widgets

I was going through the list of free vista sidebar gadgets on the windows live website to find some useful time saving gadgets for my laptop. I just couldn't stop laughing looking at this gadget: http://gallery.live.com/liveItemDetail.aspx?li=3e187adc-b662-4443-ab81-5e599c63dcb4&bt=1&pl=1

Illiterate literates

I have a few at home. My parents. Yes, both are post graduates in different fields which qualifies for being more than just literate. But when it comes to computers, I will call them illiterates(atleast a year ago). Same is the case at my aunt's place where I am in Chennai right now. Seems to me that my entire parent's generation would be happy to be illiterate in computers throughout their lives if there was no necessity to learn computers at all. Unfortunately, for them now it is being a necessity. From checking the bank's account statement, to receiving photos of newly born kids in the family, to searching horoscopes for their children's marriage are quite some things that are forcing the generation to forcefully learn computers. Somehow, their mantra for not learning computers irrespective of the person, place and time is "There is no necessity to learn now. When the need arises, we shall see". In other words, "I will not learn till it is forced upon me to". What an attitude!!!!

Grown ups and still acting like stubborn kids...!!! And when the need arises, usually the children are away from home and cant learn it by themselves. So I have enrolled myself to teach my uncle, aunt, mom and dad, the basics of computers so that they can send, receive emails with attachments, talk on gtalk, etc in the little time I have left before going to Manila. It is time we taught them a lesson ;)

My problems with vista

Apart from how slow vista is(due to its 20 years legacy software with thousands of patches on patches), these are some big time goof ups done by microsoft in vista. I cant make a double click on a mp3 file to enqueue by default in winamp as it did in the windows 98(even when I enable this option in winamp5.05, why? Vista is playing god). The defragment doesn't work. It took three hours to analyse my 30Gb/138Gb and still did not finish analysing.How on earth can you ship products with applications not working? (and yes, the latest service pack is also installed on my pc). Why are there two sets of microsoft offices(2003 and 2007)and the default is 2003? WOW! I am so excited..... Why cant I set a standard template for the music folders? the os's standard template for music folder's sucks. As I play mp3s only, I dont care about the #, genre, artist album.These parameters are hardly ever found in the properties/tag/attribute of the mp3s. All I want is name,type of file and size. Is that that complicated?

My new laptop

I saw my brand new lappy(that is what my old colleague used to call it) the day before. It looks KOOL and classy. A widescreen that too. Wow! Nice Altec-Lansing speakers which definitely has the potential to wake up the neighbours at the dorm later this year :P The laptop is the HP Pavilion dv6700. 3Gb RAM and 1.67Ghz x2 processors. The screen has got a very glassy look which I love. I took some time to get used to this new Windows Vista thingy - From finding the mouse movement settings to uninstalling some software. There are quite some pains with the new software. While idle, the memory is 40% occupied already. The defragmentor does not even show the fragmentation picture or a % number unlike the previous ones. What a pain.... Anyways, I will have to live with this for a long time.