I’m proud to unveil a new feature here on the Wambooli web site: The Wambooli Technology Dictionary. It’s an on-line dictionary full of computer and high-tech terms.
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Back in my 20s I thought a Life Cycle was one of those stationary bicycles I sweated on at the gym. Indeed, the clever manufacturer had named them “Life Cycle.” But in software development, a life cycle is a product’s usable lifespan. A product is born or introduced, used, then eventually it fades away as a replacement or update comes along.
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One of the original jokes about Windows Vista was that Windows Vista was a joke itself. No, not that one. The joke was that some pundit was asked whether he’d ever upgrade to Windows Vista. His answer was that he’d wait for the SP1. Well, it’s that time!
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Do you miss DOS? (Get it: MS-DOS? Ha!) You probably don’t. If you knew what I know about DOS, you’d wake up every day and pray thanks to the computer gods that it’s no longer around. But, then again, DOS had some really good software. There are also some pioneering games that I remember fondly.
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One of my favorite authors passed this week. Arthur C. Clarke died in his home in Colombo, Sri Lanka this past Tuesday. I really enjoyed reading his stories when I was a teenager. Even on my last business trip, I read another one of his books.
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Ever try to get a handle on the terms megabyte or gigabyte? I hear people discuss these electronic yardsticks in normal conversation these days. Some know what they mean, but I feel that few really have a handle on how dang much information there really is in a gigabyte.

First a refresher.

A byte is a unit of data storage. Technically a byte stores 8 bits of information on a modern computer. (Though a byte is not always 8 bits. There were 5, 6, 7 and even 10 bit bytes at one time or another.)

Through the mystery of binary math, there are 256 possible combinations of the 8 bits in a byte, meaning that a byte can store values from 0 up to 255. Most commonly in a computer, those values represent a character. So the text bellybutton requires 11 bytes of computer storage.

By itself a byte is fairly useless. Early computers came with hundreds of bytes of storage. Eventually that number increased to thousands of bytes. To quickly express that quantity, the term kilobyte (K or KB) was used. Kilo comes from the Greek word χιλια, which means 1,000.

Sidebar. Traditionally, a kilobyte is 1,024 bytes. But most people believe it to be 1,000 bytes. That’s okay. Computer scientists use the word kibibyte to mean the value 1,024. That’s because 1024 is a binary value, 2¹⁰. You can ignore this sidebar.

As computers expanded their storage, larger values were used:

After the kilobyte comes the megabyte (M or MB), about one million bytes of storage. During the 1980s computer memory was measured in kilobytes and disk storage measured in megabytes.

After the megabyte comes the gigabyte (G or GB). It’s gig with a hard G, not jig-a-byte. A gigabyte stores over one billion bytes of information. Computers in the 1990s measured memory in megabytes and disk storage in gigabytes.

We are now in the terabyte era. A terabyte (TB) stores one trillion bytes of information. You can buy terabyte hard drives. (Though most terabyte drives are simply two 500 gigabyte drives in one box.)

After terabyte comes the petabyte (PB).
After petabyte comes the exabyte (EB).
After exabyte comes the zettabyte (ZB).
After zettabyte comes the yottabyte (YB).

No, I’m not making any of that up.

Someday your grandkids (or great-great-grandkids) will be bemoaning the fact that their lousy petabyte iPod is incapable of full 3D realistic reality reproduction and why didn’t you pony up the 400 Euros to get them the 6 exabyte model instead?

Macintosh users have disliked Microsoft Word for a long time. Oddly enough, Word was one of the first full-powered word processors available for the Mac, way back in the early 1980s. But Microsoft had their own, non-Mac ways of doing things. So while the program was popular it was disliked. That didn’t stop Microsoft from producing Word for the Mac. Right now, I’m disgusted to say that Word 2008, the latest version of Word for the Mac, is truly a hard core disappointment.

Oh, where to begin . . . ?

The program is slow. Very slow. Painfully slow. Word takes an eon to start. It takes longer to start on my Mac than Photoshop, and Photoshop is notorious for being one of the bulkiest Mac programs. It’s not a very fast starter.

You stare at the Word splash screen for at least several minutes. It’s annoying to have to wait, especially when there are urgent thoughts rattling in your brain that must be typed vigorously at the keyboard lest they be lost in a mess of frantic thought!

When the splash screen goes away, you see what you think to be a blank Word document. Don’t be silly. It’s a mirage. The rest of the program has not yet come in to roost. You have to wait even longer for the toolbars to show up. Only then can you actually start typing.

Sensing that I might be exaggerating, or suffering from some sort of rift in the space-time continuum, I broke out my handy stop watch. From the time I double-clicked the Word icon on the dock to the time my hastily-typed text appeared on the screen took a full 32 seconds.

DOS was faster.

I won’t go into my other dislikes: The program has weird palettes instead of the standard toolbars. The palettes unpredictably change as you work in Word. Some documents sport a weird grid-like thing I cannot get rid of nor determine why it’s there. And, as expected, things have moved around. Thank the gods that Microsoft doesn’t design cars or we’d find the brake and accelerator pedals swapped every two years.

The program is file-compatible with Office 2007. Those weird DOCX files are used for the new Word 2008. Still, it can still read the older DOC files from both the PC and Mac.

Why did you upgrade if you hate it so?

Because, wise guy, I really didn’t like the old version of Word that I was using. It was Word X from 2002 or something. It would randomly crash on me. Word 2008 hasn’t crashed, but as long as I know that I have enough time to get a cup of coffee and pee after I start the Word, I’ll survive.

The third edition of Troubleshooting Your PC For Dummies it out. Yeah! It’s been completely updated and geared entirely toward Windows Vista. Yeah, yeah, you may still have Windows XP and you’re stuck with it, so the book won’t do you any good. But I hope that changes soon.

I don’t want to dwell no the Windows XP “I’m Not Upgrading” thing. But look at it this way, sometime soon you’ll buy a new computer. It will come with Vista. Possibly before then, Microsoft with withdraw XP support. That’s it. That’s the end of the line.

So if you want a Troubleshooting book on Windows XP, get the 2nd Edition of Troubleshooting Your PC For Dummies. Enjoy it.

The 3rd Edition of my Troubleshooting book covers Windows Vista exclusively. There’s a reason for that: Windows Vista sports a wonderful array of troubleshooting and support tools, more than any other version of Windows. In fact, I used some of them today to recover from a bad software update.

Yeah, yeah, if Windows Vista sells better, then my book will too. But even beyond that, I view Windows Vista as having those valuable tools that make using my computer easier. I consider that a feature worthy of an upgrade. And it explains why more than half the PCs in my office now run Vista instead of XP.

So, whether you have Vista or not, buy the book!

New Wambooli Video. Please check out my latest video. This one is on selecting and using a shredder.

Interesting Web Site I Dept. Ever get one of those calls? You don’t recognize the number on your Caller ID so you let “the machine” pick it up. No message is left. And they keep on calling! Who is it? Find out by visiting the Who Calls Me? web site. Fascinating.

Interesting Web Site II Dept. Want to know what your name means? Or maybe you’re just hunting for a name for a new baby. Think Baby Names is an interesting web site.