The Helium 3 Irony

Wow, Nanami Madobe, Microsoft's official Windows 7 OS-Tan (personification of an operating system, usually in the form of a virtual girl), has been on the front page of BrickTech for more than a month, as noticed by a reader in our Chat Box on our Sidebar:

Apparently Nene Anegasaki, another virtual girl, from the dating simultion game Love Plus, is more in demand than Nanami. She was mentioned over on BrickGamers.

Anyway, it's about time we solved this 'girl war', so we're finally updating BrickTech with a new comic! This comic is just giving a possible scenario due to recent news about the shortage of a certain element which is required to detect a certain type of bomb. So if we just think about it, some terrorists could use this advantage for their benefit. Mainly, we're talking about this...

Confused?
The US is developing a technology to detect smuggled uranium and plutonium, used to make nuclear bombs, but this machine requires Helium 3, and US is running out of this element. Talk about irony.

So why can't they just make Helium 3? Well, there's another problem. See, Helium 3 is formed when Tritium decays, but the US stopped making Tritium in 1989. This makes the demand for Helium 3 become 10x the supply.

If Tritium sounds familiar, it's because it's a by-product of Deuterium, and if THAT sounds familiar, then you must be Otaku or Geeky enough for BrickTech to know that Deuterium is used in the Star Trek universe for the Warp Core inside a Warp Drive used in Starships.

Tritium is also used in certain glow-in-the-dark products as Tritium is radioactive and well, glows. It's not found in your typical glow in the dark as those need light first before they glow.

Anyway, the US had planned to make up to 1,400 of these nuke bomb detectors, which costs USD800,000 each, for a total of 1.1billion dollars, to be placed in ports around the world so they can be detected in shipping containers before they enter the US.

Well all is not lost, they can actually rely on an older technology to detect these nuke bombs, but this older tech also has a problem of detecting cat litter as a nuke bomb too - seriously. Talk about toxic waste.

Source : New York Times

More Data?

Internet Censorship

Those who have observed Malaysia's 12th General Election on 8th March 2008 will have noticed the Opposition won 5 states from the dominant Government via the Internet, which the Govt had little control over while they were controlling the mass media.

This was even mentioned by Vinton Cerf, Father of the Internet @ WCIT 2008 - which you can read more about him here in our previous post (at the bottom of that post). He mentioned about how the Internet has shown it plays an important role in politics, and it has even resulted in the world's first blogger to be voted into Parliament, which is Malaysia's case, is Jeff Ooi. So what has the Gov tried to do? Read on for more.

As a result, in order to work towards securing the 13th GE in 2012 from being lost, the Govt has begun to blog like the Opposition, and has recently decided to attempt to filter the Internet, just as how China tried with their Green Dam project.

However, as Jack of BrickGamers have said, if even the Middle Kingdom can give up (at least for now), perhaps it's futile for the Govt here to consider pursuing this when it actually contradicts the MSC (Multimedia Super Corridor) Bill of Guarantees, which prohibits Internet censorship to encourage foreign investments in the country.

So far the Govt has said the filter is only to censor pornography, but we all know power can be abused in the wrong hands once laws are laid down, and in anycase, it still violates the MSC's Bill.

More Data?

Do you need RAID?

Image from Fujitsu

Some of you may have heard of RAID and some of you may already be using RAID. But what is RAID and do you need it since it's so popular these days?

In essence, RAID tech is using more than 1 storage drive for either speeding up the performance, or security as a backup device to mirror the contents of the drive. Hence there's RAID 0 for stripe, where 2 drives are used to form a single storage volume, and RAID 1, or mirror, where 2 drives are used to form copies of each other. These are the 2 most common form of RAID, which other advanced versions like RAID 1+0 (or RAID 10) where it's a combination of speed and security. But is RAID always a good idea?

As much as it may sound like a superb solution, you need to remember because RAID works with more than 1 drive, if anything were to happen to the computer which the RAID is running on, you can't just take out the drive and connect it to another computer and save the data.

Remember, it's now a volume which needs 2 drives to work. You can't just plug both drives into another computer and expect it to work flawlessly as well. RAID is designed when the computer that it runs on is almost flawless. Like servers. Hence why RAID started off in servers and workstations. Now however, it has entered desktop and even notebook computers!

However, this is more of a feature to sell than actually being of any real benefit. It's better for you to invest in a faster drive, like if you can afford Western Digital's Raptor series of 10,000RPM drives, and a second backup drive - either internal or external - for security.

More Data?

Best Free Antivirus?

If you're looking for the best free antivirus out there, there's nothing better than Avast, made by Alwil. Not only does it support x64 (64-bit) operating systems (Windows XP or Vista), it also supports Linux, and comes with boot scan capability, which is very important if you have a virus or worm on your computer, as this ability eliminates the malicious program before it even loads when the OS starts up.

Avast works for a year - all you need to do is register on their site. Avast can also remove infections from USB flash drives (but please right-click and scan the drives in your My Computer first before opening it - you might have to do this a few times to fully get rid of it), and trojans. Did you know you can also customise the look of it?


If you like to skin your AV software, Avast has a selection of skins here. Choose from Bionic for a BioHazard look, LCARS for Star Trekkies/Trekkers, Corporate if you're tech support installing for offices, Matrix for Neo fans, aVist if you're using Vista and want the AERO feel, and even KDE for Linux fanboys.

And yes, Avast is recognised by XP and Vista's Security Center so it will notify you when it's outdated so you can manually update it should the automatic update not execute (perhaps your connection was down at the scheduled time). Anyway it's always a good idea to manually update your security software off and on for any updates it may have missed during automatic updates.

A word of advice, an AV - or any AV for that matter - is a prevention tool more than a solutions tool. Meaning you need to take measures to scan the unknown before opening, not use your computer as usual and expect the AV to solve a virus once you're infected. Virii are designed to disable AV - trying to remove one once you're infected can be a hassle.

You can get Avast 4.8 from here (XP/Vista 34MB) and then register here. For more download languages, visit here. Linux users can download it here. Check out its features compared to others here.

More Data?

Windows 7 Anti-Virus

If you're using (or testing) Windows 7 RC, you should also have an Anti-Virus present, and just like with Win7 Beta earlier, where you had a choice of 3 AV, Win7 RC also comes with a choice of AV to use - even more now actually - 7. Coincidence? Not actually! Lately 2 more were added to be 9. You can see them here. So perhaps more might be added in the future. Read on to see the free duration of each offering.

The List:

• Kaspersky (6 months free)
• Panda (3 months free)
• Trend Micro (only 1 month free)
• AVG (only 1 month free)
• Symantec Norton (registration required and only 2 weeks free)
• McAfee (registration required)
  
• F-Secure (registration required)
• WebRoot (not free)
• BullGuard (unknown)
  

Just like before with Win7 Beta, only ONE AV offers the longest free duration of usage on Win7 RC - Kaspersky. They continue to offer half a year (6 months) of free usage for their Win7 AV 8 Beta.

No this post wasn't paid for by Kaspersky. You do the research yourself and see who offers the best deal for testing or using Win7 RC. As gamers will say, do we hear a "Mother Russia"?

More Data?