Back in the days when computer hard disk capacities were within the range of a few megabytes and the majority of files were text documents, compression utilities like WinZip and WinRAR ruled the land. But in the terabytes world of today, we do not really need to compress any file for the sole purpos...

The NTFS file system supports file compression which basically means that it is possible to reduce the sizes of files stored on a NTFS volume to save hard drive space. The compression algorithm is Lempel-Ziv compression which is a lossless algorithm which means that no data will be lost when applied...

Bitser adds itself to the impressive list of file compression programs for the Windows operating system. It stands out because of its interesting interface that resembles Windows Explorer and not a usual file compression program. Most file compression programs use an interface with only one panel th...

Budgets are shrinking. Resources are tight or shrinking. In a recent post, I discussed how ideas that I had been a proponent of for 2-3 years suddenly became extremely valuable to companies during the downturn of 2001-2003. This downturn is a different beast. This means that you will need more than ...

The Float-A-Pet floating dog collar saves pet lives should God decide to spite us with another flood for all the debauchery. When the collar's sensors detect water -- PFFFFT -- the collar inflates, keeping most tiny-ass dogs and cats afloat by their neck. Also, I'd say it probably works on turtles. ...

Over the past couple of years, Pure Digital Technologies has changed the way people think about video cameras by turning these heavy, expensive, intimidating devices into affordable, user-friendly gadgets that fit into a shirt pocket. To keep the prices of its Flip camcorders affordable, Pure Digita...

* Chest compression alone nearly doubled the chances of a good neurological outcome in patients at greatest risk (those that stopped breathing , which accounted for 90 percent of those in the study). * The good outcomes were most likely if the rescue attempt began within four minutes of the collapse...

Network.com setup in Vegas, Thumper disk bay, green by Shawn Ferry As I expected it would, the fact that I used ZFS compression on our MySQL volume in my little OpenSolaris experiment struck a chord in the comments. I chose gzip-9 for our first pass for a few reasons: I wanted to see what the “...

Pimp My Drive by Richard and Barb There’s remarkably little information online about using MySQL on ZFS, successfully or not, so I did what any enterprising geek would do: Built a box, threw some data on it, and tossed it into production to see if it would sink or swim. I’m a Linux geek,...

Add this to my “Things to hyperventilate over� list: British police are on the lookout for something called a WASP Knife, a weapon that injects a ball of compressed gas into its victim that then......