This Week's Topics
- Comments from the Editor
- Recently Published Books
- New & Updated Articles on CodeGuru
- A TR1 Tutorial: Regular Expressions
- The Amazing GroupBox, Part 1
- VIDEO: Intro to Databases
- Hottest Discussions
- New Articles on Developer.com
- Pushing Data to the Browser with Comet
- The Two Faces of JSF on WLP
- Adding Google Maps To Your Rails Applications
Comments from the EditorProgramming is all about numbers. It is interesting to see large numbers thrown around in the tech world. Just a few years ago, we saw gigabyte hard drives move into the mainstream. Now, it is possible to get a terabyte hard drive for under $200 (U.S. dollars). Let me ask a couple of trivia questions. How much storage space is on a 1-terabyte drive? A better question is, what comes after a terabytes? If you know what is next, do you know what will follow that?
If you took a programming 101 course in school, you know that a kilobyte is 1024 bytes. The 1024 comes from using binary numbers. If you have a megabyte, you have 10242 bytes, or 1,048,576 bytes. A megabyte would be 10243 bytes, or 1,073,741,824 bytes. A terabyte is 10244 bytes, or 1,099,511,627,776 bytes.
Of course, if you buy a hard drive today that is 1 terabyte, you should look at the box. People selling storage often use a base of 1,000 instead of 1,024. This is just a small difference today, but, as you can see, it can cost you nearly 100 gig of space if you were to buy a terabyte drive.
As drives get bigger, the cost difference also gets bigger. With the next level, a petabyte, you lose over 125 terabytes (12.5%). With an Exabyte drive (exabyte follows petabyte) you lose nearly 153 petabytes (15.3%). This difference will increase as storage space continues to grow.
Do you know what comes after exabyte? I'll answer that in the forums at http://www.Codeguru.com/forums!
Related to all this storage talk is an announcement by Pioneer®. As many of you know, Blu-Ray won the battle for the next disk storage format. The Blu-Ray format has much more space than previous DVDs. In fact, it offers 25 gigabytes in a layer on a single disk. A two-sided disk can give you 50 gigabytes, Pioneer not only just announced that they would be selling Blu-Ray players, but they also announced that they have stacked 16 layers on a single disk. These disks, which are compatible with Blu-Ray, have a capacity of 400 gigabytes. That is a lot of storage—or so it seems today!
Of course, is that 400 gigabytes figured on a base number of 1,024 or 1,000? Then again, when we have 400 gigabytes of storage on a single disk, will the loss of a hundred megabytes really matter!?
Until Next week!
Bradley L. Jones
Recently Published BooksFor those of you keeping up by reading books. The following are just a few of the new books that have been recently released. If you've read any of these, feel free to write a review to be posted on CodeGuru. See the submission guidelines.
Mananging Projects with MS Office Project 2007 Training Kit
By Ballew and Reynolds for Microsoft Press
540 pages for $59.99 w/ CD
Begimning SQL Queries
By Clare Churcher for Apress
230 pages for $34.99
Pro SQL Server 2008 XML
By Michael Coles for Apress
460 pages for $59.99 (hardbound)
New & Updated Articles on CodeGuruFollowing are short descriptions of new articles on CodeGuru. If you are interested in submitting your own article for inclusion on the site, then you will find guidelines here.
A TR1 Tutorial: Regular Expressions
By Marius Bancila
Discover an overview on the algorithms and classes for regular expression in TR1, with examples for matching, searching, and replacing.
The Amazing GroupBox, Part 1
By Hannes du Preez
Learn how to create your own GroupBox, with added features such as Alignment for the Title, and a scrollbar for child controls.
VIDEO: Intro to Databases
By Bill Hatfield
New to databases? Start by learning the basic terminology.
Discussion GroupsCheck out the CodeGuru discussion forums
Forums include Visual C++, General C++, Visual Basic, Java, General Technology, C#, ASP.NET, XML, Help Wanted, and much, much, more!
... HOT THREADS ...
New Articles on Developer.comPushing Data to the Browser with Comet
By Kevin Nilson
See how adding Comet to AJAX will allow you to push data from the server to a client at an undetermined interval.
The Two Faces of JSF on WLP
By Scott Nelson
Starting with version 9.2, WebLogic Portal provides two options for creating JSF (JavaServer Faces) portlets. Learn how to use both approaches and choose the right approach for your project.
Adding Google Maps To Your Rails Applications
By Jason Gilmore
Web-based mapping solutions are in high demand these days. Learn how to take advantage of the Google Maps API and YM4R/GM plugin to add mapping capabilities to your Rails applications!
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