:: Some nice gadgets ::

OK, it's nothing new, not at all. But today I got myself thinking about some nice gadgets we are now used to. Take cell phones for a start. Not too long ago they were "gadgets for fancy and rich people". Nowadays any punk can have one. No, nothing against punks, at least not against the good ones ;) . I have a Nokia 7060; I can listen to radio on it, take pictures and EVEN make/receive phone calls *LOL* Some fancier (and not cheaper) cell phones can store loads of data, work as a MP3 player, record videos, etc, etc.

Now one of the most usefull things I have: a USB key or, as we call it in Brazil, a pendrive. No, I don't have those "big" pendrives. I only have two which can store 1GB each. I have one for serious things (like job things) and another for whatever I want to use. Damn they are usefull.

Do you remember those crappy floppy disks? Believe it or not, there are people using those crappy things, even today. Yep, I swear! Before my last PC upgrade I even had a floppy drive on my PC, just in case someone would come with one of those disks asking me to open some file. And to think I believed they would start to die in 1995, when the Iomega Zip drives landed in Brazil (in fact they showed up here a bit earlier). But nooooooooooo! Since zip disks were expensive, the damn floppy drives survived.

Then came the CD-R and CD-RW disks. OK, now I was certain the floppy would die. No, damn it! They were stronger than a tank. People kept using them. Not everyone could afford a CD burner, and... every damn PC was still coming with a floppy drive. Then came the DVD burners, and hey, they are quite cheap these days. But what I believe is really, FINALLY killing the floppy crappy drives are the USB keys/pendrives.

OK, pendrives are not as cheap as a floppy disk but... wait a minute! You don't need a special burner to write to a pendrive. All you need is a USB port and you are ready to go! Plus, the amount of data you can store on them? The access speed (read/write)? Bye, bye floppies, you are late to arrive in hell.

What else? Webcams? hmmmm no. Well, at least they are not usefull TO ME. I do have one (remember that mini-howto I created on the linux section?) which my father gave us. But I used it... just a few times. It's there "sitting" on my desk, next to my monitor, just "taking dust". Wireless (or cordless) mouse/keyboard? No thanks! I don't like them. Why? Well, I only use my mouse and keyboard when I am actualy in front of my monitor, that is on my desk. So I don't need to go far. I just HATE when the batteries of a keyboard or mouse goes off. I just can't imagine myself playing on the computer then the mouse or keyboard dies. I would go "MOTHER PEEEEEEEEEE!!!!". No, no thanks. And oh! my corded mouse is lighter than any cordless mouse I saw till now. So... NOOOOOO THANKS!

Another great thing, but it wouldn't be categorized as "gadget" is Virtual Machine. Yep, it's not a gadget since you can't touch one. Well, that's the way I see it. But hell Virtual Machines are usefull. Me, for example. I have hmmmmm four or five VMs on my Linux box. I have two Slackware Linux, a Windows XP, a OpenBSD and a NetBSD virtual machines installed inside my Bluewhite64 Linux. What good for is all that? Well, I can learn about those OSs, I can use them for tests, to work, etc and I don't need four or five separate computers. No, I am not dumb! If I wanted to run all those OS at the same time, I would need five computers. With VMs, I only need one. Ok, it has to be quite a powerful computer to have all those VMs running at the same time, but... even then it is cheaper than having five computers ;)

So, is all this post kindda silly? Hmmm perhaps, but I was in the mood to write it anyway ;)