Today I just wanted to share my experience of upgrading the RAM of my gaming laptop, the XPS M1710 from DELL.
I’ve been wondering if it would be worth changing my 2×1GB of RAM for 2×2GB. Would I run applications faster? Do I really need those extra 2GB of RAM? I searched the web for some signs of wisdom which could lead me to the right path. Well, it was very insightful and I got the idea that yes, it is worth it.

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Canon 5D Mark II is almost here. Don’t bother rushing to the stores yet (if you have the money for it), it will only be available this November.

This is a fantastic camera that will replace the already-becoming-old-but-still-great Canon 5D. The most amazing features for the Mark II are:

• 21.1MP full frame CMOS sensor
• DIGIC 4 processor
• ISO range expandable to 25600
• Full HD (1080, 30fps) movie recording
• High-res 3.0” VGA LCD with Live View
• 3.9fps JPEG shooting up to card capacity
• 9-point AF + 6 Assist AF points
• Magnesium alloy body

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 “The Large Hadron Collider is the largest and most complex scientific instrument ever built and the highest energy particle accelerator in the world. The accelerator is located 100 m underground and runs through both French and Swiss territory.”

The LHC is a huge (and I mean HUGE) machine built to be part of CERN’s scientific complex. The size of this particle accelerator is 26659 meters (circumference) with a total of 9300 magnets inside which will be pre-cooled to 80 Kelvin (-193.2 degrees Celsius) using more the 10 thousand tonnes of liquid nitrogen. These will also be filled with about 60 tonnes of liquid helium so that they can reach the temperature of 1.9 K (-271.3 degrees Celsius). That’s less than 2 degrees above absolute zero.

After 20 years of hard work LHC is ready to fire the first beam this Wednesday (10 September 2008) after passing the final test of its synchronization systems.You can watch this event online through http://webcast.cern.ch/.

For more information about the largest particle collision ever built you can visit CERN’s website.

. . . that the speed of sound is 343 m/s or 1235 km/h? Speeds higher than this are called supersonic and are usually referred by the unit Mach. Being Mach 2 two times the speed of sound (2470 km/h). Speeds after Mach 5 are usually called hypersonic speeds.

. . . that the speed of light is approximately 300,000 km/s (three hundred thousand kilometers per second)? To be more precise it is 299,792,458 m/s (meters per second).

. . . the distance from Earth to Sun is around 149,598,000 kilometers (almost 150 million kilometers)? To this distance we can call Astronomical Unit or AU.

. . . that with the above data we can say that light generated by the Sun will take roughly 500 seconds (8 minutes and 40 seconds) to reach us.

Paint.net 3.36 is still fresh. Get it from http://www.getpaint.net/download.html.

This is the new version of this amazing piece of imaging software. It’s free and it’s good. Here are the latest changes:

Improvements

• Effect rendering should be a little faster now.

Changes

• Implemented some changes to the “Add Noise” effect that were suggested by a forum member.
• The canvas background color is now always #c0c0c0.
• The auto-updater should now correctly detect .NET 3.5 and newer, which will help to save bandwidth when Paint.NET v4.0 is released (it will require .NET 3.5).

Fixes

• Paint.NET now works on a system that has the .NET 3.5 SP1 “Client Profile” installed.
• When zoomed in and the cursor is to the top-left of the image (negative coordinates), the ruler is now highlighted in the correct area.
• The effect rendering system no longer sets the “Tag” property on the configuration dialog.
• Some incorrectly authored plugins would cause a crash when loading their support details (author, copyright, etc.).
• There was a bug in the color wheel for IndirectUI that caused it to show the wrong values at initialization.
• There was a performance problem for effects that used the IndirectUI color wheel control.
• In some rare cases, Paint.NET would crash while shutting down.
• When using the “Fixed Ratio” feature of the Rectangle Selection tool, it would crash if 0 was specified for both the width and height.