I was reading some comments on some blog site the other day and one of the commenters — an obviously very knowledgeable fellow — was clearly and concisely explaining to everyone what the word "bandwidth" meant.  By the confidence with which he wrote, there was little doubt he knew exactly what he was talking about.

And he couldn’t have been more wrong.

Nor am I criticizing him.  There’s a lot of confusion out there, often because a term has two different meanings depending upon context, and such was the case here.  With other terms, it might be a matter of people believing the ad hype, or a word’s meaning has simply evolved over time.

With all this in mind, here’s a Points of Confusion list I’ve come up with:
 

Definitions	The Internet
Bandwidth	Connection & Download Rates
Image	Download Accelerators
Resolution	Web Site Hits
Web’ & ‘Internet	What You’re Seeing Isn’t The Web
Disc’ & ‘Disk	Cookies
Software	Hardware
Mac vs the PC	Memory & Hard Drives
Firefox	Faster CPUs
Newer Isn’t Better	Computers Wearing Out
Screensavers	Defragmenting Hard Drives
Backing Things Up	Printer Ink Costs

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

You just wouldn’t believe how much crap you’ve been handed.
 

Definitions

Bandwidth

To someone surfing the web, bandwidth is a "per second" measurement.  A piece of streaming video is coming down at X kilobytes per second and if you don’t have the bandwidth, the player is going to stop to download more data before continuing.  You don’t actually use bandwidth; it’s more like the size of a gate and how much data can get through at any one moment.

To a webmaster and his web hosting company, bandwidth is a "per month" unit.  It’s the accumulated amount of bytes that has been downloaded from the site over the month.  If 10 people watch a 10-meg video clip, that’s 100 megs of bandwidth used.  To a webmaster putting huge videos on his site, bandwidth can be a critical issue.  In the old days, web hosting companies really squeezed us poor webmasters, but modern companies like BlueHost have broken down the barriers and are now offering unlimited bandwidth and server space per month, very cool.

As a small side note, that’s not just hype.  I have over 25 gigs on my own site (1,055 pages, 2,205 pics, 303 videos) and at one point a while back I put the link to what, according to the site stats, was a fairly popular video and lots of people were watching it, yet no one complained of any ‘stuttering’ from the player.  Not a bad deal for $6.95/mo.
 

Image

This little rascal actually has five uses:

• If you have a program like Photoshop or MS Word open and you’re moving a bunch of small pictures or icons around, it would be proper to say you’re "moving some images around."
   
• The entire picture is often referred to as an "image", along with "pic", "picture", "snapshot", "screen-grab", "graphic", "photo", "visual", etc.
   
• Videos can also be called "images" in context.  It would be proper to say, "Now load the video image into the program."
   
• A disc image is a great big file of an entire hard drive partition.
   
• And if someone looks just like someone else, that would be a spittin’ image.
   

Resolution

Like "bandwidth", this has two very different-yet-related definitions.

Originally, it meant the "saturation" of a picture.  Basically, how many little color pixels were crammed into a given space.  The more pixels, the higher the quality.  The pictures we see on the computer usually have a resolution of 72, which is the beginning of ‘photographic quality’.  The only place this definition is still used today is in the printing field.

When monitors started growing in size, they needed a word for "screen size", and somebody deemed "resolution" to be the word, and that’s how it’s used today.  As in, "My monitor has a resolution of 1024 x 768 pixels."
 

Disc & Disk

If it’s round and flat — you know, like a discus — then it’s a "disc".  CDs, DVDs, phonograph records, frisbees, are all ‘discs’.

If the disc is within a container, like a hard drive, then it’s referred to as a "disk drive".  Remember floppy disks? Although the flimsy platter inside was a ‘disc’, the whole thing was a "floppy disk", or diskette, because it was in a casing.

There’s really no such thing as a "disk". It’s either a "floppy disk" or "disk drive".  If the item is round and flat and sitting there all by itself, it’s a ‘disc’.
 

Web & Internet

Picture a pie graph.  The entire thing is the Internet.

A big part of it is taken up by the Web.  The address for this area of the Internet is "HTTP:", like you see in a browser address box.  When your request gets to the Internet portal, the program sees that "HTTP:" and sends it to the Web area.

Another part is taken up by Usenet, also known as "the newsgroups".  The address for this area is "NNTP:".  These are zillions of message areas where people chit-chat (via message) about whatever the topic of the group is.  The downside is that Usenet doesn’t have cute pictures and icons and such, but the up side is that it’s totally unmoderated.  You don’t have to worry the power-hungry boss of some web forum or blogsite is going to ban your sorry ass just because you innocently called for the immediate beheading of all liberals.  You want freedom of speech? You want Usenet.

And another part is taken up by FTP, the "file storage area" of the Internet.  It’s address is "FTP:".  This is a ‘raw’ file storage area, somewhat like a hard drive, where all you see is a listing of the files.

It’s to note that there is a large interaction between these areas.  You can read and answer Usenet messages using a browser or email program instead of a newsgroup reader.  You can access the ‘raw’ contents of an FTP site with a browser instead of an FTP program.  You can put active links to Web sites in Usenet messages just like you do in email.  As a webmaster, you view your web site with a browser but you upload new files to it via FTP.  It all interfaces quite nicely.

However…

With all that said, you’d be completely correct by today’s standards to refer to the Web and the Internet interchangeably.  The Web is the area that gets all the press, and, as such, "the Internet" has entered the general lexicon as meaning "the Web." If someone asks you where you got that cool picture and you answer, "I got it off the Internet", it’s assumed you meant some Web site.
 

The Internet

Connection & Download Rates

There are two general measurements of Internet speed; the rate at which you’re connected to your ISP, and the actual rate of your downloads.

The connection rate is measured in ‘MB’, or megabytes.  The bigger the number, the faster your connection speed and the faster everything should work, be it downloading, uploading, or just browsing.  How fast the connection rate is depends on which account ($$) you have with your ISP.

The download rate is measured as "KB/sec", or "Kilobytes per second".  If a little box pops open while you’re downloading something, that’s the rate to look for.

If you know your connection rate and want to figure out your maximum download rate, divide it by 8,000.

A ‘meg’ is a million bytes.  If you have a 5-meg connection rate:

5,000,000 divided by 8,000 = 625 KB/sec

That’s the maximum rate you should be able to download.  If you’re downloading two items at the same time, each download box should be approximately half of that.  Four simultaneous downloads would each use about a quarter of the maximum KB/sec.  Max bandwidth is max bandwidth.

While you should be getting close to the maximum rate, there are a lot of factors involved and you may not get the absolute max.  If you’re getting significantly less than your max, then you’ve got a legitimate beef with your ISP and you should have them come out and check the line to the house.  It’s not unusual for the cable connection up on the pole to get a little crusty over time.
 

Download Accelerators

There is no such thing as "accelerating" your downloads on a proper-running machine.  Your maximum download rate is determined by the connection rate to your ISP, and it’s a finite, limited number.  A ‘gate’, if you will.  You can’t get around it by being clever or sneaky.  Max bandwidth is max bandwidth.

If a "download accelerator" actually does improve your download rate, then it’s re-tweaked some system setting that was out of whack to begin with.  Just guessing, but installing it on machines that were purposefully put out of spec is probably how they put together impressive-sounding before-and-after numbers for their advertising department.

Getting your system correctly tweaked for broadband is part of the ‘Setup – Serious’ page.

On the subject, there’s a big difference between a download accelerator and a download manager.  A download manager queues up files and downloads a bunch of them together, just to make sure the download meter’s pegged.  They also can resume a broken or stopped download, a very handy feature.  But there’s no pretension that anything is "accelerated."  For a download manager, I’ve used GetRight for years.
 

Web Site "Hits"

Not only is the terminology misleading, but there are easy ways to grossly inflate one’s stats, which somewhat renders the entire subject pointless.

The basic problem is the word "hits".  Every item on a web page; every icon, picture, background graphic, etc, is considered a "hit" by the browser.  In the old days of slow modems, you could actually see the browser saying "Connected to…" as it downloaded an icon, then it would go blank, then say "Connected to…" again as it downloaded the next icon, each ‘Connected to’ being a "hit".  If you hooked up a site counter to a brand new site, you’d go to the site once and the counter would read something like "13 hits."

Nowadays, speeds are so fast that you don’t see that little ‘Connected to…" message, but the browser’s still looking at each piece of the page as a "hit".  So if you hear somebody refer to the massive number of "hits" their site gets, take it with a boxcar of salt.

The proper terms are "visitors" or "page views", and that’s broken into two categories; total "visitors" or "page views" per month and the "unique visitors" the site gets; that is, how many new people came to the site that month.  Unique visitors are the "fresh blood" of the industry and are probably more important than "page views" when it comes to getting people to click on ad banners.

But as far as ‘visits’ or ‘page views’, these stats are very easy to inflate in a couple of ways, and the era of tabbed browsers has totally skewed the results because of the "auto-refresh" so many sites (Drudge, Instapundit, Townhall, etc) use.

Picture this:

• Just to pick a number, let’s say 10,000 people fire up Drudge in one of their browser’s ‘tabs’ when they get to work.  It sits in the tab all day.  When they click on a Drudge link, it opens in another tab.
   
• Drudge auto-refreshes the site every 3 minutes.  It’s right there in the source code and it’s easy to test.  Just go to the site and hit the stopwatch.  Around the 3-minute mark you’ll see the screen flash briefly as it refreshes itself.
   
• Each refresh is another ‘visit’ to the site. 

3 minutes into an 8-hour workday = 160 refreshes times 10,000 visitors = 1.6 MILLION ‘visits’ a day from a mere 10,000 viewers — and all because of tabbed browsers and auto-refresh.

And for those not using tabs, consider that Drudge doesn’t open a new browser window when you click on a link.  That means you have to hit the browser’s ‘Back’ button to get back to his site — and there’s another ‘visit’.  Read a number of links and your one visit just became ten visits.  No matter how you play it, the numbers are vastly inflated.

In the meantime, Drudge touts the big numbers to his advertisers and charges accordingly.

It’s not an outright ‘scam’, but it’s damn close.
 

What You’re Seeing Isn’t The Web

Not to put too fine a point on it, but as long as we’re tackling computer misconceptions, I suppose this should be briefly mentioned.

When you’re on a Web site, you think the files you seeing displayed are on the site, right?

Nope.

Every single file you see or hear on the Web has been downloaded to your computer first.  Most of it’s residing happily in your ‘Temporary Internet Files’ folder.

The Web is actually a glossy coat over the FTP part of the Internet, its file storage area.  A browser is a big interface that automatically downloads these files from the FTP area to your computer and then displays them for you.

Realistically, it doesn’t make any difference whether you’re seeing files on your own computer or on a web server, but it does raise an interesting point about copyright law.

Let’s say you have an art gallery of pictures online and suddenly some company is claiming you "stole" a picture from their web site.

Well, no, technically you plucked it out of your Temporary Internet Files folder.  Nobody "stole" anything.  And, if it’s sitting right there on your computer, then you certainly should have the right to do with it whatever you want, right? How in the world, Your Honor, is poor little you supposed to determine which pictures in your Temporary Internet Files folder are copyrighted and which ones aren’t? And, if a big company like Microsoft thinks it’s perfectly legal to download the picture with its browser in the first place, who are you to argue otherwise??

I’m being (a tad) facetious here, but it’s an interesting point.  If the browser has automatically downloaded a file and it’s sitting right there on your computer, it’s a little hard to argue that you "stole" anything.
 

Cookies

It’s amazing how many times I’ve seen supposed experts warning people about those vile, evil cookies.  Yet, to the best of my knowledge, no one has ever gotten a computer virus from a cookie.  If you read an article on the latest worm or virus to hit the scene, you’ll see references to "Java" and "ActiveX", but you won’t read the word "cookie" anywhere on the page.

Cookies are tiny files that are sent to your computer by a web site.  They have two main purposes:

• They tell the web site who you are so you don’t have to enter your name & password every time you arrive, an obviously very handy feature.
   
• They provide demographic information to commercial enterprises.  There’s nothing ‘personal’ in the info, just your general geographic location and whether or not you’re a paying customer so companies can get a bead on where their customer base is strong or weak.

The latter is why cookies have acquired the reputation of being ‘invasive’, and why almost every "Make Your Computer Secure!" article tells you to turn them off, but there’s simply no justification for it.  Login-wise, they’re extremely helpful, and who cares what companies know about your browsing habits? Until you start seeing "Wild Cookie Runs Amok!" in the news, appreciate them for the good they do.
 

Software

Mac vs The PC

When it comes to the ol’ Mac vs Windows debate, it can be summed up with one simple question:

• You open the browser.  You surf the web.  You close the browser.
   
• You open the word processing program.  You write a letter to Grandma.  You close the program.
   
• You open a program like Photoshop.  You crop the picture.  You close the program.

Quick: Which operating system are you using?

What’s that?  Don’t know?  Can’t tell?

Well, doesn’t that prove the point? People talk like they "use" the operating system whereas, in reality, they very rarely "use" the OS; they just use the programs that run on it.  Once your browser or word processing program or whatever is up, the OS you’re using is almost irrelevant, nor could you even tell which OS you were using outside of a few menu and icon differences.

If you’re talking about stability, that’s a whole different story, and I’d match my PC against any Mac in the "stability" department, any day.  It almost never melts down, and the few times it does it because I’m trying out some goofy video program written by some college kid that locked up the system’s video drivers.  But my Windows XP, itself, is solid as a rock.

When it comes to programs, there is nothing the Mac can do that the PC can’t, and vice versa.  And most good programs these days have a version for both platforms.

And both systems can run ‘emulation’ programs which can simulate the other platform, so even if there was some perfect program only written for one of the operating systems, you could still run it on the other.

The one place where there really is a discernible difference is when it comes to hardware, but even that’s something of a moot point.  Yes, the computer store has a billion more things for the PC than the Mac, but the question is, how much of it do you really want? Once a computer’s running and assuming it’s got all the usual peripheral devices, you might want a little doo-dad or two in the future, but most likely there’ll be a version for both platforms.  There might be six versions for the PC and only one for the Mac, but as long as the Mac one does the job, who cares?

The whole Mac vs Windows argument is blown way out of proportion.  What many consider a matter of life and death rates an "almost inconsequential" in my book.
 

Firefox

Measuring browser popularity is almost impossible.  It simply depends on what type of site you’re measuring.  Taking a page out of Apple’s playbook, Firefox has pitched its browser as the counterculture program of choice for those wishing to buck the Establishment, so both techies and left-wing bloggers (and some ‘maverick’ right-wingers) have glommed onto it.  They praise it on their site and the bleating acolytes and drooling sycophants jump on board.  As such, if you monitor a techie site or a political Lefty’s site, it wouldn’t be surprising to see over half of the users using Firefox.

To counterbalance that, here are last March’s stats for a (completely non-techie, non-political) company I used to work for.  There were 34,934 ‘unique visitors’ over the month:

Internet Explorer:	98.8%
Mozilla Firefox:	0.5
Mac Safari:	0.2
Opera:	0.1
Netscape Navigator:	0.0
Other:	0.0

So when you hear wild claims of how popular Firefox is, take it with a boatload of salt.  Context is everything.

By the way, before the pitchfork-wielding Firefox crowd comes after me because I’ve dared question their obamafication of Firefox, let me quickly point out that I’m using it right now.  For online editing, it just blows the doors off IE.  It’s also quicker, more stable, and often does a better job displaying certain blogsites, like Maggie’s.  Just so you know.
 

Macs, Firefox & Malware

By the statistics, two things are certainly true:

• Macs are safer from viruses than PCs
   
• Firefox is safer to use than Internet Explorer
   

Likewise, two other things are true:

• Viruses aimed at the PC are under constant scrutiny, both from Microsoft and the anti-virus companies.  Because anti-virus programs are constantly checking the home site for updates, your PC is as up to date as a computer can be.
   
  This massive, sustained effort does not exist in the world of Apple.  On the very seldom occasion when a hacker was so bored that he actually bothered to write some malware for a computer holding 10% of the computer market… it ran rampant! AOL’s Mac users went through some real hoops a few years ago when some Mac hacker exposed a loophole in one of their scripts, and there have been a few other small incidents.  Nothing major, though — because how can one call a problem that only affects 10% of the computer market "major"?
   
• While it’s true that online malware is geared toward finding faults in Internet Explorer, it’s also true that Microsoft has a huge team of professionals trying to keep it clean and ward off any future problems.
   
  Firefox also has a team working on security, but since security hasn’t been much of an issue — because of its low market share — there’s simply no way their team is going to come anywhere near Microsoft’s.  So, if you suddenly get something nasty on your system because it slipped past Firefox, who ya gonna blame?  Firefox, for not having the resources to combat a pervasive global enemy, or yourself for using Firefox?
   

Newer Isn’t Better

There are certainly times when a program upgrade makes a real quantum leap, doing something noteworthy and is deserving of a fee for the hard work involved.  But, overall, I’d say 90% of all updates are meaningless.  If you actually look over the list of ‘improvements’, it’s almost always fixing some bug because one of their techies discovered the program wouldn’t work with some ancient video card made in 1987 — and other items of that magnitude.  A user complains, the programmers rush to fix the bug, and, the next thing ya know, another "update" hits the market… for only $49.95.

Another common tale is using some program and just having a great ol’ time with it, then buying the upgrade and finding out they’ve eliminated your favorite feature.  Or ‘improved’ it somehow, maybe by making it ‘automatic’, and you’re simply crushed.  It’s the incomprehensibility of the situation that’s so frustrating.  Over the years, having tested hundreds upon hundreds of programs and updates, the most common question I have is, "Didn’t they even use this thing??"  It just seems so obvious that if they actually sat down and used the program like we do, they’d realize the way that favorite old function worked was just perfect — and certainly didn’t need any "improving".

I mention below how the computer price vs power story is a perfect example of capitalism at its best, but this is the downside of capitalism.  Constantly feeling the pressure to compete and stay on the cutting edge, companies feel a moral imperative to continuously fiddle with things, often fiddling them right into nonworkability.  Then their long-time customers abandon them in droves for a better product and they sit there scratching their heads thinking "I don’t get it!  What went wrong?  We worked tirelessly to constantly improve our product!"
 

Screensavers

Screensavers, those cute effects that display when your computer has been idle for X number of minutes, haven’t actually been necessary for over a decade.  In the old days, when monitors were much cruder, if you left a page open for hours and hours that had a black bar running across a white background, the bar would actually ‘phosphor burn’ the screen pixels and you’d see a ghost of the bar on the screen for the rest of the monitor’s life.  Hence, screensavers being invented.

These days, though, they’re just a gimmick, albeit a harmless one.  And, admittedly, some of them are pretty cool.  But your monitor, itself, doesn’t actually need ‘saving’ anymore.
 

Backing Things Up

The problem with a normal backup program is that it works on a file-by-file basis, but some of Windows’ files are "in use" and can’t be copied.  Thus, you can’t make a complete backup of your system and, come the day it melts down, you’ve got to reinstall Windows.  The backup program will have saved all of your personal files, but, unless you know how to install Windows yourself, it’s going to cost a couple of hundred bucks at the shop and you’ll lose your machine for a week while it’s being done.  And that’s not to mention $250 for a new copy of Windows unless you’ve got your original install disc.  It’s not a pretty picture.

The ‘myth’ here is that the standard backup programs give you the impression that "everything’s safe!" — but it isn’t.  Just your files are, and that’s not enough.

An image file backup program works on a drive sector basis and doesn’t even look at the files as "files".  It just copies everything on the drive to one great big file.  This is the pro way to go.

I would strongly suggest Acronis True Image, and either get in the habit of running it once a week (takes about 3 minutes), or just tell it to back up the entire system automatically when you’re not using it.

If you just install the program and start making image files, you’ll still lose any bookmarks, email, pics, etc, that drifted in since the last time you made an image file.  There is, however, a way to put all of these items on a separate drive so you don’t lose a single thing.  More info here.
 

Hardware

Memory & Hard Drives

Newcomers often have a hard time distinguishing between these two, and the computer ads are rife with misleading claims.

A hard drive is a little metal box inside the computer that has a spinning disc inside, just like a CD.  It can be written to and erased from.

Memory is a chip on the motherboard and is like a ‘work area’ the computer uses while it’s turned on.  When you run a program, it copies itself and a bunch of support files to memory.  This is so everything will run faster since it’s being read electronically from the chip, rather than having to physically be read off the hard drive.

A big program might use up 15 megs of memory, a medium-size program about 10, a small program maybe 5.  So, if you ran Internet Explorer, MS Word, Photoshop, and a bunch of smaller programs, you might use up 100 megs of memory.

When computers got to 256 megs of memory, that was really enough at the time.  But, under the heading "Bigger Is Always Better!", everything out there now has 1,000 megs of memory (1 gig), if not two gigs, and soon to be even more than that.

As a small side note, Windows Vista is a huge memory hog and has been the big driving force behind the recent surge in memory on new machines.

As far as hard drive space goes, a gig or two would probably last most people a lifetime.  We’re at the 1000-gig mark at this point.

The one exception to all this is working with video.  Unlike everything else (pics, text, emails, etc), videos can gobble up an immense amount of hard drive space, and you need a bunch of memory if you’re going to work with the biggest video tools.  Video is also the one exception to faster CPUs, which I’ll cover next.

The amazing thing about what’s happened over the past 20 years is, while everything was getting bigger and bigger and bigger, the prices got smaller and smaller and smaller.  The dropping of computer prices while the units have only gotten more and more powerful over the years is really the quintessential example of capitalism at its best.
 

Faster CPUs

The CPU (Central Processing Unit) is a great big microchip that sits in your computer.  It’s what does all the ‘thinking’.

Along with bigger hard drives and more memory, the ads also demand you buy a faster CPU.  Well, one thing is for certain:

When you open that MS Word letter to Grandma with your hot new machine and its blazing "dual-core" processor, it is true that the document will open approximately 0.375 seconds faster than on your old machine.

So you’ll have that going for you.

There is only one situation where CPU speed makes the tiniest bit of (real) difference, and that’s converting a video from one format to another, known as ‘rendering’.  At that point, it’s strictly numbers.  If it takes two hours to render a movie with a 1 GHz machine, it’ll take half that on a 2 GHz machine.  So, that’s an hour saved with a faster CPU, a discernible difference.

While it’s certainly true that a faster CPU will help speed up screen displays a microfraction, and copying large files from hard drive to hard drive might be a few seconds faster, and programs will pop open a tad quicker, for the most part the average person wouldn’t even notice the upgrade.  Or, more correctly, would notice it for the first hour or so, then it would just become the ‘normal’ speed the machine operates at.

With that said, if you wanted to upgrade just one thing on your computer, I’d make it the CPU.  At least that’ll do some good — as referred to totally wasting the money on memory or hard drive space you’ll never use.
 

Computers Wearing Out

No, computers don’t "wear out".  Not in the slightest.  Your computer is exactly as fast as it was the day it was made.

They do, however, slow down over time due to software bloat, and for three very understandable reasons:

• Windows, itself, tends to get a little bloated as time goes by.  The ‘Registry’, a gigantic file that contains every scrap of info about the computer, does nothing but grow and grow, and, since it’s read every time a computer function is performed, eventually things start slowing down a tad.  And Windows does other things that tend to make it more bloated as time goes by, all of which add up.
   
• Every program you install adds more files to the system and further bloats the Registry.  And when I say "more files", I mean more files.  Installing Adobe Photoshop, After Effects and Acrobat adds — are you ready? — over 50,000 files to the system.  When you see Adobe products referred to as ‘bloatware’, that’s why.
   
• And if you have an older rig and have definitely noticed it slowing down over the years, that’s most likely because of the background programs that your own programs have installed.  A lot of programs install a ‘pre-loader’ that pre-loads a bunch of files into memory during bootup so that the program, itself, will pop up quicker when you run it — because a bunch of its files have already been loaded into memory.  However, by the time the dust settles, these pre-loaders might have gobbled up half — if not more — of your machine’s memory and the entire system has slowed down as a result.

If you want to verify how many background programs we’re talking about, go to the Start Menu, ‘Run’, type in "msconfig", click OK.  Click on the ‘Startup’ tab.

This window is empty on a brand new Windows XP system.

Everything you’re seeing has been added later.  That’s why machines slow down.  It’s not because of Windows.

It’s because of you.
 

Defragmenting Hard Drives

When a computer writes information to a hard drive, it usually writes it in small chunks.  If it sees an empty spot on the hard drive’s disc that will hold 25 sectors of information, it writes the 25 sectors and then looks for the next empty spot.  As such, by the time a large program is written to the drive, the pieces might be scattered all over hell and gone.

When you fire up the program, the little arm with the magnetic pickup on the end (much like the tone arm of a record player) has to skip all over the disc reading the information and the program takes longer to load as a result.  A defragmentation program rewrites everything on the drive in solid chunks so the info can be read in a single spin or two of the disc, taking less time to load and popping onto your screen just that much faster.

At least, that’s how it used to be.

In the old days, hard drives were much slower than they are today.  And I mean that literally, in the sense that they spun around much slower.  When they got jacked up to 5,400 RPM, the whole ‘defragmentation issue’ somewhat went away, but when they hit 7,200 RPM, it became meaningless.  The ‘read time’ of a modern hard drive is so fast that the extra micromilliseconds it takes to read from multiple spots on the disc simply can’t be measured in human terms.
 

Printer Ink Costs

What’s that?  Printer ink’s a rip-off?

Not even.

If you do much printing, you should get down on your knees and thank the Printer Gods for having the wisdom and foresight to include the print head in the ink cartridge and not the actual printer.

Unless, of course, you don’t mind buying a new printer every few months.

The "print head" is a micro-small orifice or ‘jet’ through which the ink is sprayed.  The friction of the ink eventually starts wearing the inside of the jet, widening it.  Result? Blotchy printing.

You want your printer to provide you with years of crisp, professional print?  Then you put the print head in the ink cartridge, even if it doubles the price.