Disk

Modern mechanics has brought any number of kitchen marvels - the electric mixer, the food processor and the blender. But sometimes progress doesn't offer the best answer. Consider the food mill. It may be mechanical and marvelous, but it is resolutely unmodern. It's not as basic as a mortar and pestle, but it's not far behind. There are only three parts: a big bowl with a hole in the bottom, a perforated disk that fits into that hole (most come with three disks with perforations of different sizes)

CHICAGO -- People suffering from a "slipped" spinal disk usually recover in two years with or without surgery, though surgical patients tend to see relief sooner, a major sciatica study has found. Supported by the National Institutes of Health, the research was intended to help settle a controversy over the effectiveness of spinal surgery to repair a slipped disk compared with conservative therapy that includes exercises and anti-inflammatory drugs. But the results, reported in today's issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, were somewhat inconclusive, primarily because attempts to randomly assign patients into two groups broke down.

About 15 minutes into the movie Twisted, the lovely face of Ashley Judd dissolved into a blob of pixels on our TV screen and froze there. I fumbled with the fast-forward and reverse on the DVD remote. No luck. I pushed the button to shift to the next scene, figuring what the heck, we'll only miss a few minutes. It played for 20 seconds, then froze again. Same with the next scene. The scene after that froze, too, and then the movie skipped a couple of more scenes before picking up again.

Iran into Moore's Law this week, and I'm glad it's still on the books. A theory rather than a real statute, it was named after Gordon Moore, the co-founder of Intel, who predicted back in 1965 that the number of transistors that engineers could cram onto a silicon chip would double every 18 months or so for the foreseeable future. In real terms, he meant raw computing power would double -- or conversely, that the cost of raw computing would drop by 50 percent every 1 1/2 years. So far, Moore has been right.

We like to think that we are in control of our computers, but we aren't. We see things on our screen, but we can't save or print them. And there are sounds our computers make that we can't save so that we can play them back or burn them to a compact disc. But fortunately, some products are out there that give us back at least some control. Most of us are familiar with screen-capture utilities that let us take "snapshots" of all or any portion of the screen and save them to disk or send the image to a printer.

What is it about electrical engineers? These guys just can't get along. A group of them brings a wonderful new technology to market, and another equally brilliant band creates another way of doing the same thing. It's the customers who end up sorting things out by voting with their dollars. And heaven help the consumer who backs the loser. Think of the hapless souls who chose Sony's Betamax videotape standard over VHS. That didn't turn out at all well. For a more recent example, there's the "plus/dash" war in the recordable DVD business.

When I bought a new computer with a 120-gigabyte hard drive, 512 megabytes of RAM and Windows XP, I had the seller install as a second drive my old 20 GB hard drive with Windows 98SE. However, when I turn the machine on, it does not offer that drive as a choice. Instead I have to go to setup and have that Windows 98 drive as the selection on all three drive selections, the floppy, the CD, and the second hard drive. How can I have my computer let me select either operating system or hard drive like Partition Magic does when you install another operating system on the main hard disk?

Is paper dying? As a columnist, I've been receiving an alarming number of similar questions from people in all sorts of businesses, educators and even social groups. It seems they share a frustration in trying to communicate using paper. In fact, printing anything on paper these days just doesn't seem to have the communications impact it used to have only a few short years ago. Perhaps it's a byproduct of our electronic age. More and more of us are corresponding via e-mail and seeing everything via the Internet.

Kristopher Sharrar is regularly asked the best way to completely erase data from a computer. His answer: steamroller. "They ask if that's a program," said Sharrar, national leader for Computer Forensic Services at Ernst & Young's Litigation Advisory Service Practices. "I say, `No, that's a piece of heavy construction equipment.'" Deleted files are rarely truly erased, even when a hard disk is "wiped clean" by some software programs that promise to make computer files unrecoverable, computer security experts say. Computers can retain files for years.

With its measly 1.44 megabytes of storage capacity, the 3.5-inch diskette is an anachronism in a world of 20-gigabyte MP3 players, DVD burners and tiny memory cards that can hold hundreds of digital photos. Yet like a lingering party guest who hasn't realized that it's time to go home, it somehow holds on as a form of removable storage. Diskette drives are still found on most computers, even though few people make much use of them. According to Disk/Trend, a company in Mountain View, Calif.