The Refresh Orlando Heirs

Choosing the right photo printer for you is somewhat a complex task if you want to choose the right match for you.

There are many things you need to take into consideration so you make sure you get your photos printed in the best possible way. When choosing a color printer there is no better way to compare than to print one of your own images on a variety of them and compare the results. Barring that, you can read reviews or ask around.

If you are looking for quality in photography, then a good specialized photo printer may not be the best fit when printing regular text. You also need to keep in mind the cost of the printer’s accessories as it is not only about the printer itself.

For example a good high quality photo printer will require a lot of ink and it’s recurring costs may soon exceed the cost of the printer.

A word on printer resolution…

When it comes to printers, resolution is not the final determinant for the quality of your final print result. This is because, each pixel on an ink-jet printer isn’t a single drop of color but a cluster of many drops. For ink-jet printers, the size of the small ink drops is more important that the dpi.

A really big secret for getting an amazing photo print not in the printer.

As amazing as that sounds, a huge difference, and something that can make drastic results on the photos you print lies in the paper you use. If you have a low cost printer and don’t really want to upgrade to a “bigshot” photo printer, then you can definetly go for this option.

Get the best paper, the special photography paper and print your photos on it, and you will be surprised of what your printer can accomplish with the right instruments.

If you are not necesarilly a profissional photographer and want to make the most of both your digital camera and your printer, then by making a small investment on a good printer ink and some great photo paper at your local print shop, and they will definetly make it worth your investment.

Next time you at someone’s birthday, you’ll be able to take as many photos as you want knowing that you’ll print them really cheap and making the most of your printer.

I have a site to help you with everything you want about printers and that also means photo printers, so feel free to visit.

An absence of light - that’s the definition of darkness. When
the power suddenly goes off in the middle of a thunder storm,
the first thing you grope for is the nearest flashlight. Trouble
is, groping around in the black fog is not easy. Trying hard to
focus on your pursuit of that light source, you stumble along,
not entirely sure where the doorway is and what lies in between.
You soon realize that things somehow do not appear to be in the
same place as they were in the light.

One flicker; that’s all it takes! One little match; one candle
dispels all the confusion; the stumbling and bumping into
things. Darkness holds us as a grip around our heads. It causes
us to fear, think of the worst; and confuses our sense of
direction. With our feet treading very slowly, hands
outstretched and head bent, we exhibit an expression of defeat,
helplessness and solitude.

This is the way we may feel - if only for one moment while
reaching for the nearest flashlight or candle. With this picture
in mind, we can only begin to faintly imagine the prison so many
precious souls find themselves in. They’re behind the bars of
depression and hopelessness. They cannot see; their thoughts are
distorted by their darkness and their hands reach out - groping
- but neither finding nor able to embrace what they so
desperately need. They’re withdrawn by fear.

But the Bible says that “When I fall, I shall arise; when I sit
in darkness the Lord shall be a light unto me (Mi.7:8). Be
encouraged, then. Be strong and refuse to listen to the dark
thoughts. You know, sad and bad thoughts actually change our
chemical balance. How we process our thoughts has a lot to do
with changing our personalities from happy-go-lucky to
depressed. No need to go into the medical and biochemical jargon
about it here. There are tomes of information available in the
medical journals to corroborate that claim.

In simple, layman’s terminology, we can take a hold of the
thoughts that keep pulling us back into the unfortunate
happenings of the past or the negative reports of ill health and
even death. You can be empowered to be in charge of your own
happiness. It is not hard, but it takes consistency, faith and
perseverance. Once you know you can, you’ll want to have it, and
before you know it, you will have your wish!

Just remember; darkness is only the absence of light. All you
need is one tiny spark. The light of the body is the eye; when
the eye is focused properly, the whole body is in the light
(Mat.6:22). You have the power to turn on the light. According
to Psalm 18:28, the Lord God will enlighten your darkness. The
more you reach out to Him, the more you shall be bathed in
light!

In life there is a huge variety of things that you can’t
control, no matter what! Nevertheless, you should never let
those things, regardless of how bad they are, defeat you.
Remember that, no matter how bad the situation gets, you’re the
one who decides how to react to it and how much it can affect
you. It is essential to always meditate on the positive aspects
of any occurrence. In other words, try identifying the good
parts in everything. Even though it might sound extremely hard
or very foolish at the beginning, seeking the good aspects in
the worst situation of all will help you exercise your way of
thinking and, in no time, you’ll find yourself meditating in an
incredibly constructive and positive manner. The question is how
to find the power to analyze everything in a good light, when
things can’t get worse than they already are. The answer is to
detach yourself from the facts. Remember that most things in
this life are temporary and you have to move on, no matter what.
Also, if you train yourself to smile a lot and be polite to the
people around you, you might discover that, in fact, this
actually represents an efficient medicine against bad thoughts
and a healthy attitude towards life can sometimes play a crucial
role. Nevertheless, remember to seek out the lesson you should
learn after a disgraceful occurrence. Have a learning attitude
towards whatever happened and try to convince yourself that all
is for your own interest – after all everything bad that happens
to you can only make you wiser, stronger and contributes to your
self-improvement, if you know how to turn the situation in your
favor. When there is an extremely difficult problem to solve and
no solution seems to fit in, remember to change the perspective
from which you’re analyzing the data. Getting awfully scared and
not being able to think clearly, will definitely not lead you to
resolving the issue. On the other hand, if you meditate and try
to observe the situation form another perspective, which is, if
not better, at least less harmful, you might soon identify a way
to solve the problem. If your worries are related to your
future, strive to impose to yourself that you can reach the
goal, no matter what! You have to have a winner’s attitude in
order to defeat the problems. This is why, you also have to
remember that, in a certain way, the others share the same
attitude that you have for yourself. Consequently, if you’re
nervous, afraid you might fail, unconvinced with your actions,
etc. people around you will perceive you exactly as you perceive
yourself. Not in vain do they say that what others think about
ourselves, is in fact, the reflection of our actions, which is
actually the reflection of our attitudes. The good thing about
attitudes is that one can change or educate them and it has been
proven that a good attitude toward everything around us is more
efficient than any other drug. It’s free and it can only produce
good results, so have an open attitude about it! To learn how to
improve yourself visit the http://www.welc
ome-to-self-improvement.com site. Help Yourself While
Helping Others In Need. 10% Of All Proceeds Are Donated To Help
Support The National Children’s Cancer Society.

Probably the most common technique used traditionally to extract data from web pages this is to cook up some regular expressions that match the pieces you want (e.g., URL’s and link titles). Our screen-scraper software actually started out as an application written in Perl for this very reason. In addition to regular expressions, you might also use some code written in something like Java or Active Server Pages to parse out larger chunks of text. Using raw regular expressions to pull out the data can be a little intimidating to the uninitiated, and can get a bit messy when a script contains a lot of them. At the same time, if you’re already familiar with regular expressions, and your scraping project is relatively small, they can be a great solution.

Other techniques for getting the data out can get very sophisticated as algorithms that make use of artificial intelligence and such are applied to the page. Some programs will actually analyze the semantic content of an HTML page, then intelligently pull out the pieces that are of interest. Still other approaches deal with developing “ontologies”, or hierarchical vocabularies intended to represent the content domain.

There are a number of companies (including our own) that offer commercial applications specifically intended to do screen-scraping. The applications vary quite a bit, but for medium to large-sized projects they’re often a good solution. Each one will have its own learning curve, so you should plan on taking time to learn the ins and outs of a new application. Especially if you plan on doing a fair amount of screen-scraping it’s probably a good idea to at least shop around for a screen-scraping application, as it will likely save you time and money in the long run.

So what’s the best approach to data extraction? It really depends on what your needs are, and what resources you have at your disposal. Here are some of the pros and cons of the various approaches, as well as suggestions on when you might use each one:

Raw regular expressions and code

Advantages:

- If you’re already familiar with regular expressions and at least one programming language, this can be a quick solution.
- Regular expressions allow for a fair amount of “fuzziness” in the matching such that minor changes to the content won’t break them.
- You likely don’t need to learn any new languages or tools (again, assuming you’re already familiar with regular expressions and a programming language).
- Regular expressions are supported in almost all modern programming languages. Heck, even VBScript has a regular expression engine. It’s also nice because the various regular expression implementations don’t vary too significantly in their syntax.

Disadvantages:

- They can be complex for those that don’t have a lot of experience with them. Learning regular expressions isn’t like going from Perl to Java. It’s more like going from Perl to XSLT, where you have to wrap your mind around a completely different way of viewing the problem.
- They’re often confusing to analyze. Take a look through some of the regular expressions people have created to match something as simple as an email address and you’ll see what I mean.
- If the content you’re trying to match changes (e.g., they change the web page by adding a new “font” tag) you’ll likely need to update your regular expressions to account for the change.
- The data discovery portion of the process (traversing various web pages to get to the page containing the data you want) will still need to be handled, and can get fairly complex if you need to deal with cookies and such.

When to use this approach: You’ll most likely use straight regular expressions in screen-scraping when you have a small job you want to get done quickly. Especially if you already know regular expressions, there’s no sense in getting into other tools if all you need to do is pull some news headlines off of a site.

Ontologies and artificial intelligence

Advantages:

- You create it once and it can more or less extract the data from any page within the content domain you’re targeting.
- The data model is generally built in. For example, if you’re extracting data about cars from web sites the extraction engine already knows what the make, model, and price are, so it can easily map them to existing data structures (e.g., insert the data into the correct locations in your database).
- There is relatively little long-term maintenance required. As web sites change you likely will need to do very little to your extraction engine in order to account for the changes.

Disadvantages:

- It’s relatively complex to create and work with such an engine. The level of expertise required to even understand an extraction engine that uses artificial intelligence and ontologies is much higher than what is required to deal with regular expressions.
- These types of engines are expensive to build. There are commercial offerings that will give you the basis for doing this type of data extraction, but you still need to configure them to work with the specific content domain you’re targeting.
- You still have to deal with the data discovery portion of the process, which may not fit as well with this approach (meaning you may have to create an entirely separate engine to handle data discovery). Data discovery is the process of crawling web sites such that you arrive at the pages where you want to extract data.

When to use this approach: Typically you’ll only get into ontologies and artificial intelligence when you’re planning on extracting information from a very large number of sources. It also makes sense to do this when the data you’re trying to extract is in a very unstructured format (e.g., newspaper classified ads). In cases where the data is very structured (meaning there are clear labels identifying the various data fields), it may make more sense to go with regular expressions or a screen-scraping application.

Screen-scraping software

Advantages:

- Abstracts most of the complicated stuff away. You can do some pretty sophisticated things in most screen-scraping applications without knowing anything about regular expressions, HTTP, or cookies.
- Dramatically reduces the amount of time required to set up a site to be scraped. Once you learn a particular screen-scraping application the amount of time it requires to scrape sites vs. other methods is significantly lowered.
- Support from a commercial company. If you run into trouble while using a commercial screen-scraping application, chances are there are support forums and help lines where you can get assistance.

Disadvantages:

- The learning curve. Each screen-scraping application has its own way of going about things. This may imply learning a new scripting language in addition to familiarizing yourself with how the core application works.
- A potential cost. Most ready-to-go screen-scraping applications are commercial, so you’ll likely be paying in dollars as well as time for this solution.
- A proprietary approach. Any time you use a proprietary application to solve a computing problem (and proprietary is obviously a matter of degree) you’re locking yourself into using that approach. This may or may not be a big deal, but you should at least consider how well the application you’re using will integrate with other software applications you currently have. For example, once the screen-scraping application has extracted the data how easy is it for you to get to that data from your own code?

When to use this approach: Screen-scraping applications vary widely in their ease-of-use, price, and suitability to tackle a broad range of scenarios. Chances are, though, that if you don’t mind paying a bit, you can save yourself a significant amount of time by using one. If you’re doing a quick scrape of a single page you can use just about any language with regular expressions. If you want to extract data from hundreds of web sites that are all formatted differently you’re probably better off investing in a complex system that uses ontologies and/or artificial intelligence. For just about everything else, though, you may want to consider investing in an application specifically designed for screen-scraping.

As an aside, I thought I should also mention a recent project we’ve been involved with that has actually required a hybrid approach of two of the aforementioned methods. We’re currently working on a project that deals with extracting newspaper classified ads. The data in classifieds is about as unstructured as you can get. For example, in a real estate ad the term “number of bedrooms” can be written about 25 different ways. The data extraction portion of the process is one that lends itself well to an ontologies-based approach, which is what we’ve done. However, we still had to handle the data discovery portion. We decided to use screen-scraper for that, and it’s handling it just great. The basic process is that screen-scraper traverses the various pages of the site, pulling out raw chunks of data that constitute the classified ads. These ads then get passed to code we’ve written that uses ontologies in order to extract out the individual pieces we’re after. Once the data has been extracted we then insert it into a database.

Todd Wilson is the owner of screen-scraper.com (http://www.screen-scraper.com), a company which specializes in data extraction from web pages.

Who needs a Satellite phone?

Anyone who needs to use a phone on a ship, in the middle of the ocean needs a satellite phone.
Anyone who needs telephone contact in wilderness areas like the desert or mountains needs a satellite phone.
Anyone who needs constant telephone contact while driving across the country where there are vast rural areas with no cell phone signal needs a satellite phone.

A satellite phone costs a lot more to buy and the rate per minute is much higher than conventional cell phones, but there are many situations where the extra cost and inconvenience are worthwhile.

Mobile Phones need a phone mast to have a signal. There are many parts of the world, including USA, Canada, Australia and Europe where no phone masts exist. The lack of masts may be because the population is too widely spread to make economic sense providing coverage, or it may be because planning restrictions are in place to protect areas of outstanding natural beauty.

Satellite phones work by using a signal bounced off one of a series of communication satellites hundreds of miles above the surface of the Earth. The phone must generate a strong enough signal to reach the satellite. This is one reason why satellite phones are larger than the tiny mobile cell phones that you can carry around in your shirt pocket.

There are several types of satellite phone available and you need to research carefully into charges, coverage and other costs.

Sometimes it may make sense for a company to buy a few satellite phones so that its executives and sales force are always in touch with company head office.

It is more common for individuals to rent satellite phones than to buy them. Short-term rentals are available and this makes more sense economically than buying one, especially if you are planning an adventure or wilderness vacation.

Sebastian Romero has a background in the security industry, including Cash in Transit. For more related information check out Satellite Phones or Logistics Information

Niagara Falls, Ontario - Telephone Magic Inc. is pleased to
announce it has added the Voyager line of long and ultra-long
range cordless phones
(http://www.telephonemagic.com/voyager-long-range-wireless-phone-
systems.htm) to its very popular telecom equipment website at
http://www.telephonemagic.com. This latest addition supplements
the other long range cordless phone systems previously on the
site (http://www.telephonemagic.com/longrangewireless.htm) and
gives visitors a whole new way of expanding their existing
business phone systems with a cordless phone extension.

Jeff Jackson, president of Telephone Magic Inc. states: “Long
range cordless phones have come a long way in the past few
years, and we’re happy to provide the Voyager line of wireless
phones. While the North American models feature a range of 1-6
miles, international models have a range of up to 50 miles,
making them ideal solutions for areas that are not serviced by
cellular phone coverage.” Jackson continues “In addition to the
long range, all Voyager phone systems are expandable to cover up
to 9 lines and 90 handsets, making them a very attractive option
for factory or greenhouse operations that need to keep in touch
with their employees over a distance.”

“There are also several station-to-station models that enable
companies to install a ‘virtual’ phone line to a remote
location, without having to dig any wires or make any
infrastructure changes. The phone signal is simply transmitted
wirelessly from one location to another. There are companies and
individuals using these systems now connecting buildings
together that are 8 miles apart or more. It is these functions
that make the Voyager line of long range cordless phones very
attractive to the end user. This is truly the next generation of
long range cordless phone technology and Telephone Magic is
happy to once again be at the leading edge of telecom in this
area.”

Telephone Magic Inc.’s website is considered one of the
strongest business phone equipment sources on the Internet.
Telephone Magic sells business telecom products at wholesale
prices, which allows dealers and end users alike the opportunity
to save money on the cutting edge telecom products they require.

For Additional Information, Please Contact:

Mark Kawabe Email: sales@telephonemagic.com Website:
http://www.telephonemagic.com

Knitted Babes

The pleasure is all yours! Published September, 2005 Knitted Babes by Clare Garland is an invitation to a modish doll party. Bring your eccentric yarns and retro fabric scraps. This is the place for orange and pink marshmallow creations. Knit up the Babes then outfit them as you choose — surfer girl or glitzy diva, whoever takes your fancy. Make a Babe, and you’ll want more. Here are my variations for fervent fingers:

The Babes: Dot Pebbles surf chick; Flo Tilly delicate dancer; DD Diva in desirable Deco; Rudy Ranch red-haired Western wild country girl; Bunny Bright café bar star.

1. The arms and legs can be worked in i-cord, though the original knitted strips are softer if your doll is to be love-squashed by a little one. Finish the i-cord with four rows of straight stocking stitch to enable flat stitching to body shape.

2. Experienced knitters may prefer to knit the body/head piece in the round. Cast on with waste yarn (or crochet a scrap chain a few more chains than required, then knit up stitches into back bumps of chain. Release chain later when sliding stitches onto needle for cast off.). When doll is completed, leave final stitches for head on a yarn holder, turn inside out, working a 3-needle cast (bind) off across base. Pull through to right side. Stuff doll through small head opening and finish ends.

3. The book instructions are for 4ply yarn, but that’s only the beginning. Dye natural wool with flowers, leaves or packaged colour. Perhaps handspun or tweed wool; or since only a 50g ball is required, use a luxury fibre (silk, alpaca, cashmere) for a chic Babe.

4. After making a few Retro Babes, you might want to add to your collection with Vintage Babes. Style her wardrobe, adding highlights of violet, pearl, mauve, rosebud, pansy and spring greens. Freshwater pearls (where jewellery packs are sold) make sweet necklaces strung on a length of crochet perle cotton. Cocktail hats can be fashioned from felt, netting, feathers, beads and miniature silk flowers. Sift through broken brooches, bracelets, earrings and necklaces for deft jewels and metal filigree.

5. The clothing patterns given in the book are knitted or sewn. Imagine designing crochet creations for her as well. Begin with an evening shawl or textured blanket for Ruby cowgirl. Diva Babe will thank you for snips of pure silk satin, cotton net and silk georgette.

6. Observe the safety rules if the doll is a gift for a small child. If this is your Babe… try out jewellery-making on a manageable scale or accentuate clothing and hats with glass beads. Excite yourself with a new craft, letting Babe model your embroidery, cross-stitch or millinery techniques. Fabric shops are now stocking up on retro and vintage prints. Dive in!

Full graphics version here

Esmerelda Jones… The Knitting Wench
Writer Of Desires
Writer Of Old Curiosities

Victoriana, Victorian Swoon, Gods & Goddesses: The Wisdom And Pleasures of Ancient Greece, Classic Romance, Poems For The Passionate, Whimsical Tales, Bushrangers & Australian Pioneer, Ghosts I Have Known, Gypsy Knitting. Ratings and comments delightfully accepted.

According to Digital Media Europe News “Achievo Corporation, a
global software and IT outsourcing provider, announced the
signing of a definitive agreement to acquire Jeyo Computer
Technology Limited. Jeyo is a software and IT outsourcing
service provider based in Guangzhou, China, the capital of the
Guangdong Province. Jeyo possesses know-how in a variety of
industries including mobile phones, manufacturing, and
telecommunication. Jeyo offers certified processes and expertise
in wireless applications, business intelligence solutions and IT
services.

Major customers include Guangdong Telecom, Huawei, IBM, Computer
Associates, Microsoft and Oracle. Upon completion of the
acquisition, Jeyo will operate as a wholly-owned division of
Achievo.

Achievo looks forward to expanding its new Guangzhou development
centre and accessing the city’s attractive technical workforce.
The acquisition further expands Achievo’s operations in China
beyond its existing presence in Beijing, Shanghai, Dalian and
Training Outsourcing

A Dish Network satellite TV system is based off signals
transmitted and received by multiple satellites. But, the main
satellites in space are constantly moving in what is called an
orbit.

Any object that moves around the earth has an orbit. The orbit
is defined by 3 factors. The first is the shape of the orbit,
which can be circular or elliptical. The second is the altitude
of the orbit. The altitude is constant for a circular orbit but
changes constantly for an elliptical orbit. The third factor is
the angle the orbit makes with the equator. An orbit that brings
the satellite over the poles or close to it has a large angle.
An orbit that makes the satellite stay close to the equator has
a small angle. Orbits depend on the mission the satellite was
built for. The following orbits can be defined:

Low Earth Orbit Satellites in low earth orbit (LEO) orbit the
earth at altitudes of less than 2000 km (1242 miles). Satellites
in LEO can get much clearer surveillance images and require much
less power to transmit their data to the earth.

Medium Earth Orbit At an altitude of around 10.000 km (6.000
miles) a satellite is in medium earth orbit (MEO). This altitude
balances the advantages and disadvantages of LEO and GEO. MEO’s
are used generally for navigational satellites and
communications satellites Geostationary Orbit.

A satellite in geostationary orbit orbits the earth in exactly 1
day and is placed above the equator. The angle with the equator
is 0 degrees. As a result the satellite seems to stand still as
seen from the earth. These satellites are used for
communications and Satellite TV.

Polar Orbit An orbit that goes over both the North and the South
Pole is called a Polar Orbit. The angle with the equator is 90
degrees. The advantage of these orbits is that they go over the
poles. This may sound funny, but in reality most satellites
never “see” the poles. Most polar orbits are in LEO, but any
altitude can be used for a polar orbit.

Polar orbits are used a lot by navigation satellites which have
to provide navigational information all over the world,
including the poles.

Sun Synchronous Orbit This is a very interesting type of orbit.
Satellites in Sun Synchronous Orbit pass over the same locations
on earth at the same time each day. Suppose a satellite in sun
synchronous orbit passes over your house at 3 pm. The next time
the satellite will pass over your house is 24 hours later at the
same time the next day. In order to do this the satellite has a
very special orbit. Not only does it orbit the earth, but the
plane of the orbit changes as well. It has to do this because
each day the earth moves a bit through space around. After 3
months, the earth has moved 90 degrees of its orbit around the
sun. If the satellites orbit wouldn’t have moved with it, it
would show up 6 hours later than planned. (Actually the earth
spins around its axis in approx. 23 hours, 56 minutes and 3
seconds and not in 24 hours. Because of the earth’s orbit around
the sun, 1 day lasts 24 hours. A star day however is approx. 23
hours, 56 minutes and 3 seconds long.)

However, there is no need to actively change the plane of the
orbit. The earth is not a perfect sphere but is a little bit
wider around the equator. This is caused by the spinning of the
earth. The gravitational difference this causes changes the
orbit of a satellite. When the angle with the equator is chosen
correctly (approx. 8 degrees of a polar orbit), an orbit is a
sun synchronous orbit.

A very special type of sun synchronous orbit is called the
dawn-to-dusk orbit. This orbit is above the earth where the sun
comes up or goes down. A satellite in this orbit never enters
the shadow of the earth but always receives sunlight.

Orbit Decay and Reentry The earth’s atmosphere doesn’t stop at a
certain altitude but really fades out into space. The higher you
get the less thick it is until eventually there is no more
atmosphere. Generally we say that the atmosphere is about 100 km
(62 miles) thick, but in reality it extends much further out
into space. Satellites experience friction from the atmosphere
up to altitudes of 1000 km (620 miles). Due to the friction, a
satellite will loose speed and with that the altitude will
decrease until eventually the satellite will fall out of orbit
back to the earth. Depending on the altitude this happens sooner
or later. A satellite at an altitude of 200 km (124 miles) will
stay in orbit for just a couple of months. At 300 km (186 miles)
a satellite can stay in orbit for a couple of years. Above 1000
km (620 miles) a satellite can stay in orbit for thousands of
years.

Letting Satellites fall back to earth and burn up in the
atmosphere is also a way of disposing of satellites. However, if
you’re a Dish Network customer, you don’t need to worry about
the Dish Network satellite falling to earth and disintegrating
into nothing. Unless a space alien shoots it down, the Dish
Network satellites are there to stay.

If you’re interested in learning more about Dish Network and
satellite TV, go to http://www.dish-network-satellite-tv.ws/

A computer requires memory in order to run applications (RAM/DRAM), handle basic functions (ROM), as well as process all video functions (VRAM). It is vital to a computer to have memory in order to process all of the commands that are entered either physically or programmatically.

Firmware is ROM (Read-Only Memory) that resides on the motherboard (the main board in the computer that contains the CPU, bus, and slots for the cards to be plugged in to). Firmware stores basic command information in order for the motherboard to communicate with the CPU. It is called firmware because it resides on the motherboard and is never (practically) removed or replaced. It is ROM, because it cannot be rewritten. This is important as it is what allows the electronics of the motherboard (i.e. +/- 5V) to be translated into 0s and 1s for the CPU.

RAM/DRAM (Random Access Memory/Dynamic RAM) is used to store programs while they are running. Programs (applications) are stored in RAM and presented to the user based on the user’s requests. The firmware/CPU will “page” the application into RAM/DRAM as needed, so the more RAM/DRAM that you have the better off you are. “Paging” is a feature that allows large programs that don’t fit into the RAM/DRAM available on the motherboard to “page” in the necessary piece of the application when it is needed. For example, if you have 512MB of RAM/DRAM and the program that you are running is 1GB in size, only 1/2 of the program can be stored at any given time, thus it will be paged into memory (RAM/DRAM) as needed (this a very general way of looking at RAM/DRAM, not to be taken literally). RAM/DRAM is also used by the CPU to handle internal O/S (Operating System) issues. RAM/DRAM is critical to the motherboard and the operation of a computer. RAM/DRAM therefore is not ROM, as it can be (and is) rewritten over and over again during the course of a user’s session on the computer.

The last form of memory that I want to discuss in this article is VRAM (Video RAM). This generally is stored on a video card that is plugged in to the motherboard (NOTE: more and more motherboards are coming with VRAM installed on them so that you don’t need a special card for it). Basically VRAM is RAM specifically for rendering graphics on a screen of some sort (monitor, TV). VRAM is very important for you gamers out there. The more VRAM that you have the faster the computer tends to be able to render your graphics. If you are not using your computer for gaming then VRAM is nominally necessary.

As we have seen from this article, ROM, RAM/DRAM, and VRAM all have important roles to play in your computer’s operation. Without any one of these pieces, you will be hard pressed to have a running computer.

Mike Kolar
About the Author

My Website: http://www.BowlersEverything.com