The Technical Exorcist

December 21st, 2009

Comptia Net+

Posted by exorcist in Interesting

I passed the Net+ exam today with an 805 out of 900. Minimum score is 720. I think I got by more on good logic and troubleshooting skills than I did on knowledge. A lot of the test focused on enterprise networking technologies like WAN. I’m not too good with Fiber Optics, frame relay, leased lines, etc. I never managed a business grade firewall either, so I was shaky on the port numbers and protocols. I was glad I studied up on subnetting and supernetting. . . some people said that it didn’t feature much on the Net+ exam, but that wasn’t my experience at all.

Some questions definitely left me scratching my head. Differentiating between dynamic routing protocols? I felt lucky that I could recognize RIP. I got no clue which alternative would have shorter “convergence” time. And I don’t have any idea why MAC Address filtering would have more overhead and be less effective on some types of cables compared to others.

I was pleased that there was next to nothing about IPv6 on the test. It’s hard enough calculating IPv4 addressing logic without having to do much larger numbers, and in Hex to boot.

Comptia wants you to take their stupid survey after the test, and they have devised a method of pure evil to accomplish this. After you finish the exam, they refuse to tell you your score until you complete the survey. Those fifteen questions never seemed longer.

December 16th, 2009

A Mouse with Button Barf

Posted by The Editor in Hardware

An amazing number of people think that genius is doing something random and then marketing it. A perfect example of this is an 18 button gaming mouse. The Inquirer has an amusing review. Reminds me of Wes Peden’s juggling. . . It’s different, totally random, and completely unappealing.

December 1st, 2009

USB3 and SATA3 have arrived!

Posted by exorcist in Hardware

At last, Gigabyte has released a motherboard with integrated USB3 and SATA3 chipsets!

A decent article can be found on The Inquirer. Gigabyte’s website also has an overview. Only a couple hundred bucks on newegg. . . not bad for a new release.

For those not in the loop and desiring the overview, USB3 allows for 4.8Gbps transfer speeds for external peripherals, approximately 10x the current USB speed. It also does away with the irritating CPU polling that would cause USB devices to give your computer the hiccups.

SATA3 is twice the speed of your current SATA connections—6Gbps transfers speeds will be handy for faster internal flash drives in the near future.

These are both major speed choke points on modern computers, so the improvement should be more noticeable than your everyday technology advancements.