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" " Visitors crowd the IBM stand at the CeBIT technology trade fair on the first day the fair opened to the public on March 4, 2008, in Hanover, Germany. Sean Gallup/ Getty Images Some people might tell you the world is getting smaller, and sometimes it seems that way. This is especially apparent in the things we buy. Many products you can find in the United States, such as clothing and toys, are manufactured overseas in countries like China and India. A lot of the gasoline someone might purchase to fill up a car probably comes from an oil refinery in a faraway country. Food grown on a farm in the Midwest can be shipped to the other side of the world in less than a day. The ubiquity of the Web has made these networks of trade even quicker to form and more complex. Anyone, no matter his or her interests, can surf the Internet for goods and services and make quick transactions. A student in New York City writing a major thesis on current Japanese animation can … [Read more...] about How does information technology work with trade laws?

Version 1.0 of the Universal Serial Bus (USB) standard was released in January 1996. 25 years and three attempts later, we’ve gone from USB 1.0’s 12 Mbit/s speeds to USB4’s 40 Gbit/s speeds. Here’s how USB conquered the world. The Problem: Wrestling with Ports and IRQs In the early 1990s, connecting peripherals to PCs was a mess. To use set up any PC, you had to utilize a handful of different types of incompatible ports and connectors. Most commonly, those included a keyboard port, a 9- or 25-pin RS-232 serial port , and a 25-pin parallel port . In addition, PC game controllers used their own 15-pin standard, and mice often plugged into serial ports or proprietary cards. At the same time, peripheral manufacturers began bumping into data rate limits in existing ports used for peripherals on PCs. Demand for telephony, video, and audio applications was growing. Traditionally, vendors had sidestepped these limitations by introducing their own proprietary ports that could be … [Read more...] about 25 Years of Making Connections With USB (After Three Attempts)

Developer Mode is available on the Xbox Series X and S. This feature can turn every console into a development kit. Microsoft officially announced it for the Xbox One back in 2016. Here’s how to use Developer Mode on a modern Xbox, and why you might want to. What Is Developer Mode? Microsoft first announced the Xbox would be getting a developer mode during its Build 2016 event keynote, along with the news that Universal Windows Platform (UWP) would be coming to the Xbox One. With developer mode enabled on a Microsoft console, it’s possible to install and run UWP apps. When developer mode is enabled, retail games and other services won’t work. Playing retail games and apps downloaded from the Microsoft Store requires that you restart your console. UWP was Microsoft’s big shot at a unified software platform that allowed apps to run on Windows 10, Windows 10 Mobile (Windows Phone), Xbox One, and HoloLens. The benefit of a UWP app was that it didn’t need to be rewritten to be … [Read more...] about How to Put Your Xbox Series X or S into Developer Mode

Laptops offer the power of a PC wherever you go, from the other side of the country to the other side of the couch. But sometimes you want a desktop for a bigger display, a larger keyboard, and a beefy mouse. Here’s how to turn your laptop into a pseudo desktop. Any Laptop Can Transform Into a Desktop Transforming your portable PC into something more permanent is easy with a few cables and the necessary peripherals. The best part is that your laptop doesn’t have to remain tethered to your workspace, and any time you need to get on the move, just disconnect the cables and you’re good to go. Let’s go through the basics of a DIY setup to get on the road to big-screen glory. What Do You Need From a Laptop? The first question people often have is whether their laptop can handle driving all those peripherals, including a larger screen. The answer for most people is almost always yes. Even something as old as an Intel Sandy Bridge CPU can work. All that counts is that the PC has … [Read more...] about How to Turn a Windows Laptop Into a Desktop PC

When the dominant Linux distributions adopted systemd , dissenters forked distributions and started new projects. So what are your options if you’re looking for a non-systemd distribution? Let’s take a look. systemd: A Quick Recap Historically, the startup sequence in a Linux system was a replica of the initialization system that was introduced with System V Unix (SysV). The SysV init system adhered to the Unix philosophy . When people refer to the Unix philosophy, they usually reduce it to the well-known soundbite “Do one thing, and do it well.” And that thing was to start as the first process and then start other processes. It also culled zombies now and then. SysV init did its job well enough, but it didn’t do it too efficiently. It started processes serially, one after the other. There was no parallelism. The design bottle-necked the throughput. This was more or less masked by the speed gains of modern hardware, and it’s not as if booting a Linux computer took … [Read more...] about The Best Linux Distributions Without systemd