Class #5

I know, I'm a little behind. What can I say, except Dan, I'll catch up as I can. But I want to get these thoughts down while they're fresh.

Tonight we talked about the glorious hexidecimal numeral system. Oddly, the hex system is a more "human friendly representation of binary coded values..." (Wikipedia). So instead of saying that I'm 101101 years old in binary, I can say I'm 2B years old in hex. See...that IS much clearer. Seriously. As Dan explained, the other benefit is that more data is moved more quickly. He analogized: if there's a crowd of 256 people who need to be transported from Salt Lake City to say...Boise, it will happen a lot faster if we transport 16 people at a time in our rock star tour bus instead of 2 people at a time in our Ferari. Personally I'd prefer the Ferari AND I'd want to drive...to Las Vegas. But you get the idea.

In previous classes we've created a Virtual Machine. That basically means I have a whole nother computer (the guest) installed on my laptop (the host) and I can run them both simultaneously. That means 2 versions of Windows XP run at the same time. I learned today that if I mount the CD ROM drive to the guest, it completely takes it over and the host can't use it at all. How rude.

As for the whole user permissions vs. user rights and individual users vs. user groups discussion, that went a little over my head. And we have a paper due on this in 2 days. I heart Wikipedia.