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As geeks, we never stop learning – if you do, you’re either too old, or you’re dead. But even when we think we know something, there’s a good chance what we think we know isn’t really what we know, you know?
It’s often good to revisit and question the things we have stored away in our memory banks to find out whether they’re still true, or if they ever were actually true in the first place.
Some myths, such as Apple computers don’t get viruses, are pretty obvious, so we’ve avoided them and instead looked at some of what might be lesser-known but still important tech myths to be aware of, things as diverse as cheap USB chargers and RAM speed.
Now you might not agree with some of the things we’ve come up with. If not, the ‘APC flame bar and grill’ is always open.
Because technology is generally, well, technical, along with the fact that there’s just so damn much of it, it’s easy for myths to form, grow and take on a life of their own.
For example, Moore’s Law, which is often quoted as ‘the density of silicon chips will double every 18 months’, isn’t actually Moore’s Law.
Former Intel CEO Gordon Moore, to whom the law is attributed, told CNet he said it was ‘every two years’ and that the ’18 months’ came from former Intel executive David House.
Tech myths are hard to avoid, meaning it’s always good to challenge what we think we know because, to state the bleeding obvious, technology – it changes. You know?
MYTH: I-PS displays are always better
Well, we wouldn’t take this one to the bank! It actually depends on how you spell your tech. Personally, I love I-PS (in-plane switching) panels.
I love the deeper, richer colours, I love the beautifully wide viewing angles.
But I-PS is as much a trademark as it is a monitor category – meaning it’s not the only option. Samsung’s PLS (plane-to-line switching) is a variation on a similar theme, as is AUO’s AHVA (Advanced Hyper Viewing Angle).
Even so, the I-PS category itself isn’t the best at everything – no monitor tech is. They all have something they don’t do as well as other alternatives.
For example, I-PS panels generally have slower response times that don’t suit gaming. Fast TN (twisted nematic) panels don’t typically deliver the best colour accuracy.
VA (vertical alignment) panels try to beat both, but mostly only take a middle ground.
As for OLED (organic light-emitting diode)? There are issues here with lifespan, showing up as changes in how the individual red, green and blue OLEDs (particularly blue) degrade over time, so it’s not perfect either.
The most practical advice we can give is try to see a monitor deliver on the apps you’re going to use before you buy it. Sure, that’s easier said than done in many instances, but saying I-PS is always better makes as much sense as saying cheese is always better than chocolate – it depends on what you’re doing with it.
MYTH: Overcharging kills your smartphone battery
Actually, this one is true – overcharging a smartphone battery will kill it. Either it will pop the cell in a controlled (burst) or uncontrolled (explode/flames) manner.
But for all that, it’s really difficult to overcharge a smartphone battery, making this a dud myth – your phone just won’t allow it.
Exploding smartphone batteries are not great for a phone maker’s profitability – neither are the lawsuits that would typically follow – so all smartphones incorporate battery management circuitry that not only stops your phone overcharging the battery, it also ensures that it doesn’t over-discharge the battery either.
Lithium-ion batteries are terrific, but they’re notoriously fussy and if you discharge one beyond its ‘point of no return’, you’ll kill it. So, the circuitry is designed to keep it happy.
The only way we can see that you could attempt to overcharge a phone battery is to have the phone powered off, remove the USB charge cable once the phone says the battery is charged and plug it straight back in again to try and trigger the phone to start charging again.
But chances are you’d have to do this that many times to cause any real problem, you’d break the microUSB connector first.
And if someone tells you leaving your phone on charge overnight will kill the battery, you can tell them that’s rubbish, too, for the same reason.
MYTH: Wireless charging is a must-have for smartphones
I don’t often find myself agreeing with Apple. But on the topic of wireless charging, I totally get where Apple Senior Vice President Phil Schiller was coming from – for consumer electronic devices like smartphones and tablets, what’s the point of wireless charging?
Does it save cables? No – as Schiller said, you still have to have a baseplate and that has to connect to power somewhere via cabling.
Does it charge faster? No – inductive charging doesn’t charge as fast as a direct connection (but soon will, according to new claims).
Is it more efficient? Again, no – wireless charging creates losses, including as heat in the wire coils, heat that won’t do the phone battery any good and losses you don’t get with direct-wired charging.
Further, university tests show the real-world efficiency of wireless charging tech available aimed at smartphones is only around the 65-70% mark at best – that means you’re spending 40% more electricity to charge up your device with this tech than using a cable.
Multiply that 65-70% efficiency by a billion smartphones charging every day and that’s a heck of a lot of extra energy we’d have to generate. At a time when almost everyone is looking at reducing energy consumption, why are we now happy to drop from a comparative 100% to 70% efficiency to accommodate wireless charging?
Is it cheaper? Nope – wireless charging tech will always cost more than 1.8-metres of USB charge cable, but the 70% efficiency means it’ll also cost more in electricity, unless serious improvements are found.
We’re all for convenience and there are applications where wireless charging will rock –medical implants, for example, and sealed gear that must live in harsh outdoor locations where connectors are an open-house invitation for dust. It’s also getting serious notice from electric carmakers.
But for now, do we really need to use up 40% more energy to save 10 seconds hooking up a USB charge cable?
How it works
Wireless or inductive charging uses a concept originally discovered by Michael Faraday about 200 years ago, that if you pulse an electric current through one of two windings of wire wound around a ring of iron, the changing electromagnetic field created ‘induces’ an electric current in the second winding.
Faraday didn’t know it at the time, but he had discovered the basic principle of the transformer and without it, we’d still be in the dark ages, literally (there’d be no power grid, for starters).
Inductive charging works on this principle, except the ring of iron is replaced by literally nothing – air. The clever concept of ‘resonant inductive coupling’ is similar, too, but runs at higher frequencies.
It works a bit like an AM-band radio receiver picking up broadcast transmissions via a ‘tuned circuit’. It can increase the ‘coupling’ distance (distance between power transmitter and phone receiver), but there are questions about whether its efficiency matches inductive charging at smartphone power levels.
Either way, wireless charging is less efficient than direct-connect, through that loss in energy in the coupling.
Since the efficiency is lower, you either have to pump in more energy to match the charge speed of direct cabling or charge at a slower rate.
If you don’t align the coils in your phone and the charge plate just right, efficiency drops further and charging takes longer again (although multiple coils and clever new sensing tech aim to help).
But none of this is helped by two competing standards – Alliance for Wireless Power (A4WP) and the Wireless Power Consortium (WPC).
In its favour, wireless charging is still a relatively new technology and university research has managed to hit 85% efficiency. However, it’s a long way from the lab to the loungeroom – and even further to match cable-charging.
The WPC is currently updating its Qi standard to increase charge speed, claiming to now match wired charging. But we suspect it’ll still be at around 70% efficiency.
Wireless charging is interesting tech, but for smartphones and tablets, it’s not there yet.
MYTH: High-speed RAM adds significant PC speed
Maybe it does in some parallel universe, but not here.
We’ve looked at this a number of times in APC Labs over the years and the evidence to support higher-speed RAM adding significant sizzle to your system speed just never stacks up.
Yes, technically, choosing DDR3-1866 or even DDR3-2133 RAM – if your motherboard can use it – will run your system faster than stodgy old DDR3-1333 or 1600 memory.
But the actual gains are never more than a few percentage points and for the extra money you spend, you’re almost always better off putting that money towards the next rung of the CPU or graphics card ladder, where you’re more likely to see greater performance gains.
PCs: Buy on tick or tock?
CPU design is a well-oiled machine, and a hugely expensive one at that.
So much so, that chip giant Intel likes to have two runs at each new level of transistor miniaturisation – the first of those runs (the ‘tick’) is the launch of a new smaller transistor manufacturing size; the second (the ‘tock’) adds new features or ‘micro-architecture’ to the core(s).
But what does it mean in practice when you head online to spec up a new machine?
New chips of the ‘tick’ cycle, such as ‘Ivy Bridge’ and ‘Broadwell’, get the first crack at the smaller die/transistor size and generally deliver better power consumption, whereas ‘tock’-cycle chips, like ‘Haswell’ and the up-coming ‘Skylake’, get the benefit of added performance.
So, if you’re buying or building a new desktop, the ‘tock’ cycle makes more sense – it’s the more mature tech and delivers extra speed (although sometimes not as noticeable).
But if you’re keen on a new notebook, the ‘tick’ iteration is where you’ll likely see more battery-life gains.
The only caveat on this is that the CPU isn’t always the chief power-guzzler in a notebook – you can’t forget the LCD panel and its backlight.
Still, in general, if its performance you’re after, buy on the ‘tock’, but if you value reduced power consumption more, buy the ‘tick’.
MYTH: Flash storage retains data forever
With flash memory card prices so cheap, a lot of people think it’s fine to just use them as permanent storage for precious photos and whatever – basically, using them as a ready-made backup as soon as the card comes out of the USB port or camera, because that data stays there forever.
Well, you wouldn’t guarantee it – and neither do flash manufacturers. It turns out there are two things flash memory cells don’t like – they don’t like being written to and they definitely don’t like heat.
Two companies that deal a lot in flash – Texas Instruments and Macronix – have performed accelerated testing on flash memory and found that the more you use a flash device, the less time the flash memory cells will retain data.
However, if the flash device is kept at high temperatures, the data retention time can drop off a cliff.
This data retention lifetime graph from a Macronix Application Note shows brand-new flash memory cells (less than 10 program/erase or P/E cycles of use) will hold data for 100,000 years at 25°C. Crank that up to 60-degrees, though, and it’s just 1,000 years.
Now before you laugh too hard, these are accelerated tests, so go with us on this for a bit – take flash memory flogged up to 100,000 P/E cycles and it’ll retain data for around 100 years if kept at 25°C.
But push that flash cell to 60°C and it’ll struggle to retain data for just a single year. Push 80°C and you might get five weeks.
Flash maker Spansion carried out similar tests – data retention on brand-new flash is rated at 20 years at 55°C. After 1000 P/E cycles at that temp, it’s 10 years. By the time 10,000 cycles have been run and won, you’re down to one year.
Now chances are pretty good you won’t be taking photos on a clapped-out flash card and storing it in 80-degree temps. But the Internet of Things (IoT) is bringing flash memory into many industrial areas with temperatures you can’t guarantee will hover at a comfortable 25°C.
That’s where high-quality industrial-grade cards come in. Interestingly, Panasonic rates non-industrial SD cards good for only 250 P/E cycles and single-level cell (SLC) industrial-grade cards for 60,000 cycles, but still at no more than 85°C.
So, yes, flash memory is robust – but it ain’t bulletproof.
MYTH: Discharge your smartphone before charging
If you hear this one, don’t just walk away, run. About 20 years ago when rechargeable batteries were mostly horrible Nickel-Cadmium types, this was totally true.
Those batteries suffered from a problem called ‘memory effect’, which meant the level you regularly discharged them to would become the new ‘discharged’ level.
For example, discharge ‘Nicads’ to 50% often enough and the 50% mark would become the new ‘dead-flat’, losing you half the battery capacity in the process.
Nicads don’t have the same capacity as newer Nickel-Metal-Hydride (NiMH) cells either, so it was a real problem.
Older NiMH batteries do have some memory effect, but it’s not a real issue today.
Not that it matters – every smartphone uses Lithium-based battery tech, so by fully discharging it first, you’re only likely to do the battery more harm than good.
The problem is, Lithium-ion batteries are often good for as little as 500 full charge-discharge cycles, half of NiMH’s nominal 1000 cycles. But tests have shown that if you discharge a Lithium-ion battery to only half-empty, you can extend the total life of the battery up to 1,500 cycles or so.
MYTH: Set Windows 10 for faster booting!
Now to be honest, we haven’t actually heard anyone call this one out yet, so we’re calling this a pre-emptive strike.
One built-in Windows tool that sometimes gets users into trouble is msconfig. It’s a great little utility for tweaking Windows boot, services and startup options.
If you’re running Windows 10, fire up msconfig (type msconfig on the run/search box in Start and hit Enter), click on the Boot tab, then press the Advanced Options button.
You’ll see a ‘number of processors’ checkbox and a listbox beneath showing just one processor selected. Check that box, the list becomes live, scroll down, set the maximum number of processors (CPU cores available) and bingo – you’ll get Windows 10 booting up considerably faster.
The only problem is it’s a steaming crockpot of lies. This is a variation on a myth that originated back in the days of Windows Vista when this option first appeared.
It’s been a feature of msconfig in every Windows release since, but here’s what Microsoft says about it:
Number of processors. Limits the number of processors used on a multiprocessor system. If the check box is selected, the system boots using only the number of processors in the drop-down list.
Yep, it’s just a way to manually limit the number of CPU cores Windows uses on boot.
Think about it – Microsoft’s not dopey. It’s not about to limit boot performance and not use every CPU core available. Misreading these software twiddles can do far more harm to system performance on boot-up than you might think.
Our tip is just leave this one alone. If you want Windows 10 to boot faster, try the old-school options of a faster CPU or using a solid-state drive.
MYTH: All USB chargers with an AU plug are safe
You probably already know that just adding a plug converter to a power brick of US-origin may prove problematic because of the AC voltage differences between the US and Australia (110VAC in the US and 240VAC here).
So that suggests any power brick with an Australian angled plug on the end has to be safe, right?
Unfortunately, no. This is particularly true if you’re tempted to buy the dirt-cheap AU-plugged USB chargers in some overseas online stores. They’re often called ‘fake’ chargers, but it’s a misnomer – even the ‘fake’ chargers work, that’s not the problem.
All electrical power adapters sold in Australia should be designed to pass our ‘C-tick’ electrical standards that ensure the product you’re buying is safe for use. There are cheap USB chargers with AU plugs available online outside Australia that don’t bother with C-Tick.
All of these devices use clever electronics to convert the 240VAC mains voltage into the 5VDC USB standard that will charge your device, but they don’t all afford the protection of heavier old-school, transformer-based power bricks.
To test this out, we purchased a couple of budget USB power chargers online from overseas, specifically to pull apart and see how they’re made. What we saw will ensure they are never used in our homes.
When you see light-gauge hookup wire soldered directly to the plug pins with just a couple of dollops of solder and the other ends of those wires loosely soldered into the circuit board, you’re looking at an accident waiting to happen.
One of those wires only has to let go, touch some other part of the circuit board and you could have up to 240VAC power running right up your USB cable.
So our tip is this – be very careful when buying a cheap USB charger from a $2 discount shop and do not purchase Australian-plugged mains power adapters online from overseas.
If you buy a gadget online from overseas with its own cheap AC power adapter, consider replacing it immediately with a locally-sourced approved alternative from Jaycar Electronics, Dick Smith, Altronics or similar, ensuring the voltage, current and plug polarity ratings are the same.
We buy technology gear online, but any USB power adapters get noted for the specs and tossed in a box marked ‘do not use’. You can always find an alternative power source – the risks of using cheap, non-standard power adapters from overseas are never worth it.
Oh, and if you’re tempted to take a US-origin power brick and bend the AC plug pins with a pair of pliers to make it fit our mains sockets (don’t laugh, we’ve seen this), consider your geek license revoked.
MYTH: All same-type SSDs have equal endurance
This might surprise you, but the answer is no, they don’t.
Buy a hard drive and you get a hard drive – it writes data to the disk platter(s) and you reasonably expect that if you buy a drive of any capacity from the same family, they’ll all stand the chance of lasting roughly the same amount of time.
The same isn’t true for Solid State Drives – buy a 64GB SSD and it’ll potentially only last half as long as a 128GB model, which will last only half as long as a 256GB model and so on.
Why? You know doubt know that every time you write data to an SSD memory cell, you’re slowly killing it – they only have so many program/erase (P/E) cycles, usually less than 5,000 for most consumer models.
So to ensure maximum lifespan, drive manufacturers employ a technique called ‘static wear-leveling’, which aims to spread the data love around and ensure that no particular memory cell gets overworked more than any other.
Now if you have a 128GB SSD, you have twice as many cells available as a 64GB SSD to spread the wear, meaning, when writing the same amount of data per day, the 128GB SSD will run twice as long (Fujitsu white paper, pages 14 15).
Getting more capacity is one way to extend endurance.
MYTH: It’s okay to let your computer run hot
We read a post recently saying essentially this and struggled to figure it out for a while.
The upshot was that computers can run hotter than we normally let them do, but hey, that’s a good thing because ‘the hotter the CPU is allowed to be, the more freedom it has to run at a higher clock speed’.
Maybe, but it’s never really good to let a computer run hot – and for a laptop, ‘hot’ is anything over 40°C.
The reason? Heat kills batteries – whether it’s your smartphone, notebook or tablet.
As we’ve seen already, lithium-ion batteries don’t like heat, so the hotter you run your portable device, the more you’re stressing the battery and that’ll mean fewer charge cycles and less run-time per charge.
According to one source, running at 40-degreesC and full-charge can knock the real capacity down to just 65% in just three months.
A desktop CPU can run up to 70-degreesC at peak times without significant damage, but a decent cooler should never allow a CPU to get that hot, so there’s no real need to let it happen.
MYTH: Expensive HDMI cables work better
Well, that depends highly on your definition of ‘work’.
If we’re talking about getting audio and video from your media player to your TV over short distances, you won’t likely notice any difference between the $3 cable you buy on eBay and the $200 platinum-plated oxygen-free copper premium offering.
As others have said, the signal is digital, so provided there is continuity in all connections of the cable, it should work.
But there is one caveat we’ve found – that’s because we’ve purchased one of these cheap cables and pulled it apart to see how it worked. The way you make a cable cheaper is put less into it – some ultra-cheap HDMI cables won’t give you all the internal connections.
An HDMI connector has 19 pins in total in two rows, ten on the top and nine underneath. However, depending on the HDMI standard you’re working to, not all of the pins are strictly necessary and you don’t need all of the pins to transmit audio/video.
The cable we purchased had only 13 of those 19 pins wired up, but for the most part, the cable worked, delivering correct-spec video and sound.
So what was missing? Firstly, the CEC line wasn’t connected. CEC stands for Consumer Electronics Control – it’s a one-wire communication/control system that allows you to use your TV remote to turn off your DVD player at the same time.
For HDMI versions 1.3c and older, there’s also a ‘reserved’ pin that doesn’t do anything and unless you have HDMI v1.4 gear, you won’t notice it missing, so it wasn’t there either.
To transmit such high-speed signals reliably over longer distances without interference, HDMI uses a differential signal system called TMDS (Transition Minimising Differential Signaling) that sends the digital signal on one wire and its mirror-opposite on another.
Now there are four digital signals to be transmitted using TMDS – a clock signal plus three data signals.
These four plus their mirrors were all present on the cheap cable, but what was missing was the shield wire for each signal – the manufacturer decided TMDS didn’t need individual shield wiring over the short distance, so those four wires were missing, too.
Provided you don’t need full CEC-remote control and you use cable lengths of no more than two metres, this budget cable worked beautifully – but for longer runs and full functionality, this is where you do need to spend a bit more and ensure you pick up an HDMI v1.4 cable to get all of those pins connected through. But not $200 worth.
MYTH: Online privacy agreements are for your benefit
Well, we had to finish this off with a laugh, but sadly, there must still be folk who think this true, that your privacy is paramount to every company online.
Privacy is very much of relative term these days – it depends on who you’re actually wanting privacy from.
Take this little test – when was the last time you signed up to an online service after reading the company’s privacy policy statement?
Actually, let’s make it simpler – when did you last read a privacy policy statement?
For example, did you know Facebook’s privacy policy permits them to conduct ‘research’ on data it gathers from you?
Did you know Facebook manipulated the newsfeeds of nearly 700,000 users in early 2012 to see the effects on users’ emotions? If you’re a science/psychology geek, it sounds pretty interesting – but not if you’re one of the 700,000.
There’s a growing sense that when it comes to keeping our privacy, particularly against large online companies, the horse has well and truly bolted.
University of New South Wales professor of law and information systems, Graham Greenleaf, last year said the strengthening of privacy laws worldwide was being ‘overshadowed’ by the ability of US-based companies to suck up personal data and use it with little restriction.
It should at least stop and make us think for a bit.
Creative Commons (CC) article source: http://apcmag.com/tech-myths-busted.htm/