You arrived to the white papers section of the site. Do you know what that means? You have a little bit of geek in you. :-) You are the type of person who likes to understand how things work. I commend that, and I am here to help.

White papers are in-depth reports or guides on how something works. While they extend beyond technology, the focus of this site is strictly on the aspects relating to technology. I won't delay your inquisitive nature any further, so get reading! And, as always, if you have a question about how something works, feel free to contact me. Get your geek on!

Flash memory - Flash memory is one of the most useful, and ubiquitous, tech inventions of the last 25 years. It’s become the portable storage media of choice for small devices such as USB thumb drives, digital cameras, cell phones, and digital media players, and it looks poised to replace the spinning hard drives in laptops...continued

Solid State Drives (SSD's) - In the past year and a half, solid state drives have come from nowhere to take their place as the Next Big Thing in storage, especially in notebooks. The MacBook Air and the Asus Eee PC and OLPC XO-1 (One Laptop Per Child) netbooks were among the first consumer notebooks to utilize solid state drives. While SSDs are still most popular in netbooks, they have begun appearing in more mainstream notebooks and even high-end desktops...continued

Touch Screen Technology - Touch screens may never replace our clicky-clacky QWERTY keyboards—no, we’ll have to wait for brain-stem probes for that—but they are becoming more common. In fact, devices using this technology have been in use for more than 35 years and are becoming ubiquitous—kiosks, tablet PCs, desktop computers, and many handheld devices all now rely on human touch...continued

DirectX 11 - DirectX 10 marked a radical departure from DirectX 9: In order to be compatible, a graphics processor must feature a unified architecture in which each shader unit is capable of executing pixel-, vertex-, and geometry-shader instructions. The changes in DirectX 11 aren’t quite as fundamental, but they could have just as big an impact—and not only with games...continued

Surge Suppression - The surge suppressor is one of the unsung heroes of the computer world. Often valued more for its ability to multiply one electrical receptacle into many than for its role as protector of all things electronic, the surge suppressor is your first line of defense against transient power surges that can damage or destroy sensitive components inside your PC. Let’s take a look at how they work...continued

Virtual Machines - System virtual machines fall into two categories: Type 1 hypervisors (left), which run directly on the host hardware, and Type 2 hypervisors (right), which run on top of another operating system. Both are capable of running multiple independent instances of one operating system or different operating systems, all of which behave as though they are solely in control of the system...continued

PCI Express 2.0 - The Peripheral Component Interconnect Special Interest Group (more commonly known as the PCI-SIG) unveiled the PCI Express 2.0 specification in January 2007. If you’re surprised that it took motherboard and GPU manufacturers nearly a year to introduce products based on this technology, keep in mind that it took 14 years for the industry to get this far...continued

Memristor - Integrated-circuit design is currently based on three fundamental elements: the resistor, the capacitor, and the inductor. A fourth element was described and named in 1971 by Leon Chua, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley’s Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences Department, but researchers at HP Labs didn’t prove its existence until April 2008. This fourth element—the memristor (short for memory resistor)—has properties that cannot be reproduced through any combination of the other three elements...continued

The Evolution of Viruses - The first computer virus appeared more than 30 years ago, which renders this class of pestilence a mere infant compared to the real thing. But 30 years is an eon in technology time, and the critters—and their creators—have morphed and adapted to resist every effort to stamp them out. While early viruses were the innocuous work of geeks seeking a creative outlet, any of today’s computer viruses are hatched with criminal intent...continued

Power Line Networking - When it comes to networks, help from a geek readers fall into two camps: Those who already have one (and want to expand it or extend its range), and those who wish they had one. Whichever category you fall into, power-line networking is finally becoming a viable alternative to Cat5 and Wi-Fi...continued

Building a Modern CPU - Designing and manufacturing a modern CPU is a huge project. It requires both backward compatibility and an understanding of where PC workloads are going in the future—a delicate balancing act made more difficult by the huge engineering staffs and massive dollar outlays involved. Let’s take a look at the steps needed to build a Core i7 or AMD Phenom II processor...continued