A filename extension is a suffix to a filename. There’s the name of the file itself, then a period, then the extension. When you see Document.pdf, the ".pdf" is the extension. The filename extension is one of those things that’s a necessary evil in computing to differentiate one type of file from another.

Some UNIX/Linux environments purposely use specific extensions for the sake of convenience because they’re technically not required. For example, the Debian distribution uses files that end with .deb to represent a Debian software package. When you see a file that ends with .deb, you instantly know what it is. You can consider filename extension use in a UNIX/Linux environment to be more of a descriptor (i.e. metadata) than anything else.

The Windows environment requires filename extensions to operate. Traditional extensions do not exceed three characters. For those of you thinking, "Isn’t is true all file types in Windows use three-character filename extensions?" Not necessarily. 7-Zip for example uses the two-character .7z by default, and several programming languages use one or two-character extensions.

Common filename extensions that confuse people as to what they are

Some extensions are really easy to figure out because they’re part of a word.

Examples: TXT (TeXT), DOC (DOCument), BAT (BATch script file), COM (COMmand), WAV (WAVe sound file), SH (SHell)

Then there are those that are abbreviations, like PDF (Portable Document Format).

But then there are those that do nothing but confuse people because they don’t know what they are. Here’s a few should you encounter them:

M3U and PLS

These are both file types that represent a multimedia playlist. Many get confused when they encounter these because they think there’s actual audio within them. Not true. They are small "pointers" to other audio files (such as MP3) either local to your computer and/or on the internet.

The super-long title for M3U is "Moving Picture Experts Group Audio Layer 3 Uniform Resource Locator". Try and say that 5 times fast.

PLS to the best of my knowledge means either PLaylistS or PLay Stream, although I could be mistaken (and if I am, feel free to correct me by posting a comment).

ODT

This is a file type that that is slowly becoming recognized in mainstream use, that being the OpenDocument Format. The T is for text. There is also ODS with S for spreadsheet, ODP with P for presentation, ODG with G for graphics and ODF with F for formulae (mathematical equations).

Most people know ODT files from using the freely available OpenOffice suite. The ODT format by the way is compatible with Google Docs if you don’t have software to read them.

RAR

Most people know what this is but there are still a few that don’t. It’s a Roshal ARchive. This is an archive format like ZIP. If you want to open one, use 7-Zip or WinZIP (paid software). If you want to create one, use WinRAR (also paid software).

FLV

FLash Video. If you want to view an FLV video independently (meaning not in your web browser), use the freely available VLC.

FLAC

Free Lossless Audio Codec; an audio file type that sounds better than MP3 because it is lossless while MP3 isn’t. To play them you can use Windows Media Player or the freely available WinAMP.

3GP and 3G2

Both of these are usually video file formats and part of the 3GPP standard. You will usually only encounter these when someone sends you a video file via a cell phone. Windows Vista and 7 will view these via Windows Media Player. If using XP, use Apple QuickTime.

M4A and MP4

Both are MPEG-4 Part 14.

Both file types can be either audio or video. While it’s true that most files ending in .m4a are audio-only, it doesn’t mean they have to be.

Windows Media Player 12 – which is bundled with Windows 7 – will play this format. For older versions of Windows you can use Apple QuickTime or the freely available VLC.

OGG

A newer multimedia file format. It can be audio or video. This format can be opened and played on many different programs, including the freely available VLC.

Older file types you may encounter

What’s listed below isn’t in mainstream use any longer, but should you encounter them you’ll at least know what they are and how to deal with them.

ARJ

An archive file type like ZIP and RAR.

ARJ is Archived by Robert Jung. This file type was actually quite popular during the 1990s and at one point gave ZIP some really good competition. 7-Zip is able to open these.

WPS

This is a proprietary document format used by the Microsoft Works when you save a document with it. It is the file extension everybody hates because nobody can open them that doesn’t have Works.

Fortunately you can do a Save as in Works and save in DOC format, but most people who use Works do not do that. And if you use Works, I strongly urge that you always save in DOC and not WPS – especially if you’re sending documents to other people.

Got a bunch of WPSes and need to convert them? Use Zamzar to do it. (WPS conversion, thankfully, is supported.)

TIF or TIFF

This is an image file type. It stands for Tagged Image File Format. Most image editors can easily open TIFF files, including the Windows Picture and Fax Viewer which is included with the Windows OS.

If for whatever reason you have a problem (which you shouldn’t) opening a TIFF, use the freely available GIMP software.

RTF

This is Rich Text Format, a document type developed by Microsoft way back in 1987. It is still, even in Windows 7, used as the default file type when saving from it’s bundled word processing application WordPad.

For older generation computer users, RTF sticks out like a sore thumb due to the fact so many people used Windows Write (the predecessor to WordPad). But many newer generation users have never seen RTF files.

Shades of the past: Using the Start/Run dialog in Windows 7, if you type write and click OK, WordPad will load up.

I am not a journalist. Or am I? Keep that question in mind as you read through this.

Dave attended BlogWorld Expo this year, and one of the things he noted is that Leo Laporte stated in so many words that new media will be the new standard in journalism soon enough.

"New Media" is a very overhyped term, but is the only one that accurately defines the difference between traditional news outlets and the newer ways of getting news and events. In other words, it’s the difference between print (old) and internet (new).

As a writer for PCMech, I make my best effort to follow the tenets of traditional journalism. In that vein, reports are to be as factually accurate as possible, opinions (editorials) are to foster meaningful discussion, humor is to be inoffensive to the reading audience, and so on.

A journalist in strict definition is, "a writer for newspapers and magazines." I don’t think that definition accurately applies any longer. It should be changed to, "a writer for media outlets", meaning print and/or internet. If a traditional journalist has an online column or authors one exclusively but used to have a print column, does that mean a journalist doesn’t classify as one any longer? I don’t think so.

Definitions aside, something that I’ve always been aware of is that for whatever I write here, I’m responsible for it. This is another tenet of journalism. You, the reader, expect that whatever is written here is true, be it a report, documentation or otherwise. With the increased readership to PCMech as well as a ton of other web sites, that responsibility is something to be taken seriously.

Authors of blogs with wide readership understand this responsibility. We understand it to the tune of, "Wow, there’s a lot of people reading what I write, so I’d better not steer them wrong."

What makes New Media differ from Old Media the most?

1. Instant delivery.

You don’t go to the store and buy what you read here. It’s delivered instantly any time you want, for free, simply by typing in the web address.

2. Two-way communication.

Old Media has always hated this. The old way was the (in)famous "Letters to the Editor" section of whatever publication you were reading. Out of the hundreds of letters received, only a scant few would ever appear in print. The rest were all tossed and would never see the light of day.

New Media has reader discussion right on the article itself, and if you want to contribute, you can do so easily.

The reason I say Old Media hates two-way communication is because they’ve never been able to handle it properly. As most know, Old Media was pulled into the internet kicking and screaming all the way. They labeled it as simply a fad that would go away. It didn’t. Instead it steamrolled right over them and they were forced to go online. But they still don’t know how to handle two-way communication and struggle with it consistently. I don’t believe this is going to change any time soon.

3. Edge.

Traditional journalism is not edgy and is best described as sober – almost to a fault. It’s bland reading that has no bite whatsoever. In other words, boring.

Edge in this context is not meant to imply gimmicky, sell-your-soul type of garbage. Rather it means that the author has to be willing to (gasp!) have an opinion and stick by it. With Old Media this is almost nonexistent, hence the blandness.

New Media more or less dictates, "It’s OK to have an opinion. Do it."

4. A chance for others to write and contribute their voice.

Something that everybody takes for granted is the ability to link web pages. At any time, you could start up your own blog for free (Windows Live Spaces, LiveJournal, Blogger, WordPress, TypePad, etc.), write up your own article and link back to this one as a reference. Or maybe you want to post a rebuttal article against this one. Or whatever. It doesn’t matter what it is. What matters is that you can do it. You can’t do that with print because you don’t have the circulation. With internet, your circulation is the world.

Is Old Media scared?

Yes, and has been for a while now. Print media readership has been dropping like a brick. All of them missed the boat with internet, and even though they’re all online now, they’re still not doing it right. New Media continues on its path of ushering in a new era of journalism.

I want to make clear that I do not want print media to go away. Newspapers and magazine are established and well-respected sources of news and information. I do not wish even for a second that they vanish into obscurity, as it would be very sad if that happened.

What Old Media needs to do is to stop treating New Media as "something we deal with only because we have to." Instead of rowing against the stream they should simply go with it. Otherwise they will be stomped out. Yes, stomped.

Are internet-only writers journalists?

The only person qualified to answer this question is you.

Do you feel that you get the same level of news and information online as you do with print?

Do you consider online content to have inferior, on par, or superior quality compared to print?

Does personality (with edge mentioned above) in content matter to you, or just the facts and only the facts?

If we added a comics section and a daily crossword puzzle, would PCMech be a "tech newspaper?"

Interesting questions, to be sure.

If you haven’t heard, everybody (like here, here and here in addition to a ton of other places) is talking how a Hotmail phishing attack happened and somewhere in the neighborhood of 20,000+ account passwords were leaked.

Use Hotmail and think your account is compromised? Well, if you happen to be in European user and your account name started with an A or B, probably. You’ll know if you attempt to login and can’t. It should be noted Microsoft responded to this immediately and is in the process of restoring accounts.

What caused this fracas to occur in the first place? As the title of this article indicates, phishing. This means a ton of people were fooled into simply giving over their account information. Where did the phishing occur? Social media. It was not an internal Microsoft system fault.

You could simply blame the account leaks on dumb internet users, but the difference today compared to yesteryear is that we now have web sites that routinely require our permission to interconnect.

For example, if you have a Flickr account and use another web service that accesses it, what happens on first use is that you must grant permission for the other site to use it. After you authorize it, the secondary web site can access the original Flickr account.

This is not a bad thing, but what is bad is that we see these authorization notices often, and many just consider it normal and that you should do it. Add to this that in social media these authorization requests all roughly look the same, and you can see where this can pose a problem.

With that said:

• If there is any email that asks you for your email account information, don’t do it.
• If when using social media (such as Facebook, MySpace or otherwise) it asks you for your email account information, don’t do it.
• Only check your mail within the mail system itself and not via any third-party source.

Something interesting to think about is how long data will last, because as everyone knows, nothing is forever.

Here’s a rundown on how long you can expect the media you use to last.

"Media" defined: Data storage on something physical that you own, be it hard disk, optical, flash or tape. I don’t list floppy diskettes because nobody uses those anymore.

Assumptions:

• You are using the media a minimum once per week and when not in use is disconnected and/or unpowered from the electronic mechanism it uses to write data to and stored (ex: you take the DVD out of the drive, put it in a case and store it).
• You are physically storing your media in a dry place at room temperature (72° F / 22° C).

Hard Disk

A production-use hard disk usually has a life span of 3 to 5 years. Some last longer, but trust me there is a reason why most hard drive manufacturers usually do not have hardware warranties that go beyond 5 years.

A hard disk used for backup purposes lasts longer because it isn’t used as often. You can assume the HDD will last at least 7 years. But bear in mind that is an assumption.

As a short-term backup solution, hard disks are a good choice. As a long-term solution, not so much given their relatively short life span.

For more information, this really old (but still relevant) post from our own PCMech forums will give you tons of useful info concerning the life span of a hard disk drive.

Optical

Optical media that you use is CD, DVD, the now-defunct HD DVD and Blu-ray.

Assuming you have a decent CD/DVD burner drive, the life span of optical media almost exclusively depends on how well the disc was made.

Premium-grade media can easily last 10 years. And no, you won’t find it at Wal-Mart. The best possible writable CD/DVD media you can buy is manufactured by Taiyo Yuden. A Google search will reveal where to get some if so inclined. It is lauded as the best of the best. That’s because it is. And yes, you’ll pay good money for it too.

For the rest of us, there’s name brand and generic optical media. You can expect name brand (Memorex, Verbatim, etc.) to last about 5 years. Some of you out there will get 7 to 10 but I personally wouldn’t put that much faith into this type of media.

Concerning generic, the plastic may separate from the aluminum in less than a year. Not a good choice.

With optical media, yes, you get what you pay for concerning life span. No question.

Tip: It is better to store optical discs in jewel cases instead of books. Natural problems (like pages of discs sticking to each other from sitting there too long) can happen with those fold-out books.

Flash

It has been speculated that flash based media, such as a USB stick, will last 8 to 10 years easily. This is because there are no moving parts, the heat it generates is minimal and the way it connects and disconnects to a computer is nearly impossible to get wrong (and therefore almost impossible to break).

What most people will encounter with a USB stick in the future is expiring the amount of times data can be written to it or erased before age-related failure. Most USB sticks will allow one million write and/or erase cycles before it cannot be used any longer.

If a USB stick is used as backup media where it is only used once a week, it is highly unlikely you will ever tap that limit.

But the limit age-wise for data retention is stated to be 10 years and no longer at present.

Tip: You might want to use a label-maker and mark the stick with a date 9 years from now (this gives you enough buffer of time from date of manufacture). Who knows? You might still have it then. And you’ll know the stick will soon fail when the date marked is reached.

If you’re thinking, "How can I be sure USB will even be around in nine years?" It will be. Even if it is replaced by another technology, you will still be able to access the data on it somehow.

Think of it this way: Right now nobody uses floppy diskettes any longer, yet you can still buy a floppy diskette drive and disks easily. At worst, USB flash drives will end up like that. Woefully obsolete, but still accessible.

Tape

This is probably going to surprise a few of you, but premium grade tape backup can last 50 years. Sound ridiculous? It’s not. This method of backup is usually only used by large enterprise and government IT centers.

Tape is one of those things that is about as old-school as you can get when it comes to data storage. True, the technology has advanced, the cartridges are built better and the media can store much more and is more reliable, but the method of the way it works is still essentially unchanged.

Tape media is still readily available, but for those looking for the "big guns", what you would want is certified 30-year tape media. The one notch after that is the premium 50-year. Yes, it’s overkill for most people (and wickedly expensive), but if you want something that lasts longer than anything else, tape is basically your only option.

For those who think tape backup is dead as a doorknob, I beg to differ. Maybe it’s dead as a consumer option, but in enterprise it’s still widely used. Maybe you’re not enterprise, but you can use it. In fact, tape is still the best bang for the buck long-term storage media there is.

If you think tape may be right for you, here are a few things you should be aware of:

First, tape decks do require cleaning. The way to clean is with a tape head cleaner cartridge. The heads will need to be cleaned periodically to ensure proper data writes.

Second, transfer speeds are defined differently but you can assume they’re going to be on the slower side. No, they are not molasses-slow as tape drives were years ago because we’ve got USB connectivity now, but it is true they’re not lightning quick, nor have they ever been.

Third, tape is very particular to format. There’s DLT, SDLT, 1/2-inch, LTO, 4mm, 8mm and so on. When shopping around for a deck, pay strict attention to format and how easy (or not easy) it is to acquire media for it.

Will there ever be a long-term backup solution better than tape?

The only media I know of that could potentially outlast tape is the internet itself. But obviously the internet is not physical media. In fact it’s not even physical. The storage of the internet is termed as putting data "in the cloud". However there are more than a few out there that would rather have media stored safely in a closet or attic rather than on some distant server run by someone else.

Chances are you’re more comfortable with the "un-clouded" way.

What’s the most convenient solution right now?

Tape may be the longest lasting, but USB sticks are the most convenient.

You can most likely fit every digital photo you’ve ever taken on a 4GB stick. And that’s under $15 to acquire.

You can most likely fit every email you have on a 2GB stick. And those are under $10.

As long as you remember to swap the sticks out once every 8 to 10 years, you’re in good shape.

That is unless you leave one in your pants pocket and run it thru a wash cycle while doing the laundry.

What do you use for backup media?

Do you use CD/DVDs? USB sticks? Tape? The internet itself? A combination?

Let us know by writing a comment.

An interesting little program I came across which allows you to view just about any information on your media files is MediaInfo. From their description:

MediaInfo supplies technical and tag information about a video or audio file.

Simply put, that is what it does. You can extract just about any information you can think of from vitually any audio or video file format. Additionally, you can export this information to a text file format and the available command line interface gives you the ability to create a batch file to quickly gather information on your entire media library.

While I personally cannot think of any true practical applications for this program, if you can please drop a comment.

In a few short months it’s going to be 2009, and a ton of stuff has changed in the world of computing over the past almost-ten years. Some of the modern advancements have proven to be a notable improvement while others still produce the same crapola they did nearly ten years ago.

In this installment we’ll be taking a look at portable media.

Portable media

Everyone knows what a hard disk drive is, abbreviated HDD. However this is what’s termed as a “fixed disk”, i.e. one that stays within the computer that is not designed to be moved from place to place.

In the portable media arena there are four types that most people remember:

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There are a few keyboard and mouse shortcuts in Windows Media Player 11 that are handy to know just in case you ever need to use them.

Switching between skinned and non-skinned mode

Non-skinned: CTRL+1

Skinned: CTRL+2

If you have a kid that sometimes "messes with" the media player and it has this weird skin on it (such as the way it looks at the top of this article), CTRL+1 will fix that in short order so it goes back to "full mode", like this:

Getting the menus to show up on the top bar

The keystroke for this is CTRL+M. To hide them, press CTRL+M again.

Going to compact mode

To make Media Player look like this…

…hit the bottom right arrow (the one at the extreme bottom right). Hit it again to bring Media Player back to full mode.

The list pane disappears, how do you bring it back?

If your Media Player looks like this:

You can bring back the list pane on the right by clicking the small down arrow under Now Playing (top left) and clicking Show List Pane.

Like this:

…and then your Media Player will get the list pane back.

Showing the enhancements

If you want your media player to have extra options like this:

…click the down arrow under Now Playing, then Enhancements, then Show Enhancements, like this:

Alternatively you can directly pick what enhancement you want to view from here also (like Color Chooser or Graphic Equalizer).

Removing this panel can be done by clicking the small X at the top right of that pane, or by clicking Now Playing then Enhancements then Show Enhancements again to hide it.

Situation: You’ve carefully backed up some sensitive data to CD or DVD. Afterwards you took the extra step of placing the disc in a standard jewel case instead of a fold-out case. You even took the extra precaution of putting the disc in that case in a room where the ambient temperature is never too cold or too hot.

Less than one year later you open that jewel case to retrieve some data off the disc and see spots and blotches on the data side. The disc is unreadable. You took all the precautions in the world so what happened?

What happened is that the disc became oxidized. The aluminum separated from the plastic which is why you see those spots and blotches.

All the precautions you take will be for naught if you use cheap media because yes, that 50-pack of discs you bought on sale was discounted for a reason: poor manufacturing. And yes, they can oxidize in less than a year.

Well-manufactured discs – assuming they’re stored properly – usually have a shelf life of about 5 years. Premium discs can last as long as 10.

Want quality and reliability? Go for the blue and gold.

How do you know a good disc from a bad one? Its data-side color. The ones with a blue or gold data-side are far superior to those that are silver-colored.

Brand name does count

Best: Taiyo Yuden premium media. Very expensive. Totally worth it.

Good: Verbatim and TDK make above-average discs.

Middle-of-the-road: Memorex, Maxell, Fujifilm

Bad: Sony and any store-branded disc.

The one most people will pay attention to is Sony. Yes, Sony makes crap optical media and always has. This is why it’s always available and always on sale.

Have you ever received a disc from a friend and it won’t read in your CD/DVD drive? It was probably on Sony media.

PCMech readers and PCMech Live viewers have heard me wax on about how SSD is going to be the next big thing with computers. Why? One reason: Speed. And lots of it. Solid State Drives are where computers are going. If you wanted any indicator as to when to upgrade, SSD is it – no question.

And Samsung appears to be the company that’s going to bring it to us – this year.

How fast is fast? How about 160MB per second write-speed fast? It leaves rotating hard disks in the dust to say the least.

Personally speaking I’m pleased as punch this is happening now (as in this year) because it’s bringing us closer to the way computers used to be.

If you examine very old-school computers like the Commodore 64, TRS-80 and the like, their boot-up time is instantaneous. SSD brings us much closer to the simplicity that is: You turn it on and go. No waiting. And that’s just plain frickin’ cool all around.

One can only hope that the same will occur for optical drives as well (as in solid state media replacing rotating media.) We’ve thankfully been able to more or less get rid of the floppy drive, but the ancient optical tech is still around. The only reason we still use them is because flash-based media doesn’t have a low enough price point just yet compared to optical discs.

It is not uncommon to find a 50-pack of blank CD-ROMs for 10 US dollars. That’s 20¢ per each disc that can hold 700MB. Flash-based media isn’t that cheap just yet but it’s getting there.

It would be interesting if the computer industry made floppy-shaped flash-based media. The media would look just like a floppy diskette but would be a flash-based card that could hold a few GB’s of data at bare minimum. Media of this type would keep a familiar feel while providing modern portable storage.

Think it’s a crazy idea? Remember, the CD-ROM optical disc is a rounded version of the 5.25″ floppy diskette concerning it’s size. That’s why it fits perfectly in a 5.25″ sleeve.

[Source: Electronista]

The only thing you need to pay attention to as far as memory cards for digital cameras are concerned is whether it will physically fit in your camera or not.

There is absolutely no significant advantage from one card format to the next. All that matters is that it can physically be connected to the camera you have.

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