David L. Farquhar on technology old and new, computer security, and more
28 years ago, on May 7, 1997, Intel introduced its Pentium II processor. It wasn’t the first followup to the very successful Pentium. But the Pentium II overcame problems with the Pentium Pro that kept it from gaining more widespread mainstream acceptance.
Before May 2013 there was always question about whether you actually owned software after you paid for it. But before May 6, 2013, you certainly had more control. That was the day Adobe switched to a subscription-only model for its creative software. Other companies followed suit, notably Microsoft with its office suite.
It was on April 30, 2012 that Chrome passed Internet Explorer in market share for the first time. It took nearly 14 years for someone to pass the former afterthought in the Microsoft Plus pack to become the dominant browser. The two browsers jockeyed for the lead for two weeks, with Chrome overcoming IE for good on May 14, 2012.
With Chrome taking over, we traded one monopolist, Microsoft, for another, Google.
Windows 10 is going end of life in mid October, less than six months from now. It’s not supported on PCs with less than an 8th-generation Core i series processor, which leaves a huge number of systems that run Windows 10 more or less fine out in the cold. But there is a way around that. I’ve been running Windows 11 on unsupported hardware for a few months. And believe it or not, I almost like it better than Windows 10.
There’s no guarantee this will work forever. Microsoft may release future updates that require features present in newer CPUs. But this buys us some time beyond October 2025, at the very least.
Some dotcom-era startups were just bad ideas, and others were bad timing. I think Webvan was in the bad timing category. Today there is nothing especially odd about the idea of ordering groceries over the Internet. Several successful companies use some kind of variant of that business model today with success. On April 26, 2001, Webvan had an especially bad day. It pulled out of the Atlanta market, laid off 885 employees, and planned a 1-for-25 reverse stock split in a desperate attempt to keep its stock listed. This was just 13 days after its CEO, George Shaheen, resigned, on April 13, 2001.
Clippy was the unofficial nickname of the office assistant, a feature present in Microsoft Office 97 and Microsoft Office 2000. His proper name was Clippit, but nobody I knew called him that. Clippit, or Clippy, was inspired by Microsoft Bob, a misguided attempt to make Microsoft Office friendlier, more helpful, and easier to use. But most frequently, it was more annoying than any of those other things. On April 11, 2001, Microsoft announced the Office Assistant would no longer be enabled by default in future versions. Clippy was retiring. And there was much rejoicing.
On April 4, 1975, childhood friends Bill Gates, then 19, and Paul Allen, then 22, founded Microsoft, a company that makes computer software. Originally based in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Microsoft relocated to Washington State in 1979 and from there grew into a major multinational technology corporation. In 1987, the year after Microsoft went public, Gates became the world’s youngest billionaire at age 31.
AnandTech was an online computer hardware magazine founded in April 1997 by then-14-year-old Anand Lal Shimpi. Shimpi remained CEO and editor-in-chief until August 2014, with Ryan Smith replacing him as editor-in-chief. The website was a source of hardware reviews for off-the-shelf components and exhaustive benchmarking, targeted towards computer-building enthusiasts. Its debut article, released April 3, 1997, was a review of AMD’s then-new K6 processor.
I can never find this when I need it, so I am going to write up how I troubleshoot long scan times in Tenable Security Center. And if it helps you too, so be it. Usually when a Security Center scan takes forever, it’s because one or two hosts is responding much more slowly than the rest, holding up the entire scan. The scan won’t complete until every system finishes. Finding the slow hosts so you can troubleshoot them, or at least move them to their own scan, can help you keep the scan from dragging on forever.
It’s Patch Tuesday, the day Microsoft and Adobe grace us with new software updates to track, argue about, and maybe someday deploy to our computer systems. But have you ever wondered why we call software updates “patches?” What’s the meaning of the word patch?