David L. Farquhar on technology old and new, computer security, and more
An article on Slashdot asked this weekend whether video games were a good investment. So are video games a good investment? Will they appreciate over time?
The answer is generally no. Collectibles in general are not–they follow a boom and bust cycle. I’ve seen it happen in my own lifetime.
I picked up a Hisense Sero 7 Pro tablet this evening. I’ve only spent about 90 minutes with it, but my first impressions of it are very favorable. It’s fast and smooth, the screen is sharp, and the price is right at $149. I’ve seen people at xda-developers say it’s the best $149 they’ve spent in a long time. While I won’t go quite that far, I’ll say this: If you’ve heard of this tablet and you’ve been thinking you might be interested, you’re interested. You won’t regret it.
I’ll talk about it some more this week, I’m sure, but here’s the lowdown on it: It’s a no-name tablet, sold in discount stores, that uses the same chipset as the Google Nexus 7, but it adds a video port so you can connect it to your TV for video playback, and it adds a microSD card slot for expansion. So it fixes the only two flaws the Nexus 7 had, but costs $50 less. It’s probably not as rugged as a Nexus 7 for that price, but for $50, you can buy a carrying case to ruggedize it a bit.
Once the word really gets out about these tablets, I think they’re going to be able to sell them as quickly as they can make them. I’m that impressed, and that’s with the stock ROM on it. I understand that if you’re willing to load a custom ROM, the first custom ROM to come available for it removes some bloat and performs even faster.
This comes courtesy of Dan Bowman: If you’re an Evernote user (I’m not, at least not yet), it now has three new security features, including the all-important two-factor authentication. Those of you who rely on Evernote would do well to look into enabling two-factor authentication, at the very least.
I’ve been noticing a lot of slowness that I’ve traced to DNS issues lately, typically with the caching DNS in routers. It happened to me, and it happened to my mom. We have different routers from different manufacturers, and they probably even use different embedded operating systems. Hers almost assuredly runs Linux; I have an oddball one that runs FreeBSD.
But the caching nameservers aren’t working well lately. I haven’t investigated why just yet. The solution I found was to hard-code the DNS settings on all my computers rather than letting them pull it from DHCP (my oddball router won’t let me specify external DNSs to use–lovely). Be sure to pick the best ones for your network.
Making that simple change fixed my mom’s dog-slow computer, and fixed my unreliable one.
This week, Mark Shuttleworth closed the longstanding Ubuntu bug #1, which simply read, “Microsoft has majority market share.” Because Microsoft didn’t lose its market share lead to Ubuntu, or Red Hat, or some other conventional Linux distribution, some people, including John C. Dvorak, are interpreting this as some kind of surrender.
I don’t see it as surrender at all. Microsoft’s dominant position, which seemed invincible in 2004 when Shuttleworth opened that bug, is slipping away. They still dominate PCs, but PCs as we know it are a shrinking part of the overall computing landscape, and the growth is all happening elsewhere.
I have (or at least had) a reputation as a Microsoft hater. That’s a vast oversimplification. I’m not anti-Microsoft. I’m pro-competition. I’m also pro-Amiga, and I’ll go to my grave maintaining that the death of Amiga set the industry back 20 years. I have Windows and Linux boxes at home, my wife has (believe it or not) an Ipad, and at work I’m more comfortable administering Linux than Windows right now, which seems a bit strange, especially considering it’s a Red Hat derivative and I haven’t touched Red Hat in what seems like 400 years.
What Shuttleworth is acknowledging is that we have something other than a duopoly again, for the first time in more than 20 years, and the industry is innovating and interesting again. Read more
I found some good advice on Lifehacker today about building a professional network. Not just having 500 connections on Linkedin, but having a real professional network made up of people who help one another advance their careers.
I stumbled into this completely by accident. Read more
What happens when you talk three password crackers into doing their worst to a leaked database of 16,000 passwords and then talk to them about it?
You learn a lot, and we can learn a lot from their experience as well. “qeadzcwrsfxv1331” isn’t a good password. Neither is “Philippians4:13.” Neither is “correcthorsebatterystaple.” Neither is “Qbesancon321” or “Qbe$@ncon321.” Password guessing has too much intelligence built into it now.
And not only that, by continuing to use the password “popcorn,” you make it easier for those guys to guess other passwords too. Read more
I’m reading the excellent Blackhatonomics right now. And one thing I read in it reminded me of a question that someone asked me last year. I was probably the third or fourth guy with an advanced security certification he’d met, and he asked me one day what it is that keeps us from turning criminal.
I said, “Well, for one thing, good guys have much longer careers.”
I didn’t cite a specific example, but Blackhatonomics cited the case of Albert Gonzalez, the infamous hacker convicted of breaking into TJX, Dave & Buster’s, and others. His crime spree, which ended when he was captured in 2008, netted him $2.98 million.
He was convicted in 2010, and had to give back what was left of his fortune, and now is serving 20 years in a minimum-security prison.
I like my approach better. Read more
LED lighting seems to change constantly. I read about Cree’s LED bulbs a good 12-18 months ago and they sounded too good to be true. In a way, they were, because you couldn’t buy them anywhere. The wait is finally over–they’re finally available, though only at Home Depot. I tried out their 800-lumen (60W equivalent), 2700K, 9.5W bulb, which currently costs about $13. It’s a good bulb that lives up to the hype.
I had numerous ancestors who fought in the U.S. Civil War. On my mom’s side, one of my direct ancestors was a Union spy during the war. He was captured three times. We joke sometimes that he was better at escaping from Confederate prisons than he was at being a spy. He survived the war and lived a long life.
On my dad’s side, Dr. Isaac Proctor Farquhar put medical school on hold and became Private Isaac Proctor Farquhar, like many of his brothers did. The elder Farquhar brothers who were already doctors became officers in the Union army, while the younger Farquhar brothers became infantry. All survived, came home to their families and resumed their productive medical careers.
James Washington McAdow did not. Read more