Here are some headlines I read this past week: Dell is trying to take itself private. Microsoft is investing in Dell. Intel is pulling out of the motherboard market. AMD is considering ARM CPUs. And the PC is dead.
It’s all related.
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Windows Medkit cleans up the damage after removing malware infestations
I’ve written before about cleaning up Windows boxes using a Bitdefender Live CD, but the live CDs often don’t clean up all of the collateral damage that the malware does to try to keep you from uninstalling them.
That’s where Windows Medkit can come in.
The lines between white hat/gray hat/black hat hacking and moral laws
University computer science programs need to teach security, not demonize it
I saw this on Slashdot today: A computer science student was expelled from a Canadian university for practicing what most people would call white-hat hacking.
Their reasoning: “Schools are supposed to teach best practice, which includes ethics and adherence to reasonable laws.” But there is such thing as ethical hacking. Read more
A good reviewer doesn’t seek out special treatment
Stopping spambots cold with Botblocker
I’ve been absolutely getting pounded lately with spam comments from spambots–to the tune of one spam comment per minute. That’s filling up and slowing down my database and consuming CPU resources that I want for human readers.
So I resorted to installing Botblocker. All I can report right now is that it seems to be working–no spam comments for several hours.
I can’t guarantee it will work forever, and I’ve got Akismet to hide whatever spam gets through, but so far my server seems less busy and more happy, which is good. Things had gotten so bad for a while that I was getting timeouts when trying to post, which is ridiculous.
What I did since I (temporarily) need Java
I’ve been seeing the same question over and over in my search logs lately: Is Java safe to run in 2013?
Generally speaking, the answer is no.
I have little choice but to run Java right now, though. I’m studying for a certification exam, and the best quiz program that I know of is written in Java. Its user interface is in Polish, a language I don’t speak, but that bothers me less than it being written in Java. Google Translate can help me with the Polish, but it can’t make Java safe. That’s up to me.
So here’s what I did.
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My Stan Musial stories
When I was a toddler, I played in Stan Musial’s swimming pool.
Yes, I really did.
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A cheap kitchen makeover
The kitchen cabinets in the house we live in have seen better days. They were reasonably well-built, but 50 years of raising families–mine is the third family raised in this house–took their toll on them. A couple of years back we painted them, to cover the scars of the years. It was an improvement, but the color dated itself pretty quickly, and we didn’t use the highest-quality paint, so the finish wore fairly quickly.
This time, we repainted them white. We used an expensive Benjamin Moore Decorator White in semi-gloss, because it looks good, but also because we’ve found it to be durable in other projects. And you’d be surprised how many half-million-dollar houses have white-painted cabinets. I’m an estate sale junkie, so I’ve seen a lot of half-million-dollar houses over the years, and I would estimate 40% of them have simple, white cabinets in their kitchens. It’s a look that doesn’t date itself, and is cheap and easy to take care of. (As a point of reference, a modest three-bedroom ranch house in the same county costs around $125,000.)
I’ve also seen people do this to improve the appearance of a house prior to flipping it.
If you needed another reason not to buy Windows 8….
I’m still waiting for someone I know to tell me they like Windows 8. I’ve seen some strangers online say they like it, but not a lot of them, and many of them appear to be astroturfers because they just like it too much. I’m sure Apple loves it, because, like my boss told me, a lot of older apps (like anything older than Office 2010) won’t run on Windows 8. So, if you have to re-buy all your software anyway, what advantage is there to buying a Windows 8 machine over a Macintosh?
In fact, that’s exactly what his parents did. They gave up on Windows entirely and bought a Mac Mini.
The other approach, of course, is to buy a Chromebook. A lot of people seem to be doing that too, seeing as it’s the best-selling laptop on Amazon–so much so that they don’t have any stock, and third-party sellers are scalping them for $80 above retail like they used to do with Nintendo Wii consoles. Read more