I see this question coming through on Google all the time: Should I sell my stock in 2011?
Two letters: NO.
There. That was easy. But I’ll explain why.
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How about hard drives that vary their speed based on workload?
Facebook wants hard drives that slow down when the data they hold isn’t in high demand. They estimate that slowing a drive from 7200 RPM down to 3600 RPM could cut its power usage from 7W to 3W.
We already do something like this with other hardware. Why not with hard drives?
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Is your neighbor hungry?
I heard something really disturbing in church this morning. Something not terribly surprising, I guess, but something that isn’t right. There are kids in that community that aren’t getting enough to eat.
I go to church in Oakville, Mo. Oakville is a sleepy, isolated, upper-middle class suburb along the Mississippi River. On the surface, it’s the picture of affluence: Nice cars, manicured lawns, big houses. But somehow, there are homeless people there. Or people who are having to choose between buying groceries or paying bills, apparently.
If it’s happening in Oakville, it’s happening other places.
Intel fixes a major issue with its 320-series SSDs
Intel 320-series SSDs have an obscure bug in their firmware that can cause them to change from a multi-gigabyte SSD to an 8 MB pumpkin. Intel finally found the issue and posted a fix.
This might explain why supplies of Intel 320s have been a bit sporadic lately. If you have an Intel 320, get ready to download and install the update. You may want to wait just a few days to make sure there are no issues with it, as SSD updates in general tend to be, shall I say, rushed.
Psst! Want a cheap tablet?
HP figured out what to do with all those unsold tablets. Friday they dropped the price in Canada to $99 and $149, depending on the memory. And this weekend, they’re doing the same in the States.
They’re underpowered and they’re orphans, but at that price, I’ll bet they’ll sell.
Lenovo and IBM look back at IBM’s PC exit
The Register reports that Lenovo is gloating over its purchase of IBM’s PC division and its turnaround efforts, while IBM doesn’t regret pulling out, at all, even going so far as to call the PC dead. Who’s right?
Lenovo. Though IBM was right to get out–but the PC is only as dead as the television. Old media doesn’t go away quickly. Radio was supposed to make newspapers go away, and it’s only now, 90 years later, that newsprint is hurting. The old stuff adapts and evolves and finds new uses. Some people argue that if newspapers were managed better, they wouldn’t be hurting, but that’s a different issue. Let’s talk IBM PCs.
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Bombshell: HP pulls out. Of tablets and desktop PCs.
And speaking of duds, it looks like HP has one on their hands in their Web OS-based tablets.
Best Buy has about a quarter-million unsold tablets in their warehouse and has only managed to sell 25,000 of them. And when Woot ran a special on them, selling them for $120 off, they sold a whopping 612 of them.
And now it looks like HP is just going to discontinue Web OS altogether.
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How to view questionable PDFs safely
I said Tuesday that it’s a bad idea to download and view PDF (Adobe Acrobat/Adobe Reader) documents from questionable sources, but I didn’t really elaborate on why, nor did I tell you how to view questionable PDFs safely.
The reason is that pretty much anybody with a little bit of determination and the ability to follow a recipe can plant a trap in a PDF file and use it to gain access to your computer. Adobe Reader is extremely prone to these kinds of attacks, and don’t think you’re safe if you don’t run Windows. There are toolkits that will inject traps that work on Macintoshes and Linux too.
Yes, your antivirus software should catch it. But most antivirus software doesn’t dig deeply enough into PDF files to find it.
Scared yet? You should be. You do have some options.
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Commodore 128, top-12 dud? By what measure?
PC Magazine presented a list of 12 computer duds, and while I agree with most of them, my old friend the Commodore 128 makes an appearance. Commodore released several duds over the years, but calling the 128 one of them doesn’t seem fair.
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Firefox 6 is out. Yawn.
Firefox 6 came out sooner than expected, and yet, I can’t find anyone who’s excited about it. Probably because, under last year’s conditions, this probably would be called Firefox 4.2 or perhaps Firefox 4.5 or 4.6, something like that.
Yeah, I’ll be installing it, if only because it’s the security update for Firefox 5. But it sure feels anticlimactic. When Firefox 3 and Firefox 4 came out, I felt excited. Maybe that means something’s wrong with me. But there was something compelling, something tangible about those new releases. I don’t think either of them let me do something I couldn’t do before, but they at least held the promise of letting me do those things faster.
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