So, Wikipedia is losing contributors. Cnet says so. People like me already knew it.
I left the place years ago.
Tradeoffs at the low end: Cores or Cache?
I’m looking at building myself a new PC for the first time in years. That’s a little bit of a misnomer though. Today, building a PC can mean bolting as few as two components into a case and connecting four cables. Building PCs in the 1990s was a lot more difficult. I remember in 1994, during one of my first builds, someone walking past in the hall, looking at the mess of cards and cables, and asking, “How do you know which one goes where?”
Today, the assembly is pretty easy. Figuring out what to buy is harder. In 1994, the differences between the various flavors of 386 and 486 chips available was confusing, but it all fit on an index card. Mainly the difference came down to the amount of memory the chip could address (386) and whether it had a math coprocessor (486). Beyond that all you really had to worry about was clock speed. Back then the research took 30 minutes and the system took hours to build.
Today there are two chip manufacturers (down from four) but they both have half a dozen product lines. And nobody really talks about clock speed anymore. That’s fine because clock speed was a crude measure of performance, but is throwing numbers like 560 or 840 or 965 on the chips really any better? Today the research takes hours (if not days) and the system goes together in about 5 minutes. Shake the bag right and it could just come out of the bag fully assembled.
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What I would do to fix Dr. A’s computer
I left my conversation with Dr. A nearly convinced he doesn’t really need a new computer. The local store is pitching him a new $700 Dell Inspiron with a 1 TB hard drive and 6 GB of RAM and a 17-inch screen. But he could upgrade to a 1 TB hard drive for less than $125. If he doesn’t want to switch to Windows 7, his current Windows XP Professional will only use 4 GB of RAM anyway. Upgrading to 4 GB of RAM will cost less than $40. And looking at the new system, I don’t know that its CPU is all that much more powerful than what he already has.
To me, the clincher was this. I asked myself the question whether, if I were offered a machine exactly like his for $200 or $300, would I buy it. And it was an easy answer. I would.
I haven’t done a thorough analysis of the machine, but I’ve seen enough to have an idea what it needs. Much of it will seem familiar, if you’ve been reading me a long time.
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HP or Dell?
Dr. A is disenfranchised with his Dell. Seeing it, I understand why. It frequently interrupts his work with Dell-branded system optimization programs that scour his hard drive for shortcuts to fix and other mundane things that only need to be done once a year, if ever. It does no harm–other than interrupting him of course–but who wants an OCD laptop? So he said he’s considering switching to HP. The only problem with that is that if you’re not careful, you can end up with an HP bundled with similar stuff.
So is there a difference? Read more
Questions to ask when buying a computer
I had a conversation with someone having computer issues, so he’s thinking about buying a new one. He went to my favorite store, but one thing he said got me thinking about questions to ask when buying a computer.
“I’m not convinced all the people there know what they’re talking about,” he said.
Fair enough. And that doesn’t matter when I’m doing the shopping, but not everyone is me. So here’s what you need to know if this isn’t what you do for a living.
Creative play with boys
On Saturday morning, my wife went out for a few hours to run errands and left me home with the boys. And when she came home, I was on the living room floor building a garage out of Mega Bloks (an oversized Lego knockoff for toddlers) with them. My oldest is really, really into Cars right now (the Pixar movie, not the New Wave band), and that improvised Mega Blok garage was just about the greatest thing ever–well, maybe just all day, which in a 3-year-old’s mind, might as well be forever.
“I never would have thought to do that with boys,” my wife said.
Secure that public wi-fi with a low-tier, no-cost home VPN
If you spend any time at all using unencrypted wi-fi networks at hotels and coffee shops, you need a VPN. Public connections are fine for reading news headlines and checking sports scores, but cannot be considered safe for e-mail, online banking, making purchases, or anything that involves a username and a password. A VPN, which encrypts that traffic from prying eyes, is the only way to make them safe.
Here’s how to set up a VPN that’s good enough for personal use. All you need is a home Internet connection, a computer at home, and the laptop you take on the road.
Of course corporations can set up VPNs that are much faster and much more robust, but this is something you can set up in a couple of hours on a weekend afternoon without spending anything.
Why you should align your SSD
Aligning an SSD is the process of ensuring that your filesystem’s logical blocks begin and end on the same memory boundaries as the SSD’s memory blocks. Doing this improves speed and longevity. Not doing it can roughly halve your drive’s life expectancy.
It’s not as mysterious or weird as it may seem. I’ll try to take the mystery out of it.
How to tame e-books
I haven’t exactly been rushing out to buy an e-reader, for at least a couple of reasons. The practical reason is that I’m afraid of being locked in to a single vendor. Amazon is the market leader and the most likely to still be around for the long term, but they’re the worst about locking you in. The other vendors offer slightly better interoperability–supporting the same file format and, optionally, the same DRM–but the non-Amazon market leaders are Barnes & Noble, Borders, and Sony, all of which are scary. Borders is being liquidated; B&N isn’t losing money–yet–but its profit margins have shrunk each of the last two years; and Sony’s recent problems are well known to the security community. I’m not too anxious to climb into bed with any of them. Google is entering the market as well, but the first Google-backed e-reader doesn’t support highlighting or note-taking.
The Luddite reason is that I’m old enough to have an attachment to books. Physical books, printed on paper. Maybe this isn’t true for any generation beyond mine (I’m a GenXer), but for my generation and previous generations, having books on your shelf is a sign of being educated. And there are certain books–or types of books, depending on your field–that you’re expected to have on your shelf.
To a certain extent, the latter reason can be negated by playing the e-reader card. Of course I have the complete works of Shakespeare on my e-reader, so those Shakespeare books from college just became clutter…
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I’m back.
Four words: Worst. Business trip. Ever.
I’ll give some more details later, after the airline decides what they’re going to do to make things righter (they can’t make it right). They managed not to crash the plane. Which is less of an achievement than me managing to drive to the airport without crashing my car. Other than that, they didn’t do much of anything right.
I had a nifty VPN set up that let me connect back into my home network to post, but a power outage knocked out my proxy server, which I had forgotten to configure to auto-start. I wasn’t about to log in here via unencrypted hotel wifi, which was why I was absent here for a few days.
I’ll have some more stuff in a while, but for now I need to take care of a few other things.