Yet another question from a reader: Is it OK to defragment a laptop?
Of course it is. A laptop is a computer, after all. The only question is how often, and with what.
Yet another question from a reader: Is it OK to defragment a laptop?
Of course it is. A laptop is a computer, after all. The only question is how often, and with what.
I experienced an interesting collection of contrasts going to journalism school in the mid 1990s. Inside the same building, we had investigative journalists who specialized in advanced use of databases and stodgy editors who missed the days of manual typewriters and wore technological ignorance as a badge of honor.
And yet, there were textbooks that said journalists ought to be learning computer programming, because there was going to be a need for journalists who had the ability to do both. It took a while, but it seems that day has come. Maybe not to sit down and write applications software, but to hack.
But is it ethical for a journalist to hack?
Read more
After years of workarounds, and even sometimes denying there was a problem, Mozilla has identified a fix for Firefox’s sometimes out-of-control memory usage.
The culprit appears to be the Javascript engine, which probably shouldn’t be much of a surprise.
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Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire is a 1992 autobiography of Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates. It’s old. But it’s a compelling snapshot of what the industry thought of Gates and Microsoft before Windows 95, before Microsoft Office, and before Internet Explorer. Indeed, it gives an early glimpse into the struggle to bring Windows to market, some of the bad bets Microsoft cast on its early productivity software, and just how close Microsoft came to betting the company on the success of the Apple Macintosh.
If Microsoft’s history were written today, many of these stories would probably be forgotten.
Sometimes it’s necessary to recover drive partitions because you accidentally repartitioned a drive you didn’t mean to, or because your MBR got infected or otherwise trashed. Here’s how to recover them, for free.
Infecting MBRs with malware is popular with virus writers again. And I fully expect chaos to ensue, because that’s what happened the last time there was more than one virus floating around that infected MBRs. They quit doing it for a good reason.
So here’s how to clean up the mess when an MBR gets infected, or when multiple infections blitzes the MBR and the hard drive loses the ability to boot, just displaying a message like Missing Operating System or Operating System Not Found.
We’ll be using the Gparted Live CD. Many Linux live CDs have the proper tools, but GParted works well and it’s a small download. You can try to use another Linux live CD, and it will work fine, but the icons might not all be where I say they are.
Most desktop PCs don’t have the ability to set an ATA password in the BIOS, precluding you from enabling the onboard AES-128 encryption in a drive like the Intel 320 SSD.
If you’re willing to hack your BIOS or burn a boot ROM to put in a network card, Arne Fitzenreiter has ATA Security eXtension (ATASX, or ATA SX)–a way for you to add that support to computers that lack it. Read more
I mostly agree with Dvorak’s Permanence of Posting Online, but I take serious, serious issue with what he says in that piece about passwords.
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The Guardian presents an interesting perspective, that hacktivists are bored teenagers driven by their hatred of government policy.
If that’s the case, it’s nothing new. They’re just able to make bigger messes today than their counterparts could 20 years ago. Read more
Why, we do the only logical thing you do with a building that’s 15 years old or older, of course. We tear them down to make way for a strip mall! Or a gas station!
I don’t know what those stupid Europeans are thinking. You can’t have progress when you keep your buildings for hundreds of years.
I’m going to write up a proposal that we redevelop the site of the Gateway Arch. It’s old and rusty, after all. Imagine all of the vacant office space we could put there!
There’s a nasty rumor going around that if your computer gets infected with the Popureb rootkit, your only recourse is to wipe your MBR, reformat your hard drive, and reinstall (or run your factory recovery disk, which is essentially the same thing).
Not so fast.