David L. Farquhar, computer security professional, train hobbyist, and landlord
College is a waste of time?
I disagree with Mr. Stephens’ statement that college is a waste of time. I don’t know what college he went to, or what he studied there, but I certainly didn’t spend four years at the University of Missouri copying my professors’ thoughts.
We had a power outage tonight. There was a boom, then a poof, then silence as everything in the house shut down. Maybe a nearby transformer couldn’t handle everyone running their air conditioners to escape the 95-plus degree heat. Maybe a squirrel got somewhere it shouldn’t have. I didn’t bug the service guys to find out.
I’ll be back tomorrow with some stuff. I’m too tired now to post anything else for the day. On the plus side, I got the excuse I needed to move my web server to the place where it belongs, rather than the “temporary” area where I staged it and it’s been sitting since, oh, September. It was already down, so taking an extra 10 minutes to move it didn’t hurt anything.
I’ve seen the Windows 8 screenshots. What I see in them reeks of overreaction. Pundits are predicting a post-PC era, so Microsoft is trying their best to make a PC look and feel like a smartphone.
Why does a PC need to look and feel like a smartphone?
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OCZ introduced a hybrid hard drive, featuring 60 GB of solid state storage caching a 500 GB conventional hard drive, priced at around $350 and due in July. It’s on a plug-in PCI Express x4 card.
The idea has some merit.
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If you’ve been procrastinating about deploying 450-megabit (802.11n) wi-fi to your house, I have a reason for you to procrastinate a while longer: Gigabit wireless (802.11ac).
It’s only about twice as fast as its predecessor, which pales next to the 8x improvement 802.11n provided over 802.11g, but if you’re wanting to stream HD media through your house, you’ll notice the difference.
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Exomizer is a compression program for Commodore and other 8-bit computers. The compressed program still runs, but it takes up less space on disk. Decompressing takes some time, but usually less time than reading more data off a 1541 disk. And unlike native packers which sometimes take all night to run, Exomizer runs on modern PCs, so it runs extremely quickly.
The space savings isn’t as much of a consideration now as it was in 1986, but being able to cram as many programs as possible on a single disk image makes access more convenient.
Sometimes you need to put two internal hard drives in a system, but only have a single 3.5″ bay available. This is common in small computers, like HP Slimline and whatever Dell’s equivalent is.
There are two ways to do it. Both have tradeoffs.
Business Insider has an interview with Apple’s first CEO, Michael Scott. (Not the guy from the TV sitcom.) It’s interesting reading from a historical standpoint.
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I contracted out some work recently. It involved a large sum of money, at least to me. It amounted to about a three weeks’ worth of take-home pay. He wanted the money for the materials up front. I didn’t really want to do that, but other people had told me he was completely honest, so I did it.
He had trouble getting the necessary permits and other paperwork. I had trouble keeping his story straight. I gave him some time to sort it out. After about a month–which might have been too long–he concluded he wasn’t going to be able to do the work, and told me he’d give me a refund.
Then he quit answering his phone.