David L. Farquhar on technology old and new, computer security, and more
This morning as I was trying to dodge commercials and morning-show call-in games, I heard a couple of DJs talking about personal finance, and how their finances are a mess, and they heard that in the old days, people budgeted by putting money in cash envelopes, paid expenses out of those envelopes.
They asked if anyone has a high-tech way of doing the same thing.
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I guess there’s something floating around Facebook right now comparing sleek, elegant European trains against clunker, junky trains that roam the rails in the United States. I haven’t seen it yet, but I’ve already had some questions about it.
There was a time when U.S. trains were pretty bleak to look at, but that time isn’t now.
My webserver seems to be having a hard time keeping up with demand. It was only a couple of weeks ago that I could have had my preferred low-end motherboard for about $33, but I was able to come up with about 10 reasons not to buy it at that time and tackle the project. I can get an Asus Socket 775 board and a 2-core Intel CPU to put on it locally for around $90-$100 total, which will give me a four-fold increase in available CPU power and RAM, not to mention a newer and better-known chipset to work with. But I had several things come up this weekend that kept me from making that trip. Studying, of course, but also a family matter.
My server managed a not-exactly-heroic uptime of 3 days on this last reboot. If I can swap the board for something better this week, I’ll try. And if it dies again before I’m able to do that, I’ll have to see if I can remember to put some more memory in it. I just found a half-gig PC3200 DIMM that will fit, assuming I have a slot available.
My wife wanted a point-and-shoot camera. My go-to brand for that sort of thing usually is Olympus, based on the recommendation of someone who’s forgotten more about cameras than I’ll ever know, but there are some serious concerns that Olympus may not be around much longer.
So I bought a Panasonic Lumix DMC-S3, a point-and-shoot I got on sale for under $100. Unlike most cameras I could find in that price range, the reviews on it were overwhelmingly positive.
“Companies once felt an obligation to support American workers, even when it wasn’t the best financial choice,” said Betsey Stevenson, the chief economist at the Labor Department until last September. “That’s disappeared. Profits and efficiency have trumped generosity.”
Apple Computer, currently the highest-valued company in the country, at its peak employs 1/10 the number of Americans as General Motors did in the 1950s. Apple is an easy target because it’s big, but the problem isn’t unique to Apple. Technology companies as a whole employ fewer people than the heavyweights of ages past like General Motors and General Electric. It’s the nature of the work.
Fightforthefuture.org declared victory yesterday, saying that SOPA and PIPA have been dropped. Their e-mail said some other important and interesting things, but most importantly, it made some references to China. Communist China. Totalitarian Communist China.
The distinction is important.
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There isn’t much time left, and I apologize, but for the rest of the day, you can get the home version of Acronis for free. Details at the link. It’s not a bad idea to be familiar with Acronis, since it’s so widely used by businesses. Getting it and using it on your home PCs will get you some relevant experience. I’m not sure what the differences are between the home and business versions (I haven’t seen the home version yet myself), but using it will put you in position to figure it out. And you can’t beat the price, right?
Today I was helping one of my coworkers study for the Security+ exam, and one of his study questions reminded me of a story.
I wrote a few days ago about spending some time in an unhealthy IT shop. One of my cohorts supported one of the departments that decided to outsource its IT to a contractor, rather than use the internal IT department. It was a form of shadow IT on a large scale. The hand-off didn’t exactly go as it should.
I don’t pay a lot of attention to food, and certainly not to celebrity chefs. I don’t think the name Paula Deen would have meant anything to me a week ago. Most likely I’d have heard the name, but if you’d given me a multiple choice test, I probably would have gotten it wrong.
I know who she is now. Read more
Today, the Web protested SOPA and PIPA in various ways. And though momentum seemed to start shifting as long as a week ago, the protest went on, and some Washington politicians started changing sides, suggesting that maybe, just maybe, sometimes representative government can’t be bought.
I even saw a quote somewhere–I wish I’d written down where–that attributed one side-changer as saying it’s more important to get this legislation done right than to get it done fast. Read more