An excellent story about collectors of old signs

Dave Farquhar St. Louis , , ,

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch profiled three local sign collectors this weekend. Bill Christman, Greg Rhomberg, and Jim May go around buying old storefront signage, particularly enamel-painted metal signs with neon lights.

“Most businesses are branded franchises, so you see the same signs over and over, repeating every few miles,” said Tod Swormstedt, who operates a sign museum in Cincinnati. “But the old signs — the hand-carved shoe or the gold-leaf lettering on a window — were iconic and what made each neighborhood unique. People miss that.”

So I guess I’m not the only one who misses that, but it sure seems like we’re a minority.

UEFI on ARM illustrates why we still have to watch Microsoft

Dave Farquhar security, Software , , , , , ,

UEFI is a technology that forces a computer to only load a digitally signed operating system. This has some security benefits, as it makes parts of the operating system unbootable if they become infected, since the viruses won’t be digitally signed by a reputable vendor.

Great idea, right? From a security perspective, absolutely. The more attack vectors for viruses we can eliminate, the better off we’ll be. But Microsoft’s policy on ARM systems shows how it can be abused.

Read more

If you don’t know what SOPA and PIPA are

Dave Farquhar Copyright , ,

If you don’t know what SOPA and PIPA are, I urge you to visit this site. SOPA and PIPA, among other things, completely undermine the idea of due process, without which we might as well still be constituents of King George III.

If we want a government of the people, for the people, and by the people, SOPA and PIPA have to be stopped. If we want a government of the corporations, for the corporations, by the corporations, SOPA and PIPA are a tremendous jump in that direction.

Write your congressmen. You can do it from the site linked above. If you have certifications, sign off with them. Any little extra bit of weight you can throw behind your argument helps.

Copyrights can be useful things, but SOPA and PIPA have too many unintended consequences. It’s like treating an illness with hemlock. It’ll cure the illness, but there’s this one side effect that’s a doozy.

Mozilla goes sane with the corporate ESR version of Firefox

Dave Farquhar security, Software

In what can only be a wise move, Mozilla decided to release an ESR version of Firefox, which will be replaced once a year and patched in the meantime. A six-week cycle is perhaps manageable for home users, but it’s downright lunacy for corporate environments. It’s hard enough to test and deploy pure security fixes in 4-6 weeks, let alone test something that introduces entirely new features and deploy it.

I’m not sure that corporations and Mozilla want each other all that much, but they need each other. It’s a cheap way for a corporation to improve its security posture, as long as testing, deploying, and keeping it up to date isn’t a full-time job for someone.

Why computerized information systems frequently fail to meet the needs of users

Dave Farquhar security , ,

Let’s take a look at another CISSP-type question today, because I think it has broad implications for more than just CISSPs.

Here’s the question.

Which of the following best explains why computerized information systems frequently fail to meet the needs of users?
A)Inadequate QA (quality assurance) tools
B)Constantly changing user needs
C)Not enough project management.
D)Inadequate user participation in defining system requirements

Read more

The future of 3D printing is now. The next industrial revolution comes in a box and costs $1299

Dave Farquhar Uncategorized ,

CES is this week, and undoubtedly there will be a lot of different things showing, but I can’t imagine anything being more important than this: The first ready-to-use home 3D printer.  3D home printing is going to change the world, and this device is the first commercially available printer that you don’t have to assemble from a kit.

This is an industrial revolution in a box.
Read more

If you’re looking for a cheap motherboard

Dave Farquhar Hardware , ,

If you need a dirt-cheap, dependable motherboard, Computer Geeks Discount Outlet has a refurbished Asus M4N68T-M V2 available for under $34. It’s a socket AM3 board, so it uses readily available AMD Sempron/Athlon II/Phenom CPUs and up to 8 GB of DDR3 memory (and there’s little reason not to put the full 8 GB in–4 GB DIMMs cost $19). I’ve been running one of these boards since September or so and I’m thrilled with it.

You can build a nice 4-core system around this board, or, for a budget build, drop in a $40 Sempron and 4 GB of RAM for $19 to upgrade an aging system on the cheap, or build an affordable, low-power HTPC. A low-end Sempron will outperform an Atom while using less than 45 watts.

I spotted that this weekend, and thought you might like to know.

Best Buy has one foot in the grave?

Dave Farquhar Uncategorized , , , , , , , ,

In a highly publicized article, Forbes argues that Best Buy is not long for this world.

I can’t disagree with any individual point in the article. Some of the problems Larry Downes identifies existed when I worked there in the early 1990s–I’d spare you the joke about being young, naive, and needing the money, but it’s too late now–but in the 1990s they could get away with that, sort of, because there were competitors who tried to get away with worse.

Sears/Kmart is a favorite whipping boy, but they have one very big thing up on the land of the blue shirts. I can make a five-minute trip to Sears or Kmart–particularly Sears Hardware–to pick up a couple of things, and I do so fairly frequently. I tried a couple of weeks ago to do that at Best Buy, and, like the author said, calling it a miserable experience is putting it mildly. Read more