David L. Farquhar on technology old and new, computer security, and more
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.
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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.
I had this discussion this week with longtime reader Jim `, which I present here in hopes of it being useful to someone. When I don’t have time to write well, maybe I can at least post something of a little use.
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
The C-64 sort of turns 30 this week. It was introduced 30 years ago this week, though it wasn’t until August or so that you could actually buy one. It took that long for memory prices to come down to reach the target price, and if memory serves, the machine they displayed at CES in January wasn’t quite production-ready anyway.
I remember the machine well. It was my first computer. It seems like just yesterday the thing turned 25. And not all that long ago that I still used one on a regular basis.
I found a question in my studies whose answer I didn’t like. So I’ll repeat the question and the choices, and state what I think the answer should be and why I think that way. Any experts out there who might be reading can feel free to chime in.
Which of the following is a potential problem when creating a message digest for forensic purposes?
A. It’s an extremely slow process
B. The message digest is almost as long as the data
C. The last access time of the file is changed
D. One-way hashing technology invalidates message digest processing Read more
I bought a 2-pack of LG LED bulbs from Costco for $16. They aren’t as good as the bulbs I bought at Home Depot in 2010 or the ones I bought at Lowe’s last year, but for the price difference, they’re probably worth it at least in some cases. The Home Depot bulb sells for 25% more and uses 1.1 watts more energy; the Lowe’s bulb sells for 50% more.
I ran into something maddening today. I have a large number of self-study questions in plaintext format that I’ve been using to prepare for my upcoming test. To weed out the large number of duplicates, I massaged the file into a tab-separated format so I could load it into Excel and alphabetize it by the question wording. It worked nicely, especially in Excel 2003.
I got a nasty surprise when I loaded the same file on an Excel 2007-equipped machine.
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ESPN’s David Schoenfield writes, regarding Hall of Fame votes, and Bruce Sutter vs Lee Smith specifically:
Why does [Bruce] Sutter start at 23.9 percent [of the vote] and later gain momentum and enshrinement after 13 years on the ballot, but Lee Smith start at 42.3 percent and after nine years remain at 45.3 percent?
It doesn’t make sense.
As someone who grew up in St. Louis watching both pitchers, it makes sense to me. Sutter and Smith look similar by some mathematical models, but the people who watched them remember them differently. And memory is everything when it comes to close-call Hall of Fame candidates.
If Copyright law was still the way the Founding Fathers intended, anything copyrighted before 1955 would be in the public domain today. A number of noteworthy things came into being in 1955.
But like Duke University’s Center of Public Domain Studies, I’m a bit more concerned about the stuff that isn’t as noteworthy.