David L. Farquhar on technology old and new, computer security, and more
Microsoft is getting aggressive with Windows release dates, and I can’t help but wonder if it’s going to put a damper on future sales.
Windows 8 is coming out in August, which was a poorly kept secret anyway. That can’t be helping Windows 7 sales, but at this point I think Microsoft is mostly concerned about new computer sales and corporate sales. What’s more concerning to me–initially–is the revelation that Windows 9 will be out in November 2014.
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If you haven’t heard, there’s a hard drive shortage due to floods in Thailand, where many drives and/or components are made. So now, rather than 1 TB hard drives being priced lower than a tank of gas in most cars, prices are rising fast.
That will discourage upgraders, and could cause the cost of PCs to rise.
I was looking deeper into Firefox optimization, and I found Adventures in Firefox-places.sqlite. It’s a pretty intense analysis that goes beyond the usual simple, in-browser SQL vacuum that I’ve mentioned in the past. It was written with Mac OS X and Linux in mind, which is fine, but if you run Windows, you might want to do the same thing.
It has two benefits. It speeds up Firefox, and it reduces the amount of disk space your Firefox profile occupies. The two things are related; smaller databases are quicker and easier to navigate than large ones. As for why you should care about the amount of disk space it takes up, well, on an SSD every megabyte counts.
I’m of the age that’s supposed to like Nirvana more than U2. Or at least, when U2’s Achtung Baby came out, I was. (I suspect a lot of people my age would rather listen to U2 than Nirvana now, while my teenaged nephew would have the opposite opinion.)
I bought both Nevermind and Achtung Baby, at the same time in fact. I’ve written before about what Nevermind meant to me and the people around me. Being arguably my favorite record of all time, I think Achtung Baby, which is being re-released this week, deserves the same treatment.
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Since posting my tongue-in-cheek hints for completing your employee self-evaluation, it’s received a ton of hits, presumably from people who want serious advice on filling out employee self evaluations. Just to clarify, I do not recommend calling yourself “awesome sauce” on your evaluation.
The main thing is to be understated if anything, fair to yourself, and back up what you say.
About a year ago, I told you about how to vacuum Firefox’s SQLite database to make it run better.
The trick still works, but they moved stuff around on us in Firefox 7.
HP came to its senses this week and decided that ex-CEO Leo Apotheker’s decision to pull out of the PC market he didn’t understand was a bad decision. They’re staying in.
I just saw that LSI Corporation bought Sandforce, maker of high-performance SSD controllers, earlier this week for $400 million.
LSI makes a lot of things. I’ve owned a couple of SCSI controllers over the years with their chips on them. I’ve administered servers with their RAID controllers in them. They also make system-on-a-chip solutions.
A longtime reader wrote in this week recommending TCP Optimizer. I’ve used this program off and on for years, but don’t seem to have ever mentioned it on the blog.
I talked about similar programs in my book, but TCP Optimizer works with all modern (and many ancient) versions of Windows, and it can make a tremendous difference. It’s a small, self-contained program that doesn’t require any installation, the way programs ought to be.
Want a $199 tablet? Want something more open than a Kindle Fire? Want it a couple of weeks sooner? Don’t mind a slower CPU to have device portability on your books and more open access to the operating system?
Kobo is betting with its Kobo Vox tablet that the answer to at least one of those questions, for some people, is yes.