David L. Farquhar on technology old and new, computer security, and more
The Borders at my local mall is closing today. I’ll miss it.
I still remember when the store was being prepared. It was around the time I got married. My then-pastor said he was really looking forward to it opening. While his wife and his daughters shopped, he could hang out in there. I agreed with him. Nearly every time I went to the mall, I would sneak over to Borders for a while.
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Normally, after you install any version of Windows, you have a ton of patching to do. And that patching takes as long, or longer, than the installation takes, while leaving the system vulnerable to exploits in the meantime. Slipstreaming your hotfixes into your installation media sidesteps those issues, and reduces fragmentation. You get a faster performing system, you get the system up and running a lot sooner, and you save a lot of unnecessary writes to your SSD.
So I wholeheartedly recommend slipstreaming.
I was on my way to work when they said on the radio something was wrong. The details were scarce, but an airplane had hit one of the towers of the World Trade Center. Then the other. And as I was pulling into the parking lot, the news came that one of the towers had collapsed.
The day didn’t get any better as it wore on. I remember it well. Looking back at what I wrote on that day, some details faded over the decade, but my recollection of most of the day is vivid. I can tell you more about that day than I can most of the days of the past week.
Dan Bowman sent me the following link and asked me to comment on it: http://lifehacker.com/5467758/move-the-users-directory-in-windows-7
It needs little comment. It’s a brilliant solution to the problem.
It’s not Facebook, it’s you. You’ve got malware.
The malware is called Page Rage and Drop Down Deals. Head to this page to disable Page Rage, and this page to uncheck everything related to Drop Down Deals. And if you’re not infected, then no, I don’t suggest visiting either of those pages. Only go there if you’re having the issue.
Once you’ve visited those two sites with every web browser on your system, then scan the living daylights out of your computer with your antivirus/antimalware software. And install Bit Defender Safego to reduce the chances of something like this happening again.
And if you hear anyone talking about how great Page Rage or Drop Down Deals are… Well, ignore them. It’s just adware, 2011 edition.
I’ve been messing around with slipstreaming and with ramdisks, but since I’m not completely certain the slipstream process works consistently, I’m not publishing it today. I’m very excited about the possibilities that ramdisks have, but I got the ramdisk to fail on me twice last night. In light of that, I’m not going to come out and say what a great thing this particular ramdisk product is when I have doubts about its ability to stand up to heavy use.
In my Amiga days, I did most of my everyday computing using a ramdisk as my main storage medium. The operating system used it heavily, and all my downloads went there. I did all my creation and extraction of Zip files there. I even had the machine configured to reboot off one. The initial cold boot had to come off a hard drive, but the machine was capable of warm booting from its ramdisk. I took advantage of that, and when I had to reboot, the machine was back in literally seconds. Booting Windows 7 from a ramdisk is a non-starter on several levels, but if a ramdisk can’t do everything else an SSD can do and do it faster, I don’t think it’s worth having.
So I have high standards and high expectations.
When I find something that works well, I’ll share it.
The Register reports that Seagate is offering a massive 4 TB hard drive for $250.
Seagate brags that the drive can store 2,000 high-definition movies, thus answering the question of what you need such a large drive for.
Due to the Dutch certificate authority Diginotar being compromised, Mozilla released Firefox 6.0.2 and Microsoft released security advisory 2607712 in order to prevent those compromised SSL certificates–in layperson terms, a file that permits web servers to use https for security–from being used.
Without this step, someone could use a compromised certificate to set up a fake web site masquerading as some other web site you trust and using it for fraud.
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When I wrote about using ipconfig /flushdns to fix intermittent Internet problems, a longtime reader reported he has the problem frequently on his dialup connection. If you find yourself doing this a lot, there’s a more permanent fix.
Dan Bowman sent over this ongoing series at Forbes. I’d seen the first couple of parts of it, but didn’t realize it was still ongoing. In light of new Amazon tablet rumors, it takes on new relevance.
It’s a thought-provoking look at the state of U.S. manufacturing today, and the state of management. I don’t know if the author thinks it’s too late to reverse this decline, but presumably no. Otherwise he wouldn’t be writing it, probably.
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