I spotted a bargain SSD: The Kingston SSDNow V+100 96 GB is available at Amazon for $130. (It’s available other places for about the same price, but with Amazon’s free shipping, it’s probably cheaper there.) It uses a Toshiba controller that (by some accounts) lacks NCQ, but other than that, it’s a modern controller, and it has a good track record, having been the controller Apple used in its Macbook Air.
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My first really bad day in IT
Next weekend is Labor Day weekend. I can’t remember if it was one Thursday or two Thursdays before Labor Day weekend in 1997, but one of those two days happened to be the beginning of the first crisis of my career.
Whichever Thursday it was, it was getting close to midnight when my phone rang. It was Max. The print server wasn’t working. That happened a lot. That server had IBM’s Services for Macintosh on it, which never worked all that well, and, worse, tended to make the rest of the server act up a lot. That in and of itself shouldn’t have been a crisis. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
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A tip for selling something: Stage another interested buyer
I stumbled into something today that I’m sure I’ve read elsewhere and had forgotten about.
We’re trying to rent this house out, you see. And so far, everyone I’ve showed it to has jerked me around about it. And most people don’t want to rent it. They want to buy it for nothing. It’s a little irritating, but I try to stay cheerful. I have to.
Today, I showed the house to a guy who kept going on and on about how it’s not very much house for what I’m asking–I’m asking what an experienced and successful realtor who knows the area says to ask–and finding tons of nitpicky things to dislike about it.
And then another car drove up.
Maybe this is how Apple does it
Sitting in the stands at a baseball game the day after Steve Jobs’ surprise resignation from Apple, of course the subject came up.
“I wish I knew how Apple does it,” I said.
“I have an idea,” my friend Tom Gatermann said.
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Watch out for this Apache bug
There is a nasty Apache exploit going around right now that exploits a vulnerability in versions 1.3.x, 2.0.x and 2.2.x. Basically, it allows the process to exhaust all available memory and crash by sending GET requests with overlapping byte ranges. The methodology seems to borrow a page from the teardrop attack. Yes, I’ve been studying for a security certification….
And now it’s Apple’s turn
It’s been a weird month for technology. And as always, Apple had a way to get people to stop talking about anything else, though it’s not the news Apple wanted do deliver this week. I can only think of one bit of news Apple would want to deliver less.
Steve Jobs is stepping down as CEO. He’s becoming chairman, but perception is everything. Especially with Apple. I don’t think any company in recent memory has leveraged perception the way Apple has.
Lessons of the HP Touchpad
At full price ($499 for the 16 GB model and $599 for the 32 GB model) the HP Touchpad was a colossal flop. Like AT&T’s first PC clones of the mid 1980s, it was a me-too product at a me-too price that wasn’t quite as good as the product it was imitating. So, basically, there was no reason to buy it.
At closeout prices, it became an Internet sensation. The few web sites that have it in stock can’t handle the traffic they’re getting. At $99 and $149, it’s selling like the Nintendo Wii in its glory days.
And I think there’s a significant parallel there that highlights the missed opportunity.
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Oracle’s bombshell: We might buy HP
And if the HP situation couldn’t get any weirder, Forbes speculates that Larry Ellison and Mark Hurd might attempt a takeover of HP if its share price drops far enough. HP and Oracle once were close partners, but now they hate each other.
I think it might be a little more complicated.
Should you sell your stock in 2011?
I see this question coming through on Google all the time: Should I sell my stock in 2011?
Two letters: NO.
There. That was easy. But I’ll explain why.
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How about hard drives that vary their speed based on workload?
Facebook wants hard drives that slow down when the data they hold isn’t in high demand. They estimate that slowing a drive from 7200 RPM down to 3600 RPM could cut its power usage from 7W to 3W.
We already do something like this with other hardware. Why not with hard drives?
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