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Help someone plug a computer into a TV, become a criminal

Dave Farquhar Hardware July 14, 2011July 16, 20111980s, apple, Apple Computer, DisplayPort, garage sale, hp, radio shack, RCA, sony, VCR

Digital video is confusing. You get some clear advantages, since signal degradation becomes a thing of the past, but if you’re not someone who works in video for a living, it’s difficult to keep it all straight. And standards are a problem. You can’t just assume that two devices will work together because they’re both “digital.”

One of the problems is physical incompatibility. Some devices have Displayport ports. Some of them have HDMI ports. The solution is easy: get a cable with an HDMI connector on one end and a Displayport connector on the other. Problem solved.

And now the guy who sold it to you is a criminal. (You aren’t necessarily. Possession isn’t illegal, just sale or manufacture. So don’t sell it at your garage sale in 2019.)
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Microsoft sold 400 million Windows 7 licenses; what does it mean?

Dave Farquhar Software, Windows July 13, 2011March 25, 2025android, apple, apple ii, IOS, os x, piracy, proprietary unix, Steve Ballmer, unix, vista, windows 2000, windows 7, windows 8, windows 98, windows me, Windows Vista, Windows XP

Steve Ballmer announced today that Microsoft has sold 400 million Windows 7 licenses, but anywhere from half to two-thirds of PCs are still running Windows XP and need to get with the program.

He also continues to insist Windows 8 will ship in 2012, which really makes me wonder why those XP users need to switch now. December 2012 is 17 short months away, and XP support runs until 2014. I see little need to rush out now and buy Windows 7, use it for 18-24 months, and then turn around and buy Windows 8. If XP is fulfilling users’ needs, what’s the hurry? Unless Windows 8 is going to be late, as bad as Vista, or both. But none of that can happen, right? (Note: It’s not 2014 anymore, so if you haven’t upgraded from XP, you need to.)

I’m sure the Windows 8 Police will be along to haul me away shortly for insinuating such things. But until that happens, that 400 million figure lets us do some other interesting extrapolation. Read more

Google jumps into the e-reader game

Dave Farquhar Hardware July 12, 2011October 11, 2019android, christmas, Microsoft Office, Open Office, public domain, tin

On July 17, Google and Target are introducing the Iriver Story HD, a $139 e-reader. And the more I think about it, the more I think Google is really serious about being a player in this space. The analysts who are dismissing it as a me-too, too-late product miss one key thing.

Integrating WordPress 3.2 with Twitter

Dave Farquhar net.culture, This weblog July 11, 2011April 17, 2017Bing, LinkedIn, SEO, tweet

Rich P. tells me all the cool kids use Twitter now. And that some people, instead of using RSS feeds, want to get blog updates from a Twitter feed.

I’m about four years late to that party, but I’m not ready to become a total curmudgeon yet. So I signed up for a Twitter account–I’m siliconundergro, or is that #siliconundergro? Or @siliconundergro?–and spent a little while figuring out how to get WordPress to talk to it.

How to use WordPress’ drafts feature to your advantage

Dave Farquhar Writing July 10, 2011

In 1994, I was a rookie columnist for my college newspaper. My predecessor, Judd Slivka, had stepped aside to become sports editor. Judd asked me one day how my new gig was going, and I observed that ideas were coming to me faster than I could write them. “Write them down,” he urged me. “You’ll need them later.” And he was right. It took about a month for me to learn that ideas come in waves and droughts, and survival as a weekly columnist depends on stretching those waves far enough to cover the droughts.

And bloggers face exactly the same challenge. Otherwise, they run out of ideas and become people who post something only occasionally, and, eventually, not at all.

Upgrade diary: Compaq Presario C552US

Dave Farquhar Hardware July 9, 2011July 9, 2011apple, compaq, intel, spartan, toshiba, vista, Western Digital, windows 7, Windows Vista

The Presario C552US shipped from the factory with a 1.6 GHz Celeron M single-core CPU, 512MB of RAM, and Windows Vista Home Basic.

It’s the most miserable computing experience I’ve seen in a very long time, if ever. I don’t know how they ever sold a single one of these machines, performing like that.

Fortunately, there’s room to improve it.

Is it OK to defragment a laptop?

Dave Farquhar Hardware July 8, 2011September 26, 20171990s, christmas, defragmenter, vista, windows 2000, windows 98

Yet another question from a reader: Is it OK to defragment a laptop?

Of course it is. A laptop is a computer, after all. The only question is how often, and with what.

Should journalists hack?

Dave Farquhar Journalism July 6, 20111990s, journalism, Missouri, piracy, university of missouri

I experienced an interesting collection of contrasts going to journalism school in the mid 1990s. Inside the same building, we had investigative journalists who specialized in advanced use of databases and stodgy editors who missed the days of manual typewriters and wore technological ignorance as a badge of honor.

And yet, there were textbooks that said journalists ought to be learning computer programming, because there was going to be a need for journalists who had the ability to do both. It took a while, but it seems that day has come. Maybe not to sit down and write applications software, but to hack.

But is it ethical for a journalist to hack?
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More help is on the way for high Firefox memory usage

Dave Farquhar Software July 6, 2011July 6, 2011chrome, firefox, keyboard shortcuts, Task Manager

After years of workarounds, and even sometimes denying there was a problem, Mozilla has identified a fix for Firefox’s sometimes out-of-control memory usage.

The culprit appears to be the Javascript engine, which probably shouldn’t be much of a surprise.
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A snapshot in history of Gates and Microsoft, 1992

Dave Farquhar Software July 5, 2011March 25, 20251990s, altair, Andy Grove, apple, Apple Macintosh, Bill Gates, DEC, Digital Research, IBM, intel, macintosh, Microsoft Office, Paul Allen, Steve Ballmer, windows me, Windows XP

Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire is a 1992 autobiography of Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates. It’s old. But it’s a compelling snapshot of what the industry thought of Gates and Microsoft before Windows 95, before Microsoft Office, and before Internet Explorer. Indeed, it gives an early glimpse into the struggle to bring Windows to market, some of the bad bets Microsoft cast on its early productivity software, and just how close Microsoft came to betting the company on the success of the Apple Macintosh.

If Microsoft’s history were written today, many of these stories would probably be forgotten.