David L. Farquhar on technology old and new, computer security, and more
I propose a new user interface for Calculator, because the one we’ve been using since 1990 is too confusing, and the one that came with Windows 7 didn’t help. It’s just different, not better.
The only thing that can save Calculator is the ribbon interface.
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The way we buy things (or don’t buy them) has changed a lot in the last decade or so. We stopped buying CDs. Now that our Internet connections are fast enough, we’ve really slowed down on buying movies, too. And the emergence of practical e-readers means a lot fewer people are buying books now too. All of this is part of the reason why there’s probably a Borders closing near you, and there are suddenly a lot less of what we used to call record stores too.
But there’s something even bigger looming overhead. 3D printing. Ars Technica has a piece about its legal implications. Rather than rehash that, I’d rather talk about some of its other implications, including why you should care at all.
Cardinals beat writer Derrick Goold (who also happens to be a former classmate) dug out an interesting story about Cardinal great Stan Musial. In 1947, he was diagnosed with appendicitis. Team doctor Robert Hyland was reluctant to recommend immediate surgery, as it would sideline Musial, the team’s best player, for nearly a month. So instead, he froze Musial’s appendix, Musial sat out five days, and played the rest of the season before having the appendix removed.
This curious, um, cure caused a lot of head shaking and questions. So I did a little digging. Read more
Here’s a site worth bookmarking. Add-ons are the big thing Firefox offers that the other browsers don’t, but it sometimes comes at the price of performance. And I guess Mozilla is tired of that, so now they’re testing add-on speed and publishing the results at https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/performance/ .
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It was 1998. I was getting ready to network my two PCs, so I asked my friendly neighborhood networking professional what to buy. He didn’t hesitate. “Intel or 3Com,” he said. “Cheap NICs will talk, but they’ll start acting flaky after a while, dropping packets in the middle of transfers, stuff like that.”
I couldn’t afford 3Com or Intel at the time, so I bought a cheap “SOHOware” brand bundle that included two 10/100 NICs, a hub, and cables for around $150. A comparable first-tier setup would have run me twice that. The hub died after a couple of years. The cards fared better. “After a while” took 11 years or so to come, and I finally got sick enough of it to retire my last one.
I hate April Fool’s Day. So nobody thinks this is an April Fool’s joke, I’ll just write more about what I wrote about yesterday, concentrating on media reactions to Paul Allen’s memoir. Then, tomorrow, I’ll revisit a very serious, important topic. Read more
You’ve probably heard by now about Vanity Fair publishing an excerpt from Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen’s autobiography, which doesn’t give the most flattering portrayal of Bill Gates, his former business partner.
I’ve heard most of these stories before, though I’m trying to figure out where. What surprises me is the people who are acting like this stuff came out of the blue. If I’ve heard most of this stuff before, then so have a lot of people.
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Here’s a question that came up the other day. Can you set an HP slimline computer on its side?
Yes.
How anticlimactic of me.
For a while in the 1970s and 1980s, Lionel used DC power in its least expensive O27 electric train sets. They stopped this practice in the mid 1980s, but there are still plenty of those sets kicking around in basements or attics and on the secondary market. They tend to be very inexpensive, especially compared to new sets on the market today.
Here’s how to figure out what you have, and track down a suitable replacement. AC and DC power supplies are not interchangeable, and you can seriously damage your train if you use the wrong kind. Trying to run a DC train on AC results in a train that won’t move and makes a ton of noise.