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If Microsoft goes through with the threat to ribbon-ize Explorer

Dave Farquhar Software April 8, 2011Windows XP

If Microsoft goes through with its threat to foist the atrocious ribbon on the flawed but useful and usable Explorer, I have insurance.

You can install Far Manager, a text-mode Win32/Win64 clone of the classic Norton Commander. It’s fast, it’s functional, it’s easy to use, and it looks just like you remember the old DOS classic that you haven’t used since the day you upgraded from DOS to something else, whether that was OS/2 or Windows 95. But it supports long filenames and it’s a true 32- or 64-bit application.

If you prefer a GUI application, there’s Free Commander, which resembles the Windows GUI version of Norton Commander.

My proposal to improve Windows 8

Dave Farquhar Windows April 7, 2011command prompt, netbooks, pc magazine, windows 7, windows 8

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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Buy online, manufacture at home

Dave Farquhar General April 6, 2011November 3, 2025american flyer, Ars Technica, tinkerer

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.

Stan Musial and his frozen appendix

Dave Farquhar Baseball April 5, 2011July 30, 20181940s, cardinals, classmate, Stan Musial

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

How to find out what add-ons are slowing down Firefox

Dave Farquhar Software April 4, 2011antivirus, firefox, malware, Malware Domains

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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Flaky networking? Suspect cheap NICs

Dave Farquhar Hardware, Servers and Networking April 3, 2011March 2, 20223com, Broadcom, d-link, hp, intel, netgear

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.

Intel’s and Sandforce’s AES-128 encryption is useful, but not for what you think

Dave Farquhar Hardware, security April 2, 2011April 3, 2025AES, anandtech, intel, ocz, passwords, TrueCrypt

I spent some time this week with a coworker looking into the AES-128 encryption in current Sandforce and upcoming Intel 320 SSDs, and we’ve concluded it’s no substitute for software full-drive encryption.

This is important, so we’ll talk about it further.

Reactions to Allen’s memoir. And my reactions to them.

Dave Farquhar Retro Computing April 1, 2011January 2, 20251990s, 6502, altair, apple, apple ii, Digital Research, Gary Kildall, IBM, Microsoft Basic, out of the blue, Paul Allen

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

Paul Allen’s tearing into Gates seems familiar

Dave Farquhar Retro Computing March 31, 2011March 25, 20251990s, altair, Bill Gates, DEC, IBM, New Mexico, out of the blue, Paul Allen, Steve Ballmer

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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Can you set an HP slimline computer on its side?

Dave Farquhar Hardware March 30, 2011March 1, 20221980s, 1990s, hp

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.