David L. Farquhar on technology old and new, computer security, and more
Every time a major anniversary for either system comes along, discussion of how the NES saved the videogame industry after the disastrous Atari 2600 comes with it. Your opinion of Atari vs Nintendo probably depends on your age.
I have to admit I scratch my head as I read this stuff. Did the people who write it live through both of them? By what measure was the 2600 a disaster? I can’t help but speak out in defense of Atari a bit.
This week the usual sources were flooded with stories about how slow and bloated Openoffice is. I guess this came on the heels of the release of version 2.0; it’s never been much of a secret that Openoffice was big and slow. It’s descended from Staroffice, after all, and it was big and slow too.
Speedup tips ensued.
I’m not sure when I first heard of Craigslist. I think it was sometime this year. It’s probably the biggest up-and-coming website there is, and while it’s a way of life for some (people have used it to sell everything they own, including their house, then move to a new city, find a new place to live, a new job, and new stuff to fill it) a large number of people have never seen or heard of it.
What I’ve always wondered is how what amounts to a free classified ad board makes money.It turns out it makes its money from the job postings. Prospective employers have to pay for their ads. The rest of us get to freeload. And I do; I’ve sold stuff there, and I’ve bought stuff there. I’ve placed wanted ads, and I’ve bought stuff there that I knew I could resell for a profit elsewhere.
A lot of people don’t like the site because it’s basically all text with virtually no graphic design. Other people like it for just that reason. Personally, its minimalist design doesn’t bother me at all. It’s a free ad service, it’s easy enough for me to find stuff on it, and enough people use it to make it worthwhile to look there and post there. What more could you want?
Supposedly, the up-and-coming Google Base is going to take aim at Craigslist. Others think it’s an Ebay killer. We’ll see. Based on the few vague descriptions that are out there, it’s not clear to me exactly what it’s intended to do yet.
Personally, I’d rather see Ebay get some real competition. Amazon and Yahoo have launched auction sites, but no one comes. People list at those venues basically as an afterthought. I’ve picked up some bargains both places, but it’s rare enough that anything I’m interested in turns up there that it’s been months since I’ve looked either place.
Ebay is big and successful and you can find almost anything there, but it’s almost too big and too successful. Its fees are high, and if you use Paypal, you essentially pay the fees twice. What we’re seeing is the classic monopoly problem: The company is so dominant, the only way for it to gain revenue is by raising its fees, so it raises its fees every year. The people who make their living on the service protest, but there isn’t much they can do about it; packing up and going elsewhere won’t work because there’s nowhere else to go. So they work harder.
Competition would be good for everyone. It would force Ebay to lower its fees and find other ways to improve its experience, and maybe the competing product will be better too. Imagine what the auto industry would be like if GM didn’t have Ford and Toyota around to keep it honest.
What about Craigslist? Well, if it goes by the wayside, it was fun while it lasted. But I suspect it, too, will adapt.
Hmm. Companies hire H1Bs to pay them less.
And in other news, George W. Bush listens to country music.H1Bs are the worst thing that has happened to the computer industry, aside from all of the massive outsourcing. When you can’t outsource, you drag an indentured servant over here from someplace else and pay him 60% of what you paid his predecessor.
H1B sysadmins make for $17K a year less than U.S.-born sysadmins (such as me). This could explain the dearth of sysadmin-type jobs out there. I had a recruiter contact me this week about a job for an experienced Unix sysadmin. At best I’m a marginal candidate for the job. When he told me the pay, I couldn’t believe it. It was easily $13K a year less than I would have expected, given the qualifications. It’s a step up for me–a small one–but I doubted that someone who was really a good fit for the job would actually take that little.
We’ll see if that job ends up going to an H1B. I suspect it will.
I’ve been contacted for a number of jobs this past week that pay $30,000 a year. No benefits. I told the last guy–obviously an H1B himself–that you can’t live in St. Louis on what he was offering. Well, if you can find an apartment next door to a crackhouse and you drive a 1991 Honda Civic I suppose you can… But I did the math. Adjusted for inflation, that’s less than I made at my first job coming out of college at age 22.
So CEOs slash salary costs and pocket huge bonuses while they take a wrecking ball to the local economy. But they also destroy productivity. I have to deal with a lot of people in my day-to-day job whose first language obviously isn’t English, and it can be hard sometimes. There are an awful lot of problems that come across my desk that literally take 30 seconds to fix. I know this, my boss knows this, and my two coworkers know this. But there are times when I have to read the description of the problem about 12 times before I finally figure out what the problem is and what the writer wanted me to do about it. And I might have to bug one of the other guys to read it to confirm my interpretation. So that 30-second problem can easily balloon into a monster that consumed half a man-hour.
Of course, some genius will take that out of context and use it to argue that U.S.-born workers are lazy, unproductive, and overpaid.
Normally, politicians have no control over the economy. But I think this next crash, when it comes, will be made in Washington.
What economic crash? Let’s think about it. We’ve encouraged a negative savings rate to artificially fuel a sputtering economy, so people are strung out to the point that when gas prices jump 50 cents it’s an economic hardship. Add a 15% cut in salary (whether it happens through a true salary cut or if it happens over the course of several years of raises not keeping pace with inflation) and let’s see what happens. People can’t afford their lifestyles now. Make ’em absorb a 15% cut in salary and see what happens. Oh, and make the bankruptcy laws more difficult while you’re at it.
Yeah, they got smart fellas in Washington. Yee haw.
There’s advice flying around the ‘net today about how much energy we save by shutting PCs off when they’re not in use.
Having widely dispensed the advice to leave PCs on all the time (but I’ve been saying for 15 years to turn monitors off), let me be the contrarian and talk about the counterpoint.The issue is the amount of energy an idle PC wastes doing nothing. And that’s the main reason I’ve always recommended turning monitors off–monitors use a lot of energy and give off a lot of heat, and there’s no particular advantage to leaving them on either. Picture tubes degrade rapidly if they’re left on all the time–this is why every monitor in a used computer store requires you to turn the brightness and contrast all the way up for the display to be readable. Turning the monitor off and on repeatedly isn’t good for it either, but it saves the picture tube.
Now, on to the PC. My PC on its own consumes less electricity than the light bulbs in the room it sits in. Energy costs are going up, but that’s still only a few dollars a year it’s burning. In the 15 years I’ve been leaving computers on all the time, I’ve had a very small number of hardware failures–I’ve lost maybe four hard drives, and one or two power supplies. And I own a lot more computers than the average person. That averages out to one repair every two years on a house full of computers. If I were having to replace a hard drive every year, I’d be spending more money.
Aside from the money, how much energy am I saving by not having to replace lots of parts every year? Isn’t the increased lifespan of my computers worth something?
That’s not the only issue, of course. A computer generates some heat, and in the summer you have to get rid of that heat. But rather than turning PCs off all the time, I prefer to minimize their power consumption. If I don’t need the hottest new 3D video card (which I don’t), then I don’t use it. And the majority of my CPUs are in the gigahertz neighborhood. They do everything I need. So I save energy that way. I get energy savings elsewhere (by using compact flourescent bulbs, for example), so to me, leaving the PCs on makes sense.
In the winter, of course, the heat given off by PCs is a nice benefit. The more heat my computer gives off, the less work my furnace has to do.
I think some common sense is in order. I turn my monitors off when they’re not in use (though LCDs use little power, I recommend shutting them off too in order to conserve the backlight). The PCs I use every day stay powered on. PCs that I only use occasionally–say, once or twice a week–get powered down when I am finished with them for the day. Admittedly I’m more likely to leave a little-used PC powered on in the winter or summer.
This is cool. Steve DeLassus finds stuff and I blog it. If you like Tinyurl, there’s a Firefox extension that’s going to make you like it a lot more. If you don’t know what Tinyurl is, read on and you’ll be using it almost every day.First, why Tinyurl is useful: Ever try to give someone a web address, and you end up with something that’s three lines long? Items on Ebay are probably the worst. You try to e-mail it to someone, or post it on a discussion board, and the long length messes up the formatting, or the address gets chopped up and people have to copy and paste the thing back together again–if they think to try it.
Tinyurl is a web page you can visit, punch in any obnoxious address of any length, and it spits out an address that’s a few characters long, which can be easily passed along and won’t mess anything up.
Nice, eh? But what if you don’t want to visit tinyurl.com over and over again?
Install the TinyURL extension for Firefox, that’s what. Then you can just push a button to turn whatever page you’re viewing into a tinyurl and it goes straight to the clipboard. Push a button, then paste, and you’ve got it. What could be easier?
In case you haven’t read it elsewhere, Flash and other plugins allow popups in Firefox, even if you have popups disabled. Here’s how to disable popups from plugins.
I made the change (it takes 30 seconds) and the sites that had been getting popups through to me aren’t anymore.
I hang out at several train-related sites online. The Gauge is one of my favorites, partly because I learn so much there.
One of its great teachers, who was known both by his handle, Matthyro, and his first name, Robin, died today. In some ways he was the heart and soul of The Gauge–not many have their own entire section named after them.
You owe it to yourself to take a look at what Robin could build. What you’ll see isn’t the work of a hobbyist. It’s the work of a true artist.Unfortunately not many build like Robin anymore. Robin’s main material was, of all things, cardboard from cereal boxes. Sometimes he’d add corrugated cardboard, and wood was almost a last resort.
In an era when most people buy their structures for their layouts already assembled, and people can wow a crowd by dripping thinned gray paint into the lines that are supposed to represent mortar and drybrush a little grime on it, Robin stood out.
And he wasn’t the least bit shy about sharing his methods. He patiently took pictures of each step of most of his projects, posting them online and explaining just about everything he did–the master teaching his captivated students.
I learned a ton from reading his posts on the forum the last 18 months or so. I know I’m not the only one who will miss him.
I count myself fortunate to have been able to follow some of the last of his projects while they were still in progress.
I wanted to build a small-as-possible Linux for the purpose of creating a lightweight NAS a few years back. I even downloaded the uclibc development tools and started compiling for the purpose of doing it. Then I got distracted.
I guess it doesn’t matter. I think NASLite had beaten me to the punch anyway.Here’s how it works. You download the appropriate floppy for the network type (SMB for Windows networks, NFS for Unix) and network card you have. You find an old PC. As long as it has PCI slots, it’ll work. Drop in the NIC if there isn’t one there already, and then drop in as many as four IDE hard drives. (The disk will reformat the drives if there’s anything there, so make sure they’re new or scratch drives beforehand.) If the BIOS doesn’t support the drives because they’re too big, disable them in the BIOS. Don’t worry, Linux controls the drives directly so you don’t need the BIOS. Boot off the floppy, and it joins the network and you’ve got a bunch of disk space for the cost of the drives and possibly the NIC.
Nice, huh?
This isn’t suitable for use in most corporate environments since it creates wide-open storage (it might work well as a big file dump, so long as people realize there’s no security there, but I’ve learned the hard way that users tend not to listen, or at least not remember, when they’re told such things). For home networks it’s fine, unless you’ve got wireless, in which case anyone who can get into your wireless network would also be able to get to your NAS.
Even then, it’s useful if what you want is a central repository for programs like Irfanview and Mozilla Firefox that you install on all your PCs and want to keep handy.
At any rate, if you’re creative and careful and have a Linux box and know how to use the dd command (or have a fairly up-to-date copy of WinImage) to copy a 1.72-meg disk image to a floppy, this is a useful tool for you.
The FBI nailed Alan Ralsky.
Ralsky’s reaction? “I’m not a spammer. I’m a commercial e-mailer.”
In other news, Marion Berry doesn’t go to strip bars. He goes to erotic clubs.Ralsky, if you’re not familiar with him, is one of the more prolific spammers in the world. And while some people sympathize with him since sending spam seems to be the only way he can make a living, the fact is that spam hurts everyone. It wastes your time–the lost productivity dealing with spam has been valued at anywhere from $9 to $22 billion–and it hurts your ISP too.
I know someone who administers mail servers for one of the largest cable companies in the United States. The upgrades to its mail servers cost six figures when they have to do it. This past week he described the situation with spam and worms as “SETI@Home in a DDoS attack against mail.ispname.net.”
If you want to know why broadband Internet access doesn’t cost $5 a month, you can blame people like Ralsky.
Defenders say Ralsky didn’t break any laws. But according to various anti-spam laws, you disguising the origins of your mail is illegal, and Ralsky has been guilty of this. To me, this rings of jailing Al Capone for tax evasion. Another question to ask is whether Ralsky has hawked pornography to underage children and whether he has ever hawked prescription drugs. If he had set up a table on a streetcorner and done either of those things, he would have landed himself in jail. If it’s illegal on the streetcorner, it ought to be illegal online. Especially because if he were doing it on the streetcorner, he’s only using a small parcel of public land. When he does it online, he’s utilizing thousands of computers that don’t belong to him.
I was glad when thousands of people signed Ralsky up for every junk-mail list they could find. It told a lot about his character when he remained defiant afterward. Filling his mailbox with junk was wrong, yet he saw nothing wrong with filling out e-mail boxes and he continued to do so.
Someone else will rise to take his place, but it will take time to learn his tactics, and in the meantime, anti-spam tools will get better.
The reason spam works is because somebody buys stuff from it. It might be one out of a thousand, or one out of a million, depending on who you believe. But it doesn’t take much more effort to blast out 3 million messages than it takes to blast out 3 thousand. It’s an attractive business because someone who’s unable or unwilling to do other work can get started with little or no expense, using equipment he or she probably already owns. It’s safer than, say, trying to sell stuff on Ebay. If I list a big pile of stuff on Ebay and it doesn’t sell, I owe listing fees–probably around 30 cents–on each item that doesn’t sell. Plus I’m stuck with that item and out whatever I paid to get it. But if I blast out a bunch of spam and nobody bites, I haven’t really lost anything, except maybe my ISP suspending or discontinuing my service.
The courts need to make an example of Alan Ralsky. Meanwhile, the FBI needs to go find a few of the other big fish in this pond and do the same.