David L. Farquhar on technology old and new, computer security, and more
Someone asked (not me specifically) whether it’s possible or desirable to run Marx and Lionel trains as part of the same layout, what the caveats are, and how to do it.
It seems to be a pretty dark secret. The answer is, yes it’s possible, and yes, it might very well be desirable, but it’s possible to run into some pitfalls.
Two weekends ago, I headed back up to Bethlehem Lutheran Church to rebuild the computer lab I had set up for them a few years ago. Built on P3-based Compaq Deskpros and Windows 98, it had held up, but was desperately in need of repair.
The vision of this project was to set up a lab in a declining neighborhood, where kids could come to do their homework and adults could come to learn computer skills. The lab is run under adult supervision, and outsiders with teaching and/or training experience come in occasionally to teach computer literacy classes.
Ultimately, I want this project to produce some sysadmins in North St. Louis. Years ago, when this was in the planning stage, I told Pastor John Schmidtke that I wanted to see some Mercedeses and BMWs in that neighborhood, purchased with salaries earned from skills picked up in that lab.
Well, that hasn’t happened yet. But there’s still time. In the meantime, how about if I talk about what I’ve learned from three years of operation?Fancy computers not necessary
These were midrange machines when they were new. The lab cost some $10,000 to build, including materials to renovate the room. A contractor who attends my church renovated the room to my specifications. For what it’s worth, I told him there would be about 10 computers there, and the keyboards needed to sit so that a five-foot person’s elbows would make a right angle while seated. He built an around-the-room desk to hold the computers and bored out a couple of holes at each station for the keyboards.
Back to the computers. Today those computers would be worth about $100 apiece. That’s OK–they’re fine for word processing and e-mail, casual web browsing, and educational games, which was the goal. They were fine then and they’re fine now.
Any business with a philanthropic mindset could duplicate what we did here with a dozen outmoded office computers. A Pentium II with 64 MB of RAM can run Windows 95 or 98 adequately. There’s no point in messing with anything lower than that, since P2s sell for 50 bucks a pop these days. One thing I will say: The quality of the keyboards, mice, and monitors is much more important than the computers themselves. If people are going to be typing, they need decent monitors, a good mouse, and a keyboard that doesn’t feel like oatmeal. So if you’re working with a budget, plan on spending the most on monitors and optical mice.
Adequate power outlets completely necessary
There was only one hardware failure in this lab’s three years. One computer wouldn’t run, no matter what I did. It wouldn’t even power up.
Well, speaking as someone with a decade of professional experience in sales and service of computers, I’m embarrassed to say the computer that failed wasn’t plugged in. It looked like it was plugged in. But with the electrical outlets in a mismash and the cables all over the place, it wasn’t. Why didn’t I try another power cable and discover the problem? I have no excuse.
I suspect someone needed an outlet for something–be it speakers or a hair dryer, you never know–unplugged something at random, then didn’t plug it back in when finished. Worse yet, the business end of the cable ended up in a box under the desk, so everything looked fine. The result was a computer that didn’t run for about two years. I didn’t even find the stray end of the cable until I traced several other cables.
So provide as many outlets as your breaker box can handle. Provide extras. People will bring in other things they want to plug in. Three outlets per seat (computer, monitor, and speakers) is inadequate. To be safe, plan on four.
Create system images
You’ll have to reload the system no matter what you do. Lockdown software can be counted on to break things for the innocent and at best only slow down the people who are going to circumvent it. When the goal is for people to learn how things work, they need to be at least somewhat free to experiment. So make images of a working system with all software installed. Train someone to re-image the system. Then don’t be shy about re-imaging. Do it once a week or any time something goes wrong with a computer. If you can’t afford Norton Ghost or PowerQuest DriveImage, a freeware alternative called Savepart exists. Use it. Come to think of it, use that, and spend the money you’d spend on Ghost or DriveImage on better keyboards or mice.
Use identical hardware
System images don’t save you much trouble if your hardware is all different. Your image probably won’t work. Use systems that are as similar as possible: same motherboard, same video card, same sound card (if not on the motherboard), same network card. Put the cards in the same slots on each machine.
Frequently you can get away with not being that careful, but trust me, you don’t want the one time in a thousand that it matters to come and bite you.
Match your hardware and operating system
Sometimes it’s not possible to use completely identical hardware. In those instances, make sure any dissimilar hardware is recognized by the OS without loading any drivers. For example, this lab has a mix of Netgear and Intel network cards. The Netgear isn’t recognized by Windows but the Intel is. So I made the image for a Netgear, and when the system comes up with an Intel, it handles the situation gracefully.
Do the same thing for the sound cards and video cards.
Don’t ask too much of your systems
Yes, Windows XP will install and boot on a Pentium II with 64 MB of RAM. But there is absolutely no benefit to it. XP wants lots of memory and CPU power, and when it doesn’t get it, it’s a slow pig. Realistically, a P2 with 64 megs ought to be running Windows 98. Don’t even try 2000 or XP unless you have P3s faster than 500 MHz with 256 MB of RAM.
While there are subtle differences between versions, for the most part Windows is Windows. If someone can use Windows 98 and Office 97, it’s easy to adjust to the current versions. Don’t be afraid of running back-level versions.
Get discounted charity/educational software
You don’t have to pay $200 for Windows and $500 for Office to build a computer lab for a charity. I don’t know what charity or educational prices are right now, but it’s a fraction of that. The rule of thumb is this: If you don’t pay sales tax, you don’t have to pay full price for software either.
Most computer stores can get you information on charity pricing. Support your local computer store. You might need it someday. Who knows–the owner may be able to get you a line on some things you need.
And if worse comes to worse, run Linux. That was my original plan, but Pastor Schmidtke wanted to use what local businesses were using. That’s a better plan, but if you can’t afford software, Linux works nicely and is more than adequate for things like word processing and web browsing.
Just do it. That’s about all else I can say. The lab in your head isn’t doing anyone a bit of good. If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing badly. If you’ve got a vision for this, get what you can to get the lab up and running. You can always come back and add newer or more computers later.
I upgraded to Mozilla Firefox 0.9 today. My initial impression is pretty good, with one caveat.
If you’re running an earlier version and haven’t upgraded already, make a backup of your profile first. I upgraded from version 0.8 without uninstalling version 0.8 first, and lost my saved passwords and bookmarks. What I lost isn’t anything I can’t type in again or find again but it was annoying.
But that’s pretty much where the problems end.This new version feels faster than the old one did. It also seems a bit more stable, but a few hours of messing around isn’t enough of a test to declare something stable or not. I’m also not about to assume that any other living human being’s browser habits resemble mine.
I did notice that memory usage has a tendency to go back down as I close tabs. That’s an improvement–that didn’t always happen with older versions.
The ultimate test is going to be leaving it open for about a week of heavy use. Older versions tended to not like when I did that–memory usage would balloon and over time the speed would degrade. We’ll see how this version handles that torture test.
Since I had to go back and re-customize it, I can tell you the tweaks I make to the browser. Maybe you’ll like some of them too.
First, I type about:config into the address bar to bring up all the hidden options.
I set network.http.pipelining to true, and network.http.pipelining.maxrequests to 100. This speeds up page rendering, at the cost of occasionally mangling a page. (This happens most frequently when I visit Slashdot, ironically.) Reloading usually clears it up. The problem happens infrequently enough that I live with it–I like the speed.
I set image.animation_mode to “none”, since I find animated GIFs distracting. Try browsing with image animation turned off and I’ll bet you’ll wonder how you ever lived without it. You can also set the string to “once” if you like animation. That way you can still see the animation but it doesn’t continue to loop while you’re trying to read.
I set browser.popups.showPopupBlocker to false. I don’t care to know when Firefox has blocked a popup–these days it’s pretty safe to assume that every site up there sent you a barrage of popups.
I set browser.blink_allowed to false. Few people use the dreaded blink tag anymore, especially since it was a proprietary Netscape tag that few others implemented. It doesn’t hurt anything to disable it just in case someone used it somewhere.
Since you can never have too much screen real estate, I customize the toolbars as well. If you go to View, Toolbars, Customize, you can drag the icons and menu items you use wherever you want. Drag things you don’t use down to the bottom. For example, if you never use the Go and Help menus, drag them down to get rid of them. I drag the address bar up to the top, next to the Help menu. Since I don’t use anything else on the navigation and bookmarks toolbars (I use keyboard shortcuts), I turn those off, which opens up lots more screen real estate. If there are some icons you use, you can drag them up to the menu bar and turn off those toolbars to save some space. It’s cheaper than a bigger monitor and takes up less space on your desk.
And as much as we tend to live in our web browsers these days, it’s almost as good as having a bigger monitor, isn’t it?
A mailing list I subscribe to reminded me of some good advice I haven’t repeated in a very long time. Someone recommended a favorite screen saver, and then someone else chimed in, warning that nothing stops a screen saver, or any other free program, from being infested with spyware and other undesirable things.
The only screen saver I’ve been using for the past 12 years has been Blank Screen (or its equivalent–12 years ago I wasn’t running Windows). Why? Because every other screen saver does more harm than good, that’s why.
The idea behind screen savers is to keep an image that’s been displayed a long time from becoming permanently etched into your monitor’s phosphors. English, please? We have a monitor at work that permanently says “It is now safe to shut down your computer” because the person who used to use that monitor wouldn’t turn it off at the end of the day when she left. This was the result of displaying that screen repeatedly for 16 hours a day during the week and for 60+ hours every weekend.
Modern monitors make screen burn much more rare than it used to be, but they are still vulnerable to extreme abuse like I just mentioned. Monitors used to burn much more quickly, but these days I’ve inadvertently left a monitor on overnight displaying the same thing with no ill effects.
The idea behind a screensaver is to display some moving object to keep your e-mail screen from getting burned in. Nice idea, but unnecessary in an age when you can leave the same image on the screen unchanged for 8 hours without harm. The other problem is that many screensavers are poorly written, either intentionally or inadvertently causing harm to the system. I can’t tell you how many times I solved an intermittent computer problem just by changing the screen saver to blank screen. Some screensavers do crash the system.
Plus, what your monitor really needs to be doing during its idle periods is resting. Some screensavers can cause your monitor’s phosphors to age prematurely, causing odd (and annoying) visual effects if they wear it unevenly, or, if they wear it evenly, they cause you to have to crank the brightness on your monitor up all the way in order to see the picture.
Displaying bright, fast-moving graphics is harder on the monitor than just displaying a static screen.
Set your screen saver to blank screen, with a timeout interval of 30 minutes, and you’ll actually do your monitor some good. And who doesn’t want increased monitor life expectancy? A good monitor can outlive three computers. As an added bonus, displaying just a blank screen cuts the monitor’s power consumption as well.
Some might say a computer set up this way lacks personality. Maybe it does. So spend the money you didn’t have to spend on a new monitor on some pretty pictures and other doodads to spice up the space around your monitor. A cool toy always gets more attention than even the best screen saver.
I went to a family reunion this past weekend. You typically need rosters at my family’s family reunions, because my grandmother had 13 brothers and sisters. I don’t know why, but before I got into genealogy, I just couldn’t keep everyone straight.
Now that I know how people are connected to one another, it’s somehow easier to keep it straight.
At the end of the day, my aunt drove me out to the house where my grandmother grew up.Along the way, she told me my great grandfather, Tom Kimrey, didn’t buy a car until after World War II, when he bought a surplus jeep. She said she didn’t know if he ever learned how to drive it, although several of his daughters did. We pulled onto Kimrey Lane and drove all the way to the end. It was cool to see a street named after one of my ancestors, even if it was on the edge of a booming metropolis of 74.
The house was a humble affair. It’s a four-room house, with a kitchen, living room and two bedrooms. The living room doubled as the master bedroom. There was no running water. The house had a tin roof and tarpaper on the sides. A brick pattern was etched into the tarpaper. My aunt showed me where the pot-bellied stove used to be, and where my great grandmother Sallie Groves’ pump organ used to sit.
The whole house was probably smaller than my kitchen and my study put together. And Tom and Sallie raised 13 kids in it. (One died very young.)
I guess standards of living have changed a bit over the course of four generations.
At any rate, seeing that old house gave me some idea of why my grandmother and great aunts and uncles were the way they were about some things. Sharing a bedroom with six other people changes your perspective about things, I guess.
Well, with the Royals having been all but mathematically eliminated from contention by Memorial Day–that’s what happens when you forget how to field, pitch, and hit, and aren’t fast enough to steal any bases–it looks like they’ll soon be disassembling the team. And the first to go out the door will be Carlos Beltran.
He shouldn’t be.Beltran is possibly the most underrated player in baseball. He’s a classic five-tool player, in that he makes spectacular catches, has a great throwing arm, can steal bases, hit home runs, and hit for average. For the past four years or so he’s been one of the most exciting players in baseball, but because he’s played in Kansas City, even a lot of Kansas Citians don’t know it.
Trouble is, Beltran is represented by Scott Boras, who is a leading candidate, along with George Steinbrenner, Bud Selig, and Donald Fehr, to do the most to ruin the game of baseball. I think the nicest thing I’ve ever heard Boras called was "a one-man wrecking ball." Hey, none of those words will get you fined by the FCC…
Boras gets called lots of colorful things because Boras is a master at extracting every red cent out of you. Boras gets seven-figure salaries for pitchers who can’t pitch and position players who can’t hit or field routinely. And if you happen to be any good at all, Boras will get you an eight-figure salary.
How’d World Series MVP Ivan Rodriguez end up playing for the Detroit Tigers, a team that lost 119 games last year? Easy. They were the only team willing to pay the salary Boras demanded.
So, back to Beltran. Scott Boras’ job now, the way he sees it, is to present Beltran as the best player in baseball. Or at the very least, twice as good as anyone else available. And as we all know, if you’re twice as good as someone else who plays baseball, you should make at least four times as much money.
Scott Boras is going to try to get Beltran $25 million a year. And if he can’t get it, he’ll take the best offer on the table, which needless to say probably won’t be the $9 million the Royals are paying Beltran now.
So the Royals, desperate to get more than nothing for the best player they’ve developed since George Brett, are shopping Beltran. The only thing is, how many teams are willing to give you anything in exchange for a Scott Boras client, who’s going to walk at the end of the season?
The Yankees will, but the Yankees don’t have anything the Royals want or need. They’ve depleted all of it trading for less-talented players for their pennant drives the last few years. The Royals and Yankees discussed an even-up trade of Beltran for Alfonso Soriano during the offseason, but then the Yankees traded Soriano for Alex Rodriguez.
Seeing as nobody else is likely to have an Alfonso Soriano-caliber player at an Alfonso Soriano price to offer, the Royals’ best bet is to keep Beltran around and let him give them some highlight reel exposure. The Royals’ pitchers give him plenty of chances to chase down long fly balls.
The reason for this is simple: When a free agent the quality of Beltran departs, you don’t get nothing. You get a draft pick. In the case of Beltran, you’re virtually assured of getting the team’s first-round draft pick.
When you’re a small-market team, drafting is just about your only hope for being able to find and afford another player like Beltran.
Don’t be fooled by the topic I put this in: This has potential implications for any area of manufacturing.
Lionel, the most famous U.S. maker of toy trains and model railroads, has been found guilty of industrial espionage and ordered to pay $40 million to competitor MTH Electric Trains.
What happened? Well, both Lionel and MTH outsource their production. As it turned out, some work that was done for MTH ended up in Lionel designs as well.I really don’t think anyone has a good grasp of what happened, but the story I heard is that a contractor who worked for MTH’s subcontractor designing locomotives moonlighted for Lionel’s subcontractor, and that he reused some work that he did on an MTH design on a Lionel design. MTH claims Lionel knew about this. Lionel claims it did not.
Regardless of who you believe, somebody was wronged. R&D work for one company ended up benefiting its competitor, and now that mistake is costing lots of money.
As a consumer, I’m disappointed because I’ve been led to believe that Lionel and MTH do their own designs and outsource production to Korea and China. Evidently they outsource some of their lucrative R&D as well.
Apologists for both companies have said that Korean companies tend to be related by blood or marriage and that workers routinely move from company to company, taking trade secrets with them and using them. That’s the corporate culture. U.S. corporate culture, of course, is exactly the opposite. We demand that you somehow forget all of your proprietary trade secrets when you change employers. Or at least don’t use them in your new job.
The products involved in this case aren’t the $20 locomotives you see at Hobby Lobby or Toys ‘R Us either. We’re talking premium products that sell for five figures here. I’ve seen them in person–they’re definitely impressive looking. But they’re playthings for people who make six figures per year, minimum. I like O gauge Lionel stuff an awful lot. But I don’t expect to ever own one. They cost more than I’m willing to pay for a computer.
I suspect that with those kinds of profit margins, they could have afforded to build them in Michigan or New Jersey, where Lionel understands how its workers work and its workers understand how its employer works. That’s the scenario if you assume Lionel is innocent. If you assume Lionel is guilty, well, that scenario makes industrial espionage much more unlikely. It’s always best not to allow yourself to be tempted to do something wrong–it’s easier to avoid temptation than it is to resist it.
And if they’d had to raise the price of a $1,400 locomotive by another $100, I doubt too many people would have screamed. Especially if the words “Proudly made in USA” were prominently featured on the package.
There’s some question whether there’s even room in a $100 million hobby for both Lionel and MTH. When your industry is worth $100 million as a whole, and you have to share that pie with four or five competitors, you can’t really afford a $40 million jury award, can you?
Saving a few bucks in labor and R&D may have just cost Lionel its life.
I’m sure you’ve read it 4.3 billion other places already, but Microsoft has been granted a patent on double-clicking.
Well, there’s something you probably have only read a few hundred other places. Apple obviously had people double-clicking more than a year before Microsoft did, seeing as Windows 1.0 was released in November 1985 and the first Macintosh shipped in early 1984. Commodore had Amigans double-clicking by the summer of 1985. So did Atari.
Guess who supplied Atari with its operating system, since Jack Tramiel failed to swindle his way into ownership of the Amiga?
Digital Research, that’s who. DR provided Atari with a version of CP/M-68K, with its GEM GUI running on top of it. Atari marketed the bundle as TOS, for Tramiel OS.
Digital Research got crushed by the Microsoft juggernaut a few years later and eventually sold out to Novell. Novell then attempted to compete head-on with Microsoft (buying up its Utah neighbor, WordPerfect, and part of Borland in the process) and failed spectacularly. Smelling a rat–Novell believed Microsoft sabotaged some of its applications so they would not run under DR-DOS–it then pawned the Digital Research portfolio off on Caldera, a Linux company run by former Novell executives. The catch? Caldera had to turn around and sue Microsoft. Which they did, successfully.
A few more years later, The Santa Cruz Operation, a small Unix firm, wanted out. It sold its Unix-on-Intel business, as well as the rights to the old AT&T Unix (purchased from Novell, ironically) to Caldera, who soon changed its name to The SCO Group to reflect this business.
Yes, this is the same SCO who is now on a legal rampage, suing anything that moves.
Now, whether Novell or SCO is the more rightful owner of the double-click “innovation” is arguable. But such matters never seem to matter to SCO. It’s a frivolous lawsuit, but Darl McBride and Co. have made frivolous and baseless lawsuits into an art form.
Go get ’em, Darl.
I attended a sneak preview a couple of weeks ago of a movie that was released last week. The movie title isn’t terribly important–it was a ho-hum flick that no one will remember in six months–but the measures, well, they gave credence to a comment I made recently in a conversation.
When my girlfriend said the United States is a free country, I said that at least when it comes to copyright, it’s not.How ridiculous have things become? Let me tell you. There were four security guards as we stood in line. Cell phones, pagers, and all other recording devices had to be turned off. My girlfriend got special permission for her insulin pump. She had to tell them that no, she couldn’t do without it. Yes, really. Why? If something lights up, the thugs are instructed to assume it’s a recording device and evict you, no questions asked.
"Disney wants you to talk about this movie," the head thug said. "But Disney is equally concerned that nobody makes a copy of it."
Judging from the quality of the film, they’re more concerned about people copying their stuff than they are about making good new stuff. No wonder Disney’s in financial trouble. (The most frustrating thing about this particular film was that it probably could have been pretty good but it was blatantly obvious that the screenwriters didn’t know anything about the world they were trying to portray.)
Once we were seated, when someone came back from the concession stand, I so wanted to ask the person, "You sure there isn’t a recording device hidden in that hot dog?" But I couldn’t remember if they’d told us recording device jokes would not be tolerated–kind of like bomb jokes while standing in line to get on an airplane. I assumed they wouldn’t be tolerated and kept my mouth shut.
This totalitarian atmosphere has a lot to do with what’s wrong today with the music and movie industries. They love pay-per-view because they can control it. You have to fork over a few bucks every time you watch the movie. They’ve made two attempts at disposable DVDs because, again, their lifespan is limited. If you want to watch it again after the disc has self-destructed, you have to pay again.
You think they’re going after 321 Studios just because they don’t want people pirating DVDs? Think again. DVDs do have a finite lifespan, which does give you a legitimate reason to make a copy for your personal use. DVDXCopy is coded to only allow you to make a copy for personal use, though I suppose you could use it to make a copy of a borrowed or rented DVD. What you won’t see is people hawking DVDXCopy-made counterfeits out of the back of a van parked on a busy city street. But that’s OK. Hollywood doesn’t want you to make a copy of your Field of Dreams DVD because they want you to buy another one in six or seven years.
The way the big movie studios got big was by making great films that people wanted to see again and again. Along the way they made lots of bombs too, but that was part of the cost of doing business. Some films took a while to be appreciated–It’s a Wonderful Life being a prime example. Even though now it’s considered a classic, it was initially a flop.
And there are plenty of good films still being made. Time will tell on Secondhand Lions, for instance, but I loved it.
Being a somewhat creative person myself, I can sympathize with these companies. Making something good is hard. Making something that sells is hard. Making something good that sells both today and tomorrow is just about impossible. Even when you have thousands of people working for you, you can’t count on accomplishing that feat even once a year. The factors are beyond your control.
When the goal is increasing profits, it’s much cheaper and easier to buy a few Congressmen and set up a totalitarian state. That’s something you can control.
As a journalist, I was taught not to sugarcoat, so I won’t sugarcoat here either. My good friend Debby, who has been fighting cancer for nearly two years, died on Monday.
I’d been hosting a semi-regular blog for Debby. It’s been some time since she’s been able to type, so two of her longtime friends–including my high school computer science teacher–have been posting updates for her.
I’ve been editing video for her funeral.One of our church staff members interviewed her in July 2002, just a few weeks after she found out she was sick. I’d seen the video previously. A year ago she asked me to edit it for her because Debby was near death and her outlook wasn’t good. I took the tapes, a camera, and a laptop out of town for a weekend where I wouldn’t be distracted, watched them repeatedly, transcribed most of them, and put together a script.
For a variety of reasons I didn’t finish it a year ago. Debby pulled through and within weeks she went from not being able to so much as feed herself to being up and around and actually driving herself places. I started seeing her at church again. It felt downright wrong to be putting something together for someone’s funeral when you still saw her at church almost every Sunday. I’m not that goth. So I put the tapes on my shelf, where they sat for nearly a year.
I saw Debby for the last time in early April. I didn’t think anything of it. As usual, she was late getting out of the 9:30 service and as usual I was late getting to the 10:45 service. She was walking to her car as I pulled into the parking lot. I think her youngest daughter Wendy was with her.
I got a phone call right around tax time. It was Elizabeth, my former high school teacher. Debby wasn’t doing well. I took the news pretty badly. But then I remembered that in May and June 2003, Debby wasn’t doing well. Next thing I knew, I was seeing her in church again. Debby had already outlived half a dozen people she wasn’t supposed to outlive. If anyone could come back from the brink and live another 1, 2, 5, or 10 years, it was Debby.
My phone rang on Monday afternoon. It was Elizabeth. “I have some sad news,” she said. She didn’t have to tell me the rest.
What struck me then was the same thing that strikes me today. Debby didn’t spend much time talking about how she felt. Any time that subject came up, she could only talk about feeling God right there beside her. Although once she did admit her shoulder and her hip hurt sometimes. Then she laughed. She talked a lot about how other people felt though. That seemed to concern her a lot more than anything else did.
Well, one other thing struck me too. Her sense of humor. “When my time comes, it’s going to be a celebration. If Pastor doesn’t play the Beach Boys I’m going to be very upset.”
So when did Pastor find out about this? Tonight. From me. He didn’t believe me. I played the tape.
He went scrambling to find a Beach Boys record. He doesn’t want Debby to give him a hard time about it for the rest of eternity.
She’ll find something else to give him a hard time about. Me too. That’s just the way God made Debby.
Whenever anyone needed someone to talk to, or someone to pray with, or just a smile or a laugh, Debby was always there.
We’ll miss her terribly.