Korea Archives - The Silicon Underground

Commodore 64 common questions and answers

Dave Farquhar — Fri, 14 Apr 2017 11:00:23 +0000

I hear a lot of questions about the Commodore 64 over and over again. Many of them don’t warrant a single blog post. So here’s a list of Commodore 64 common questions and their answers. If you want to know

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Marx vs. Lionel

Dave Farquhar — Thu, 03 Mar 2016 12:00:42 +0000

In the 1950s, Marx and Lionel took turns being the biggest toy company in the world, largely riding on the popularity of O gauge trains. Neither company particularly liked the other, but both owed some degree of their success to

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What I would have done to secure the Astros’ database

Dave Farquhar — Thu, 18 Jun 2015 11:00:45 +0000

The now-infamous breached Houston Astros database sounds like a classic case of what security professionals call Shadow IT: a project that the business needs, done without adequate involvement from security and, most likely, from the IT department as well. These kinds

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A Comcastic-ally bad idea

Dave Farquhar — Mon, 16 Jun 2014 11:00:06 +0000

If you haven’t heard about it, Comcast has plans to build a wifi network for its subscribers, on the back of its other subscribers’ routers. What’s worse is it’s an opt-out service. If you don’t hear about it and say

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Sculley on Jobs

Dave Farquhar — Wed, 11 Sep 2013 11:00:31 +0000

John Sculley famously fired Steve Jobs in September 1985, a move that’s pretty universally panned today. Nearly 28 years later, Forbes asked Sculley about it. Here’s the money quote: “He was not a great executive back in those early days.

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Lionel in the non-hobby media

Dave Farquhar — Wed, 17 Jul 2013 11:00:33 +0000

Cnet took a field trip to the official Lionel repair facility and wrote a feature story about it. It’s nice to see the attention outside of the hobby press, since it’s frequently news to people that Lionel is still around

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Kansas City and Google Fiber

Dave Farquhar — Sat, 23 Mar 2013 11:00:35 +0000

I get a few questions about Google Fiber, because I have Kansas City connections, and I work in computers. People who’ve known me long enough know that I upgraded to first-generation DSL about 30 minutes after it became available at

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Fighting Web rage

Dave Farquhar — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 22:34:29 +0000

There's something about the Internet that turns people into jerks. Or maybe there's something about jerks that turns them on to the Internet. -- Tim Barker, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch

I loved that lead, and the rest of the story is good too. I first started using the Internet in 1993, and I first went online sometime in 1986 or 87.

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So we\’re complaining about our economy…

Dave Farquhar — Sat, 22 Jan 2005 14:39:24 +0000

OK, so this is a bit late coming, and I haven't really been able to think this through as well as I should, so I hope some other people will think through it with me. The problem: Our trade deficit is up.

The solution is to devalue the dollar. Supposedly.

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You still think outsourcing is a good idea?

Dave Farquhar — Tue, 08 Jun 2004 01:47:15 +0000

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.

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