Missouri

Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson needed to explain himself

Dave Farquhar Uncategorized , , , , , , , , ,

I understand Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson’s predicament. I don’t agree with how he handled it.

You see, both Scott Thompson and I work in the technical industry, and neither of us have a degree in computer science, computer engineering, some other kind of engineering, high mathematics, or another socially accepted relevant-to-the-industry field. Read more

Happy late birthday, OS/2

Dave Farquhar Retro Computing , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Twenty-five years ago this month, on April 2, IBM announced its new PS/2 computers and a new multitasking operating system to run on (most of) them–OS/2. They even lured a bunch of the actors from M*A*S*H to do an ad campaign for them.

It didn’t seem like it at the time, but that was the beginning of the end of IBM’s PC business.
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Securing wi-fi isn’t about price gouging

Dave Farquhar security , , , , , , , , ,

The so-called wi-fi golden era is over, and apparently being glad about it makes me an absolutist.

But John C. Dvorak is wrong. This isn’t about making people pay for Internet access. It’s pure security. Toilets and drinking fountains are free because the majority of people don’t abuse them. The Internet can’t be wide open and free like a public restroom because when it was totally wide open and free in the 1990s, too many people abused it. Read more

Feeling poor on $100,000 a year

Dave Farquhar Saving money , , , , , , , ,

Yahoo! Finance! has! a! first-person! story! about! struggling! on! six! figures!

Silliness aside, you might be surprised to hear I–an infamous stingy Scottish miser–am at least a little sympathetic. Read more

The old days of viruses

Dave Farquhar security, Viruses , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Blogging pioneer John Dominik, inspired by my Michelangelo memories, wrote about his memories of viruses later in the decade. So now I’ll take inspiration of him and share my memories of some of those viruses. I searched my archives, and at the time it was going on, I didn’t write a lot. I was tired and angry, as you can tell from the terse posts I did write.

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Best Buy has one foot in the grave?

Dave Farquhar Uncategorized , , , , , , , ,

In a highly publicized article, Forbes argues that Best Buy is not long for this world.

I can’t disagree with any individual point in the article. Some of the problems Larry Downes identifies existed when I worked there in the early 1990s–I’d spare you the joke about being young, naive, and needing the money, but it’s too late now–but in the 1990s they could get away with that, sort of, because there were competitors who tried to get away with worse.

Sears/Kmart is a favorite whipping boy, but they have one very big thing up on the land of the blue shirts. I can make a five-minute trip to Sears or Kmart–particularly Sears Hardware–to pick up a couple of things, and I do so fairly frequently. I tried a couple of weeks ago to do that at Best Buy, and, like the author said, calling it a miserable experience is putting it mildly. Read more

My first really bad day in IT

Dave Farquhar security, War Stories , , , , , , ,

Next weekend is Labor Day weekend. I can’t remember if it was one Thursday or two Thursdays before Labor Day weekend in 1997, but one of those two days happened to be the beginning of the first crisis of my career.

Whichever Thursday it was, it was getting close to midnight when my phone rang. It was Max. The print server wasn’t working. That happened a lot. That server had IBM’s Services for Macintosh on it, which never worked all that well, and, worse, tended to make the rest of the server act up a lot. That in and of itself shouldn’t have been a crisis. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
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Maybe this is the difference between US and UK journalists

Dave Farquhar Journalism , ,

I’ve always wondered about the difference between US and UK journalists. I’ve always noticed a difference, but never quite figured out what it was or why. This CNN editorial is good insight.

There’s a certain irreverence and snarkiness in the UK press that you don’t see often in the States. The linked is an opinion piece and what she’s saying is theory rather than provable fact, but my experience matches hers. Read more

Should journalists hack?

Dave Farquhar Journalism , , , ,

I experienced an interesting collection of contrasts going to journalism school in the mid 1990s. Inside the same building, we had investigative journalists who specialized in advanced use of databases and stodgy editors who missed the days of manual typewriters and wore technological ignorance as a badge of honor.

And yet, there were textbooks that said journalists ought to be learning computer programming, because there was going to be a need for journalists who had the ability to do both. It took a while, but it seems that day has come. Maybe not to sit down and write applications software, but to hack.

But is it ethical for a journalist to hack?
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How young is too young for a credit card?

Dave Farquhar Saving money , , , , ,

MSNBC columnist (and one of my former college instructors) Bob Sullivan asked an interesting question last week. How young is too young for a credit card?

I think the credit industry used to draw the line somewhere around age 19 or 20. But things changed a lot in the 1990s.
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