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Lenovo’s phone is ringing again. And it’s IBM. Again.

Dave Farquhar Hardware April 21, 2013November 3, 2025Ars Technica, IBM, lenovo, mainframe, x86

When IBM sold its desktop and laptop PC business to Lenovo nine years ago, it held on to its x86-based server business. But now, IBM doesn’t see the x86 server business as a growth area anymore, and now they’re interested in selling that to Lenovo, too. Read more

Dave Farquhar

David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.

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Why Intel can’t quit x86

Dave Farquhar Hardware March 10, 2013June 9, 2024amd, apple, DEC, IBM, intel, marvell, motorola, motorola 68k, os x, Steve Jobs, x86

Here’s a nice perspective on Intel’s non-x86 efforts, and why they failed and x86 marched on, despite its weak points, and why Intel can’t quit x86.

Kudos for remembering that Intel made ARM chips.

Dave Farquhar

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Four simple steps to optimize WordPress

Dave Farquhar Apache, Linux February 1, 2013August 16, 2014apache, mysql, os x, spam, SQL, x86

A couple of years ago, I stood up a WordPress server. I made no effort to tune it, let alone turbocharge it, which is a decision I later came to regret. If your site gets more than a few hundred hits per day, you need to tune it. If you want to get more than a few hundred hits per day, you need to tune it because Apache and MySQL’s default settings are by no means one-size-fits-all. And you can never have too much speed. There are two reasons for that: Google favors fast sites over slow sites, and Amazon found that a one-second delay in page load drops traffic by 7 percent.

There’s a lot of advice out there on tuning WordPress, some of which seems to be good, and some of it not so good.

Here are four things that I know work. I run Apache and MySQL under Linux; these tools may run under Windows or OS X too.
Read more

Dave Farquhar

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A minor (but vital) Apache performance tweak

Dave Farquhar Apache, Linux January 27, 2013April 15, 2017apache, mysql, perl script, PHP, spam, x86

My problems seem to have become more rare since I started blocking spambots and tuned PHP and Apache but last night my server ran out of memory again and started timing out.

It turns out I still had a critical problem, but one that’s easy to fix with a relatively simple Perl script.

Dave Farquhar

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How the previous week’s headlines flow together

Dave Farquhar Hardware January 27, 2013amd, asus, dell, hp, intel, IPO, nvidia, pentium ii, unix, whirlpool, x86

Here are some headlines I read this past week: Dell is trying to take itself private. Microsoft is investing in Dell. Intel is pulling out of the motherboard market. AMD is considering ARM CPUs. And the PC is dead.

It’s all related.
Read more

Dave Farquhar

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Up and coming low-end Android chips

Dave Farquhar Android January 19, 2013January 6, 2025amd, android, asus, black friday, intel, mediatek, nvidia, samsung, x86

I decided to dig into what the low-end Android chipmakers like Mediatek and Rockchip are up to, since they’re the ones who are likely to drive prices down.

Dave Farquhar

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How to make finicky 32-bit applications install and run in 64-bit Windows

Dave Farquhar Windows January 10, 2013January 10, 2013adobe creative suite, antivirus, irony, x86

Certain older 32-bit applications (notably Adobe Creative Suite CS2 apps, but there are probably others) object to being installed in “C:\Program Files (x86)\”, which is where 64-bit Windows wants to put legacy 32-bit apps.

The solution is easy but non-obvious, as is true so much of the time.

Dave Farquhar

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Amiga on x86

Dave Farquhar Retro Computing, Software June 28, 2012June 25, 2012amiga, amiga os, x86

Re-implementing Amiga OS on cheap, commodity x86 hardware always made sense, so I’m not surprised that someone is doing it. Mostly I’m surprised that it took me this long to find it.

Am I interested? You bet. I’m sure I can find some PC hardware to run it on. I certainly don’t see myself using it as an everyday machine, but as something to tinker on, and something to have running next to my everyday machine, I can see it being fun and possibly even useful.

Dave Farquhar

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SCO v. IBM winds toward resolution

Dave Farquhar Linux, Retro Computing February 18, 2012October 30, 20181990s, AIX, AT&T, BSD, Digital Research, Gary Kildall, IBM, intel, SCO, unix, x86

Slashdot reported yesterday that SCO v. IBM is back on. Well, it is, sort of. The case never was fully resolved, due to SCO running out of money and filing for bankruptcy. Groklaw has the details.

If this sounds vaguely familiar, I’ll try to refresh your memory.

Dave Farquhar

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Deep Firefox SQL optimization

Dave Farquhar Software November 1, 2011August 10, 2016firefox, mac os x, ocz, os x, profiles, SQL, sqlite, Windows Explorer, x86

I was looking deeper into Firefox optimization, and I found Adventures in Firefox-places.sqlite. It’s a pretty intense analysis that goes beyond the usual simple, in-browser SQL vacuum that I’ve mentioned in the past. It was written with Mac OS X and Linux in mind, which is fine, but if you run Windows, you might want to do the same thing.

It has two benefits. It speeds up Firefox, and it reduces the amount of disk space your Firefox profile occupies. The two things are related; smaller databases are quicker and easier to navigate than large ones. As for why you should care about the amount of disk space it takes up, well, on an SSD every megabyte counts.

Dave Farquhar

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