Archive for October, 2008
Wikipedia and truth
For better or worse, the community-written encyclopedia Wikipedia has become a primary online reference source. Disdaining experts and relying on readers to vet the accuracy of its articles, Wikipedia is very often one of the first entries in a Google search. This is a self-reinforcing feedback situation since highly ranked Google entries are apt to [...]
Reviews of the new MacBook
Although most readers are Windows users, I think it’s worthwhile to put in an occasional post on Macs. Apple just came out with a new line of MacBooks and there are two reviews I will mention. The first is from Walter Mossberg and is oriented to the less technical reader. Mossberg concludes:
All in all, though, [...]
Microsoft issuing emergency security patch
Microsoft usually waits to bundle Windows security patches into its monthly update. However, it seems that a problem has been found that is severe enough to warrant an emergency update to be issued at 1 pm EST. Mary Jo Foley reports:
Microsoft hasn’t offered many details about the patch, other than to say it should be [...]
When good enough is all you need
I recently gave away my eight-year old IBM ThinkPad laptop that was still running Windows 98 SE. I finally gave up on it because it got to the point where the CMOS needed to be reset every time you turned it on. But otherwise this sturdy, well-built laptop ran just fine. Sure, the battery had [...]
Alternative operating systems
It may be mostly a Darwinian world but just because something is the best doesn’t mean it will succeed. History has many examples of this and so does technology. Consider the universal “qwerty” keyboard layout. This is not the most efficient way but better layouts such as the Dvorak never became accepted. Everybody had learned [...]
Botnets and zombie PCs
I have often mentioned the problem of criminal rings that have taken over hundreds of thousands of PCs without the owners knowing and are using them for malicious purposes . The problem is sufficiently serious that the front page of today’s New York Times business section has an article, A Robot Network Seeks to Enlist [...]
Transactions between the mutually ignorant
Apt as the title of this post might be for describing some of the financial shenanigans that have gone on, I am actually referring to the average PC buyer and the average PC sales clerk. A typical home PC user knows very little of all the details of a PC and its peripherals and has [...]
A different kind of economic curve
For better or worse, computers have allowed people to carry out all sorts of data analysis. For your weekend reading you can peruse the research report on how economic conditions affect preferences for Playboy Playmate Curves.
Via Paul Kedrosky
Keeping tabs on your hard drive
Speaking of hard drives, it pays to keep track of the health of your hard drives. Although Windows Chkdsk has some rudimentary functions, you might consider some additional software for monitoring a hard drive’s status. One free application is HDDScan, which can be downloaded here.
The future of the hard drive
The slowest major component on most PCs today is the hard drive. Will these mechanically driven disks ever be replaced by flash memory? Tom’s Hardware gives an account of where hard drives are going and concludes that solid state drives are going to remain niche players and that hard drives will continue to dominate and [...]
Advanced search in Vista
The search function in Vista (and the new Windows Desktop Search 3.01) is supposed to be better than the old Windows XP search. Personally, I’m not so sure about that but one thing that the new search can do is make use of some advanced operators. You can read about using the advanced features at [...]
