Ramblings & ephemera

Dropbox for Linux is coming soon

According to this announcement, a Linux client for Dropbox should be coming out in a week or so:
http://forums.getdropbox.com/topic.php?id=2371&replies=1
I’ve been using Dropbox for several months, and it’s really, really great.
What is it? Watch this video:
http://www.getdropbox.com/screencast
It’s backup and auto-syncing done REALLY well. Best of all, you can sync between more than one computer, even if one is [...]

What Dell learned from Wal-Mart

From Fake Steve Jobs’ “Why Dell will not bounce back” (11 May 2008):
On the manufacturing side, Dell figured out faster than the others in its space how to squeeze component suppliers and play them off each other. They brought in loads of former Wal-Mart people to refine this practice. One example: If you want to [...]

Ban USB devices or glue USB ports shut

From AAP’s “Computers ‘glued’ to protect data” (News.com.au: 4 July 2006):
A rise in the level of corporate data theft has spurred some companies to take measures to stop rogue employees sneaking corporate data out of the workplace on memory sticks, iPods and mobile phones, The Australian Financial Review reported.
Rising data theft has prompted a number [...]

1st 2 questions AOL tech support asks

From Spare me the details (The Economist: 28 October 2004):
LISA HOOK, an executive at AOL, one of the biggest providers of traditional (“dial-up”) internet access, has learned amazing things by listening in on the calls to AOL’s help desk. Usually, the problem is that users cannot get online. The help desk’s first question is: “Do [...]

How virtual machines work

From Samuel T. King, Peter M. Chen, Yi-Min Wang, Chad Verbowski, Helen J. Wang, & Jacob R. Lorch’s “SubVirt: Implementing malware with virtual machines
” [PDF] (: ):
A virtual-machine monitor (VMM) manages the resources of the underlying hardware and provides an abstraction of one or more virtual machines [20]. Each virtual machine can run a complete [...]

Arguments against the Web’s ungovernability

From Technology Review’s “Taming the Web“:
Nonetheless, the claim that the Internet is ungovernable by its nature is more of a hope than a fact. It rests on three widely accepted beliefs, each of which has become dogma to webheads. First, the Net is said to be too international to oversee: there will always be some [...]

The growth in data & the problem of storage

From Technology Review’s “The Fading Memory of the State“:
Tom Hawk, general manager for enterprise storage at IBM, says that in the next three years, humanity will generate more data–from websites to digital photos and video–than it generated in the previous 1,000 years. … In 1996, companies spent 11 percent of their IT budgets on storage, [...]

Number of PCs doubled from ‘95 to ‘99

From Harvard Business School Working Knowledge’s “Lessons from the Browser Wars“:
At the same time, the growing usefulness of the Internet drove sales of personal computers off the chart—the installed base of PCs doubled to 213 million computers between 1995 and 1999.

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Nice pun #4

Big wheel keep on Turing

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Intel: anyone can challenge anyone

From FORTUNE’s “Lessons in Leadership: The Education of Andy Grove“:
[Intel CEO Andy] Grove had never been one to rely on others’ interpretations of reality. … At Intel he fostered a culture in which “knowledge power” would trump “position power.” Anyone could challenge anyone else’s idea, so long as it was about the idea and not [...]

Intel’s ups and downs

From FORTUNE’s “Lessons in Leadership: The Education of Andy Grove“:
By 1983, when Grove distilled much of his thinking in his book High Output Management (still a worthwhile read), he was president of a fast-growing $1.1-billion-a-year corporation, a leading maker of memory chips, whose CEO was Gordon Moore. … What Moore’s Law did not and could [...]

Trusted Computing: security for whom? from whom?

From Bruce Schneier’s “Trusted Computing Best Practices“:
The language [in the Trusted Computing Group's best practices document] has too much wiggle room for companies to break interoperability under the guise of security: “Furthermore, implementations and deployments of TCG specifications should not introduce any new interoperability obstacles that are not for the purpose of security.”
That sounds good, [...]

Four principles of modernity

From “Relativity, Uncertainty, Incompleteness and Undecidability“:
In this article four fundamental principles are presented: relativity, uncertainty, incompleteness and undecidability. They were studied by, respectively, Albert Einstein, Werner Heisenberg, Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing. …
Relativity says that there is no privileged, “objective” viewpoint for certain observations. … Now, if things move relative to each other, then obviously [...]

DRM Workaround #18: HP printer cartridges

From “Cartridge Expiration Date Workarounds“:
In light of the lawsuit against Hewlett-Packard over the expiration date of their cartridges, two ways to fix the problem:
1) Remove and reinsert the battery of the printer’s memory chip
2) Preemptive: Change the parameters of the printer driver
Search for hp*.ini … In it there is a parameter something like pencheck. It [...]

Which wires match the mouse test?

From Computerworld’s “Q&A: A lost interview with ENIAC co-inventor J. Presper Eckert“:
What’s the zaniest thing you did while developing ENIAC?
The mouse cage was pretty funny. We knew mice would eat the insulation off the wires, so we got samples of all the wires that were available and put them in a cage with a [...]

Man, I lived a lot of this

Ode to the 90s
Found on FuckedCompany.com

I part-time telecommuted
as a Webmaster
for a dot com
in Y2K consulting.
They said it was
temp-to-perm.

it didn’t pay
but there were options.
I swung by the office to make trades.
(Not that there’s anything
wrong with that.)
cause we had a T1 Line
and there was a bull market
with a strong,
virile President.
and you never knew
when it could
crash.

I was a [...]

Serial killer apps

From “Andreessen singles out consumers as key to Web future“, in InfoWorld (26 May 1999):
[Mark Andreessen] then switched gears and talked about the “serial killer apps” on the Internet. A serial killer app, as opposed to a killer app, just keeps getting more useful and more killer as people keep coming online, according to Andreessen.
Andreessen [...]

Number of programs installed, number used

From St. Petersburg Times (22 September 1997):
The average home PC owner has about 48 software programs installed, but uses only about 6.3 a month, according to surveys conducted by Media Metrix Inc.

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Most expensive computer error ever

From Computerworld (13 October 1997), page 76:
A computer glitch at a New York brokerage causes a half-million customer accounts to be credited with $19 million each for a brief period. At $9.975 trillion ($19 million times 525,000 accounts), it’s a record for a computer error.

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