Archive for the &;technology&; Category
Somewhere, Osama Bin Ladin is Laughing His AssOff
November 20, 2010
For years, the idea of &;flying naked&; to show security folks you weren&;t a terrorist was a joke. It&;s not a joke anymore, as the TSA (and more importantly, the political powers above them) feels justified in invasive search, groping and near-sexual assault to &;prove&; passengers aren&;t carrying bombs stuffed up their body cavities.
I&;m no Sarah Palin fan, but this tweet &;TSA: it’s politically incorrect 2 “profile” anyone when natl second is issue?We profile individuals/suspects in other situations!Profile away&; actually seems right on.
Asking people questions and watching their reactions seems much more sensible (and works for the Israelis) rather than what Bruce Schneir calls &;security theatre.&;
Tags:political-correctness, security, terrorism Posted in political-correctness, Politics, technology, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment &;
Time Capsule of a More ProsperousEra
October 15, 2009
Cleaning out my office I found some &;sacred artifacts of the past&;, as Leonard Cohen sang in another context (about the loss of the &;naked man and woman&;).
What did I find? I found a Family Computing Magazine from 1999, talking about the best computer and printer to buy, how to set up your home office, fight viruses, etc. At the time, people would pay $2.99 for a magazine that would impart such wisdom. And writers and editors would actually get paid for their expertise in technology.
I used to say, &;If you can write about tech, you&;ll always eat. You may not want to live, but you&;ll always eat.&;
No more.
In a related development, I found a NY Times classified ad page that had no less than ten (10) columns offering editorial jobs, from managing editor, puzzle editor, editorial/idea shaper, reporter, development editor, producer editor at Times Mirror for hunting and fishing websites, music editors, editorial assistants, and even a copyeditor!
Rather than save these depressing time capsules, I tossed them.
The paperless era appears to be the payless era as well. As Everybody knows&;
Tags:copyediting, death-of-journalism, death-of-print, Leonard-Cohen Posted in Journalism, technology-and-its-discontents, technology-journalism | Leave a Comment &;
Ford Fusion Hybrid, InternationalSupercar
October 9, 2009
Ford has been much in the news. Unlike the other Big 3 automakers, it didn&;t take government money and hasn&;t been as painfully mismanaged or dismembered as Chrysler or General Motors, which no longer builds excitement. Ford has retired debt, reached an agreement with the UAW and seen its stock more than quadruple in the past few months.
What&;s missing from the equation? Cars. But Ford&;s comeback, to be successful, depends on building cars people want to buy. Like the Ford Fusion Hybrid. Which I watched hungrily at its launch at the 2008 LA Auto Show, and which I plunked down my hard earned money to buy six months ago.
I call mine &;international supercar&; because it&;s an American Ford, is a 5-seater based on the Mazda 6, is assembled in Mexico and includes a Japanese gas/electric hybrid system and navigation system.
After six months, I hardly see it, as my wife has decided it&;s her favorite car of all time. She loves the heated leather seats, the Sync Bluetooth handsfree phone system, the hard drive where Patti Smith and Bruce Springsteen reside&;and most of all, the 36.8 miles per gallon we&;ve averaged on gas over the 6500 miles we&;ve driven the car. Doesn&;t hurt that a friend says our silver Fusion &;looks like a Lexus.&; Or that my wife looks good in it, either.
One of my favorite features is that it goes up to 45 mph on electric power alone, so I can be crusing Ventura Boulevard in stealth mode. It runs on regular gas, too, unlike our Lincoln Aviator, which greedily (13 miles per gallon) drinks only premium.
As a techie I love all the electrical gadgets, from blind spot detection to being able to pick a restaurant or a cheap gas station (as if I needed one) on the screen or command it via Blackberry. It&;s basically a voice-operated computer on wheels&;without Microsoft&;s &;blue screen of death&; so far.
I&;ve had my disagreements with Pulitzer Prize winner Dan Neil of the LA Times. But not when he says of the Fusion, &;Wait, so somebody invented the car of the future and didn&;t tell us?&;
Tags:Ford, Ford-Fusion, Ford-Fusion-hybrid, hybrid-cars Posted in Automobiles, technology | 1 Comment &;
Death Panel for MyDell
September 24, 2009
I submitted my seven-year old Dell 4400 to a death panel last week, and the verdict was thumbs-down. Perhaps there are some packrats out there who will grieve for this $1300 1.7Ghz Pentium 4 system with 256MB of RAM and 64MB NVIDIA GeForce3 video card, but I doubt it. Even the charities wouldn&;t take it.
Business was slow, and only I would know what was worth keeping from it. So began the disappearance of four days of my life.
I excavated the old computer to find the files I wanted to transfer, only to find that USB flash drives didn&;t work on the damn thing, due to the difference between USB 1.0 and USB 2.0, which apparently (I tried) is not updatable by downloading drivers. The damned Dell also wouldn&;t support my handy-dandy portable hard drive, for the same reason.
Better yet, it wouldn&;t write to the CDRWs I tried to use to download data either. After days of this (and use of the old &;sneaker network&; of 3.5&; floppy drives to transfer data), I had a sudden thought and ran off to Office Depot. CDRWs didn&;t work&;but the Hawaiian pattern CDRs I bought ten for $1.99 did!
Hallelulah, almost ready for the dump! Just need to format the hard drive and&;. Wait, can&;t format the hard drive? Need to reinstall XP in order to wipe out the existing version? What?
The nightmare continued, through two phone calls to Dell tech support (end-of-life-support in this case) in the Phillipines, I believe. Each asked the same question, &;Where&;s your original Dell XP disk?&; Who the hell knows? I found manuals for Windows 98 and XP in the man cave, even Windows 95 disks, but not the Dell XP disk. Without it, they couldn&;t help me, and of course my Acer XP disk wasn&;t recognized.
Choices? I could buy another Dell-flavored XP disk for $12 and wait for it to arrive, or download some of the dubious disk erasers out there.
The PC never ran very well, but its stubbornness in holding onto to its operating system and data was heartwarming.
Ultimately I got sick of the time sink spent dealing with it. I found a recycling yard full of dead PCs, televisions, fax machines, tape drives and the assorted flotsam of Western civilization, for the Dell to spend its days in squalid purgatory before its inevitable journey to the Third World for its final destruction.
As for the 80GB hard drive, I pulled it out and let my 10-year old take it apart. Once torn to pieces, it went into the trash and off to the dump. If you want to find it and dig out my old invoices and stories, knock yourself out.
Tags:technology, technology-and-its-discontents Posted in technology, technology-and-its-discontents | Leave a Comment &;
Twitter is forTwits
March 26, 2009
I do have a Twitter account. I haven&;t used it in more than a year.
Nonethess I constantly get emails that so-and-so is &;following you&; on Twitter. Why? To see if I move or just continue laying there?
I just got a tweet announcing I&;m being followed by, of course, someone I don&;t know. Intrigued (not), I went to his profile page to see what his answer to the burning Twitter question, in fact the only Twitter question, WHAT ARE YOU DOING RIGHT NOW?, was.
watching tv
Actually, twittering as the latest expression of our addled ADD age isn&;t for twits. John Cleese has it right.
Tags:John-Cleese, Social Media, Twitter Posted in Social Media, technology, technology-journalism, Twitter | Leave a Comment &;
Say Sayonara to SteveJobs
January 22, 2009
Although I am not an Apple fanatic, I do wish the best for Steve Jobs as a person. Being sick and focusing on getting better is no picnic.
That said, I think he should make a final break with Apple, in the same way that Bill Gates receded from Microsoft. Lost in the happy news about Apple beating estimates in a shitty market today was this news about an SEC investigation into Apple&;s disclosure policies about his illness.
The investigation and Apple&;s non-disclosures (such as the &;hormone imbalance&; sham) suggest the company took a &;Weekend at Bernie&;s&; approach to propping up the great man. And as usual, the dwindling band of technology &;journalists&;/Apple syncophants didn&;t ask the hard questions.
While the Woz is right that Apple can survive with Jobs, the company needs to go cold turkey now.
Tags:Apple-Computers, bill-gates, Steve-Jobs, Steve-Wozniak, technology-journalism Posted in business-journalism, technology, technology-journalism | Leave a Comment &;
Facebook versusACT!
December 3, 2008
In the 1990&;s, it was common for professionals to &;live all day in ACT!&;, ACT! being a contact manager that also had a word processor, calendar, to-do list, etc. ACT! was all about productivity.
In fact, you were supposed to call people (remember calling people?) in your &;tickler&; every 30 days, where you had listed some conversation-starter like &;Saw your wife at the dog show.&;
Now those professionals live all day in Facebook, briefly departing to do actual work. Indeed, many IT types and other corporate drones would ban it if they could. Facebook versus ACT!: an interesting contrast between packaged, stand-alone software and a widely-shared web application.
But are they really so different? As the ACT! website puts it:
Keep important contact details in one place with ACT! so you have quick access to the information you need.
Be up and running quickly because ACT! is easy to learn and use.
Sound familiar, social networkers?
Tags:ACT!, Facebook, social-networking Posted in social-networking, technology, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment &;
UCLA Snoops Shows No MorePrivacy
October 31, 2008
Some 1041 patient files were violated by peeping eyes at UCLA Medical Center&;and that&;s just the ones they know about.
While the files violated included those of California First Lady Maria Shriver, actress Farrah Fawcett and singer Britney Spears, we don&;t even have 1000 celebrities in LA, even if you add 5 actors from each of the top 20 TV shows, another 5 from the top ten films, 50 musicians, the entire roster of the Dodgers, Angels, Lakers and Clippers (that last a stretch) plus comedians, politicians, artists and has-beens.
So that means people at UCLA (and probably your local hospital) are snooping on their ex&;s, their neighbors and &;that guy they brought in today&; out of boredom and unwholesome curiosity. More than 165 workers at UCLA have been disciplined; doesn&;t seem to be working. Maybe they should start actually firing and arresting people.
As CEO of workstation maker SUN, Scott McNealy was best known for his intemperate attacks on Microsoft (referring to Bill Gates and the current CEO as &;Ballmer and Butthead&;) and his uninspired leadership of the failing company.
But even a broken clock is right twice a day. As McNealy told reporters back in 1999, &;You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it.&;
Tags:Brittany-Spears, Farrah-Fawcett, Maria-Shriver, Privacy, Scott-McNealy, Sun-Microsystems, UCLA Medical Center Posted in Privacy, technology, technology-journalism | Leave a Comment &;
Humble Hard Drive Wins NobelPrize
October 10, 2007
It&;s good to see the discoverers of the basic science around hard drive technology winning the 2007 Nobel Prize. The hard drive has become the ultimate commodity product&;everyone reading this has one, but like Rodney Dangerfield, the spinning disk that stores your applications, music and porn &;gets no respect.&;
One industry spokesperson described manufacturing disk drives as &;the longest-running industrial philanthropy.&; If someone could find a way to make money with hard drives, that would be worthy of an economics Nobel!
Posted in 2007 Consumer Electronics Show, Computers, technology, technology-journalism | 1 Comment &;