Dropsafe

I just posted this to Peter at risks-digest, but what the hey… Hi Peter, ObDisclaimer: I work for Sun, but this is really *neat*: it’s a demonstration of what happens when you shout at hard disks / other loud noises, visualised as performance impact – watch the latency spikes: http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=tDacjrSCeq4 It makes you think…. maybe

(more…)

Jeff Nolan writes: Slate asks what does it mean that the top Amazon laptop sellers are netbooks. It is pretty stark, the top 20 sellers are windows netbooks or Macs, you have to get to #21 before a full size Windows laptop makes an appearance. It probably means that low priced laptops are capturing a

(more…)

If you are getting spammed on AIM by the likes of BraveCoho, FastCoho, RigidCoho and so forth, you need the following links: http://www.musingsforadarkenedroom.com/social-media/i-just-became-a-statisti-in-a-social-experiment/ http://morouxshi.com/2008/10/27/aim-the-trout-salmon-coho-screenname-and-how-to-stop-it/ http://www.guidetoworlddomination.com/2008/10/aim-coho-salmon-trout-bots/ …which tell you what it is and how to turn it off.

(more…)

What with all this technology at my disposal – the digital-whiteboarding, the HD video-cameras, the wikis, the word processors, the fabulous diagramming tools… I find it deeply ironic that the most effective, fastest, cheapest, bombproof means of communication at my disposal is the combination of: a ream of paper a box of sharpies a small

(more…)

I’ve installed two OpenSolaris machines now, both of which have had benefited from greater performance by increasing swap space – in one case from 512Mb to 4Gb, since the laptop concerned (Acer Ferrari 3400) has only 1G of RAM but 70-odd gig of disk… The method I used was as follows: su – root #

(more…)

Boingboing posted this today: http://www.boingboing.net/2008/12/08/genetic-algorithm-ev.html Matthew sez, “This is a GA I wrote to design a little car for a specific terrain. It runs in real-time in Flash. The fitness function is the distance travelled before the red circles hit the ground, or time runs out. The degrees of freedom are the size and initial

(more…)

It’s only taken me 20 years to find this after I first heard about it: YouTube – bad moon rising

(more…)

Hey all, I upgraded my big-ass AMD server box to OpenSolaris yesterday, and it’s durned pretty and dead useful – I am doing AVCHD to QuickTime video-transcoding on it[1] which is not something that is typically said about Solaris-at-home. A couple of things went wrong: * I did manual network configuration; this failed in a

(more…)

This is from my Mail.app “Connection Doctor” when talking to GMail; I am not sure – it could be a Ricky Nelson quote, or a Reba Mcentire quote, or a morphed reference to The Office (US) … But it is a bit weird – not on par with “Avast, ye scurvy dogs!” or whatever some

(more…)

There is just *so* much potential for things to go wrong with this scenario. Just think of the possibilities… Lenovo will let you kill a notebook with a text message Lenovo is working with Phoenix on a BIOS that will let you disable a ThinkPad notebook PC by sending it an SMS text message. The

(more…)

UPDATE: to properly cite David Stephenson I can’t wait to see what Schneier makes of this, but I am disappointed with the thrust of what Tim quotes below, from David Stephenson. They appear to be suggesting that the government – say, for instance, the TSA – should be invited to tell people what to say-and-do

(more…)