Dr Wingnut

Category: Computer

  • Gateway drugs

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    I was reading the CTO Connection in Infoworld on 29 March 2005 where the Chad Dickerson said, “Some call the iPod the ‘gateway drug’ to the OS X platform.”  What a great reference.  The only other company that comes to mind that has that kind of marketing clout in my mind is Harley Davidson.  I…

  • Any man and his dog?

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    Howard Adamsky’s article “Save Your Job” (Viewpoint, Jan. 2005) states that code is a commodity and suggests that any man and his dog could write it.  If it were so easy as the author and many CEOs claim, why then are so many projets bug-ridden failures?Cost-effective development comes from employing highly competent individuals regardless of…

  • IT Support Haiku Contest

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    Thanks to everyone who submitted such great poetic masterpieces this past week.  Here’s the top entry, by Thaddeus Melvin Jacobs.  Perhaps it’s the poem’s sonorous pathos or its inverted syllable count for lines two and three that caught our attention.No Antelope lopeNo Buffalo roamIn cubicle farm my homeSubmit your own Haiku and review all the…

  • Bye bye Carly

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    In consumer PCs, HP is still getting punished by Dell, which just reported record numbers.Time, 21 February 2005, Pg. 36The consumer PC’s at HP were not Carly’s problem, they sucked way before she took the reins at HP.  They don’t work very well, they break more than comparable business PCs and they cost a fortune…

  • Stuff that runs at Windows startup

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    In addition to the applications that are in the startup folder, there is another place that contains startup applications.  These items are stored in the registry in the My Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run key.  This is a good place to start looking when you can’t figure out where some spyware or other application is being launched from.When you look…

  • BitTorrent under fire

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    In the 14 February 2005 issue of Time in an article about Bram Cohen and the technology he invented BitTorrent that is used to speed distribution of data between all the users who are trying to download something from somewhere—including movies—the following appeared: “Neither Cohen nor BitTorrent is named in the lawsuit, although an MPAA…

  • Why everyone hates Qwest

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    The date: 31 January 2005The time: 11:00 HoursThe event: Our T1 starts to act flaky and then dies.The resolution: 19:00 HoursIt’s not like telco circuits never die, it’s just that you don’t expect them to.  That’s why the telephone industry if famous for having five nines of reliability (99.999% uptime, or five minutes of downtime…