Great. If it reverses some of the truly bone-headed decisions that Vista was graced with — such as the Hollywood-friendly but user-hostile DRM stuff that’s built in — then it can’t come soon enough. And apparently even Microsoft secretly agrees… Pulling such a major release forward would be out of character for Microsoft. Could this [...]
Archive of entries posted on January 2008
Best of Craigslist: “Help me keep the shell people alive”
I sympathize with the idea, and the guy is apparently serious… but even GoddessJ (a self-identified “geek groupie”) wouldn’t be likely to go for this. On the other hand, it might be a good way to get dates with techie girls…
I’m tickled pink about ThunderBayes!
After several days of using ThunderBayes/SpamBayes, I’m happy to report that it’s just as awesome as it was rumored to be! Even better, I’ve been able to fix one of the problems that I had with setting it up (the multiple-accounts bug). I sent the code changes to Daniel Miller, the original ThunderBayes developer, and [...]
Antivirus Programs
Every so often, some company will say something about a virus or antivirus program (such as this), and the comments on it (if allowed) will be filled with an OS flame war. I’ve used PC-based computers since 1989 or thereabouts. In that time, I’ve been attacked by two viruses — one in 1997, a DOS [...]
“Is the music industry dying?”
That seemed like a rhetorical question to me when I first read it. But after reading the rest of the article, I’ve changed my mind. The music industry is alive and well, and in fact is thriving — it’s just the existing music labels, with their extremely wasteful business models, that are suffering: EMI, recently [...]
It works!
As reported yesterday, I’m now using ThunderBayes/SpamBayes to filter spam. I manually classified several hundred recent spam messages, and a roughly-equal number of recent personal (“ham”) messages. So far, it hasn’t had a single false positive on either side, and most of the “unsure” classifications have been of legitimate commercial messages (that do resemble spam [...]
Getting SpamBayes/ThunderBayes Working (Under Linux)
Thunderbird’s built-in spam filter is pretty good, more accurate (and a lot easier to set up and use) than several others I’ve tried, but even so it’s accuracy still leaves something to be desired. I don’t get anywhere near as much spam now as I used to, but roughly half of my daily e-mail is [...]
“Top 10 Telephone Tricks”
This collection of tips can come in quite handy. I already use a small Radio Shack device to “trick automated phone bots into thinking your line’s dead” (number 1), but I wasn’t aware of number 4 (“skip the greeting and get right to the beep with one keypress“). I’m rather surprised at number 2, “get [...]
“Reasons (and Ways) to Avoid Buying Just-Released Gadgetry”
Like many techno-geeks, I love gadgets. When I was younger, I spent a great deal of money (that I usually didn’t have) buying the latest and greatest techie toys. For me, that stopped when I looked around and realized that I had more unused computers than ones in use — and that was without even [...]