I’ve talked about depression a lot on this blog, both my own and in general, primarily because I’ve been dealing with it since early childhood. My personal depressive hell has gotten a lot less torturous over the last few years; my depressions now last a day or two at most (thanks primarily to the Lefkoe …
Continue reading ‘News Flash: Depression Has Been Solved… For the Last Forty Years!’ »
I’ve often wondered what the future would look like if someone did create a true artificial intelligence, and it was simple enough that anyone could do it once they knew how. I’ve often thought that most of today’s intellectual jobs would just vanish, the way that so many blue-collar jobs did when automation started replacing …
Continue reading ‘“I, for one, welcome our robotic communist jobless future”’ »
Bruce Schneier, the well-known security expert (warning: that’s an extremely tongue-in-cheek encryption-geekery fan-site), has a new essay on his (real) site today, and it touches on a subject that I’ve talked about before: how at some point in the near future, technology will make it possible for single individuals or small groups to cause destruction …
The Solid State Drive (SSD) has been in the system for over a week now, so here’s an update on it: It’s FAST! Okay, that’s not news, but I felt compelled to say it anyway. 😉 After letting the Linux VM run for several days with memory-hog programs like Firefox (with about a dozen pages …
Both the new Solid State Drive (SSD) and the Data Doubler mounting bracket arrived way ahead of schedule — on Thursday afternoon, in fact, a day early for the Data Doubler and at least four days early for the drive itself. I’m not complaining. 🙂 The drive was in OEM packaging, meaning that it was …
Solid State Drives. Ridiculously fast. Ridiculously expensive too. I’ve wanted to move to one for years, but one major thing held me back: their longevity. Not only do they fail, but according to both Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky (old-school computer geeks who I highly respect), they fail catastrophically, and in a really, really short …
“…it’s worth doing badly first.” It’s a good idea to keep in mind, especially if (like me) you have a tendency toward perfectionism.
I often take my computer and do programming in places where I don’t have an Internet connection for a few hours at a time. It generally works out well: no e-mail or IM to distract me, no fascinating web links to follow and spend time reading. Unfortunately it also means that I don’t have access …
Before I sold it, Project Badger was ugly. Almost painfully ugly. It wasn’t a deliberate decision — I’d have made it pretty if I’d had the time — but our customers wanted what it did, not how it looked. When BigCo bought it, the first thing they did was slap a new name on it …
Continue reading ‘“In Defense of Hard: When Easier Isn’t Better”’ »
Those of you who care about such things might have heard that Apple recently released a new version of it’s desktop OS, 10.7, code-named Lion. It was inevitable that I would upgrade my current system (a mid-2009 model MacBook Pro) eventually, but I wanted to put it off for a while. I’ve talked before about …