Topics pertaining to science and technology, current or future.
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 …
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 …
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 …
Continue reading ‘Getting SpamBayes/ThunderBayes Working (Under Linux)’ »
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 …
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 …
Continue reading ‘“Reasons (and Ways) to Avoid Buying Just-Released Gadgetry”’ »
I’ll second that. Not that I plan to move to either in the foreseeable future — DVDs do the job just fine for me.
Two recent articles from Boing Boing suggest major advances in medical science. The first talks about a compound which “reverses Alzheimer’s in minutes,” which is a pretty bold claim and has so far been tested on only one patient, but has at least the possibility of being true. The second talks about using the rabies …
InfoWorld has started a petition to Microsoft, asking them to continue selling Windows XP after the June 30th, 2008, cutoff date. Even if you don’t use Windows yourself, think about the people you support… then go sign the petition, because being interested in computing is going to get a lot worse if Microsoft is allowed …
Scott Adams made an entry in the Dilbert Blog today, making a prediction of a coming Golden Age. It’s a lovely vision, and I’m sure the reality will be interesting, even if nowhere near as awesome as he describes. But there’s one thing in particular that he mentioned that bears repeating: Wars appear to be …
Color me shocked. After my post on the recent Office 2003 debacle, I expected Microsoft to do what they’ve always done (and what they continue to do with Windows Vista): ignore the complaints and forge on. Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead. But apparently they heard enough complaints that they’ve backed off on this one. …
Continue reading ‘“Microsoft admits Office 2003 ‘mistake’”’ »