I’ve always loved this sort of thing. The idea of exploring secretive, long-hidden places fascinates me.
“Disclaimers in Email Signatures are Not Just Annoying, But Legally Meaningless”
I recently saw this, and having seen several of these disclaimers in the last decade or so, thought it would make a good blog topic.
When I first started communicating with BigCo, they had a policy that required an eleven-line legal disclaimer at the end of all e-mails. I know bits are cheap, but these add up, especially in an e-mail culture where every quoted line is sacred and untouchable. Some messages had literally dozens of these things cluttering them up. It looked ridiculous. I’m no lawyer, and never had any reason or desire to forward any of their messages to a third party, but even the first time I saw one I was fairly certain it couldn’t be enforced.
(I was amused, a few years ago, to see that some people were putting deliberately ridiculous disclaimers on their own e-mails. The Register apparently even collected some of the worst offenders in a number of different categories — the “best spoof” one is priceless.)
Somewhere in the last six years, BigCo’s legal department apparently suffered a rare bout of sanity, because the disclaimer disappeared. I’d gotten so used to ignoring it that I didn’t actually notice it was gone until I started writing this post and went to look for it. Now there’s only a line asking that you consider the environment before printing the message, which is actually a pretty good idea.
Progress marches on, even in corporate legal departments. Who’d’ve thunk? 😉
“The Future of Sleep”
I’ve previously mentioned my inability to stay asleep long enough each night. I really need at least seven and a half hours a night, but can rarely get more than six before rising no matter what time I go to bed, like it or not. And yes, I’ve tried melatonin… I don’t recall whether it actually let me sleep a full night through, but I do remember that it consistently left me so sleepy as to be essentially useless all the next day.
But articles like this give me hope that technology may soon have an answer for this kind of problem.
I love technology. 😉
“Enormous 1km ice-cube machine fashioned at South Pole”
Neat. I’d heard of neutrino detectors in played-out salt mines, but this is far larger. And hopefully far better at its job too.
“Stiglitz: wealth concentration will be America’s downfall”
There’s a growing movement to “do something” about the massive inequality of wealth in the US, but no one seems to know what to do, or even what can be done. The obscenely wealthy essentially control the politicians (if you don’t believe me, just look at the rhetoric of “tax cuts for the wealthy!” that no politician dares to stand against, despite the fact that the US is flat broke and rapidly digging itself toward China in more ways than one). And the politicians make the laws that are the only possible thing that could peaceably deal with the dangerous concentration of wealth.
I’ve thought about it quite a bit lately myself, and I’m sorry to say that I see few resolutions that don’t end in some level of bloodshed. Usually a lot of it. I hope that that’s just my lack of imagination.
“Got a buck to send M Night Shyamalan to film school?”
I’ve never watched any of his other movies, so far as I know — they seldom appeal to me — but I happened to like the movie The Last Airbender, though I know I’m in the minority. If I’d ever followed the series it was based on, I’d probably be donating to this too. Probably several times the one-dollar fee that it’s requesting too, judging by what fans of the series have said.
“Lasers set to replace spark plugs in car engines”
It seems that we’re finally on the verge of the future we geeks have been dreaming about for the last half-century. Laser spark plugs… how cool is that! 😉
Exasperating!
VMware Fusion 3 is a great piece of software, but it has some very annoying quirks.
My Linux virtual machine was getting some very annoying delays at times that it shouldn’t have. Compiling a fairly small project resulted in a ridiculous amount of “iowait” time. Even switching folders in my current e-mail program could take twenty seconds or more. For months, I’d thought it was just a slow hard drive on the host machine, but I couldn’t figure out why — the data being requested by the programs when the problem happened wasn’t ridiculously large, and the specs of the drive were reasonably fast. I’d looked into upgrading to a solid-state drive, but I couldn’t justify spending the money for the size I needed to replace this one, nearly half the original cost of the definitely-not-cheap machine.
Yesterday morning I’d finally had enough of it. I had to know why it was happening, even if I couldn’t do anything about it immediately. What else could be causing it? Perhaps some interaction between the disk format and VMware Fusion, that could be remedied with a different disk format?
A web search didn’t turn up anything about that, but did produce some interesting information on “iowait” problems with VMware Fusion, including a setting in the VMX file to try (“useNamedFile=false”, with an intriguing explanation here). I tried it, and it worked!
Now comes the exasperating part.
I knew I had made another entry about VMware Fusion settings that helped the speed, so I wanted to add this to it. It didn’t take me long to find it… or to find that this setting is already listed there. 🙁 I’d had to rebuild my virtual machine since then (wiping out those changes, which I didn’t reapply because the original problem didn’t seem to come up), and I didn’t think to try the settings there because the problem didn’t exhibit any of the other symptoms from that entry.
Oh well, live and learn.
“Happy Birthday, Skynet!”
It seems that I missed an important date in science-fiction yesterday:
Today’s the day when Skynet achieves sentience, according to Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. The nuclear armageddon happens in a couple days. […]
“Möbius Gear: a one-sided, toothed gear”
If asked, I’d have said this wasn’t possible. Just goes to prove that I’m not omniscient. 😉 I wonder what use someone will find for it.
The world is moving so fast these days that the man who says it can’t be done is generally interrupted by someone doing it.
— Harry Emerson Fosdick