Posted 02/10/2010 at 01:21:48am

"We’ll take off our own pants."

Wait. I was supposed to be wearing pants before?

Crap.

Posted 01/22/2010 at 04:12:50pm

For what it's worth, AMD's stock was down about 12% today. Investors, apparently, are not impressed.

Posted 01/18/2010 at 08:50:53pm

"Are we getting the real story here?"

Hell no.

Do any of us know what the real story is? Equally unlikely.

Very strange situation, though.

Posted 12/28/2009 at 09:03:22pm

I'm normally a fan of Wired magazine, but this list is pretty damn terrible.  The thing is, Wired is good for a lot of things.  This is not one of them.  They need to remember to play their strengths.

It sort of reminds me of when Popular Mechanics attempted to do a Mac v/s PC comparison and did a terrible job of it.  Is Popular Mechanics a good magazine?  Its history at least would suggest it's alright.  Would I trust it to do a computer review? Not on my life.

Posted 12/28/2009 at 08:12:56pm

“To do this while supposedly being concerned about privacy is beyond me.”

They just don't get it, do they?

The reason you hack into a secure system is to find the exploit before someone else does.  If I as a good guy can break it, then you can damn well bet that some bad guy will figure out how to do it (if they haven't already).

Before anyone brings this up, this isn't the same as the quote from the Google CEO hand-waving at privacy.  Google doesn't have a vested interest in your privacy, and you shouldn't expect them to.  These guys do, and claim that breaking crypto isn't for the sake of privacy (and security).  That's more troubling. 

Posted 12/24/2009 at 10:42:26pm

Just for the record, F11 also works in Opera, Chrome, and IE8 (couldn't say for Safari).  I know you guys are religiously attached to Firefox, but sometimes your Firefox tips work in other browsers too.

Posted 12/11/2009 at 08:57:24pm

IIRC, the story behind the beach vacation while on sick leave for depression was that the trip was actually something her therapist wanted her to do.  I could be making that up, but I'd have to be pretty creative (plus it actually makes sense).

Posted 12/11/2009 at 05:10:38pm

Now that I've been using it for a few days, I feel like I can give my impressions.

It doesn't add much in the way of features, but it's pretty (considering it's a social networking app, that sorta matters).  What functionality it does add is actually fairly useful.  The absence of FBChat isn't a big deal since I use Digsby anyway. (plus FBChat is awful; the only advantage to it is that I have a wider contact base on Facebook than something like, say, AIM) 

My biggest complaint is performance.  From my unscientific "watch the task manager" method, the CPU utilization seems to peak fairly high basically any time you move around to different profiles (anything that would require loading a new page if you did it in the browser, basically).   RAM usage is definitely high - seems to hover in the 200MB ballpark for open profiles with a few pictures, which is more than Opera with a few tabs open.

I still like it as is, but if they can make it a little snappier and more efficient then I'm totally sold. 

Posted 12/11/2009 at 04:38:48pm

Ok, so it's a blinky thing.  I just don't see the point.

In my experience with W7, a problem between router (or whatever you may be connecting directly to) and the outside world will almost always result in the little yellow exclamation point being superimposed on the connection icon.  If the problem exists between you and what you're connecting to, usually that icon will indicate that the connection is unsuccessful.

There are, of course, exceptions to both of those cases and problems that don't fall in either domain.  However, in those cases I'd usually prefer a more sophisticated tool to solve the problem.

I guess what I'm saying is that this is filling a really small hole between what's in the built-in troubleshooting and what's in more advanced tools.  My approach is that if the easy way doesn't work, I just go straight to the big hammer.  I'm sure others have a different take, though.

Posted 12/08/2009 at 07:32:22pm

Not worth the effort? I don't follow.  Unless Dell is spending billions on its social networking outreach (from what I've seen it looks like the work of like maybe five people...), I don't see how $6.1 billion isn't worth the effort.  Yeah, maybe it's a small part of their total revenue - but it would seem to me that it costs them practically nothing to do it.