| China Cuts PC Makers Some Slack |
|
China’s Xinhua News Agency reports that PC makers will not be required to install the “Green Dam-Youth Escort” filtering software on new PCs as of July 1. The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology said that the “massive installation demanded extra time”. As if 23 days wasn’t enough time. |
|
|
Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Internet Librarian
|
Comments (0)June 8, 2009
| China Outsources the Whole Justice Potter Stewart “I Know It When I See It” Pornography Thing [UPDATED] |
|
The Chinese government has announced that all new PCs sold in China must have a porn filter installed on them. They’ve given the PC manufacturers all of 2 1/2 weeks to comply — the law takes effect July 1. The software, called “Green Dam-Youth Escort” regularly checks a list of banned sites so that it can “[construct] a green, healthy, and harmonious Internet environment, and preventing harmful information on the Internet from influencing and poisoning young people.” The software was created by a company with “ties to China’s security ministry and military” says the Wall Street Journal (sub required). So will the filter limit itself simply to blocking sites with adult content? Given China’s track record, I think not. But at least the Chinese have given the PC makers a sort of plausable deniability. They can claim to have loaded the porn filter while having no responsibility over which sites get blocked. It’s the price you have to pay to access the huge Chinese market. UPDATE, June 10: Oh, Chinese surfers are just thrilled by how Green Dam works. |
|
|
Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Internet Librarian
|
June 3, 2009
| Stuff Only An Operating System Geek Could Love |
|
Item 1: Acer plans to sell an Android-based netbook this year. For an idea of what a phone-based OS will look like on a netbook, here’s a clip of an ASUS Eee PC running Android. Item 2: Windows 7 will ship on October 22 in 5 different versions: Starter, Home Premium, Professional, Enterprise and Ultimate. I wanted to say something snarky here, but I’m actually enjoying running Win 7 on the Frankenbox. And Win 7 went 3-2-1 (as in win-loss-tie) in Lifehacker Gina Trapani’s feature-by-feature showdown with Mac OS X. |
|
|
Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Internet Librarian
|
May 19, 2009
| My First Week With a Netbook |
|
I’ve been interested in netbooks since last autumn. I didn’t buy one at the time because I wound up getting my mitts on a T-Mobile G1 smartphone. Last week I pulled the trigger — I got the Acer Aspire One. For me, it was an impulse purchase. I stopped into my local Micro Center (aka Valhalla) ostensibly to look at the Lenovo S10. I swear I was just gonna look. Then I saw the Aspire for $279 and thought, “What the heck. If it croaks after 6 months I’m not out that much money.” My wife was like, “$279 is nothing if it makes you shut up about netbooks.” So, boom, the deal was done. Pros:
Cons:
Final note: The Acer’s running Windows XP. I decided to go without antivirus (but did turn on the Windows firewall), ’cause I’m just sooo tired of having it slow me down. I decided to stick exclusively with Google Chrome because it’s way safer than IE and even Firefox. We’ll see how it goes. |
|
|
Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Internet Librarian
|
February 24, 2009
| Netbooks, Revisited |
|
Netbooks are all the rage. I’ve blogged about them before. I haven’t followed up on that original post, because most of the articles I’ve been reading are written by propeller heads who argue about cache speeds or screen refresh or some other esoteric thingie that 99.99999999% of computer users do not know or care about. But Wired has a quite interesting article about the Netbook Effect. Here’s one quote that jumped out at me: “For years now, without anyone really noticing, the PC industry has functioned like a car company selling SUVs: It pushed absurdly powerful machines because the profit margins were high, while customers lapped up the fantasy that they could go off-roading, even though they never did. So coders took advantage of that surplus power to write ever-bulkier applications and operating systems. What netbook makers have done, in effect, is turn back the clock: Their machines perform the way laptops did four years ago. And it turns out that four years ago (more or less) is plenty.” So true. And even though I have 2 pricey — at least by *my* standards — Macs at home, I am quite fond of my 6 year-old, hand-me-down Dell Inspiron 1100 running CrunchBang linux. |
|
|
Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Internet Librarian
|
February 13, 2009
| They Stole My Headline |
|
Wired reports that today at 6:31:30 PM EST, Unix time, which is the number of seconds since January 1, 1970 — don’t ask why, Unix guys are just different, trust me — will be 1234567890. Our IT guy Ken tipped us off about this on Tuesday. I was going to post using the title “We’re gonna party like it’s 1234567890,” but Wired beat me to it. I guess it’s all for the best — I’d have gotten a C&D notice from the RIAA or maybe even one of its clones. |
|
|
Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Internet Librarian
|
January 22, 2009
| 2.5 Million Macs, 22.7 Million iPods, 4.3 Million iPhone 3Gs [UPDATED] |
|
Apple had a very good first quarter. (On the other hand, Microsoft didn’t.) And speaking of the Mac: Happy 25th! |
|
|
Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Internet Librarian
|
December 19, 2008
| No Color Monitor. No Hard Disk. No Keyboard. But It Had Switches and Blinky Lights. |
|
Thirty-four years ago today the world’s first commercially-successful personal computer, the Altair 8800, officially went on sale. (Notice I didn’t say “world’s first personal computer”. Obsessive techno-nerds get all manner of cranky when you call it the first PC.) The Altair was featured on the cover of the January 1975 issue of Popular electronics. Obtaining an original copy of that issue is like the Holy Grail to computer enthusaists. The 8800 didn’t do a whole lot compared to today’s PCs, but it was popular nonetheless, especially with two ubergeeks named Paul Allen and Bill Gates. They got together to create a programming language for the Altair. (You know the rest of the story.) When you look at the guts of the thing, you realize how much the technology has changed in the last four decades. |
|
|
Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Internet Librarian
|
December 11, 2008
| Hard Drives: Present and Future |
|
Whether you store all your data locally (on your desktop computer or laptop) or keep it on the Cloud, it’s gonna live on a hard disk somewhere. Two articles I stumbled upon today summarize the present and future of hard disk technology. First, Gizmodo demystifies the current technology. Here are some key points:
What about solid-state drives which use flash technology? “Some say that the end of the trusty hard drive is near, killed by SSD. But let’s not be so quick to give up on a technology that stores a whole terabyte for $100. It’ll be years before solid-state flash-memory disks (in this case usually referred to as SSDs) let us cheaply bank the same amounts of data as trusty old hard disk drives for a reasonable price.” John Markoff, writing in the NY Times, disagrees: “For example, it is now possible to buy a 128-gigabyte, 2.5-inch internal drive from the consumer electronics reseller OCZ for as little as $299. Although that price might be twice as much as a comparable hard drive with rotating storage, the combination of faster speed, lower power consumption and heat generation — as well as potentially better reliability — is enticing.” Mr. Markoff goes on to discuss how, as a test, he replaced his MacBook’s 300GB hard disk ($99) with an 80GB SSD ($540) from Intel: “… the results were impressive. Using a standard Macintosh performance measurement utility called Xbench, the Intel solid-state drive increased the computer’s overall performance by almost half. Disk performance increased fivefold. The computer started more quickly and applications seemed to open nearly instantaneously. Most laptops do have small fans, but the computer was definitely quieter; gone was the telltale whirring of the drive motor.” I’m also particularly interested in weight. Neither article discussed it, so I poked around on the Web for a bit. I think it’s safe to say that an SSD would probably save me at least half a pound. That may not seem like much until you have to hump a laptop around all day in a bag. (This is one of the reasons why people are gaga over netbooks.) |
|
|
Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Internet Librarian
|
December 9, 2008
| 40th Anniversary Of The Mother Of All Demos [UPDATED] |
|
It was 40 years ago today that Doug Engelbart introduced the world to the wonders of the computer mouse, hypertext, video- and teleconferencing, and more. The 90 minute presentation, part of the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco, stunned attendees, and was dubbed The Mother of all Demos by Steven Levy in his book Insanely Great: The Life and Times of Macintosh, the Computer That Changed Everything. It’s hard to overstate how amazing this demo is, even after the passage of 4 decades. You simply must watch the video, even if you only have time for part of it. UPDATE - Wired has a story about this, too. |
|
|
Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Internet Librarian
|
RSS
