Posts by Slow Joe Crow
9 posts • joined Tuesday 8th March 2011 18:35 GMT
Hight tech Goldbugs
Interestingly, the economists I pay attention to like Nobel laureate Paul Krugman, Mark Thoma and Brad DeLong are highly critical of bitcoin as a wasteful fiat money for people who don't trust banks, essentially a left leaning version of Glenn Beck's exhortation to buy gold because Obama is a socialist.
Citations: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/15/opinion/krugman-the-antisocial-network.html
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/04/12/adam-smith-hates-bitcoin/
http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2013/04/why-gold-and-bitcoin-make-lousy-money.html
Posted in BOFH: Hasta la Vista... luser
The stupid amazes me
I have a laptop at home with an 8 year old Windows XP Pro installation that runs fine, but I installed the OS myself and ruthlessly stomp the garbage. Surprisingly both my 70 year old mother and 14 year old son also mange to keep their systems clean so my tech support load is light, except for my 9 year crushing her netbook, but at least the OS was clean.
Xubuntu FTW
Just another reason to continue using XFCE instead of Gnome or Unity. I prefer the cleaner simpler UI, since all I need on my machine is a browser, a shell, and text editor. I also end up doing most of my software management with Synaptic or Apt-get anyway so I have even less use for the eye candy.
Posted in Ten backpacks for tech-heads
No Timbuk2?
I see the Swiss pack a lot but personally I use an older Timbuk2 Swig backpack. This is a fairly basic hauler which meets my needs of being big enough to haul an HP 8530W and small enough to fit in a BMW motorcycle saddle bag. Mine was out of date and thus cheap, the newer ones have a nicer back panel and a sternum strap.
Their especial dos and tres are also well regarded.
I think it was competitive pressure
Baen, http://baen.com/ the other huge SF publisher in the US has been DRM free from the start and has a policy of giving away back catalog for free and allowing copying and redistribution of the CDs bundled with some of their books. According to author Eric Flint, this dope dealer business model has driven sales of series and related works since the free ebooks create demand for paid ebooks and paper copies.
There actually is a Jagwire
But they make cable for bicycles so I'm guessing it is an intentional pun http://www.jagwireusa.com/
icon chosen for the bike helmet
Posted in A sysadmin's top ten tales of woe
I blame lock in
I think it was more a matter of making you buy their "special" cable at twice the price of a generic DB9 serial cable. Fortunately USB has made this a thing of the past since I also found out the hard way about UPS cable pinouts, but luckily it was only a desktop machine.
This is why I use Xubuntu
I have never liked Gnome (mostly due to Nautilus) and while I used KDE for years, the change from 3.5 to 4 lost me when I couldn't do some of the things I used to do and the rest became harder. XFCE was a revelation, fast light, and a file manager (Thunar) that didn't irritate me. SO now I use Xubuntu on one box and Fedora with XFCE on the other box ad grit my teeth when I have to use Gnome. I also found the pseudo OS X look of Ubuntu 10.10 annoying, but a theme change in Gnome or switching XFCE banishes it.
Posted in Toshiba NB500 budget netbook
Acer seems to do cheap better
This review validates my decision to buy my daughter an Acer Aspire One D255E. I got it on sale for $200 US with free shipping and while it can be a bit slow loading programs, the touchpad and keyboard are OK and it meets the computing demands of an eight year old for almost a third less than the Toshiba. Also I found out that I can easily bump the RAM to 2GB which may help the speed, as would tossing Win7 starter for Ubuntu.
