| |
|
Wednesday, January 12, 2005
|
|
A month or so ago my neighbor Gary got a new Dell. It's a pretty nice machine, with a great looking flat screen and a nice small box. (I don't like the fact that there's a door to get to the CD, and that the CD is on a tray, which makes it hard to put the CD in; I prefer a slot. But that's not a big deal.) Last week he told me he was getting these notices saying his machine was infected with spyware and viruses. So I went to over to have a look at it. It was a mess. IE was totally infected by something that was taking over things so any request to go to a specific URL sent it to somewhere else, some malware site that was telling him he had spyware! I spend a lot of time on Windows, but I'm pretty careful, and I hardly ever use IE, so I wasn't really prepared to see the mess that I saw.
After spending some time with the thing, I couldn't fix it. I couldn't download IE or Spybot or Adaware because it wouldn't let me go to those sites! The copy of Norton that came with the machine didn't help. So I had just that day installed Microsoft's new Spyware tool, so I came home, burned it to a CD, and installed it on his machine. It took a couple of passes, but it did the trick, and the machine is now useable.
So, I guess, kudos to Microsoft for putting this thing out. I imagine that other tools would have done as much. But why in the hell is an older version of XP with an IE that doesn't stop popups being distributed by Dell? And how did these folks let things get so bad? Because I tell you this was really bad. Gary wondered what the point of these guys taking over the machine was, and it's hard to figure.
For the past few years, I've been pretty OS neutral, and generally recommend Windows machines. But given that mess, and given the new less expensive Mac, and figuring that 90% of what most people do is browse the web and read email, it's really hard to know why someone would prefer a Windows machine to a Mac. Personally, I was pretty disgusted, and wonder what naive users who don't know someone to help them out do.
3:14:56 PM 
|
|
Reality was a forbidding place for young...: "Reality was a forbidding place for young P . G . Wodehouse : cold, uncaring parents and a nanny who ran a prison. Comedy was escape..."
(Via Arts & Letters Daily.)
Interview with the author of a new Wodehouse bio.
During the war, Wodehouse also invented Bertie and Jeeves.
The two are a perfect fit, like Holmes and Watson. Bertie believes that he's a man of the world, but he's really a childlike figure who constantly finds himself in the soup (or "waist high in the gumbo and about to sink without a trace," as he once put it). It is Jeeves's job to glide noiselessly to his employer's side and apply his oversize brain to the task of fishing him out.
Had Bertie Wooster been a real Englishman of the time, as George Orwell once observed, he'd likely have died in the trenches around 1915. As for Jeeves, he was a real Englishman: Wodehouse borrowed the name from a Warwickshire cricketer he'd seen play as a young man. The real Jeeves was killed on the Somme, but McCrum found no evidence that Wodehouse ever noticed this.
My knowledge of the details of the Wodehouse life is pretty scanty: lived to be 89, wrote 96 books (or was it lived to 96, wrote 89 books?), made some unfortunate anti-British or pro-Nazi radio broadcasts during the war, lived in the US for most of this life, wrote some musicals with Jerome Kern. But though I'm sure the book is fascinating and revealing, something tells me it doesn't pass the Wodehouse test -- that is, would one be better off spending the same amount of time reading Wodehouse. As I've said befoe, though, that's an almost impossibly high standard, and unfair to nearly all other writers.
2:15:45 PM
|
|
Why Oh Why Are We Ruled by These Liars? (Harold Myerson Is Shrill Department): " Harold Myerson writes:
washingtonpost.com: President of Fabricated Crises: Some presidents make the history books by managing crises.... But when historians look back at the Bush presidency, they're more likely to note that what sets Bush apart is not the crises he managed but the crises he fabricated. The fabricated crisis is the hallmark of the Bush presidency. To attain goals that he had set for himself before he took office -- the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, the privatization of Social Security -- he concocted crises where there were none. So Iraq became a clear and present danger to American hearths and homes, bristling with weapons of mass destruction, a nuclear attack just waiting to happen. And now, this week, the president is embarking on his second great scare campaign, this one to convince the American people that Social Security will collapse and that the only remedy is to cut benefits and redirect resources into private accounts.... Social Security is not facing a financial crisis at all. It is facing a need for some distinctly sub-cataclysmic adjustments over the next few decades that would increase its revenue and diminish its benefits.
Politically, however, Social Security is facing the gravest crisis it has ever known. For the first time in its history, it is confronted by a president, and just possibly by a working congressional majority, who are opposed to the program on ideological grounds, who view the New Deal as a repealable aberration in U.S. history, who would have voted against establishing the program had they been in Congress in 1935. But Bush doesn't need Karl Rove's counsel to know that repealing Social Security for reasons of ideology is a non-starter. So it's time once more to fabricate a crisis. In Bushland, it's always time to fabricate a crisis. We have a crisis in medical malpractice costs, though the CBO says that malpractice costs amount to less than 2 percent of total health care costs.... We have a crisis in judicial vacancies, though in fact Senate Democrats used the filibuster to block just 10 of Bush's 229 first-term judicial appointments With crisis concoction as its central task -- think of how many administration officials issued dire warnings of the threat posed by Saddam Hussein or, now, by Social Security's impending bankruptcy -- this presidency, more than any I can think of, has relied on the classic tools of propaganda....
"
(Via Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal (2004).)
12:35:22 PM
|
|
I wondered before if Myanmar, Burma, was hiding something in reporting relatively low (under 100) death totals. But when you look at an animation like this one, it seems clear that the size of the tsunami when it hit there was relatively small, because it was directly North, and most energy went East and West. Interesting.
12:34:37 PM
|
|
Why Oh Why Are We Ruled by These Liars? (Harold Myerson Is Shrill Department): " Harold Myerson writes:
washingtonpost.com: President of Fabricated Crises: Some presidents make the history books by managing crises.... But when historians look back at the Bush presidency, they're more likely to note that what sets Bush apart is not the crises he managed but the crises he fabricated. The fabricated crisis is the hallmark of the Bush presidency. To attain goals that he had set for himself before he took office -- the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, the privatization of Social Security -- he concocted crises where there were none. So Iraq became a clear and present danger to American hearths and homes, bristling with weapons of mass destruction, a nuclear attack just waiting to happen. And now, this week, the president is embarking on his second great scare campaign, this one to convince the American people that Social Security will collapse and that the only remedy is to cut benefits and redirect resources into private accounts.... Social Security is not facing a financial crisis at all. It is facing a need for some distinctly sub-cataclysmic adjustments over the next few decades that would increase its revenue and diminish its benefits.
Politically, however, Social Security is facing the gravest crisis it has ever known. For the first time in its history, it is confronted by a president, and just possibly by a working congressional majority, who are opposed to the program on ideological grounds, who view the New Deal as a repealable aberration in U.S. history, who would have voted against establishing the program had they been in Congress in 1935. But Bush doesn't need Karl Rove's counsel to know that repealing Social Security for reasons of ideology is a non-starter. So it's time once more to fabricate a crisis. In Bushland, it's always time to fabricate a crisis. We have a crisis in medical malpractice costs, though the CBO says that malpractice costs amount to less than 2 percent of total health care costs.... We have a crisis in judicial vacancies, though in fact Senate Democrats used the filibuster to block just 10 of Bush's 229 first-term judicial appointments With crisis concoction as its central task -- think of how many administration officials issued dire warnings of the threat posed by Saddam Hussein or, now, by Social Security's impending bankruptcy -- this presidency, more than any I can think of, has relied on the classic tools of propaganda....
"
(Via Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal (2004).)
12:02:44 PM
|
|
My New Prompt Via Don Box's Spoutlet via Shawn Van Ness, I love this new command-line prompt: $P$_$+$G Which, when I set it via either the prompt command or the PROMPT environment variable, gives me a command line that looks like this: C:dataProjectsflexwikiFlexWikiCore
++> The plusses indicate that I'm two levels deep in pushd, and I like that the working directory appears on the line before, obliterating the problem of long paths making commands linewrap. Nice! 
(Via Don Box's Spoutlet.)
11:59:41 AM
|
|
|
© Copyright 2005 Steve Michel.
Last update: 2/28/2005; 10:36:06 PM.
|
|
|
