fighting the lack of good ideas
Most manufacturers will list an MTBF (Mean Time Between Failure) on their products – at least in the computer hardware industry. A typical number might be 1 000 000 hours. For those keeping track at home, that’s about 114 years! Now, since no harddrive has been running for more than a century, how could they…
I enjoy histories – especially when delivered in the format that Gavin Menzies employed in “1421 – The Year China Discovered America”. The only other history I have read in the past 5 years I can recall reading so fast was Gideon’s Spies. Gavin makes a compelling presentation, interpretation, application, and conclusion of a host…
Rodale Press published a collected works book entitled “Producing Your Own Power – How to make Nature’s Energy Sources Work for You” in 1974. There are a host of now-humorous segments of the text: “The US government estimates that by 1980 1 percent of our country’s land will be covered with utility companies’ equipment” {viii}. The contiguous…
I’m trying to do some research regarding swagbucks, but so far haven’t found much about them – other than they appear to be legit. Are they the 2011 incarnation of iWon?
Ars Technica has had a great series of articles recently on virtualization (1 2 3 4 5). But a statement made in part 5 repeated what has been too-often stated as a benefit of virtualization: the reduction of servers, and associated management tasks – The benefits of performing a large-scale P2V conversion are pretty clear:…
As recently promised, here is my review of Bruce Schneier’s seminal work, Applied Cryptography (2d edition). I received my now-signed copy of Applied Cryptography (2d ed) for my 16th birthday – about a year after it was published. Of all the “odd” books I asked-for when I was younger, this single volume had to take…
It’s not often I read Christian fiction – too often some (or even most) the doctrines embraced and promulgated by the authors are not ones I agree with. I was very pleasantly surprised to fine that R E Bartlett’s book, The Personifid Project was not like that. It’s even a great example of science fiction,…