Duel CPUs - just an old story I ran into today.
Archive for March, 2006
MacNN has a story about malformed ExIf tags causing Safari to crash. Seems to be in CoreGraphics, rather than Safari or WebKit. The sample is an extra click.
Macslash posted a link to a great article on using mdfind (and mdls) instead of find or locate.
What’s the greatest tool of all time? Why, Duct Tape of course!
Virus proection more destructive than viruses? Slashdot article. As with most slashdot articles, the comments are the best part.
This one is perhaps not as horribly ugly as my last entry, but in its own way it is still quite amazing.
Unfortunately, a simple screen shot doesn’t really express the horror that is ASUS Update. You get just a hint of it with the combo box of actions and the Back, Cancel and Next button. Unfortunately, these buttons enable and disable according to a plan that only makes sense to… I actually don’t know who it would make sense to. The only button that always seems to be enabled is Cancel, which quits — even if you click it during a network operation or some such.
I wish I had a prize to give out, but nevertheless — can you top this? I’m sure you can. Video and audio card manufacturers have been racing for years to produce terrible interfaces. Surely someone has made a bigger abonimation towards mankind than this.
Fresh after a hardware disaster, I decided to list a few frequently-overlooked hardware failures. In no particular order:
- Fluctuating power supply - 5v is supposed to be 5v. 12v is supposed to be 12v. And so on. If your power supply isn’t outputting the right amount of power, weird things will happen. If your system is acting strangely, such as the hard drive not being recognized or spontaneously restarting, this is something you should look at. I’ve been hit with this at least twice, and I may be being hit with it yet again.
- Fans - Amazingly, it seems the computer industry has not figured this one out yet: Things with moving parts fail. Either the moving parts move too far or they stop moving entirely. I’ve been hit with this one three times so far.
- Loose stuff - Yes, it matters if that screw falls on your motherboard. Unfortunately, there isn’t really a quick fix for this one. Luckily, this hasn’t hit me in a while… but it hit my brother’s amplifier a few months ago.
I wish I could take credit for this, or even that it was a recent thing to find. But nevertheless, Paper is calm.
…one thing about paper which is as important as all this wizardary is paper is calm. It doesn’t contain moving images to distract the attention, it doesn’t spontaneously resize to cover your entire desk, or disappear into a little button which you have to press to recover it. It doesn’t spontaneously turn into another piece of paper. It doesn’t make a ta-da sound whenever I look at it, it’s reasonably permanent, I can’t with a flick of my wrist remove its contents or make it into large flaching yellow cyrillic. It does what you tell it to, and when you tell it to do nothing, it does nothing.