Month: March 2004

Microsoft: We can make ANYTHING insecure

A friend writes:

You know, I imported my Thawte cert in Outlook, and after asking me for the password to open the file, it blithely started using my private key for me. No opportunity for me to supply a passphrase, just heigh-ho-lickety-split look! I can decrypt messages for you! Or anyone else who happens to turn on your laptop!

Sigh.

Microsoft: We can make ANYTHING insecure.

Yup, while The World’s Richest Man talks about security and how password are terrible, this is what happens where the rubber meets the road.

what’s your time worth?

Educated Guesswork: March 2004 Archives

In two consecutive posts, Eric manages to praise Apple’s “make it work first time” design engineering and gripe about the performance of his iBook.

Now, I have an iBook as well, and occasionally I find myself staring down the barrel of the Spinning Beachball of Doom, generally accompanied by a whole lot of disk thrashing. I knew at the time that I bought a low-end consumer model and now I realize I should have stuffed more RAM in it to stave off all the swapping. (In /var/vm I have two 64 Mb swapfiles, one 128 Mb swapfile, and two 256 Mb swapfiles: some more RAM wouldn’t hurt.) Do I regret the purchase? Not really.

Being as how I’m an unemployed stay-at-home dad and housekeeper, this little gem was a good fit, but for a consultant and power-user like Eric, I would have suggested a PowerBook for, well, power. If, as he suggests in the second of the two posts, his time is worth more than $40 an hour, why buy the cheaper laptop?

This is a question I have wondered about and asked over and over again: if you spend several hours day with a tool and you make a living with it, buy the best one for the job. Not the most expensive or the newest, but the one that delivers the best value for the money. The low-end iBook represents about 25 hours at $40, about 3 days of billable work. Let’s look at some others:

* The fully loaded 12 inch PowerBook is $1,799 or 45 hours, just over a week’s worth.

* The 15 incher is a good deal more: $2,599 (65 hours).

Everyone has to make their own choices, I realize: I just wish I knew what some of them were based on. If you’re not going to be happy with the purchase, don’t make it: not spending enough and hating it is worth than spending too much.

“Dear comrade”

I added a new button/banner on the NASCAR area (what I call the proliferation of affinity stuff at the bottom left) in support of the labor movement. My recent gig at the UW taught me a lot about the value of unions, collective bargaining, and advocacy.

What I wasn’t prepared for was the email granting me permission to use the icon, with a salutation of ‘Dear comrade.’

++I {black heart suit} unions.++

a framing exercise

The Big Picture: What Will Determine the Outcome of the 2004 Election:

My own theory about the economy is all over this blog, but to reiterate: We have just come out of the biggest bubble in Human history. There was massive overinvestment, tremendous overspending, all of which has lead to significant overcapacity. In a post-bubble environment, one cannot merely stimulate your way out of the business cycle. What it will take mostly is time — something no President wants to say. “Hey, voters, just wait a decade or so and jobs will return.”

During the interregnum, policymakers can identify the biggest obstacles towards job creation, and do what they can to remove them. They may determine its rising health care costs, or high taxes on small businesses, or its the expenses of IRS filings for new workers, or litigation exposure or whatever. Identify the key issues, and deal with them.

There’s the entire election for you: How the Jobs issue gets defined. The party out of power has a few months (at most) to clarify this definition. Since they have a contested primary (while the incumbent party does not), they have an opportunity to frame the issue, and to some degree, define the debate in a very public manner — for now.

Like pére, like fils? George H. W. Bush was stunned by a supermarket scanner, demonstrating how out of touch with commonplace reality he was: is W going to show us the same thing by ignoring the fact that the world has changed and the old rules of “wait, cut taxes, and see” don’t work? And can his opponents make anything of it?

open letter to recruiters/head-hunters

Is there any compelling reason you would make someone in either a specialized technical field or in any kind of management position fill out an application form like a McDonald’s burger-flipper? If a person has a resume spanning several years of work in a given field, and the recruiter has that in hand, does it not make sense for the recruiter (who stands to make money, from thousands to tens of thousands of dollars) to transfer the information onto whatever form is required, returning it for review and signature?

In these days of increasing automation and the need to differentiate on intangibles (service, professionalism, etc.), why doesn’t this field — which is a service, no more, no less — take advantage of opportunities like this?
Continue reading “open letter to recruiters/head-hunters”

must-read books on the sciences

Freedom to Tinker: Must-Read Books: Readers’ Choices:

Last week, I asked readers to name five must-read books on science and technology. The results are below. I included nominations from my comments section, from the comments over at Crooked Timber, and from any other blogs I spotted. This represents the consensus of about thirty people.

So I need to expand my reading list . . .

I think what happened on this was people chose their favorite books, without giving any thought to an audience other than themselves.

A few notes:

* The reviews of Guns, Germs, and Steel, a popular choice of contributors, are so uneven, I’m not sure what to make of it. It doesn’t make Professor Felten’s list, either. Likewise, Gödel, Escher, Bach . . .
* A Short History of Nearly Everything has to be good, given its author, and I think that’s what’s required here: a survey for generalists with pointers on where to learn more.
* To that end, The Evolution of Useful Things looks interesting as well.

This brings up an idea I have had periodically since the earky days of Amazon.com (nearly 10 years on): I’d like to have a subscription of books delivered to me, regularly (monthly or so) based on my interests. The various book clubs can’t offer that: they’re too narrow. It could come at various price points: $10/$20/$30 and let the member choose what of several books is required. And of course, this feeds into the collaborative filtering/recommendation engine.