Category Archives: Sufficiently Advanced Technology

I am the very happy user of a Lexar secure Jump Drive. I love not having to carry a zip drive back and forth from work as I kept forgetting to put it in my backpack. (We can't access our office hard disks from home. The functionality was promised ages ago, was installed some time ago, but we are not allowed to use it.)

My first beef with the Lexar was that it was so small that I kept misplacing it, but a snap-release keychain from the hardware store fixed that, and now it lives in my pocket when not in use.

But I have a second problem: the thing is too fat for my Tripp-Lite ultra-mini USB hub The hub has two USB ports on each side, very close together, and the short ends of the rectanguar USB ports are almost touching. When I put in the Lexar, there's no room to put anything next to it.

Via Slashdot, the Hall of Technical Documentation Weirdness.

(Also via Slashdot, how carrier Pigeons transfer data faster than networks)

My friend Simpson Garfinkel, the award-winning journalist and author, had, it seems, a fairly odd hobby. It started when he spotted piles of cheap used hard drives on sale in a local computer supply store:

I took the drives home and started my own forensic analysis. Several of the drives had source code from high-tech companies. One drive had a confidential memorandum describing a biotech project; another had internal spreadsheets belonging to an international shipping company.

Since then, I have repeatedly indulged my habit for procuring and then analyzing secondhand hard drives. I bought recycled drives in Bellevue, Wash., that had internal Microsoft e-mail (somebody who was working from home, apparently). Drives that I found at an MIT swap meet had financial information on them from a Boston-area investment firm. Last summer, I started buying drives en masse on eBay.

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I used to think that the next time I was in a silly mood I'd order a few pounds of brightly colored Dilatant compound. I certainly don't want 100 lbs of it, and even $12/lb seemed steep.

But now I'm thinking the black stuff would be nice. Except that it's $24/lb. Would just one pound really be enough? And then there are all those other neat colors….

(Other problem: the stuff seems to melt in Florida, even indoors under air conditioning. I bunch it up and two hours later it has ooozed out into a flat boring ameboid shape. Could it be the humidity? Or does it do that everywhere?)

My day as an election judge is a very interesting first-person account of a day as an election judge baby sitting electronic voting machines—written by Avi Rubin, a leading critic of Diebold's Accuvote machines. (Spotted via Ed Felten blog.)

There's something you've gotta love about this sort of inaccurate but fundamentally true coverage. In this case it happens to be of an industry press conference, but the method surely has other uses.

Lexmark takes wrap off user friendly printers: Fearlessly breaking the mold of IT marketing, the printing giant boldly commissioned a study into consumer attitudes towards printers late last year. By an enormous slice of luck, the findings just happened to confirm all Lexmark’s prejudices about the printer market.

…

Lexmark CEO Paul Curlander introduced a morale sapping day of inconclusive speeches about printers to an audience of journalists from all over Europe and South Africa. Some presenters spoke in their second (or third) language, in a move to make already turgid material even more palatable to a jaded audience. Having lost the will to live by mid morning, The INQUIRER was unable to take note of the figures produced by this study, despite their enormous gravity. For the same reason, we neglected to write down the solutions to the continuing challenge of making printers more user friendly.

But here goes. The printer market is going to be worth seventy quadrabezillion dollars, according to our memory of this event. Lexmark's projected growth could be as much as 116.9 per cent every quarter, or something, we seem to remember someone saying. In a near future timeframe, we may or may not see a day when printers can obey voice commands, such as 'Just fsking print will you' and 'no I don't want fsking letter paper. But in the meantime we'll continue to be confused by a bewildering array of features we'll never use and instructions only a seasoned photocopy engineer could understand.