If you are running Windows 2000 and the operating system becomes corrupted, the easiest and least risky way to fix it is to 1) buy a new hard drive, 2) install Windows on it and then 3) set it up as the master drive (assuming it’s IDE) with your old hard drive as a slave. Then copy the data and use the old drive as a backup. The standard help-desk recommendation, always some variant of the old “you must reinstall Windows” boilerplate, puts both your valuable data and valuable time at risk. (Of course the standard recommendation should work, but then if things always worked your Windows installation wouldn’t become corrupted, would it?) The price of a hard drive nowadays seems a small price to pay to avoid hours spent in help-desk hell.
Jonathan
Information Security
“Authentication is more important than encryption.” Bruce Schneier makes the case.
The Joke’s on Them
Xerox is running a TV ad for its publishing software. In the ad, an out-of-it middle-aged professor tells his class how expensive publishing is. A confident young student puts the prof in his place by pointing out, to applause, that Xerox publishing software makes it possible for anyone to be a publisher. Ha. I guess that’s why we’re all using Xerox’s software to publish our blogs. It’s ironic that Xerox doesn’t see that its sales pitch undercuts its own product as much as it does the old publishing ways which it thinks are its main competition. Oh, well. Nobody ever accused Xerox of understanding technology.
Mark Your Calendars!
Fuze reminds us that February 27 is the feast day of Saint Gabriel Possenti, the Patron Saint of Handgunners.
Economic News
Chicago Boy WV forwards an AP article that confirms what we all know: equity markets are thin and whippy because volume is down, and volume is down because everyone is waiting for the war.
– This NYT article discusses a report (pdf link) by a pair of economic researchers who think that war in Iraq is likely to have a significant negative effect on world stock markets. This goes against conventional wisdom that markets will rally in response to the war, but (therefore?) I think these guys may be right. It’s noteworthy that the researchers base their inferences on data from Tradesports.com, an Irish online betting exchange that I discussed in previous posts (here and here). The researchers argue that the Tradesports.com contracts may be more reliably predictive than are those on the respected Iowa Electronic Markets:
The Saddam Security is in fact more widely and frequently traded than the typical contract on the Iowa market. Wall Street is over-represented among market participants, and evidence from a variety of sources suggests that these data do in fact reflect underlying war probabilities.Here’s an article about similar research one of the co-authors did on elections. One of the more interesting sentences:
Wolfers, an assistant professor of economics who as a youth worked for a bookmaker in his native Australia, followed a hunch about the predictive power of betting markets in forecasting the outcome of political elections.So much for abstract theorizing.