Elliott C. Back: In Aere Aedificare

Choose your own NY adventure–mine is expensive with three kids and swiss boarding school, but I think I forget my wife to be’s fashion needs, hehe!

How many hard drives is enough? I’ve got a hard-disk buying fever; they’re just so cheap:

I have three internal Seagate drives, four external firewire Seagate drives, a WD firewire drive, and two USB drives for a grand total of:

• Internal: 320GB + 500GB + 250GB = 1070GB
• Laptop: 120GB
• External Firewire: 300GB, 300GB, 300GB, 400GB, 500GB = 1800GB
• External USB: 40GB, 200GB = 240GB

This brings me to a grand total of 3230 GB, or 3.2 TB of disk space available to me at any given time. Imagine how troublesome my storage needs would become if I decided to say, use RAID?

IBM is finally paying back some $65 million in overtime. IT workers around the world rejoice.

Charles Arthur has written a somewhat ridiculous concept article at the Guardian UK, The price of humans who’ll spam blogs is falling to zero. It’s full of completely wrong statements, like:

If the captcha was filled in, it must have been done by a person; if it had been done by a machine, the spammers would have cracked the problem of solving captchas and would be busily spamming every blog they could find.

Actually, cracking captchas has been done reliably and cheaply. I would be comfortable saying that it’s a solved field that a script-kiddy could learn enough about online to write his own captcha-breaking spam bot.

The point of his article revolves around the idea that supplying computers to impoverished nations will result in large-arrays of manual spammers:

Elsewhere this week, deliveries began of the hand-powered laptop, Nicholas Negroponte’s computing gift to the developing world. I’ve no doubt it will radically alter the life of many in the developing world for the better. I also expect that once a few have got into the hands of people aching to make a dollar, with time on their hands and an internet connection provided one way or another, we’ll see a significant rise in captcha-solved spam.

Sorry Charles, but the human spam attack is always more expensive than the machine technique. I can buy a few machines and send out thousands of spam comments a minute–how many humans would you have to pay to do the same, 24/7?

Black Friday traffic dropped Wallmart and Disney’s websites, while Amazon fell to the popularity of their xBox 360 deal.