Kingsbury Associates

Better late then never - a post from back in October that never made it. Hats off to Dan Balz for his campaign column in the Washington Post the other day.  Rarely have I read such a compelling campaign piece with both rich on the ground observations and incisive application of broader themes.  Add to it the dispassionate tone and view, and this is Dan Balz at his best.  

So the Sunday NYT chooses as its quote of the day a reference to Egyptian president Morsi about residue from U.S. previous support of dictators in the Middle East. My choice for geek/enviro quote of the day on the tech side would be from this great NYT piece by James Glanz  about the cloud computing data centers that have gotten more press lately.   Power, Pollution and the Internet .  " Of all the things the Internet was expected to become, it is safe to say that a seed for the proliferation of backup diesel generators was not one of them." So my question about these data centers is two fold:   First, has any process begun for swapping mechanical hard drives at these data centers for the SSD drives that are increasingly more efficient.  Even if the power consumption differences aren't yet marked, any marked difference in temperature could mean huge efficiencies in the current high demand cooling requirements. Second, and probably the question I wi...

It begins!   A Taller Change than expected

I moderate a local list serve and increasingly must deal with folks whose aol, hotmail, yahoo, and other mail accounts have been hijacked so spammers bombard their address books with spam emails.  Fresh from a quite detailed ArsTechnica post by Dan Goodin last week about the current state of website and password security, http://arstechnica.com/security/2012/08/passwords-under-assault/ , wanted to bring out some of the more potent points from the piece for the many folks who would benefit from practical and less technical advice. Password cracking has advanced to the point that choosing a dictionary word for a password or using a password of less than 9 characters is not a secure practice.  Because of the number of passwords that have already been added to hacker databases, the common passwords using a word with numbers after it (e.g. strawman456) are also not secure.   Avoid using your email address as a user name if possible.   We have no control over whet...

Just a pean to Nate Silver - to say again that baseball's loss has been our gain, i.e. to the political process folks, when I read his post about the "Are you better off than you were four years ago" debate line that Ronald Reagan used in his debate with Jimmy Carter in 1980.   voters have short memories    With quite interesting charts, Silver ends with his riff on the conclusion, from 'better off than 4 years ago" to "what have you done for me lately."