Shamino reviews two new products

As some of you may be aware, I occasionally write reviews of products I buy for Epinions.

I wrote two more tonight. Check them out. If you find them helpful, be sure to let the site know (there are buttons at the bottom you can click to rate reviews).

Kodak EasyShare Z712 IS camera
Kenwood KDC-MP205 car stereo

USB enclosures: You don't always get what you pay for

Barry Brown (see the above link) was seeing poor performance when attaching a USB hard drive to an Apple AirPort Extreme router. He ran several tests with different enclosures and found that an el-cheapo enclosure performed better (sometimes much better) than a more expensive enclosure.

In the computer/electronics industry, it's not too unusual to see cheaper products outperform more expensive products, but this is a lesson that is easy to forget. Mr. Brown's example underscores this fact.

US colleges speak up against British academic antisemitism

As you may or may not be aware, back in May, the UK's new "University and College Union" decided, as its first official action to recommend that its member universities boycott all Israeli universities, as a show of solidarity with Palestinian terrorists.

Well, in a pleasantly surprising show of backbone, 300 US universities signed a statement (written by the American Jewish Committee) stating that they stand with the Israeli universities, and against the UK's UCU.

And I'm very happy to see that my alma mater (NJIT) did sign.

The continuing crisis...

I have long held the belief that people today are far too angry, and that if people could simply be a little more patient (and a little less quick to anger), most of today's problems would go away.

As if to underscore this belief, this story appears in today's news.

A total stranger in Texas calls another total stranger (a sailor in the US Navy, stationed in Virginia) a "nerd", on an internet forum (one where people routinely poke fun at each other.) In response, this sailor flips out, and threatens to kill the guy from Texas. He then drives halfway across the country, locates the Texan, and sets fire to the trailer he was living out of.

Clearly, the arsonist here is mentally deranged, is a threat to society, and should be locked away for a long time in the most oppressive prison cell allowed by law, but that's not my point. I've been seeing a lot of stories like this in the news recently - people who get murderously angry over trivial nonsense. What I wonder is: Are things like this happening more often than before? Or has it always happened, but without national publicity?

The arsonist blames the internet. Of course, that's a BS answer - the internet didn't make him do anything, but it allowed a stranger over a thousand miles away to trigger his rage. Without the internet, he'd probably have ended up following a stranger home from a local bar, movie theater or sporting event, committing his arson closer to home. Fortunately, he plead guilty, so we won't have to deal with the possibility of a jury unable to come to the same conclusion.

Anyway, getting back to my main point, is this a new phenomenon? When I was growing up, I occasionally heard news stories about crazy people committing crazy acts of violence, but I didn't hear stories like that happening all the time. Today, I hear of stories like this almost every month.

The more I observe the world, the more I want to move to northern Alaska and live out of an igloo or something.

Learn to read between the lines

Sometimes is funny how a scam-artist can become really goofy when sued by the government.

Hi-health, a shady company that sells pills, has long been advertising a product they call "ocular nutrition". This product is basically a multivitamin, nothing more. The manufacturer (advertising on nationally syndicated radio programs, like Paul Harvey) has historically made the most outrageous claims about this product. They claimed that it could cure age-related macular degeneration, remove "floaters" from vision, and even cure cataracts.

Well, they were sued, and they settled out of court by paying the FTC a $450,000 fine. A slap-on the wrist, IMO, but that's not the point of this article.

After the FTC fine, Hi-health did not stop selling ocular nutrition. They still advertise it on Paul Harvey's program, but now their product claims are much weaker. They now point out the fact that, in controlled studies, 25% of the people using it found the progress of their macular degeneration had halted or slowed.

In other words, 75% of the people taking it saw no effect or saw their degeneration progress faster! It doesn't take very much intelligence to see what they're really saying, but it does require you to pay attention and think about what was said.

Unfortunately, the elderly population - who this ad is targeted at - generally do not think critically when it comes to scam-artists promising miracle cures. And when the message comes from a friendly voice, like Paul Harvey (who actually reads the ad-copy during his broadcasts), they will tend to trust it more than if it was a random ad prepared by an ad agency.

If you know someone who is considering (or actually using) ocular nutrition, please show them this article, the FTC statement, and have them get real advice from an ophthalmologist. At best, they are throwing their money away. At worst, they may be making themselves sick, from overdose and possible drug-interactions.

Updated blogger template

Google recently updated their template system for Blogger. Not wanting to be left behind, I upgraded to the new system. None of the pre-built templates were formatted exactly as I had this blog originally (which isn't surprising, since I customized the template I used originally), but I think I managed to make everything look the same.

If you notice anything broken, let me know so I can fix it.

New e-mail contact

Just a heads-up for those readers who know me in real life.

I've recently set up a new e-mail address, which I'm requesting friends and family use instead of the addresses they have been using until now.

I sent e-mail to all of the friends and relatives that I have in my address book, but I know there are others that aren't listed there. If you are one of them, contact me for the new address. (I'm not posting it here to keep the spammers from harvesting it.)

If you are just a casual reader of this blog and don't know me personally, disregard the above message.

Don't disable memory testing

Whenever I buy or build a new computer for myself, I always configure it to test the memory. By default, most computers sold today have this disabled. They do this because it can take a few minutes to test the amount of memory needed to run modern system software comfortably.

Earlier this week, I powered on my PC and the memory test failed. After running a few of the usual tests (reseat the DIMMs in their sockets, try each DIMM individually, try different sockets) I determined that one of my DIMMs no longer works reliably. (This DIMM was working fine for two years until this weekend.) I removed it and sent it off to the manufacturer for warranty replacement.

If I hadn't enabled memory testing, leaving it in the "fast boot" mode, I would not have discovered this problem. Windows and my applications would simply run, and then malfunction when accessing the defective parts of RAM. I'd have then started tracking down things like buggy software and/or virusses, when the problem was a piece of hardware gone bad.

To everybody reading this: learn from my experience. If your PC is configured to skip memory testing (sometimes referred to as "fast boot" or "quick boot"), change that configuration. It may make you wait an extra minute or two when turning the computer on, but you will be able to quickly detect memory problems before they cause your software to malfunction.

Obama, affirmative action, and my take on it

This past Sunday, in an interview on ABC TV, Barack Obama stated that he does not believe there is a need for race-based affirmative action in college admission. He believes that poor white kids are just as disadvantaged as poor black kids, and that rich black kids are just as advantaged as white rich kids. He goes on to suggest that race-based affirmative action should be replaced with some kind of financial-need-based affirmative action program.

... and now my take ...

I think we need to distinguish between two aspects of college attendance - admission and financing.

After admission, I have absolutely no problem with colleges offering need-based scholarships, so students from poor families can actually accept the offer and attend. (Of course, such scholarships should require the student to maintain a reasonable grade level - no assistance program should allow students to slack off on someone else's dollar.)

Until the point of admission, however, financial need shouldn't be considered. Admission should be based solely on test scores, grades in school, and extracurricular activity. Race, financial status, religion and other such factors should not be considered at all. As a matter of fact, I would say that the admission boards that make these decisions shouldn't even have this kind of information (including the candidate's name, since that can also prejudice a board.)

There is nothing inherent about poverty (or race, etc.) that makes someone less intelligent or less educated. In college, I made several friends who came from poor families. They were not admitted on the basis of lowered standards, but because they were able to get good SAT scores and get good grades in high school, despite their upbringing.

Sure, many poor kids come from families where education is considered unimportant, or from incompetent public schools, and that is unfortunate, but how will these kids be served by admitting them to a college where the coursework is too advanced for them? Either they will be unprepared for the difficult coursework or the college will have to dumb-down the coursework - neither of which is going to be good for the student in the long run.

With regard to a possible solution, if there is a problem with the students' families, there is nothing anybody else can do about it. If there is a problem with the public schools (and we all know there are problems with many of those schools), then the solution is to fix those schools, not dumb-down college admissions procedures.

Of course, until the public schools do improve (which we know may take a very long time), some kids will fall through the cracks. One possible remedy would be some kind of optional post-high-school program (perhaps run by colleges) that offers remedial courses to promising students from bad school districts, specifically to get a student up to the level where he can get admitted to a college on his own merits. Many colleges already have programs like this, so perhaps the real solution is to convince more colleges to start up similar programs of their own.

Unstoppable Global Warming - an interview

The above link is a transcript of a talk by Fred Singer and Dennis Avery, authors of Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1500 Years, given at the Hudson Institute in November, 2006.

As a part of this presentation, the authors summarize their book and take questions from the audience. A lot of (politically inconvenient) facts are presented, making that case that the global warming trend we're currently experiencing is:

• Completely natural (not man-made)
• Cyclic (tied to an approximate 1500-year solar cycle)
• Not preventable, and
• Beneficial

The authors point out the junk science being published as fact, and the bias in supposedly respectable scientific journals. They also point out how much carbon reduction would actually be necessary to have an effect (for the US, 100% - meaning complete elimination of all fossil fuels from all sources.)

Read the paper. Then read the book. It's well worth doing.