Archive for January, 2012
Tuesday, January 31st, 2012
File this story under, “Throwing the Baby Out with the Bathwater” … the recording industry’s war against file sharing has apparently harmed many who were doing nothing illegal.
When the Megaupload servers were taken down, no one bothered to distinguish legitimate data from data that infringed on the copyright of others. Users who had been using Megaupload as a host for their own files were now in a position where they were denied access to those files, even though they were in many cases completely legal. It was even worse for some users who had no access to local backups of the data. With the take down of Megaupload, access to those files was no longer available.
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Tags: backup, EFF, file sharing, Mega Retrieval, megaupload
Posted in General News | Comments Off
Tuesday, January 31st, 2012
Apparently, we can all expect a Firefox upgrade some time in the very near future …
Mozilla has uploaded the stable version of Firefox 10 to its ftp server. The company is currently in the process of distributing the release to all of its world wide mirror servers in preparation for the release later today. The release of the extended support release version marks the beginning of the end for Firefox’s 3.x branch which will be retired from support in April of this year.
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Tags: ESR, firefox 10, mozilla, update
Posted in General News, software evaluation | Comments Off
Monday, January 30th, 2012
Here’s a nice synopsis that explains how to figure out what the Blue Screen of Death is trying to tell you …
For many years now the famous Blue Screen of Death (BSoD) has been the ultimate indication that something disastrous has happened to make your computer die, but how useful is the information in the BSoD and the respective crash dump file that Windows produces?
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Tags: blue screen of death, BSoD, error code, stop code, windows
Posted in tech support | Comments Off
Monday, January 30th, 2012
I know a lot of people who are still using XP; it looks like they’ve now got a little less than three years to move on to another operating system …
It seems like just a short while ago that I was writing about how Windows XP had just 1,000 days of support left but now that number is down to under 800! Microsoft reminded us of this on the weekend with a blog post encouraging companies to migrate to Windows 7 as soon as possible saying “It takes 18-24 months to plan for and deploy a new operating system.”
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Tags: microsoft, service pack, support, windows 7, Windows XP
Posted in General News | Comments Off
Friday, January 27th, 2012
Here’s an interesting tool for those of us who are concerned about privacy (and/or those of us who want to check up on our kids’ online activities …)
Keeping track of all your history items can be quite the feat if you are using more than one browser. Privacy conscious users usually delete the information regularly, while the majority of users is likely unaware what their web browser and operating system can reveal about them.
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Tags: browser history, history, History Viewer, privacy, Windows history
Posted in privacy, security, software evaluation | Comments Off
Friday, January 27th, 2012
This really isn’t anything new; Google is just following the same rules that newspaper publishers have followed for over a hundred years …
Advertisements are what keeps many of the sites going on the Internet, including the site you are currently reading. As a user, I do understand that too many ads, or ads in the wrong position, or ads that are highly distracting, reduce the user experience. While I rarely stumble upon sites anymore that have their pages plastered with ads so that it becomes difficulty to find the regular content, I have to say that I welcome the change that Google just announced.
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Tags: advertising, google, layout, publishing, search engine ranking
Posted in General News | Comments Off
Thursday, January 26th, 2012
Sounds like a great idea for those who are used to unconventional keyboards and those who want to be forced to learn how to type all over again … but a bad idea for just about everyone else.
The QWERTY keyboard layout has been used in most western countries now since the late 1800′s. Though there are differences in some countries, such as AZERTY in France, this keyboard layout remains with modern computers even though it’s not always the quickest way for people to type.
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Tags: keyboard, qwerty, smartphone, tablet, touchscreen
Posted in General News | Comments Off
Thursday, January 26th, 2012
Here’s a helpful Firefox add-on for those who travel a lot or do business overseas …
Having currency exchange rates displayed in your web browser can be useful in several situations. Maybe you prefer to buy some goods overseas and want the exchange rate right in your browser to make a rough product price calculation. Or you are trading on the foreign exchange market and want to make sure that you have the latest currency exchange rates displayed at all times in the browser. It can also be handy if you are planning your next out-of-country trip and need to convert currencies to get a better feeling for prices in the other country.
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Tags: currency conversion, currency exchange rates, firefox, metals
Posted in software evaluation | Comments Off
Wednesday, January 25th, 2012
This sounds like a potential source of problems; Norton is sometimes incompatible with other anti-virus products.
Bundling third party applications with your own software is not a new thing on the Internet. It is for instance quite common that you see the Ask Toolbar, Babylon Toolbar, or any other toolbar added to software installations. Users who do not pay attention to the installation are then not only installing the software they want on their system, but also software they do not want. To make matters worse, it usually is not that easy to get rid of the latter.
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Tags: adobe, adware, bundle, norton, Shockwave
Posted in General News, software evaluation | Comments Off
Wednesday, January 25th, 2012
These days, the main purpose of most internet services seems to be marketing research and ad delivery … so much for privacy, I guess.
An announcement was posted yesterday on the official Google blog that indicates that changes are being made to Google’s privacy policies and terms of service. What first looks like a reasonable thing to do is in fact something that will keep privacy advocates up at night. Google will merge their privacy policies, of which about 60 are now available, into one main privacy policy. This on first glance is good from a user perspective, as it improves the privacy policy’s accessibility.
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Tags: google, privacy, terms of service, user tracking
Posted in General News, privacy | Comments Off
