Archive for February, 2009
Assuming technology customers are stupid
At Internetnews, Mike Elgan uses the recent flap about Facebook’s terms of service to comment on how often technology companies treat their customers as dumb. For example, he says:
Companies of all sorts insult our intelligence when, for example, they sell wasteful and toxic gadgets as “green”; or when they slap the buzzword du jour, such [...]
Will Intel be the only CPU maker left?
Microsoft fanboys to the contrary, monopolies are not good for consumers. So I keep hoping that AMD will survive to keep Intel on its toes. As I have posted before, there is no question that hardware is better and cheaper because Intel had competition. Unfortunately, AMD has been in a rocky financial state for a [...]
Selection of free PC games
I am not an expert on PC games. I waste too much time on just Spider Solitaire as it is. However, games are a big area of interest for PC users so here’s a link to ExtremeTech’s article, The 20 Best Free PC Games.
Microsoft update for Windows Autorun
I have posted several times about the Conficker worm infection using Windows Autorun. Microsoft has now issued an update for some of the older versions of Windows. Vista had already been patched.
New security issues- Adobe Flash, Excel
Security issues just keep coming, Adobe Flash again and Microsoft Excel. Microsoft acknowledges the problem in Excel but no fix yet. Adobe has a patch at this link. More details by Gregg Keizer at Computerworld. Also, see the information about Flash problems at Security Garden and also at ZDNet.
Who’s number one in broadband?
A lot of people would answer that it certainly isn’t the US. I have read countless articles and posts bemoaning the fact that America has fallen behind in the quality and use of broadband Internet. Not true, says one study that places the US at the top of the ranking. It’s from Leonard Waverman, the [...]
More about a malware scam
I previously posted about malware pretending to be an anti-virus program and creating phony reviews of itself. Ars Technica has some more on this subject:
It’s always interesting to watch what little hooks and schemes the malware industry has cooked up in an attempt to better bait the public and the new Anti-Virus-1 package doesn’t disappoint. [...]
Is Google too big, too powerful, maybe dangerous?
People have been asking questions about Google’s effect for quite a while now but concern about the power that Google has over the Internet is reaching new heights. As posted recently, the Obama Justice Department may be taking a harder line. Sunday’s New York Times business section has an article, Everyone Loves Google, Until It’s [...]
Microsoft into the cloud
At her ZDNet blog, Mary Jo Foley relates how a Microsoft team broke away from the Windows desktop paradigm and began to develop for Internet applications (the cloud). She begins:
What led Microsoft — a company that has spent a good part of the past decade-plus protecting the Windows franchise at the expense of the [...]
The burgeoning Internet
PC World has an extensive presentation showing how the Internet has evolved and mushroomed in the past few years. There are some revealing charts and statistics. For example, the figure below shows that email is now almost all spam.
Another very interesting chart shows the growth in Internet users.
Searching the Deep Web
Search engines crawl only a fraction of the information available on networks. The so-called “Deep Web” remains largely inaccessible. The New York Times discusses the problem of the Deep Web and how new technologies may bring some of this hidden information to light:
One day last summer, Google’s search engine trundled quietly past a milestone. It [...]
