Areas of our digital life that should be left open or kept closed
{ Monthly Archives }
“Megapixels“, writes Charlie Sorrel, ”like megahertz before them, are the big consumer swindle of the camera world… Unless you are actually printing your photographs, and blowing them up to the size of posters, the camera in you pocket has all the sensor you need.”
Read the Wired article.
“On Thursday, Mozilla programmers built TraceMonkey into the latest developer version of the open-source Web browser, and it will appear in the next released test version, which likely will be the first beta of Firefox 3.1…
JavaScript execution speed can make surfing the Web snappier, so naturally, it’s a key part of the resurgent browser wars between Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, Mozilla’s Firefox, Apple’s Safari, and Opera…
TraceMonkey’s name is across between SpiderMonkey, Mozilla’s current engine for interpreting JavaScript code, and a technique called tracing developed at the University of California at Irvine…”
Read the article from Cnet.com
Cnet Matt Rosoff reports about the open question that game developer Cliff Harris left on his blog regarding video games piracy. Harris subsequently analyzed the answers to draw some conclusions that should provide hints to music majors. Sales of CDs are continuously dropping, yet the majors fail to come up with a viable replacement for selling music. Harris concluded that products should be better, demos should be longer, there should’nt be any DRM and prices should be lowered within sound economic boundaries.
As any respectable aspiring spy, my Dell Inspiron 1520 laptop is equipped with a self-destruct button. Well actually it is a button Dell intented for booting MediaDirect, a media player embedded on the motherborad and not requiring any OS to run. The problem is that when it loads MediaDirect tends to mess up my OS’s boot settings beyond recovery. In 10 months, I have inadvertently pressed it thirce, and no, I didn’t have spies on my back: it was dark and I was still waking up from slumber.
Luckily, I ritually back up my disk with Grsync, so all my pictures and documents were safely waiting on a UBS external drive. I also sync my portable audio player after each major change to the music library structure, so my collection of almost 4000 songs is easily recovered. I use IMAP for my
This time, I decided to install Linux Mint, a Debian distribution based on Ubuntu and focused on multimedia applications. The developpers included some proprietary software so that more hardware works and the OS plays Macromedia Flash and MPEG straight out of the box. Incidentally, the Adobe Flash plugin works on Opera browser.
I did set the new Linux login passwords and the Firefox master password according to my rule of critical relevance. I installed the latest version of Flock, a Firefox-based browser and RSS feeds reader that links to my Facebook and Flickr accounts, and allows me to post entries for this Worpdress blog. I recovered the list of logins and passwords from the Keepassx database. Having restructured my documents folders, I decided to encrypt my financial and correspondence folders with TrueCrypt.
I am not back to fully operational.
John Moore of FCW.com writes: “Government officials who support open source now find they have a new decision to make: whether to use one of the growing number of open-source packages that could handle higher-profile agency operations, such as business intelligence analysis, content management or customer relationship management (CRM), to name a few.”
Read the article on FCW.com
