pixporno.net

That (Mac development) team now is able to render most Web pages pretty well. But in terms of the user experience, it’s very basic. We have not spent any time building out features. We’re still iterating on making it stable and getting the architecture right.

I understand the desire to cater to the mainstream majority that uses Internet Explorer, and I also can appreciate a subversive interest in smacking Microsoft around a little by offering a competing browser on the Windows platform,Gucci Watches, but I still find it odd to introduce a disruptive browser on that most nondisruptive of operating systems, Windows.

So progress needs to be made, but at least it’s firmly on the agenda. The real question for me is,Gemstone Rings, why wasn’t it top of the agenda from the beginning? No offense to Windows users, but Mac and Linux users have tended to include a wide range of early adopters (especially in the Mac camp) and technically savvy people (especially in the Linux camp).

I would have started with these, but at least Google has now set a date for spreading to them.

Aren’t these the sorts of groups that Google would want using its software?

The evangelists live on the Mac. The geeks that will hack new extensions live on Linux. Both are devout and generally faithful to (formerly) underappreciated operating systems.

According to Brian Rakowski,OMEGA Watches, Chrome’s product manager, more work is needed first:

Google is finally acceding to customer demands for
Mac and Linux versions of its open-source Chrome browser, promising to release full versions of Chrome for Mac and Linux in the first half of 2009.

commentary

A highly credible source has revealed today that Oracle made not one, not two, but at least three separate offers for MySQL. The first was apparently in the range of $300 million. The second? $500 million. The last one was in the range of $850 million.

MySQL in the background worked on developing a home-grown replacement for InnoDB. It’s not clear how far along MySQL got with these efforts.

commentary

Sun put a heck of a lot of cash on the table. It won over Marten and the MySQL board by committing significant resources to elevate and improve MySQL, not merely buy it and bury it. This is a testament to the strength of Marten’s character and the board’s commitment to MySQL. If you’re an open-source company, you want a board like this…and a CEO like this. It’s about more than cash. It’s about character.

First off, it’s important to remember InnoDB. What many of us suspected is apparently true: Oracle acquired InnoDB in an effort to crush MySQL’s valuation by removing one of its primary storage engines. Oracle then used this weakening of its competitor as a lever to try to pick up MySQL on the cheap.

Meanwhile, the open question was if not to Oracle, who would buy MySQL (though the push continued for an IPO). MySQL seemed to have figured out how to grow more quickly (MySQL Enterprise, for example), but it wasn’t clear how the public markets would react to the company…including because of moves like InnoDB that showed potential cracks in the MySQL armor (and of any open-source company that relies heavily on third-party technology, open source or otherwise).

Jonathan Schwartz, who had been talking acquisition with Marten Mickos for years, heard that talks had started and stalled with Oracle, and pounced. This is the reason it went so fast. It’s the reason it started at all. MySQL hadn’t been actively shopping itself around, but once Oracle had opened the door…Sun decided to close it.

But Sun got the prize. What happened? It has a lot less to do with cash than it does with character. There’s a lesson in this.

On each of the occasions Marten took the Oracle offer back to the board, but nothing came of it. Perhaps there was no appetite to see an acquisition buried in the bowels of a proprietary software company, especially one that would likely have real difficulty integrating a competitive product. This wouldn’t be the case of adding Siebel and PeopleSoft. MySQL is a game changer. Selling to Oracle would potentially stop the game.

Once you are done with the gaming, you can click on the same button–now labeled “Back to Normal Mode”–and Game Booster will restart all the services it stopped earlier to bring the computer back to normal operating status.

First off, the app works. It improve your games’ performance by turning off other software and services that would otherwise run in the background the whole time. This helps free up the system resources, making them available for the game you are about to play.

So the software works. But why did I say that I wasn’t entirely wrong? Because it’s rather misleading to claim that the software accelerates your computer’s gaming performance. It doesn’t do that. If your computer can’t handle a demanding game, Game Booster won’t make it able to do so. All it does is free up the most system resources possible.

Normally, I am very skeptical of software that claims to make your computer faster or increase the speed of your connection to the Internet. I’ve never seen any of them actually deliver.

Regardless of how your computer is, Game Booster seems a fast way to make sure that it’s at its best for playing games. It took about 10 seconds to switch my computer between gaming and normal modes.

I tried a few games with Game Booster and they actually made the performance slightly better, especially the load time, with some improvement in frame rate. The difference will vary depending on your system. My computer is generally very clean, so there weren’t many unnecessary services to turn off. If your computer has a lot of junk, you will see an even bigger improvement.

So when I came across Game Booster, released by IObit on Monday, I thought, “Ah! Another useless piece of junk. It won’t boost anything!” Curiosity made me try it anyway. And I have to admit that I was wrong, though not entirely.

To put this in perspective, say if your computer is a car that you want to use for track racing, the software is not something that makes the engine any stronger. It only helps you take off all the extra seats, spare tires, carpet, or maybe even removes the roof and the windshield so that it will run faster during the race.

It’s important to note that most services that get stopped are necessary for the computer’s normal operation and need to run while you’re not playing a game. But Game Booster also allows you stop them selectively, which is very helpful.

And it does that very well. Best of all, it does that for free. But don’t take my word for it. The software is compatible with Windows 7, Vista, XP, and 2000 and is available now at Download.com.

(Credit:
Screenshot by Dong Ngo/CNET)

The application is very simple. Once launched, it gives you a list of services running and software running in the background that it deems unnecessary for gaming. There’s also a big button labeled “Switch to Gaming Mode.” Pressing this button will stop everything on the list, making the system even more ready for the real action.

The satellite, called Radarsat2, is owned by MacDonald Dettwiler, but the Canadian government financed a good portion of the construction and launch. It is uniquely positioned over the Arctic with views of the Arctic sea passage ways that could one day be used for shipping. In exchange for its investment, the Canadian government has access to images from the satellite.

The Canadian government has put the kibosh on the $1.3 billion sale of a Canadian satellite company to a U.S. firm for fear that such a deal would give the U.S. government too much control over sensitive satellite images.

The government said Thursday that it was blocking Alliant Techsystems’ bid for MacDonald Dettwiler and Associates to protect Canada’s sovereignty. The New York Times noted this was the first time in 23 years that the Canadian government has blocked such a sale to a foreign company.

Opponents of the deal fear that if the company were sold, U.S. officials would be able to ask Alliant Techsystems to let them see images of ships traveling through the Arctic. Canada has long claimed sovereignty over the Arctic sea passages, but the U.S. maintains that those waters are international.

Alliant Techsystems has 30 days to appeal the government’s decision.

Of course, not all the features from Office map to Google, so users may experience some hiccups in the transition, especially when using Google’s very limited spreadsheet and presenter applications. I was not very pleased when I tried the product last night and it immediately started syncing all my documents to Google. I’d like more control. CEO Cliff Shaw says that’s coming.

Microsoft could squash this company by releasing a true online product suite, not just the shared Web file store that Office Live Workspace offers. DocSyncer’s CEO says his product offers business a “gentle transition” to online productivity application. I buy that, but I will worry for the business when Microsoft ultimately decides to provide its own transition.

Limitations notwithstanding, the $40 per user per year fee is extremely reasonable for a business application, and certainly provides a better revenue steam to the company than free.

After taking a closer look at this business, I think there’s something very valuable here, at least for the short term. Businesses that don’t want to install Office on all employees’ machines can, with this tool, still give them easy access to the files that the high-zoot Office users are working on. Of course, you could do something similar with an Office alternative such as Open Office or Zoho, but then you wouldn’t get Google’s real-time collaboration features, plus there’s no easy sync with people who prefer to use Office. Even Microsoft’s own new Office Live Workspace doesn’t offer live collaboration (see Extend your Office apps via Live Workspace), and it requires a change in user behavior. DocSyncer just takes existing Office docs and makes them available via Google Docs. The product also offers versioning on Office documents, which Office doesn’t do natively.

In my preview of the Under the Radar conference I questioned the business viability of the document management product DocSyncer, which, among other things, takes users’
Microsoft Office files (Word, Excel, and PowerPoint) and synchronizes them into a Google Docs or Google Apps account.

(Credit:
CNET News.com)

On the other side of the equation, these sorts of technologies are moving into the mainstream in fits and starts. Vista includes some support for touch sensitivity and millions of
iPhone owners now see gestures as natural. The fact is that we are getting beyond the keyboard and mouse as the end-all and be-all. The mouse is more than 40 years old, while the idea for the QWERTY keyboard dates back to a Civil War era invention by C.L. Sholes. Don’t know about you but I’m ready for a change.

I’ve been watching Gates give performances like these since 1985 and it’s wise to treat his predictions with the appropriate grain of salt. When it comes to Microsoft, the concept of vaporware is not entirely foreign. Still, I found the demo interesting when you consider the topic against the backdrop of what Microsoft is developing in
Windows 7. In fact, a couple of months ago, Gates hinted at future support for touch-based gestures and speech recognition in a the post-Vista OS.

In the future, he said, all surfaces will feature “an inexpensive screen display capability and software that sees what you’re doing there so that it’s completely interactive.”

“The likelihood is that touch will become mainstream on certain form factors very quickly because we are working hand-in-hand with the hardware companies,” he told my colleague Ina Fried.

It wasn’t exactly Minority Report but Bill Gates’ technology demonstration at the company’s CEO Summit earlier Wednesday may be remembered years from now as a harbinger of the end for the keyboard and mouse era. Not today. Maybe not tomorrow. But soon enough. (Cue Winston Churchill here about how this is not the end, the beginning of the end, but perhaps, it’s the end of the beginning.)

I’ll wait to see how Microsoft’s product roadmap evolves before getting too exciting. Planned features for operating systems often don’t make the final scratch because of various and sundry. For his part, Gates appears confident this is the future direction of man-machine relations. In a practiced sales pitch for the TouchWall, Gates predicted that home and office walls eventually will become computers. Period.

Of course, that’s also going to require a lot of infrared cameras to pick up touch patterns as well as projection technology–and that’s all going to cost. (For the foreseeable future, touch sensitive walls remain a toy for the plutocrats. Last Christmas, Nieman Marcus was selling Jeff Han’s Interactive Media Wall for $100,000.

As Gates demoed a 4-foot-by-6-foot prototype called TouchWall, there was little resemblance to Tom Cruise’s futuristic data juggling in that 2002 sci-fi performance as he moved 3D screens around with simple hand gestures. Making what is likely his last appearance as master of ceremonies at this annual conclave of corporate heavy hitters, Gates used the show-and-tell session to offer a prediction.

(Credit:
MBL America)

The bottlenecks standing in the way of perfect sound reproduction are, in more or less equal proportions, the recordings, loudspeakers, and the listening room’s acoustics. So, even with our fantasy-perfect hi-fi and a dead-accurate recording, the average living room acoustics wouldn’t support the sound of a live band. The room’s too small.

Audio components are far from perfect, so it’s no surprise their sounds aren’t 100 percent convincing. As imperfect as the gear is, the recordings themselves are even further away from documenting the sound of vocals and instruments.

Think about it: if you were in a room with a singer playing an acoustic guitar and a drummer, without any amplification, you’d never hear the singer or the guitar. It takes a whole lot of dynamic range compression and equalization to create the illusion of pop music. And if it never exists in real life, it can never truly sound real over a hi-fi system.

I’m defining a “perfect” hi-fi as one that’s indistinguishable from the sound of live instruments. No hi-fi has ever fully recreated the sound of a symphony orchestra, jazz group, or rock ‘n’ roll band. Solo instruments fare better, i.e. guitars, flutes, and vocals; you can almost get a glimpse of their sounds over the best high-end systems. But a drum kit? Piano? No way!

I wrote “How high do you want your fi?” for the April 2009 issue of Stereophile magazine, and I’m still getting a wide range of feedback about that piece from readers and friends.

High-end audio may not be perfect, but it’s light years ahead of $49 plastic computer speakers or the freebie earbuds that come with iPods and MP3 players. High-end audio, at its best, gets you a lot closer to the music. If you really love music, every little improvement to sound quality makes the investment worthwhile.

The MBL 101X-Treme Reference System, $250,000, approaches perfection.

Catch is, perfect gear wouldn’t automatically make every recording sound life-like. At that point the gear wouldn’t have a sound per-se; the recordings’ sound would be laid bare.

Audiophiles are on a quest; we’re always lusting after the perfect fill-in-the-blank (speaker, amplifier, turntable, CD player, etc).

The age-old analog/digital divide is the least of it. The musicians do their thing, and then the microphones, their positions relative to the instruments, the skill and imagination of the engineer/producer/mastering team’s use of equalization, compression, processing, etc., create the sound we hear.

And please don’t get the wrong idea, high-end audio isn’t always stupid expensive. Vandersteen Audio’s Model 1C tower speakers ($785 a pair) are a good place to start. Look for the full review at CNET Reviews soon.

Pop or rock music is rarely played by the complete band, with vocals, live in the studio. Out-of-tune singers and players are pitch-corrected, drummers’ off-kilter rhythms are tweaked, there’s not a lot of there there to reproduce. Most recordings are so heavily processed they could never sound real.

(Credit:
Canon USA)

The overall market should continue its decline by another 1 percent to about 128 million from 2009 to 2010, but growth should return and the market should reach 148 million units in 2013, IDC said.

SLR cameras are bulkier and more expensive, but offer better responsiveness, interchangeable lenses, and higher image quality. With the compact camera market largely saturated, SLRs have shown relatively strong growth.

“Countries will emerge from the global recession in mid-2010, starting with the U.S. However, unemployment will lag behind the recovery, dampening consumer spending for the next two years, particularly on big-ticket items like digital SLRs,” analyst Christopher Chute said in a statement.

Worldwide camera shipments are expected to drop 6 percent to 129 million units in 2009. Single-lens reflex (SLR) shipments won’t be hit as hard, but still will drop 5 percent to 9.2 million units, according to an IDC forecast released Monday.

In the U.S. declines are sharper he said: digital SLR sales will drop 7 percent to 2.4 million cameras from 2008 to 2009, while the overall market should decrease 10 percent to 36 million units.

Thus far, SLR camera sales have been a bright spot in the camera market, but analyst firm IDC expects the recession will hit the higher-end models, too.

Canon's new Rebel T1i SLR

Via Cote

The 12 major brands most likely to disappear in 2009:

24/7 Wall St. examined 100 large brands that are facing troubled futures. The analysis included records for those brands that are public companies or part of public companies.

Follow me on Twitter @daveofdoom

Full details and explanations are available at 24/7 Wall Street.

Avis
Borders
Crocs
Saturn
Esquire Magazine
Gap, Old Navy, and Banana Republic
Architectural Digest
Chrysler
Eddie Bauer
Palm
AIG
United, American or US Air

A number of well-known brands disappeared in the last year due to economic forces and bad management. Circuit City, Aloha Airlines, and Washington Mutual come to mind as examples.

The previously announced cable, dubbed the Trans-Pacific Express, is scheduled to be partially operational before the Beijing Olympics begin on August 8. It will be the first direct connection between the United States and China.

Internet users in East Asia are familiar with sometimes sluggish speeds on transpacific transmissions. In my experience, connections are for some reason faster in Beijing than in Shanghai, but everywhere I’ve gone in China there’s been some lag. (Speeds in Tokyo were very fast when I was there in late 2004 and 2005.)

The existing bandwidth between Asia and North America is crowded. Following FCC approval of a U.S.-China link last month, Google and five other companies have announced a Japan-U.S. link to be completed in early 2010.

[h/t: Kaiser]

The $300 million fiber-optic cable will stretch approximately 10,000 km (6,214 miles) under the Pacific. “Google’s partners in the consortium, dubbed Unity, comprises Bharti Airtel, Global Transit, KDDI, Pacnet, and Singapore Telecommunications,” Yahoo News reported.

For Windows users my preference is the free ZoneAlarm firewall. It’s far from perfect, but a big step up from the firewall built into either XP or Vista. A big plus for ZoneAlarm is simplicity. Because it’s just a firewall, configuring it is relatively simple. Perhaps most importantly, when it issues warnings and alerts, the language is simple, to the point and devoid of techie terminology. Even non-technical users have a good chance of understanding the issue at hand.

Scams aren’t limited to email, read my introduction to voice phishing.

Someone I know, who works from home, used to depend on AOL for email, both personal and business. This person had a huge email address book and depended on it. One day, there was a problem with the AOL software and AOL’s tech support turned a small problem into a big one by wiping out the email address book.

No software can protect the gullible.

In that vein, there are some companies and software that are best avoided.

Bad software firewalls, such as the one in Windows XP, only provide inbound protection, better programs also provide outbound protection. Outbound protection is a nuisance to setup initially, but you are safer with it than without it.

*Only wsj.net and wsj.us belong to Dow Jones.

Windows XP users should install the free DropMyRights program. I blogged about this extensively back in August.

If you call the tech support department of a company, take their advice with a grain of salt. Perhaps two.

Avoid Certain Companies and Software

A couple weeks ago, I mentioned that I won’t install any software from Symantec on my computer or those of my clients. Although I use Windows XP, I avoid all other Microsoft software. Ed Foster’s Worst Vendor Poll offers some other opinions on companies you might try to avoid dealing with. Microsoft topped the list, by far.

Backup your important files to something you can hold in your hand. If they are very important, make two copies. Preferably, one copy should be a thousand miles away from the other copy.

Years ago, Jim Croce sang:

You don’t tug on superman’s cape
You don’t spit into the wind
You don’t pull the mask off that old lone ranger
And you don’t mess around with Jim

The difficulty in keeping software on a Windows or
Mac machine up-to-date is an industry disgrace. It happens because neither Microsoft nor Apple is motivated to help other companies, many of which they compete against, install bug fixes. Instead, every company handles software maintenance differently, big companies may even have more than one system for maintaining their software. In the Linux world there is more co-operation between software authors and thus hope for a single software update mechanism. That said, I’ve seen my share of Linux distributions that handled software updates poorly. A shout-out here to
Firefox, whose self-update mechanism is excellent (at least when running on Windows).

Obviously this applies to email messages, many of which are scams. A relatively new approach appeals to your patriotism - emails from people claiming to be soldiers stationed in Iraq who need help bringing money home. Yeah, sure. Skepticism is not only needed with the body of an email message, but also with the From address. Never trust it. Forging the From address is child’s play.

If you use a router to share a single Internet connection, be sure to read my March 8th posting, Defending your router, and your identity, with a password change, about changing the password.

All computer users need firewall software - without exception. A firewall program that runs on your computer is called a “software” firewall. The term is used to distinguish it from a firewall program that runs outside your computer but still between you and the outside world. Consumers and small businesses typically run across these external “hardware” firewall programs in their routers. The best protection is provided by using both a hardware and a software firewall.

Whether Mac users need anti-virus software is debatable and I don’t know enough about it to have an opinion.

There is a flip side to this though, when it comes newly released software, it is usually best to hold back. New software is always buggy, so waiting lets others find and report the problems and gives the software vendor time to fix them. In addition, newly released software may cause problems for other software on your computer. Waiting gives these problems time to sort themselves out.

Some people find the importance of their computer sneaks up on them. If you really need your computer, you need two. Same for a printer. It’s like tires - a
car needs four, so every car carries five. If your computer is nice to have but not really important, this blog is not for you.

In the last couple days I’ve been told many things by techies at Comcast and at ATT CallVantage (a VOIP phone service) that were not true. This is arguably the rule, rather than the exception. The entire tech support industry is broken. You are likely to be talking to someone who is not well trained, not well paid and reading from a script they are not allowed to deviate from.

While staying at a hotel, whether using a wired or a wireless Internet connection, alway use a VPN. This also applies to public WiFi networks too.

Backup

A couple days ago, I wrote about how a Comcast cable installer removed a crucial component of the VPN software on my computer. Take stories like this as a heads up. If someone comes to install a broadband Internet connection, realize they may not have much computer training. Watch what they do on your computer like a hawk. Make the installer explain what they are doing and why, especially if they change something. If you run Windows, make a Restore Point before the installer arrives. If it is a cable connection, there shouldn’t be a need to install any software.

Even having three copies of important files is not overkill. For example, I appear weekly on The Personal Computer Show on WBAI and we record three copies of the show. In the studio, we burn a normal audio CD, the radio station records all the shows all the time and I make my own recording at home from the over-the-air signal. More than once, we ended up with a single usable recording. Stuff happens.

I’m also not a fan of all-in-one security suites such as Symantec’s Norton 360 Version 2.0, McAfee’s Total Protection or Microsoft’s Windows Live OneCare. My point is not about these programs in particular (recently reviewed in the Washington Post) but the whole concept of a suite in the first place.

File sharing software, such as BitTorrent, LimeWire and the like, is not something that belongs on a computer you care about or one that has files you consider sensitive.

And…

Anti-Malware

Web sites too, need a skeptical review. Are you a customer of AT&T’s CallVantage VOIP service? If so, be sure to go to callvantage.att.com rather than callvantage.com. The later is a phony website (for lack of a better term). Interested in public transportation in New Jersey? If so, go to njtransit.com rather than the phony newjerseytransit.com. Read the Wall Street Journal? Which of these domains belong to the newspaper: wsj.net, wsj.info, wsj.org, wsj.biz, wsj.us, wsj.ws? Some do, some don’t.* Does the website hope.net belong to Barack Obama? No, but a recent April Fools joke made it look like it did.

Stating the obvious: install anti-malware (malicious software) software and learn how to check that it’s updated regularly.

Skepticism

Windows users are best served by avoiding Vista, if for no other reason than it will suffer from more hardware and software incompatibilities than XP for quite a while. If you don’t install any extensions/add-ons, you are safer with Firefox than Internet Explorer. Likewise, Thunderbird is safer than either Outlook or Outlook Express.

Update. April 25, 2008: Added advice to wait before installing new software.

Plan for the death of your computer

Good tech support is so expensive that many people will probably never experience it. You may get lucky, someone reading from a script, much like a parrot, may solve your problem. But talking to a really experienced person with a good understanding the product in question is all but unheard of. The best tech support I ever experienced was with mainframe software. If I said how much the software cost, some of you wouldn’t believe me. But, that’s what it takes to get good tech support.

And, finally, read this blog for a steady stream of Defensive Computing tips.

Learn From The Experiences Of Others

Did someone point you to a really interesting video that just happens to require installing new software before you can view it? Don’t do it.

Keep Software Up To Date

Technical Support?

Firewalls

There are many websites that let you test your firewall defenses, a good thing to do periodically. My favorite, from Sygate, was assimilated by Symantec and no longer exists. The first such site however, is still going strong, Shields Up! from Steve Gibson. It’s a bit techie though.

See a summary of all my Defensive Computing postings.

You wake up one day and your computer doesn’t work. Or, it was stolen. Plan for this now. Beside a new/borrowed/backup computer running the same operating system, you need to recover your applications and your data files. This is a large topic, but a word to the wise: disk image backups.

A few days ago, Brian Krebs posted a cheat sheet on the latest version of 12 popular programs. Needless to say, the posting became outdated a couple days later.

View a web page, get infected with malicious software. It happens, and one reason is that your computer has old software with known bugs.

Perhaps the most important aspect of Defensive Computing is something money can’t buy, skepticism.

Initially, the Leopard version of the Mac OS shipped with the firewall turned off, an inexcusable design decision and one that Microsoft corrected years ago. It was also buggy and poorly designed. There have been fixes to it since then, but according to this article at ArsTechnica, it still leaves something to be desired.

Previous postings on this blog, like any blog, have been narrowly focused. Sometimes it helps to look at the forest rather than the individual trees. To that end, I take a step back here for an overall cheat sheet to Defensive Computing.

Windows users, of course, need antivirus and anti-spyware software. These product categories are blurring though and some software does both. No matter what software you use however, the protection it provides is limited, the bad guys are just too motivated (see Anti-Virus Firms Scrambling to Keep Up).

What to do? For Java, see my javatester.org website. For Adobe’s Flash Player, see their Flash tester page. Windows users with little technical background are best served by having Windows automatically install bug fixes. If you can however, I suggest installing Windows bug fixes manually a few days after they are released. For everything else, Windows users can run the excellent online Secunia Software Inspector. Mac users should nag Secunia for their own version.