Today I reinstalled Windows, Catherine is staying over her sisters again so she wouldn't have to put up with the side-effects of such a huge job. Hadn't been done for about 2 years and with all the beta leftovers on the drive it needed doing, just about reinstalled all the main applications I use. This is where I should probably image the hard drive - something I always mean to do but never get around to doing....
Just had a look at the logs for Portal Forums this month. The newly released Internet Explorer 7 preview of beta 2, has had a storming month. MSIE 7.0 10846 hits which is 7% of total traffic. Firefox 1.5 7805 hits which is 5% of total traffic. The preview of beta 2 has surpassed Firefox! It's not just the Portal Forums site, all the sites are showing a similar story.
This thing should just about halve Google's over-inflated share price. I've got a few problems with the Google Pack. Firstly once you've installed it your left with loads of applications all over the system tray and your desktop, it looks like your computer has been the victim of a huge malware attack. Unacceptable. Ad-Aware is severely out of date, which makes it basically useless, it includes no real-time protection so the user is forced to run manual scans all the time....
The hype around this thing is spreading across the net, even Robert Scoble is talking about it. But what's it really do? OK sure it's a very fancy piece of technology, and the idea itself has potential. But seriously if you want to spend $400 and get into learning about the sky. Buy yourself three things: Decent pair of binoculars, with at least a 50mm aperture. A solid tripod, won't see much without one....
With Windows Vista getting closer by the day, they're slowly getting all the little things people rarely think of together. Check out them recording some of sounds over on Channel 9, it's no longer one guy infront of a keyboard, told to make a sound 6 seconds long and a bunch of dings that are some of the most heard noises in the world. A lot bigger budget than that now, but let's see if they can really top the Windows 95 sound....
Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the World Wide Web started up a blog last month, I've just got around to reading it now. The first entry I thought was brilliant and really comes at a good time. In 1989 one of the main objectives of the WWW was to be a space for sharing information. It seemed evident that it should be a space in which anyone could be creative, to which anyone could contribute....
France could become the first country to pass a law broadly permitting free downloads of copyright content from the Internet for private use. In a move that could thwart the entertainment industry's attempts to seek legal sanctions for copyright violations, French Parliament members voted 30 to 28 late Wednesday night to accept an amendment proposing such a move. Attached to a broader copyright law proposal, the amendment--roughly translated--reads: "Authors cannot forbid the reproductions of works that are made on any format from an online communication service when they are intended to be used privately and when they do not imply commercial means directly or indirectly....
Windows Media Player 11 rocks, check this new feature out - a visual library, no longer a boring list of files, but the albums displayed with album art and all neatly ordered and with the full range of options to help better visualise your music like Vista has everywhere now. These screens from the WinSuperSite. How long before Apple copies this with iTunes? I give it 6-9 months until they're boasting that they invented this....
Yup, if you're machine has been infected by a Sony music CD, then you're in a big trouble, viruses are now using the rootkit (commonly used by "hackers" to attack a computer) that the Sony music discs install on your system in secret to hide themselves from anti-virus software. This is what the Sony BMG' president had to say about it "most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?...
From Channel9: "Mark at SysInternals disects a Sony CD DRM protection which includes installation of a poorly written rootkit trojan to protect their content." This is going too far. Sony should be stamped out of existance for this, it's bad enough installing DRM shite on the machine with thier own damn player - let alone hiding it behind rootkits it's disgusting. I will never buy another Sony product, I suggest you all do the same....