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So the device they are talking about is the Belkin n52.
You can see the mirror (thanks to JWSWythe) over at his /. link mirror.
And you can order it from any of these vendors.
There are numerous reviews of the device, including some at PC Mag, Extreme Review, and Tom's Hardware. For the lazy it receives rather good reviews when looked at for it's original gaming purpose.

If you have to use windows, get an antivirus program that does not suck like Computer Associate's Etrust which is what I use, or try the free one from AVG .

Microsoft has included a programmatic interface for Windows Firewall that allows an application to do things like set FirewallEnabled to FALSE, add itself to the list of AuthorizedApplications, or change the configuration of GloballyOpenPorts. Our concern here is that a malicious application could turn off Windows Firewall or, more likely, mark itself as an authorized application. Corporate administrators can disable some or all local configurations, which will prevent programs from making changes; but ultimately, Microsoft maintains, individuals still have to be smart about what apps they run. Even the best deadbolt won't protect your house once you've let the bad guys in.

I agree with PCMag on this. Microsoft still doesn't get it. To continue the Microsoft analogy, they gave the bad guys a key to the deadbolt.

Looks like I'll be continuing to ignore the built in firewall in favor of a real one.

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,1631256,00.as p

"The bright blue Disney Dream Desk PC ($599 direct)--designed by Disney and frog design and built by German electronics giant Medion AG--will include a 2.6-GHz Celeron processor, a CD-RW/DVD combo optical drive, a kid-sized mouse, and a multimedia keyboard and digital pen. The matching 14.1-inch ( touch-sensitive ) LCD monitor ($299) sports signature Mickey Mouse ears." Disney Enters PC Market for Kids

For those wanting to RTA without registering.

Indeed. And don't forget:

5. The single file mentioned in 1. can't grow above 16 Gb with the standard edition of Microsoft Exchange. (See also 2.)

Of course, I haven't used OpenExchange yet so I can't really comment on that. I tried hunting round for a few reviews, but didn't come up with much. Here they are anyway:

eweek
pcmag
OpenMag

There is a mention of a "downside" being "lack of a spellchecker in the web client", but of course modern browsers like Konqueror have this built-in anyway.

There is also mention of the web client not being as "feature rich" or "refined" as Microsoft Exchange's, but without any actual qualifications.

Basically, from the reviews everything seems great apart from the backup aspect. This is only a downside because their is apparently little guidance given.

I live on my laptop and it's an older IBM model, so the battery life is pretty rotten. My solution has just been to find a plug. If I'm on the road, I keep a power converter in the car and plug the laptop in so I can run at a full charge. It's also good for keeping the three-year-old entertained on a long car trip.

Apple tops PC Magazine's customer satisfaction survey.

I guess you could say it is infinitely cheaper if your time is worth nothing.

I would have thought we'd see a link to actual survey instead of a story about the story about the survey ;)

Here is the results page

Here is the start of the survey story

I would have thought we'd see a link to actual survey instead of a story about the story about the survey ;)

Here is the results page

Here is the start of the survey story

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,1627184,00.as p

by the way, I think that article about bias against linux he was talking about is this one.

Well, maybe not right, but he called the stock buyback over a week ago. Maybe Gates is going to take his ball and go home.

For the ignorant (like myself):

SS7 - Signalling System #7 is a set of protocols defined by ITU-T, specifically in the Q.7* set of documents, used to set up telephone calls. (from Wikipedia).

Himalay / NonStop - The NonStop servers, which sell for an average of more than $1 million a piece, are highly valued for their ability to handle thousands of simultaneous transactions and their capability to continue operating even if hit with multiple hardware failures. The robust computing systems are particularly favored by financial institutions and are used to run 15 of the world's largest stock exchanges as well as automated teller machine networks for some of the nation's largest banks. (from PCMag, 2002)

Parent is a very informative post - I didn't know about this other side of HP/Compaq!

Let's imagine a *really* slowly reproducing virus: one that attempts to infect just a single computer a day. Now, you *could* go even slower, but 1 a day is pretty slow, wouldn't you agree?

Now, on day 1, there might be only a single packet sent by a single computer. I don't think anyone is going to notice that. But at some point, a large-enough collection of computers will send out these requests, and it will get noticed.

The question is, how many infected computers do you need before your attack is detected? If it's something like Code Red, a few thousand will get noticed: they spew out too many requests. One a day? It's harder to say. Will someone notice when there are 100,000 attacks a day? 1,000,000? But how long will it take to *get* to 100,000 infected computers? How many attacks will fail? Odds are, most of them will fail: not every IP has an attackable computer...

In other words, you could easily create a silent attack that doesn't kill anyone. Or a very noisy attack that also kills no one because it's stopped in time. Can you create a somewhat silent attack that infects a large number of people before they find out? Very tricky. It's an almost impossible balance: crash too soon and it doesn't really do anything, wait too long and it'll get caught.

To me, the better attack would be a *lightning* quick attack. Something like Slammer. According to this, Slammer was able to attack every vulnerable computer available in 20 minutes. I'm not sure how much I believe this, but I've heard that 15 Million computers were infected in that same 20 minutes. Is 15 Million dead computers enough for you?

Create a virus that spreads for an hour. Infect 15 million computers. Kill them. Good luck stopping that. The best part is, if you do your job correctly, either build a virus that only remains in memory or have it destroy the local copy of the virus in the process of killing the computer. Not only will the computers be dead, but it'll be *real* hard to figure out what hit you...

Now that I write that, that is a little scary...

Mainstream? Like Forbes, BusinessWeek , Ziff-Davis (and here and here too), CBS News, USA Today, and most have heard of PC Magazine, plus a lot of papers like The Houston Chronicle, The Detroit News, the Syracuse Post-Standard, The Baltimore Sun, and the St. Louis Post-Standard. I have all those links plus others in a list I just send to people. I keep adding to it as I find more. Usually gets the message across that I'm not making stuff up.

...http://www.pcmag.com/print_article/0,1761,a=131 189,00.asp

No annoying ads either.

Eh? It's certainly not a FireFox win, the editor gives his choice of best browser as Internet Explorer 6.0

The good ol Bait & Switch is alive and well...

Car lots
Video game consoles & Spam
Job-related markets
and Vacation Packages

Finding the other half trillion examples is left as an exercise to the reader.

I also subscribe to PC Magazine which certainly has its faults, but now that CPU Magazine exists, I doubt I'll be renewing. I also get eWeek on paper weekly as well which is pretty well done, and the price is sure right.

All in all, it sure is a lot of stuff to read on the crapper.

Might do, lots look like they merely record for later viewing...

http://www.google.com/search?q=%22Home+Video+Serve r%22

The fifth and sixth results look like something you would want to investigate for sure!

Most, however, appear to be geared towards serving a local network. This makes alot of sense considering the bandwidth problems over the public internet as opposed to a slick local connection ala 100Mbit switch.

Doesn't this strike anyone else as pretty, well..useless? Cellphone in a wrist-watch? How do I dial a number when I want to make a call? Or is there some attachable keypad you use to dial the number?

The technology already exists to have a HUD projected on your glasses or even using lasers to superimpose images directly on your retinas. Many cell phones already have voice dialing and for text messages there are
projected keyboards

I've been wondering why some company like this doesn't create a "network appliance" specification for all of us to hack on. It would be nice if I could just go buy a Netgear router and roll my own Linux installation. I purchased a Toshiba Magnia SG10 some time ago when they were a couple hundred bucks during the end-of-life period. For a 566mhz Celeron with an honest-to-goodness hard drive and switch on the back, it was hard to go wrong. I immediately wiped the stock Linux OS and rolled FreeBSD on there.

Wouldn't it be MORE profitable for companies like the aforementioned Netgear to do this? What am I not seeing? Centaur: help us out!

• Predicted the death of Apple for years and years,
• Predicted that the stratospherically successful iBook would be a disaster,
• Most recently, he predicted in March of 2003 that Apple would move the Mac to Intel in the next 12-18 months. Apple's got 3 months left to do it... what do you think the odds are?

Ummm. This isn't about Apple, it's about the semiconductor industry. As a matter of fact, Intel started saying the same thing a few months ago, and AMD has been making similar claims for years.

in my opinion, a good opinion on this. despite some radical comments, this is pretty good.

A Phone as Your Next Computer? Never.

And THAT will be the problem with these video players.

Whaddya mean "will be"? These things exist now. No need for speculation! Let's check out the reviews and see how many hours of battery life these video players actually have (when playing video, that is):

RCA Lyra RD2780: 4 hours max
Archos AV320: about 3 hours
Archos AV340: 3.5 hours

So no, you won't get your 5 hours from any f the current players.

I think the real problem here is that the manufacturers are trying to make these players too similar to audio-only players (e.g. the iPod). They're trying to use the same wimpy 800-1000mAh custom battery packs that most mp3 jukeboxes use. This makes sense from a business standpoint -- you only have to make one battery for your various jukebox products, and you get to sell those custom replacement batteries for $50. But from a practical standpoint, this just won't do.

The solution: video players are bound to be larger than mp3 players anyway, if only because of the screen size, and they're all an inch or more thick. It's time to start making these things use standard batteries, just like digital cameras. They'll fit, and the capacity of regular batteries is plenty high. I've seen AA batteries advertised with as much as 2300mAh of capacity. One of those would do the trick for sure, and two would rock! Even two AAA batteries with a 800mAh capacity each would be an improvement.

STOP posting that Stupid QWERTY article! That is an Urban Legend. It was written by economists who were paid to sway the judge in the Microsoft anti-trust case.

"The groups, the Computer & Communications Industry Association and the Software and Information Industry Association, join Massachusetts and West Virginia in continuing the legal battle that started in 1998."
-- http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,980585,00.asp

If you can invest in a new laptop, I'd recommend the NEC Daylite - it allows you to turn the LCD backlight completely off. This makes viewing the screen in bright light MUCH easier (it's virtually impossible with most laptops I've used).

They're also very small and lightweight, and have excellent battery life. (Well, at least the older Transmeta CPU models had excellent battery life - don't know about the newer P-III models.) I'm pretty sure NEC has discontinued the line, but you can probably still find them on eBay. (I've heard a few e-tailers still carry them too, but you might have to dig to find them)

I told the writer that apart from a few esoteric, high-end systems, Machrone's Law had outlived its usefulness.

Suddenly I was inundated by calls and e-mails from people begging to differ. No, they didn't beg; they said I was flat-out wrong. Systems, they said, are as expensive as ever, and the power you can get for 5 grand is what every red-blooded PC user really wants...

There are reasons why a game publisher might not want a website to post its screenshots with others, but I wonder if there might just be an error in the linked article.

In independent games, the question of quality-by-association comes up when a company approaches a developer with a request to include its game in a CD compilation. One side of the argument is that the presence of a title on a shovelware compilation can detract from its perceived quality -- your game might appear among a hundred Sokoban clones, or in an extreme case, you might see children's software next to more adult software. So, it is conceivable that publishers might have considered association with this website (archived here) a bad thing.

But I don't buy it. Entire conferences are devoted to publicity, and as they say, no publicity is bad publicity. (To wit, I'd talk up my postman about my software if I thought it'd help. He's a nice guy; we talk about other things.) The only tidbit that screams copyright violation as I understand it is this: Of this collection, several hundred were allegedly found to have been taken from magazines and overseas game sites...

However, I do not understand the end of that sentence: ...without the permission of the game publisher, a violation of Japanese copyright law.

To my knowledge, it is not illegal in the States to take and post a screenshot of a movie or game to the Web; my understanding Japanese intellectual property laws is limited, but given the number of Japanese film/gaming sites that do this, I don't believe that game publishers have any say over what screenshots are presented. I think 1Up may have meant this, instead:

without the permission of the website's publisher, a violation of Japanese copyright law.
_________________________
I long for the day when Google stops asking me, "Did you mean: inigo rage"

I know this is pretty much offtopic, but while we're on the topic of storage capacity ... everybody seems to be focusing on the storage capabilities of GMail, but what about services like Ofoto? They've got more than 11 million accounts, yet only 1 million of those have ever placed an order for prints. Email is a known beast. I don't imagine that file-size per email will increase significantly in the next 5 years ... but the same can't be said for the size of digital photos. How will Ofoto handle storing thumbnails and full-size copies of everybody's digital photos from their 12megapixel cameras in a year or two?

If anyone's interested in a good quick read on the topic, check out PC Magazine.

Unfortunately I believe its a touch more complicated. PC Mag notes because of the sensitivity of the materials in the process "this calls for a more complex fabrication process. Also, any exposure to air or moisture destroys OLEDs, so the materials must be perfectly sealed."

Applied Films I think explains the problem best:

The deposition of the organic layers itself is critical too, because of the sensitivity of the material (e.g., high temperature, incorporation of dust and dirt). The high price of the coating material also makes high material utilization a priority.

Not that it matters but IAMICE (majoring in chemical engineering)

Or is it that they all accept deep down that MS has an interface that's hard to top?

John Dvorak recently wrote a good article on outsourcing. I suggest you read it.

Please help me understand the following:

Since outsourcing is good and increases the economic activity of the USA, then wouldn't it make sense to outsource ALL jobs (except those jobs that cannot be outsourced) just imagine all of the economic activity we'd have with 75% unemployment! Dvorak makes a similar point.

I'll admit, free trade is a good thing, but only when all workers are on the same footing to begin with. The theory is sound if everyone makes the same wages all over the world, then obviously, the best are hired. Unfortunately, this is not the case. What we really have is a race towards the bottom.

Outsourcing raises profits while prices fall and people become unemployed. When people become unemployed, it doesn't matter how low prices are. If you don't have any money, you can't buy anything. Those who sell their labor for a living have a problem here. Those who don't (the incredibly rich) don't have the same problem as their earnings increase while prices for goods decrease. So they are able to buy more for less, which reinforces the concentration of wealth and decreases the size of the middle class.

Hate to burst your bubble, but that test highlights MySQL's greatest strength. Which is, what pretty much everyone openly admits. That is, readonly (select) environment.

I call bullshit. Again. According to the article, the test "stressed all facets of typical DBMS operation, including insertions, deletions, updates and searches."

Were they allowed to turn the benchmarks to target each database or did they all run the exact same code? If the answer is, they all ran the exact same code, then the test is immediatley invalidated as it ignores many, many significant features that are pretty much standard on all modern RDBMS, save only MySQL. Did they use the default tables or did they use Inno tables?

You can read it for yourself, and even download their code and run the tests yourself. The answer is that each database was custom-tuned. They used both default tables and Inno tables.

You are not supposed to RTFA now. It is reviewed on May 4th 2004.

Also missing is Dell's music player. My wife bought me one; it holds 20gb, the battery seems to last forever and the sound is great. Best of all, it's priced at only $250 for the 20gb model. Odd that pcmag didn't include the Dell in this lineup since they already reviewed it last year.

It doesn't haven't to be my current password does it ?

I guess it could also be something from BugMeNot.

According to this article it does if you have PageRank enabled. Of course, there's no way (at least that I can think of) to implement a PageRank-like system without having tracking usage.

What about IBM's purported Blue Linux Desktop?- Article. Myth? Desktop-centric? SuSE derivative? :)

Cliptrak anyone?

Sure, that's just a tool made for convienence, but someone else could make a clipboardlogger to automaticly harvest clipboard content or something.

Actually, there is alot of confusion with the way Intel decided to name the new mobile processors. The actual processor is the Pentium M, not to be confused with any Pentium 4-M chips. The Centrino comes from the integration of this Pentium M chip, wireless Lan, and a different chip set. So it really is just the Pentium M processor, (not the Pentium 4-M that is used in moste laptops though) but through the chip set and alot of power management features the Centrino books are quite a bit faster. Some of this comes from the fact that a Centrino notebook executes more commands per clock cycle than other processors. Here is a quote from PCWorlds review of Centrino laptops:

"The new chip completes more instructions per clock cycle than today's P4 chips (which favor higher MHz instead), and the Pentium M has a 1MB Level 2 cache (twice that of the P4's 512KB L2 cache). As a result, the three 1.6-GHz test notebooks landed impressive PC WorldBench 4 scores, outpacing notebooks with faster-running P4 and P4-M processors."

Here is the Article, It is still a little confusing to me. Here is another snippet from PCMag that tries to explain the confusing names better than I could:

"For starters, Intel named the new chip the Pentium M, which is bound to be confused with the faster-clocked (but not better performing) Intel Mobile Pentium 4 Processor-M family. Worse, the Centrino moniker--the new mobile-platform brand name that Intel will be pushing in its marketing--can be used on a notebook only if the notebook contains both the Pentium M (married to one of the two new Intel chipsets) and Intel's integrated wireless networking solution, the Intel PRO/Wireless 2100."

Well now everything is clear as mud, right!

Actually I love TiVo better than anything else. It's the company's dumb business model that I think is killing them.

Why can't I buy TiVo software to run on my own hardware? My HTPC? It's linux-based, after all.

jim (author of the original article for PCMag.com

I agree the DirecTV TiVo is awesome. I bought my third TiVo because it works so well. But I think Murdoch, Mr. Cheap, is going to take a hard look at that deal, and wring as much cash as possible out of it. Ergan and Dish already sell more PVRs than TiVo, and probably make more money that DirecTV on each one. Murdoch will rip up the TiVo deal and do his own thing.

My opinion of course

Jim (I wrote the article, btw, for PCMag.com.

...when John Dvorak said precisely the same thing in his column. I guess this guy liked what he read there too.

From
John C. Dvorak's recent column in PC Magazine:

"All the wheel spinning about the superiority of this platform or that platform just boils down to the fun side of computing: games. No other single factor is so skewed."

I never upgrade my computer for any other purpose than to be able to play the latest games. And it seems that many Linux fans keep a Windoze box around just for gaming.

Can be found here with picture of the thing here. Apparently it plays DivX too.