I used to use DNSKong on my WinXP machine, it's an excellent dynamic hosts-type DNS proxy/filtering program which can blacklist (ie., IP resolves to 127.0.0.1) or whitelist by domain pattern.
There is also OpenDNS, a more managed service of this type.
AdBlock Plus has the benefit of blocking by URL including regexp-based patterns, and is not limited to SWF - it will block any kind of content (HTML/JS/CSS, etc.) The default block list is quite good. Last I checked it was the most-downloaded extension from addons.mozilla.org.
At this point, RAM is in my opinion one of the larger potential bottlenecks for web apps.
Browsers can eat up a lot of memory while running JS-heavy "web apps", and leaks can result in hundreds of MB being used over time, causing excessive disk swapping etc.
On a laptop with WinXP and 512 MB of RAM, even Firefox using 200 MB of RAM (not an unrealistic number if you have a few tabs with mail, maps and other big sites open,) can start to hurt the overall system performance.
I'm a subnotebook fan also. I got a Fujitsu Lifebook back in 2006 for about $1400 (USD). 10.6" (diagonal) LCD, 1280x768, 512 RAM with XP, no fans, suede material on the bottom - no, really - 3 pounds, and from 3 to 4 hours of battery life thanks to some nice power management features.
It also ran variants of "Hackintosh" from what I'd heard due to the Intel GMA chipset. It's pricier than the more modern machines out there, but it's a great little laptop given the balance of size/features/price. I regularly get people asking about it when I'm out at coffee shops, etc.
"The web is not a movie." (That being, to grossly generalise, the web is not a binary format.) The un-web is what I consider the inability to "view source" among other things, for example.
Images are a useful form of binary content, but are not usually seen without human-readable metadata - tags, comments and so on.
I work as a web developer and while I enjoy my work, it can be frustrating at times as the hacks are still there - they've just shifted to become more specific (design/UI interaction instead of layout, for example.)
I went through this frustrating bit recently, and it looks like it may be the "wizard" which is just a bunch of web pages viewed through the browser - in part from CD I think, and in part from the web. It's possible the web stuff uses old-skool IE-specific code. It was rather amusing seeing IE 5 being installed on OS X just to set up my connection.
Unfortunately the inherent demand for "eyeballs" and other nonsense for marketing purposes means that "ratings" sites will have some value for some time to come. The article title is misleading as I think it's pretty clear Google is a popular site; rather, the metrics may simply be outdated or irrelevant.
Advertising opportunities aside, I think Shure earbuds may have been a rather poor choice for testing here as opposed to full-size headphones; the latter don't require such a customized "fit" in order to deliver the sound properly. I suspect there's likely a pretty good chance of inconsistency in sound amongst listeners here due to the kind of phones used.
I recently bought some (in-ear) E4Cs from Shure, and had to try out several different types of ear pieces before I ended up settling with the flange-style buds. Until then, the phones sounded weak and really lacked in bass. Even then, it took a bit of time to get the right fit and the proper sound. Using a big old pair of studio cans (eg. BeyerDynamic DT-880s) in the test, which don't rely on such a custom fit, would have reduced the chance for this inconsistency.
For the record (pardon the bad pun), David Goldberg from Y! Music was asking the labels for No DRM, Please last year (February 2006.) It's good to see more executive types speaking out about the idea, in my opinion.
It's also possible people may accidentally hide their navigation/address bar or otherwise mess up their browser UI, and thus they're left with their home page (hopefully a search engine) whose search box is then is then (as far as they're concerned) the address bar. (right-click -> "navigation toolbar" on the chrome up top is all it takes for Firefox, for example..)
People commonly just type whatever they're looking for into search engines, even if it's other web sites, because that also works. I had an uncle proudly tell me, "I know what I'm doing" when I asked him why he was typing a web URL into a search engine's search box. It worked, but certainly seemed inefficient to me.
QuickTime is likely the cause in this particular case, but this is just one vector.
Javascript XSS holes are a big potential problem and may be sometimes overlooked in development. It helps to understand how browsers parse HTML and inline event handlers such as onclick, onload, onerror etc. in HTML elements as mentioned, and to know some of the non-standard uses of javascript: protocol URLs and so on.
As for protection, a lot of it comes down to how the developers sanitize or filter user-generated/editable HTML and so on on the backend; it's made tougher by the fact that Javascript can run in places without using a script block, eg. inline event handlers or javascript: URLs. IE also has a few of their own proprietary markup bits and parsing for those, which could open up some holes as well.
Developers have to understand some of the more non-standard uses of Javascript URLs to fully protect against XSS. I'd imagine a few get overlooked. A popular social networking site for example used to be vulnerable to syntax like img src="javascript:alert('ding')",.. They shouldn't be vulnerable any more - I e-mailed them almost a year ago about it.;) Most of the web mail clients historically (Hotmail, Y! Mail etc.) have been pretty good about filtering against XSS.
Wikipedia cites Cyber Monday as hardly being used before the 2005 season. It's suspiciously recently "invented" (2004) and has been picked up by the media, yet it sounds like something straight out of the 1995 Sandra Bullock movie, "The Net".
While I'm looking forward to platform synergies, ajaxing ajax'ed web applications with ajax and rails in a collaborative eyeball-enhanced environment combined with wisdom of the crowds and a tagsonomy-enriched folksonomy, Wikipedia thankfully has banned the entry for "Web 3.0" and is not currently allowing its re-entry - therefore, not yet.;)
Another cookie article, and yet more cooking/baking analogies. Someone should write a cookie monster Greasemonkey script which brings up that particular character ("And now, me eat cookie! Owmwowmowmwowmowmwmowm...."), before setting document.cookie to null.
Many sites stuff advertising and tracking-related data in there alongside your login/auth information in cookies, so it seems you can't win if you need to browse with credentials etc. Blocking 3rd-party cookies is probably the safest bet against ads and so on at this point though, without disrupting cookies required just to browse/authenticate.
Slashdot Mirror
I used to use DNSKong on my WinXP machine, it's an excellent dynamic hosts-type DNS proxy/filtering program which can blacklist (ie., IP resolves to 127.0.0.1) or whitelist by domain pattern. There is also OpenDNS, a more managed service of this type.
AdBlock Plus has the benefit of blocking by URL including regexp-based patterns, and is not limited to SWF - it will block any kind of content (HTML/JS/CSS, etc.) The default block list is quite good. Last I checked it was the most-downloaded extension from addons.mozilla.org.
At this point, RAM is in my opinion one of the larger potential bottlenecks for web apps.
Browsers can eat up a lot of memory while running JS-heavy "web apps", and leaks can result in hundreds of MB being used over time, causing excessive disk swapping etc.
On a laptop with WinXP and 512 MB of RAM, even Firefox using 200 MB of RAM (not an unrealistic number if you have a few tabs with mail, maps and other big sites open,) can start to hurt the overall system performance.
I'm a subnotebook fan also. I got a Fujitsu Lifebook back in 2006 for about $1400 (USD). 10.6" (diagonal) LCD, 1280x768, 512 RAM with XP, no fans, suede material on the bottom - no, really - 3 pounds, and from 3 to 4 hours of battery life thanks to some nice power management features.
It also ran variants of "Hackintosh" from what I'd heard due to the Intel GMA chipset. It's pricier than the more modern machines out there, but it's a great little laptop given the balance of size/features/price. I regularly get people asking about it when I'm out at coffee shops, etc.
"The web is not a movie." (That being, to grossly generalise, the web is not a binary format.) The un-web is what I consider the inability to "view source" among other things, for example.
Images are a useful form of binary content, but are not usually seen without human-readable metadata - tags, comments and so on.
Yes, except that now we have to hack HTML and CSS to do things like rounded, semi-opaque, bordered dialogs with drop-shadows eg. - oh, and make them animate using "ajax" (well, no, it's just JavaScript - but sshhhh, the former gets you VC money.)
I work as a web developer and while I enjoy my work, it can be frustrating at times as the hacks are still there - they've just shifted to become more specific (design/UI interaction instead of layout, for example.)
I went through this frustrating bit recently, and it looks like it may be the "wizard" which is just a bunch of web pages viewed through the browser - in part from CD I think, and in part from the web. It's possible the web stuff uses old-skool IE-specific code. It was rather amusing seeing IE 5 being installed on OS X just to set up my connection.
Unfortunately the inherent demand for "eyeballs" and other nonsense for marketing purposes means that "ratings" sites will have some value for some time to come. The article title is misleading as I think it's pretty clear Google is a popular site; rather, the metrics may simply be outdated or irrelevant.
Advertising opportunities aside, I think Shure earbuds may have been a rather poor choice for testing here as opposed to full-size headphones; the latter don't require such a customized "fit" in order to deliver the sound properly. I suspect there's likely a pretty good chance of inconsistency in sound amongst listeners here due to the kind of phones used.
I recently bought some (in-ear) E4Cs from Shure, and had to try out several different types of ear pieces before I ended up settling with the flange-style buds. Until then, the phones sounded weak and really lacked in bass. Even then, it took a bit of time to get the right fit and the proper sound. Using a big old pair of studio cans (eg. BeyerDynamic DT-880s) in the test, which don't rely on such a custom fit, would have reduced the chance for this inconsistency.
For the record (pardon the bad pun), David Goldberg from Y! Music was asking the labels for No DRM, Please last year (February 2006.) It's good to see more executive types speaking out about the idea, in my opinion.
It's also possible people may accidentally hide their navigation/address bar or otherwise mess up their browser UI, and thus they're left with their home page (hopefully a search engine) whose search box is then is then (as far as they're concerned) the address bar. (right-click -> "navigation toolbar" on the chrome up top is all it takes for Firefox, for example..)
People commonly just type whatever they're looking for into search engines, even if it's other web sites, because that also works. I had an uncle proudly tell me, "I know what I'm doing" when I asked him why he was typing a web URL into a search engine's search box. It worked, but certainly seemed inefficient to me.
You have got to be kidding me. How long has that one been open for?
QuickTime is likely the cause in this particular case, but this is just one vector.
Javascript XSS holes are a big potential problem and may be sometimes overlooked in development. It helps to understand how browsers parse HTML and inline event handlers such as onclick, onload, onerror etc. in HTML elements as mentioned, and to know some of the non-standard uses of javascript: protocol URLs and so on.
As for protection, a lot of it comes down to how the developers sanitize or filter user-generated/editable HTML and so on on the backend; it's made tougher by the fact that Javascript can run in places without using a script block, eg. inline event handlers or javascript: URLs. IE also has a few of their own proprietary markup bits and parsing for those, which could open up some holes as well.
Developers have to understand some of the more non-standard uses of Javascript URLs to fully protect against XSS. I'd imagine a few get overlooked. A popular social networking site for example used to be vulnerable to syntax like img src="javascript:alert('ding')", .. They shouldn't be vulnerable any more - I e-mailed them almost a year ago about it. ;) Most of the web mail clients historically (Hotmail, Y! Mail etc.) have been pretty good about filtering against XSS.
Whatever name means, "doesn't drop calls, provides good coverage and sound quality" - I want them to be named after that.
That would be "the National Retail Federation's Shop.org division", according to this Cyber Monday entry.
Wikipedia cites Cyber Monday as hardly being used before the 2005 season. It's suspiciously recently "invented" (2004) and has been picked up by the media, yet it sounds like something straight out of the 1995 Sandra Bullock movie, "The Net".
While I'm looking forward to platform synergies, ajaxing ajax'ed web applications with ajax and rails in a collaborative eyeball-enhanced environment combined with wisdom of the crowds and a tagsonomy-enriched folksonomy, Wikipedia thankfully has banned the entry for "Web 3.0" and is not currently allowing its re-entry - therefore, not yet. ;)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_3.0
Another cookie article, and yet more cooking/baking analogies. Someone should write a cookie monster Greasemonkey script which brings up that particular character ("And now, me eat cookie! Owmwowmowmwowmowmwmowm...."), before setting document.cookie to null.
Many sites stuff advertising and tracking-related data in there alongside your login/auth information in cookies, so it seems you can't win if you need to browse with credentials etc. Blocking 3rd-party cookies is probably the safest bet against ads and so on at this point though, without disrupting cookies required just to browse/authenticate.