[Catching Up] I've been rather busy lately. Also, writer's block. So as you can see, I haven't written much. However, I'm gonna try to catch up on some things in this post. Sorry Davin, I won't be writing about video games just yet. One last thing I'd like to mention. When I was deciding on which blogsite to use, it was between Blogspot and Tumblr. It was a difficult choice, but I noticed Tumblr posts were more microblogging than actual ones, and I figured my writing would be too extensive for Tumblr. I have to admit, Tumblr looks nicer than Blogspot, and may be even superior in the social aspect, however what I needed was in Blogspot, not Tumblr. And so here we are. It's kinda lonely here... SUBSCRIBE DAMN IT! Well, time for the post itself!
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Articles of the Week
Here are some articles I thought were interesting, or useful, and I suggest should be read at some point during the week. Don't worry if you don't read all of them, just read whatever seems relevant to you or your interests. Well, read what's relevant, period, such as if there's an article about Macs and you own a Mac. Remember that I also have a Shared Google Reader feed that I post interesting stuff in. You can find it under my websites on Facebook or on the right side (You can subscribe to this using RSS! Crazy, huh?). Now here are the sites.
[Mac][Flash]
Flash 10.1 Gala gives Mac uses Hardware accelerated streaming - I can say from personal experience that Hardware accelerated streaming is incredibly useful; it greatly reduces the strain on the CPU ultimately reducing heat and increasing battery life. It's interesting to see adobe release this, considering the strained relationship between adobe and Apple due to the API fiasco.
[New Hardware][i7 ULV][DDR to Netbooks]
Intel prepping i7 ulv - I can tell you that an i7 is amazing. An i7 as a ULV sounds ludicrous. Despite that, I would love to have one. ULV laptops are known to have longer battery lives than their non-ULV counterparts, without the massive power sacrifice of the atom cores.
Netbooks, DDR3, and a new Atom - It's interesting to note how DDR3 ram has crossed over, if not, became cheaper than DDR2 rams. This is good, considering DDR3 is well... Better than DDR2. I wish I had DDR3 ram. As for the Atom, I still feel like it's an underpowered CPU. But "It just works" mantra falls in place here.
[HP][Palm][Mobile]
HP Buys Palm All I can say is, finally. Webos is actually quite nice, I can only say that since Steam usees WebOS in their overlays. It'll be interesting to see how HP and Palm partners up to impact the mobile market.
[Facebook][Privacy][Friends]
What Private Facebook Information your Friends can share - Bet you didn't know Facebook changed privacy 5x over, did you? It might be good to start reading on this. Although, I just feel as if the whole situation is a bit overblown. That's just my apathy to the situation though. Still, awareness is good.
[Windows Program][Mac]
How to run that one windows program on a mac - A rather complicated way of running a windows program on a mac.
Wine Bottler - Now, here's an easier way of running a windows program on a mac. Pretty straightfoward. Install, run program, then every time you run a windows based program, it opens itself up using Wine bottler. Then you do some voodoo magic with the program, and it works without having to open anything up. Okay, I bullshited on this one. But if you want to try running a Windows program on a Mac, Wine Bottler might be the way to go. I know it works, since I had success running Steam on my Mac partition using Wine Bottler. How redundant. (I can't test anything right now since I fucked up my partition...)
[Music][Piracy]
Music industry up in 2009. Piracy to blame? - Despite popular belief, piracy doesn't kill the industry. What really kills it is the refusal of the record labels to embrace technology, and continue selling CD's that no one wants to buy except for that one song at high prices, usually with crappy quality now-a-days.
[Mario][Flash Game][Crossover]
Super Mario Crossover - What do you get when you have Link, Bill Rizer (Contra), Megaman, Castlevania, and Samus in Mario? One badass flash game.
[Triple Brownie Chocolate Cake][Awesome]
Triple Brownie Chocolate Cake - To hell with my health, THAT'S A GORRAM TRIPLE BROWNIE CHOCOLATE CAKE!
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Security Addition
A while back I wrote quite the bit about security. However, there are some things I failed to mention. I've just read the summary for Microsoft Security Intelligence Report 8. And it reminded me of some things, while reinforcing others.
First off, if you have no idea how to deal with security, Microsoft Online Safety is a great place to start.
The SIR summary is only 20 pages long, which is still quite long. The actual report itself is a whoppin' 243(I think?) pages long. So I definitely will not be going through that any time soon. However, a bulk of that is just information involving the different countries, so it's less overwhelming in that respect.
The article talks about patterns in infected systems. Essentially, computers with Windows 7 64 bit, always up to date from Windows Update, and sported a security program such as Microsoft Security Essentials had the least chance of infection.
Why Windows 7 64 bit? For one, it's better than Vista in every way. And the 64-bit architecture is different than it's 32-bit sibling, due to the way code is ran differently, effectively eliminating 32-bit variants of viruses, especially anything that attacks the kernel.
Programs aren't perfect, Windows isn't perfect, Office isn't perfect. And imperfection are where attackers attack. If you don't constantly keep your software up to date, then there stands a chance an exploit may exist in your system. So it's best to keep everything updated (Except for pirates, cough). Also make sure to update to the current service packs, since data showed computers with newer service packs had a lower infection rate then the service pack below or none at all.
One last thing to note about operating systems it that Windows XP is the most attacked operating system, along with Internet Explorer 6, due to the age of the code among other factors. With Microsoft dropping support for both of these, it's imperative the user should consider upgrading to Windows 7, rather than continue using an old system. Well, Windows 7 isn't only an option though. There are some good Linux distros out there that'll run great on old systems, such as Ubuntu or the easier to use (apparantly) Kubuntu. I'll talk about Linux another time.
It also talks about the forms of infection, such as how easy it is for a networked computers to get contracted by a virus or bug. There aren't only one form of a bug, but several as an attempt for the bug to trick the anti-virus program into thinking it's not a threat. However, with MSE, it's able catch threats in the wild while Simultaneously differentiating threats from a false positive.
Users still need to exhibit common sense, especially when dealing with scam emails and rogue antiviruses, as they may seem legit but in actuality are not. Common sense is important, I CANNOT express this enough.
One last thing that's unrelated to the report, but related to security is something called HOSTS. A HOSTS file can be used to block sites from running exploit code or something like that on your computer. Eh, just read it up on Wikipedia. How you update your HOSTS file is up to you. The easiest way may be to use both Spyware Blaster and Spybot Search and Destroy, since they update both the Hosts file among other things. Make sure you uncheck "Site Preferences" for Clear History in Firefox, since this will clear out changes made to Firefox from Spybot.
Whoo! Sleep!
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