So many “little” stories but I can’t seem to get the time to write about all of them so here they are in a nice easily-digestible format.
Google is having problems with its new upgrade, according to Search Engine Watch:
This week, problems have gotten worse, webmasters all over the forums are reporting sever issues with pages dropping in and out of the index, pages not being crawled, old cached pages, dead (404) pages being returned by Google and outright irrelevant results. This morning I posted at the Search Engine Roundtable have a nice roundup of forum threads that are discussing the most recent Google issues with indexing pages.
Apple is suing Somethingawful.com for posting parts of the Apple Service Manual. Gizmodo is rightfully indignant about Apple strongarming the site:
Of course the real problem isn’t the single excerpted page being linked from Something Awful, but instead the fact that the image shows the extremely sloppy manufacturing process that is causing the MacBook Pro to run at temperatures as high as a 95 degrees Celcius under full load. (A temperature so high that the processor is at risk of malfunctioning.) Rather than addressing the problem of the shoddy workmanship, documented not only by those who purchased Apple’s $2,500 laptop but by Apple’s own service manual, Apple is trying to silence those from the Macintosh community who are trying to help other Mac users fix Apple’s mistake.
Open-source software isn’t bulletproof. Anyone who thinks so is unbelievably naive. Its security may actually be more through obscurity than anything else in my not-so-humble-opinion. Critical bugs in two largely used open-source apps cropped up this week.
A U.S. government-sponsored open-source bug hunt has resulted in more patches and security alerts.
Vulnerabilities have been found and fixed in X Window System and Ethereal, two popular open-source software packages, according to Coverity, the maker of the code analysis tools used in the bug hunt.
The X Window System is used as the foundation of the graphical user interface of many Unix and Linux systems, while Ethereal is a sniffer tool used to analyze network traffic.
Several bugs were found in Ethereal, which is used by network administrators and hackers alike. The latest version, released last week, includes fixes for a host of security holes, including several that were identified in the scan. These flaws could allow a full compromise of a system running the vulnerable software, Coverity said. Security monitoring company Secunia deems the Ethereal issues “highly critical.”
If you wanna make copies of your DVD’s and have been stymied by the stupid copy protection included therein, this little bit from Pain in the Tech (via Lifehacker) is a great tutorial on how to do it right:
This article is a tutorial that explains the process of backing up a DVD on a PC using DVD Shrink. While there are many software solutions for backing up DVDs, the one on Windows I like is DVD Shrink. The program I use to burn CDs and DVDs is Nero. This article assumes your computer is already equipped with a burning program. An explanation of DVD Shrink and its features is available in a previous article. DVD Shrink will use Nero for burning if it is detected, but does not require Nero. Nero “Express” edition can be purchased very inexpensively (@ buycheapsoftware.com for example). This tutorial will be a concise explanation of how to get the most out of your backup. There are many reasons to make a backup copy of DVDs one has purchased, keep reading to learn how to improve the quality of your re-encoded backups.
The new Apple ads are completely and utterly brilliant. It’s nice to see Apple taking it to the Wintel platform again. They had allowed themselves to be relegated for too long, but now that they have a captive audience (read: iPod owners), it’s time they started taking advantages.
Finally, the geniuses at OpenOffice.org are peddling their half-assed MS Office knockoff by telling you that Microsoft is a big bad evil corporation (how fricking original, huh?) and that if you have an illegal copy, those evil bastards are out to get you.
No shit, sherlock.
Is your office software legal? According to figures published by Microsoft, 35% of the software in the world is thought to be counterfeit or otherwise illegal.
After years of unofficially tolerating piracy as a means of securing market share, Microsoft is now going on the offensive to make sure copies of its software are legitimate.
* It has just bought a software company specialising in detecting what software is installed on PCs.
* It is now using the internet to put piracy detection software into copies of MS-Office on people’s PCs.
* around the world, the Business Software Alliance is setting up schemes to prosecute offenders – for example, in the UK it is offering large cash rewards to anyone who informs against organisations.
* Microsoft’s licence agreements are complicated – it’s easy to break them by mistake.If you have a copy of MS-Office at work, at school, at home – are you sure where it came from?
Fortunately, there is a completely legal and free alternative. OpenOffice.org 2 is a fully-featured office suite, similar in functionality to MS-Office. OpenOffice.org 2 does everything you need: word processing, spreadsheets, presentations and much more. It can even use MS-Office format files (.doc, .xls, .ppt), so you don’t need to re-type your work. What’s more, it does things MS-Office does not, such as create pdf files to give to other people.
If you can use MS-Office, you can use OpenOffice.org 2. Studies have shown it is ten times cheaper to move to OpenOffice.org 2 than it is to upgrade to MS-Office 2007.
A poll has indicated 86% of users would prefer to try OpenOffice.org 2 rather than buy MS-Office 2007.
So what are you waiting for? It costs nothing to try. If you like it, OpenOffice.org 2 costs nothing to use for as long as you like, wherever you like. Peace of mind at no cost.
Have you ever actually used Open Office? To put it lightly, it’s awful. A half-assed UI, half-baked features, memory hogging apps, and unbelievably bad performance.
I particularly enjoyed the last part. “86% of users?” I would rather see a study done after someone uses Open Office, which asks “After using this free piece of crap, do you think it’s worth switching?” and watch how 100% of users say “Hells no!”
Give me a break.
via Dvorak
[tags]openoffice.org, apple, dvd copying, security, open source[/tags]