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Archive for December, 2009

Firefox is the internet browser of choice for those in the internet business. It is much more user friendly than the most popular Internet Browser (Internet Explorer), as it offers a variety of plug-ins which give extra functionality to the browser which is why it is so popular amongst those in the internet world.

Now Firefox have announced that they are only days away from launching a mobile phone version of their browser. Initially the browser will only be available on the Nokia N900 phone. The mobile browser will be able to synchronise with your desktop version and should be available for download before the end of the year.

Those with iphones will have to wait a little longer for the release.

Further Proof today that the Patent system is horribly outdated and insufficient, as the XML format that works behind MS word has been found to be breaching a patent held by a small company called i4i.

The reality is that the patent should never have been granted in the 1st place. XML is an open standard, it’s unpatenteable and can’t belong to anyone.

Let me dum this down for those of us that aren’t programmers.. the patent (http://www.patents.com/Method-manipulating-architecture-content-a-document-separately-other/US5787449/en-US/) says its a method of separating content from design using XML. In other words every single website using html, every modern office package (not just word) and a lot of custom software (some of which I have written myself) all uses a similar method. You can’t patent against it because it’s not theirs to begin with.

-Also, just a thought.. for the price of the $250 million they are settling for, why don’t Microsoft just buy the company and dissolve it? Problem solved.

The award winning blogger “Fake Steve Jobs” launched a campaign a few weeks back as a protest to the American mobile network AT&T’s  continually terrible level of service.

The basic idea was to get as many people as possible to run a data intensive program through 3G in order to bog down the network as much as possible for a single hour. The threat got AT&T a little worried and there were all sorts of people dipping in with their two cents on the legality of the DoS attack.

Fake Steve Jobs then began backtracking, trying haalt the campeign, but of couse by that time it had taken on a life of it’s own.

The campaign eventually only succeeded in a “blip” in their traffic levels. But it was fun to watch it all happening and maybe (just maybe) AT&T will pull their finger out and start to improve their network.

As a testament to the power of the Internet (and Facebook Groups) the band “Rage Against The Machine” has had their 10 year old song “killing in the name of” brought to the top of the music chars in the UK.

The massive Internet campaign started life from a Facebook group trying to get the song to beat the X Factor single that has become a yearly fixture for the past 4 years in a row. The protest worked astoundingly well with just under a million people now in the facebook group and the song racing up the charts as people bought the song through iTunes, Amazon and a host of other music stores.

Go RATM!

So the big news today is that the popular micro blogging service Twitter was hacked last night by a group calling themselves the “Iranian Cyber Army”.

Twitter claims the hack itself was due to the sites DNS records being compromised.. meaning that the URL was temporarily being pointed somewhere else.

There was a badly written message in the code claiming they control the Internet by our power:

U.S.A. Think They Controlling And Managing Internet By Their Access, But THey Don’t, We Control And Manage Internet By Our Power, So Do Not Try To Stimulation Iranian Peoples To….

Anyone else running scared? Nope, me neither..

So it’s been a while now since Google have released (..sort of) it’s operating system, Chrome OS on us.

I think its the 1st step in a series of very important shifts in how we use computers in general. People have been talking about Cloud computing for what seems like an age, but Chrome OS is the 1st real attempt at making it a viable solution.

Of course, I doubt we will ever really get rid of a need for installed software, but the fact that Google believes that its both technically possible and in some cases an advantage to have all your programs running off a remote server shows that its a very real possibility that we will start having to pay monthly subscriptions to use web-based office suites. Scary thought..

Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google is getting quite a reputation for putting his foot in his mouth.

Perhaps the most worrying thing about his comments a couple of days ago was the fact that his comments put light onto the fact that he obviously has no idea  about privacy, what it means and how to act responsibly with other people’s data.

Me? I’m making the switch to Bing.. I’m not having my valuable search data in the hands of some buffoon that doesn’t know the meaning of the word privacy let alone the peoples need to keep some information off the public domain.

I must confess I’m a bit of an email head. I have multiple (20 ish) accounts throughout various domains and free services. as I’m sure you can imagine, keeping track of them all is becoming a bit of a problem. Email clients such as outlook work great, giving me all my accounts in one place, but I have begun to experiment a bit with GMail, Google mail service.

It has the advantage over outlook as it is completely web based, so all my emails are accessible wherever I want them. It takes a while to get used to “labels” instead of folders, but once you do you can see why they are so much better. Give it a shot.

Hundreds of people on the Dell support forums have reported that they are having big problems with these 2 models of laptops crawling to a halt whenever they start to get a little warm.

The problem was originally thought to be the BIOS. It appeared to be throttling back clock speed to less than 50% whenever the laptops are put under enough strain to raise the temperature.

It’s now clear that tits down to the power supplies not giving enough wattage to the laptops. If you own one of these it may be worth getting in touch with Dell.

Whats interesting is that when one of the more prominent users posted a fix on the Forum, he was swiftly banned leading to some users thinking that Dell might be trying to cover up the issue.

Well, the big thing in the news this week is the windows update causing the menicingly title’d “Black Screen of Death”. It’s not much of a suprise, but it turns out that most of it was just media hype. If you believed what the BBC site was saying, it could have brought about some major problems.

Turns out the problem can’t really be traced back to the update microsoft did and was, in fact, due to malware. The software company Prevx has appologised for the false claims. If I were Microsoft I’d bring the lawyers in and be done with them.