Microsoft touts Windows vista restart manager

December 2nd, 2005

Okay – here we go…. Microsoft is talking about a new feature of Vista that allows you to …

update parts of the operating system or applications without having to reboot the entire machine.

Another angle at OSnews.com.

If that works as advertised that’s great. Update something related to networking, just restart networking *(kind of like what unix based systems do “service network stop/start/restart…)

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AMD comes out on top in Dual Core CPU showdown

December 2nd, 2005

ZDnet has a showdown between AMD and Intel dual core processors. It looks as though AMD has won in every comparison. This is not the only good news for AMD lately as summarized here. Intel’s overwhelming dominance is not what it used to be.

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Non-public database abuse

December 2nd, 2005

There is an interesting story at the SecurityFix on an individual who has been sentenced for using access to non-public LexisNexis searching to do background checks on, among other’s police who she though was investigating her for prostitution.

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Spyware’s likely suspect sites.

December 2nd, 2005

Spyware Confidential is writing of complaints from Wrestling fans of several wrestling related sites that have become sources of unsolicited spyware and adware installs. Some of them are aware of the spyware and encourage users to sign up for the ad-free service (pay) to avoid the problem. The spyware in many cases are installs that start without user intervention (or consent.)

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Glide Effortless to be the first “browser as OS”

December 2nd, 2005

Ok – browser as OS is a term that has been thrown about and speculated on. The concept is to provide a set of applications through ANY web browser such that it’s suitable for doing the majority of your work. Most people speculate on Google being the company to bring this all together, but today I found an article that talks about just that, from a company called Transmedia. The site is Glide Effortless.

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GMail vulnerability on Atom feed?

December 2nd, 2005

I don’t know about this, and will be curious to see what the answer is…. barrapunto.com had the link to a post from a Gmail user who notes… Gmail has the capability to have a feed of your new messages in Atom format. (We’re talking rss feeds here.) That’s all well and good. He went to bloglines though and tried to setup viewing of his feed…. and saw tons of email – NOT HIS.

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The DMCA exemption process…

December 2nd, 2005

Another entry from the “how do the good guys keep from getting their pants sued off…” files. Freedom-to-tinker has an entry on their application for a DMCA waiver. (The DMCA (among other things) makes it against the law to circumvent copy protection (or to communicate ways of circumvention)) It sounds like the exemption process is slanted towards not issuing exemptions, but they’re trying. There are some interesting notes from their application.

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Another Google analytics update

December 1st, 2005

It still looks like Google Analytics may be adding those that requested to be emailed when signups were available. I’ve noticed the last couple days the stats are MUCH more recent. It’s currently 20:00 hours “Google time” on December 1, 2005 and I see stats for my site through 15:00 “google time” in the analytics summary. So that’s pretty good, if it can be within 6 or so hours I’d say they’re doing pretty well.

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Great space picture of the Crab nebula

December 1st, 2005

Off topic – Space pictures have always held a special fascination for me and today when I ran across this one I couldn’t resist mentioning it. Maybe it’s all the space-related movies growing up, or just the amazing mix and blend of colors on a black background that the composite images give us.

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Gmail Virus scanning and more

December 1st, 2005

I saw a link yesterday about Gmail adding virus scanning to their featureset. It’s very good to see, they have very good junk filtering at this point and had a blanket policy that .exe’s were banned (which would stop a good percentage of the bugs.) Anyway, it’s good to see this is added. (I wouldn’t mind if there were a config switch to opt out, to help send samples to virustotal or wherever, but there are other ways to do that so it’s not a big deal and probably better that it’s not optionally disabled.) Article (brief) here.

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