Sunday, August 19, 2007

Show #43 - 08.19.2001



[Download Show #43 as MP3]

News
  • 75% of People Downloading Firefox Do NOT Become Long Time Users
    • Basic reasoning suggest that IE7 is doing well and doesn't suffer from the same problems as IE6 did
    • IE suffered fewer problems in 2006 than Firefox (according to IBM)
    • The article goes on to say that the Mozilla guys need a better marketing strategy for their browser
    • Mozilla is making strides in improving their retention rates
  • Judge Rules that Novell Owns the Rights to Unix, NOT SCO
    • Brief Recap: The company SCO sued IBM stating that IBM had released pieces of code from SCO's Unix into Linux. IBM allowed SCO to take them to court knowing that SCO did not really have a case. Novell eventually came out and said, "we retained the rights to UNIX" and sued SCO. A judge put the SCO/IBM case on hold because the SCO/Novell case would determine how much validity there were to SCO's claims against IBM.
    • Around a week ago, a judge ruled in favor of Novell, stating that Novell retained the copyrights in a license agreement made with SCO
    • This is big news on the Linux front in a case that has been going on for near 4 years now
  • Official Vista "Performance" & "Compatibility" Packs Released
    • Updates to poor memory management performance
    • Hibernate/Sleep now works
    • Printer spooling bug fixed
    • These were rolled out via Windows updates this past Tuesday so make sure you run your Windows Updates.
Software / Hardware / Power Web Picks
  • WiMax
    • We talked about WiMax a little last week, so as a follow up,
    • Sprint/Nextel Announces 4G Wireless Broadband Initiative
    • What is WiMax? A quick recap:
    • Doing this, gives Sprint a HUGE lead in 4G (4th Generation) wireless data speeds
    • If they can roll this out without the hiccups their 3G launch had, they will be ahead of the game for at least a year.
  • Wireless Hotspots
  • Wireless Routers
    • What is a Wireless Router
    • Who Makes Them
      • Netgear
        • Price Ranges $40-$150
      • Linksys
        • Price Ranges $50-$180
      • Others
    • Why Such a Large Price Range
      • Features, Some have "Hi-Speed" options, some have VPN services that allow you to connect to your home PC securely. Some even have hard drives and bittorrenting software built into the device. Point is, you can probably find a device to handle whatever your needs might be.

Security & Privacy
  • Keep your Data Private on Public WiFi Hotspots
    • When on a public network, someone can packet sniff your data. That means that they can sniff the actual data going to through the "pipes" and read your email, IMs, or even see what websites you are visiting. We are going to quickly look at some methods to secure your data when using a public wireless network.
  • Securing Your Wireless Router
    • Turn off SSID Broadcast
    • Use Encryption (WEP or WPA
      • WEP
      • WPA
      • Which is "better"?
    • Limit Access by MAC Address

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