Category: Tech

The new version of Firefox has been released. It’s working very well for me. Get your copy today.

Microsoft is giving away Visual Studio Express absolutely free until November 2006! I’ve checked the license agreement and faq and it includes the redistribution license and allows commercial usage.

I haven’t gotten it installed yet but I’ve heard that some of the features of from the professional version are disabled but they are likely features that casual users like me won’t miss.

You can install it from the web or download CD images at the manual installation instructions page.

As reported by EE Times, the Gartner group is predicting a long term decline for the DRAM market. This should be good news for all us PC users who keep needing more and more RAM.

Check out the whole article here.

The inventor of Ethernet, Bob Metcalfe, was interviewed by EE Times this week. As usual, Bob is informative, entertaining and controversial.

I particularly like his thoughts on blogging and the New York times on page three of the interview.

IBM, Novell, Philips, Red Hat, and Sony have formed the Open Invention Network to promote Linux by sharing patents royalty free.

Read more about it in this EE times article.

Congratulations AMD!

This EE Times article says that, the research firm Current Analysis, is reporting PC’s with AMD processors outsold PC’s with Intel processors for the month of October.

I’ve been a big fan of AMD processors and have chosen them over Intel for my own PC’s since the days of the first K6’s.

Sony is using rootkit technology in the digital rights management it puts on to some of their audio CD’s. This is the most invasive DRM I’ve heard about and could be very bad for your PC.

I have always recommended that people take extreme care when installing software from audio CD’s and movie DVD’s. Most of the time the software provides no useful function that other software doesn’t have and with this latest development it makes it potentially dangerous.

I first heard about this from a post on the PICList Tuesday and, it was the topic of this weeks SecurityNow podcast. To learn more about this issue visit the web page of the programmer who found it Mark Russinovich or, listen to the SN podcast.

I first heard about Creative Commons licenses quite a while ago. After my first investigations into these licenses I just didn’t get it. Later I read John Dvorak’s blog about CCl’s and I still didn’t get it.

Then on the October 23rd episode of Twit (This Week in Tech) Lawrence Lessig explained the purpose of the CCl’s and it finally penetrated my thick skull. Basically, as I now understand it, CCl’s fill the gap between copyright protected and public domain release. They also have a pre-made public domain license that makes it easy to give works legal public domain status.

I have now gone over the Creative Commons web site information thoroughly and I decided to change my web site to a Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike CCl.