For those of you feeling somewhat cramped by the 4.5-9GB capacity of current single/dual layer dvds…. The inquirer has a story on what is coming…. Ricoh believes that by 2008 they can produce a 200GB optical drive that will be compatible with the Blu-Ray and HD DVD formats. The discs would have 8 layers (compared to Blu-ray/HD’s 2 layers).
Month: November 2005
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Google accepting new signups for Analytics again
Well, Analytics is still getting up to speed. For the last week or so, new signups at the new Google analytics site had been suspended (and they suspended existing users from adding a site for monitoring.) Now It looks as though they’ve started adding new signups. The writer at the ZDnet blog, Googling Google suspects that they’re catching up on those that left email addresses for an invite when the service went live. (I imagine this may be one reason Gmail had an invite only policy for so long, afraid of being swamped with demand.)
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Opera Software patches Security holes
Opera Software has released an update to the Opera web browser. The update addresses 2 security flaws. One flaw was related to the FlashPlayer plugin, the other was a code execution bug and affected Unix or Linux users. Opera 8 has recently been released for free download (without ads as far as I know).
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One alternative to Google Book (formerly Google Print)
Search Engine watch has reported on a less controversial alternative to the Google Book Search (formerly Google Print). Less controversial, of course from the standpoint of Book publishers and those with concerns about Google’s potential for their size and leverage.
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Mozilla Firefox 1.5 to be released November 29th
Word has it that Mozilla Firefox 1.5 will be released Tuesday, November 29th, 2005. It’s gone through three release candidates and a number of betas. I think there are some good improvements from what I’ve seen of the 1.5 release candidates. One of the features I like is the auto-update feature allowing updates from within the browser to automatically happen. (Also, the updates can be done on a smaller scale than the old “download the whole thing and reinstall the whole application.”)
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More XBox 360 news
Again I haven’t been big into console gaming, but here’s a bit more XBox 360 news that I’ve run across. First up, is the Free60 project, whose aim is to port linux and darwin to the new XBOX 360 hardware platform. It’ll be interesting to see if this can be done without hardware modification…
The story I had the other day talked about the problems quite a few of hte new XBOX 360 owners were running into with frequent crashes.
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VMWare’s free VMPlayer
One of the other things I had hoped to do this weekend was play around with the new VMWare player. VMware is a company that makes virtual machine software, the entry level pricing usually starting at $199 and going up from there. They’ve recently released a “Player” that can run preconfigured vmware system images. Which means a person can setup a system image in a file then zip it up and send to another person to run in their “player”.
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Scottrade announces compromise that put eCheck secure infromation at risk
The securityfix is reporting that Scottrade, one of the larger online brokers, has announced details of a security compromise that has put a good deal of customer information at risk. It looks as though it is related to the eCheck Secure service for transferring data from personal bank accounts to Scottrade. Scottrades provider for the eCheck Secure service is the Troy Group, Inc.
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Free personal firewalls for windows will be a bit scarcer
It’s too bad that Symantec will be killing off a free personal firewall. I guess they didn’t like supporting competition for their (large) Internet Security with included firewall… About three months ago, Symantec bought Sygate who made a Sygate Pro and Sygate free personal firewall. Both the Pro and the free version will get the ax from what it looks like…
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Sounds under the creative commons license – freesound
The last post was disabling unwanted sounds on a laptop running Mandriva 2006…. this is about an archive of Creative Commons licensed audio free for the downloading. The Freesound project boasts a collection of over 10,000 sounds. Mostly sound effects of various types. (Thunder, rain, record scratch, hens, etc. etc.) So, if you’re looking for some sound effects to customize your desktop or…