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.
Author: Avery
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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…
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Disabling KDE 3.4.x sound notifications
Ok, one of the first things that I got annoyed with in the new Mandriva 2006 install on the laptop was the event triggered sounds. Popup notification window one sound, error message – glass breaking, etc. etc…. So, I started trying to remember where to cut all that stuff off. It took a bit of digging to find it, because it’s not in the KDE control panel under “sound” where it might be found in a Windows setup…
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Mandriva 2006 upgrade on Inspiron 8000 laptop saga Part II
Well the saga continues. I suspect there will be a three as I get all software installed and mention tips and tweaks. III may not be named as such, I may just do a series of articles on little things that I’ve changed. At this hour I’ve got the KDE desktop for Mandriva 2006 up and running and am as I type letting more software install. I’ve had a few bumps along the way and let me tell you about them. First was the bad md5sum on the first disk image… my fault. I expected bittorrent to have checked it and made sure it was correct, but apparently that failed. Again, my fault.
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Ooops… hard drive maker ships trojan on storage media
Oooops… According to the Sunbelt blog a Japanese storage maker (I-O Data Device) has offered to exchange drives that were discovered to have been shipped out with the Tompai-A, a worm which would give a cracker backdoor access to a machine. It affects portable hard drive’s in the companies HDP-U series.