Computer Tips -Tech Info

Category: General Web/Tech

  • OpenGL asking for help as Vista appears poised to make it useless

    It looks as though Windows Vista has been designed to essentially neutralized the usability of OpenGL, one of two competing 3d acceleration apis. Directx *(by Microsoft) is the other competing API and from what I read, the current structure makes OpenGL applications run through Directx cutting performance by 50%, preventing upgrades of the API and it would appear essentially killing off their graphics API competition.
    (more…)

  • Ever want to publish a book?

    This is a WOW idea. This article at the Financial Mirror, talks about Bob Young, the founder of Red Hat Linux, and his latest venture. The venture is called Lulu and if you’ll pardon me it’s a “Lulu” of an idea. Basically, if you have a book you would like to get published you can do so through this site and sell individual copies. Yes, traditionally you have to get a book deal and they do a printing of thousands of copies (if they think your book will sell.) This is book publishing for the “on demand” mindset.
    (more…)

  • Australia to ask Google Maps to pull images over security concerns

    According to this article, Australia will ask Google to pull satellite photos of its only Nuclear plant. It’s worth noting that several locations in the US Capital are either reduced resolution or blocked out with solid colors. Now that we live in an era of private satellite imagery are services like MSN’s Virtual Earth and Google’s Maps giving away TOO much information?
    (more…)

  • Monad will not be in Windows Vista

    I wrote earlier about “proof of concept” viruses that targeted Monad, the next generation command shell from Microsoft. There had been talk that Monad would ship with Windows Vista and so some people were saying these “proof of concept” virii were the first to target Vista. Well, according to the Microsoft Security Response Center Blog that is wrong, Monad will not ship with Vista so these aren’t Vista viruses. I thought most of the articles I had seen had made it clear that it was uncertain when Monad would be available, possibly Vista (now we know it won’t). (The next Exchange Server release?)
    (more…)

  • Wikipedia to apply more stringent content rules

    According to El Pais, the wikipedia will begin applying more strict rules to the content of articles and revisions. The wikipedia is a large publicly collaborated encyclopedia at wikipedia.org.
    (more…)

  • Google Maps hybrid map seems more complete

    A short while back, I compared MSN Virtual Earth and Google Maps, one of the things I noted was that the hybrid feature of MSN’s map was somewhat more complete, however I found a few errors. (The hybrid feature has a satellite image with road names and outlines superimposed over top.) I just noticed that the area I had looked at for comparison has improved on the Google Maps site, there is now more detail available. In fact, it’s complete in comparison to the standard map feature of the site.
    (more…)

  • Get counted at the linux counter

    One of the problems with “free software” that can be downloaded and installed on multiple machines without expense or legal recourse, is that it’s sometimes hard to know how many people run it. Yes, sure there are web statistics that might tell you if someone is using a different platform than windows. But what about those machines that don’t get used for web browsing, but sit firewalling or mail serving, or file serving their lives away without even getting to be a statistic in the big scheme of “market share” debates?
    (more…)

  • Planning for disaster recovery

    This covers all operating systems really. What would happen if your hard drive crashed right now? What data would you lose? What about if the server room flooded? What if your mission critical system went down. What data would you lose and how long would it take to be back up and running?
    (more…)

  • Google not talking to cnet?

    According to the tail end of this article, Google has decided they are not talking to CNET new reporters until July 2006. Yet another good example of why it’s a good thing to have competition in the online search market.
    (more…)

  • Yahoo ! has launched Audio Search

    Yahoo! has released an Audio search. It not only allows a search of some of the freely available audio on the net, but according to this article, it searches the catalogs of online music services (such as Rhapsody, emusic, Garageband.com, iTunes.)
    (more…)