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No one is accusing Google of being Big Brother, but it certainly was eye-opening when Ben Edelman, an assistant professor at Harvard Business School, shows that newer versions of Google Toolbar, versions 6.3 and above, was tracking Internet Explorer 8 users actions even when it was ‘off.’
Of course this begs the question, “Is there someone out there who ever turns the extremely useful Google Toolbar off?” I never have. Still, it is disturbing that this bug ever made it to the public in the first place. I mean, what part of ‘off’ did Google’s developers not get?
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hen it comes to Linux, there is no one size fits all answer. But, unlike other desktop operating systems, Linux doesn’t try to squeeze you into a system’s that’s too large or too small. Instead, Linux offers a wide variety of distributions and one of them is likely be the right one for you.
Linux, you see, is a family of operating systems. They share the same father, but each distribution has its own personality and its own audience. For example, if you really wanted to, you can have a Linux distribution that looks and act like Windows XP, but which underneath its Microsoft-like surface is actually running Ubuntu Linux. Or, if that doesn’t strike your fancy, you can always make the popular Ubuntu distribution into a Mac OS X look-alike.
Better still, you can find a Linux that will do what you want it to do. After all, despite silly tales of how you have to be some kind of technical wizard who chants “awk, grep, sed” at a shell command prompt to use Linux, anyone can run Linux these days. The default Linux desktop KDE or GNOME graphical interfaces may not look quite like the ones you’re used to but they’re every bit as easy to use and as powerful. Yes, once in a blue moon you may need to modify a configuration file by hand, but you’ll need to do it no more often than a Windows user has to do the exact same kind of thing with the regedit command.
The real question isn’t, “Can I run Linux?” It’s “which Linux is best for me?” Here’s my guide to help you find the right one for you.
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Firefox 3.6 has just come out and it’s great. There’s only one problem. Google has released the new version of Chrome, version 4, and it’s even better.
This new version retains its speed lead over other browsers. I tested it on one of my Dell 530S desktop PCs. This PC is powered by a 2.2GHz Intel Pentium E2200 dual-core processor with an 800MHz front-side bus. It has 4GB of RAM, a 500GB SATA (Serial ATA) drive, and an Integrated Intel 3100 GMA (Graphics Media Accelerator) chipset and was running Windows XP SP3. On this machine, Chrome ripped by Firefox 3.6 on the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark test with a mark of 530.8 milliseconds compared to Firefox 3.6’s 1007.0 milliseconds.
While faster than Firefox, Chrome 4 isn’t a great deal faster than Chrome 3.x. On the same machine, my older copy of Chrome came in with a time of 553.0 milliseconds. I was unable to test this production version of Chrome on Linux or a Mac because those versions are still in beta.
Speed, though, isn’t the real news in this latest version of Chrome. This time around it’s the addition of features that demands your attention.
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I know the value of Pi, the irrational number you get when you divide the circumference of a circle by its diameter, as far as 3.14159 and after that I’m clueless. Recently, though, French software engineer, Fabrice Bellard, calculated the value of Pi out o 2.7 trillion numbers… with a souped-up but otherwise ordinary home PC running Red Hat’s Fedora Linux.
Bellard, best known for being the founding developer of FFMpeg, the highly respected audio/video program for converting music and movies from one format to another, took on Pi not because he was “especially interested in the digits of Pi, ” but because he was interested “in the various algorithms involved to do arbitrary-precision arithmetic. Optimizing these algorithms to get good performance is a difficult programming challenge.” You can say that again.
To pull this off, Bellard used a PC running an 2.93 GHz 64-bit Intel Core i7 CPU with just over 6GBs of RAM. The only thing really extraordinary about his record-setting PC was that he used 7.5 TB (TeraBytes) of disk storage. This consisted of five Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 1.5 TB hard disks. These are high-performance drives with 3 Gbps (Gigabit per second) SATA (Serial ATA) interfaces.
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I still think that the safest thing you can do about your Web browsing habits is to switch from IE (Internet Explorer) to Firefox or some other browser. But, if you’re wedded to IE 7 or 8 — please, please stop using IE 6–Microsoft has made a fix available for all versions of IE. If you’re reading this and you haven’t upgraded your copy of IE yet, do yourself a favor, do it now. I’ll wait for you.
OK, using updated IE or some other browser now? Good. Now, for the bad news, it turns out that Microsoft knew about this critical bug since last August!.
Some people are making excuses for Microsoft that five months isn’t too long for them to fix this, and seven other serious IE bugs. Please. Give me a break. Serious security bugs are found and fixed in open-source software in days or weeks. Why should Microsoft get a free pass?
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