A brief article on how profitable the open-source Firefox project has become.
You see that little Google search box on the upper right? If you use that box to make a search and click on one of the Google ads from the results page, Firefox gets an estimated 80% of the money. In addition to the search box, Mozilla also makes money from searches made on the Firefox start page.
An aide for a Montana congressman was fired for trying to solicit hackers from attrition.org to boost his college GPA. The hackers merely led him on through a series of hilarious emails, including some asking him to take pictures of squirrels.
From: Todd Shriber (nascar24_08530@yahoo.com) To: lyger@attrition.org Date: Wed, 9 Aug 2006 12:58:29 -0700 (PDT) Subject: Question for you or other Attrition members Lyger - I came across Attrition.org for the first time. I enjoyed the site though I am not an expert with computers. That brings me to my next point: I need to urgently make contact with a hacker that would be interested in doing a one-time job for me. The pay would be good. I'm not sure what exactly the job would entail with respect to computer jargon, but I can go into rough detail upon making contact with a candidate. Thanks for your help.
This is a useful guide to check before purchasing cheap DVD media.
Not all media is good. In fact, with the high influx of cheap media from Taiwan, China and Hong Kong, I’d venture to say most media is bad. This review guide is meant to shed some light on who manufactures and brands good and not so good quality DVD media.
Use this list as an assistant when selecting what media to buy and use. It shows what generally works as the best media. Individual results may very, depending on the burner and how the media chooses to cooperate, though typically not by much. Read the advanced topics guide after becoming familiar with the basics presented on this page.
Here’s a hack that may allow you to access sites that let Google in to index them but require regular users to register.
Ever experienced this? You ask Google to look something up; the engine returns with a number of finds, but if you try to open the ones with the most promising content, you are confronted with a registration page instead, and the stuff you were looking for will not be revealed to you unless you agree to a credit card transaction first…. The lesson you should have learned here is: Obviously Google can go where you can’t.
If you are stuck in a position where you need to open one of the new Word, Excel or Powerpoint 2007 document formats, but have an older version of Office, grab this compatibility update from Microsoft.
Of course, you should avoid opening dangerous Microsoft Office documents you receive from others, especially considering that there is currently a zero-day exploit for Word documents that has not been patched yet. You’ve been warned!
A candid rant by a Microsoft developer on Microsoft bureaucracy.
I worked at Microsoft for about 7 years total, from 1994 to 1998, and from 2002 to 2006.
The most frustrating year of those seven was the year I spent working on Windows Vista, which was called Longhorn at the time. I spent a full year working on a feature which should’ve been designed, implemented and tested in a week. To my happy surprise (where “happy” is the freude in schadenfreude), Joel Spolsky wrote an article about my feature.
I would like to try to explain how this steaming turd happened.
The PortableApps Suite has just reached 1.0. This is a useful collection of open source programs for Windows that you can run directly off of a USB flash drive.
PortableApps Suiteâ„¢ is a collection of portable apps including a web browser, email client, office suite, calendar/scheduler, instant messaging client, antivirus, sudoku game, backup utility and integrated menu, all preconfigured to work portably. Just drop it on your portable device and you’re ready to go.
Leah Culver funded the purchase of a new Macbook Pro by selling ad space on the cover for $150 per square inch. The ads were then laser etched at her workplace.
Related:
This is a fantastic homemade computer project. Look at the schematic for this thing. Yikes!
This is an actual computer, built completely from scratch. I began the project in the spring of 2006, while I was taking a course on microcomputers. My Z80 system will remain a work in progress as long as I can think of new things to add to it.
The current specs are:
2MHz 8 bit Zilog Z80 processor
56 KB static RAM (7 x 8k x 8 )
8 KB EEPROM
1 Mb Flash Memory “hard drive”
Interrupt controller with 8 interrupt levels
20 character x 2 line backlit LCD with contrast control
RS232 serial port
2 programmable timers
Programmable beeper
8X DIP switch and 8X LED’s for general purpose I/O
Strobe button for clocked input from the DIP switches
Parallel port programming interface with parity…
I do all the programming on my PC, using Z80 assembly. I wrote a simple drag and drop utility in C++ that uploads the assembled code into the microcomputer’s memory.
Here’s an interesting write up for a project to build a Cintiq-like interactive pen tablet.
This is hybrid screen/graphics tablet which makes me drool. The price however makes me weep, £2000ish for the 20†version. They also do a thing called the PL at 17†for a more reasonable £500ish. Occasionally they appear on the site in their bargain basement ex-demo section. Still hard for me to justify though.
Then I had one of those “spang†moments. None of the tech involved is new and all is readily available second hand, it’s just a matter of putting it together. My Wacom at work will happily operate with the stylus off the surface, after that it’s just an LCD screen, right? Anyhow where’s the fun in just buying something?
The finished product:
Here’s a great site that highlights some really useful open source applications for windows with short, concise write ups.
Here’s a comparison of which of the most popular BitTorrent sites have the most torrents indexed, and which has the best features.
When I first began to use BitTorrent in 2004 there was little question as to which indexing site to use. Today, Suprnova is long gone and we are left with an array of diverse options. This is a comparison of today’s ten most used BitTorrent sites according to Alexa.com.
This is a visual guide to lock picking in comic book format. This guide is easier to read than the classic MIT Guide to Lock Picking.
Locksport International is proud to provide a simple, visual guide to lock picking. It is our hope that beginners will find this useful in learning the basic skills of picking pin tumbler locks.
Here’s another rant on the IT industry.
Often, I think a lot of people take the witch-doctor approach to with their IT careers. Even the simplest problem has to be turned into some kind of mystical journey - filled with strange methodologies, bags full of design patterns, and hundreds of pages of UML diagrams. And if even that’s too difficult for you - you can always make up a few technical sounding words and acronyms to baffle and impress your customers with. Important-sounding job-titles and roles are also very useful.
This is a fascinating though useless diversion on how to perform basic computations using dominoes.
My friend Cory and I were sitting around one day, as we often do, contemplating the mysteries of the universe, when one of us brought up the possibility of building digital logic using only dominoes. We did a web search, figuring that someone must have done something like that before, but guess what? Nary a page was to be found. Cory immediately made a trip the local toy store and bought a package of faux ivory dominoes, and we began work.
Here’s a single-bit adder:
Inventgeek.com has made their own air ionizer to replace one of the case fans in their computer.
Due to popular request we have built this miniaturized ion cooler as a second step in its evaluation. We chose to use an external design for several reasons, all of which mitigate concerns from people on our initial prototype. One of the biggest concerns was with regards to the air moving threw the computer possibly having a imbalanced electrical charge or alternately producing to much ozone and possibly damaging components in the system. By mounting the unit at the rear of the case with it sucking air out of the case we are able to still achieve beneficial results and address these issues. The rig overall is basically the same as in the initial tests with one change that we used a more standard PC case with a normal 2 fan push pull type arrangement.
IEEE Spectrum has written a nice article on Blake Ross, one of the co-founders of the Firefox project, and on what he is working on next.
But there were others in the cubicle trenches who hadn’t conceded the browser war to Microsoft. Late one night in the summer of 2002, at a nearby Denny’s restaurant, Ross fell into an impassioned discussion with Dave Hyatt, a senior engineer at Netscape who shared his vision for a leaner but more flexible browser for the masses. Rather than starting from scratch, the two took the Mozilla browser, which they thought was bloated with superÂfluous features such as chat rooms and an e-mail client, and began stripping it to the bare essentials. They felt they were raising the Netscape browser from the ashes and so named their stripped-down version Phoenix. But the rebel project became anathema to some Mozilla diehards. “I don’t see the need for Phoenix,†posted one detractor at the time. Another was more succinct: “Phoenix sucks,†he blogged.
…or, Why your Windows desktop is cluttered with crap you didn’t want.
I often find myself saying, “I bet somebody got a really nice bonus for that feature.”
“That feature” is something aggressively user-hostile, like forcing a shortcut into the Quick Launch bar or the Favorites menu, like automatically turning on a taskbar toolbar, like adding an icon to the notification area that conveys no useful information but merely adds to the clutter, or (my favorite) like adding an extra item to the desktop context menu that takes several seconds to initialize and gives the user the ability to change some obscure feature of their video card.
This is a rather interesting post on the current state of the software industry, and it has sparked a lively discussion in the comments section.
These things are fairly typical of the modern relationship with computers. I’ve gotten so used to it that I didn’t really think about how odd this is until this morning, when I read somebody on LiveJournal talking about a video game crash, saying “I should know better than to purchase a game before the first patch is out…” Then it hit me: Has there ever been a bigger con job pulled on consumers than the modern software industry?
Lifehacker has collected together some of the more useful config tweaks for Firefox 2.
The Firefox homepage calls the web browser “fully customizable to your online life,” and that’s not just marketing claptrap. Beyond the extensive options available in its menus and dialogs, there’s a lengthy set of advanced Firefox preferences that can customize the browser to your specific needs. Sure, your brother-in-law’s not likely to edit Firefox’s default configuration, but you? You’re a power surfer and you want your web browser your way.
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