Effective Thoughts

I spent a half hour or so recently on the phone walking my Mom through a technical issue. Tentatively, I diagnosed her issue as a hard drive failure. She brought it over on her last visit and sure enough, the Dell XPS 450 from circa 1999 sounds like a bad coin-operated laundry at full capacity. I was aghast to discover she's running Windows 98. Ugh. Also, her recovery disk is just that--for recovery. I don't believe I'll be able to re-install Win98 on a new hard drive. That, coupled with the end of Microsoft (and Dell) support for Win98, got me thinking about Linux. (and she's not intense about her computing needs...and she doesn't want to spend much money...) I've been reading good things about switching one's parents to Ubuntu. Any thoughts out there?

Prevent XSS attacks and reduce vulnerabilities with this updated library. This is particularly relevant with the increasing popularity of AJAX.

Chronology of data privacy breaches since Choicepoint in 2005. Far too many, people...

Check out the IE Tab Firefox extension . It allows sites optimized for IE to display within Firefox. I used to open a separate IE browser only to support Outlook Web Access (because the experience was less than optimal in Firefox). Never again! Jeff...

1. Download AutoRuns 2. Unzip 3. Run autoruns.exe 4. Click the Logon tab 5. Unselect items to disable

I am not a fan of Time Warner [Cable] but I'm hating the ESPN manipulation even more. We're only going to see more of this in the future as the cable content providers start to wield power over the cable delivery services. Interesting to see how this will play out. My speculation: 5-10 years from now, ESPN will broadcast via the Internet...bypassing the cable companies entirely (although, what if your ISP is a cable company?) I really thought the satellite firms would wallop cable but that just doesn't seem to be the case/trend. Wired still trumps wireless. Perhaps Wi-MAX or UMTS will be strong Internet "carriers" in 5-10 years; or Broadband over Power Lines. Regardless, I think an alternative to cable will help drive competition, innovation, and thus, reduced prices. Jeff... ESPN blocks rerun of game Tuesday, October 24, 2006 Though widely promoted, the planned rerun of the Ohio State-Indiana football game on ...