Archive for February, 2007

Joost invites

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 28/2/2007
in Web 2.0 and video
. 80 Comments

Joost invites

I have two Joost invites to give out.

They go to the first two people to leave a comment here.

Leave your name (first name and last name) and email (in the email field so it won’t be displayed)

Update: Invites sent to John Stephen and Jonathan Harrington - quick off the mark there guys, well done.

Update 2: Bizarrely Joost sent me another two invites so I have passed these on to the next two in the comments, Stephen and Jason. If I get any more, I’ll keep going down the names in the comments.

Update 3: Yet another invites this morning - going to Conall and Redmum

Time to stop using Safari?

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 28/2/2007
in Browsers and Mac
. 8 Comments

Oh dear, Dr. Macenstein is reporting that Safari is a resource hog - using up to 76% more resources than Firefox.

According to Dr. Macenstien Safari grabs resources from the system even when idle in the background:

It seems to me that a background application, especially one that should not really be doing anything all that processor-intensive even when in the foreground, should not hog system resources the way Safari apparently does. If Firefox can play nice, why not Safari?

My default browser on the Mac is Flock and my next most used browser is Firefox (with typically 35+ tabs open). After that I use Camino and Safari in that order so this doesn’t affect me to much.

Anyone who is a heavy Safari user might want to look closely at this article and think about using an alternative browser.

New version of Parallels too popular!

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 28/2/2007
in Mac and Windows
. 1 Comment

I have written about Parallels previously and how it makes running Windows applications on a Mac seamless.

Arstechnica are reporting that the latest version of Parallels is now available to download. For anyone who already owns a copy of Parallels, this is a free upgrade (wohoo!).

Demand for the upgrade appears to be extreme though, the link on the download page is timing out or the download dies after about 5mb :-(

More bad news for Vista

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 28/2/2007
in Microsoft, Security and Windows
. 1 Comment

According to an article in InformationWeek, a privilege escalation vulnerability has been found in Windows Vista.

The vulnerability was reported to Microsoft by eEye Digital Security on the 19th of January.

Marc Maiffret, Chief Hacking Officer of eEye said:

with this vulnerability, you can elevate yourself to system-level access. Any normal user can do anything they want to the system.

He went on to speculate that:

If it was coupled with a virus or a different remote vulnerability, it would be a lot more serious… On its own, though, it’s only medium [threat]

Oh dear! How much did Microsoft invest in Vista again?

Social network event in Galway

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 27/2/2007
in Technology
. 2 Comments

I notice that the boys in UCG’s DERI institute are holding a Webcamp next week, on the 7th.

It is on social networks and includes a few big names in the space.

Should be good.

The real reason why Vista isn’t selling?

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 27/2/2007
in Microsoft
. 12 Comments

Wow! Avowed Microsoft fanboy, Chris Pirillo, is dumping Windows Vista and reverting to Windows XP!

I’m “upgrading” from Windows Vista to Windows XP.

I stand by my original assertion that the shipping version of this OS is late beta, at best.

This is a serious blow for Microsoft - the fact that someone so publicly aligned to them would rubbish their latest OS cannot be good. I wonder does this mean Chris is withdrawing his offer to market Vista for Microsoft for $1m!!!

It looks like Steve Ballmer’s assertions that Vista’s poor sales were due to excessive piracy were a bit off the mark. No-one is going to want to pirate a duff OS.

A more likely explanation now (given Chris’ recent experiences with Vista) is that Vista’s poor sales are due to it being a lame duck operating system.

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