News and Views

After driving my Honda Odyssey for 10 years and 145,000 miles, I decided it was time for a new car. When you live many years with a car, you’re not aware of the gradual change as it ages — it still seems about like it did when it was new. But it’s not […]

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My wonderful new Windows 7 computer crashed today. I’m not sure what happened, but I think one drive of my Software RAID setup started to fail, and instead of using the good drive to keep things correct, it used the failed drive and started trying to match the good drive to the failed one. […]

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We have had a Netflix account for several years, and generally like it a lot.
I quit Blockbuster because I got so frustrated with late fees — I would be charged a whole new rental period for being one day late on a return. With Netflix, you can keep a movie as long […]

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I have had Earthlink DSL for 10(?) years now. It was about the best I could get when I started, and over the years they have slowly increased the speed, from around 768 kbps (down) initially to about 2.5Mbps (320 kbps up) the last couple of years. However the price has stayed high […]

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I was fixing a computer a few days ago that was driving me crazy. When I began, it was full of malware; trojans, fake virus scanners and browser hijackers. I ran the usual scanner/cleaners and it seemed to be clean, but as soon as I started browsing it hijacked me to some malicious […]

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Mozilla has released a new version of the Thunderbird email client.
It’s got some nice new features; tabbed emails is the main one that stands out at first.
I’ve just installed it, which was painless, and so far it looks very good.
Unfortunately my calendar plug-in isn’t compatible (yet), but it was synced with Google Calendar […]

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I got a Motorola Droid smartphone last week. I’m pretty happy with it, and am pretty sure I will keep it.
I agree that the iPhone has a few minor advantages over the Droid: I like the way it feels in my hand better, with its rounded corners. Pinch-zoom would be nice. […]

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I’d been running Windows 2000 on a Pentium 4 computer for several years, and I was starting to feel the limitations. On the Pentium 4, newer programs ran slowly and some of the big C++ compiles I did took forever. With Windows 2000, though I still think it’s perhaps the best OS Microsoft […]

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Have you ever thought about the long instructions you get when you reach the voice mail for a mobile phone?
“The number you have dialed, 480 555-1234 is not available. You can leave a message after the tone. After leaving your message, you can hang up, or press pound for other options. […]

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Mozilla has come out with a new version of Firefox: Version 3.5.
There are several improvements in this version. I especially like two of them:
1) They finally seem to have memory management under control. Previous versions of Firefox would seem to slowly take up more and more memory, and never release it […]

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