Genius. Use batteries by day, charge in USB hub or laptop overnight.
As pdp points out on GNUCITIZEN, domain admins need to make sure they don’t get carried away when outsourcing to Google apps. It’s tempting to put something like this in your DNS:
*.example.org. IN CNAME ghs.google.com.
Don’t do it! While it’s nice to have docs.example.org and mail.example.org and all that pointing to big-G with just one line, it also means that some prankster could use Blogspot to set up blog.example.org and hijack one of your subdomains.
Google will hopefully fix this particular exploit (by requiring proof of domain ownership in Blogspot) but other services may be vulnerable.
This problem is by no means limited to Google; use wildcard DNS with extreme caution. If nothing else, having kiddieporn.example.org resolving to your organization’s servers is a PR nightmare waiting to happen.
The default Mac Firefox 2 theme.
I finally got around to installing FF3 today. The verdict? Nice browser, sub-standard chrome. And none of the available themes for OSX is any better.
The problem is that they turned Firefox.app into a Safari clone. I use both browsers, and one of the reasons why I use Firefox more is that I like the look of the interface. It’s less boring. It balances web content nicely. It’s saturated while still being professional. Safari is understated and serious. Firefox is bright and clever. Or was. As others have mentioned, Moz didn’t even get Safari right.
What really kills the deal for me is that they made the RSS icon blue. You know, because Safari’s is blue. :-p
It hurts my brain.
It’s also an odd move for an application whose branding is orange and blue to remove all the orange from their user interface.
Firefox Download Day, world record, blah blah blah. It’s time to upgrade yer browser. Then again, if they really wanted to set a record, they would have posted FF3 by now (7:40am EST, nearly midnight in New Zealand).
Be sure to check out the Field Guide to Firefox 3 for whenever you actually do download it.
The way browser-based ad blocking works currently (hello Firefox users!), one or more extensions prevent the browser from downloading images from certain servers, prevent the Flash plugin from playing animations, and/or prevent the javascript includes that insert ads into the page.
This works great. Suddenly the internet is free of annoying crap in the margins, allowing you to concentrate on the annoying crap you’re looking for.
But of course, when the ads are blocked, no one gets paid. The world’s browsers need to request and download the images—hundreds of thousands of times—in order for the sponsorship arrangement to work out.
It would be great if you could tell blocking extensions to “accept, but do not display” advertising on a site-by-site basis.
If you paid for your internet by the Gigabyte, would you think twice about watching a Miami Vice marathon on Hulu? Would you get mad at being rickrolled? Would you limit your calls on Skype?
Or would your ISP suddenly feel enormous pressure to provide you with as much bandwidth as you want, when you wanted it, in order to increase revenues and maximize shareholder value?
I have no doubt that metered pricing would chill demand for high-bandwidth services, and lead to the kind of thriftyness we used to assume for interstate telephone calls. At the very least, we would all have internet meters on our dashboards, and favor content providers that optimize their offerings and use low-bandwidth ads.
But in a fair market (heh), you would expect internet providers to price their Gigabytes attractively, in order to sell more of them. The more data they move, the more money they make. This is already the case on the server side. The price per gigabyte for a high-bandwith datacenter is under 20 cents, and you can easily get as much bandwidth as your hardware is able to consume.
I think it will be a painful adjustment: there issues around security, high-bandwidth advertising, family usage, and monitoring. But if metered pricing finally gives the CEOs a long-term incentive to move packets, instead of limiting them as they do now, I’m all for it.
