hintofsarcasm
am i still ill?
Archive for Technology
August 24, 2006 at 09:11 · Filed under Technology
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“I see you have a Dell laptop, sir. A fine choice.
Would you please follow me behind this little screen,
oh, the surgical gloves? They’re nothing really…”
So, Qantas have been smart and have put a directive into place to stop it’s passengers and crew from turning into a big lithium-ion fireball mid-flight.
If you are carrying a laptop, it will be checked to see if it is a Dell. If it is. You can still use it, but, either battery only or battery out and connected to the mains. Never battery & mains at the same time.
Bearing in mind that Qantas’ first policy on defective Dell’s were to take the battery out and tape up the contacts, this is rather leniant.
But, to be honest, if you know that your battery is affected and is part of the recalled batches, why the hell are you still using it anyway? And you also want to use it on a plane? Do you not fear for your life?
 
August 7, 2006 at 07:33 · Filed under Technology
No longer will a certain typo go unpunished when navigating to a web address.
Happen to miss out the O in .com and you will be directed to a page full of advertising.
The nation of Cameroon, which controls the .cm TLD, has put a wildcard into its DNS system, so that any domain on the .cm system that is not registered, is directed to this advertising page.
Pretty sneaky, in my books. But then, it was worse when Verisign tried to do it back in the summer of ‘03.
What they did, was exactly the same, except, obviously, it had a bigger hit range. If you navigated to a non-existant .com or .net web address, you would be confronted with a page of possible suggestions, and of course, some paid links.
Plus, it broke other things. SMTP, for example. Because, essentially, every single domain was ‘registered’, if you sent an email to an incorrectly spelt domain, instead of getting an error message back from your SMTP server, you would get either nothing, or an error returned from the Verisign SMTP server, which is not good for many reasons.
Needless to say, it didn’t go down well and Verisign were forced to remove it after just a few days.
Of course, if you are really aggreived by the fact that Cameroon want your typos, you could just edit your hosts file to send *.cm to 127.0.0.1 (or similar), thus rendering the entire TLD out of your range. I mean, when was the last time you visited a Cameroonian website?
Check out my Cameroonian website, if you will.
http://www.hintofsarcasm.cm
July 21, 2006 at 08:05 · Filed under Technology
Managing your own server is a pain in the arse at the best of times, namely because if it goes down or has security issues, there is nobody to blame or to find a resolution but yourself.
My hostees have been having a rough time for the past two or three months, the rack has been down more times than a cheap hooker.
I couldn’t work out what the issue was initially, just that for some reason, almost immediately after being booted up, the resources would slowly become more and more sparse which would inevitably result in the box falling over and the only thing that would revive it was a restart.ÂÂ
After some investigation however, it came to light that it was a script that was doing the damage. Which script, you might ask?
Well, none other than wp-comments-post.php, the process that deals with Wordpress comments. It was being hit thousands of times a minute and obviously, because I use a captcha (the little code thing that you have to type in before you can post a comment), all the requests were being denied, but, still serving up a hefty page of html on each failure.
Spambots are the bain of any hosts life, especially in the age that we live in now.
It used to be that inboxes just got clogged up with erectile disfunction emails, but it seems that spam filters and tired, vigilant recipients have made the mail spammers redundant, so they have gone out on a limb to carry on their work in new and inventive ways.ÂÂ
For bloggers, that means comment spam and trackback spam. In the early days of blogging and the use of ‘CMS’ (Content Management Systems) this was not an issue. In fact, it only really started cropping up in 2004, and when it started, I wasn’t even too sure what was happening. But since then, a war has been declared on the blogging community by the spam peddlers.
If I didn’t have any spam protection, hintofsarcasm would easily receive over 1,000 spam comments per hour.
But just because they don’t get through doesn’t mean it won’t generate traffic.
Each time a spam comment or trackback is rejected by my website, it generates an error message, which under normal circumstances would be helpful as a human would be reading it and could correct their error. However, a bot just discards this information and thus it becomes a waste of precious bytes.
In these days of metered internet and high bandwidth costs, this can be a substantial hurdle to any blogger trying to prove their worth.
As soon as a blog becomes popular, the spambots will start to hit it, and depending on the size of the blog, they can hit hard. As previously mentioned, HoS gets hit thousands of times a minute and there is very little that I can do about this, short of banning entire continents from viewing the site.ÂÂ
I have put in place a temporary workaround, changing the name of the script that handles wordpress comments, as many bots use cached information of what url to hit and then setting the old wp-comments-post.php to redirect instantly to a non-existant website (something like goawayspammingscum.com). This still generates traffic, but gladly, only a few bytes, compared to the kilobytes it was using before.
It won’t be long however before the bots re-train and pick up the new script and I have to change the name again. It’s an endless circle.
But, what can you do? Answers on a postcard..
April 24, 2006 at 10:13 · Filed under Technology
A year after pictures of a prototype phone that was being developed by Nokia were leaked to tech websites, the mobile phone that has promised to revolutionise what we carry in our pockets is about to be released.
It’s debut is in Europe, today, 24/04/06.
Which handset am I talking about? Surely I don’t need to tell you?
The Nokia N91
I have mine pre-ordered and according to the company I have ordered it from, it should be shipped on release day, today, to arrive on Tuesday.
The N91 was mentioned in a previous post on this site, but at the time the release date had not been confirmed.
Technical Specifications:
Operating frequency
EGSM/GPRS 900/1800/1900MHz + WCDMA, EDGE
Data transfer: WCDMA up to speed 384 kbps, EGPRS/GPRS (class B/multislot 10) up to 236.8 kbps
Quad band, so it can be used anywhere in the world..
Dimensions
Weight: 164 g
Length: 113.1 mm
Width (max): 55.2 mm
Thickness (max): 22 mm
OK, so it’s not so small. The handset is just a bit under the size of an iPod (classic), but, it’s functionality should make up for that
Display and User Interface
Color display (176 x 208, 262k color)
S60 software on Symbian OS
Symbian, great. We like Symbian. Standard Nokia S60 colour screen.
Audio formats (decoding)
MP3, AAC, AAC+, eAAC+, Real, WAV, WMA, M4A, AMR-WB, True Tones, AMR-NB
Excellent, not limited to any one music format.
Hi-Fi Quality Sound
Use the Nokia Music Headset HS-28 with remote control or use your own high quality headphone and connect directly to the 3.5mm audio jack on the Nokia N91
Connect the Nokia N91 to external speakers
Standard 3.5mm jack! Wow! First one I will have ever had on a mobile phone. No more using crappy bundled Nokia earphones, I can plug my nice shiny new Apple in-ear set in there.
Memory
Up to 4GB of internal dynamic memory for music content, multimedia messages, ringing tones, images, video clips, and applications
This is the deal decider. 4gb microdrive. The same size as my iPod mini, on which the battery is almost totally dead as a doornail. Will this see me ditch the iPod and walk with just a phone? I think it will…
Imaging and Video formats
Video playback: 3GPP H.263, MPEG4, RealVideo
Image viewers: JPEG, EXIF, GIF, BMP, PNG
Full-screen video playback on the phone to view downloaded, streamed or recorded video clips in larger size
Nice to see MPEG4 included as a codec, this was not previously available. All other codecs are standard.
Camera
2 Megapixel
Still Image resolutions: default 1600×1200, 640×480
Still Images file format: JPEG, YUV, RGB
Capture formats: H.263, MPEG-4 (video), AMR-NB, AAC (audio)
Advanced camera modes: still, burst, video and options for night, brightness adjustment, image quality, and self-timer.
Digital zoom 20x stepless
2 megapixel works for me. Apparently this camera is not so good indoors, but, the handset is being marketed as a music phone, rather than a camera phone. It lacks autofocus which is dissapointing, but, I none the less..
Connectivity
3G
Near broadband speeds for faster and more responsive downloads.
WLAN 802.11b/g
USB 2.0 full speed interface with mass storage profile (USB mini)
Connectivity with USB or Bluetooth wireless technology
Local synchronization of contacts, calendar and music files to a compatible PC using compatible connection
Synch contacts and calendar wirelessly over Bluetooth
Integrated Bluetooth wireless technology v.1.2
3G and WLAN. Nice. But, will it eat the battery? I expect so. WLAN is a nice feature, finally, a phone that isn’t a PDA but has alternatively connectivety sources off-network, and, it runs in G mode, which is a nice feature.
Power Management
Standby time: GSM up to 190 hours
WCDMA up to 170 hours
Talk time: GSM up to 3 - 4 hours
WCDMA up to 2.5 - 3 hours
Music Playback: up to 10 hours
10 hours of playback certainly will rival my 4gb 1st gen iPod mini which, after excessive use, barely gets 2 hours now. Be sure to do the full 16hour charge when you first get it though else this will severly degrade, I should expect, especially with WLAN.
March 22, 2006 at 11:44 · Filed under Technology
On the 21st March, 2006, the French parliament voted overwhelmingly in support of forcing companies selling music online to open up their digital rights management (DRM) technology.
What in effect this means, is that subject to approval of the French Senate, if you want to sell music online in France, it has to be compatible with all music players. Regardless of it’s format or source.
As you’re all probably well aware, at the moment, if you buy a track from the iTunes music store, it can only be played on the Apple iPod and if you buy a track using Sony’s Connect music store, it can only be played using a Sony device (eg. Network Walkman, CD Walkman, Hi-MD, Clie handheld or Vaio computer) and there are more examples.
This isn’t an ideal situation for everybody, imagine what it would be like if when buying CDs, you had to go to a specific store to buy a specific format of CD to work on your brand of CD player. And then, what if you buy said CD for the brand that your home stereo is, but wanted to take it on the road using a portable CD player, that is of a different brand?
This is the situation we are in at the moment.
The record companies, government bodies and music player makers all want us to purchase our music legally, but put heavy restrictions on the end-product that we receive.
In essence, they believe that they cannot trust us with their products anymore.
For many years recordable casettes have been available and then recordable CDs and there was little that anyone could do about piracy prevention, only traditional detection and law enforcement methods were effective.
Now that the power is there to prevent the copyright owners rights from being infringed, they decide to penalise every Tom, Dick & Harry, regardless of their intentions, we are all tarred with the same brush.
During the Napster crisis of ‘99 (not to be confused with the Cuban missile crisis of ‘63, which at the time they made out were pretty similar in severity) everything was thrown at shutting down Napster and stamping out digital music downloads completely.
Record companies didn’t recognise that people wanted to download music, their only thoughts were that people wanted the music for free.
The thought never crossed their minds that people perhaps wanted to break the chains that had been strapped around the music industry since its inception.
For years, the consumer had little choice when it came to purchasing music.
Either you bought the album with all the tracks on it, even if you actually only like 50% of the songs, or you could buy the singles, which are overpriced and don’t all get released, so you miss out on some of the good tracks from the album.
Now, you can pick and choose what songs you want to have from the album for a reasonable price, no longer do you have to use the next track key because you come number 10 is stinkier than week old cheddar. The masses rejoiced and downloaded. Napster flourished and the record companies went red in the face.
But for years they did nothing but subpoena.
They didn’t seem to understand that people are doing this because they like the freedom, the power to listen to what they want, not what the fatcats want. But all they could see, was that money was being taken out of their pockets, and it had to be stopped.
It took almost 4 years after the closure of Napster before a viable legal download service was launched, a service by the name of iTunes music store, created to compliment Apple’s new music player, the iPod.
Launched on April 28th, 2003, it has recently hit its 1billionth download worldwide.
Does that not say something to the record company executives?
1billion songs sold legally in 3 years, using just one of the many download services.
Put together Napster, Sony Connect, myCokemusic & the od2 network and we’re talking at least 3billion, surely?
3billion songs downloaded legally, by the very people that are still to this day being branded as theives and being forced to accept sub-standard products, ie. music that has no flexibility.
Why are the majority being braded as potential thieves, and end up getting the short end of the stick, when it is the minority that have the intention of using their newly bought product illegally?
This ruling in France should hopefully help the rest of the world realise that DRM is not the way forward, in fact it is several steps backward and that the consumer gets shafted so that the rich can get richer.
March 8, 2006 at 19:21 · Filed under Technology
Lets face it, 2005 was crap.
Crap for mobile phones and wireless devices, anyway.
What was the best we got?
Candybar phones with 2 megapixel cameras by the back end of the year, that was about it.
And even they weren’t that impressive.
2006 however has much brighter prospects.
In fact, I would say that I am positively bonerfide about the year ahead of us.
Most notably we have the debut of the Nokia n91 to look forward to.
The first mobile phone with a hard drive, a 4gb one too, not to be sniffed at considering that at the moment the we can get about 1gb at best, in the form of various different memory cards.
Nokia have kept us waiting, however. This handset was announced and pictures released over a year ago but still it is shrouded in secrecy and a release date has still not been set.
I can empathise however, what with this being the first symbian device to have to deal with a hard-drive & Wi-Fi, there has to be a few hurdles to overcome.
The next piece of exciting kit is the Sony Ericsson K800 which is due to be launched in Q2 2006, ie. Soon.
It will be UMTS (3G), have 64mb of internal memory and a option for using Sony Memory Stick, the defining feature, however, will be the 3.2megapixel camera that is intergrated.
I mean, jesus, thats high resolution, for a phone.
Having used many Sony Ericcson handsets, including this models predecessor, the K750, which is 2megapixels, I should be assured that this will maintain the quality that has been put out in previous models.
One feature that stands out is thus;
A completely new feature developed by Sony Ericsson is BestPic™, which ensures that you never ‘miss’ an important picture. Press the shutter button once and get 9 full quality 3.2 megapixel pictures to choose from in a time sequence – 4 pictures before and 4 pictures after the actual image you captured. All 9 pictures are displayed as icons on the display. Simply scroll backwards and forwards through the 9 images and save the ones you like best.
Kinda like some mid/high range digital cameras have, a very useful feature.
One flaw, however, is that although it has 3G capabilities, it will have limited use as a video-phone due to the fact that it has no camera on the front of the handset. The same flaw plagued the Nokia 6630 which was doomed to failure and was superceded very quickly by the 6680.
Some lustful images are also coming out from Samsung HQ, such as the SGH-i310 musicphone.
With its 8gb of storage capacity and 2megapixel camera, it is one to drool over.
Although, this handset is only GSM (Quad-band). It will serve a purpose as an mp3 player, but it will be slightly outdated when it comes to wireless data transfer.
3G is a minimum requirement now guys, get with the program!
Though, an interesting and unique feature it does have is TV-Out. Quite how a mobile phone would use this, or more to the point how a mobile phone user would see this as a necessity, is quite trivial.
I can’t imagine many situations when I would want to connect my phone to a TV and watch the poor-quality videos of friends drinking in pubs. But, I could be surprised.
March 3, 2006 at 12:13 · Filed under Technology
Microsoft Virtual Earth now has a new function, an innovative one too, not just stolen from Google.
You can now walk or drive the streets, not just view from satellite perspective.
Currently the service is restricted to San Fransisco and Seattle, but I’m assured that the catalogue will be expanded in due course.
It’s all part of the ‘Windows Live’ beta that Microsoft are currently putting out there in preparation for it’s inclusion in Windows Vista.
Here I am, walking down Green Street in San Fransisco. My conclusion? Very impressive.
The site is Firefox friendly too.
http://preview.local.live.com/
February 6, 2006 at 10:38 · Filed under Technology
Have you ever been in a cafe/airport/train station (delete as applicable) and wanted to connect up via wifi using your pda/laptop/phone, but after waiting minutes for it to boot up, are left dissapointed to find that you are not within range of a hotspot?
I have, and so have many others, I have no doubt.
And thus, the guys at Kensington Technology have come up with the ‘Wi-Fi Finder Plus‘.
I got mine yesterday, and I have to say, I’m impressed.
It’s small enough to fit on my keyring, and it works quickly, giving results in just under 2 seconds.
It has 6 LED’s. The first 5 show the signal strength.
1 red for no signal and then 1-5 green to show how strong the signal is.
There is also 1 LED for Bluetooth. It will aptly glow blue if there is a bluetooth device in range.
It’s an improvement on the original Wi-Fi finder, also by Kensington, which was released last year, which would not detect encrypted networks, only had three LED’s to show strength and did not have bluetooth support.
This little geek toy is very practical and will definitely save me a lot of time.
No more whipping out the PDA to gross dissapointment. Yay.
January 12, 2006 at 14:15 · Filed under Technology
After reading today about the launch of Sky’s new broadband movie & sport download service, available free to Sky customers, I decided to take them up on the offer.
Who wouldn’t think the idea of being able to download hit movies legally, for free wasn’t a good one?
Admittedly, the installation was a little long-winded.
I don’t use Windows Media player, so I only had installed what came with SP2, version 9?
I was forced to upgrade to 10. OK, fairs fair. Not a big deal.
Then after that further DRM updates were required, OK, fine.
The layout is clean, crisp and pleasing to the eye. Very professional.
The list of available movies was impressive, basically everything that is currently showing on the 11 Sky Movie channels, available to download and watch at the touch of a button instead of waiting for the next showing on the TV.
So, I set about downloading possibly Jim Carreys biggest flop, The Cable Guy. Don’t blame me, I haven’t seen it before and I like Jim, I’m curious.
It’s quite surprising that the movie, encoded at 860kbps has to be downloaded in its entirety before it can be viewed. This particular film is 471MB in size.
No problem, I think to myself, 10MB connection, 461MB can be done in less than 15 minutes or so.
Or so I thought.
The download didn’t start off too well, around about 4KB/s, periodically jumping to around 44KB/s before losing it again. Considering my connection can do >1000KB/s, this made me scratch my head a little.
After about 15 minutes, it had gotten no faster. To download movies at that rate will definitely not implore many people use this service over illegal P2P services.
I couldn’t figure out why it was so slow, and it was almost time for me to call it a night, so the Sky by Broadband program was terminated and I went about my business, Gmail being my first stop, naturally.
I like to monitor my bandwidth at all times, what is uploading and what is downloading at any one time, it lulls me into a sense of security, like I have complete control over my PC. So I run a program called ‘Dumeter‘. It sits just above my clock in the bottom right hand corner of my screen and it displays how fast my NIC is currently downloading and what it is uploading.
Although I had no programs open other than the Firefox browser, my upload rate was around 10KB/s and download rate 30KB/s. Very odd, was my first thought.
So, I open up the command prompt and use netstat -o to view all currently open connections.
Showing in there are connections to other clients, localised to the UK. No servers, just clients.
I match the PID’s that are showing in the command window to a the PID of a program running in the background from the Windows task manager called ‘Kservice.exe’, a program that I am unfamiliar with. This is unusual as I like to be acquainted with all processes that are running on my machines, nothing should be running if I don’t know what it is.
A quick Google of the process name brought up results that to be honest, I was expecting.
This is part of Sky by Broadband. I assumed that it had not shut down properly, so was therefor still downloading my movie selection.
Terminating the application worked fine. All traffic stopped and dropped to zero, as expected.
After poking around I found that KService was setup as a Windows service, set to start at boot. Something that as far as I was aware, I had not agreed to. Not explicitly anyway.
It is looking more and more likely that Sky by Broadband uses P2P functions to deliver its content.
A quick scan of the terms and conditions at the Sky by Broadband website almost confirms this;
7. Uploading Content
If you download and save content to your computer system (a “File”), during the license period for the relevant File, we may upload parcels of content from the File from your computer system for the purpose of transferring Files to other users of the Service.
It is now that the plot begins to thicken.
I decided to install the Sky by Broadband client again, to make sure that I hadn’t missed anything telling me about the P2P aspect of the program.
I came across this little gem, quite incriminating, don’t you think?
No, you aren’t mistaken. Point 7, the only thing that even comes to admitting that P2P methods are used is mysteriously omitted.
The license agreement that all users are agreeing to are flawed, seriously flawed.
BSkyB are installing programs onto customers computers that have not been authorised.
The transfer side of the software appears to have been made by a company called ‘Kontiki‘.
Their company slogan is to ‘Distribute digital media faster and more securely while reducing video content delivery costs’.
Their clients include the BBC, I assume this is for their iMP that is currently in testing.
In essence, Sky have created a program that makes you think that you are downloading content directly from them, but really, it is a P2P system.
A P2P system that does not close when you exit the program but continues to share files and continues to eat into your bandwidth.
A P2P system that uses programs and methods that have not been implicitly implied in the TOS or T&C and does have major detrimental effects over both system resources and network traffic.
The BBC, with their iMP project have been implicit with their explanation of how the service works. In fact, the second question in their FAQ about the system includes the following line;
iMP uses peer-to-peer (P2P) technology to distribute the programmes via the Internet cost-effectively.
Unfortunately I am not on the iMP trial, so I cannot confirm whether or not it uses the same invasive methods to distribute its content.
For many users, the issue of bandwidth will be extremely relevant.
Many users have ‘capped’ broadband packages, whereby only a certain amount of data can be transferred per month. This amount of data usually combines both uploaded and downloaded data so Sky by Broadband sitting in the background happily transferring Spiderman 2 to Joe Bloggs in Preston may cause Mr N E Other in Portsmouth to go over his monthly allowance without him even knowing that is there doing this.
What I aim to find out;
Why BSkyB not publicise that their ‘by Broadband’ service is actually P2P based?
Why does KService.exe startup at boot?
Why does the service not mention at any point that the KService.exe process will start at boot and thus be constantly using bandwidth?
Why is the point that refers to ‘ocassional uploading’ in the T&C on the install program, missing?
In the same way as Sony were been brought to account over their ‘XCP‘ copyright protection in 2005 by Mark Russinovich of Sysinternals, I am launching the investigative campaign in the hope that Sky will increase the prominence of details about the way that the Sky by Broadband system works and how it will affect the users computer and network/internet connection.
I believe it to be irresponsible of BSkyB to allow users to have their connection to the internet utilised almost constantly without explicitly informing them of this.
I decided to give Sky a chance to field the question that has been burning throughout this investigation.
Are BSkyB openly acknowledging the fact that the Sky by Broadband service continues to act as a peer for other downloaders even when the client has been closed?
The answer is no. They are not.
Q: If I was to close down Sky by Broadband, does all downloading and uploading cease?
Firstly, the representative fed me something about having to be connected at the time whilst I was downloading. I don’t think she quite understood the question.
I reiterated the question and was put on hold for some 2 minutes.
When she came back to me, she answered;
No. If you close Sky by Broadband it does not continue to work.
This is untrue.
Either BskyB are not telling their first-line support the methods of the service, or they are intently obscuring it.
January 7, 2006 at 12:03 · Filed under Technology
Bloggers around the globe are once again kneeling at the feet and licking the boots of Larry Page and Sergey Brin of Google over their keynote speech at CES, Las Vegas yesterday.
Few new products were announced, Google Video Store, Google Local mobile and, Google Pack.
Now, Google Video store could be good, but, it doesn’t look like it will even be available to anybody outside of the US, at least not initially, apparently.
The best thing about this announcement is that there are apparently no plans to include DRM in the downloadable videos. I suspect that is if Google get their way. I dont expect that the content providers (US TV network CBS & the NBA) will be too keen on their content being unprotected. I mean, which record companies are out there selling their artists music in MP3 format?
Google Local mobile is another good idea, in theory, but again, G are alienating the other 191 world countries by making it US only. I tried testing it on my mobile phone. Although it downloaded, it would not bring through any local data for my area, even though Google Local does have a UK version.
Google Pack.
Google Pack is basically just a one-stop download point for Google products and other programs that are necessary these days to have a complete web-experience.
Lets just go through the offering, piece-by-piece, shall we?
Google Earth - A great program in its own right, why on earth would you want to promote it in a package?
Picasa - Again, great tool to have, but not everybody would want or need it.
Google Pack screensaver - Do we not all have this already built into Windows XP? The ‘My Pictures slideshow’?
Google Desktop - Ok, this one perhaps does deserve to be here, no qualms with it, although, I refuse to use it as it is too intrusive
Google toolbar for IE - GToolbar for IE bundled in the same install as Firefox with GToolbar? Perhaps a little trivial, but, I suppose there will be people who will still use both browsers. But, what self respecting IE user does not already have GToolbar? And if they don’t have it, I would expect it to be out of choice, rather than ignorance.
Mozilla Firefox with GToolbar - Great promotion for the Mozilla Foundation and Firefox, this should really help to get user numbers up. But, will it not artificially inflate usage figures? Users download the standard edition of Google Pack, Firefox gets installed. Google reports to Mozilla that 1.2million people downloaded Google Pack with Firefox, therefor, they must have 1.2million extra users, which may not be true. It may be sat there unused.
Norton Antivirus 2005 - I use Norton. I have no problems with it. A 6 month free subscription? Nice. Blatant product placement though, dumping a licensed product in with a bunch of opensource/freeware stuff. Symantec quite obviously paid Google quite a sum of money to get this in there, on the assumption that a large number of those that download GPack will then pay for a Norton subscription after the 6-month period. You have to hand it to Symantec, great marketing ploy.
Ad-Aware SE Personal - Not the best anti-spyware product out there. In fact, I have to hand that award to Microsoft Antispyware. But, I can see where G are going with this GPack thing, anti-microsoft. Good on ‘em.
Adobe Reader 7 - What web-user does not already have this? And, going back to the whole GToobar/IE thing, if they don’t have it, it’s probably through choice that they don’t. Some of us do prefer opensource PDF readers like Foxit Reader
Now we’ve spent some time looking over what Google Pack is offering, I shall conclude on my initial thought. Why are they announcing this as a major new product? There’s nothing new here. Except Google Updater, but that’s circumstancial, since all the programs that are offered in the pack already have their own updaters.
Some are dubbing it ‘way cool‘, but, Google Pack get a big thumbs down from me.
 
