Know your Browser: Internet Explorer 9 Beta

So I was going to write up this post last week but decided to give it a few more days of testing to get a good feel for it. I’ve used it every day in my normal work, which consists of going through probably hundreds of tabs throughout the week and almost never closing the browser. Loading plenty of flash and sites with a lot of javascripting.

So what are the results? I would give IE9 Beta a 7/10. It is by far better than IE8 or lower. It does have most of the modern web standards, supporting audio and video tags from HTML5. It is much faster than other versions and more slim and compact. For me it scored a 95 / 100 on the Acid3 test. where IE8 only had a 20/100 and Firefox had a 94 / 100, so a bonus there also. Another improvement I've noticed is that the Remember Password doesn’t come up as a popup but instead a hover over the page at the bottom similar to how other browsers do it. Some of the downfalls to it, is, well that it’s Microsoft. Other than that, visually it does not have some of the features we’re used to in other version of IE. There is no status bar, instead when you hover over a link it shows in a little popup in the bottom. To me I find that annoying. I don’t mind losing some of the web viewing space for the status bar.

There are also very limited good or free add-ons for it as there are in Firefox and Chrome. Although a lot of improvements are built in to it, you can’t fully customize it and make it your own as much as I would like. It also does not and as far as I know does not support default re-opening your last session. Although you can still do it via the New Tab page. Also if you still need to view a site in IE8 or 7 it has an engine switching mode in the developer section by pressing F12. Though the developer section doesn’t seem to have changed at all from IE8 and not nearly as functional as Firebug.

So to sum it up, performance wise it seems good, a far improvement from older versions. Functionality and feel of it is lacking and takes some getting used to. So if you’re a dedicated IE user then this will be awesome for you and the greatest thing ever, and for us web developers, we can’t wait for everyone to start using it when it comes out in full release next year. For you firefox and chrome users it’ll still be a useless blue e icon on your pc, but at least it’ll look prettier.

IE8 Acid3  Test

IE9 Acid3 Test

 

By FreedomChicken

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Know your Browser: Internet Explorer

With IE9 Beta just around the corner I figured I’d start off my new series of posts, Know your Browser, with the infamous Internet Explorer. From it’s roots in 1995 it has come a long way. Unfortunately it got old, obese and lazy. They stopped keeping up with the times and tried to make a come back in IE 7-8 but still fell short with no HTML5 support, ect… Granted I was a fan of IE 8 when it came out. But that was until I actually used it for a few weeks with 10+ tabs open constantly and it got slow again.

IE8 would rank about a 5 / 10 not the worst browser out there, but with it’s quirks of being able to let web pages change the rendering to that of IE7 depending on it’s meta tags. I guess that’s good to keep people wanting to see all their weird random sites normally and not move to another browser anyway, but this does not help people out there to get some better XHTML standards. IE has made improvements for RSS and Ajax support which did help to move it forward in the world, and it’s accelerators and WebSlices aren’t too bad.

With IE9 Beta coming up tomorrow it will be nice to try out with it’s 95/100 on the Acid3 tests and HTML5 video/audo tag support. Maybe when it finally releases next year Youtube will be able to start moving more off of flash video. One major problem I have seen with IE 9 being more important on the web is that it won’t have support for Win XP, and yes there are a lot of those people out there already. Especially in the workplace. Hell there are some places still on IE6 even… *shudders* But at least they’re working in the right way and as Microsoft loses more of the dominance with IE on the web they will conform more to the rest of the world.

By: FreedomChicken

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Clean Up Stale Records in DNS

One of the many many tasks I was asked to lift off the shoulders of my company’s other Sr. Systems Engineer was to clean up DNS in the many domains we administer. He apparently took over an aging network that needs some serious TLC.

Since he is overloaded with many other projects, I gladly took that one off his plate. If you ever find your self having to do a similar project, it is actually pretty easy to do. You see Microsoft has built a feature into it’s DNS server that does an auto cleanup of stale records in DNS, the problem is they don’t turn it on by default. A lot of Systems Administrators overlook this feature when initially setting up DNS on their networks, and over time it can create problems, and a messy DNS structure.

The feature is called Aging and Scavenging. If this feature is never enabled you may encounter the following problems:

• If a large number of stale resource records remain in server zones, they can eventually take up server disk space and cause unnecessarily long zone transfers.
• DNS servers loading zones with stale RRs might use outdated information to answer client queries, potentially causing the clients to experience name resolution problems on the network.
• The accumulation of stale RRs at the DNS server can degrade its performance and responsiveness.
• In some cases, the presence of a stale RR in a zone could prevent a DNS domain name from being used by another computer or host device.

To enable Aging and Scavenging on all DNS zones do the following:

1. Open the DNS snap-in.

2. In the console tree, right-click the applicable Domain Name System (DNS) server, and then click Set Aging/Scavenging for All Zones.

3. Select the Scavenge stale resource records check box.

4. Modify other aging and scavenging properties as needed

[Via Technet]

You can also simply make the change on individual zones as well, to do that:

1. Open the DNS snap-in.

2. In the console tree, right-click the applicable zone, and then click Properties.

3. On the General tab, click Aging.

4. Select the Scavenge stale resource records check box.

5. Modify other aging and scavenging properties as needed.

[Via Technet]

So why isn't this enabled by default? According to Technet, there are some risks here:

By default, the aging and scavenging mechanism for the DNS Server service is disabled. It should only be enabled when all parameters are fully understood. Otherwise, the server could be accidentally configured to delete records that should not be deleted. If a record is accidentally deleted, not only will users fail to resolve queries for that record, but any user can create the record and take ownership of it, even on zones configured for secure dynamic update.

Still though, I think the good outweighs the bad with this feature. What do you think though? have you ever had problems with this feature? Do you know of some other good tools to use with DNS/AD cleanup? Let me know in the comments!

Technorati Tags: how to,dns,cleanup,clean up,microsoft,server,2003,2008,aging,scavenging

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Free Internet Resources Part 2

Hopefully the previous post gave you a bit of an appetite for more. If you haven't seen it I recommend you check out the first page of this piece. This installment is going show you a little bit more. Without further ado on with the show!

Public domain

Public domain is anything that is owned by everyone. This can be a very tricky minefield to navigate as you can find yourself using something you found to be public domain only to have the owner say "Hey you're stealing!". Anyone can put something they own into the public domain but, once it is there you can't take it back. For many reasons software doesn't tend to end up in public domain, instead this is where you find books, music, movies, television and images, at least for the most part.

Project Gutenberg. This is a public domain text repository. They have many great literary works of art available here for free download. With over 100,000 titles you could spend hours just going through the books available.
http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page

Burningwell.org. This is a public domain image site that hosts member submitted images. While this is a small site it has quite a few high quality images available for free usage in any project you have. As a bonus I created the banner for the site.
http://www.burningwell.org

Musopen. This is one of the few places where you can find public domain music recordings. While songs may be in the public domain recordings of that music are almost without exception NOT public domain. This is a site that aims to change that. Classical music.
http://www.musopen.com/

Gimp Savvy. This is a sort of add on site for the gimp, but it documents public domain images form the US government. The archive is publicly moderated so don't look for this site to be accurate in it's descriptions.
http://gimp-savvy.com/PHOTO-ARCHIVE/

NASA Image Exchange. This site has a ton of cool copyright free images, especially if you are a nerd like me. It is also interesting to note that any NASA website is public domain. The only restriction on any usage of NASA is the emblem, which you must have permission to use, for the reason of preventing people from saying a product is sanctioned by NASA when it isn't.
http://nix.nasa.gov/

Open Clipart Library. A very cool place. Many high quality vector images that will resize nicely. I can spend a few hours on here easily just browsing the new additions.
http://openclipart.org/

Creative Commons

Creative commons licenses are available in a wide variety, sometimes overlapping GNU or public domain and sometimes being very restrictive you can get more in depth at http://creativecommons.org

CCmixter. This is music and sound that is available to take and mix up, kind of like a worldwide collaboration. There are some great pieces of music that come from here.
http://ccmixter.org/

Jamendo. If any of you know me personally you know I have been raving about this site since I found it. It is a fantastic free music download site. All of this site is available to download and listen to for free, while there are no big name artist, the music does not suck, in fact much of it is really very good. With global participation you get music of all different styles from home and around the world, plus if you really like an artist you can donate to them so they can continue making great music.
http://www.jamendo.com

Paint.Net. Ever wish MS Paint could do more? Well this is what you were looking for. It has a bunch of bells and whistles that paint should have. It's definitely worth a look if you like to use paint.
http://www.getpaint.net

GNU Public License

This one can actually be wrapped in a Creative Commons license so I am sort of combining this with the category above. Gnu Licenses can also have different stipulations, however most of the software under GNU license is free for any or free for personal use. Also the source code is usually available as well to allow you to compile it yourself or spread it.

7-zip. This is an archive creation and opening program. It supports many major formats. Use this to replace Winzip or Winrar.
http://www.7-zip.org/
(Available for most platforms)

VideoLAN - VLC Media Player. This is a media player that players a lot of different formats, it's skinnable, which means you can change how it looks. It is short and sweet in resource usage and provides everyhting you would expect out of a media player.
http://www.videolan.org/vlc/
(Available for most platforms)

Filezilla. This is an FTP solution allowing you to upload and download from anywhere that FTP access is allowed, like school, website or FTP sites.
http://filezilla-project.org/
(Available for most platforms)


Audacity. Audacity is a free sound editor. You can use this for music, ghost hunting, voice recording or anything that you would need to use a sound editor for. Don't let the spartan appearance fool you this is a really full featured tool.
http://audacity.sourceforge.net/
(Available for most platforms)


Notepad++. This is a really cool text editor, like notepad but better. It has tabs for open documents so you can have a bunch open in one window, syntax highlighting for code editing and you can collapse nested tags. Plus it has a few other nifty features anyone who needs an advanced text editor would need.
http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net/uk/site.htm
(MS Only)

PidginIM. Another chat tool that I would highly recommend. This one can talk on just about any chat service you can imagine...seriously. AIM, ICQ, Jabber/XMPP, MSN Messenger, Yahoo!, Bonjour, Gadu-Gadu, IRC, Novell GroupWise Messenger, QQ, Lotus Sametime, SILC, SIMPLE, MySpaceIM, and Zephyr are all supported across different operating systems.
http://www.pidgin.im
(Available for most platforms)

Linux. You can't do an introduction to free software without talking about Linux. Seriously, it would be like ignoring Neil Armstrong or Yuri Gagarin when talking about human space flight. Linux isn't just a program it's a kernel which allows people to build whole operating systems. The operating systems built on the Linux kernel are called distros and there are many many versions of them for just about any specialized or general use you can think of. Running off of Linux is stable and far more secure than Windows. In years past you had to be kind of a guru to use Linux, but now there are versions that anyone can use such as Freespire/Linspire, Ark Linux or Ubuntu(This and Freespire are some of the easiest). They even have Linux distros that can run the whole operating system from a cd, just pop in the cd and your computer will run Linux.
http://www.linux.org


Conclusion

Well, this is not the end of the free software on the web, actually it is just a start as people are always creating new software for the betterment of each other. I highly recommend supporting these coders and artists who do this so that they will be encouraged to do more. If there is anything that was unclear or something else specifically you were looking for let me know.

By @philiptruax

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Some free internet resources... Part 1

An Overview

I know that normally Bauer-Power is known for promoting Linux. While I am a recent convert to the world of Linux it's sometimes the small steps of realizing that there is a viable free option out there. Much of the software listed below is Microsoft only, but a good portion of it is also available for all systems. I had written this for my own blog a while back and thought that I would share it here.

This will be a long post because I am going to rattle off a list of information here. It's amazing how in this day and age some people still don't know about the plethora of stuff people just give away for the betterment of each other on the internet. This includes video games, music, software, pictures, educational resources and more stuff than I could type. Locating much of this can be a daunting task for even professional users sometimes, so I thought I would put together a handy little list of a few of the places to start looking for free and legal products that are as good or better than the stuff you pay for.

A brief primer is in order for the non-tech savvy among us. There are a few terms you should know before moving on so I will give in list form some of the more common things you might hear in your trek around the world wide web.

• Freeware: This is software that is given away for whatever reason by the author. This can be limited to personal usage or open for commercial usage depending on what the author of the software decides.


• Open source: This is software that anyone who is inclined to can contribute to. A group of volunteers usually makes up the core of people who contribute to the project. The Firefox browser from Mozilla is a great example of this software. This is usually available for free to anyone for any reason. This isn't really a license but a way of creating software.


• Public domain: This mean there are no restrictions on usage whatsoever. You can use, modify, sell whatever you want to do with the software.


• Creative Commons: This is actually a variety of licenses under one umbrella and can provide a wide variety of restrictions or lack of restrictions. The author retains the rights to the software/music/etc.


• GPL: General Public License. This is usually a free for any usage software, however there are many forms of this license that are available to protect the rights of companies who may wish to allow usage of a part of the product to the public for free modification but still incorporate some proprietary software.

This doesn't quite cover everything in great detail but is a quick and brief overview of what each stands for. In general open source, GPL and freeware are terms used in software and Creative Commons(CC) is used for works of art, however there are exceptions to everything.

Freeware

A great source I have continually gone to over the years for freeware is Freeware Home . Freeware home has been around for a while and has a massive collection of software links to just about every imaginable type of free software. I personally really like these guys and they are on my favorites.
http://www.freewarehome.com
(Mostly MS software)

Caiman.us is the first place I head to to check out freeware games. They have a really nice selection of games from all over the globe. Again a big thumbs up.
http://www.caiman.us
(Mostly MS games but some are available on Linux)

Believe it or not Wikipedia has a great selection of links to freeware. Some of the links are dead as updates can be spotty, but overall a good site.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_freeware_games
(Multiple Operating Systems Supported)

Tucows.com is a pretty good place to find software as well, just make sure you check the freeware tab when you are searching, or you can wind up getting demos or shareware (pay a nominal fee for usage but the product is usually usable without paying).
http://www.tucows.com
(Mostly MS)

Irfanview is one of my favorite pieces of freeware. It is an image viewer product with a lot of nice built in functions and some great add ons. I have used this for quite a few years now and it is one of the pieces of software that goes on first. This is free for personal usage and allows you to view a wide variety of image types and give you some nifty abilities such as making changes to a bunch of images(batch processing) and cool things like red ye reduction, adjust the colors, crop the image to size and even add a few cool effects.
http://www.irfanview.com
(MS only but I wish it was cross platform, it is a great program)

Spybot Search and Destroy is a must for any computer I run. It detects programs that install on your computer and send information about you and your browsing habits to some undisclosed location, then it zaps them and allows you to protect your computer from it happening again. It's relatively quick and very good at what it does with updates frequently.
http://www.safer-networking.org
(Obviously MS only)

Avira Antivirus. I used to recommend AVG Antivirus Free very highly, however as of late I have found their program to be very bloated and resource hungry. They have created an All-In-One software suite that I found the downsides outweigh the benefits, especially for low end computers. So I have turned to Avira Antivirus. I have been very happy with it so far. They have the occasional pop-up but, hey for something that updates daily and is very good with your system it's a small price. Free for personal use.
http://www.free-av.com/
(Obviously MS only)

Comodo Firewall. Since the Sygate firewall was consumed by a nameless beast, I have turned to Comodo firewall and it has treated me very well. The firewall can be a bit panicky at first, but once it eases into things you will rarely even know its there. For those of you who may not understand what a software firewall is for and why the one that comes with your operating system isn't good enough, let me explain. The firewall is like a guardian that monitors who gets into your computer from the internet and how. If you are on dial up, this isn't really a huge issue, but if you are on DSL, Cable or a dedicated line(T1,T3 you lucky dog) you have a connection that is always on. This leaves you vulnerable to hackers, with a software firewall there is another barrier for hackers to fight before they can get to those precious pictures of kitty or the passwords and bank account information stored on your computer. The Windows firewall, while it tries very hard is just not up to the task, mainly because it wasn't really meant to do a full service job. Comodo will run just fine with the Windows firewall so everybody plays nice and you have that much more protection. Free for personal use.
http://www.personalfirewall.comodo.com/
(Obviously MS only)

Open Source

This has been the 800 pound gorilla as of late. Major successes with this community based software design have forced a lot of commercial software companies to step up their product quality. I'm going to brush over some of the major players in this field.

Mozilla. Mozilla has a long and storied history, they came from netscape for those of you who remember that. With a suite of software, such as the Firefox web browser that has more security features than Internet Explorer plus the ability to add things called extensions which really make Firefox customizable. You can change your theme, your settings, your buttons, just about everything to suit your preferences. If you think that is pretty nifty, they also offer an email client which compares to Outlook. They even have a calendar. The great thing is that you can get each of these separate or if you prefer in an all-in-one suite called Sunbird. I highly recommend this as your first tour of the free internet world.
http://www.mozilla.org/
(Available for most platforms)

OpenOffice.org is a great piece of software. You know how you keep losing your MS Office Cd? It doesn't matter any more. OpenOffice.org(OOo) is a free office suite that includes all of your favorites from the Microsoft realm with, you guessed it zero cost. You can even get add ons to this to make it more powerful. The best part? If you've got friends who aren't yet up to the free revolution you can still work with them because OOo is completely compatible with the Office suite. With word processor, presentation software, spreadsheet program, database program, a drawing program and even a math program this suite has it all.
http://www.openoffice.org
(Available for most platforms)

The GIMP. The Gimp is a free raster (pixel based, meaning made up of little squares, like photos) image creation manipulation software. Some people love it and some people hate it. I find it relatively confusing even with modifications, however that shouldn't discourage you from trying it out. It is a very powerful program and a great alternative to paying for commercial software.
http://www.gimp.org/
(Available for most platforms)

Inkscape. A free vector(images created using math, like those iPod ads) image creator. Fairly straightforward usage and has all the features it should have. I have this as well as GIMP installed, however I tend to prefer the Adobe software.
http://www.inkscape.org/
(Available for most platforms)

Blender. Free 3D image software. This bad boy allows you to create 3D images and is extremely powerful as well as widely used. It also has a nice image library that you can use for anything as it is released into the public domain. If you are into 3D graphics or want to learn this is great. It is very beginner friendly with a huge community behind it.
http://www.blender.org/
(Available for most platforms)

Miranda IM. This is a cool program that lets you talk across a bunch of different IM programs at once. Yahoo, MSN, AIM, ICQ and IRC are all available with a few others. Easy customization and some nifty add ons round out this cool program.
http://www.miranda-im.org/
(MS Only)

Sourceforge.net. This is one of the great software sites for open source software and one of the big reasons for open source. Sourceforge has a massive collection of open source software that it hosts. If you can't find it on here, it might not exist as open source, of course with the exceptions of those programs noted above. If you have a few hours to kill check out this site.
http://www.sourceforge.net

That's it for part one. That is just a taste of what is out there, but it should get you on a good start. Feel free to send any comments or questions to me and I will try to answer them as best I can. Part 2 is next!

By @philiptruax

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Who Wants a Free Microsoft Technet Subscription?

I just saw a pretty cool retweet on Twitter from @digininja talking about a free Microsoft Technet subscription! Gee, do I want cool free exclusive downloads, IT news, and updates about the haps at Microsoft? Umm... Yes please!

Of course, this is available only to U.S., U.K., and Canadian Residents, so sorry to you other international Bauer-Power readers. Microsoft is basically saying you can go pound sand. Don't worry though, there will always be a special place for you in my heart ;-P

For those of you (like my boss) who aren't familiar with Technet, here is a description from Wikipedia:

Microsoft TechNet is a Microsoft program and resource for technical information, news, and events for IT professionals. Along with a website, they also produce a monthly subscription magazine titled "TechNet Magazine".

TechNet was originally available only to customers with paid subscriptions; however, it has been expanded to include public information, webcasts, local events, and free newsletters. They have also started an open source blog on April 6, 2006 called Port 25 to publicly explore that business model and provide discussion forums.

I signed up for mine, now I have free access to all of Microsoft's software including operating systems! I am downloading a copy of Vista Ultimate right now. Put that in your pipe and smoke it!

Normally a subscription like this goes for about $399 per user, so you HAVE to take advantage of this right now! This subscription will only last until September 30th (Convenient right? it ends just before they release Windows 7 to the public in October).

Okay, so how do you claim your free subscription? Just click one of these links of course:
(US)
(UK)
(Canada)

Technorati Tags: free, microsoft, technet, subscription

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IE8 FTW Baby!! Yeah!!

So Microsoft has released IE8 Right NOW! And hopefully companies will pick it up quickly as it really is far better that Firefox or Chrome. Really MS has actually redeemed itself in this release of IE. I’d even say that it does better at Malware protection than any other browser out there. (with the exception of maybe a text browser) You can download it HERE. I urge you to try it. From as long as I’ve been using it in beta, it’s run faster and safer than Firefox and by far more so than IE 6 or 7. Also from a web developer standpoint they have come a long way also. One of the key features is their Compatibility mode, which will help to ensure better web standards across the net but for those sites that are not XHTML compliant that’s what it’s there for. Much like Opera does.

Now for those skeptics out there that think it really can’t be better. NSS Labs did a test and from the data they collected, IE8 RC1 was 69% effective at catching malware before it did harm to your pc. Where Firefox came in at second with only 30%.

IE 8 will also be the standard for the Windows 7 OS. In the first time in Microsoft’s history, as far as I know, in Windows 7 they will actually give users the ability to turn off IE 8 as a feature on your pc. So see Microsoft is turning over a new leaf and actually making good software now. So try out IE 8, You’ll love it.

By Sundance of MakeMeASammich.com

Technorati Tags: ie8, internet explorer 8, microsoft

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Microsoft is Laying People Off. WTF?!

I was in a meeting yesterday at work, and I looked down to check my Twitter timeline on my Blackberry, when I noticed a tweet from my friend (@biggeek) saying that he had just been tweeted himself from a friend who works at Microsoft. That friend on the inside said they had been escorting people out of the building all day.

I sent him a direct message back asking him how many total are getting laid off, and he said 5,500 employees are slated to be laid off! WTF?!?! Turns out, only 1400 were laid off yesterday, but still.

A quick check online said that this is the first layoff in Microsoft's history! Crazy stuff! This is from the New York Times:

"Microsoft, based in Redmond, Wash., plans to lay off 5,000 of its 94,000 employees over the next 18 months, including 1,400 people on Thursday [yesterday]. The company disclosed the cuts as it released second-quarter results, which reflected an 11 percent drop in net income, to $4.17 billion, from $4.71 billion in the period a year ago."

This comes not very long after a recent notice I read about Google laying off people, of course not as many, only 100 compared to 5000 or so. This is from Silicon Alley Insider:

"Google has announced layoffs. Not contractors. Not hourly workers. Googlers.

Not many, thankfully--only 100--and some may be able to find jobs elsewhere in the company. But they're all in HR, which tells you something about how quickly Google has scaled back its own growth expectations."

This economy is seriously affecting all markets. I work in the Real Estate Market, and we have been hurting for over a year now, and have gone through three sets of layoffs our selves. It's certainly a scary time for everyone.

My recommendation: Make sure your resumes are up to date!

Have any of you been affected by layoffs? Know of someone that has? Share your stories in the comments.

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Tech Debate: Linux vs. Windows

There are many heated debates and arguments in the world of computers and technology these days. Some of these debates have been around since the computers first became popular amongst average, everyday people. Issues like choosing a Mac or a PC, or choosing an Apple operating system or a Windows operating system have been highly debated for years - and there have even been a recent line of commercials that brings this argument right into your own living room. However, one of the newest arguments involves a relatively little-know, but highly powerful operating system known as Linux. And the exact question is what one is better - Linux or Windows?

Well, the answer is not a simple and quick one, by any means. There are many things that you need to take into consideration when trying to make the decision between running Linux on your PC or running Windows - and this article attempts to help educate you on the topic, so that you can make a better decision for yourself regarding Linux vs. Windows.

The first thing to consider is your PC gaming life. If you are always playing the hottest new game, you probably want to stick with Windows. Because it is by far the most popular computer operating system available today, more games and applications are developed for Windows than any other platform. And while you may be able to run most Windows-based games on a computer that is running Linux, it's not a guarantee that every single game in your collection will work. That is why if you are a computer gamer by any means, you will definitely want to pick Windows over Linux.

However, being the most popular operating system has a down side too, as Windows users are well aware of. Because more people use Windows on their home computer than any other operating system, malicious computer users and computer hackers target Windows-based computers far more than any other computer. There are thousands upon thousands of different viruses that may affect your Windows machine - with Linux, however, this simply is not the case. Computer hackers are not going to spend the amount of time that it takes to try and develop a virus for Linux, when it is so easy to make one for Windows. So if security is your main concern for your home computer, without a doubt Linux is the way to go.

Because Linux is an open source operating system however, it has gained quite a bit of popularity lately. What this means is that all of the ordinary users of Linux are free to play around with the operating system and develop their own programs and applications. And as this becomes more and more commonplace, you never quite know what Linux might come out with next. Indeed, it might be even better than anything Windows has to offer. And if you are already running a Linux operating system on your home computer, you will be a step ahead of most users who are still using Microsoft Windows on their machines. Ultimately, the choice is yours - though each system does have its advantages and disadvantages.

By John Parks of http://www.managedserversolutions.com

Article Source:Go Articles

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Why Exchange is still better than Zimbra: A response from a Bauer-Power reader

A few months ago I re-posted an article that the Slothman over at AskTheAdmin wrote. It was on the relatively new open source alternative to Microsoft Exchange called Zimbra. Friday I brought that article to the top, and that sparked an interesting rebuttal from Bauer-Power reader William Lefkovics.

Instead of keeping his ideas secluded in the comments section of that post, I though I would re-post his rebuttal here. Without further ado, here is William's rebuttal to the Slothman:

Wow. There is so much misinformation there, I don't know where to start. First, I love Zimbra (at least up until their sale to Yahoo! which still has lingering merger issues with Microsoft and AOL). I started with ZCS 3.0 and support 5.0 today.

The free version of Zimbra does not have all the features of the commercial Network version, and is not even a competitor to Exchange. The Network version of Zimbra is $35/user per year. It is a subscription license. If you run it on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, also a subscription license, the costs compare to Exchange 2007 on Windows 2003 in about the 4th year.

Please explain how Microsoft Exchange is "notably vulnerable to attacks and viruses". I have never heard of an Exchange virus, but I have only been running Exchange for 10 years (and Zimbra for 2 1/2). It is a messaging system, so it will transport viruses through SMTP messages, just like Zimbra, Scalix, Cisco PostPath, OpenXChange, Axigen, Domino, Oracle Collaboration Suite, SendMail, etc without proper anti-virus mechanisms applied somewhere.

Exchange is not as scalable as other solutions? Ever try Zimbra with 1000 users with the Outlook connectors? Back in Exchange 2003, Korea.com has 6 million users with 150,000 users per Exchange Server (low concurrency and IMAP connected). Walmart, US Dept of Defense... hundreds of thousands of Exchange mailboxes. It is scalable.

1000 Zimbra users on an old box with 1 GB of RAM? Have you tried that? With the Network version with the Archiving module, Zimbra Mobile, Outlook connector, etc? Web administration is an option on many messaging solutions. They all tend to be limited. I actually use the Zimbra CLI over SSH rather than the slow, poorly designed Web admin UI.

Yes, Exchange is a beefy solution. It needs and uses resources. I am not sure why that is a bad thing. It doesn't take any more administrative effort than alternatives like Zimbra. They all require backups, reporting, user administration, etc.

Zimbra and Scalix are not, and never have been, "Exchange Killers". They are, however, Exchange competitors. They offer great alternatives to enterprises comfortable with administering messaging solutions on Linux. And they are solid products. And so is Exchange Server.

By William Lefkovics

Great feedback William! Does anyone have anything to add to William's ideas? Anyone disagree. I want to hear from you in the comments!

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Microsoft's New "I'm a PC" Ads: IN YOUR FACE MAC!

Now these new ads are what the doctor ordered! I am not a big fan of Mac. Not to alienate those of you out there that like Mac, but for the most part I look at Mac users like pretentious pretty boys, or stuck up drama queen chicks. No offense intended on my part. That is just one of the stereotypes that are out there for Mac users.

On the flip side, Mac has been portraying the negative stereotype of PC users as being nothing more than uptight, old nerdy dudes that are only concerned with office work and productivity. I'm sure both camps would agree that for the most part, neither stereotype is very accurate.

Well, the new Microsoft ad that just came out decided to show that, but in a very PUT THAT IN YOUR PIPE AND SMOKE IT attitude towards Apple. Haven't seen it yet? Check it out:

[Via Geeks are Sexy]

So what do you think? Did Microshaft finally come out with a winning ad to combat those Mac ads? Let me know what you think in the comments.

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Microsoft Popfly - Game Creator

What Is Popfly, you ask?

Well Popfly is a fun, quick and easy way to build, share and learn about making mashups, games web pages and more. Popfly uses Microsoft Silverlight and a set of nice virtual tools. It comes with a set of graphics and you can also import your own. I'm really just interested in the Game Creator part of Popfly. With almost no programming experience you can create your own game and with more programming you can do almost anything. Here are a couple examples of some very simple games I've made in less than 30 min.

Bubble Popper:


Killer Crack Chicken:


By: Sundance of Free TV Shows Online

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Free Alternative to OneNote

After a little searching and trying a few products I have come to the conclusion that the best Free alternative to Microsoft's OneNote is Evernote. I've used OneNote at home for a long time so getting used to the change was a little difficult but well worth it. I now no longer use OneNote at home and have used Evernote exclusively. It is quite a bit different than OneNote and does not have exactly all the same features, but it does have features that OneNote does not have. Evernote can be installed on a vast variety of devices and can be accessed via the web.



You can create multiple notebooks like in OneNote but they are not in tabs nor are the color coded. Some other features of the notebooks is you can select which notebooks you want to sync with the web and which ones you don't. You can also use Evernote to publish your notes on the web. So say you're taking an online class and want to make your notes easily available to everyone you can just go into your notebook options and publish it with any title you want. Then it's instantly available to everyone.

By: Sundance of Free TV Shows Online

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Microsoft Using Self-Signed SSL Certificates

Can anyone tell me why in the free world Microsoft, a multi-billion dollar corporation, thought it would be best to use self signed SSL certificates to secure their public websites? Anyone? Hello?!?!?!

This isn't the first time I noticed this, but today I decided to go ahead and write about it. The other day I went to login to my MCP account to get some information, and I saw that their site was secured by a self signed SSL cert. Today I went to login to my company's volume license account, and once again it is "secured" by a self signed SSL cert. Now, I use self signed certs all the time for home stuff, and for internal web servers for my company, but if I was running a multi billion dollar empire, I think I could probably afford $2000 for a Verisign cert! I mean, it is a trust issue. Do I trust YOUR self signed cert? Hell no! Do I trust mine? Sure. Do I trust Microsoft's self signed certs? I don't know. How do I know someone didn't poison DNS, and redirect me to some phishing site?

Seriously! The problem with self signed certs is that ANYONE can make one, and issue it to themselves. Having a trusted public certificate authority like Verisign validate a websites identity is one of the main reasons for having an SSL certificate!

Here is a screen shot of Microsoft's Volume License website's cert info taken from Firefox:



Am I being to harsh here? Am I being too paranoid? Whats your take on this?

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Removing Windows Components in Windows Vista

I got a call out of the blue from a Navy buddy of mine who is stationed in Germany yesterday asking me how he can uninstall Windows Media Player from his new Windows Vista machine. Seeing as how I haven't gone down the Vista road yet I wasn't sure.

I thought it would be just like in Windows XP where you go into Add/ Remove Programs, then go into Add/Remove Windows Components. Of course it wasn't that easy in Vista. No, once again they made a change for the sake of change.

In order to Add/Remove Windows Components in Windows Vista, you have to do the following:

1. Open Control Panel
2. In the left hand pane choose “Classic View”
3. Double click “Programs and Features”
4. Look in the left hand pane and click on “Turn Windows Features on or off”
5. Once the box is “updated” you will be able to Add/Remove Windows Components

I remoted into his computer in Germany using ShowMyPc and was able to go in and uninstall it for him. I'm glad to know that even though I am no longer in the Navy, I can still serve my country by helping a sailor out with his PC. By the way, this is also good to know if you want to add components too like IIS.

Do you know of an easier way to get to this in Vista? Let me know in the comments.

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Where is Add/Remove Programs in Vista?

Since I am visiting my wife's family for Christmas, I have of course been roped into doing computer service for them along with the rest of her family. That doesn't really bother me too much though because I love this stuff.

Well, on my wife's aunt's new computer she has Windows Vista Home Basic. I haven't upgraded myself, because lets face it, Vista sucks. Unfortunately it is a reality, and people are upgrading so we had better start learning it.

For the most part, there are a lot of similarities with Vista and the the previous two versions of Windows, but they did make some subtle changes for the sake of change. One of those changes is where they put Add/Remove Programs. The new computer I was setting up for 'aunty' came from Dell so of course it was loaded with bloatware, and trial crap that she didn't need. I had to get rid of it, but when I went into control panel, Add/Remove Programs wasn't there. It didn't magically appear when I changed my view to classic mode either.

No, they stuck it in a weird place in my opinion. Now if you want to remove an application you have to open up 'My Computer' and in the top bar there is a button that says, "Uninstall or change a program."

New name, new location, same thing.

What computer related stuff did you get roped into this Christmas? Got any horror stories or success stories? Hit me up in the comments!

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Get Windows XP Service Pack 3 RC1

Hello everyone, I hope you had a good holiday weekend, didn't eat too much turkey, and survived black Friday. I know personally I am now at least 20lbs heavier (Damn my wife is a good cook!)

Anyway, I found this cool registry hack to make Windows XP Service pack 3 available in Windows Update. Full credit is due to DailyApps.net where I found this script, which you can download here: (Windows XP SP3 Hack)

The script deletes an old Windows update registry key, then ads a key option for the the latest release candidate.



From DailyApps:

Please note this hack is the exact way Microsoft expects its beta testers to try Windows XP SP3 out, so you don’t have to worry too much about Microsoft catching hold of you.

Just download it, run the script, and check online for windows updates. If you don't see the option for Service Pack 3, reboot once and try it again. Let me know how it turns out for you in the comments!.

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The End Of Operating Systems As We Know Them.

The end of the Operating System as we know it is at hand.


Well actually, not quite at hand but the blueprint has been laid down and the race is on to see who can make the future happen. I happen to know three entrepreneurs in the valley who are actively working on making this happen.


How pray tell? I'll tell you. Not because I want to share a secret but because so far they no one has discovered a cost effective way to do it...It's pretty well understood that this is the direction we're headed in.

First, let's take a look at the way operating systems have evolved.

Earlier operating systems actually just came on the hardware because the computer age was in it's infancy.

Then came the age of the early computers with the large floppy discs (they were actually floppy). Next came the smaller so called floppy discs with earlier Windows PC's. Then came CD's and of course, here we are today with DVD's.

These models of O.S. were all based on an install process, based on the theory that you would have a piece of hardware called a computer and that this computer could start off as a blank slate.

You could then take your CD's, DVD's etc and install whatever operating system you wanted on this computer and (relatively) tailor the install to your own needs.


The new model is more interesting. It states that all you need is a web enabled terminal and a keyboard. The operating system is hosted by the particular company you choose and all you have to do is log in to your environment with a username and password. This is how you log into Hotmail or Yahoo now.


It makes sense. Nothing for the user to install, all they need to do is pay as they go. If you want office, you pay to add it and download it onto your OS module. If you want games, add them to your profile and there they go.


Also, since this O.S. is now a service as opposed to a stationary piece of software, who needs to take a laptop with them? All you need is your username and password and you can really work globally from any web enabled terminal.


So far, no one has executed this model perfectly. The hardware requirements are well...Googlish but the winners would rule the earth. Think about it. Ability to work from anywhere. To have the SAME EXACT desktop wherever you went.


To have access to all the notes you left in Notepad wherever you are. To have the same desktop background and colors. The same distracting programs that you love and the exact same feel as your "home" computer.


You would have the same exact footprint wherever you were.


My prediction is that Microsoft or Google will do this first. If I had to call it now, I would say Google would be my choice. They are BOLD, wildly innovative and know how to scale the sort of infrastructure required to pull off this madness.


Microsoft could catch up but they are burdened with supporting legacy operating systems. It makes the transition harder.


Anyone who has used a Citrix thin client sees this model coming. I predict this will be here in less than 5 years and will be highly disruptive technology.


I for one, can't wait.


Till next time.

Onuora Amobi




About The Author:

Onuora Amobi is the CEO of Nnigma Inc. and editor of http://www.Windows-Vista-Update.com. He writes a monthly article for the website that can be found at http://www.windows-vista-update.com. Windows-Vista-Update.com is the premier Microsoft windows Vista information portal. On this site, you can find news, information, tips, new features and updates about Windows Vista.

Article Source: thePhantomWriters Article Submission Service

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Can I Change The Inbox Font in Microsoft Outlook?

I have this user who just got upgraded to a new laptop. When he logged in for the first time and opened Outlook, he was in for a shock. The fonts were extremely small (Apparently he is as blind as a bat, and likes larger fonts). Anyway, he called me to fix it.

If you run into the same thing, here is what you do in both Outlook 2003 and Outlook 2007:

Outlook 2003:

1) Click on View > Arrange By > Current View > Customize Current View

2) Click on the 'Other Settings' button

3) Click on the Column Font, Row Font and AutoPreview buttons to change your fonts

4) Click OK, then OK again, your fonts should now be changed in your inbox list.

Outlook 2007:

Note: Microsoft made this a little more intuitive in this version

1) Click on View > Current View > Customize Current View

2) Click on the 'Other Settings' button

3) Click on the Column Font, Row Font and AutoPreview buttons to change your fonts

4) Click OK, then OK again, your fonts should now be changed in your inbox list.

I hope this helps some of you out there. If this doesn't work for you you always have some alternatives such as glasses, contacts or even lasik surgery. Good luck!

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Microsoft Surface - Multi-Touch Table

This thing is crazy cool!

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