Internet Explorer beats Firefox hands down

BELIEVE IT or not after many years experience with the Internet, I have tried all the browsers, netscape,ie,firefox,ect....and my favorite one is IE. I find that firefox doesnt give the same look for some websites that I like compare with IE, and IE webpages loads faster. Its hard to see that most people prefer firefox, I think they are both superb browsers, the only thing is firefox seems more secured when browsing, well if you run IE with spyware blaster and webroot spysweeper, you'll never have any worms,spywares, zeroes, and the surfing is just great.

Name supplied

Nforce 4 and Nforce 5

Uh, why exactly are you surprised that they are calling it nforce4 and not nforce5? After all, aside from DDR2, there aren't any added features, it's just standard nforce4 SLI with a memory controller. Making it nforce5 would 1) imply that Intel's chipset is better than AMD's, 2) confuse buyers, since it's hard for the average consumer to understand why nforce 1,2,3,and 4 are AMD, and nforce5 is Intel, then whichever comes next is 6, etc. 3) other companies have model numbers going up, but relative to the same company, and use suffixes to distinguish. For example, VIA's AMD chipsets are like K8Txxx, while the Intel ones are PTxxx. they don't call AMD's first K8 chipset like VIA 8, Intel's VIA 9, AMD's PCIe VIA 10, Intel's PCIe VIA 11, etc. A K8T800 is older than a K8T890, for example, but you can't base the relative position of a PT880 just because it's in between in numbers, cause it's not from the same family. Anyways, sorry about the rant, I've just been telling everybody for a while that nvidia wouldn't call the chipset nforce5, and it's been pretty annoying.

Name supplied

HP Cartridges

Yes, those cartridges are programmed to refuse to surrender their ink after a certain date. I had to turn my computer's date back three years to make them give it up. I could have also turned off ECP & EPP support in the BIOS. Setting the date back was easy enough - I routinely spend the whole night dreaming quite vividly that it's any given weekend night 40 years ago and temptation has overcome us both.

Name withheld by request, supplied

Media Center: What a conundrum!

Hi Mike,

Yo....How are you?? I am having a tough time to decide what to put in a cool-MediaCenter-machine so that I have feeling of being ready to tackle the future, but all in a sensible price. I think big names like ASUS, MSI or Gigabyte should get MCE mATX boards at right price.

Its really a passing phase, Processors with 775 & 939 are becoming more mainstream but future remains shady as newer (read dual) processor supports and newer technologies (PCIE+HD-AUDIO+SATA2) are big questions. Frankly if I want to make one MC-SFF my self right now(which I really want to do) there are no real good mATX boards which boast much needed features and aren't feature ready to make it to a Media Center machine. Also I think it will be nice to get S-Video on-board atleast for mATX boards which are geared towards Media-Centers.

I know you can help me pass the message to the Board makers of the world. As always you rock. Hope you make it to India this year.

Harshal.

The French
I am amazed after reading your article "Google book plan angers the French". The cynicism of the French seems nearly infinite.

In fact, phrases from the French like "such a move will lead to a domination of American ideas over other cultures", "Google's choice of works is likely to favour Anglo-Saxon ideas and the English language", "Google imposes a certain view of things which will be Anglo-Saxon in its views" an finally that they do want a "multi-polar view of the world" are laughable.

France has been historically a culture and language eradicator. Be it during the times of the absolutist kings or after the French revolution, France has always struggled for global domination of their culture and have injured seriously any non-french cultural manifestation in their territory. France is the only country in Western Europe that has refused to sign international charters for the preservation of minority languages. France has a rich variety of local languages, like Occitan, Breton, Catalan, German (alsacian) and Corsican that don't have any kind of recognition. According to their Constituon only French exists in their territory. The other languages are non-existent and illegal for them. And some languages like Occitan are in real danger of disappering thanks to France's Jacobinist government and policies.

The last straw has happenned recently. According to a French government study, inmigrants that speak their native languages to their children at home risk making them criminals and/or socially inapt. The government is thinking about coercing the parents that don't follow the rule of speaking only French at home. Talk about multi-polar views and respect to culture. Inmigrant associations are up in arms...

The Americans are hundreds of times more respectful with foreign cultures and languages and my opinion (and that of other people) is that one of the good things about the Americans ruling the world is that the French don't.

Josep

You Youngster!
You showed your lack of years in the PC business when you published this article. What Microsoft did was bring direction and a common base for everyone to write to and use.

Now before you think I'm a MS lover let me tell you that I have used LOTS of OS's over the years and Windows wouldn't have been my choice for the world's main OS. But I don't get to make those choices.

Back to my original point though. Before Microsoft and DOS (don't blame Gates for buying it and exploiting it, blame the original author for not having the vision to use it himself!) the industry was serverly fragmented as to what OS to use. There were several flavors of CBM OSes from the PET to the VIC-20 to the C64. There were various flavors of Atari. There were also Mattel, Coleco, Sinclair and others making there own OS flavors. There were various "open source" OSes like OS9 from New Zealand. You had MANY flavors of CPM and UNIX (Linux wasn't even a gleam in Linus's eye yet!). This was just the tip of the iceberg. All were trying to be THE OS.

Each OS had to have it's own drivers for a device. You usually also had to have device drivers tailored to each application for that same device. Printers were the easiest peripheral to find drivers and yet you could get caught without drivers for a certain "mainline" printer because your core business software didn't have a driver yet.

Every computer was built on proprietary architechture. NOTHING was cross compatible. Everything was VERY expensive because everything had to be made for YOUR computer. Lots of times you would see hardware that you needed only to find it only worked on XXX brand of some OTHER computer. There was no version available or even planned for your computer.

It was a mess.

Then DOS arrived on the IBM PC and things slowly started to change. I was selling business solutions based on a different hardware base when the first IBM-PCs came out at $5000 for a base model. I watched as the marketing might of IBM (pulling Microsoft along with it) ate up the business market for all the other computers over the next 5 or so years. When Windows 3.0 came out it was buggy, but I knew that this was the way the world would go. You couldn't fight the marketing strength of Microsoft by that time. I was still selling against the PC Clone/Microsoft platform, but by now had moved on to a hardware platform the was lightyears ahead of what the Wintel boys were doing. Still, I watched the Wintel camp eat up that market.

Without something like Microsoft happening we wouldn't have the PC technology that we have now. The lack of OS diversity has been a blessing to the hardware side of the equation. Because there has been one OS that holds 90% of the market it has been easier for hardware makers to RAPIDLY advance the state of the art. Without the stability of OS Microsoft has given us we might now only be getting late 90's hardware on our desktops.

And this points out what I see as the major stumbling block to anything like Linux taking over, at least in the non-techie or corporate worlds.

Linux is already starting to diversify to much. In the corporate world we want to know that applications will run on the desktops. Today that is becoming less and less the case. With Windows your main question is will it run on 9.x core or NT core? Even if you get specific you choices are 95, 98, ME, NT4, 2000 and XP. How many choices do you have for Linux? With the number of distros exploding exponetially everyday and that number multiplied by the number of versions of each the average administrator has a mind numbing job of shuffling through what app will run on what distro flavor. Of course you could stick to the large distros like RHEL, SUSE, Mandrake, SunJAVA Desktop and so on but you STILL don't KNOW that all your apps will run on the same desktop.

The LSB project would be a great boon to the acceptance of Linux on the corporate desktop. But so would the addition of things like seamless Active directory integration and Windows client technology. If the average Admin can't just fire up a Linux distro that installs a desktop that is integrated with his network then they're less then likely to move. Remember, these guys already have enough work, they don't need extra headaches of installing and configuring ANOTHER desktop. They's already worked hard enough to create their stabile desktop using the OS of their choice.

I guess I should get off the soapbox

There.

Steve Hoult

The French: Part Two

Is this ridiculous, or what ?

If Mr. Jeanneney wants to see the French version of the Revolution online, he can digitize it and do so himself.

Or he can push the French National Library to do so.

But protesting against what is arguably a great initiative for spreading knowledge and culture just makes him a Luddite and an idiot.

Mr. Jeanneney : as a French national, I am incensed by this attitude. Instead of complaining, make a contribution to the effort.

Otherwise you're just a whiner and you do nothing to improve our international reputation (especially in America).

Oh, he probably doesn't understand. So let me put it this way : Monsieur Jeanneney, en tant que citoyen Français je suis outré par votre attitude. Au lieu de vous plaindre, offrez votre contribution à ce projet. Sinon, vous passerez pour n'être qu'un gamin colérique, ce qui ne fera rien pour améliorer notre réputation dans le monde anglo-saxon.

Pascal.

P.S. : please correct your article. It is not because one French idiot does not understand the scope of Google's project, that all Frenchmen are against it.