If you consider yourself a geek, you most likely feel that its necessary to have the most current version of the popular software, hardware or gaming system out there; as long as you can afford it. However, even for mindless geeks like us – you probably reach a point where you can’t seem to justify every single upgrade. This is how I felt when I recently upgraded my mac to OSX 10.6 and with Windows 7.
What constitutes an OS upgrade?
The simple answer is: Anything that the OS manufacturers consider that consumers are willing to pay for. But from a user’s point of view, how much of a change in user experience is enough for you to consider to pay for an upgrade? Let’s look at the past upgrades of the two major OS manufacturers. (more…)
Earlier this month, Opera released the final version of Opera 10 with some new features and improved performance. As always, with each new version, Opera continues to come up with innovative ideas and great features, which almost surely will be copied by other browsers one way or another; as it has been the case in the past.
With this final release, Opera introduced several new features, but the two most significant features were:
- Opera Turbo. A compression technology that is likely to improve browsing speed for internet surfers who suffers from slow internet speed. If you have a decent internet speed, you are unlikely to see and difference.
- Visual tabs. Full thumbnail views of all your tabs.
Despite leading the way with innovative features, Opera lacks behind the rest of the modern browsers when it comes to javascript performance. The new turbo feature doesn’t improve javascript performance, making Opera several time slower than modern web browsers like Chrome, Safari and Firefox. Opera’s javascript performance is only better than IE8, which remains the worst browser in javascript performance.
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One of the few things I missed when I made my move from Linux to OSX is the ability to use htop. As many of you might know, OSX is based on Mach Kernel – a custom implementation of Unix. So right out of the box OSX gives you the power of many *nix command line tools, which is why users who are comfortable with *nix systems, fit right at home with OSX.
Unfortunately htop doesn’t have OSX binary available so you will basically have to install it from source. Fortunately, there is an OSX specific htop project out there.
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In a perfect world you should be ok with whatever default configuration your server comes with. You install your server – set a decent iptables rules and you should be good to go as long as you do regular updates. But we don’t live in a perfect world and the default server configurations are almost always not the best configuration, more so when it comes to security. One of the many ways an attacker plots their attack is by gaining as much information they can get about the server software and more specifically which version of the package they are running. Some of these packages may have very well known exploits in the wild which can be used to compromise the server. Of course if you are running a version of the server package that has well-known exploits in the wild, obscuring server signature will only delay the inevitable.
But even when you are running a patched and up to date version of the server, obscuring your server signature adds a layer of protection on an already secured system. Most people who argue against security by obscurity, fear that this will only make people lazy towards implementing standard security practices. To them I have to say that “You can’t cure stupidity”.
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For those who are not familiar with Bookmarklets, they are usually small snippets of JavaScript’s which can be saved as a link or bookmark and can be later used to perform certain actions by just clicking on the link. It works a lot like Firefox add-ons but without having to install anything – restarting your browser in the process and making your browser slower as you add more and more add-ons to your browser. Bookmarklets (or favlets for IE) can perform many useful functions that will make your life easier without having to go 2-3 steps to perform the same task.
To start using Bookmarklet in Firefox just drag and drop the bookmarklet link to your bookmarks toolbar. Its always a good idea to get bookmarklet from the original source, so we will just give you the link to their website or reputable source instead of embedding it here.
1) TBUZZ:
This bookmarklet lets you tweet (twat?) from the current website you are on and you can see what others are talking about that link. Its very useful for power tweeter users who likes to share a lot of links.
TBUZZ website.
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