nixCraft » Windows

Google Public DNS Servers Launched

Vivek Gite — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 19:43:55 +0000

Today, Google has announced the launch of their free DNS resolution service. Many ISPs and 3rd party provider such as OpenDNS snoops around or send traffic to ad servers. However, Google promises not to play with end users and send the exact response his or her computer expects without performing any blocking, filtering, or redirection that may hamper a user's browsing experience. In other words Google will not hijacking your traffic on non-existent domain name and it will follow strict RFC standard.

Linux / Windows Application For Prevention Of RSI (Repetitive Strain Injury)

Vivek Gite — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 05:21:00 +0000

Repetitive strain injury (RSI) is occupational overuse syndrome, non-specific arm pain or work related upper limb disorder. RSI caused from overusing the hands to perform a repetitive task, such as typing, writing, or clicking a mouse. Unfortunately, most people do not understand what RSI is or how serious it can be. You can easily prevent RSI using open source software called Workrave.

BBC's Rory Cellan-Jones: Not Happy With Ubuntu Linux

Vivek Gite — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 18:17:03 +0000

BBC's blogger Rory Cellan-Jones took Ubuntu Karmic Koala for 24 hours test drive and predicated that - "... Ubuntu will remain a very niche product - but it's Google's Android which could bring open-source to the mass consumer market...".

Use a Linux LiveCD to Avoid Windows Malware For Netbanking

Vivek Gite — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 12:53:55 +0000

Internet has revolutionized the way online users can shop and avail banking services like internet Banking from anywhere, anytime without visiting bank. But, how safe is your money with online net-banking which allows to carry out money transfer? Companies and in some case individuals lost anywhere from $10,000 to $500,000 dollars because of a single malware infection. The cyber crooks are targeting innocent MS-Windows user. If you are concerned about how best to protect yourself from this type of fraud, use Linux LiveCD for online banking and avoid Microsoft Windows at all cost.

Dell Says Linux Netbook Returns A Non-Issue

Vivek Gite — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 06:59:43 +0000

Microsoft chief operating officer Kevin Turner recently talked about netbook and claimed that retailers experiencing higher return rates as compare to MS-Windows operating systems:

And the reason that we were able to make so much traction - because this is the first real test of the value of Windows - the reason we were able to make so much traction on this particular space is because we went to retailers and said, "Hey, what are your return rates on these Linux netbooks that you are getting?" And they said, "Oh, gosh, they're, like, four or five times higher than what we're seeing on other PCs that have Windows." I said, "Exactly." So let's do the TCO story. Let's talk to customers. And you can't find a retailer - I challenge you to find a retailer who wants to sell Linux on these netbooks, because the returns are bad. The customer complaints are bad. And our ability to really showcase the value proposition with Windows has never been greater and was never tested more than it was with this particular product. But we've made great progress there, but the up-sell opportunities with Windows 7, because it runs so well on these low-end laptops, is going to be tremendous for us.

Top 5 Email Client For Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows Users

Vivek Gite — Sat, 08 Aug 2009 08:41:12 +0000

Linux comes with various GUI based email client to stay in touch with your friends and family, and share information in newsgroups with other users. The following software is similar to Outlook Express or Windows Live Mail and is used by both home and office user.
Webmail interfaces allow users to access their mail with any standard web browser, from any computer, rather than relying on an e-mail client. However, e-mail client remains extremely popular in a large corporate environment, small business, home and power users. An e-mail client (also mail user agent (MUA)) is a frontend computer program used to manage e-mail. Mail can be stored on the client, on the server side, or in both places. Standard formats for mailboxes include Maildir and mbox.
The following are top five amazing piece of cross-platform software from various projects to make your life easy with wide variety of plug-ins / add-ons.

6 Tools To Find Out Website Load Speed

Vivek Gite — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 17:42:34 +0000

Research shows that if your web pages take longer than 5 seconds to load, you lose 50% of your viewers and sales. As a UNIX admin often end users and web developers complain about website loading speed and timings. Usually, there is nothing wrong with my servers or server farm. Fancy java script and images / flash makes site pretty slow. These tools are useful to debug performance problems for sys admins, developers and end users. Here are six tools that can analyzes web pages and tells you why they are slow. Use the following tools to:

Make your site faster.
Debug site problem, especially client side and server side stuff.
Better user experience.
Improve the web.

Google Announces Linux Kernel Based Chrome OS

Vivek Gite — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 12:49:05 +0000

Google has announced Google Chrome OS, which should be available mid-2010. This is a direct challenge to MS Windows operating systems. This is excellent news and it is going to tied tightly to its Chrome Web browser. Google Chrome running within a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel. Speed, simplicity and security are the key aspects of Google Chrome OS - said Sundar Pichai, VP Product Management, in a blog post.

Download Of the Day: Firefox 3.5 For Windows, Linux, Mac OS X

Vivek Gite — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 05:25:00 +0000

Firefox version 3.5 has been released and available for download. Firefox 3.5 is the fastest web browser. It is twice as fast as Firefox 3. As a result javascript and multimedia enabled web apps loads faster. Firefox is the first browser to support open video and audio formats, allowing practically limitless new ways for sites to display rich content. This is based upon the open formats (HTML 5) which allow displaying media without a plug-in and/or proprietary software.

How A Microsoft Veteran Learned To Love Linux And Why It Matters

Vivek Gite — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 22:50:37 +0000

Great article.

"After The Software Wars", is a new book in which former Microsoft employee Keith Curtis explores the worlds of proprietary and free software. Quoting from the article:

While I came to not be all that thrilled with Fedora itself, I was floored merely by the installation process. It contained a graphical installer that ran all the way to completion, it resized my NTFS partition -- which I considered a minor miracle, setup dual boot, and actually did boot, and let me surf the Web. I didn't have a clue what to do next, but the mere fact that this all worked told me more about the potential of Linux than anything I had read so far. You cannot, by accident, build an airplane that actually flies.

=> How a Microsoft veteran learned to love Linux, and why it matters

OpenOffice.org Quick Introduction For New User

Vivek Gite — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 11:26:39 +0000

OpenOffice.org (OOo) is a freely available, full-featured office suite. OOo is both a software product and a community of volunteers that produces and supports the software. However, new users may get lost while finding help, support and productivity enhancing extensions. This blog post covers OOo new user orientation to to discover support, tutorials, community insights, templates, clip art, extensions, and blogs for OOo.

Windows 7 Starter Edition Only Runs 3 Applications At Once

Vivek Gite — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 12:32:56 +0000

Yet another reason to get an open source operating system.

MS-Windows 7 started edition can only runs 3 apps at a time. This is worse than MS-DOS limitations. Is Microsoft nuts? You can install Ubuntu and run as many apps you want for the Internet and office work.

Do You Blame Users For IT Security?

Vivek Gite — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 19:31:24 +0000

An interesting article published by security guru Bruce Schneier:

Blaming the victim is common in IT: users are to blame because they don't patch their systems, choose lousy passwords, fall for phishing attacks, and so on. But, while users are, and will continue to be, a major source of security problems, focusing on them is an unhelpful way to think.

=> Blaming the user is easy – but it's better to bypass them altogether

Uninstall IE8 Under Windows 7

Vivek Gite — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 02:07:39 +0000

IE (Internet explore) was first released as part of the add-on package Plus! for Windows 95 in 1995. IE is fully integrated into MS operating system. IE has been subjected to many security vulnerabilities such as spyware, adware, and computer viruses. Removing Internet Explorer does have a number of consequences. Applications that depend on libraries installed by IE will fail to function, or have unexpected behaviors. A just-leaked build of Windows 7 lets users remove Internet Explorer (IE), the first time that Microsoft has offered the option since it integrated the browser with Windows in 1997.

Security Through Obscurity: MAC Address Filtering ( Layer 2 Filtering )

Vivek Gite — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 18:37:21 +0000

MAC Filtering (layer 2 address filtering) refers to a security access control methodology whereby the 48-bit address assigned to each network card is used to determine access to the network. Iptables, pf, and IPFW can block a certain MAC address on a network, just like an IP. One can deny or allow from MAC address like 00:1e:2a:47:42:8d using open source firewalls. MAC address filtering is often used to secure LAN or wireless network / devices. Is this technique effective?

Debunking the "Linux is virus free" Myth

Vivek Gite — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 20:46:10 +0000

Is Linux is virus free? The author of foobar blog provides some insight about the same. Linux users can't just catch a virus by email or downloading malware from the Internet, contrary to "those Windows users". From the foobar blog post:

Then you save an email attachment under Linux, the execute flag is normally NOT set and thus, the file can't be executed just by clicking on it. So, no luck?

Why Did You Switch From IE ( Internet Explorer ) ?

Vivek Gite — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 20:17:26 +0000

I was going though my server logs / Google Analytics settings and found that over 60% users are on MS-Windows. However, each and every month visitors are switching to Firefox or Google browser and so on. So I would like to know your reasons for making switch from IE to another browser. Why did you switch and which browser did you switch to?

Samba 4: Linux Active Directory Server

Vivek Gite — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 18:08:45 +0000

Linux does have directory server called OpenLDAP, but it requires good understanding and admin skills. Enterprise networks now have an alternative choice to Microsoft Active Directory (AD) servers, with the open source Samba project aiming for feature parity with the forthcoming release of version 4.

Woman Blames Dell and Ubuntu For Missing Online School Classes

Vivek Gite — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 16:40:30 +0000

Another clueless woman has claimed that Dell computer and Ubuntu Linux have kept her from going back to school via online classes. According to a story - a woman bought a Dell computer and realized she ordered it with the Ubuntu Operating System rather than MS-Windows. She tried to change OS to Windows but Dell refused. Her Verizon High-Speed Internet CD won't load, so she can't access the internet. She also can't install Microsoft Word, which she says is a requirement for MATC's online classes. As a result, with no internet and no Microsoft Word, Schubert dropped out of MATC's fall and spring semesters. The full story is here including followup.

Now, I've no idea about Verizon's modem and DSL connection but most A/DSL provider modem (router) comes with an Ethernet port. There is no need to use wizard or CD based installer. Other software such as MS-Word can be replaced with OO (I submitted all my school work using OO office writer and no one noticed the difference... ). Further both Verizon and MATC ready to help:

Verizon says it will dispatch a technician to try to assist her accessing the internet without using the Windows-only installation disk. MATC also says it promises to accept any of Schubert's papers or class documents using whatever software she has installed.

So what is the problem here?

Tutorial: OpenOffice.Org Mail Merge

Vivek Gite — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 20:14:35 +0000

Mail merge is a software function describing the production of multiple documents from a single template form and a structured data source. This helps to create personalized letters and pre-addressed envelopes or mailing labels for mass mailings from a word processing document which contains fixed text, which will be the same in each output document, and variables, which act as placeholders that are replaced by text from the data source. The data source is typically a spreadsheet or a database which has a field or column matching each variable in the template. When the mail merge is run, the word processing system creates an output document for each row in the database, using the fixed text exactly as it appears in the template, but substituting the data variables in the template with the values from the matching columns.

This technique of merging data to create mailshots gave rise to the term mail merge. OpenOffice.Org has a in built software mail merge feature.

If you haven't tried OpenOffice.org's mail merge feature because you find it confusing or difficult to use, you are in luck. Mail Merges in OpenOffice.org and StarOffice provides a detailed description of the mail merge feature from start to finish. Among other things, it shows how you can use the mail merge to create letters, labels, and envelopes.

=> You can download this excellent PDF ebook for your persusal or read the article online - Mail Merge in Openoffice.org: Everything You Need to Know.