Category: Software
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Network traffic: BitMeter to replace DU-meter
I have been testing DU-meter as a way to display the network traffic around my computer. It shows a nice little graph to present the network traffic in a very usable/understandable way like here: This graph is updated in real-time which means that color bar allow you to recognize incoming or outgoing traffic, but this…
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Firefox 3 already
Firefox 2 is hardly out that developers are already working hard on the new version 3 as shown by the apparition of an alpha version on the FTP server. Some visible improvements: Bookmarks will be replaced with “places” that will end in a left-side menu (an innovation to be tested). Tabs will be easier to…
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BitTorrent purchases uTorrent
BitTorrent, the leader and creator of the P2P technology that is driving most of the video and large-file peer-to-peer exchanges just announced that they bought µTorrent (micro-Torrent or uTorrent), the company providing the smallest, lightest (and maybe, fastest) BitTorrent client. Apparently, they intend to re-inforce their presence, possibly in preparation of an extension of the…
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Very slow network on Win2K
On a PC computer equiped with Windows 2000, I had a major problem of network slowness (when accessing the network, all operations seemed to atke ages to complete). I admit I was somewhat lost without a solution. So, I decided to use the ever-powerful solution: Google. It allowed me to find a web site with…
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Apple wants total supplier security
This is the obvious conclusion of this minor news that may attract the attention of the engineers among us: Apple now has no less than seven suppliers for the Printed Circuit Boards (PCB) of its iPod (they expect a strong growth in 2007): Tripod Technology, Nan Ya Printed Circuit Board (NPC), Unimicron Technology, Compeq Manufacturing,…
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Vista: Time for 64 bits
While Vista will soon be available in a 64-bit version (and that GNU/Linux went down this path several months ago), it is time to ponder the following question: “Do we need to go 64 bits?” And the answer is surprisingly simple if you look at it. Currently, PC are more and more often equiped with…
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AntiGravity: Toilets flush and Microsoft
There is no end to jokes about what Microsoft did wrong (they’re the number one target for many jokes and many grievances, just from their being #1 software company). Today, I want to point you to an excellent little paper by Steve Mirsky published in his excellent column in Scientific American magazine. In the October…
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How do your web site look?
This is the tough question that BrowserShots.org web site anwsers for you. They provide a simple way to test your web site in a large variety of configurations and browsers. This is a very nice idea founded on the voluntary help of computers installed all over the world (widely distributed architecture). This way, you will…
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Public-Key cryptography ready to shatter?
Public-Key Cryptography is a very common technique used to protect sensitive information by encoding it in such a way that decoding relies on the extreme difficulty of some mathematics techniques (like finding the root factors of a prime integer). Today, a large part of our security is relying on this (including most of the secure…