Record as I Am

Tech && Soccer && PHP Coding - More Bolivian than America expected.

Much like my dad has done, another Windows Vista customer has "upgraded" a Vista machine to Windows XP.  So, I guess the PR Lady was somewhat correct?

On our way to dinner Friday, my Dad and I were wondering what is the exact difference between a router and a switch.  Sounds like something basic most anybody with a home network should know, but at best all we could do was guess/BS our way through the answer.  Wikipedia to the rescue.

Router

A

As much as we'd like to bash Microsoft, or whatever software vendor is affected by exploits, the truth is that user behavior also contributes to the poor security on some machines.  Jeff Atwood details his own experience with a PC that was infected because he surfed 1 website with an old version of IE6.

Before reading Jeff Atwood's post about Hard Drive Temperatures, I would have thought the the CPU is the most temperature sensitive component in a PC.  That's what I focused on, when I was selecting parts for a

Dad passed me along the link to the slashdot discussion of Microsoft's partnership with Novell.  (Usually, its me sending him the slashdot link).  On the face of it, the major part of the announcement concerns patent rights MS holds - specifically that it will not assert them against open source developers.

Firefox 2 comes out tomorrow (Tuesday) and IE7 is slower rendering some pages, particularly if they use AJAX, than Firefox.

Of course, you know I'm going to tell you to install Firefox 2.0 once its released, and I don't have a windows XP machine so no trying out the newly released IE7.  By the way, did you see that security vulnerabilities were already found for IE7, less than 24 hours after its release?

Scott Rosenberg draws an interesting parallel between Microsoft's attempt to rewrite Windows, and the Bush administration's foray into Iraq.  Of course, the two aren't morally equivalent, but its a good intellectual excercise with more than a shred of validity.

Sandy made some excellent points, as expected, arguing for a Mac - "So count that as $150 for a really good environment and some nice apps, which retail all together for about $200." No doubt cause he just bought himself a shiny iMac. OS X is definitely a very nice operating system. After 2 years with a Powerbook, its worked great.

I stayed up way too late last night researching a potential desktop replacement. I'm torn between a DIY AMD64 PC vs an Apple. Up front, the biggest decider will be price, as I want to keep the price at or below $1,000. That rules out iMac's and MacPros, leaving the Mac Mini as my choice from Apple.