Among those hapless souls waiting in line at one of many department stores nationwide on the eve of Black Friday, I found myself camping out alongside my cousin and uncle in front of a Fry's Electronics store in Houston, TX. This story I shall tell in a later blog post. For now however, I will fast forward to Best Buy ten hours later among the hourdes of senseless shoppers. While my uncle was scoring the latest deal on an HD Toshiba projector I found myself in the mp3 section checking out the latest sales. In the end, I came out on top with a Sandisk Sansa e250R 2GB mp3 player for only $99 bucks!
I will be featuring a review over this mp3 player in the coming days right here on Convergence Daily, but for now here is a tidbit covering this lovely device. This mp3 player also happens to play movies, FM radio, display photos, and do voice recording. This particular model is branded with Best Buy's Rhapsody player software which is comparable to Apple's iTunes and includes a microSD slot for extra storage (among several "one-ups" on Apple's iPod). So far this product is exceeding my expectations and I have yet to tap into its full potential after just a week's worth of use. Be on the lookout for the write-up over the Sansa e250R in the coming days!
Wednesday, November 29, 2006
Monday, November 20, 2006
IE7: The Journey Back to the Original
I've been using Internet Explorer 7 at work consistently now for about a month and have grown accustomed to it. Some of the features I enjoy are the easy tab generation, the ease of adding favorites (showing the whole tree-view of your favorites), the somewhat streamlined interface, and the ability to view all of your tabbed windows in one single window. The obvious benefit to using IE over Firefox as a whole is that a high percentage of webmasters program their websites to be IE-compatible so the likelyhood of you coming across a page that doesn't format correctly is very slim.
My only major complaint with IE7 as it was with earlier versions is the speed. After you open a few windows (or in IE7's case, tabs) and keep your browser open for awhile you'll notice the performance decrease (I did, but then again I have multiple programs open: topographic mapping software, Outlook 2003, an RDP session, Trillian, Google Desktop / Google Talk, and FeedReader if not more). Firefox was a welcome change with tabbed browsing and a faster startup and operating speed, something I adored since I typically don't have time to waste sitting in front of a monitor waiting for pages to load.
The downside is that because a higher percentage of people still use IE today, most of your virus and malware-writers program malicious code especially for the IE browser. Personally, I've always been able to stay clean as long as I steer clear of objectionable sites and other sources of censurable content and keep my antispyware and antivirus programs up to date.
Unfortunately, the novelty of Firefox being virus free in the early days provided a false sense of security that has now worn off. Virus-writers are taking obvious notice at the growing market share that Firefox is attaining (soon will be approaching 15%) and are shifting gears to develop malware and search for vulnerabilities to exploit. Some of us expected this as a result of the exponential growth due to the grassroots campaign across the web for users to jump the IE bandwagon and come aboard the Firefox one. I was one such user and still basically am, using the Firefox browser mostly at home (even as I type this article), but as the title of this article illustrates I have dipped my toes once again in Microsoft's pool for lack of a better reason: work.
My only major complaint with IE7 as it was with earlier versions is the speed. After you open a few windows (or in IE7's case, tabs) and keep your browser open for awhile you'll notice the performance decrease (I did, but then again I have multiple programs open: topographic mapping software, Outlook 2003, an RDP session, Trillian, Google Desktop / Google Talk, and FeedReader if not more). Firefox was a welcome change with tabbed browsing and a faster startup and operating speed, something I adored since I typically don't have time to waste sitting in front of a monitor waiting for pages to load.
The downside is that because a higher percentage of people still use IE today, most of your virus and malware-writers program malicious code especially for the IE browser. Personally, I've always been able to stay clean as long as I steer clear of objectionable sites and other sources of censurable content and keep my antispyware and antivirus programs up to date.
Unfortunately, the novelty of Firefox being virus free in the early days provided a false sense of security that has now worn off. Virus-writers are taking obvious notice at the growing market share that Firefox is attaining (soon will be approaching 15%) and are shifting gears to develop malware and search for vulnerabilities to exploit. Some of us expected this as a result of the exponential growth due to the grassroots campaign across the web for users to jump the IE bandwagon and come aboard the Firefox one. I was one such user and still basically am, using the Firefox browser mostly at home (even as I type this article), but as the title of this article illustrates I have dipped my toes once again in Microsoft's pool for lack of a better reason: work.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
