The Whole Story

Microsoft in the next month or two will be entering a new market in which they have never been in before, the highly competitive MP3 player market. With the huge dominance Apple have in this market with their very popular iPod line of products, it will be interesting to see how Microsoft fair with their entry called the ‘Zune’.

The Zune to retail at USD$299 (to be confirmed) will directly compete with the iPod for market share dominance this christmas holiday. Currently Apple hold an overwhelming 85% share (last time I checked) and no other company in the mp3 market so far has been able to crack Apple and their iPod music player.

Here are just some of the Zune’s features:

• Price: USD$299 USD$249
• Storage: 30GB
• Manufacturer: Toshiba
• Vendor: Microsoft
• Video Capabilities: landscape playback, portrait playback, WMV, MPEG-4, H264
• Audio Capabilities: MP3, AAC, WMA
• Picture (photo): JPEG, BMP
• Connectivity: WiFi (802.11b)
• Power Technology: li-ion (lithium ion)
• Comes in black, white and brown (at launch, possibly other colors in the future)

The Zune can be charged with the USB cable provided and just like the iPod, the Zune will not include a power adapter to plug into an outlet to charge the device.

With the Zune’s wireless functionality, it will be possible to view and share your song collection with other Zune users, but cannot be connected to the Internet, but more information may be release at a later date regarding online connectivity.

The Microsoft Zune Media Player looks to be a very promising contender to battle the iPod and first impressions of the device look impressive scoring great enthusiasm by many in the industry already, time will tell if it has what it takes to overtake Apple in the MP3 market.

Look out for the Zune this christmas holiday, it will be all over the place I just know it.

Over 71% of all mail sent/receieved worldwide is spam. There are literally millions of email messages sent daily across the planet meaning that this figure is quite alarming, and obvious that email spam has become more and more of a problem since the beginning of the internet bubble (Web 1.0) in the early to mid 1990’s.

Everybody recieves messages talking about miracle growth pills and busty babes and at first it was merely just a nuisance, as of now it has almost reached epidemic proportions. While spammers used to rely soley on the volume of their attacks, these days they have a whole lot more to deal with such as mail filters, spam blockers, etc.

ISP’s are making a stand and trying to block as much of this ‘crap’ as they can, but its hard work and we all need to chip in to reduce the amount of spam we each recieve on a daily basis.

Some of the biggest spam culprits are:

1. Image Spam: A way of sending a spam message in a non-text form. Harder for spam filters to detect.
2. Phishing: A form of internet fraud which attempts to steal your personal details such as bank account numbers, PIN numbers, passwords, credit card information, etc.
3. Trojan style spam: Spam which automatically downloads and installs nuisance software onto your computer.
4. Spyware: Software that sends information about your web surfing habbits and preferences to its website.

So, what can we do? How can we stop getting this stuff? between you and me, there is plenty we can do:

1. Manage your Email inbox cautiously: If you’ve identified some spam, adding it to your ‘blocked sender’s list’ is always a good idea. As long as your email client is doing its job, it ensures you won’t recieve any more mail from that source.
2. Never open anything remotely suspicious: Watch out for email attachments that don’t exactly look ‘normal’ or with weird names such as “file001.zip” or “x003b.dat” or anything of that nature.
3. Always delete potentially harmful mail: This mainly includes email recieved such as Phishing and trojan style mail. This ensures that you don’t come back to the same message thinking it was legitimate.
4. Never give your email address to just anyone: Stay “off the grid” as possible. The less your email address is used in signing up for newsletters, mailing lists, joining forums, etc the less likely that address will be spammed.
5. Use spam filtering software on your inbox: Use spam-filters on your email inbox. There are a number of different filters out there these days for Microsoft Outlook, Outlook Express, Eudora, Mozilla Thunderbird. Just a few include spamMatters, SpamAssasin, Spam Bully or check out a great in-depth look at some of the best filters around here.

There’s always something you can do to combat spam. Its annoying I know, and wouldn’t you love to get rid of it!

With the impending release of the highly anticipated Firefox v2.0 web browser, Mozilla have gone all out on party planning. Its going to be huge, and in only 15 days time!

Mozilla (the company behind the popular firefox browser) are planning to throw as many parties as possible right across the globe and the site Firefox Party is keeping track of all the progress.

“All over the world, we’re celebrating the launch of Firefox 2. Join the fun by hosting or attending a party. We’re targeting the weekend of October 27th for the shared celebration, but if you’re hosting, you make the call.” - firefoxparty.com

As you can see, there are ALOT of parties happening all over the world, mainly in North America, but most continents across the world are hosting at least 1 party which will be great. I live in Melbourne Australia so I guess I could fly up to Sydney to check out the Firefox party up there, we’ll just have to see what happens. It would be really cool to go though, take lots of photos and share them with you guys here on my blog. That would be cool!

October 9th - 2006: North Korea have successfully conducted the country’s first nuclear weapons test in an underground vertical (abandoned mine or something) space with reports of no radioactive leakage of any kind from the blast zone as of this time.

Measuring 4.2 on the richter scale,  the blast was reported to have had a blast yield equivalent to 550 tons of TNT explosive.

“The test also follows a United Nations Security Council presidential statement from October 6, 2006 warning North Korea against conducting a nuclear test and “that a nuclear test, if carried out by the DPRK, would represent a clear threat to international peace and security”.  - source: globalsecurity.org

I watch the news, read the papers and am online every day and have read, seen and heard so much criticism leading up to the test by various countries including Australia, the United States, England ruling that such a test is non-beneficial for humanity. Even living in the age of terrorism, the use of nuclear weapons has become almost outlawed across the entire globe with the majority of countries entering into nuclear non-proliferation treaties and such.

I have no idea what kind of impact the latest nuclear test in Korea will affect the world, but heads of power are absolutely outraged at the North Korean leader with calls for the UN to intervene. Nuclear weapons technology is very dangerous and must be taken seriously, the actions of one country will affect the entire world which must be understood. We cannot afford to have ‘rouge’ states developing weapons without any control on them whatsoever (it seems anyway).

The Korean Prime Minister has been labelled a ‘Cowboy’ and ‘reckless’ in various print articles I’ve read over the last day or so and the general feeling of the international community would be fairly similar I would imagine.

The hugely popular MMORPG title World of Warcraft came out in 2004 and since then has started a huge pop-culture fascination with the genre and online gaming in general. More and more people are being lured into the game when they have not necessarily been hugely into games in the first place. There’s something about this game that even non-geeks get attracted to and after almost 3 years of staying clear of the sensation, I caved and went out last weekend and bought World of Warcraft.

Its not like I haven’t liked the idea of the game since it came out, I just knew that if I started playing this game, that I would never want to finish playing it, and my entire life as I knew it would be lost, lost to the world of Azeroth. I would no longer call myself an average 20-something year old guy WITH A LIFE; no, all I’d be interested in would be when the next time I would gain an extra level, and where the hell I could find a way to increase my mana lol.

So as I said, I went out last weekend and picked up a copy of the game. I have installed it on my PC but have yet to set up my account and start playing. I only have three weeks to go until my semester is over for uni, then I have all of November of exams which I should be studying for I suppose, and not playing WOW all of that time. So, I think I’m being quite good and holding off of my huge temptation to start playing right now.

I haven’t started playing yet, end of November I think I’ll start. I want to start playing with all the time I have in the world, I don’t wanna have any huge school committments in the way when I start, but since I bought it, I have been thinking about what character im going to start playing as when I do start playing.

I’ve been thinking of either:

• Human Paladin
• Night-Elf Druid
• Tauren Warrior

If any of you guys play World of Warcraft and have any good suggestions on which race and class to start playing as, I’d love to hear your comments, you know where to leave them :).

Here’s something for all you guys that love watching stuff explode or get destroyed. Some college fraternity guys got together and filled two garbage bags full of water weighing an estimated 300lbs and dropped from three stories above the ground.

That much water makes for a huge water explosion, you can watch the clip below:

It has been recently announced by Microsoft that their newest operating system “Windows Vista” will ship with new anti-piracy measures that will essentially ‘lock down’ the OS if it has not been activated within 30 days from first use.

We’ve all known since Windows XP was released that Microsoft has been trying to combat piracy in their flagship operating systems mainly with technology called Windows Product Activation (WPA). If you install Windows Vista and do not activate your copy within the first 30 days, the OS will enable a new limited functionality mode.

Without entering your key after this period, you will be presented with the following options:

• Reduced Functionality Mode: this allows minimal use of the OS until it is validated. Microsoft has not disclosed full technical details, but they have indicated that the web browser (presumably IE) will work for about an hour before interrupting the session and forcing you to log off. Additional limitations are described below.
• Buy a key online: hop online, buy a new key, and you’re done.
• Phone in for activation: instructions on how to activate over the phone rather than the Internet.
• Enter your key: Oops, it was under the coffee table book the whole time.

It has been said that Microsoft is very adamant to let end-users know that this new technology will not and cannot turn off your computer without your direct request.

For more information on the new reduced functionality mode of Windows Vista, be sure to check out the article I came across which details it very well.

Apple Computer Inc. these days is such a successful and prosperous company, its hard to imaging that just 10 years ago, things looked a little different at the Apple camp in Cupertino CA.

A few years after the creation of Apple Computer Inc by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, Jobs was let go as it was thought that the decision to remove Jobs from the company would be the best thing for Apple. How they were wrong. After Steve left the company, things really went downhill for Apple with declining sales and loss of interest by the public in their products.

1997 was the year that Steve Jobs would return to Apple and totally change the way they did business and turned the company around from a premature death, to the multi-billion dollar grossing company they have become today.

Back in June 1997 just before Steve came back to Apple, there was an article which featured in Wired Magazine (Cover Story) entitled “101 ways to save Apple” written by James Daly. He listed over a hundred ways the company could turn themselves around with quotations such as “You’re out of the hardware game” and “Don’t disappear from retail chains”. All these statements made by Daly of course were stringently backed up citing a number of sources.

This article is a very interesting read, and a walk down memory lane for any Apple nostalgist looking for that piece of the past that can never be realized again. Apple is such a strong dominant company these days, and with Steve Jobs at the reigns, the company only promises to continue to be successful.