It might be true that the video is a little overreacted but it contains actual footage of Steve Ballmer, SEO at Microsoft. Although this video was added somewhere in 2005 it still represents the Redmond company, I mean Ballmer is SEO and Chairman, he is Microsoft. I don’t love Microsoft and I don’t hate Microsoft but watching this video makes me wonder at its policy.

Just compare: that guy being your boss at the office or working for Google that has it’s own spa, restaurant, gym, etc. for its employees.

We’ve all assisted Google launching the Premiere web applications package a few days ago. Some of us considered switching, some of us are still holding the grounds, but one thing is certain. There will be debates. Google is obviously trying to conquer Microsoft’s office suite market and they’re playing it rough. Let see a few reasons in favor or against the migration to the new service.

In favor:
* The price - Instead of paying ~$500 for the full Microsoft Office suite, you might as well pay $50/year to Google. I am not referring to the price per quality ratio right now. It’s strictly about the price. It’s cheaper, even on a long term basis.
* Remote accessibility - With Google, your documents will be accessible from almost everywhere. And you’ll see why I’m phrasing it like that a bit later. However, your data is accessible with every computer with an internet connection.
* Minimum computing power - Since everything is browser-based and you will not run any third-parties on your own machine, the computing power is reduced significantly, transforming even those old computers into something useful.

I am not going to discuss the so-called security advantages, since it’s all relative, but I am going to mention the fact that with Google office apps, you will get rid of those updating procedures you got used to with Microsoft, you won’t have to worry about license restrictions, and you won’t have to spend time and resources installing the suite when you feel like adding a few computers to the network.
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While most of us ( including me) were focusing on Vista’s new features it looks that some were concentrating on the more boring but nonetheless important end user licensing agreement. You all know about it, it’s that big screen of text you never read but you have to agree to in order to install any software.

As I was saying there are some that read the fine print and think about it. And they should, for that agreement contains lots of information you bound yourself to when you use a certain software. In our case the software is Windows Vista and it seems that the new Vista EULA contains serious limitations and privacy issues.

As you can read here, the agreement allows Microsoft to check the legitimacy of software on a machine and to delete programs considered as dangerous without asking the user. Besides, when you activate Vista on a device the software is associated with that specific piece of hardware and it sends automatically information about your hardware to Microsoft.

This all might be a false alarm but I strongly advice that you read the ‘fine prints’ in ALL your software, and specially the Vista EULA as it might take from you the control over your own computer.

After several discussions of Mozilla’s developers, during last week, the features for Firefox 3 were gathered and sorted out.

Gecko, the rendering engine upon which all of the Mozilla applications rely will be tweaked for better standards and support. What worths mentioning is the ability of saving documents as PDFs. Since the PDF should and maybe will remain the main format used in exchanging documents for the upcoming years, all of us will be monitoring the development progress for this feature.

Another important feature would be the enhancing of the navigation while going back to a form using the POST function. That annoying warning message won’t be visible anymore.

The guys at Mozilla are implementing a possibility for us to use a theme or a plugin without restarting Firefox. They might even implement a plugin manager, so things can get easier as it goes.

Since security is one of the most discussed topics related to browsers, Firefox 3 will have a EV certificate support, even if limited to accepting and/or displaying them. EV certificates are more reliable and have an extended validation.

On the other hand, Mozilla is planning to get rid of the browser crashes caused by not responsive plugins (I often get that when trying to display a PDF document within the browser window), but unfortunately that got scheduled for the Firefox 4. The feature would require major code re-writing, and that would delay Firefox 3’s release date.

Last but not least, they considered implementing a crash reporting tool called “Airbag” meant to replace Talkback, and they are going to release the MSI version of the installer as well for the whole package.

We’re looking forward to try the final version of what’s supposed to be the best browser out there.

I am positive that you know what I’m talking about just after reading the title. After a while, your Windows practically refuses to shut down as fast as it used to, even though you successfully closed all of the running applications.

Microsoft says the issue is caused by a problem it experiences while trying to unload the current user’s profile, and they have published a HOTFIX for this.

Basically, you’re installing a new service, a service to help with slow log off and unreconciled profile problems. The User Profile Hive Cleanup service helps to ensure user sessions are completely terminated when a user logs off. System processes and applications occasionally maintain connections to registry keys in the user profile after a user logs off. In those cases the user session is prevented from completely ending. This can result in problems when using Roaming User Profiles in a server environment or when using locked profiles as implemented through the Shared Computer Toolkit for Windows XP.

On Windows 2000 you can benefit from this service if the application event log shows event id 1000 where the message text indicates that the profile is not unloading and that the error is “Access is denied”. On Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 either event ids 1517 and 1524 indicate the same profile unload problem.

To accomplish this the service monitors for logged off users that still have registry hives loaded. When that happens the service determines which application have handles opened to the hives and releases them. It logs the application name and what registry keys were left open. After this the system finishes unloading the profile.

It practically reclaims the resources of the ended tasks. I tried this myself on a XP test system, and it worked like a charm.

Now that we all know the hidden pages in Firefox, it’s time to go a bit deeper into tweaking your browser for optimal use. All of the operations will be made in the about:config page, so save your important stuff, open up a new tab, write about:config in the address bar and be prepared. I have gathered four tricks that will improve your Firefox experience, and here they are.

1. Fetch only pages that you click
Firefox mostly resembles to Google from this point of view. It has a built-in feature (enabled by default) that will pre-download the pages behind the links it thinks you MIGHT click. Google anticipates you might click the first result from the page, but how in the world can Firefox anticipate the link you’re going to click? Anyway, in my opinion this is just useless bandwidth usage, CPU power and HDD space. You’re practically downloading and storing pages you are not viewing. Here’s how you stop that in three simple steps.

In the about:config list, filter up your search after ‘network’ so it would be easier for you. Then, find through the remaining list options the key that says network.prefetch-next. It should be set to TRUE. Double click it, and it will turn to false. There we go, now Firefox will stop acting creepy and will only fetch what you click ;)
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Converting files from one format to another is a necessity and you don’t need me to tell you that. A few years ago, software programs that were converting WAVs to MP3s, AVIs to MPEGs,were pretty much popular, although their abilities were limited to just a few features and not to mention the low format support.

Today, they do have some serious competition, and I am going to present you the most reliable options. The main advantage of what I’m going to present is that you do not need to download nor buy any software. They’re mostly free and accessible via your web browser. Some projects may be still in the beta stage of development, but I can assure you that everything goes safe and sound. Try them out yourself, and feel free to share opinions.
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