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From USA Today: Surfing the Web has never been more risky. Simply connecting to the Internet — and doing nothing else — exposes your PC to non-stop, automated break-in attempts by intruders looking to take control of your machine surreptitiously. Chart courtesy of USA Today
Alex Walcer is a good friend who lives in the same city as me. We go to Church together, we used to work at the same place, and he has been a subscriber to PCIN for years. His brother-in-law, Adrian listens to a Toronto radio station, Mix 99.9, and they have a segment on the …
I have never tried any of these, but CrystalGraphics has a number of what they call PowerPlugs. These are plug-ins to various Office products. There are PowerPlugs for PowerPoint, FrontPage, Outlook, and Excel. The PowerPlugs can either be purchased as a suite, or individually. I’ll probably ask to review the PowerPlugs for Outlook at some …
Graham was recently looking for decent speech recognition software recently. I gave him the only thing that I had, an old version of Dragon Naturally Speaking (v.4 or v.5 I believe). ScanSoft has released version 8 of Dragon Naturally speaking. They claim they have made it 25% more accurate and in the article quoted above, …
http://www.fourcc.org/codecs.php Definitions of raw and compressed pixel formats used in Windows video programming. If you’ve ever downloaded a video, you probably come across ones that you cannot play because your system needs a decoder. Windows Media Player will play AVIs, MPGs, and many other standard formats, but not every one. Check out the above site …
From Vnunet: The global spyware plague has reached epidemic proportions, with the cost to global PC users set to rocket by 2,400 per cent over the next four years. According to newly published research from IDC, the need to identify and eradicate these parasitic programs will drive anti-spyware software revenues from $12m in 2003 to …
From InfoWorld: A screensaver developed by Lycos Europe that gives spammers a dose of their own medicine is attracting plenty of attention, but not all of it good. The company officially launched the ‘Make Love, Not Spam’ screensaver Wednesday but a beta version had already been widely distributed. Offering to ‘spam the spammers,’ the screensaver …
From CNN: A four-letter term that came to symbolize the difference between old and new media during this year’s presidential campaign tops U.S. dictionary publisher Merriam-Webster’s list of the 10 words of the year. Merriam-Webster Inc. said on Tuesday that blog, defined as ‘a Web site that contains an online personal journal with reflections, comments …
From the NYT: At the Exploratorium, the hands-on science museum here, there is an exhibit called ‘Energy From Death’ that staff members refer to as ‘the rotting carcass.’ In a small terrarium hundreds of dermestid beetles eat the flesh and bones of a dead baby mouse over several days. Next to the live beetles is …