HP Selling MediaSmart WHS

Posted on November 6, 2007 by Jeremy Clark

Windows Home Server (WHS)

I did a review of the beta release of WHS back in March, and now it seems that it has finally it the market. WHS is a nice product that simplifies the process of backups and acts as a central repository for all your photos, music, moves. The beta was very simple to install and extremely easy to connect client computer to the server (inserting a CD). HP delayed their release of the product as they were adding custom software to connect to some of their other software.


From HP

MediaSmart, which won’t ship until later this month, is priced at US$599 with 500GB of storage, or $749 with a terabyte of disk space. Those prices were identical to the listings leaked by Amazon.com in late August.

Although this is more of a niche product that niche has been growing lately, 50% of homes have at least two PCs and 25% have more than three. Although I personally use a Linux server for all my needs, this is a very nice product from Microsoft (I know I can’t believe I said it either)

Source: PCWorld

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Why Companies Need IT

Posted on November 5, 2007 by Jeremy Clark

Companies and businesses will always need an IT department, why you ask. Because the people these companies hire just don’t care about security or just don’t know any better. A recent survey of employees revealed that at least 35% have violated IT policies put in place to protect company as well as customer’s data. At least 15% have use P2P networking clients on corporate networks, if thats not asking for trouble I don’t know what is. What you had 100,000 customer accounts in your shared folder, oh well?!

Most employees don’t care about their information either, 3/4 or employees check their personal accounts (email, banking, ebay) from work. Not only does this pose a security problem in the form of spyware, viruses, and other forms of nasties, but puts their personal information out on a public network. That same 3/4 also probably installs the good ol bonzi buddy, and my cool web search. This is why companies will also need IT to clean up the mess their idiotic employees make, oh and to have someone to blame for the whole lost customer account thing.

Source: Net Security.org

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Mac Malware

Posted on November 2, 2007 by Jeremy Clark

Yes you heard right. The first malware written for the Mac has been named OSX.RSPlug.A by Intego (a Mac-security company). The malware is disguised as a video-codec that users are tricked into installing in order to watch nasty movies. This malware is written to hijack DNS of the machine it’s installed on, redirecting their web requests to another web page. The thing about this is it only redirects users who attempt to visit one obscure adult website. It could be alot worse, it could have spoofed bank sites, paypal, or ebay.

This malware doesn’t exploit a hole in the Mac OS, instead it relies on good old social engineering. McAfee researchers have already found this on 65 websites, so this is becoming widespread fast. Security has never been a priority to Apple, soon all types of nasty software will exploit holes that do exist in the OS.

Security researcher Gadi Evron
“Apple’s day has finally come, and Apple users are going to get hit hard, OS X is the new Windows 98.”

Source: Wired

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Sony Helps Fight Diseases

Posted on November 1, 2007 by Jeremy Clark

Many may be aware of the Folding@home project run by Stanford University, but thanks to Sony now they have a Guinness record. This record certifies the Folding@home project as the most powerful distributed computing system, reaching over 1 petaflop (thousand trillion floating point operations per second). In comparison the SETI@home project has only reached 256 teraflops (265 million floating point operations).

What does Sony have to do with the record. Well more than 600,000 PS3 owners have been donating their spare cpu cycles to the project and this along with others donating their PCs spare cycles have netted the project the World Record.

Source: News.com

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Halo 3

Posted on September 11, 2007 by Jeremy Clark

Halo 3

I couldn’t take it any longer I went out and preordered a copy of the limited edition Halo 3. 

Update: It seems Microsoft and Bungie goofed on the design of the limited edition case.  During shipping both discs might fall out and slide around and become scratched, mine were very lightly scratched.  If anyone experiences any problems with this Microsoft will replace the disc/s free until Feburary next year. 

Link to the replacement form.

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