Slack season

Regarding “Christmas is a busy time for avoiding work”: While probably true, there's also a very good business reason for the slack time. Where I work, at least, most upgrades or software changes are banned for the month prior to year-end. I can only assume that's based on experience in the past.

John Ralph
Des Moines, Iowa

Language barrier

Regarding “WORLDBEAT -- French radio stumbles over podcasting”: Stupide! I am French, but I think that forcing the substitution of any English word with a French equivalent, though presented as having the laudable goal of preserving French culture (as if it were that simple), may give birth to a few excellent expressions ("baladeur" comes to mind), but it does not hide the fact that the reason people all around the world are saying “podcast” or “email” and not “diffusion pour baladeur” or “courriel” is that the French did not invent them. French culture would be better served by creativity and entrepreneurship that by word policing.

Jean-Paul Buquet
Freelance illustrator
Tokyo

More on Fasterfox

Regarding Mark Gibbs’ Gearhead column, “The perils of precaching”: It's lovely that Gibbs has seen the light and uses Firefox, and the column did have its amusing moments. However, Fasterfox is not a plug-in. Plug-ins are things like the Flash player, the Java runtime and Acrobat Reader (when called as a plug-in) -- external programs called by the browser to handle particular types of content the browser doesn't handle natively. Fasterfox is an extension, written in XUL, CSS and Javascript, which becomes part of the browser when installed.

In addition, Fasterfox is not an active program. All it really is is a GUI giving easier access to various underlying preferences. You can do the same thing through about:config, if you know the appropriate values to modify. If you uninstall it, it does seem to set values back to defaults, but Gibbs could have solved his stated problem by simply turning off prefetching on the first tab of the extension's Options dialog screen. (You would probably need to restart Firefox for certain effect.)

Dennis McCunney
New York

Firewall may sap speed

Regarding Matthew Leeds’ letter to the editor in which he says that replacing his Alcatel 1000 and SonicWall firewall increased his speed from less than 700Kbps to 1.25Mbps: I've had an Alcatel 1000 for at least as long and my connection speed is consistently 1.25Mbps. Perhaps his only problem was the SonicWall firewall.

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