Christmas is a busy time for avoiding work; French radio stumbles over podcasting; The perils of precaching; letter about replacing his Alcatel 1000 and SonicWall firewall; 2007: The Year of Being Outraged?
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.
Ken Regenos
Palo Alto
Get outraged
Regarding Mark Gibbs’ BackSpin column, “2007: The Year of Being Outraged?”: I am outraged over so many issues that I feel overwhelmed most of the time. The Sony issues are just the tip of the iceberg. Mark Gibbs’ quote from Sony CEO Thomas Hesse – “Most people… don’t even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?” — says it all. The Sony rootkit was installed without warning on half a million systems, some within the Department of Defense, compromising national security. If ever there should be a video clip played over and over on every network, it should be Hesse’s quote.
I think people really do care; they just do not understand, are misinformed or feel powerless to effect change. I try my best to educate end users; however, most issues are so complex, I see my reflection in their glazed-over eyes. I have been and continue to riot in the streets about many issues, technical and political. Most people just pass by that weird guy jumping up and down on the street corner. They do not realize that it is more costly to regain something lost than to have protected it in the first place.
The key word is “accountability.” Some people are held accountable for their actions and some are not. It seems accountability has more to do with how many quality lawyers you have, not the crime you commit. If you or I hacked into half a million computers and got caught, where do you think we would end up? So many issues, so little time. To quote the movie “Network,” “I am mad as hell, and I am not going to take it any more!” To the general public – know the issues, vote with your dollars, vote at the polls. Each and every one of you can make a difference.
Robert Bowen
Via e-mail
