MagiKomputer is composed by a team of European Independent reviewers that provide professional advice and news for computing environments, focused in the Graphic Arts Industry, Internet, Web Design, Audio and Video, etc.
Firefox Portable is a repackaged version of Mozilla Firefox created by John T. Haller. The application runs from an external USB flash drive, CDROM or other portable device on any Windows computer, Mac OS X computer or Linux/UNIX computer running Wine. This portable version does not require Firefox to be installed on the host computer and does not leave any personal information on the host computer neither interferes with any installed versions of Firefox.
Firefox Portable runs quite efficiently from fast flash drives, portable hard drives or iPods if connected to a USB 2.0 port. But if your external USB stick is slow and/or you're stuck in a USB 1.1 connection you'll notice a slow-down in performance.
Firefox Portable has to read and write bits of data to and from your portable device while it's running. On most flash drives, every time something is written, all reads stop causing Firefox Portable to appear to "freeze" or "hesitate" momentarily.
However there are a few different things you can tweak to speed things up:
Disable Cache: Not meant for USB external drives, Cache will actually slow Firefox Portable down. If it's not disabled by default it can be disabled at the Options box.
Disable Session Restore / Undo Close Tab: Session Restore keeps track of all your open windows and tabs so you can restore your session if Firefox crashes. For that functionality to be active it has to write to disk on every page load, which slows down Firefox Portable. To disable this feature you must:
In Firefox's address bar, type in about:config and then hit enter
Right-click on any entry and select New - Boolean
For the name, enter browser.sessionstore.enabled and click OK
Select false and then click OK
Disable Anti-Phishing: The anti-phishing filter that warns you about fake sites also produces additional writes to the drive. You can disable this feature by clicking Tools - Options and then selecting the Security tab. Uncheck the box next to "Tell me if the site I'm visiting is a suspected forgery".
Disable History: Disabling history at the Options box will prevent Firefox Portable from writing a small bit of data to your drive for every page you visit.
Enable pipelining: If you're using a broadband connection you can load pages much faster by setting network.http.pipelining and network.http.proxy.pipelining to true and network.http.pipelining.maxrequests to 8 in the about:config window.
XAML represents a bridge between the designer and developer teams. A new role has emerged as the result of this fusion, that Paul Alexander, a technical program manager with IdentityMine, calls the integrator:
"The Integrator understands the needs of the developer while also supporting the needs of the designer to assure that the app's UI is as compelling as it was designed, while also validating that the concepts can be realized in code from the developer."
The integrator deals mostly with XAML code and provides an interface between the developer and designer, by structuring and modularizing the XAML.
The Designer<->Integrator<->Developer Model allows the design team to leave the XAML unattended and focus on having their assets effectively integrated into the project. Designers can work with tools such as Expression Design, Inkscape or Adobe Illustrator and output the results as XAML. The integrator then integrates the XAML into the project and passes it on to the developers, who need not to be concerned with design issues. Obviously, this model also works perfectly well the other way around, and in some cases it is advisable to have the developer team establish the foundations of the project.
A recently released tool by Microsoft, Expression Blend, makes this transition even easier, by accepting and generating XAML code that can be directly imported/exported from/to Visual Studio.
"Spamming is the abuse of electronic messaging systems to indiscriminately send unsolicited bulk messages. While the most widely recognized form of spam is e-mail spam, the term is applied to similar abuses in other media: instant messaging spam, Usenet newsgroup spam, Web search engine spam, spam in blogs, wiki spam, mobile phone messaging spam, Internet forum spam and junk fax transmissions.
Spamming is economically viable because advertisers have no operating costs beyond the management of their mailing lists, and it is difficult to hold senders accountable for their mass mailings. Because the barrier to entry is so low, spammers are numerous, and the volume of unsolicited mail has become very high. The costs, such as lost productivity and fraud, are borne by the public and by Internet service providers, which have been forced to add extra capacity to cope with the deluge. Spamming is widely reviled, and has been the subject of legislation in many jurisdictions."
Spam affects about everybody that uses the Internet in one form or another. And in spite of what Bill Gates forecasted in 2004, when he said that "spam will soon be a thing of the past", it is getting worse by the day. While the European Union's Internal Market Commission estimated in 2001 that "junk e-mail" cost Internet users €10 billion per year worldwide, the California legislature found that spam cost United States organizations alone more than $13 billion in 2007, including lost productivity and the additional equipment, software, and manpower needed to combat the problem.
Where does all that Spam come from? Experts from SophosLabs (a developer and vendor of security software and hardware) have analyzed spam messages caught by companies involved in the Sophos global spam monitoring network and came out with a list of top 12 countries that spread spam around the globe:
USA - 28.4%;
South Korea - 5.2%;
China (including Hong Kong) - 4.9%;
Russia - 4.4%;
Brazil - 3.7%;
France - 3.6%;
Germany - 3.4%;
Turkey - 3.%;
Poland - 2.7%;
Great Britain - 2.4%;
Romania - 2.3%;
Mexico - 1.9%;
Other countries - 33.9%
There are many types of electronic spam, including E-mail spam (unsolicited e-mail), Mobile phone spam (unsolicited text messages, Messaging spam ("SPIM"), use of instant messenger services for advertisement or even extortion, Spam in blogs ("BLAM"), posting random comments or promoting commercial services to blogs, wikis, guestbooks, Forum spam (posting advertisements or useless posts on a forum, Spamdexing, manipulating a search engine to create the illusion of popularity for webpages, Newsgroup spam, advertisement and forgery on newsgroups, etc.
For the purpose of this post we shall focus on Newsgroups spam, the type of spam where the targets are Usenet newsgroups. Usenet convention defines spamming as excessive multiple posting, that is, the repeated posting of a message (or substantially similar messages). During the early 1990s there was substantial controversy among Usenet system administrators (news admins) over the use of cancel messages to control spam. A cancel message is a directive to news servers to delete a posting, causing it to be inaccessible to those who might read it. Some regarded this as a bad precedent, leaning towards censorship, while others considered it a proper use of the available tools to control the growing spam problem. A culture of neutrality towards content precluded defining spam on the basis of advertisement or commercial solicitations. The word "spam" was usually taken to mean excessive multiple posting (EMP), and other neologisms were coined for other abuses — such as "velveeta" (from the processed cheese product) for excessive cross-posting. A subset of spam was deemed cancellable spam, for which it is considered justified to issue third-party cancel messages.
The Breidbart Index (BI), developed by Seth Breidbart, provides a measure of severity of newsgroup spam by calculating the breadth of any multi-posting, cross-posting, or combination of the two. BI is defined as the sum of the square roots of how many newsgroups each article was posted to. If that number approaches 20, then the posts will probably be cancelled by somebody.
The use of the BI and spam-detection software has led to Usenet being policed by anti-spam volunteers, who purge newsgroups of spam by sending cancels and filtering it out on the way into servers.
A related form of Newsgroups spam is forum spam. It usually consists of links, with the dual goals of increasing search engine visibility in highly competitive areas such as sexual invigoration, weight loss, pharmaceuticals, gambling, pornography, real estate or loans, and generating more traffic for these commercial websites. Spam posts may contain anything from a single link, to dozens of links. Text content is minimal, usually innocuous and unrelated to the forum's topic. Full banner advertisements have also been reported. Alternatively, the spam links are posted in the user's signature,where is more likely to be approved by forum administrators and moderators. Spam can also be described as posts that have no relevance to the threads topic, or have no purpose in general (e.i, a user typing "CABBAGES!" or other such useless posts in an important news thread).
But Google Groups are responsible for the higher proportion of the spam that floods the Usenet nowadays. Google Groups isn't the only source, but is the one that makes it easier for spammers to carry out their irritating activities. It's so easy to spam Usenet through Google Groups that there are some infamous spammers who have been doing so for years. Perhaps the best known of all is the MI-5 Persecution spammer who gets his way across just about any other newsgroup with rambling postings that often appear as clusters of 20 or more messages all related to Mike Corley's perceived persecution of himself by MI5, the British intelligence agency. This UK-based spammer readily admits that he suffers from mental illness in several of his postings. He annoys the rest of users in such an exasperating way, that some of them have even offered themselves to the MI-5 to personally finish off the job.
The solution, IMHO, is to implement the Breidbart Index in Google Groups. It would be an easy task for a company that excels at implementing all kinds of algorithms in their search engine, that I just can't understand what are they waiting for.
