Shojobeat – Shojo's News Beat

Apple recently seeded the “Golden Master” release of its Mountain Lion operating system to developers. The term “golden master,” by the way, is taken from audio recording where it refers to a single copy of either the original, recorded audio or of a finished album from which all other copies are made. In software, the golden master is the final, canonical version to be released to the public. All that means that Apple is very close to releasing Mountain Lion which will be available in the Mac App Store for $19.99. If you’re planning to upgrade, here are a few things you can do to get ready.

Backup
It’s always crucial to make a backup of your data. Lots of things can go wrong during a software upgrade or just in daily life: the power could go out, your download could be corrupt, or you might accidentally erase your hard drive (hey, it happens). A good backup should be up to date, verified (you’ve tested to make sure you can recover your data from it), and on a separate hard drive. Preferably you’ll also have a copy of your most important data in a separate location (referred to as an off-site backup). That way your data will be safe even if something terrible happens to your house. And just to be clear, having a backup means you have two copies of everything, one on your computer and one on your backup drive. Backing up your photos and then deleting them off your laptop to save space doesn’t count.

On this one point, I will allow myself to get preachy. Backup, backup, backup because, as the saying goes, there’s no use crying over spilled milk. Unless it lands on your laptop.

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The Guardian picked up on a story about a new HTTP status message that’s being proposed to indicate that content on the Internet has been blocked for legal reasons.

HTTP status codes are standardized messages that tell you what’s going on with the content you’re trying to access online. You’re probably most familiar with “404 Not Found” which crops up when you enter a URL that doesn’t exist or “403 Forbidden” if you’re trying to access something you’re not allowed to. Developer Tim Bray came up with the idea for this new HTTP status when he read about certain British Internet service providers (ISPs) returning a 403 error to users trying to access The Pirate Bay.

A 403 (forbidden) error might be a little misleading to users since it usually means that the server you’re trying to access (in this case, the Pirate Bay’s web server) is refusing to fulfill your request (in this case, your request to load their webpage,) but the Pirate Bay server wasn’t refusing the request, it was the ISP. The new HTTP code proposed here would return error 451 which would indicate that the content has been blocked for legal reasons. Continue reading →

image credit: the wonderful Hugh MacLeod click through for source

It seems that you can’t go very long without seeing another story in the news about the RIAA complaining about piracy or taking some sort of new action against it. The latest: The RIAA things Google isn’t doing enough to prevent piracy. And specifically, they want the ability to submit an unlimited number of takedown notices (Google’s forms only allow 10,000 URLs to be submitted at a go. Yes, “only” 10,000). By the RIAA’s estimation, the current system doesn’t allow them to report infringements for the Billboard top 10, “much less the entire catalog of the American creative community.”

The first question that comes to mind: Why should Google devote the processing power to dealing with hundreds of thousands of takedown requests? Why should they have to deal with alleged copyright infringement that doesn’t reside on one of their sites at all? They built a search engine. They built a cool tool that crawls damn-near everything on the Internet and provides an index for us to search through at lightning speed. Why does the RIAA find them culpable? Now, since nearly any search returns an insurmountable pile of hits, Google does have to do a lot of tweaking to present the hits in order of (hopefully) how useful or relevant they are and they do make an effort to lower to cut out certain types of sites to reach that goal. They also filter out other sorts of potentially illegal or undesirable hits, but in this case, it seems like the RIAA is asking Google to do the RIAA’s job. Continue reading →

If you’re like me, then you loathe the idea of getting your computer fixed by a professional. If you’re like me, you picture “computer help” as a long, involved, and inconvenient process, during which you either haul your PC up to the local computer fix-it store and wait for hours, or ask some unknown computer-fixer into your house and again, wait for hours.

Thankfully, for people like you and me, those scenarios are things of the past. The internet has changed the way we do everything, including the way we think of, and deal with, PC problems. You lose the hassle—the long waits, the inconvenience, the awkwardness of in-home visits, the large expense—and gain in all of these aspects. With services like WF computer repair, you pay one, reasonable, flat charge, and then avoid all of those other hassles.

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If you use a computer and the internet at the office or at home, you might need to share the service with others. If your service is currently set up for only one person, you will be thinking about what to do to change that. How do you go about setting up a computer and internet system for multiple users? The answer: an Ethernet router.

Perhaps you want multiple computers in your home to be able to access the internet. Maybe you want access for web browsing, or playing games. An Ethernet router allows multiple users to access the internet at the same time on different devices.

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Shojobeat – Shojo's News Beat

Filed under Technology …

Getting Ready for OS 10.8 “Mountain Lion”

New HTTP Code Proposed as an Homage to Bradbury

Does the RIAA Think They’re Winning?

Taking the Hassle out of PC Repair

An Introduction to the Ethernet Router