The MUST-KNOWS you should know!

Looking for an external hard disk drive? Want to do your backups as easily as possible (instead of burning DVDs)? Well external magnetic disks are certainly easier to operate - plug in the cable, the OS senses the new drive, allocates it a drive letter and away you go... almost. Don't forget to make sure that you get the right drive for your machine (Firewire is great, USB2 is fab but check what you have first - and perhaps anticipate what you'll buy next year as well).

Examples include Maxtor One-Touch and LaCie - but here are some more in a CNET review.

Remember to make sure you get one that's compatible with the ports on your machine - PC owners would usually have USB rather than Firewire, so confirm a USB connection to the external HDD. If you have USB2 that's faster and better. Most of them will support USB2 (as well as USB1), so you should be fine.

You can search prices from my affiliates page here - and yes I get a commission if you buy via my links, and that helps me pay for this site! The computer stuff is waaay down the bottom, just click on the advert.

Also, Shopbot have a huge and confusing range of prices to compare. In any case expect to pay a minimum of about $A200 for about 100Gb, however it gets cheaper if you go bigger - relatively. Pay about $A250-$A300 for 200Gb for example. It depends on features, too. Read the box, check out the web reviews.

Or just use Google; or simply (in Australia, anyway) go to either a Harvey Norman computers franschise (not cool but works), or a small computer shop (like CDG at Erina, where I buy my PCs - just down the street from Harvey Norman in fact). Big chains like Harvey Norman will usually have them in stock and will haggle over price. So make sure you do that ;-)

OK, I couldn't resist, so here it is... a link to theWhoTour.com. Launch Squeezebox for those essential Who videos!

Not sure how you control fictional content, but as an emotional release for women done wrong- and possibly as an effective tool against habitually cheating men - this has got to be worth a look. Just don't sue me, sue them, OK.

Does this sound right to you? Forbes mag reports: "We believe if we say yes to the right things, we can do both--make money and do the right thing for the catalog," says Love's manager Peter Asher.
Which is to say sell out to the capitalists. Now I reckon Kurt may have turned around 180 degrees on his beliefs given enough time, but as he's dead he's not likely to have rethought this one as yet. The idea of Nirvana tracks on CSI is not sickening but smells like a ripoff of the artist in question. It's OK for Pete Townshend of the Who to sell out and get a gig on CSI (and everywhere else) - indeed they gloried in exactly that on The Who Sell Out - but Townshend's alive and making his own decisions. Hmmm.

A simple question deserves a loooong answer!

Yes, that gibberish is both weird and - sometimes - amusing. There are even people who collect it - and I've seen at least one book based on the gibberish alone! Anyway, as to why they write the gibberish: well the spammers have 3 main tactics to avoid the spam filters on servers and in your average email client.

Typically the filters are dumb, simply looking for words like 'viagra' or 'cialis' or looking up 'blacklists' of known spammers. So firstly the spammers will deliberately mis-spell their 'products' in the subject lines or body of the email. So you get 'v1agra' or 'vi AG ra' and so on. Sometimes that's enough. However smarter filters use statistical, analytical and adaptive methods that will learn to pick out the spam from genuine email over time (ie they get better the more spam they see). Often they use Bayesian algorithms to assess the statistical probability of each email being spam. They look for key things like text length, frequency of particular keywords, and the number of targets "cc'd" in a note. Shorter emails are more likely to be spam, as are emails 'mass-mailed' to multiple similar recipients, and emails where certain keywords appear too frequently (like 'sales' or 'mortgage' or 'pharmacy' to use just 3 examples).

So the spammers reacted to smarter filters with the second tactic: padding out their emails with long slabs of "gibberish" that actually looks real; in fact it's often genuine text copied from books or genuine websites. The gibberish masks the keywords, making it harder to be certain that a particular email is spam based purely on statistics - it introduces doubt.

Lastly they have used avoidance by creating images that look like text but are in fact images. So the filters have very little to go on - they need text as image-recognition is much harder to do. Thus they can only decide black or white based on subject lines, destinations and senders, all of which can be carefully constructed by the spammer to conceal (as in using a 'genuine' subject line message like 'Hi Geraldo how's it going?') or to 'spoof' (where real email addresses or even IP packets are hijacked for spam use, often by trojans carried by spam).

Which brings me to the dangers therein. Some "GIF" images actually can conceal code, so looking at an image in your email program can invoke a simple program that could plant a trojan that then calls up other software to invade your machine, Using up to date email software usually fixes that loophole, though.

Some links embedded in spam, especially the more cunningly concealed 'phishing' type of spam, actually obscure the real intent of the link. Clicking on the link may download a small program that will load a tracking device for 'marketing research' (ie spyware), or a trojan that invokes later and may set you up with a backdoor for later nefarious use (such as using your machine as a proxy spam send-mail server). Or it could download a keystroke capturer (to get your passwords and send them 'home'). Sounds scary but all you have to do is -- avoid clicking on any link in spam!

So the rules are
(1) use the latest version of your email application
(2) don't click on links you don't trust and
(3) perhaps most importantly, get a virus checker, an anti- spyware tool and a personal firewall.

The firewall will stop attacks coming in, and will also detect the unexpected - like when your machine starts sending thousands of spam messages without your knowledge. It will in fact say, sorry, you are not a mail server and block that outbound access. Some brands I trust are the Mozilla Thunderbird email client, Check Point Integrity Flex for firewalls, Lavasoft Ad-Aware for spyware checking and Symantec/Norton AV or VET as viruscheckers. There are others, I just haven't tried 'em all.

How's that for a short answer!!!

The Kids are Alright

Indeed, it's The Who and the Kids are Alright...

PC World reports significant performance improvement on apps that can multithread and actually use the potential of Intel's quad core Kentsfield chip:

"Kentsfield really starts to shine, however, once you hand it a complex video-encoding or 3D-rendering task. Both 3D rendering apps, POV-Ray and 3DS Max 8, ran considerably faster with four cores; in particular, POV-Ray rendered 83 percent more pixels per second running on the Kentsfield chip than on the Core 2 Extreme. Video editing and encoding ran about 30 percent faster in Sony's Vegas app and in the DivX converter."

However the gains are non-existent for other applications. So I guess we can all buy dual core chips instead, unless we do have pressing video editing or rendering needs. Or just wait a bit and grab a coffee.