I bought my PS3 when it was at $600. It came with only one game controller, and 60 GB HD. Now a day you can grab a PS3 for $200 less. PS3 from Blogmyway online store costs only $389.95, brand new, and it has 160 GB HD, and one Dualshock 3 wireless controller. I still think the current price of PS3 is expensive. The good news is that Sony corp CEO Nobuyuki Oneda said the production cost of PS3 units is now %70 cheaper. This means Sony may be able to cut down the price of the PS3 further! In my opinion, if you’re a patient type, you don’t have to go out and buy a PS3 now, you can wait till next year that Sony drops the price for PS3 again, and get a PS3 then will be cheaper.
For your information: I get commission in U.S. dollar if you buy a PS3 at Blogmyway Store.
Running a website now a day is a complicated thing if you want to be doing it the right way and is serious about running it. Let start with why should you care how your website looks like? You don’t want to create a website that looks like it is a dinosaur’s fossil right? This means your website needs to have extra features such as RSS feeds, a social feature that helps you share website’s contents with Digg and Newsvine and so on, web 2.0 style in general, provide comment form for web discussion in appropriate areas, and more. How a website “looks and behaves” is a big subject which you can bet on that delving further can lead to hours of reading materials and hand-on practices.
An even more complicated matter that you should care or have taken care of when running a website is to securely running it. What is that mean? Unfortunately, when running a website that is behaving in a modern way (web 2.0 speaking), you have to watch out for the evil doers remotely. Why is that? Modern websites contain more forms and functions that allow website visitors to interact with your website’s databases, and if you don’t have a clue about website security, then hackers and script kiddies can easily take all kind of bites at your cakes – your website and your website’s databases. You can look up these terms for starter — SQL injection, XSS, comment spams, registration spams, and web application vulnerabilities.
The list of appropriate ways for running a website securely and attractively can be really long. It’s best to leave a completion of the various tutorials and tips and tricks on this matter to the appropriate technical books that you can always pick up in a book store near you, or download such books digitally from valid online sources.
Let talk about prevention! I think prevention is better than cure, but you need both to have a good night sleep! Though I will only rant about prevention on this specific post. My prevention rant should not be your completed guide to web security, because I merely scratch the surface of this very topic. When installing a web application for your website, it’s best to choose a well written web application (well coded). All web applications have bugs that may introduce security risks for website’s owners, and this is why you should do research about a specific web application before applying it for your website. Some open source web applications are so successful, because there are huge communities that support them. Successful web applications’ communities release bug fixes fast to patch up security holes, and answering rocket science questions often on the support forums. It’s best for you to choose a web application that has a huge active support community. If it’s an in-house web application (custom made), then let hope you have good or great web developers/programmers be ready whenever you have an emergency situation. Even better, you can learn some programming languages yourself.
I can say the best prevention of all is to install ModSecurity if you are running Apache web server. ModSecurity allows you to introduce security rules that can prevent malicious web activities to reach your web applications. With correct security rules, ModSecurity can prevent SQL injections, XSS attacks, automatic bot activities, and a lot more. It’s like a firewall for your web applications.
ModSecurity’s rules are complicated, and if you’re brand new to this whole website running process, I think you should ask for professional help. Though if you are a daredevil, you can always try install ModSecurity yourself, grab excellent ModSecurity’s rules from GotRoot.com, and apply the rules. One thing you should know about ModSecurity is that it’s excellent in preventing malicious activities from reaching your web applications, it can also break your website’s functionalities if you configure it wrongly. Why? Some ModSecurity’s rules are too strict, and by using those rules, your website’s functions and features may not be able to run normally since ModSecurity is blocking it. Watch ModSecurity’s log carefully to see which rule is preventing which feature in your website from functioning, and then delete out that specific rule is one of the way to quickly fix this type of situation.
There is an easier way to allow your website works well with ModSecurity is to add a whitelist IP address or addresses. For example, if your website is host on IP 111.222.333.444, you can add SecRule REMOTE_ADDR “^111.222.333.444$” “nolog,phase:1,allow” to your ModSecurity configuratin file(s). Locating this main configuration file is varies depend on what system you are running your Apache and ModSecurity on. From this main configuration file you can use Include statement to include rules that are in external directories and files.
In the good old days when hard drive was merely a few gigabytes, and it was expensive too. Now you can get a hard drive up to a terabyte and more. You can count on that hard drives keep getting bigger in capacity, but the size might get pretty slim. I’m not talking about a hard drive that is residing in server or desktop, it’s possible to get a terabyte hard drive inside your laptop now. You gotta love a laptop that can store up to terabytes eh?
A professor at a university that I went to once said it’s unimaginable why one needs more than 10 gigabytes hard drive, but he was so wrong. Well, we can’t blame him since it was the past! As the way things go now a day, computer users are hungry bunch as they grab whatever they see on the Internet and store them onto their hard drives. I’m talking about videos, long flash movies, free video games. So many free open source software that one can go about to fill up a large hard drive easily.
A nerd like me love to split a large hard drive into many partitions. With many partitions I can install different operating systems (Linux flavors and Windows) onto each partition. Doing this with a large hard drive you can get not only dual boot but triple boot and more. Neat!
Good news for hungry nerdy bunch as Western Digital is now shipping a 1 terabyte mobile hard drive. Getting this hard drive won’t be too expensive either, it’s below $300. More…
By now I bet you have already heard about Paypal unless you have never shopped online. When buying stuffs on the Internet, people use Paypal to securely pay for their products. Online store owners use Paypal to securely receive payments from their customers. Did you know while we are speaking, around $2000 per second is going through Paypal?
Many other payment services that are similar to Paypal had to close down their services, but Paypal survives and thrives. Why? Paypal knows how to minimize online frauds — help boost confidence for online customers and online services alike. While making it hard for hackers to steal confidential information, Paypal is trying to balance things out by making it easy for online consumers and online services to transact payments. Knowing how to curb financial risk and being a source of trusted mediator help Paypal thrives. Ebay saw how profitable Paypal was, and everyone was using Paypal to purchase products through Ebay, this prompted Ebay to acquire Paypal. Even if part of Ebay is slowing down in this hurting economy, Paypal is still very profitable for Ebay as now. It was a good decision in Ebay’s part for purchasing Paypal.
To improve its Paypal and to help web developers get more freedom when working with Paypal, Paypal is announcing the launch of flexible payments API — known as Adaptive Payments. For now Paypal only accepts beta testers for Adaptive Payments, but the platform will be available for interested parties in November. Possibilities for this new platform are many, but one possibility stands out is that online store owners can aggregate payments in the back-end. For example, you run an online store that sell just about all products, and when a customer purchases more than one products, but each of the products are belong to different third parties, Adaptive Payments allows online store directs the payments to correct third parties seamlessly, while that specific customer won’t know that he or she is paying somebody else — he or she thinks that your store is completely responsible for the payment.
You can read more about new Paypal’s Adaptive Payments here.
40 years ago mankind had the courage to visit the moon, stood on its surface, and explored a small area of the moon, but that was the only time that humans visited the moon. Before and after the moon race, U.S. and other space nations only had sent out humans to explore the closest orbits, robotic probes and satellites to probe new planets, and humans could only see the adventures from home through satellites’ captured images. Mankind now has space-station — out of space but so near earth. Humans live on space-station to do research and so on… The hope is that one day mankind will be able to send more humans to different planets — to do research, explore, find ways that allow the future space colonizers to live there. Where should we go? A planet comes into mind which is Mars.
For average people like the most of us who aren’t the astronauts, we are more than happy to see the moon virtually. Google Earth is a software that was developed by Google, and this software allows people to view streets, cities, and other images of Earth’s specific locations. Google has just launched a new feature inside Google Earth to allow everyone to revisit the moon as the astronauts of Apollo 11 once had. See it for yourself by installing Google Earth! Also, you can read all about this on Google’s blog.
If you’re a blogger or in a writing profession, you may have had a hard time in getting images for your stories. Stealing images from copyrighted sources could send you into a fray of legality. Have you heard of Creative Commons? When you’re using images under Creative Commons licenses, the images’ owners are pretty much allowing you to use their images for free. Nonetheless, you need to be very careful about this. Some people actually took images from copyrighted sources, and then release the images that they stole under Creative Commons licenses — by using these images you may have to face a copyright issue. Having said that, when you’re searching for images to use for your articles, targeting the images that are released under Creative Commons licenses help you speed up your image seeking process tremendously. It’s up to you to dig deeper to find the true sources of the images that you want to use.
How to find images under Creative Commons licenses? Flickr has a huge pool of images that are released under Creative Commons licenses. Another good place to find this type of images is Google’s Images Search. To find Creative Commons images using Google’s Images Search, you need to click on Advanced Image Search, pick an image filter by licenses at the bottom right drop down menu, and type in the search terms that you want to use in the correct search boxes. As now there are four types of licenses when you click on the filter menu. 1) Labeled for reuse. 2) Labeled for commercial reuse. 3) Labeled for reuse with modification. 4) Labeled for commercial reuse with modification. To understand these filters’ usage rights, you can go here.
There are open source software that you can totally replace the expensive software in stores. As a brand new computer purchaser, you may listen to the wrong advice and throw away even more money to buy the expensive software. Don’t do that! I’ll list some open source software here that may help you be more productive with your brand new computer, and you don’t even have to thank me for saving you a load of money.
Open Office has many features and similar functionalities as Microsoft Office. What can you do with Open Office? You can create spreadsheets, create word documents, create a simple database using Open Office’s Base, and create presentation materials such as slideshow and more.
Gimp is as powerful as Adobe Photoshop. You can create all type of logos, manipulate images, and much more.
Linux is a very powerful operating system that can replace Microsoft’s Windows. There are way too many Linux versions to be listed here, but I name a few that you can test it out. Fedora Core, Ubuntu, openSUSE, Debian, PCLinuxOS, Mandriva, Dreamlinux, and PC-BSD. To get more Linux flavors or find out the official websites for different Linux distributions, you can go to Distrowatch.com.
Firefox is a browser that can replace Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser. Firefox has hundred of plugins and themes that you can use for eye candy purpose and security.
Thunderbird can be as a replacement for Microsoft Outlook. Read more about Thunderbird…
VLC media player plays huge number of media format such as MPEG-2, MPEG-4, H.264, DivX, MPEG-1, mp3, ogg, aac, and so on.
Clamwin is an open source anti-virus software that is very effective in revealing new and older computer viruses.
This list may grow as I’ll be testing and adding more open source software that work on Windows. If you know any, please feel free to suggest through comments.
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