Well I have heard some of the most exciting geek news all this year. Apple computer is leveraging its massive cash reserves and purchasing General Motors. They are also partnering with Tesla motors in the enterprise. Finally we are going to get an American company that will be run right. Steve Jobs was quoted as saying "cars used to be the tech wonders of the beginning of the 20th century, now we can once again make them tech wonders in the 21st century".
This will make for an interesting battle. Ford Motor Company has fitted out all their cars with Microsoft driven technology. Now GM will be running all the latest Apple software and be outfit to interface with the iPhone and iPod. Imagine also being able to have a GM mini-van with an Apple TV built right in to keep the kids happy in the back seat.
Apple is also known for being environmentally conscientious so I would assume we will see some amazing changes. With Tesla Motors, the maker of the all electric roadster, on the team I have a feeling that we will see a truly useful all electric car within the next year. Tesla had already announced a 5 seat sedan for 2011, maybe with this merger they will be able to get it out end of 2010. Tesla has some great forward thinking engineers, and with the manufacturing infrastructure of GM they will be able to produce cars in high volume.
Governor Granholm was quoted as saying "this is great news for Michigan, we have worked hard to transform to a high tech manufacturing base". I would assume that Apple and Tesla are getting some good tax incentives to keep things in Michigan, but with unemployment at the nations highest, bringing jobs here is the most important thing.
I bet the other thing we will see is some of the coolest cars on the road. Apple is known for really awesome design. They bring art to tech in a way no other company has been able to consistantly done. I am so looking forward to future auto shows now!
Wednesday, April 01, 2009
Monday, March 23, 2009
A lost art.....
Like a lot of people, and all geeks, I spend a lot of time on the computer. Of course when you are on the computer you spend a lot of time typing. I think the new modern term is keyboarding, but it is the same thing. The interesting thing is that years ago we used to have a class in high school called typing! We learned all about proper form for business letters and other types of documents. More important though is that we learned to touch type. We learned where to put our hands and what fingers were suppose to go with what keys. We also then learned how to increase our speed over time. If you were reasonably good you would type about 60 words a minute, which is about what the average person speaks. Most secretaries would type in the 90 to 120 words per minute range. There was a teacher that could actually do close to 200 words per minute!!!
Now days touch typing and decent speed seem to be a lost art. Most people that I work with in the computer field don't even touch type. They use the old hunt and peck method. It takes a long time for them to type up anything. Many times I will be communicating via instant messaging with a work partner in another city somewhere and it takes forever for them to respond with a single sentence. Emails are rife with spelling and grammar errors. They are very short, and often don't communicate the information well. Most of this, in my opinion, can be attributed to the fact that they are such poor typists that it is painful to communicate through typed correspondence.
The other issue with poor typing in business is how much less productive you are. If you type at only like 10 words per minute it will take forever for you to complete a typed task. Well it will take a long time if you do a good job at it. Thus the tendency for people to have short, choppy, poorly formed documents. It just takes to long to do it right.
Well here is the point of this blog post, it is easy to fix. You can easily get pretty decent at typing skills on your computer. All you need to do is to spend 10 minutes a day with a typing tutor program. There are both commercial and free ones. The most well known commercial one is probably Mavis Beacon Typing. You can get it for $19.95 from Amazon. There is also SpongeBob Typing 2008 for $13.49. TypeRightNow includes a special peekproof keyboard cover and sells for $26.99. I think for my kids I am going to make my own version of that. I have several extra keyboards laying around. I think it is time to start taking the letters off the keyboard and making them type with those. If you go to download.com you can find some free typing tutor programs too.
Anyway, like all good skills, it is all about repetition. If you are trying to learn the piano or guitar they will tell you to spend like a half hour a day every day and not try long marathon sessions. The same is true with keyboarding. And you don't even need a half hour a day. Just take 10 minutes a day going through the exersizes. Or you can even break it up and one day is exersize day and the next is one of the keyboarding games. Yes these programs include games too! First you will want to see how fast you can type. Then set yourself some goals to hit for speed and accuracy. I bet by this next fall you can easily be up to between 3o and 40 words per minute, and you will feel much more comfortable with typing on the computer. And if you get to 200 words per minute then email me with a screen shot of the results and I will post it on www.atomicsupergeek.com hall of keyboarding fame so you can be world famous!
Now days touch typing and decent speed seem to be a lost art. Most people that I work with in the computer field don't even touch type. They use the old hunt and peck method. It takes a long time for them to type up anything. Many times I will be communicating via instant messaging with a work partner in another city somewhere and it takes forever for them to respond with a single sentence. Emails are rife with spelling and grammar errors. They are very short, and often don't communicate the information well. Most of this, in my opinion, can be attributed to the fact that they are such poor typists that it is painful to communicate through typed correspondence.
The other issue with poor typing in business is how much less productive you are. If you type at only like 10 words per minute it will take forever for you to complete a typed task. Well it will take a long time if you do a good job at it. Thus the tendency for people to have short, choppy, poorly formed documents. It just takes to long to do it right.
Well here is the point of this blog post, it is easy to fix. You can easily get pretty decent at typing skills on your computer. All you need to do is to spend 10 minutes a day with a typing tutor program. There are both commercial and free ones. The most well known commercial one is probably Mavis Beacon Typing. You can get it for $19.95 from Amazon. There is also SpongeBob Typing 2008 for $13.49. TypeRightNow includes a special peekproof keyboard cover and sells for $26.99. I think for my kids I am going to make my own version of that. I have several extra keyboards laying around. I think it is time to start taking the letters off the keyboard and making them type with those. If you go to download.com you can find some free typing tutor programs too.
Anyway, like all good skills, it is all about repetition. If you are trying to learn the piano or guitar they will tell you to spend like a half hour a day every day and not try long marathon sessions. The same is true with keyboarding. And you don't even need a half hour a day. Just take 10 minutes a day going through the exersizes. Or you can even break it up and one day is exersize day and the next is one of the keyboarding games. Yes these programs include games too! First you will want to see how fast you can type. Then set yourself some goals to hit for speed and accuracy. I bet by this next fall you can easily be up to between 3o and 40 words per minute, and you will feel much more comfortable with typing on the computer. And if you get to 200 words per minute then email me with a screen shot of the results and I will post it on www.atomicsupergeek.com hall of keyboarding fame so you can be world famous!
Thursday, March 05, 2009
Microsoft Hyper-V and the cloud
Well it has been a while since I have posted. I have been meaning to, but I have a master plan I am working on that this blog is just a part of. There will soon be an AtomicSuperGeek website also. But in the meantime I did want to blog a little about some stuff that I saw at a Microsoft conference I was recently at.
********* GEEK ALERT **********
This is a really geeky post this time. High end stuff more for the people that work in computers. So, unless you are suffering from serious insomnia or work in computers, you might want to wait for the next post.
There were three things at the conference that I found really interesting. The first one is the cloud computing strategy of the company. If you have read the computer trade rags at all you know that cloud computing is the new wave. If you are unfamiliar with the term then cloud computing is where a company like Microsoft or Google creates a huge server farm (you don't plant and grow servers you house them... so it really should be a server ranch) and then offers you a way to put your app on top of the farm and it just runs somewhere. So if a computer or two, or a whole data center goes down then your app will automagically switch to another server or data center. Your users will never ever know that there is a problem.
This is like the golden end point for computer data centers, fault tolerance, and disaster recovery. The thing is that to get enough computers into enough data centers with enough bandwidth to work you need to spend a whole ton of money. In the meantime none of the computers are really working very hard. So, unless you have a whole lot of different apps to run on your cloud, it is just not cost effective. In steps Microsoft. They are building a cloud with an abstration layer for you to build on. It is still in the early stages, but looks really good. I am thinking that all small and medium businesses that need a lot of uptime will find this very interesting. Not sure if the cost savings will be there for large companies at this time. Time will tell.
OK, second is the Hyper-V offering. This is Microsoft's answer to VMWare ESX Server. If you have not used virtual computing yet then just wait. I will be putting some really cool stuff together on virtualization for the main website soon. In the meantime, ESX server in the large corporate environment is way cool. You can have one physical computer host like 6 or 8 or more virtual servers. The users never know that it is virtual. If you have multiple ESX servers and they are all linked to a SAN then you can move a virtual computer from one host to another with the click of a button.
But this is suppose to be about Hyper-V from Microsoft. The Hyper-V virtualzation is really pretty cool. It all comes out of the VirtualPC product Microsoft bought several years ago. The thing that Microsoft is working on right now is management of the virtual environment. This was really cool. What was exceptionally cool is that you can manage both Hyper-V and VMWare environments from the same management console. The other cool thing is that you can actually manage down into the box to the application level. This was something very impressive.
There were two things that kind of surprised me though. First, if you do a P2V (physical to virtual) move of a server it clones the MAC address along with everything else. I have never seen a need to do this in any of the P2V clones I have ever done before. Also, this means you will have a problem if/when you reuse that hardware on the same network segment again. NOT a good idea. Second, if you clone an existing computer then it destroys the source computer. The clone of course has computer name and SID etc all stripped out, but it blows away the computer in the process. That seems totally unneeded. I would like to know what they were thinking.
Finally, they showed the software for creating apps for Windows Mobile so you could make an application for a cell phone. There were a number of asides about iPhones during the presentation, but you could see that they have seen the light that cell phones as a computer platform is a very large growing market. I am only a minor programmer. I do scripting but never thought of doing an app for a cell phone. I don't think I still could do it, but it does look interesting. If you are a programmer you might just be able to become financially independent with a cell phone program. BTW there was a guy I read about that made $700,000 this last year for a simple tank program for the iPhone.
********* GEEK ALERT **********
This is a really geeky post this time. High end stuff more for the people that work in computers. So, unless you are suffering from serious insomnia or work in computers, you might want to wait for the next post.
There were three things at the conference that I found really interesting. The first one is the cloud computing strategy of the company. If you have read the computer trade rags at all you know that cloud computing is the new wave. If you are unfamiliar with the term then cloud computing is where a company like Microsoft or Google creates a huge server farm (you don't plant and grow servers you house them... so it really should be a server ranch) and then offers you a way to put your app on top of the farm and it just runs somewhere. So if a computer or two, or a whole data center goes down then your app will automagically switch to another server or data center. Your users will never ever know that there is a problem.
This is like the golden end point for computer data centers, fault tolerance, and disaster recovery. The thing is that to get enough computers into enough data centers with enough bandwidth to work you need to spend a whole ton of money. In the meantime none of the computers are really working very hard. So, unless you have a whole lot of different apps to run on your cloud, it is just not cost effective. In steps Microsoft. They are building a cloud with an abstration layer for you to build on. It is still in the early stages, but looks really good. I am thinking that all small and medium businesses that need a lot of uptime will find this very interesting. Not sure if the cost savings will be there for large companies at this time. Time will tell.
OK, second is the Hyper-V offering. This is Microsoft's answer to VMWare ESX Server. If you have not used virtual computing yet then just wait. I will be putting some really cool stuff together on virtualization for the main website soon. In the meantime, ESX server in the large corporate environment is way cool. You can have one physical computer host like 6 or 8 or more virtual servers. The users never know that it is virtual. If you have multiple ESX servers and they are all linked to a SAN then you can move a virtual computer from one host to another with the click of a button.
But this is suppose to be about Hyper-V from Microsoft. The Hyper-V virtualzation is really pretty cool. It all comes out of the VirtualPC product Microsoft bought several years ago. The thing that Microsoft is working on right now is management of the virtual environment. This was really cool. What was exceptionally cool is that you can manage both Hyper-V and VMWare environments from the same management console. The other cool thing is that you can actually manage down into the box to the application level. This was something very impressive.
There were two things that kind of surprised me though. First, if you do a P2V (physical to virtual) move of a server it clones the MAC address along with everything else. I have never seen a need to do this in any of the P2V clones I have ever done before. Also, this means you will have a problem if/when you reuse that hardware on the same network segment again. NOT a good idea. Second, if you clone an existing computer then it destroys the source computer. The clone of course has computer name and SID etc all stripped out, but it blows away the computer in the process. That seems totally unneeded. I would like to know what they were thinking.
Finally, they showed the software for creating apps for Windows Mobile so you could make an application for a cell phone. There were a number of asides about iPhones during the presentation, but you could see that they have seen the light that cell phones as a computer platform is a very large growing market. I am only a minor programmer. I do scripting but never thought of doing an app for a cell phone. I don't think I still could do it, but it does look interesting. If you are a programmer you might just be able to become financially independent with a cell phone program. BTW there was a guy I read about that made $700,000 this last year for a simple tank program for the iPhone.
Thursday, February 19, 2009
Secure logins!!!
OK.. I am going to tell you today about one of the best kept secrets to protecting your PayPal and eBay accounts. What, you don't have a PayPal or eBay account? You have got to be kidding me. You definitely need to check those out. Well for those of you that do, have you ever thought about what would happen if someone hacked your account? It could be aweful. And if someone put a keylogger on your computer, or if you are accessing the account from a more public computer how are you going to make sure your account is safe? All they have to do is record your user ID and password and they can get in.
Well there is an easy way to take care of this. It is called two factor authentication. What is that? Well you have your user id and password, then you get a device you need to use when you log in. There are a few ways to do it, smartcards, keyfobs, or even fingerprint scan or face recognition. The key is that it is all about something you know and something you have.
PayPal (and it's parent company eBay) have put in place the ability to use two factor authentication. I stumbled on it by accident when I was at a computer show recently. I was told about it from the vendor that supplies the devices for PayPal. After a bunch of searching on their site I found out how to get setup.
So here is the deal. You log into PayPal and then go to http://www.paypal.com/securitykey to get to the page to set yourself up. It was a real bear to find it, trust me. Anyway, you then register and pay $5 for the device (that is way cheaper than what they cost). Then within about 10 days you will get your security key in the mail. You log back into PayPal, go to that same link above, and activate the key. Once this is done when you log in you first will be asked for your user ID and password. Then the next page will ask you for the six digit number from the security key. You press a button and a number is generated. It is different every time. You put that in and complete the login. Now if someone gets your user ID and password they still cannot get in. Because they must have that security key to get a valid number.
Now I know some of you might be saying like "what if I lose it or do not have it with me?". Well they have a way to get in for onesy twosy times. But you should use the key as often as you can.
Oh, the other thing that is nice is that you can use the same key for eBay. It rocks. Now I don't have people getting on my eBay account and bidding on a bunch of stuff I am not going to buy and totally messing up my account (or worse). Later this week I will put together a video of this and post it. But I wanted to let you all know about this best kept secret that PayPay and eBay should be advertising on their front page. I also wonder when places like banks will get wise and start offering something like this?
Well there is an easy way to take care of this. It is called two factor authentication. What is that? Well you have your user id and password, then you get a device you need to use when you log in. There are a few ways to do it, smartcards, keyfobs, or even fingerprint scan or face recognition. The key is that it is all about something you know and something you have.
PayPal (and it's parent company eBay) have put in place the ability to use two factor authentication. I stumbled on it by accident when I was at a computer show recently. I was told about it from the vendor that supplies the devices for PayPal. After a bunch of searching on their site I found out how to get setup.
So here is the deal. You log into PayPal and then go to http://www.paypal.com/securitykey to get to the page to set yourself up. It was a real bear to find it, trust me. Anyway, you then register and pay $5 for the device (that is way cheaper than what they cost). Then within about 10 days you will get your security key in the mail. You log back into PayPal, go to that same link above, and activate the key. Once this is done when you log in you first will be asked for your user ID and password. Then the next page will ask you for the six digit number from the security key. You press a button and a number is generated. It is different every time. You put that in and complete the login. Now if someone gets your user ID and password they still cannot get in. Because they must have that security key to get a valid number.
Now I know some of you might be saying like "what if I lose it or do not have it with me?". Well they have a way to get in for onesy twosy times. But you should use the key as often as you can.
Oh, the other thing that is nice is that you can use the same key for eBay. It rocks. Now I don't have people getting on my eBay account and bidding on a bunch of stuff I am not going to buy and totally messing up my account (or worse). Later this week I will put together a video of this and post it. But I wanted to let you all know about this best kept secret that PayPay and eBay should be advertising on their front page. I also wonder when places like banks will get wise and start offering something like this?
Thursday, February 05, 2009
renaming lots of files
Well we talked last time about organizing your photos so you are not royally overwhelmed with trying to find the picture you are looking for. Well most people are like me. They don't think of organizing things when they first start using digital cameras. I know I did not think about it at first. So anyway, now you have photos all over the place and you want to start using a really good naming scheme. But of course renaming hundreds or maybe thousands of files seems daunting.
Well you need to go to one of my favorite places to find software to help you solve problems. Go to Download.com to find the software. For this one you will want to look for the program called FileRenamer. This is a really cool program that helps you to do batch renames. So now you can go in and sort your files by date in Windows Explorer and start to move them into folders by date. Then you can use the FileRenamer program to change the file names. You can do something as simple as adding the date to the front of the files. You could also totally change the name of the file so that all the files for a particular event are named the same. My guess is that all your files are named something like DSCxxxxx.jpg so you will probably just want to change the names of all of them. If you are trying to know what to rename them to just go back to my previous post.
So there.... how to rename files easily. Until next time.......
Well you need to go to one of my favorite places to find software to help you solve problems. Go to Download.com to find the software. For this one you will want to look for the program called FileRenamer. This is a really cool program that helps you to do batch renames. So now you can go in and sort your files by date in Windows Explorer and start to move them into folders by date. Then you can use the FileRenamer program to change the file names. You can do something as simple as adding the date to the front of the files. You could also totally change the name of the file so that all the files for a particular event are named the same. My guess is that all your files are named something like DSCxxxxx.jpg so you will probably just want to change the names of all of them. If you are trying to know what to rename them to just go back to my previous post.
So there.... how to rename files easily. Until next time.......
Monday, January 26, 2009
Where did I put that photo?????
Now that a majority of people are using digital cameras rather than film cameras we are seeing the cameras come out a lot more. And the cameras are not just being used more (because it is basically free to shoot photos now) but people are also taking a lot more photos. Now you can shoot and shoot and shoot and in the abundance of photos hope you get a good one of Grandma and the grandkids (or that award winning look you always thought you could do).
Well in the process of shooting so many photos you are also ending up with a problem. How to find that photo you took 9 months ago at Bob's birthday party. You have seen it I am sure.... all the photos are named something like DSC101327.jpg or some other weird name. And there is no way to find it by filename then. So now you are wading through hundreds if not thousands of those tiny thumbnails. Talk about an impossible task! Oh there is also the problem that if you just dump them all in the same folder then the computer starts having a hard time even organizing them if you sort by file date or to display all the thumbnails.
So what is the solution to this? Well the best way I have found to handle it is to get organized when you unload the photos from the camera. There are several ways to do this but over time here is what I have come up with. Under the folder I store all my photos I have created sub folders named the particular year, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, and so forth. Then when I pull the photos off the camera I will put them in folders below that with the format YYYY-MM-DD subject name for the folder. So like my daughters birthday on the 13th of January went in the 2009 folder in a subfolder called 2009-1-13 Shoshannas birthday this year. The other thing I do then is to have the software I pull the photos off the camera rename the photos with the same format as the subfolder and then just add -001 on up to the photos. I still will have to look through the thumbnails... but now I know right where the proper group is and only have maybe 50 to 100 or a little more to go through and not thousands.
So give it a try the next time you unload your camera onto your computer. A lot of the software that does the transfer will make easy work of this. I use Photoshop Elements and it does a great job. The standard Windows software for transfering from camera does a good job too. If the program you use to transfer the pictures from your camera does not enable you to rename them as they come across then look for alternatives. Next post I will also tell you about a really cool utility I found for doing mass updates to file names and such.
Well in the process of shooting so many photos you are also ending up with a problem. How to find that photo you took 9 months ago at Bob's birthday party. You have seen it I am sure.... all the photos are named something like DSC101327.jpg or some other weird name. And there is no way to find it by filename then. So now you are wading through hundreds if not thousands of those tiny thumbnails. Talk about an impossible task! Oh there is also the problem that if you just dump them all in the same folder then the computer starts having a hard time even organizing them if you sort by file date or to display all the thumbnails.
So what is the solution to this? Well the best way I have found to handle it is to get organized when you unload the photos from the camera. There are several ways to do this but over time here is what I have come up with. Under the folder I store all my photos I have created sub folders named the particular year, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, and so forth. Then when I pull the photos off the camera I will put them in folders below that with the format YYYY-MM-DD subject name for the folder. So like my daughters birthday on the 13th of January went in the 2009 folder in a subfolder called 2009-1-13 Shoshannas birthday this year. The other thing I do then is to have the software I pull the photos off the camera rename the photos with the same format as the subfolder and then just add -001 on up to the photos. I still will have to look through the thumbnails... but now I know right where the proper group is and only have maybe 50 to 100 or a little more to go through and not thousands.
So give it a try the next time you unload your camera onto your computer. A lot of the software that does the transfer will make easy work of this. I use Photoshop Elements and it does a great job. The standard Windows software for transfering from camera does a good job too. If the program you use to transfer the pictures from your camera does not enable you to rename them as they come across then look for alternatives. Next post I will also tell you about a really cool utility I found for doing mass updates to file names and such.
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
Safe web browsing.. or protecting from malware
I have had a lot of times where people want me to help them with a totally messed up computer. You know, the computer that is atrociously slow because of pop-ups and other junk that is messing it totally up. The biggest common denominator of all of these people is they all were on Windows AND used Internet Explorer (IE). There is a bit of history in the security problems with IE. It started with Active X and has gone downhill since.
Now I am not going to bore you with all the technical details of the problems with IE. Suffice it to say they are there. If you use IE for all your web browsing you WILL have problems. Just count on it.
Now one of the good solutions is to move to using a Mac instead of Windows. Now for you Linux geeks, yes that would work too. But my position is that Linux is not ready for the average household. So put your flamethrowers away. I will not even listen (La la la la I am not listening to the Linux pontifications). The Mac has a whole ton of benefits. I very well might expound on those one of these days. But for the point of this argument, yes you will get rid of malware problems.
Of course most of you will not want to move from Windows. There is another fix however. The answer is don't use IE. There are several really good alternatives that will keep you away (for the most part) from the crushing problems of malware. I and my household have used these for years and we have almost no problems with malware. I cannot recall ever having a friend contact me to help with a dorked up machine where they use something other than IE all the time. So here are your options.
Firefox- this one has been around for a really long time. I love it and it is the one I use almost all the time. There are some awesome add ons you can get for it too. It is free and avalable from www.firefox.com for download.
Safari - this is a Windows port of the Apple Mac browser. Initially it had some problems, but it is maturing nicely. It is really fast and is very slick looking (it is from Apple after all). It is available from the Apple website.
Chrome - this one is written by people at Google. It is suppose to be the fastest, most stable, and safest of the options. It has some real holes at first, but these have been fixed for the most part. Chrome is the most spartan of the browsers. It takes a bit of getting used to.
Now here is the deal. You might find a website that will not work on anything other than IE. It does not happen to often, but there are a handful of sites this is true of. You have two options. First, just don't use the site. Send the people a message that you decided to shop elsewhere or whatever. The second is to use IE for just that site. Personally I vote for the site almost every time. And if enough people let these sites know then the programmers will stop using those program calls that only work in IE.
This brings up one final point that goes well with a rant against IE. A lot of programmers I know that write exclusively for IE say that they really don't care because IE is the majority browser and growing. Well the funny thing is that the trend is changing. The number of people using IE has started to drop significantly. There are a lot of reasons, including wonderfully that the Mac population is growing very large. The point is that as of December 2008 the percentage of people using IE has dropped to 68% and is still falling. So as more and more people use non-IE solutions then the web developers will be forced to start writing web sites that are industry standards compliant. Take that Microsoft!
Now I am not going to bore you with all the technical details of the problems with IE. Suffice it to say they are there. If you use IE for all your web browsing you WILL have problems. Just count on it.
Now one of the good solutions is to move to using a Mac instead of Windows. Now for you Linux geeks, yes that would work too. But my position is that Linux is not ready for the average household. So put your flamethrowers away. I will not even listen (La la la la I am not listening to the Linux pontifications). The Mac has a whole ton of benefits. I very well might expound on those one of these days. But for the point of this argument, yes you will get rid of malware problems.
Of course most of you will not want to move from Windows. There is another fix however. The answer is don't use IE. There are several really good alternatives that will keep you away (for the most part) from the crushing problems of malware. I and my household have used these for years and we have almost no problems with malware. I cannot recall ever having a friend contact me to help with a dorked up machine where they use something other than IE all the time. So here are your options.
Firefox- this one has been around for a really long time. I love it and it is the one I use almost all the time. There are some awesome add ons you can get for it too. It is free and avalable from www.firefox.com for download.
Safari - this is a Windows port of the Apple Mac browser. Initially it had some problems, but it is maturing nicely. It is really fast and is very slick looking (it is from Apple after all). It is available from the Apple website.
Chrome - this one is written by people at Google. It is suppose to be the fastest, most stable, and safest of the options. It has some real holes at first, but these have been fixed for the most part. Chrome is the most spartan of the browsers. It takes a bit of getting used to.
Now here is the deal. You might find a website that will not work on anything other than IE. It does not happen to often, but there are a handful of sites this is true of. You have two options. First, just don't use the site. Send the people a message that you decided to shop elsewhere or whatever. The second is to use IE for just that site. Personally I vote for the site almost every time. And if enough people let these sites know then the programmers will stop using those program calls that only work in IE.
This brings up one final point that goes well with a rant against IE. A lot of programmers I know that write exclusively for IE say that they really don't care because IE is the majority browser and growing. Well the funny thing is that the trend is changing. The number of people using IE has started to drop significantly. There are a lot of reasons, including wonderfully that the Mac population is growing very large. The point is that as of December 2008 the percentage of people using IE has dropped to 68% and is still falling. So as more and more people use non-IE solutions then the web developers will be forced to start writing web sites that are industry standards compliant. Take that Microsoft!
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