The Design and Implementation of laffer1

HP has a new backup product called upline. It's a web and application based backup solution for Windows based PCs.

I decided to give it a try. I love .Mac and saw this as a backup solution for my Windows box in which I lost homework and itunes content on last year.

The website is great. However, I'm not impressed with the windows client. It's a bit ugly, and suffers from one flaw. Users must pick what file types they want to backup. it shows folders it's scanning, but it doesn't backup the whole folder. I don't like this. My information is all stored in my profile in windows and I want a full backup of that folder. I don't know if this was a way to minimize disk space usage on their part or concerns of liability. Either way, I don't like it.

This product would have saved my music and word documents that were lost in my vista crash. I'm going to give it a little more time and see what they do with it.

There is a free trial for one year with 1GB of storage and the plans are reasonable with unlimited storage.

I've been more energy concious lately.  My home PC has an Intel Core 2 Duo 6420 which supports intel enhanced speedstep technology.  This means that the CPU can slow down when it's not being used to save power. 

Laptop processors have supported this feature for years, but it's starting to crop up on many desktop systems as well.  If your computer was built in the last two to three years, it may have this feature.  It is not found on lowend processors like the celerons or slower Pentium D chips.  You can confirm the features of your processor at Intel.com.  AMD has a similar feature called PowerNow on their chips.

I found that Windows XP SP2 and higher support this feature, but have it turned off.  Vista is much more friendly in this regard.  If you have Windows XP SP2 or SP3 installed, you can turn on this feature by doing the following.  Go into Power Options in Control Panel.  Select Minimal Power Management.  

To verify that your computer is using this setting, make sure no programs are busy running.  (CPU utilization should be zero)  Now, go into Control Panel, System, and view the CPU speed.  You should see two speeds if it's working.  The first is the maximum speed while the second is the effective speed. 

My system seems to be running at about 1.6Ghz now while idle.  In MidnightBSD, it tends to run much lower than that with cpufreq + powerd enabled.  Now, my system can benefit a little in Windows like it does in BSD. 

Anyone that uses a laptop can tell you the difference between the system when plugged in or running on battery.  One of the common savings is slowing down the processor.  This does something similar, but speeds it up if you do something intensive like playing a game or compiling a program. 

Every little bit helps.

http://www.cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2010-0232 

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/advisory/979682.mspx

Microsoft has issued a fix.  This was for the previously mentioned NT 3.1 through Windows 7 vulnerability I talked about in my blog. 

It's kind of amazing what they have been able to do with DosBox in browsers. You can now run Windows 3.1 in a web browser and play solitaire or minesweeper, old school!

https://archive.org/details/win3_stock