MusTech.Net!

If you’ve ever wondered if there was a way to globally unsubscribe to spammers and spam list, you’re out of luck. There is no such thing.  I was researching this topic today and found a fairly authoritative answer at SpamHaus (SpamHaus is one of the “Big-Guns” working to reduce email spam) .  

SpamHaus points out a number of so-called “spam removal” services being run by seemingly would-be do-gooders are, in fact, SPAM or Email Collectors themselves.  They state that “Any system that wants money in exchange for removing your address from a spammer’s list is a scam”.   ~Seems logical to me.

The biggest con of them all seems to be the Direct Marketing Associations “spam opt-out service”.  SpamHaus states that the very mission of the group is to “advance the interest of junk-email senders.”  They go on to state that some sites literally “spray” hundreds of millions of emails out per day.

What about sending a “Remove Me” from your list” back to the spammers?  Unless you are SURE that you are receiving a legitimate email from someone YOU DID subscribe to (E.G. JC Penney, Buy.com, FTD, etc.).  NEVER unsubscribe to a would-be spammer.  It only confirms your email address a working, legitimate, valid address.  By sending the “Remove Me”, you are actually setting yourself up for even more unwanted emails.

To read the article I found from SmapHaus about remove lists, click here:
http://www.spamhaus.org/removelists.html

To read about more about sending a “Remove Request” back to a potential Spammer, click here:
http://www.spamhaus.org/removeisformugs.html

Best wishes for a SPAM free Summer!

The Blue Snowball Microphone is definitely on the “cool” end of USB Microphones.   Blue Microphones have been making their “ball” type microphones for a number of years now and the “Snowball” is their latest USB offering.  

At first glance the Blue “Ball Microphones” look quite different, the mics themselves are about as big as a softball and varied in color; the Snowball is, as you would expect, white.  In order to help with some of the thumps and bumps you might pickup while using them to record they offer the Blue “Ringer”, which is a suspension unit for the microphone that gives a “vintage” look and helps with picking up unwanted “knocks” with the microphone.

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This computer problem was brought to my attention and I thought I would post it on Mustech.net to see if any of you SUPER TECH SAVVY people out there could shed some light on this problem…. and help all of us with a working solution within the context of how we are trying to get this resolved.

The problem:
If you have a Tablet PC, and XP (or Vista), and have tried to access NBC.com with IE7 (Internet Explorer -I’m not sure about version 6 or prior), you get the following typical, bland, message: Internet Explorer cannot display the webpage

This is only interesting because it WILL open with Opera, Firefox, and other browsers on the tablet PC.  To further compound the issue, it will open fine in any of the other XP or VISTA, non-tablet, PC editions/computers.

The problem seems to be materialized only with the tablet PC and IE combination when going to the site www.nbc.com.  I have not find this anomaly anywhere else.  Are any of you experiencing this phenomenon with any other sites? 

Now, before anyone goes off rambling and posting here on a hundred reasons not to use IE7, Microsoft, tablet PCs, etc… I am looking SPECIFICALLY for solutions that take into consideration this scenario only.   The definitive solution at this point, as far as I can tell, is to use a standards compliant browser… but this doesn’t resolve the curiosity as to why this doesn’t work at all in IE7 and the curious webpage not found issue without any clue as to THE WHY…

I have replicated this problem on multiple tablet PCs from different locations and can confirm this to be a problem. 

Here is some troubleshooting information:

• The IP address of NBC.com is 64.210.192.67
• Entering the IP address into the browser also results in the same problem.   I can successfully ping and tracert to the above IP Address. 
• I have cleared all the cache information, flushed all the dns information, added the IP address to a hosts file, and disabled all add-ons and extensions from IE7 and still cannot access the site.
• The address WILL open in Firefox and Opera
• NBC.com has failed to respond to any inquiries about this as of yet

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Toshiba has “called it quits” and Sony’s Blu-ray format has become the undisputed “winner” of the high definition wars.  Quite frankly, I’m glad the war has ended.

I decided that I was going to wait until Christmas season this year to decide on which format that I wanted to support/own and now I don’t have to make that decision.   As an owner of an XBOX 360, the temptation was there to buy the HD-DVD player but, looking through my “future goggles”, I thought that the format might have a problem ”catching on” with the public for various reasons.

The one sticking point that I always came back to with regard to the specificities of the formats was that Blu-ray, from the outset, could hold 20GB of more data that the HD-DVD for its dual layer type media and the theoretical limit for Blu-Ray is 200GB and HD-DVD is only 60GB.  This is a major consideration when you consider how fast we are “chewing up” data allocations with our media storage needs.   Although, I’ve never worked with authoring a Blu-Ray menu system,  my understanding is that the process is/was much harder than the HD-DVD format.  I hope that this gets easier now that all efforts can be concentrated on one format.  Especially, because it will not be long before we start to attempt to edit our own HD videos and store them on Blu-ray discs in the near future.

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