PC Magazine writer Neil Rubenking wrote a massive and very useful review of security suites (antivirus + firewall) for PC Magazine recently, with ratings and detailed observations.

The chart below summarizes our findings for three dozen current security suites, highlighting overall scores and category scores of 4.0 stars or better. It's easy to see that some products earned high scores in all or nearly all the categories, while others got just a few high scores.

http://www.pcmag.com...,2817,2369749,00.asp

I may not agree with everything written but it's darn useful.  See also some newer PC mag security reviews that came out after the roundup here.
See also: http://securitywatch...ce-need-not-conflict

This is a public service announcement for those of you who do not like the Windows 7 taskbar being so damn tall eating up desktop space for no reason.

You can change it go to back to the sane pre-Windows7 height and format:



It's the small icons setting which reduces the height.  I also change the taskbar buttons (grouping) option so that each program running gets it's own taskbar entry until it runs out of space; I hate the new behavior of combining taskbar buttons for multiple copies of explorer, etc.

Note: One thing that happens when you reduce the taskbar height is you lose the full date shown in the bottom right.  To solve that I install Tclock and configure it to show full textual date+time on the taskbar.

Nice little article about how in-app purchases in (mostly mobile) games are nickle-and-diming people to death and getting worse.

I don't like writing negative articles that don't include a solution to the problem, but in this case, there is no solution. The state of in-app purchases has now reached a level where we have completely lost it. Not only has the gaming industry shot itself in the foot, hacked off their other foot, and lost both its arms ... but it's still engaging in a strategy that will only damage it further.

http://www.baekdal.c...hases-has-destroyed-

An entertaining experiment (with lots of animated gifs) where someone took a football video game and pitted some lopsided teams against each other.

I'd like to see more experiments with "breaking" video games.

Over the course of the season, I've discovered lots of different ways to hack Madden NFL 25 into a thing that no longer resembles football as we know it. I've played around with rules, injury settings, all manner of player ratings, player dimensions, and anything else the game's developers have made available to us.

This time is special, though, because I'm pulling out every single one of the stops at the same time. No other scenario I've built in Madden has been so abjectly cruel or unfair; no other scenario has even been close.

http://www.sbnation....owl-broncos-seahawks

I think this is an excellent introduction to what makes C different than most modern high level languages:

http://www.chiark.gr.../~sgtatham/cdescent/

This article attempts to give a sort of ‘orientation tour’ for people whose previous programming background is in high (ish) level languages such as Java or Python, and who now find that they need or want to learn C.

C is quite different, at a fundamental level, from languages like Java and Python. However, well-known books on C (such as the venerable Kernighan & Ritchie) tend to have been written before Java and Python changed everyone's expectations of a programming language, so they might well not stop to explain the fundamental differences in outlook before getting into the nitty-gritty language details. Someone with experience of higher-level languages might therefore suffer a certain amount of culture shock when picking up such a book. My aim is to help prevent that, by warning about the culture shocks in advance.

This article will not actually teach C: I'll show the occasional code snippet for illustration and explain as much as I need to make my points, but I won't explain the language syntax or semantics in any complete or organised way. Instead, my aim is to give an idea of how you should expect C to differ from languages you previously knew about, so that when you do pick up an actual C book, you won't be distracted from the details by the fundamental weirdness.

Just wonderful.. I wish we could all remember to not take things so seriously and have this kind of fun with our skills.