Rob Pegoraro
Monday, December 5, 2005
10:10 AM
Somehow, despite all the time I find myself spending in instant-messaging chats, I'd never devoted an entire column to the biggest program in that category, America Online's AIM, until yesterday.
I hope my review of AOL's new AIM Triton helps to make up for that omission.
In Web Watch, Frank Ahrens gets "Lost" on the Web. We've got a look at a new way to soup up holiday greeting cards online, as well as a review of Ratchet: Deadlocked. And in Help File, I explain why you should never run two anti-virus programs at once and how to get your keyboard back up to speed.
Once again, I'll be online at 2 p.m. today to offer gadget gift guidance to perplexed shoppers everywhere. I'm doing these chats every Monday until Christmas. The last two (Nov. 21 and Nov. 28) drew enough questions to keep me tied down for almost two hours apiece, so please be patient if I can't answer your query right away. (And if you can't be online at 2 to catch the chat live, you can read the transcript any time at the same link.)
Firefox Turns 1.5
One other widely used Internet application recently got an update -- my favorite browser, Mozilla Firefox. Barely a year after version 1.0 shipped, 1.5 arrived Tuesday. It incorporates one big change that nobody will see at first: a faster and easier update system that automatically checks for, downloads and installs patches.
That's "patches," not "an entirely new copy of the browser." Firefox 1.5 only has to fetch a small updater file, which it can apply to itself. With this one feature, Firefox's developers have addressed the biggest issue with this browser.
This new release adds a few other interesting features. Its Options window has been reorganized and cleaned up slightly, and you can now rearrange the tabs that group multiple Web sites in a single window by dragging and dropping them left and right.
Its pop-up blocking has supposedly been upgraded as well, although I'm still seeing those annoying fastclick.net pop-ups (this site and others, apparently anxious to go out of business in a hurry, defeat conventional pop-up blocking by exploiting other weaknesses in Web coding). If you upgrade to Firefox 1.5 and see different results, please let me know.
I'll probably have a review of this browser at some point in the next month or so, but I need to decide how I'll frame it. Do I just write about this one release? Do I wait until I can also cover its e-mail-only counterpart, Mozilla Thunderbird 1.5? Do I compare it with such other browsers as Opera and Flock, a Firefox offshoot that incorporates bookmark-sharing and other "social browsing" features? Do I also report on the 7.0 release of Microsoft Internet Explorer, due at some point next year?
It's nice to have these choices in front of me. Competition is back in the browser market, after far too long.
FCC Thinks Anew About a-La-Carte TV
Something strange is afoot at the Federal Communications Commission. Its new chairman, Kevin Martin, said last week that the government might have to require cable and satellite companies to let customers pay for only the channels they want to watch.
The FCC has not lately been in favor of any sort of restriction on the ability of media companies to sell their content (although it's had no problem with imposing far more onerous regulations on consumer-electronics and computer manufacturers).
Martin's thesis is that if customers could cherry-pick their favorite channels, they would no longer be offended by the racier fare that comes standard in the current set of cable and satellite packages.
That makes sense to me, although my support for so-called a la carte TV is on simpler grounds: I don't want to pay for things that I don't care to watch.
As various pundits have said since Martin's revelation: When you can cherry-pick the best songs off an album at a store like iTunes, where do cable and satellite providers get off insisting that we buy these huge packages?
I hope Martin and his colleagues pursue that idea. Giving customers that option seems only fair. And any cable or satellite company that wants to argue that this is impossible will first have to answer why cable operators in Canada seem to do fine offering that level of choice.
Even weirder than the FCC's chair endorsing the idea of a la carte cable, however, is cable-industry CEOs agreeing that they could deal with it, as executives at AT&T and Cablevision have said.
One Day in Consumer-Electronics Hell
The Sunday after Thanksgiving should have ended with two things accomplished at my mother's house in northern New Jersey: a stereo set up to play CDs and a TV connected to cable. Neither happened as planned.
The stereo was my fault, even though it should have been simple enough -- drill a couple of holes for the speaker wires in the bookshelves, hook up the stereo components to each other and plug in everything.
It didn't take too long to run the speaker wire through the shelves, but then I had to play the usual guessing game with the two leads of each paired wire: Which one connects to which terminal on each speaker? I guessed that silver went to black and gold to red, then clumsily stripped off some insulation to connect them. (Tip: never clip your fingernails right before attempting this task.)
Then I connected the rest of my mom's basic setup -- stereo receiver, CD changer and tape deck. Naturally, three devices needed eight cables: one pair of RCA cables to connect changer and receiver, two pairs to connect tape deck and receiver.
When I flipped on the receiver and CD changer to play a disc, however, the speakers remained silent but the receiver's display only lit up with one word: "PROTECT." Huh? Then I noticed that the volume was set almost at 11, stupidly decided this was some well-meaning warning put in by Sony to stop customers from detonating their eardrums, and spun the volume down to a reasonable level.
I pressed play on the CD changer again ... and heard maybe three seconds of music before the receiver's display flashed brightly, then died.
The receiver refused to turn on again. An overdue glance at the "Troubleshooting" pages of the manual informed me that the "PROTECT" message had reported a short circuit that the receiver was protecting itself against. Apparently, that protection was only good for one try. (Perhaps a more strongly phrased warning, like "SHORT CIRCUIT. SHUT OFF AND REWIRE NOW" would have helped.)
Mom may get a new receiver this Christmas. (Unfortunately, nobody seems to make a receiver-plus-CD-changer hybrid for living rooms, so I can't even simplify her setup in the bargain.) Or the old one may be fixable:
I took the case off the receiver and quickly found what looks like a blown fuse -- but it's mounted on the underside of a separate circuit board, requiring further disassembly before this 50-cent part can be replaced. Mom says her electrician is good at detail work; I hope that's true.
Oh, and the cable TV? Cablevision had granted itself a spectacularly imprecise eight-hour window -- 8 a.m. to 6 p.m.! -- to set up service, but its installer still didn't arrive until around 6:30.
Well, at least my mom can watch TV now. I suppose I should be glad that I didn't try to set up her VCR.
Questions? Comments? Send them to rob@twp.com.
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