Merry Christmas From Digital Spyders
Thursday, December 18th, 2008 | Press Releases | No Comments
Created By: Brad Thompson
All the staff from Digital Spyders would like to issue a very hearty Merry Christmas to all our loyal customers, clients, partners, and manufacturers. Even in times of economic hardship we can turn towards what matters most, our family and friends.
Take some extra time and appreciate the quality time you can spend with each other. Some of the best memories are the older traditions that are increasingly being overshadowed by today’s technology. Break out a board game, go for a slay ride, or anything else that you can do together. Remember, true wealth is not measured by your net worth, it’s measured by the quality of your friends and family, which are priceless. We look hopefully to 2009 and wish everyone a happy and safe New Year!
Free Trade Publications - Now Available!
Wednesday, December 10th, 2008 | Company Press Releases, Helpful Links | No Comments
Created By: Brad Thompson
Today Digital Spyders has partnered with the NetLine Corporation to offer customers access to free trade publications. With over 50+ categories and 1000s of titles to choose from, NetLine is a major asset to small and large businesses that are looking for targeted industry publications. Digital Spyders has been using NetLine for three years for discovery of helpful magazines for agents and employees.
You can use NetLine in two ways. 1) You can find free publications for your industry to keep yourself current. 2) Subscribe to an industry publication that you have interest in doing business with to gain a better insight that will assist in tailoring your product and service to be relevant, so when you walk through the customer’s door you appear to know what you are talking about.
Here are some of the titles we discovered and find very useful.
- Internet Retailer
- Baseline
- CIO Insight
- Web Site Magazine
- eWeek
If you are a business professional and don’t subscribe to publications related to your industry, you are really dropping the ball on your intelligence gathering efforts.
You can browse the whole repository here.
(TIP: If you have a waiting area, these magazines will provide excellent reading material for your guests and are free!.)
Secunia - A Security Tool No Small Business Should Be Without
Tuesday, December 9th, 2008 | Desktop Security, Security | No Comments
Created By: Brad Thompson
Recently we came across a company that makes a very unique and very helpful piece of free Windows software that checks installed third party software for security vulnerabilities. Think of it like a virus/spyware checker, but for finding insecure or out-of-date applications.
The application is called, “Secunia Personal Software Inspector (PSI) 1.0.” (Download here)
Once installed it quickly scanned my workstation in approximately eight minutes and reported all the security issues. It reported my computer being 97% compliant, in which three apps were old that needed updating, and four issues dealing with Flash 9 Active X. The report interface explained the threat level and provided a download link directly to the updated program file from the publisher. If it was a web based installer it opened a browser to the installer web page, like Adobe Flash Player. I updated the old programs and resolved the Flash 9 Active X issue by upgrading to Flash 10, then rebooted my PC. Upon coming back up I ran the scan again and passed with 100% compliance. If you allow the background process to run it will periodically check your system and alert you when a program needs attention to keep your system current.
For larger companies Secunia makes another product called, “Network Software Inspector (NSI) 2.0.” (Download here)
Network Inspector is the enterprise commercial version of PCI for managing multiple PCs installed software states and is sold by volume licensing per PC. NSI comes with an administrative dashboard that includes advanced functions and alerts, such as emails or SMS message when a fault is found.
Every home user or SOHO should be running the free PCI version. Secunia really fills in a key security area where firewall/malware/anti-virus/spyware scanners do not. Considering today’s computers have hundreds of applications, it’s next to impossible to keep current manually. Secunia is very easy to use and saves a lot of time keeping your PC even more secure.
Using IE6? What are you thinking!!?
Sunday, November 23rd, 2008 | Browsers | No Comments
Created By: Brad Thompson
Did you know that IE6 is one of the most difficult browsers to design a web site for? Do you often come across web sites that look like a hurricane hit it? Well you are experiencing IE6.
Here at Digital Spyders we have a very fast and efficient design process that hits a wall at 99.9% every time due to IE6 CSS flaws. This contributes to 80% of the time spent developing a single function in our web site.
We would love to discontinue support for IE6 but a huge majority of visitors are still using IE6. Here is a Urchin 5 report of the current breakdown on IE versions used on digitalspyders.com.
Unfortunately IE6 constitudes 37.14% of all IE visitors, so we can not pull the plug on IE6 support. It boggles us why people haven not taken the opportunity to upgraded to version 7. It’s free and works on all version of windows. Upgrading to IE7 will provide a much fuller user experience where web sites that looked broken before will look normal. Not to mention the many security fixes which aid in the prevention of identity theft and other malicious web content, this should be a mandatory forced upgrade.
UPGRADE TO IE7
If you have not upgraded, please visit your Windows Update manager or go to: http://windowsupdate.microsoft.com/ in order to upgrade your IE6 to IE7.
Preferably the best upgrade would be to switch to FireFox available at: http://www.firefox.com/.
Firefox is a much more complete browser than IE will ever be. Due to the open source nature, there exists a behemoth repository of free add-ons, themes, and extensions that adds tons of user functionality. You can customize the layout, change the look, disable certain web annoyances, and the most important is the invaluable add-on “Ad-Block Plus” which will auto filter out all those annoying web advertisements.
Check for yourself at: Firefox Add-Ons
Google Chrome also is showing to be a very promising browser, but the only draw back currently is the lack of add-on support currently available. As time goes on Google’s Chrome browser will be a major player. The nice thing about Chrome is that it works off of the Apple’s Safari “Web Kit” platform meaning web pages designed for Safari compatibility, for the most part have compatibility in Chrome.
Checkout Google Chrome: Google Chrome Download
If you know of someone that is still using IE6, please tell them to upgrade. “True friends don’t let friends surf with junk!”
iPhone 3G - The Official Phone of Digital Spyders
Wednesday, November 5th, 2008 | iPhone | No Comments
Created By: Brad Thompson
All the staff at Digital Spyders use the Apple iPhone 3G. This was not a company mandated or issued technology, but one that we all came to the conclusion we wanted after one staff member purchased and brought it to the office. Word of mouth spread quickly and everyone had to try out Chris’ iPhone. It took about one week for everyone to get an iPhone3G which transformed into an interesting business tool.
Personally I do not count myself as an Apple fan, but the opposite. Apple from my perspective is a very interesting company. I have a lot of loyal Apple friends that we get into quite the heated tech debates sometimes. The things that really bother me is Apple’s deceptive marketing practices that re-brand PC features and abilities and put a letter ‘i’ in front of it and charge people for it telling them it’s a ground breaking event to have this new software.
The reason I made the switch was that I was on a HP Ipaq hw6955 PDA Phone for the last two years and it was getting close to the end of the device and my data plan had ballooned beyond what I wanted to pay. Going to the iPhone would actually lower my overall costs for data. It was a hard decision to give my money to Apple for this device but the rage online was too great and many of my peers were flaming evangelists for this phone, so I did it.
I’ve had the phone for over six weeks now and here are my thoughts in point form.
(UPDATE 12-30-2008)
- WHAT!? NO CUT & PASTE!!? ARE YOU KIDDING ME!? RAWR!!!!!!!!!!!
- Apple in my opinion, and even greater now that I’ve customer experienced them, is a completely over hyped company with an amazing marketing division.
- The wall adapter that came with my phone had to be warrantied. They sent me a new one in a shoe box sized box for a piece that measured no more than 1×1x2 inches and weighed no more than 2 ounces and requested the return of the old one. What a waste of gas and money! Not green at all.
- Apple is a pro-consumption company that wants to turn over the products in your closet like it turns its inventory at the warehouse. (http://www.storyofstuff.com comes to mind.)
- User interface is 95% awesome.
I’m let down that I can’t run apps in the background.(Download “Backgrounder” from Installer)- I jail broke my phone in 24hours and the real fun began.
Fetch email feature doesn’t work, there is a bug.(Fixed in 2.2)- Missing easy access setting to control the device sound.
- Without the App store, this phone would be nothing.
- If I didn’t buy the iSkin Revo2 this would be a constant grease magnet. (Get this)
- iTunes on Vista is a slug, I fear opening it. XP has no problem so far.
- The stock camera app sucks and lacks basic features. (3rd party apps greatly increase functionality)
- No stock video recording app (Download “Cycorder” from Cydia).
- No flash for camera.
- Was successfully able to rid myself of outlook by using Corporate GMail and iTunes to sync contacts using NemusSync to sync my Google Calendar.
- Hard to run IM properly because of failed ability to run an application in the background persistently. I’ve got an app called “backgrounder” that allows you to selectively put apps in the background but it’s some what flaky.
A lot of random crashes, especially in Safari. We need FireFox for this phone, seriously.(fixed in 2.2)- Web browsing is very decent besides the crashes and the SDK for making a site iPhone friendly isn’t too difficult and looks awesome.
- eBook Readers are plentiful and awesome.
- Lot’s of great shopping comparison apps to check prices.
- 3G is amazingly fast at about one half the speed of my Cable connection.
- Using PDAnet I can teather my notebook much easier than in the past using BlueTooth DUN. WiFi Ad-Hoc is the only way to go. So quick and fast and consistent. June Fabrics deserves a standing ovation on this app.
- Social networking is going to explode with this device in regards to location. BriteKite is one service I see major things happening.
- Some of the GPS apps and ones that use the accelerometer are just wild.
- My Creative Zen Vision:M is now collecting dust as I prefer to watch video on the larger iPhone screen without headphones.
- External speakers are louder than some notebooks we have sold.
- Disappointed no dock included, not to mention a crappy case at least.
- Disappointed that bluetooth does not support A2DP for wireless headphones.
Processor speed is lacking. Opening SMS takes 5-10 seconds sometimes.(better with 2.2 upgrade)
Overall this is a great device, but it’s sloppy and not complete by any means. I sure hope the next upgrade (2.2 or whatever) will fix a lot of these well documented issues. If Apple comes out with iCopy and iPaste both for sale on the AppStore for $9.99 each I will be selling my iPhone.
(UPDATE 12-30-2008)
2.2 Firmware fixed a lot of problems. I made sure to do the upgrade asnot to upgrade the modem(baseband) update in order to unlock the phone when the iPhone Dev Team comes out with the unlock on New Year’s Eve. Email and browsing is rock solid now. Fetch mail works properly and the increase functionality of mobile iTunes makes the phone more self dependent from the desktop. It’s going to be very hard for other companies to compete against this phone.
We are just now in the study phase of how we can benefit the greatest using the device in our organization. Mostly back office web applications are the top of the discussions which we are looking into. Given Christmas and CES are on the door step, these are low priorities. Fortunately Safari is compaible with all the current apps we have, it’s just not as nice as if it was made for the iPhone screen resolution. Subscribe to this blog for future articles in our advancement as we post more on our iPhone integration experience.
Welcome to Blogs!
Tuesday, October 28th, 2008 | Company Press Releases | No Comments
Created By: Brad Thompson
I would like to personally welcome all customers and new visitors to the launch of our company blog. We have decided to start sharing all the useful technology news and information that we receive from industry insiders and partners. Our objective is to help educate and service anyone interested in current trends in hardware, software, Internet, and other closely related sectors.
Blogs will be contributed by trained Digital Spyders staff and partners. Please subscribe to RSS to be notified of new posts. We hope to have regular postings with a fixed schedule in the near future.
If there any topics you would like us to cover, by all means contact us and we will take your request into consideration.
Feedback is also greatly welcome, let us know what you think!
Please enjoy!
Brad Thompson
President / CEO
Digital Spyders Inc.