Wanting some way to express sarcasm in text-based communication is not a new idea – while probably not limited to my professional community, it’s something for which many of us who work with computers and code seem to find ample need. We are, apparently, a pretty sardonic bunch. In fact, someone out in the Twitterverse proposed, with an unknown level of tongue-in-cheekedness, that the W3C (the international community responsible for developing Web standards) include a tag as part of the specification for the latest HTML standard. The W3C tweeted back with good humor, while basically informing this person they probably shouldn’t hold their breath.
Sarcasm is a form of indirect speech, a sophisticated construct where the real message gets conveyed implicitly through a combination of verbal and non-verbal cues. It often involves saying the opposite of what you really mean, and is usually easiest to recognize in face-to-face verbal dialogue. It’s a fairly ambiguous form of communication, but is, curiously, quite common in the nuance-poor online world. Comments on blog posts, customer reviews of products and other opinionated, user-generated content are often written with an acerbic tongue. But text is a tricky platform for implicit speech. It can be hard enough for humans to recognize sarcasm in text form, let alone computers, which is why it’s notable that an Israeli research team has actually developed a machine algorithm that can recognize sarcasm.
This novel sardonic bloodhound is called SASI, a Semi-supervised Algorithm for Sarcasm Identification. SASI can recognize sarcasm in online customer reviews with 77 percent accuracy. In developing the algorithm, the research team of Oren Tsur, Dmitry Davidov and Ari Rappoport looked at 66,000 product reviews on Amazon.com for 120 products including books, music players, digital cameras, camcorders, GPS devices, e-readers, game consoles, and mobile phones*. They had three people tag sentences for sarcasm to create a small seed of 80 sentences of annotated data. The team identified sarcastic patterns in the reviews, ranked the sentences by level of sarcasm and created a classification algorithm. They applied the algorithm against the seed set, which helped it learn words and patterns that distinguish sarcastic remarks. The algorithm achieved 81% recognition in the pattern acquisition phase.

Having put SASI through basic training, the team introduced it into an evaluation set of reviews containing completely new sarcastic sentences. Each sentence in this new set had again been classified for sarcasm by those three human annotators. Using what it had learned in the pattern acquisition phase, SASI achieved 77 percent precision for sniffing out sarcasm in the new data, and just over 81 percent pattern evaluation efficiency. Not perfect, but it’s easily better than some of my more literal friends.

So, does this matter? Do we care about a computer being able to recognize sarcasm? It’s actually pretty interesting from a commercial point of view — user preference studies suggest some users dislike sarcastic product reviews, finding them biased, while others actually prefer them. Therefore, the ability to identify sarcasm in reviews could improve the personalization of content ranking and recommendation systems. Review summarization and opinion-mining systems that attempt to aggregate public sentiment could also benefit if sarcasm could be identified and not included in the average scores, where its often opposite meaning would skew the results inappropriately.

A hardware firewall in a typical broadband router employs a technique called packet filtering, which examines the header of a packet to determine its source and destination addresses. This information is compared to a set of predefined and/or user-created rules that determine whether the packet is to be forwarded or dropped. A more advanced technique called Stateful Packet Inspection (SPI), looks at additional characteristics such as a packet’s actual origin (i.e. did it come from the Internet or from the local network) and whether incoming traffic is a response to existing outgoing connections, like a request for a Web page. Most hardware residential firewalls have an Achilles’ heel in that they typically treat any kind of traffic traveling from the local network out to the Internet as safe, which can sometimes be a problem.

Consider this scenario: What would happen if you received an e-mail message or visited a website that contained a concealed program? Let’s say this program was designed to install itself on your machine and then surreptitiously communicate with someone via the Internet — a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack zombie or a keystroke logger, for example? Trust me; this is by no means an unlikely scenario.

To most broadband hardware firewalls, the traffic generated by such programs would appear legitimate since it originated inside your network and would most likely be let through. This malevolent traffic might be blocked if the hardware firewall was configured to block outgoing traffic on the specific Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) port(s) that the program was using, but given that there are over 65,000 possible ports and there’s no way to know which ports a program of this nature might use, the odds of the right ones being blocked are slim.

Moreover, blocking too many ports would almost certainly adversely affect your ability to use some programs (many games, for instance). Also, some broadband router firewalls don’t even provide the ability to restrict outgoing traffic, only incoming traffic.

Advantages of Software Firewalls:

Now consider what a software firewall might do in the aforementioned scenario. When you first set up a software firewall, you can specify which applications are allowed to communicate over the Internet from that PC. Programs that aren’t explicitly allowed to do so are either blocked or else the user is prompted for confirmation before the traffic is allowed to pass. Therefore, it would likely intercept this kind of traffic before it left your computer.

Another potential scenario where a software firewall would be useful is in the case of an e-mail worm with its own e-mail sever, like the recent “SoBig” worm. Its built-in mail server could attempt to send mail on the valid Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) port (25), which would probably pass through the router because of its trusted origin.

On the other hand, a software firewall could be configured to only allow Microsoft Outlook to use port 25 (assuming Outlook is your e-mail client). Any attempt by another application to use the port would be dropped, or blocked pending user confirmation. For that matter, the application’s attempt to use any port would be blocked if the firewall was configured that way.

By comparison, a hardware firewall that had the ability to filter outgoing traffic might allow you to block most kinds of traffic from a particular PC, but it wouldn’t be able to flag you and alert you to repeated attempts to infiltrate your computer.

One obvious downside to software firewalls is that they can only protect the machine they’re installed on, so if you have multiple computers (which many small offices do), you need to buy, install, and configure a software firewall separately on each machine. This can get expensive and can be difficult to manage if you have a lot of computers.

But the fact of the matter is that software firewalls generally offer the best measure of protection against certain types of situations like Trojan programs or e-mail worms. Speaking of which, a firewall isn’t the only protection method available to you. Whether you end up using a software firewall or a hardware firewall, you should always supplement it with anti-virus software.

A good anti-virus package is just as important as a firewall, and I would seriously suggest that you invest in a good one (I’m partial to both Norton and McAfee myself). However, keeping your virus definitions updated is far more important than which program you use. I cannot stress the importance of this enough. Making sure your definitions are current is absolutely critical to maintaining your protection. Many Anti-virus programs today can be configured to automatically update themselves, so you have no excuse for not maintaining them.

The bottom line is that with any home-office broadband connection, a hardware firewall should be considered a bare minimum, and supplementing it with a software firewall on one or more computers (and don’t forget anti-virus software) is almost always a good idea.

In 2003, the Wi-Fi Alliance released a security standard called Wi-Fi Protected Access. Although the first version (WPA), which uses TKIP/RC4 encryption, has gotten beaten up a bit, is not totally cracked, and can still be very secure.

The second version (WPA2), released in mid-2004, does provide complete security, however, because it fully implements the IEEE 802.11i security standard with CCMP/AES encryption.

In this article, we’ll discover the two very different modes of Wi-Fi Protected Access. We’ll see how and why you’d want to move from the easy-to-use Personal mode to the Enterprise mode.

Two Modes of WPA/WPA2: Personal (PSK) versus Enterprise

Both versions of Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA/WPA2) can be implemented in either of two modes:

* Personal or Pre-Shared Key (PSK) Mode: This mode is appropriate for most home networks—but not business networks. You define an encryption passphrase on the wireless router and any other access points (APs). Then the passphrase must be entered by users when connecting to the Wi-Fi network.

Though this mode seems very easy to implement, it actually makes properly securing a business network nearly impossible. Unlike with the Enterprise mode, wireless access can’t be individually or centrally managed. One passphrase applies to all users. If the global passphrase should need to be changed, it must be manually changed on all the APs and computers. This would be a big headache when you need to change it; for instance, when an employee leaves the company or when any computers are stolen or compromised.

Unlike with the Enterprise mode, the encryption passphrase is stored on the computers. Therefore, anyone on the computer—whether it be employees or thieves—can connect to the network and also recover the encryption passphrase.
* Enterprise (EAP/RADIUS) Mode: This mode provides the security needed for wireless networks in business environments. Though more complicated to set up, it offers individualized and centralized control over access to your Wi-Fi network. Users are assigned login credentials they must present when connecting to the network, which can be modified or revoked by administrators at anytime.

Users never deal with the actual encryption keys. They are securely created and assigned per user session in the background after a user presents their login credentials. This prevents people from recovering the network key from computers.

This comes down to the windows registry. In all programs and files there are files called .DLL files. DLL stands for dynamic link library. What this essentially is – is an area in the windows files which stores specific files that are commonly needed by more than one application/program. Before the DLL library was invented, you could only run one thing at a time, but with the “shared” DLL library more than one application/program is able to access the same DLL file at the same time.

You will no doubt have noticed that some programs and software’s warn you during their uninstaller that there is a possibly shared file that may be deleted as part of the uninstall process. It is usually best to leave these files intact as; speaking from personal experience, there have been odd occasions when other things have gone wrong after I’d fully uninstalled some software. Part of the reason why so many people get frequent .DLL errors is due to the fact that so many different things can be accessing and using the same .DLL at the same time – including spyware and viruses!

Here is a simplified explanation of what the registry is:
The registry is what the windows system uses to store hardware and software configuration information, user preferences and setup information on your computer. The longer you own your computer, the more errors and invalid entries your registry is likely to have. This leads to decreased system performance and an unstable computing environment.

How to fix minor errors yourself:
There is some limited help available to repair common errors – 2003/XP and vista have a built in scan and repair tool that you can utilize; provided that you have access to your windows CD/DVD. All you need to do is use the start/run function, type – “cmd” [without the quotations]. This opens up the dos command window. In the command console type – “help”. This brings up a list of dos commands.

On the left is the commands list and on the right is the description of what each command does. Go through the list and find – “chkdsk” type this into the console and it will begin checking the health of your files and hard-drives. It will give you an overview of its findings. It may recommend using the fix command if it finds errors – “CHKDSK/F”. Make sure to do this if it is suggested.

If your registry errors are causing errors in windows loading up, you can try the command –“fixboot” which will write a new boot sector, or if this fails you can try “fixmbr” which will write a new boot-up sequence. The chkdsk and fixboot commands will help to repair common problems, but be advised that this will most likely not solve the whole problem –especially if it is registry related. The only sure way to fix registry errors is to use a reliable and high quality registry repair tool.

The majority of people just don’t think about the way things work.  Software programmers constantly make improvements to their drivers due to user’s complaints, performance issues, incompatibility issues, etc. What could be better than if a new utility was created which was able to update, install, and take care of each and every driver, as necessary?  No doubt we should pause to describe what a driver does.  Without delving too deeply for now, a driver is simply an application that provides necessary information about a webcam, monitor, or motherboard, and others.  I was thrilled when, while looking for a certain driver, i happened upon a great tool – a driver detector that discovers a legitimate and up-to-date rendition of any possible driver in just seconds.  A very handy utility, it can routinely (and you don’t even need to be involved!) search and update all your computer’s drivers for say once a week.

There’s no doubt that drivers are crucial elements that need looking after, in the same way that you (hopefully) maintain your windows system.  You will soon discover that it’s no trouble to find exactly what you need when you need it, or before you need it, no time-wasting web searches are required!  Regardless of the path you go for, it’s a good idea to keep a backup of your drivers on an external device of some sort.  You never know when you’ll need it!

When you use these tools, regardless of whether you have to download a Windows audio or a digital camera driver, it just “knows” the best available drivers.  What a helpful idea!  It keeps your drivers up-to-date almost identically to the way you periodically upgrade your windows.   With each passing day, computers are growing more and more complex; the downside of this is additional preventive maintenance and time requirements to have to deal with.  An additional tip: in the event your current (perhaps older) computer becomes problematic in means of performance see what new drivers can do for it – this might just get it back on track.

CLICK HERE to check out the website.

With the final release due in a couple of months, Microsoft have provided a beta test version of Office 2010 that’s free for members of the public to download. The beta test version will run unhindered until October 2010 at which point users must decide whether they wish to purchase the final release or have it removed from their hard drive.

For the costs involved, the majority of home users may still be better off with the free OpenOffice Suite (www.openoffice.org) as it should provide all the features you are likely to need at no cost. This having been said, the Office Suite has remained a popular flagship product over the years due to business users often requiring a specific function or application only present in the Microsoft offering. I, for example, use Outlook (Entourage to you fellow Mac Users) on a regular basis and haven’t yet found an alternative that suits my needs.

Having not been the biggest fan of Office 2007 (especially the ‘ribbon’ interface discussed in the past) I wasted no time downloading the 64-bit professional version of the beta to put it through its paces. I have now been using it for a couple of weeks, and it does appear notably faster than Office 2007 and certainly more stable. The speed increase could easily be attributed to the fact that a 64-bit version of the application is now available to run on modern 64-bit computers.

Office Professional 2010 includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, InfoPath, OneNote, Outlook, Access and Publisher. The home edition (also currently available in beta) includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and OneNote. After the official release, computer manufacturers may choose to bundle new machines with a starter edition of Office which includes just Excel and Word; this version of Office will replace the aging Microsoft Works Suite.

Although the ribbon interface remains, it is certainly a lot clearer than that provided with Office 2007. The confusing Office orb has been replaced with the familiar file menu, there are fewer distracting borders, a neutral colour scheme and most importantly it is customizable to the user’s individual tastes. The applications look and behave like a ‘family’ now and have become more intuitive to use as a result of the more refined user interface.

An important new feature due for release in the final version but missing from the beta is the ‘Web Apps’ which will extend the Office functionality to a compatible web browser. Very similar in form to Google Docs, Office Web Apps allows users to collaborate, edit and share Office documents online. This is an incredibly important new feature that has no doubt come about due to the success of Google Docs.

Users interested in downloading the beta version of Office 2010 should visit www.microsoft.com/office/2010 to get their hands on a copy.

1. Make regular backups.  It should be said that there is no absolutely safe way of protecting your computer.  Virus creators regularly find holes in new computer products to use them for infection of computer systems.  Some dangerous viruses can considerably damage data files or even erase an entire file system!  Make regular backups of your data files to an external file storage device.  This can be a separate hard drive, flash card, compact disc or another file storage device of your choice.  To ease the procedure you can use some automatic backup software as well.

2. Be ready to reinstall your system if it crashes because of viruses.  Get distributives of your operating system and distributives of software which you use and keep them together in a safe place.  In this case if a virus infection causes unrecoverable system failure, you can rapidly reinstall your working medium.

3. Protect your network connection with a Firewall.  A Firewall is a piece of software which blocks suspicious and potentially dangerous connections from preventing viruses from penetrating your system.  Windows XP operating system has quit a simple but reliable built-in firewall.  You can enable it as follows. 1) in Control Panel, double-click “Networking and Internet Connections,” and then click “Network Connections.”  2) Right-click the connection on which you would like to enable firewall, and then click “Properties.”  3) On the “Advanced” tab, check the option to “Protect my computer and network.”  If you need more flexible control of connections with your network, you can get and install more advanced firewall software like “Norton Personal Firewall” or “Outpost Firewall.”  If you use this software you have ability to permit or to block particular connections and to monitor your network activity.

4. Use antivirus software.  Install antivirus software which will scan your system searching and erasing viruses on a regular basis.  I have been installing AVG Antivirus on my client’s machines for years now and it has proven to be both effective and reliable!  In fact, it has picked up viruses on machines that were running Norton Antivirus (which Norton itself failed to notice)!

5. Regularly update operating system.  Windows XP has a built-in automatic updating service.  It regularly contacts the Microsoft server(s) to find updates and notifies you if updates are ready to be installed. Updates are important because hackers regularly find holes in an operating system which are often used by creators of viruses.

6. Don’t install and don’t run suspicious software!  Check new programs which you are going to install with anti-virus software.  Don’t download software from suspicious websites.  To download software, always seek the website of the software creator or official distributor.  Do not open applications received by email from unknown persons.

7. Limit access to your computer.  Protect entry to your computer system with a password.

8. If you use “Microsoft Internet Explorer,” consider moving to another browser.  As IE is the most distributed browser today, virus creators actively use defects in its security system (and there ARE a few!) to infect computers.  Infections may also arise if you visit a webpage which contains invisible harmful code.  Major IE competitors like “Firefox” and “Opera” browsers now provide the same comfortable interface and range of services for working on the Web.

9. Use spam protection. Viruses are often distributed via email.  Switch on spam filters in your email box to block spam receiving.  If you need assistance with using of the filters you can ask your email service provider and I’m sure they will be of assistance.

2… The Finder has been completely rewritten in 64-bit Cocoa to take advantage of the new technologies introduced in Snow Leopard. This has resulted in a much smaller OS footprint, taking up about 7 GB less space than Mac OS X v10.5 did. The large amount of recovered disk space has also been attributed to the fact that printer drivers are now downloaded or installed only as needed, rather than being all installed at once. The default install only contains those drivers needed for existing printers and a small subset of popular printers.

3… iChat enhancements include greater resolution video chats in iChat Theater and lowered upload bandwidth requirements.

4… Microsoft Exchange support is now integrated into the Mail, Address Book, and iCal applications. However, only Microsoft Exchange 2007 is supported and customers using prior versions of Exchange must either upgrade or use Microsoft Entourage.

5… Full multi-touch support has been added to notebooks prior to those introduced in October 2008. While the original MacBook Air and other early multi-touch enabled notebooks had support for some gestures, they were unable to use four-finger gestures. This limitation has now been removed in Snow Leopard.

6… Preview now has artificial intelligence algorithms that allow it to infer the structure of a paragraph in a PDF document.

7… QuickTime X, the next version of QuickTime player and multimedia framework, has been completely rewritten into a full 64-bit Cocoa application and builds on the media technologies in Mac OS X, such as Core Audio, Core Video, and Core Animation, to deliver playback. Apple has redesigned the QuickTime user interface to resemble the full-screen QuickTime view in prior versions, where the entire window displays the video and all controls including the title bar fade in and out as needed. QuickTime X also supports HTTP live streaming and takes advantage of ColorSync to provide high-quality color reproduction. If Snow Leopard is installed on a Mac with an nVidia GeForce 9400M graphics card, QuickTime X will be able to use its video-decoding capabilities to reduce CPU load.

8… Safari 4 features Top Sites, Cover Flow, VoiceOver, expanded standards support, and built-in crash resistance, which prevents browser crashes caused by plug-ins by running them in separate processes.

9… Time Machine connection establishment and backups are now much faster.

10… VoiceOver has also been greatly enhanced in Snow Leopard. Reading of web pages is improved with Auto Web Spots — areas of a page automatically designated for quick access. On newer Apple portables, trackpad gestures can be used to control many VoiceOver functions, including the “rotor” gesture first seen in VoiceOver for the iPhone 3GS, allowing for the changing of certain VoiceOver navigation options by rotating fingers on the trackpad. Braille Display support is also improved, with Bluetooth displays supported for the first time.

If you were one of the disgruntled users of Vista, and had strong thoughts of “downgrading” to XP (if not only for the lack of reliability in Vista), you’ll be happy to know that Microsoft seems to have fixed the major bugs! I’ve been BETA testing Windows7 Ultimate for the past 6-7mths and have honestly not run into many issues!

What are some of your thoughts on the issue?