TriedIT - Software and Hardware News and Reviews

From lifehacker comes this comparison between FileVault and BitLocker, the two respective native file encryption systems for OS X and Vista.

The main differences boil down to BitLocker being used to lock down the entire operating system, while FileVault only locks down the user’s home directory. BitLocker requires much more setup in that you have to have a special encrypted partition that Vista is installed on, as well as have the unencryption keys stored on a USB stick. This USB ‘key’ is needed to allow Vista to boot. The author of the article feels that BitLocker is better because of the total lock-down of the hard disk. While that is overall more secure, FileVault I feel is more efficient since it only encrypts the user’s home directory which is where all the sensitive information is going to be stored anyhow. While I haven’t benchmarked either encryption method I’d imagine that FileVault probably has higher performance since BitLocker would have to do on the fly encryption and decryption of every single file the OS needs access to. Not only that I feel like backups would probably be more difficult to do on a BitLocker partition than simply backing up FileVault’s encrypted home directory.

In any case it is good to see that OS vendors are including such basic security mechanisms directly into the operating system. The more security the better.

One of my favorite applications on Linux, K3b, has finally reached its 1.0 release. Congratulations to the K3b team!

On another note, I apologize for the slow posting the last few days. I have been busy lately but have a couple of reviews I hope to get out this Sunday. Happy St. Patrick’s Day everyone!

Here’s an operating system of a different flavor I am intending to try out soon. ReactOS 0.3.1 was released today. Its goal as an operating system is to be a free and open source OS that is compatible with applications and drivers written for Microsoft Windows and it is based on the Windows architecture. The reason for its existence is quoted here from this ReactOS web page:

The raison-d’etre of ReactOS is the simple fact that some people, or especially companies, will -never- switch to Linux. No matter how much Linux gets better, or is better, it is not an option for them. Some people out there still use the 2.2 Linux Kernel and refuse to upgrade to a new version of the same OS; it is understandable that others will be totally unwilling to switch to a whole new OS. Until now, open source had no way to reach out to those people. Sure, other free applications could slowly get rid of the Microsoft applications, such as Office and IE, but the OS itself is hard to get rid of. This is the target and intended audience of ReactOS. Because of its compatibility and visual consistency with Windows, it removes many of the problems that people or companies face when switching to Linux: training everyone on the new OS, increased support costs, acquiring or writing new software, hardware incompatibilities, and the list grows. With ReactOS, all those worries vanish, except perhaps for the fact that any support contract with Microsoft will be rendered useless (however, any technician or 3rd-party personel in charge of this would have no problem).

I think this sounds like quite an interesting project that I want to try out soon. I had heard of ReactOS before, but I didn’t have much motivation to try it since I’m a Linux and Mac person primarily. But since I’ve started this site I’ve been interested in all sorts of different things to try. Look for a ReactOS review sometime in the future.

My favorite CD/DVD burning application in Linux is K3b and it is nearing its 1.0 release. Since I prefer KDE as my Linux desktop choice, K3b has been my go-to burning application for awhile now. I can’t remember when I first started using it, but even in its early days it was always the simplest GUI CD burning application that I had used. Prior to that, there weren’t that many GUI-based burning programs and the ones that were available had a pretty bad interface. Now there are a few different ones with fairly good interfaces. K3b, however, is still the best I have ever used.

K3b’s features have been greatly expanded since the project first began. Far beyond a simple CD/DVD burning utility, it can also rip and encode DVD videos to Xvid files, and includes extensive audio ripping and burning capabilities. One feature which they wanted to get into 1.0, but were unable to, is DVD shrinking. That is, re-encoding a video on a dual-layer DVD, so it can be burned onto a single-layer DVD. That feature will make it to a post-1.0 release. As dual-layer DVD burners get more prevalent and the blank media gets cheaper, that feature will become less necessary anyway. I have a DVD player than can play Xvid files burned directly to a CD or DVD which makes the DVD ripping features of K3b much more useful to me than it having DVD shrinking.

Linux.com discusses the features of 1.0 and the overall progress the project has made since its inception and includes some screen shots of the latest release.

Osalt.com is a site to help you find open source alternatives to popular software.

From their site:

Our mission is to provide easy access to high quality open source alternatives to well-known commercial products. And remember that open source software is also a freeware alternative.

You can search based on commercial application and it will find open source alternatives for that application. It looks like a useful site to find free open source software to take the place of expensive commercial applications. While many open source alternatives aren’t as good as their commercial offerings, there are some that are even better than the commercial closed source versions. Most people don’t necessarily need all the features of an expensive software package when the features of an open source program will do. Check out the site and see if you can replace some of the programs you pay for with free open source alternatives.

Some people prefer to use Microsoft Windows, and other people have to. Just because you use Windows doesn’t mean you can’t use some good high quality free open source software. This topic has been done before, but it never hurts to add another person’s opinion. Without further ado, here are my choices for the 25 best open source applications that you should use on your Microsoft Windows PC.

Read the rest of this entry »

Dashboard, introduced with Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger), gives users quick and easy access to mini-applications called widgets that can provide a variety of information and help users accomplish common tasks. On Apple’s Dashboard widgets download page there are a ton of different widgets available. While I’ve tried a bunch of them, there are many more that I have yet to play with. Of the ones I’ve tried, here are the 10 best and most useful Dashboard widgets that I have used.

Read the rest of this entry »

At KDE.news there’s an article about KDE 4’s new file manager, Dolphin. It is a very interesting article about the improvements to Konqueror over the years, and what kinds of features Dolpin will incorporate to improve the usability of KDE. I’m looking forward to trying out the new KDE soon to see how all these improvements stack up.

OS X Basics discusses the four major browsers available for OS X and the main advantages of each. He prefers Firefox on OS X, and I’d have to agree. I use several extensions which I have come to depend on that Safari doesn’t have. Also, since I use Mac, Windows, and Linux regularly I like having one browser that is the same on each platform. Safari might be faster to load and run, but evidence also shows it could hurt your system’s performance.

Knopperdisk is a small, Gentoo based, Linux distribution. It comes in two flavors: floppy and USB pen-drive. The USB version, which will be reviewed here, contains many useful utilities which would make it a handy rescue Linux distro.

Read the rest of this entry »