posting to say I have had similar problems with zone alarm to those described in this thread. I use avast these days and it is pretty darn good.

Use AVG.

I may be wrong but I'm sure I saw something about AVG stopping support for the free programme i.e. no more virus database updates, sometime next year? I don't use it much, its just on the win partition of my mac, but they sent me an email a while ago saying that, then I heard nothing more about it. It'll be a shame if they do cause its great and you don't loose half your resources to it like with norton etc.

Faiz,

What kind of "modem" are you using? (If you're using dsl/cable than this box, technically, is not a modem but that's beside the point).

How about router?

Actually, DSL uses a modem too. Just a different type. It MOdulates and DEModulates a signal, albeit at a higher bandwidth. Same with cable.

The good old U.S. of A is much behind the rest of the world in terms of broadband. Most other places in the world have full on fiber optics running to people's houses. DSL and Cable are short term technologies until the telecom companies can find some way to stick it to us, uh, I mean provide us with fiber optic lines.

As someone who is a fan of open source, I find it is much better on the server side than client side. Firefox is sort of a spawn of Netscape, and I have always detested that browser. It has always been a nightmare for developers to cross develop, and honestly Microsoft has stuck with W3C recommendations more than Netscape or Mozilla.

Browsers are one area where I wish there was a monopoly, because although there are standards, people do not follow them. So client side code often needs to be generated or tweaked to work with a multiplicity of browsers. So far, no complaints with Firefox users who use our web applications. It's such a small market share, at least in terms of who visits our webapp.

I was so happy at work that they finally agreed to drop support for browsers older than Netscape 4.7 and IE 4.0. I know, they are very old and browsers are free, so why not expect people to use the newer ones? Our users are doctors, which explains a lot...

blinduncledallas wrote: For instance, Lately whenever i'm in the EA forums and click on a link to a you tube video the link just shows me the HTML code.

My guess is you have to configure the MIME types. It should be done already, but maybe it became undone. I don't use Firefox, so I don't know how to do it, but you can Google it...

blinduncledallas wrote:In a sort of answer to the hotmail question. It always runs funny in Firefox for me. That's why I went to gmail. It works fine. Maybe Microsoft are fucking with Mozilla. I don't know.

I really doubt it. Most likely, there is a configuration issue with Firefox or your firewall software.

Hotmail doesn't use very sophisticated client side technology. You can run it on older versions of IE and even old Netscape versions.

If they were sabotaging Mozilla, it would be so easy to find out. Just look at the source code. You'd have thousands of open source dorks riding on unicycles, flipping out about it.

My gripe with Hotmail is that after Microsoft bought it, they moved it from a stable Unix platform to their own technology. Since then, you see periodic performance issues, site outages, etc.

Microsoft has never been good with the server side of web development. Their products are hokey and fail without any sort of way to troubleshoot problems effectively. J2EE (Java 2 Enterprise Edition) is such a better platform. This comes from using Microsoft and J2EE stuff equally... The Microsoft stuff is just so obnoxious... You can never find errors well. They have no concept of a stack trace and crappy logging. Their event viewer is a joke. They added these links with "issue id's" to the viewer, but they are all bad links! What a joke. Thankfully, they will never be able to capture the enterprise market. Just small business and the few enterprises looking to save a few bucks (most of their tools are included with the OS) at the expense of their customers web experience.

We run J2EE on Windows Server, but are looking to move to Unix... Won't effect our code, because it is java and runs in an appserver that works on both platforms.

I think companies like Apple and Microsoft should stick to consumer software and music players and the like. Apple's OSX Mac rack mount servers were about the funniest thing I have ever seen in my life. Who's going to spend top dollar for poor processing power? You gots to really love you some Apple for that...

I could only get avg to tell me their were viruses - it wouldn't do anything about it. but maybe i was doing something wrong.

avast works great though

yut wrote:They have no concept of a stack trace

J2EE is not an operating system, so you're comparing apples to oranges.

Besides, Windows does provide stack trace facilities. Google "minidumps" to learn about how to get Unix-like core dumps (and therefore, stack traces) on Windows. The .NET CLR also has full stack trace support. As does Sun's JVM on Windows.

yut wrote:and crappy logging.

Logging, and how you view log messages is really an application's concern. The OS can provide you with basic generic facilities, but it can never be as good as what can be offered by a tailored application.

yut wrote:We run J2EE on Windows Server, but are looking to move to Unix... Won't effect our code, because it is java and runs in an appserver that works on both platforms.

Good look with that. Get ready for a lot of testing and debugging.

Does your Unix appserver provide an identical level of J2EE compliance as your current one on Windows? Has your app code been written to be OS agnostic? Care to bet that the Sun JVM running on Win32/x86 is going to do the exact same thing with your Java code when run on an IBM-developed JVM on AIX with a PowerPC chipset?

Write Once, Test Everywhere.

Noodles wrote:I may be wrong but I'm sure I saw something about AVG stopping support for the free programme i.e. no more virus database updates, sometime next year?

I believe this is incorrect. AVG released a new (still free) version that needs to be downloaded and installed manually, but I haven't heard a thing about discontinuing updates.