AtA News
IE6 pronounced dead at the scene, “mourners” flood in to join the festivities…
Feb 24th
Hors D'ouvres will be served near the IE6 dartboard?
IE6 will be barely missed by us here at AskTheAdmin. We’ve had bad times, and we’ve had worse times with our old frienemy Internet Explorer 6. Rest in pieces you old coot.
Commodore 64 (the one you used to play Bruce Lee on) ,8,1
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Australian dude has to pay 1.5mil for uploading Mario. Oh the WII is now hackable!
Feb 11th
I read this yesterday via Slashdot regarding an Australian man who leaked the latest Super Mario Brothers game for the Nintendo Wii to the interwebs before the game was released. Check it out:
“A Queensland man will have to pay Nintendo $1.5 million in damages after illegally copying and uploading one of its recent games to the internet ahead of its release, the gaming giant says. Nintendo said the loss was caused when James Burt made New Super Mario Bros Wii available for illegal download a week ahead of its official Australian release in November of last year. Nintendo applied for and was granted a search order by the Federal Court, forcing Burt to disclose the whereabouts of all his computers, disks and electronic storage devices in November. He was also ordered to allow access, including passwords, to his social networking sites, email accounts and websites.”
So now that Nintendo did this publicly what do they hope to accomplish? Do they think they will actually see the 1.5 million dollars that this normal dude has to pay? Or did they alert THE WORLD to the fact that you do not have to pay for Nintendo WII games? The system has been hacked a long while ago but I did not think that was common knowledge – guess what?
It is now! What do you think? We would love to hear your opinion in the comments. Does this make you scared to download torrents or hack your hardware? Not Us over here!
Be Afraid! Chinese Hackers CAN and HAVE Exploited Google and YOU.
Feb 3rd
Chinese Hackers
Hello Kiddies,
Do you remember the good old days when hacking was done for fun? Back in those days anybody that knew Linux or Unix was considered a Hacker. One would think that since then, antivirus companies would have actually become effective. But what one company can compete with a whole country? To make matters worse, who can compete with multiple countries full of young hot heads venturing forth for the almighty dollar? That’s a powerful force to be reckoned with.
Since a hacker doesn’t technically require a whole lot of bandwidth to do what he/she does, internet access of any kind
Here at Ask The Admin we are committed to being sure every one of our readers is in the know. And while we cant really offer much in the way of a sure-fire killer app that can protect you from anything, we can offer you these few points of advice.
- Keep your antivirus software up to date
- Use a well known anti virus software, and do some research before purchasing
- Be well versed with all the functions of your antivirus software, so no surprises come your way
- Though it does slow you down, schedule full system scans as frequently as daily
- Leave your computer turned off if you can
- Lastly, try to use an OS other than Wind Blows (as we like to call Windows around here). If your a hacker its only more logical and profitable to target the statistically dominant OS, which is Microsoft’s unfortunately.
That’s all for today kiddies…
Has you or anyone you know been directly affected by this? Even if your just afraid and need a little encouragement, drop us a comment below.
This is Commodore64 signing off. Over and out.
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I-Pad disappoints and Asus Intrigues
Jan 29th
Apple's New I-pad Disappoints
With the release of Apple’s shiny new I-Pad many enthusiasts were left wondering “What’s it for?”
This inherent identity crisis on the part of Apple’s new toy might or might not break it, since the price point resembles that of the original I-Phone. We all know how that turned out…
It doesn’t quite measure up to other tablets in any major arena : processing power, hardware, upgradability, versatility, and the list goes on.
I can imagine the disappointment to be largely due to Apple’s strong history of unveiling devices that re-pave the way for particular gadgets we’ve all used and loved – the cellphone and the MP3 player.
The question here is “What is being innovated?”.
I’m not sure even Mr. Jobs completely understands the specific direction for this device
Asus will debut their new EEE Tablet PCImage courtesy: www.techticker.com
Enter Asus. Another example of a company that has positioned itself to be known for innovation, minification, and basically answering the call of the wild market. I’m sure this device will be everything the I-Pad is not, and because of the price point set forth by Apple, I’m positive this little gadget, once polished, will be just as affordable.
I for one, will definitely be in line to pick up one of these tablets.
Let us know which device you think will accomplish what the Apple didn’t. And to be fair, let us know what the I-PPad does actually accomplish, or what need you think this pretty gadget fills – In The comments!
Thanks for tuning in kiddies,
This is Commodore 64 signing out-
Commodore64 (The one you used to play Bruce Lee on)
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Software Giveaway: Audials One.
Jan 14th
Sure it has been a while since our last giveaway – and they all can’t be $1000+ computers right? Yes you should be kicking your self for not entering that! But I digress…
Today we are giving away a nifty commercial application that normally costs $60. It is called Audials One and it allows you to capture ANY audio that you can hear on your computer. You can rip songs from Blu Ray or DVD’s. It is billed as a professional media converter, organizer & player.
You can grab a track right from a audio stream. Audials One will save the track to a MP3 that you can then listen to offline, burn it to a cd or throw it on your iPod. The application also has a built in search feature to scour the Internet for specific audio bytes and to top it all off it doesn’t care one bit about DRM or any other SILLY copy protection scheme.
You can actually play a DRM’ed track on your machine and magically strip it off when you are saving it as a MP3 – you can learn more via their tutorials here.
As I said before we have 5 copies to give away so step right up and enter our contest all you need to do is leave a comment on this post as to why we should give it to you. Be funny, be witty and this might just be yours. The publisher also told me if we see a lot of comments and tweets we can up the number to 10 or maybe even 20. Let’s see how much you guys need this..
A comment will get you one entry, tweeting about the contest will get you 2 entries (tag it #AskTheAdmin) and blogging about the contest will get you 3 votes.
The contest will go for one week from today! So get your entries in, starting NOW!
AtA upgrades to WordPress 2.9 today.
Dec 19th
I have learned my lesson some time back and now keep my wordpress updated as quickly as a day after release. We have a mirror site for testing first and I can announce safely that the automatic upgrade works nicely and without a hitch. There are a bunch of new features, security improvements and overall speed enhancements.
Batch Plug-in Update in Word Press
When Word Press introduced one click upgrade for pluggins, it was like Christmas in July. But this time maybe on the actual Christmas or perhaps slightly earlier with the release of Word Press 2.9, we will now be able to upgrade multiple pluggins with one click from our WordPress Admin Panel.Optimize/Repair Database Functionality
WordPress has added a new feature to the core which allows you to repair and optimize your database. In order to activate this function, you will need to add this line in your wp-config.php
define(‘WP_ALLOW_REPAIR’, true);
Once you have added it, you will now be able to run the script which is located at this URL:
WordPress Recycle Bin / Trash
Regardless of whether you are a PC user, or a Mac user, we have all had moments when we accidently deleted something really important. But good thing about the operating systems is that they have something where our trash is stored at. In PC its called a recycled bin, and in Mac it is called the Trash, regardless of what it is called, the fact that we can restore it is what matters. WordPress has now added a similar functionality for the posts, pages, and the comments. Instead of permanently deleting these, you can now trash it and then later on empty the trash once you are completely done with what you were doing. By default WordPress will empty the trash every 30 days, but you can change the time limit by simply entering the following code in your wp-config.php:
define( ‘EMPTY_TRASH_DAYS’, 10 );
Image Editor
The image editor is something that a lot of users were waiting for and it is included in this release. This editor will let you make simple changes such as cropping, rotating, scaling, etc.
Ability to add Post Thumbnails
You have probably seen many sites displaying posts on the homepage with a post thumbnail. Or many sites having the post thumbnail next to each post in their index. Before version 2.9, it was done through custom fields. In this release, you can simply add the thumbnail when writing the post and displaying it in the template is even easier.
In order for you to have this functionality available in the admin panel, you must have a theme that supports this function. It is really simple to add support for this feature and we will have a full tutorial on this coming up soon. You will need to visit your theme’s functions.php and add the following code:
