Are original inkjet cartridges really worth the high cost? Do third party refill inks do as good a job? This article looks at printers from Epson, HP, Canon and Lexmark, with a combination of original inks and the top selling third-party options, using a whole host of different papers. A panel of printer users judged the output in a blind test — the printer manufacturers may not be happy with the results

Source: Slashdot

Regular readers probably noticed that in recent days Aviran’s Pace web site experienced several outages. The reason for that is that my previous host 1And1 decided to be greedy and force me to close my account on their shared server because it is taking too many resources. My site got dugg and slashdotted twice in recent weeks so 1And1 could not manage the load on the shared server so they had to move my site to a better server. Every time they did that they told me that I need to get a dedicated server or virtual server. However on regular days my site does not have nearly enough traffic to require a virtual server. So based on several hours of peak traffic from slashdot they forced me to buy a package that I don’t really need. After I explained the situation and insisted that my site is not big enough to require a dedicated server they agreed to put me back on the shared server, until couple of weeks ago where they suddenly notified me that I need to more to a virtual server, although there was no spike in traffic.

I had enough so I started looking for a new host. I decided to go to grid hosting with a hope that they can handle spikes in traffic. because I run several sites, I switched all of them from 1And1 to Media Temple’s grid hosting. Media temple cost twice as much as 1And1 and they give you 1000 GPU (grid processing units), which is calculated by how much the site uses the grid resources. But couple of weeks after switching to media temple I noticed that had utilized all my GPU. Media temple does not say how they calculate the GPU, but for twice the price I payed with 1And1 I assumed that I could host both my sites and not go over the GPU. In addition to that in the few weeks I’ve been hosted with Media Temple’s Grid hosting I noticed several outages. Needless to say I’m not happy with the grid server and the obscure GPU.

So after more research I decided to move to yet another host, so now I’m hosted at ApisNetworks. It is only been few days that Aviran’s Place run on ApisNetworks but so far my experience is pretty good. They do not have as good of a control panel to manage your site as the other hosts but so far their customer support and service is excellent, and also the price is very good. Hopefully I’ll not have to switch to another host and the site will perform better.

Google Inc. has bought video conferencing software from Marratech AB, a Stockholm-based vendor, and hired the engineers involved with the software, a Google spokesman said Friday.

For now, Google plans to use the software internally, as a tool for its employees, the spokesman said, declining to speculate whether Google might later try to market the technology or integrate it into one of its commercial products.

Should Google decide to market or integrate the technology into its products, the move would be seen as another in a string of recent steps taking Google into the sphere of collaborative work tools.

YouTube, the Internet’s No. 1 video warehouse, is gearing up to collect user data that could prove valuable to marketers, according to the company’s chief marketing officer.

Suzie Reider, YouTube’s chief marketing officer, told an audience at the Advertising Research Foundation’s Rethink conference this week that YouTube will launch in a few weeks its first user study, according to trade publication Advertising Age.

Earlier this week, Microsoft filed what appeared to be a patent application for a smart phone interface, causing many a blog to begin speculating that maybe it was for a “Zune phone” (for better or for worse)–something that’s been talked about for some time now. The images in the application, showing a tiled graphical interface, definitely look somewhat iPhone-ish, and plenty of buzz arose that perhaps Microsoft was trying to develop an “iPhone killer.”

On Thursday, Apple issued a megapatch of bug-fixes for its Mac OS X desktop and OS X server systems. The fixes, 25 in all, are itemized in the company’s Security Update 2007-004.

Apple recommended that all OS X users install the update. It said that the vulnerabilities could lead to a system crash or allow an intruder to run unauthorized software on the computer. The fixes relate to various components and services in the Mac OS X operating system, including the AirPort driver, the Help view and the Installer application.

About half of the patches relate to security, such as remote code execution that could permit a hacker to obtain control over a Mac, although there have been no such reported attacks.

A consumer group asked the Federal Trade Commission Friday to investigate and block Google Inc.’s proposed $3.1 billion purchase of online advertising firm DoubleClick Inc. unless the companies improve consumer privacy protections.

The complaint, filed by the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), alleges that Google and New York-based DoubleClick collect exhaustive personal information on consumers using the Internet but don’t adequately protect the privacy of that information.

Google’s acquisition of privately held DoubleClick “will give one company access to more information about the Internet activities of consumers than any other company in the world,” the complaint from the Washington-based group said. “There is simply no consumer privacy issue more pressing for the Commission to consider than Google’s plan to combine the search histories and Web site visit records of Internet users.”