networking

Facebook reigns as the best place to work

Maybe it's the ability to influence a billion people or maybe it's the deluxe campus and free food, but Facebook employees have come out in full force and voted their company the best place to work this year.

Company review site Glassdoor annually compiles the 50 best places to work based on comments from employees in dozens of companies. This year, nearly half a million reviews were submitted that rated employers on career opportunities, salary and benefits, work and life balance, senior management, and culture and values. And, Facebook won out.

"The company's leadership truly believes … Read more

Just in time for Festivus, @SeinfeldToday feed debuts

The hit sitcom "Seinfeld" might have gone off the air long before some of the technology we enjoy today was invented, but that hasn't stopped one person from taking to Twitter and guessing at what the modern-day "Seinfeld" would look like.

On Sunday, BuzzFeed sports editor Jack Moore opened a Twitter account, called @SeinfeldToday, where he shares storylines that could have been produced if the show was airing today. The tweets center on scenarios in which Jerry, George, Kramer, or Elaine interact with today's technologies.

"Jerry joins Twitter only to find that a … Read more

One way to tackle captive network connection errors in OS X

When you connect your Mac to a network, if you receive a proper configuration such as an IP address and DNS servers from your router then you should be able to use Mail, Safari, and other networking client programs to access various services either on the local network or through the Internet. However, sometimes it can happen that despite a seemingly healthy connection you aren't able to access Web pages and e-mail.

Recently MacFixIt reader Tom ran into such a situation with a university network:

We have a MacBook Pro mid-2012 release running 10.8.2. The computer is … Read more

Sony begins testing online Entertainment Network Store

Sony has started testing a new online marketplace to buy games, movies, and television shows.

The Sony Entertainment Network Store popped up on the Web today and was discovered by Eurogamer. For now, the marketplace appears to only be available to customers outside the U.S. When folks go to the site and choose a country and language, a U.S. option is not available.

Sony has not formally announced the marketplace, but in a comment on a blog posted to the EU PlayStation site, Sony Computer Entertainment Europe blog manager Fred Dutton said the company is "testing a … Read more

How to set up and use network locations in OS X

When you're carrying around a laptop looking for a network connection, most of the networks you encounter are basically plug-and-play: they use DHCP to issue an IP address and dynamically manage what clients are on the network, and when a connection is established, OS X will automatically configure it.

This works well in most settings, but sometimes a network will have specific configuration requirements such as manual IP address assignment, multicasting setups that isolate logical networks over the same hardware, or authentication schemes that have special hardware requirements.

In these instances, while you can continually access your network settings … Read more

For the Internet of things, a cheap but slow network

PARIS -- Wi-Fi's range is too short, 3G and 4G are too expensive, and both use too much power. A French start-up called Sigfox, says it's licked these network problems -- at least for the idea called the Internet of things.

The Internet of things involves networking countless devices such as cars, toys, heart rate monitors, and traffic lights. These devices may not necessarily need the network capacity of a smartphone used to watch videos, but they need to connect from all over and they need to run on a small battery.

Sigfox's network, using a technology … Read more

Manage fonts in Windows with Cfont Pro

Windows accepts nearly every kind of font, but managing them is a different story. Freeware font managers can fill the need, and there are plenty to choose from. Veign's Cfont Pro is a powerful tool for viewing and managing your system's fonts. It can install and uninstall font packages, print and export font data, and even repair common registry errors that can affect fonts. Its Preview mode lets you see fonts before actually installing them, and a SlideShow mode displlays installed fonts one by one. Cfont Pro's extras include a glyph viewer and a Zoomer tool that … Read more

Foggy Bottom's future social-media approach? Hold that tweet

There's deliberative. There's slow. And then there's the U.S. State Department, which is reportedly considering a policy that would hold up employee tweets from going live for a couple of days as they went through official review and approval.

The State Department indirectly responded to leaks about the draft proposal, which was first reported by the blog Diplopundit, in an e-mail comment to CNET from spokesman Mark Toner.

Provisions in the Department's Foreign Affairs Manual are constantly under review. We are in the process of updating the regulations governing publication -- both traditional and digital … Read more

Digital storage basics, Part 3: Backup vs. redundancy

Editors' note: This post is part of an ongoing series, for the other parts, check out the related stories. This post was updated on March 29, 2013, to add more information on backing up.

One of a storage device's most important roles, if not the most important, is to keep the information stored on it safe, especially from hardware failure. Redundancy and backup are the two popular types of data protection. They are not the same, however, and it's important to understand the differences between the two.

Redundancy

In a nutshell, redundancy in consumer-grade digital storage means using … Read more