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Category Archives: Computers
The Bug Tax
My wife is a graphic artist. She has a Mac. Because Adobe has a virtual monopoly on graphic design software she has to use Adobe’s Creative Suite, and the cost for this is hundreds and hundreds (and hundreds) of dollars. In fact, it is much more than the Mac itself.
She recently upgraded to Microsoft Office 2008. This brought out a bug in DreamWeaver CS3, where you cannot copy from Word and paste into DreamWeaver. Adobe won’t patch the bug, instead requiring users to upgrade to CS4. The cost to upgrade just DreamWeaver is about $200.
Adobe could just send out a patch that fixes this bug, but is instead extorting this $200 from their customers if they want a working version. Read that page, they’re not even shy about it.
The modern corporate business model is about harvesting the customer, not providing quality and service.
AOL Webmail Question
For a friend: Is there a way to set AOL Webmail as the default mail program used by the web browser, the way you can do for GMail and Yahoo Mail?
I don’t mean the AOL program, I mean AOL webmail.
New Mac Notebooks – Still No Blu-Ray
Apple’s new notebook line is announced. They still cost about double what a PC costs, and still don’t offer Blu-Ray drives for watching HD movies. Oh well, I was hoping…
So, I hear you can install MacOSX on a PC. What’s up with that?
Firefox and Flash
I’m still having a problem with Firefox and Flash. I either can’t play videos like YouTube, or there is no sound. If I reinstall Flash it works for a day or two then quits again. Everything works fine in Internet Explorer, except I hate IE.
Do you think the Firefox people will ever fix it?
Speak Out California Is Back Up And Running!
This post originally appeared at Speak Out California.
One day your website is yours, and the next day it is someone else’s. Organizations, businesses and regular people are at the mercy of a confusing deregulated system.
A little over a week ago the Speak Out California website suddenly disappeared, and viewers instead saw a website full of advertisements.
We had no way of even knowing what had happened. It was just a surprise. One day typing “speakoutca.org” into a web browser took viewers to our website, the next day it took viewers to an ad site that someone else managed.
Some of us are more sophisticated and internet-savvy than most citizens so we were eventually able to track down some information. I’m not going into details here, except to say that no one at Speak Out California received any notice that this was going to happen. It took several days to even track down where the domain name (this is what internet addresses like speakoutca.org are called) had been registered, who had registered it, and contact info for the registrar. Then it took several more days to restore the domain name to us and get it working again.
Here’s the thing: the only way we were able to get this name back and get the site operating again is because some of us are much more internet-connected than most people. Most people would have no idea where to even start to look for information and help solving a problem like this.
This is certainly not an uncommon problem. My wife had a business named Dancing Woman Designs with a website at dancingwomandesigns.com, and then one day she didn’t. She received no notice, nothing. It was just there one day and gone the next and if she wanted it back it was going to cost her. It was going to cost her a lot. And so she doesn’t have dancingwomandesigns.com anymore and that address takes you to an ad site. A whole business that took years to get going and build is history now. It was wiped out in a minute because someone was able to get the web name.
A larger business is more likely to have the resources to hire the necessary experts to fight something like this. But it can be an expensive proposition and it can take time.
This is the difference between regulation and deregulation. Regulations protect regular people. Deregulation enables and protects scammers, schemers, and cons. The Internet is largely unregulated and is full of scammers, schemers and cons. Most of the businesses and organizations on the internet are good, honest, credible and legitimate but regular people are also left completely at the mercy of numerous cons, scams, schemes and rip-offs and the burden is on us to find a way to tell the difference.
We got Speak Out California back up and running. It only took us a week and a little money. But we are sophisticated, internet-savvy and connected — and lucky. Hmm … maybe some new legislation is warranted.
Click through to Speak Out California
Gmail Problems
I’ve been having problems with Gmail for a few weeks. It’s extremely slow, sometimes doesn’t come up at all, sometimes won’t send mail. Is anyone else seeing this?
Bush Authoritarianism Opens HUGE Corporate Security Problem
The Bush administration insists on the right to search and download to keep the contents of any memory device or hard drive taken across a border. That means that the government can now make copies of any laptop hard drive or “thumb drive” crossing the U.S. border.
Travel group warns: Corporate data at risk from laptop searches at border,
Companies need to review their policies to see if such searches will cause privacy problems for them or their customers, she said.
“For example, if you are carrying personnel information on your laptop, there are certain privacy violations that can ensue” if that data is accessed and downloaded as part of a border search, Gurley said. Other kinds of sensitive and proprietary information — including intellectual property — can sometimes be exposed via such searches, she said.
Many companies, especially in Europe, are having compliance officers look at the broader implications of such searches and have begun curtailing the kind of information their executives can carry on their laptops when traveling to the U.S, she said.
You can just imagine that big Republican corporate donors will see an opportunity here to get competitive info. “YCorp’s patent guy is crossing the border at 11. Get us all the data on his hard drive.” And if you and I can imagine it, you can be sure that YCorps’ people are thinking about it, too.
So as a result of this every single corporate employee in the world is going to have to clean up everything on every device that might cross an American border. And this kind of cleanup is not easy. It is cumbersome, inconvenient, expensive, and might not be enough. I can foresee policies requiring installing fresh hard drives before any travel. (This includes Canada and Mexico.
All of a sudden corporate cronyism isn’t looking so good to all those corporate types.
Apple’s New Tiny, Thin Notebook Computer
Who will buy Apple’s new expensive, ultrathin laptop? It doesn’t even have a CD drive! This post gets it exactly right:
… [T]his notebook will be Apple’s next step in a strategy to infiltrate the enterprise.
[. . .] [T]he MacBook Air is aimed at a narrow upscale segment of the market. These customers care about style and what that style says about them. It’s all a part of their personal brand.
. . . When they open this machine at a meeting, it may say more about them than a $300 haircut, or a bespoke suit.
Will these users worry about connecting FireWire for digital video or external storage? They may worry more that a heavy briefcase filled with a heavy notebook could wrinkle their suit before a meeting. Listen, if one of these persons needs an power outlet because the battery is heading towards critical, someone will find them an outlet. And besides, there’s plenty of juice for notebooks and mimosas in the first class cabin.
What’s great about the MacBook Air is that this machine appears to be a new twist in Apple’s stealth campaign into the enterprise. The MacBook Air is all about switchers.
Who will be customers of this classy machine? Captains of enterprise and commerce. Traditionally, these customers have been Windows users. But now they will buy Apple’s new ultralight and join the ranks of switchers.
Yes, that’s me all right.
But I do want one.
Haiku Operating System
This isn’t my usual subject, but I encourage all the techies out there to take a look at the Haiku Operating System, and tell techies that you know to take a look.
Haiku is an open source operating system currently in development designed from the ground up for desktop computing. Inspired by the Be Operating System, Haiku aims to provide users of all levels with a personal computing experience that is simple yet powerful, and void of any unnecessary complexities.
Also take a look at BeBits.
Blank Paper Utility
At last, the product we all have been waiting for: Blank Paper Utility!
When you need a blank sheet of paper, use this product!
A Technical Point About Those Missing E-Mails
Here is how e-mail is typically stored: There are at least three hard drives where an e-mail is located: The sender, the server and the recipient. If there is more than one recipient of an e-mail the other recipient’s hard drives will also have copies. (Webmail is another story…)
Even supposedly-deleted data would still be on each of these hard drive – marked as deleted but still there – unless it has been overwritten. That is not as likely these days with very large-capacity hard drives. A data recovery effort would locate the e-mails or report why not. If the erasure was due to normal file overwriting, this would be apparent. And if it was due to intentional erasure, this would also be apparent.