Most experts agree, that in a year or so, one of these formats will be gone. But this will delay a new high-definition video disc format of any type from being widely adopted by consumers for that time.
For us, we’re just annoyed that our efforts to rid ourselves of VHS cassettes in favor of DVDs are not yet done and the DVD is already being replaced by a High-Definition cousin.
If anyone had the power to disrupt Apple’s 85% market share, it was Microsoft. But it appears that their product has dropped the ball. Zune is not even compatible with the staple of Windows media experiences, the Windows Media Player. Even the touted wireless feature only allows transfers to other Zunes, not to allow transfers from your computer wirelessly.
Time for Microsoft to drop this like they dropped Microsoft Bob.
Security insures against loss. Perhaps there is a way to relate a cost-savings in insurance, but besides that, security is a drain on the bottom line, be it in a corporation or with an individual.
Individuals are the same when it comes to security. The managerial side of us has to ask the justification for spending money and time protecting against loss, while our IT side speaks of viruses, spyware, malware, and environmental disasters…
Data seems too intangible to people to see it as a valuable item, like the equipment protecting it, or jewelry which must be secured. Either way, we must force ourselves to listen to our IT people, or the IT voice in our head and protect our valuables…
The people at Silicon.com have put together briefs of foolish things people have done to their hard drives or other data sources. The list includes:
Now…we can’t emphasize this enough…backup your data…protect your data…disaster may strike at any moment. And if it does…the services that specialize in data extraction cost big bucks.
It created quite a mess for the Internet. Netscape threw in the towel, but its heir, Mozilla Firefox, continues to hold a share in the market. Recently, Firefox unveiled its version 2.0, as Internet Explorer released the long-awaited IE7.
Internet Explorer 7 has a simplified interface which leaves more workspace than its previous incarnations. It implements tabbed browser, a longtime popular feature on Firefox. It implements a unified search box and RSS feed integration, long part of Firefox.
Both Firefox 2.0 and Internet Explorer 7 boast improved security features including new phishing protection to prevent visiting spoofed websites. When IE7 is used in the upcoming Vista release, it promises a protected mode that isolates it from the rest of the OS for security protection.
IE7 is a major improvement to the Internet Explorer browser. However, much of its improvements are playing catchup to the Firefox features that have proven too popular to ignore.
Firefox 2.0 has the same list of features, plus improvements to their tabbed browsing, a session restore feature allows a complete restore of a terminated Firefox session. inline spell checking, improved plugin management, as well as other improvements make Firefox the better of the two despite the higher market share Internet Explorer commands.
We don’t recommend chucking IE completely. It can still be very useful for sites that stubbornly refuse to open in Firefox. Of course, there is an extension for Firefox that allows you to open any link in an IE window embedded inside a Firefox tab, called IE Tab. Wait…perhaps you can discard IE entirely if you want…
We received an email from Moxia Energy noting that orders were being accepted for the USA now on a two-pack of AA USBCell batteries. The batteries cost GBP10.50 or approximately $19.95 with a standard delivery charge of GBP1.50(about $2.85). They will be announcing US Retail Outlets shortly. We will have that information as we hear of it.
Long plays opposite John Hodgman, who plays the role of a PC. Now, we think Hodgman steals the show from Long, despite the fact that Long plays the product that Apple is trying to push.
For years, we did criticize the Mac when you had to buy all the hardware from Apple and could not do anything with it yourself. We still recall the Performa which we spent hours trying to disassemble to replace the battery that controlled the clock. Even that supposedly required an Apple technician. The Performa(feel free to comment to disagree) stunk as a computer.
But in recent years, the Mac unveiled OS X – which is actually a UNIX based operating system. That allowed hundreds of open-source programs designed for UNIX systems to be easily ported over. The creation of USB as a standard had already made the purchase of peripherals that were Mac compatible easy, and then Apple opted to switch the processor line for the Macintosh to Intel, the processor that most PCs are based on(No, we aren’t forgetting AMD). Intel processors aside, the hardware standardization and the switch to an operating system that incorporated the best Apple GUIs had to offer with the power of UNIX removed most of our fundamental objections to the Macintosh.
That just left the price point and the fact you can’t build one yourself from parts. But, we have no trouble considsering them as an option for those for which they are suited. For those of us with tight budgets, a PC running a free Linux distribution might be almost as good. Of course, Linux and free means no tech support.
CutePDF offers a free product, the CutePDF Writer, which uses a Postscript to PDF converter, for example Ghostscript(A staples on UNIX-based systems) to create a virtual printer that turns the printer output of any program into a PDF. There is also an optional free addon that requires you to install adware in order to use it. However, the Writer itself has no such strings attached.
For those of you who want to eliminate the free Adobe Acrobat Reader there is the Foxit Reader from Foxit Software. Adobe Acrobat Reader is a bloated and slow program which installs resident on your system, using resources even when not being used, and requires you to wait through a long splash screen to pull your file. Foxit Reader allows you to read and print PDFs. There are addons for the reader that cost money. They allow annotation, saving PDFs to text files, etc. Foxit also offers a Creator and Editor which are available at a charge.
For the simple creation and viewing of PDF files, these two pieces of software work.
The question you must ask is: Why Switch? Ultimately, as we mentioned, XP will be obsolete, fewer and fewer programs and drives will run, and we’ll feel the peer pressure. But for the early days, until it is time to replace a computer…what makes Vista worth it?
Pricewise: Home Basic will retail at $199, $99 for upgraders; Premium $239, $159 for upgraders; Business, $299, $199 for upgraders; Ultimate, $399, $259 for upgraders.
Now…you could buy a computer for these prices…not top of the line…but should your OS cost as much as the system? If you buy OEM, they will probably give you one of these options, most likely Home Basic. But for an upgrader or a builder…let’s get into more detail.
Vista overall makes useful improvements in multiple areas. The majority of XP Users log in using administrative privileges to have full access to features and thus leave themselves open to various security issues. A new feature called User Access Control allows one to log on as a standard user but perform certain tasks with enhanced privileges. This is possible under XP using the RunAs command…however its implementation is not convenient. Either way, many programs written for Windows do not properly implement their own security under the XP Security model and may not under Vista. PC Magazine noted that the feature is plagued by implementation problems and frequent popup windows that may cause users to disable it entirely, negating its point. Other security improvements include Microsoft Defender, an antispyware program and IE7 which was just released for XP.
On the useless, or at least minimally practical side of things is Windows Aero, a new graphical user interface that will require state of the art processors and graphical hardware to be able to run. It looks nice, but those who buy Home Basic won’t even get it and many power users will turn it off to avoid the performance hits.
There is more…increased search functions, new designs, and it will come out at the same time as Office 2007(Another product to dump your money on).
If you decide to buy a computer from a manufacturer before Vista is released though, note that some manufacturers as well as Microsoft itself will be offering free upgrades to Vista if you buy during the holiday season, since it was unable to release in time for the lucrative holiday sales market. For more details on the various manufacturers, click here.
In conclusion, if you get Vista…enjoy it. But it is not yet worth the investment. For those of us a bit more frugal, we will be unveiling a new category here on Gadget Wisdom…Free Software. Remember, Free does not mean bad.
Damn Small Linux is an even smaller distribution based on Knoppix. It is a 50MB mini desktop designed to be booted from a Mini-CD, a USB drive, or even within Windows. There is a larger variant available that is currently around 85mb for those who wish to take advantage of certain technologies that the smaller footprint does not allow.
KnoppMyth is the Linux equivalent of Windows Media Center Edition. It is a Knoppix distribution that attempts to automate the setup and usage of the MythTV DVR package. It can be used in a variety of ways. We’ll have more about MythTV in the future.
There are numerous other variants. But a plain vanilla Knoppix CD or DVD can mount Windows drives when the Windows OS is corrupted, resize partitions, and thus is a valuable tool. The graphical tools included as well as the standard command-line Linux tools can be a lifesaver.
Recently, a Windows XP computer failed to boot. We could not, no matter how we tried, get it to boot even to Windows XP Safe Mode. We booted the system with Knoppix, backed up the data over a network, then did a wipe, reinstall, and copied the data back.
