It was, indeed, Microsoft whose trademark was registered with the New Mexico Secretary of State 30 years ago Sunday. Gates and Allen, as ballsy as any two entrepreneurs ever, came to Albuquerque because Micro Instrumentations & Telemetry Systems here was producing the very first personal computer — and they wrote the software for it.
Here’s a good, quick history of Microsoft from American Heritage.
$101 off on some computers, $31 off on iPods, $21 on Nanos. More.
Google is good for a lot of things, but here’s my favorite new search engine.
Update: I’ve been back to visit Ms. Dewey again. I can’t believe I am so easily amused.
The Mossberg Report has a good primer today on computer security. Here are some key points, but read the whole column to make sure you are doing everything you should to protect yourself and your identity.
1. If you have a Windows computer, you must obtain and install all of the following: a reputable antivirus program, a software firewall, a junk-mail filter and an antispyware program. Even if you own a Macintosh (Macs have been unaffected by most of these threats to date), you will still need to turn on your computer’s firewall and employ a junk-mail filter.
2. Upgrade to the latest versions of the leading Windows web browsers, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 7 and Mozilla’s Firefox 2.0, both of which warn you when a web page you’re visiting appears to be phony. (The new Internet Explorer also has under-the-hood security improvements that close some of the holes plaguing older versions.) … On a Mac, consider using Firefox 2.0 instead of Apple’s Safari, which, while very good and generally secure, lacks a fake-web-site detector.
3. Never respond to or click a link within any unsolicited email message from a financial institution — even your own — no matter how official it looks. …
5. Never, ever download software from a company or web site whose honesty or veracity you’re not sure of. …
Microsoft offers a good security package — if you don’t mind paying Microsoft extra for the security their operating system should include free. There’s a 90 day free trial at Windows Live OneCare – Home.
Google $509. You could have had it at $85 (well, maybe) in August 2004.
Apple $88. First mentioned here at around $32 in January of last year.
Shuffle ad. That’s the Prototypes singing.
Mark Morford just gushes over his new MacBook Pro Core 2 Duo. An excerpt:
You know it’s true. Apple has done more than perhaps any other mass-market consumer line on the planet to affect the look and feel of nearly every gizmo made today. This cannot be underestimated. It’s a George Bush world, after all, one that values sameness, mediocrity, intellectual and spiritual laziness. But merely rub your hand across the top of a MacBook or whip your thumb around the click wheel of an iPod and notice: Feel that throb? That’s your id saying mmmmmmm.
What? What’s that you say? Why yes, other tech companies have changed the world, too. Microsoft, for example. They invaded the global cube-farm and made everyone’s workday a bit more bloated and annoying and sad and just a little uglier, buggy as hell, frustrating, virusy and lonely and numbing. Truly, it has been quite an impressive accomplishment.
It is strange how much better even Windows seems on my Mac than it did on a PC. That’s not fair because the iMac has a larger monitor and is faster, but there is something else …
David Pogue ran a test:
On the show, we did a test. We blew up a photograph to 16 x 24 inches at a professional photo lab. One print had 13-megapixel resolution; one had 8; the third had 5. Same exact photo, down-rezzed twice, all three printed at the same poster size. I wanted to hang them all on a wall in Times Square and challenge passersby to see if they could tell the difference.
Even the technician at the photo lab told me that I was crazy, that there’d be a huge difference between 5 megapixels and 13.
Bottom line, no one could tell the difference: “I’m telling you, there was NO DIFFERENCE.”
NewMexiKen installed Windows Vista (Release Candidate 1) on my iMac today. There are still a few tweaks left, but both systems appear to be working fine. All-in-all, including the repair of an unrelated disk problem, it took less than 90 minutes.
Vista is real purty on the 20-inch Apple monitor.
Update: Some small problems in Windows with drivers and software, partly related to increased security in Vista. Just bugs that needed workarounds. Windows quite fast on iMac with 1GB RAM. Windows partition using only 10% of iMac hard drive with room to spare for software.
I put Windows on the Mac because I have a couple of Windows programs without Mac equivalents, one important to me. With free software (BootCamp from Apple and Vista from Microsoft) I’ve now got six more months to wean myself. (My copy of Windows Vista expires June 1, 2007.)
NewMexiKen has seen no references to this on the internets, but Firefox 2.0 has rather consistently frozen up on me since it was a beta. I go to start it and the little icon in my dock just jumps up and down but nothing happens. I have to force quit and start over, sometimes more than once. (Mac version). I have the latest download.
Anyone else having this type of issue?
No browser is perfect — and I do like Camino 1.1 (a beta) quite a bit — but I’d probably use Firefox the most if it didn’t aggravate me so.
The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) has compiled an index to Apple documents on the care and feeding of iPods.
Shopping for computers and other high-tech products has always been a challenge, partly because the manufacturers and retailers erect a tower of techno-babble terminology to confuse you into spending more money, and to make poorly trained salespeople who merely memorize jargon seem smart.
This year, that tower of babble is higher than ever, as new terms have come into being, and old ones have come to the fore. So, here’s a quick glossary of some of the current techno terms you may encounter when shopping for a computer, television, digital camera or cellphone this holiday season.
Learn the new terms at Personal Technology from The Wall Street Journal.
Born from Paul Allens desire to give back to the city where he and Bill Gates spent their early years with Microsoft, STARTUP opens Nov. 18 to the general public, and offers countless items from Allens own collection. Dozens of displays take the visitor on a tour from the computer eras dawn to the present day.
Its relics carry a certain mystic power, starting with the entrance hallways pre-revolutionary murmurs. There is a Frieden S10 calculator from the 1930s. IBM 700 Series vacuum tubes sit before an ancient Big Blue ad describing them as “fingers you can count on.” A television plays a public information movie about “machines that can practically think,” a self-parodying artifact of the 1950s. Behind a glass screen stands a UNIVAC 1 mainframes control desk. Upon it is an OQO, nearly invisible amid the electromechanical monoliths myriad of buttons of lights.
“Its educating people about history,” Aydelott said. “When I started university, I was using punchcards. When I left I was using an Apple.”
And where is the city Paul Allen and Bill Gates spent their “early years”? Why it’s Albuquerque — and Startup is in our very own New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science.
[As elsewhere, the apostrophe key appears not to work at Gear Factor.]
Chances are that in the past week youve received an e-mail in your inbox that pretends to be from your bank, e-commerce vendor, or other on-line site. Hopefully you[‘]ve realized that many times this e-mail is fake – a phishing e-mail. The sender phisher of these fake e-mails wants you to click on the link in the e-mail and go to a phishing Web site – which will look just like the Web site of the company being phished. Once on the phishers Web site they hope to obtain your account, financial, credit and even identity information. Of course not every e-mail you receive is a phish. In fact you should expect your bank or e-commerce vendor to send you legitimate e-mail. But how can you tell the difference? Well that[‘]s what the Phishing IQ test is all about – give it a try.
NewMexiKen scored six correct out of 10. Not very good.
The SonicWALL people seem to have a problem with apostrophes. Funny, because one of their clues to phishing is bad grammar.
According to Yahoo! News:
Both IE7 and Firefox have built-in antiphishing features designed to alert you when you’ve hit a fraudulent site. With Microsoft’s browser, antiphishing is turned on by default. Each Web site you visit is checked against a database maintained by Microsoft, and known frauds are blocked.
Firefox has two antiphishing options. With the first, the sites you visit are checked against a local database on your computer. With the second, the sites you visit are checked against a live database maintained by Google.
In the SmartWare test, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 7 blocked 690 known phishing sites, or 66.35 percent of the total. In contrast, Firefox blocked 78.85 percent when using a local antiphishing database and 81.54 percent when using the online database.
Note that testing was on Internet Explorer 7. Internet Explorer 6 is much less secure. Upgrade to 7.
Even people who love PowerPoint have no shortage of gripes about it. Over the years, the software has been blamed for boring people senseless. The phrase “Death by PowerPoint” is common corporate parlance. Some companies and conference organizers have prohibited PowerPoint, and the press perennially skewers it as a thought-free plague. One legal scholar, tongue-in-cheek, proposed a constitutional amendment banning its use.
Yet, there are an estimated 30 million PowerPoint presentations given each day around the world, inviting the question: Why, if so many people dread presentations, do we still see so many of them?
Read more from WSJ.com.
And don’t forget the Gettysburg Cemetery Dedication in PowerPoint.
Apple® today announced it is teaming up with Air France, Continental, Delta, Emirates, KLM and United to deliver the first seamless integration between iPod® and in-flight entertainment systems. These six airlines will begin offering their passengers iPod seat connections which power and charge their iPods during flight and allow the video content on their iPods to be viewed on the their seat back displays.
The pilots will be watching and listening to their iPods, too.
On election day, here’s one more thing we can learn from Abraham Lincoln. An excerpt:
When he used an electronic message Lincoln maximized its impact by using carefully chosen words. His August 1864 telegram to General Grant, “Hold on with a bull-dog grip, and chew and choke” could not have been more explicitly expressed. Emails, on the other hand, have tended to become the communications equivalent of casual Fridays, substituting comfort and ease for discipline and rigor.
Good stuff.
of having only a cell phone. Not one election call, automated or otherwise.
Apple has announced plans to open a new retail store at the ABQ Uptown mall in Albuquerque, New Mexico on Wednesday, Nov. 1 at 10:00 AM. The store will be Apple’s first in New Mexico.
— Macworld
If you’re running Windows you need spyware protection. “Windows Defender is a free program that helps you stay productive by protecting your computer against pop-ups, slow performance and security threats caused by spyware and other potentially unwanted software.”
NewMexiKen has had good success with Defender (and its beta predecessor Windows AntiSpyware).
According to David Pogue at The New York Times some company did a survey of 20,000 help calls it received, pro-rated for percentage of units in the market, and scored the companies (higher is better):
Lenovo/IBM: 243
Apple: 201
HP/Compaq: 12
Dell: 4
Gateway: 12
Not sure what these scores mean, if anything, but I won’t be buying a Dell anytime soon.
Firefox 2.0 leap frogs Internet Explorer 7.
Walt Mossberg takes a look at Internet Explorer 7 — now available — and finds “that it’s much improved.”
But, more importantly, he adds, “It’s mostly a catch-up release, adding to IE some features long present in Firefox and other browsers.”
Bottom line, “The new Internet Explorer is a solid upgrade, but it’s disappointing that after five years, the best Microsoft could do was to mostly catch up to smaller competitors.”
NewMexiKen continues to use Firefox and occasionally Safari (Mac only). Firefox 2.0, not quite ready for prime time, has some nice new features.
Meanwhile, my reaction to Windows Vista — and in all honesty I haven’t really worked with it that much — is that it will make millions of adopters very unhappy. I can’t explain it actually, it’s just a sense that it’s too different and somehow there’s no obvious consistency to all the changes.
If I had Microsoft stock I’d sell it short in the first months after the Vista release.
Report from CNET News.com:
What: Police seize computer without a warrant after husband declines permission but then wife consents.
When: 8th Circuit Court of Appeals rules on Aug. 25.
Outcome: Court decides that computer seizure was illegal and sends case back to trial judge for further proceedings.
Follow the link to read about the case.
It’s better than a beta, if not quite ready for prime time. It’s the Firefox 2.0 release candidate, all operating systems.
Some nice new features — a little prettier, a spell checker for the text area (great for us bloggers), better security, improved tabbing. I’ve been using the beta and have been pleased with the changes, though it does seem to crash on start-up too often (Mac !?!?).
There is big new security issue with Internet Explorer, so you might want to consider Firefox or the release candidate (Windows only) of Internet Explorer 7. It’s a big improvement over IE6.
