I often mention the many useful free applications for system administration that Sysinternals creates. Many of the troubleshooting utilities have now been bundled in a suite. Many of these are quite specialized and not generally useful to the home PC user but many others like Autoruns are worth having by almost anybody. Go here for a list of what’s included and the download link.
You can personally participate in the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) project that is discussed in the previous post. OLPC has a campaign where you donate a laptop and get one for your own child:
Since November 12th, OLPC has been offering a limited-time Give One Get One program in the United States and Canada. During Give One Get One, you can donate the revolutionary XO laptop to a child in a developing nation, and also receive one for the child in your life in recognition of your contribution. Thanks to a growing interest in the program, we are extending Give One Get One until the end of the year. Through this extension, and the increasing public interest in OLPC, we hope to give many more children the opportunity to grow, explore, learn and express themselves.
Several years ago, MIT professor Nicholas Negroponte started a non-profit project called One Laptop per Child (OLPC) to help bring computing to poor children around the world. To their shame, Microsoft and Intel have tried to kill the idea. Bill Gates personally went out of his way to make disparaging remarks and Microsoft has done what it could to scuttle the project. The Wall Street Journal put it this way, “How a Computer for the Poor Got Stomped by Tech Giants“. Both Intel and Microsoft went into competition with OLPC by launching for-profit ventures to sell computing technology to developing nations.
Intel has softened its opposition somewhat and is now actually participating in the OLPC project to a certain degree. Intel’s objection stemmed from the fact that OLPC was using AMD chips (they were cheaper). And of course, Microsoft is dead set against anything that doesn’t use Windows and OLPC is a Linux machine.
Bill Gates is trying to make a name as a big giver to charity but there is no charity when it comes to Windows. Microsoft is a company where billions of dollars roll in routinely. How much could losing the profit on even 100 million low-cost machines for poor kids affect Microsoft’s bottom line? Gates and Ballmer could finance the OLPC project with their pocket change.
In the United States, tomorrow is the major holiday Thanksgiving. I wish a happy Thanksgiving to all who celebrate this American tradition. For many, it will begin a four-day break. For those who might like to get in a little reading, here is a link to the New York Times 100 Notable Books of the Year.
Tomorrow I will be overeating along with some twenty or so family members and in-laws. Blogging will be suspended until Monday.
I can’t personally vouch for its usefulness but CNET has a post about a new site for information on caring for the elderly. The site is called Caring.com and CNET says:
Another tool has emerged for Baby Boomers and Gen Xers faced with caring for an aging parent or grandparent.
Caring.com, which debuted Monday, offers how-to information on caring for elderly family members, whether they live in their own home, with a family member, or in a facility. The topics include providing in-person and long-distance support, financial and legal advice, and end-of-life issues
The heading of this post is the title of a satirical piece over at Google Blogoscoped. Needless to say, it isn’t in praise of how Microsoft does things. Here’s the opening premise:
Today I want to ponder the question: what if Microsoft, not Google, had created Gmail? What would be the differences in that web mail client for users today? What if we apply some of the same design rules that brought us Hotmail, for instance?
Keyboard shortcuts can be useful and periodically I post about some collection of them. Microsoft has a page with many shortcuts applicable in Windows XP. Some are the usual ones that have been posted before but there are also some more esoteric ones listed. For example, there are shortcuts given that apply when using one of the management consoles or using the Character Map.
Perhaps of more interest to average PC users are the shortcuts for dialog boxes:
• CTRL+TAB (Move forward through the tabs)
• CTRL+SHIFT+TAB (Move backward through the tabs)
• TAB (Move forward through the options)
• SHIFT+TAB (Move backward through the options)
• ALT+Underlined letter (Perform the corresponding command or select the corresponding option)
• ENTER (Perform the command for the active option or button)
• SPACEBAR (Select or clear the check box if the active option is a check box)
• Arrow keys (Select a button if the active option is a group of option buttons)
• F1 key (Display Help)
• F4 key (Display the items in the active list)
• BACKSPACE (Open a folder one level up if a folder is selected in the Save As or Open dialog box)
A beta release of the next version of the Firefox browser is out and is receiving some good reviews. Ars Technica says:
Firefox 3 delivers an impressive assortment of new features and interface improvements. There are lots of changes under the hood as well, which improve performance and reduce resource consumption.
At ZDNet, Adrian Kingsley-Hughes writes:
Without a doubt the Firefox 3.0 UI has been dramatically improved. Compare version 3 to version 2 and you instantly see the difference. Everything is brighter, clearer, and easier to access. Things that should be simple, such as bookmarking, saving passwords, and finding words and phrases in the text of a web page are now simple. Page zooming is brilliant, as is the feature that resumes interrupted downloads.
Note that this is a beta release and is intended for testing only so hold off on downloading it unless you are prepared for a buggy experience.
The media and blogosphere are full of stories about the new ebook reader from Amazon. Actually, it is more than a book reader and also offers various wireless services through the Sprint network. Today’s Wall Street Journal has an article comparing the new device to the iPod and says:
Besides ease of downloading, Mr. Bezos believes Amazon can win over consumers with attractive pricing for content. It is initially offering more than 90,000 electronic versions of books for Kindle, with best-sellers and new releases priced at $9.99 and classics as low as $1.99. Newspapers such as the New York Times and The Wall Street Journal and magazines such as Fortune will be available at monthly subscription fees.
Kindle users will be able to access the Web via wireless connection on the Sprint network, which is fairly extensive in the U.S. Users won’t receive bills for wireless access, which taps the same high-speed data network as advanced cellphones.
The device has a hefty price of $399. Various companies have tried marketing ebook readers with little success and I wonder if Bezos isn’t overestimating the demand.
Development of service pack 3 for XP continues on its timetable for release sometime in the first half of 2008. According to Mary Jo Foley:
Microsoft has begun rolling out to testers a near-final Release Candidate (RC) build of Windows XP Service Pack (SP) 3.
Testers said they began pulling down the bits from Microsoft’s private download site on November 18.
Users of Windows XP shouldn’t expect anything noticeably new in this service pack. In a comment on Foley’s post, Adrian Kingsley-Hughes says:
I’m running RC of the SP for both Vista and XP on systems here (not any critical systems thought …) and what I’m seeing is that XP SP3 looks like mostly bug fixes and the impact of performance isn’t really noticeable.