Windows Tips and Tricks

Walter Mossberg thinks so. He recently gave a talk in Princeton, NJ where I live (except in the winter). I’m away so I missed the talk but there’s a report of it in the local newspaper:

Prominent technology journalist Walt Mossberg came to Princeton University on Wednesday bearing a message of the future: The Internet, for all its current pervasiveness, has only just begun its expansion into every corner of American life.

”People are going to live a life where you’re always going to be online,” said Mr. Mossberg.

Mossberg may very well be right in his picture of the future but I am not personally enamored of the idea of always being online. I already wonder at the willingness of so many people to be slaves to their cell phone. Everywhere I go, I see people constantly having to answer their phone or feeling obliged to call people up, no matter where they are. I seem to be in the minority but I have no interest in being tethered to a phone or the Internet every minute of my life.

I suppose that by now most of us are reluctantly accepting the fact that what passes for service these days is pretty poor. I have already commented on the level of tech support at major companies. It isn’t just the outsourcing to script readers in faraway lands, however. Some companies don’t seem to have any human beings working for them. Their Web sites have no links to real people, only FAQs that are so general that they are uninformative. Just try to get hold of a real person at Yahoo, for example.

Then there are those companies that provide telephone numbers but only have automatic answering machines and make you push one button after another only to get some generic recording that is of no help. For some assistance in finding a real human, my SeniorNet colleague Joel May points to a service called Bringo at www.nophonetrees.com/. According to the site:

Stop Talking to Machines and Talk to a Real Human
Tired of dialing 1-800 numbers and not being able to get through to a human who can help you?
BRINGO cuts through all of that so you don’t have to. That’s right, BRINGO has conquered phone trees.

Here’s how it works:

1. Find the company you’d like to call by category (credit cards, mortgages, loans, health care)
2. Enter your phone # (we will never disclose your phone number to anyone, not even your mother!).
3. Wait a few seconds while we navigate the phone tree.
4. When we call you back, pick up your phone and you’re done. No more phone trees

I haven’t tried Bringo, but if you have any experience with it, let us know how well it works.

Related to my previous post is the nebulous concept of “intellectual property”. I was a presumed producer of “intellectual property” for years but I never realized that I was supposed to lay claim to it and patent it or copyright it or somehow “own” it. Being just a naïve academic, I thought knowledge was something to be shared, something that belonged to everybody. So I just published and hoped that what I discovered was useful to other people.

Nowadays knowledge has gotten all mixed up with ideas of property and an interesting article by Cory Doctorow on the subject of intellectual property is at the Guardian. I think it’s worth a read. Doctorow ends his article:

If we’re going to achieve a lasting peace in the knowledge wars, it’s time to set property aside, time to start recognising that knowledge - valuable, precious, expensive knowledge - isn’t owned. Can’t be owned. The state should regulate our relative interests in the ephemeral realm of thought, but that regulation must be about knowledge, not a clumsy remake of the property system.

Current software patent law and policy is a disgrace. The patent office has been allowing absurd patents such as figuring out how to do something with one mouse click instead of two. Many or maybe all software patents should never have been allowed. A piece of code should be no more patentable than a solution to an algebraic equation. Certainly, there is intellectual work and maybe even insight involved but the same holds for a lot of unpatentable basic scientific research. Suppose someone could have patented the Second Law of Themodynamics or the Schroedinger Equation of quantum mechanics? I have written computer programs and I have published scientific papers without expecting to patent any of it. The idea is ridiculous yet we have the present farcical situation where someone who decides to use a linked list instead of an array can get a patent.

There are hopeful signs that maybe people are starting to recognize the danger of silly patents and how they are seriously interfering with innovation. Ars Technica has a good article about recent developments. There is a new movement, “End Software Patents”, that is trying to ban software patents entirely. As the article points out:

The patent system has traditionally excluded coverage of innate scientific truths and mathematical expressions. There is no basis in law for assuming that software methods are patentable, but some dubious legal rulings issued by the Federal Circuit after its inception in the 1980s have created legal precedents for software patentability.

It concludes:

Patent reform proposals are gaining momentum in congress, but largely fail to address the software patent issue. The ESP project’s efforts to eliminate software patents by working through the court system could have very positive results for the entire software industry by helping to put an end to the destructive gridlock and patent trolling that has increasingly stifled technological innovation in software development.

Even at its peak, AOL was consistently rated at the bottom of the national dial-up ISPs. When I had to teach computer classes using AOL, it was a frustrating experience using their dreadful software. It was a poor service but it trapped many newcomers with its ubiquitous offerings and omnipresent disks. Once snared, it was difficult to get out. The proprietary and non-convertible formats used by AOL for email, addresses, favorites, etc. made moving to another ISP very difficult. (Not to mention that canceling the service was no easy task.) The spread of broadband finally convinced many to drop AOL but millions are still subscribers. If you are one of those who feels you are stuck with AOL because of all your personal data being in their format, PC Magazine has some help. A recent article describes the situation:

Chewing off your own leg to escape from AOL was never actually required, but for many years the process seemed nearly as painful. AOL’s traditional modus operandi kept subscribers shackled to the service even if they hated it. Admittedly, the company has made efforts of late to “open” the service quite a bit and has made most of its content free. Maybe AOL has finally realized that genuine customer loyalty is rarely created via force. But legions of captives still pay monthly ransom to AOL a decade or more after installing one of the unavoidable AOL start-up disks from the nineties. Many others remain stuck with AOL’s maddening desktop client software, even though the service is free, because they don’t know how to convert their data.

The article describes some commercial software that can help you escape:

Fortunately, a number of independent developers now offer utilities for converting AOL data into less proprietary forms. The most seamless product I found was ePreserver from Connected Software (www.connectedsw.com), which makes the technical part of the conversion a snap.

Update: Walter Mossberg mentions http://www.trueswitch.com/ in his latest mailbox column.

Over the years I have mentioned a number of free utilities from Karen Kenworthy. Her backup program Replicator is one that I use a lot and it has just been updated. Here’s the description:

Automatically backup files, directories, even entire drives! Karen’s Replicator copies selected files from one drive/folder to another. Source and Destination folders can reside anywhere on your network.

Options include repeated copies at intervals as short as a few minutes, or as long as several months, copy only files that have changed, and the replication of folder and file deletions.

New features allow you to specify which files should not be copied, and also which days a file should be skipped!

If you have certain folders that are frequently changed, this program provides an excellent adjunct to full system backups.

Norton anti-virus and other Symantec programs are notorious for being nearly impossible to remove. They come with uninstall programs but they leave behind significant pieces of these limpet-like programs. Symantec even has special tools just to remove their stuff but even they still leave things behind. For example, at least one DLL and some Registry entries are left to guard against people installing and uninstalling trial copies of Symantec’s Norton anti-virus. In other words, in the name of Digital Rights Management, your computer is permanently infected by Symantec. The problem is that other security programs may have conflicts with these residues. One site that gives a prescription to get really free of Symantec is here. Scott Dunn discusses the general problem at Windows Secrets.

Probably nobody will use all of them but you may find at least one or two additions for your current software in a list from PC World entitled, 50 Ways To Make Your Software Do More:

Stuck with a boring browser? Wish that Word could handle more tasks? Feel hemmed in by Photoshop? You don’t have to toss (or upgrade) your existing software to get new features and tools. Sometimes a plug-in, an add-on, or even a simple tweak can enable your computer to do tricks you never even thought of before. We rounded up more than 50 of our favorite tools and tips for unlocking extra value from popular browsers, productivity applications, and multimedia tools.

Where it will all go I don’t know but today’s announcement by Adobe of a system called “Air” that blends the Internet and the PC may be a hint of the future. The New York Times has a substantial article about the Flash-based project and how it may shape up a big battle with Microsoft. Here’s an excerpt:

The battle will largely pit Microsoft’s 2.2 million .Net software developers against the more than one million Adobe Flash developers, who have until now developed principally for the Web, as well as a vast number of other Web-oriented designers who use open-source software development tools that are referred to as AJAX.

For political and/or religious reasons, various governments have blocked Web sites from access in their countries. On Sunday, Pakistan blocked YouTube, not just from Pakistan, but from much of the rest of the world. The AP reports:

On Friday, the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority ordered 70 Internet service providers to block access to YouTube.com, because of anti-Islamic movies on the video-sharing site, which is owned by Google Inc.

The authority did not specify what the offensive material was, but a PTA official said the ban concerned a trailer for an upcoming film by Dutch lawmaker Geert Wilders, who has said he plans to release a movie portraying Islam as fascist and prone to inciting violence against women and homosexuals.

The block was intended to cover only Pakistan, but extended to about two-thirds of the global Internet population, starting at 1:47 p.m. EST Sunday, according to Renesys Corp., a Manchester, N.H., firm that keeps track of the pathways of the Internet for telecommunications companies and other clients.