Archive for October, 2008
Finding the right product review
Yesterday, I wrote about the question of the reliability of online product reviews. By coincidence, Katherine Boehret was also writing about online reviews at the Mossberg Solution. In particular, she talks about a site that gathers and filters reviews; it is called Buzzillions.com and she writes:
But reviews don’t always identify their authors’ true motives. One [...]
Shady Microsoft tactics in Africa
Microsoft has always been a bare-knuckle competitor and its tactics have sometimes pushed the ethical envelope pretty far. Anti-trust judgments have toned down some of Microsoft’s more egregious practices in the US and Europe but it seems to be up to its old tricks in Africa. Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal had an article on [...]
When humans should take back control
Computers are wonderful tools but they are just that, tools. The ultimate responsibility for the tasks of the world remains with humans. And when humans abdicate that responsibility, chaos or worse can happen. Although much of the present financial crisis is the result of greed and mistaken ideology, an over-reliance on complex computer models has [...]
How trustworthy are online reviews?
Before I buy an appliance, consumer electronics, or any reasonably expensive item, I check to see what online reviewers have to say. But how reliable are these reviews? I’ve learned that you have to look at quite a few reviews to get anything like an unbiased picture. Some writers of reviews are a little strange, [...]
Windows 7 news
The pace of news about Windows 7 is picking up. Microsoft is starting to release more information and is showing a pre-beta build at the Professional Developers Conference (PDC) in Los Angeles today. Here are some links with news about features and some screen shots of the new OS:
Lifehacker
Gizmodo
ActiveWin
Ed Bott
Added later: PC Magazine
Apple earnings approach Microsoft
Recently released financial numbers for Apple and Microsoft were an eye-opener, at least for me. The Apple Insider reports:
While Microsoft executives like to talk about Apple as an insignificant company with less than 5% of the worldwide market share of all PCs and servers sold, the Mac maker now has more cash than Microsoft and [...]
Windows Azure
If you hear the term “Windows Azure” and wonder what it is, it is Microsoft’s new cloud computing platform. Microsoft is hosting the Professional Developers Conference (PDC) in Los Angeles this week and is unveiling a number of things.
Windows Azure is intended for business but might some day have consumer services. Ars Technica reports:
Ray Ozzie, [...]
Smart phone as a computer replacement
Can smart phones like the iPhone and the Google phone replace the laptop? The Wall Street Journal has an article, Time to Leave the Laptop Behind, that says:
These souped-up cousins of ordinary cellphones, with email and other Internet functions, have become much more powerful in the past year. So powerful, in fact, that they can [...]
Rating USB flash drives
Speaking of external drives, the USB flash drive has now become almost indispensable. As I have commented before, the cost just keeps coming down. There are many different brands and what many PC users may not know is that the speed of USB drives varies a lot. At Extreme Tech, Michael J. Miller reports on [...]
Big external hard drives
Are you looking for some large capacity storage for all those songs, movies and TV shows you have? External hard drives with 1 TB (1000 GB) have come way down in price. Tom’s Hardware reviews four offerings:
It’s been interesting to watch storage prices drop in recent months. Hard drives as large as 750 GB have [...]
A quicker startup
One of the seeming bottlenecks in computing is the time that it takes for a machine to boot up and load Windows. I’m not referring, of course, to starting from standby but to a boot from a completely shut down machine. In fact, the technology for a quick startup has been around for a long [...]