Alas, discussion of PC subjects on the Internet is all too often not a reasoned discourse but a rancorous clamor that sounds more like the frenzied exhortations of religious fanatics than a rational comparison of merits and flaws. Use Macs and be saved! Switch to Linux and escape the evil of Microsoft! Use Windows or else!

In the nature of things, the majority of the discussion is by Windows advocates. In addition to the Windows religious sect, there are the numerous technical professionals who owe their livelihood, directly or indirectly, to Microsoft. This large group includes some influential people who write about Windows for a living. Without impugning their basic integrity, I think it is fair to say that this economic dependence on Microsoft has the inevitable effect of coloring the outlook of many in the computer industry and in technical journalism. Although they may try to be balanced in their judgments, it is only human for them to be affected, often subconsciously, by their Microsoft ties and friends. Of course, there are also columnists and bloggers who are professional detractors of Microsoft but they are much fewer in number.

The problem of objectivity is not new. Print media have had a similar problem with economics creating bias. If Dell is your biggest advertiser, do you pan their PCs? But respectable print publications have a wall between content and advertising. What is new on the Internet are the many conflicts of interest and the fact that these conflicts of interest are often not revealed or are indirect and not apparent. There are some straight-shooters out there and I treasure them but they are too few.

Having vented some of my frustration about the nature of discussion and reporting on the Internet, I think it appropriate to repeat where I stand; I have no ties with the computer industry and I view things as a consumer and educator. I don’t have to sell anything.

©2009 The PC Informant. All Rights Reserved.

Let me spell this out for you. Some people out there used no fewer than six Windows botnets to go after this one guy. And, in the process, they knocked out, for hours at a time, most of the major social networks.

How did this happen? It happened because Windows is an insecure piece of junk. Anyone who knows anything about security knows that this kind of disaster was only a matter of time. Windows botnets are responsible for DDoS attacks and most of e-mail spam.

You cannot secure Windows. Microsoft keeps saying that they will, and they always fail. Period. Windows has been insecure since day one and it’s still going to be insecure when Windows 7 shows up.

As you can tell, Vaughan-Nichols is no fan of Windows and he is a little over the top. However, the kernel of his argument has validity. Of course, the situation is more complex than just blaming Windows security. It is true that, prior to Windows XP SP2, Windows security was a sieve. But defenders of Windows point out that Microsoft has worked very hard to upgrade security in Windows and that Vista and Windows 7 contain many security features. I think that a knowledgeable person who is careful can feel pretty secure with a newer Windows system. But that little phrase, “knowledgeable person who is careful,” is the catch.

What the technical professionals seem to ignore is that the Internet has hundreds of millions of users who are not knowledgeable persons and who are not careful. These are people who understand little or nothing about PCs or Windows. Furthermore (and this is what the technical professionals can’t seem to fathom), these are people who have absolutely no interest in learning anything about PCs or Windows. They won’t go beyond learning how to turn the PC on and memorizing a few icons to click on, no matter how much you preach to them. There are also myriads of PC users who do not understand how or do not want to be bothered with constantly applying the never-ending parade of security updates. In fact, the security firm Secunia says that the majority of PC users probably have unpatched applications. And these unpatched PCs are vulnerable to malware. Combine that with the large numbers of people who will click on anything or who download from dubious sites and you get botnets. So to some extent I agree with the Vaughan-Nichols comments. I see no possible end to the botnet problem until a simpler, consumer-oriented Web appliance is the choice for average Internet surfers.

I do think that Microsoft has been so oriented to the desktop that it has not understood what a big change occurred when hundreds of millions of technically unskilled users started using the Internet. Recent announcements about cloud computing indicate that Microsoft may be beginning to wean itself from the cash cows of Windows and Office. Now, if Redmond could only stop selling an operating system far too complex to hundreds of millions of users who haven’t a clue how to use it properly. It shouldn’t be hard for Microsoft to come up with a simpler, safer operating system designed for all those people who just want an Internet appliance and only sell the more complicated version to the enterprise and those who know something about Windows. Perhaps, the threat (slim as it currently is) of low-cost notebooks with a Google operating system or other Linux variation will spur Microsoft on. I hope so. Unfortunately, Microsoft’s reaction so far has been to try to limit netbooks as much as possible. For example, see this PC World post.

©2009 The PC Informant. All Rights Reserved.

©2009 The PC Informant. All Rights Reserved.

Have you been meaning to learn how to type, but never seem to get around actually starting the lessons? Wish you could bang out dozens of words per minute, but don’t want to shell out for typing software? Well for those of you who were not lucky enough to spend a few hours per week under the expert guidance of Mavis Beacon during your high school years, TypingWeb is here to fill the gab.

TypingWeb is a web application that offers a wide variety of typing exercises from beginner to advanced, right inside of your browser window. You can register with the site in order to keep track of your progress, or go through the lessons without registering.

©2009 The PC Informant. All Rights Reserved.

©2009 The PC Informant. All Rights Reserved.

©2009 The PC Informant. All Rights Reserved.

“Like the physical universe, the digital universe is expanding. In fact, exploding,” says John Gantz, a researcher for IDC.

For the last three years, Mr. Gantz has been commissioned by storage provider EMC to count the number of bits created each year. And each year he reports that IDC previously underestimated the explosion of information.

And how many bits are there? I am not sure how accurate the count is but according to IDC:

In 2008 alone, IDC says the world created 487 billion gigabytes of information, up 73% from 2007. That was 3% more than it forecast at the beginning of the year.

Like the US federal budget or intergalactic distances, that number is more than the human mind can conceptualize.

©2009 The PC Informant. All Rights Reserved.

By any reasonable analysis, eBay should have been a nightmare for archaeologists, allowing looted goods a new outlet, one that eliminated any cloak-and-dagger aspects of the illicit trade in antiquities by allowing the trade to flourish in plain sight, hidden by the anonymity of users’ accounts and the sheer volume of goods changing hands. But, according to at least one archaeologist who specializes in the civilizations of pre-Columbian South America, that hasn’t been the case at all. Instead, by swamping the market with fakes, eBay has made forgery a far more lucrative business, and destroyed the economics of looting.

Charles Stanish, a professor of anthropology at UCLA, argues that making fakes and selling them on eBay is easier than having to steal the real stuff. He writes

Back in the pre-eBay days, the cost of acquiring and selling an antiquity was high. The actual looter was usually paid little, but various middlemen down the line added huge costs. During my 25 years of working in the Andes, I have often seen this dynamic at work. In years past, transporting an object was a big expense, even for portable artifacts, and the potential for arrest added to the total cost of doing business. In addition, the expense of authentication, conservation, and occasional restoration of the pieces, made buying and selling quality antiquities a wealthy person’s vice.

He goes on to say that what eBay has done is to provide a convenient marketplace for fakes (sold as originals, of course) :

But a very curious thing has happened. It appears that electronic buying and selling has actually hurt the antiquities trade.

How is it possible? The short answer is that many of the primary “producers” of the objects have shifted from looting sites to faking antiquities.

©2009 The PC Informant. All Rights Reserved.

The company said a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission that while its board of directors hasn’t made a final decision, it “currently anticipates that it would initiate a process to spin off one or more parts of the businesses of AOL to Time Warner’s stockholders, in one or a series of transactions.”

©2009 The PC Informant. All Rights Reserved.

Oracle said Monday that it will buy Sun Microsystems for $9.50 a share in cash, or about $5.6 billion excluding debt, in a deal that plunges Larry Ellison & Co. into the hardware market. The company added that the acquisition of Java “is the most important software Oracle has ever acquired.”

©2009 The PC Informant. All Rights Reserved.