Windows Tips and Tricks

The question of how much the Web (often exemplified by Google) is changing our thought processes is being discussed more and more. I previously posted about the article in the Atlantic by Nicholas Carr that asked the question, Is Google Making Us Stupid?. Now, Andrew Sullivan has written in the Sunday Times (of Britain), Google is giving us pond-skater minds. He asks:

Are we fast losing the capacity to think deeply, calmly and seriously? Have we all succumbed to internet attention-deficit disorder? Or, to put it more directly: if you’re looking at a monitor right now, are you still reading this, or are you about to click on another link?

He goes on to say:

I don’t want to be fatalistic here. As Carr points out, previous innovations – writing itself, printing, radio, television – have all shifted the tone of our civilisation without destroying it. And the capacity of the web to retrieve the old and ancient and make them new and accessible again is a small miracle.

Right now, we may be maximally overwhelmed by all this accessible information – but the time may come when our mastery of the new world allows us to gain more perspective on it.

Here’s hoping. Shallowness, after all, does not necessarily preclude depth. We just have to find a new equilibrium between the two. We need to be both pond-skaters and scuba divers. We need to master the ability to access facts while reserving time and space to do something meaningful with them.

What do you think? Is the Internet making us dumber?

With the exception of economists and others who believe the absurdities of government statistics, everybody knows that inflation is heating up and that food prices have been on a tear. MarketWatch has an article that discusses how to use the Web to save a little money:

The cost of groceries is on the rise, as is the price of auto fuel that it takes to get to the store. It’s enough to turn carefree spenders into coupon clippers. Luckily, the Internet is making it easier for consumers to scope out deals on groceries, restaurant meals and other necessities.

The article goes on to list a number of sites where various discount coupons can be found.

Certain questions about Windows get asked over and over. One of the recurring puzzlements for average PC users is how to alphabetize the All Programs list in the Windows XP Start Menu. As you add new programs, the list gets jumbled but it is very simple to get everything back in order. I posted something about this a few years back but it won’t hurt to come back to the subject.

To keep things ordered, open the All Programs list and right-click on any entry. (Note that clicking on a blank spot doesn’t work.) The context menu that appears will contain an entry “Sort by Name”. Click that and the list will be alphabetized. Folders will be listed first, followed by entries that are single files. The figure below illustrates the process.

A home computer is by far the most complex item that an average consumer is likely to own. Unfortunately, many of the possible uses of the standard home computer require a level of technical understanding that the average user does not have. Also a computer requires a level of routine maintenance that is more than many people can or will deal with. Security problems abound and require a vigilance that many do not exercise. Further, the economic interests of the computer industry usually do not coincide with the best interests of the consumer. For these reasons I say that home computing is currently a mess.

I have given several presentations of a talk discussing the state of home computing and the slideshow from that talk can be viewed below. I may enlarge on various points in future posts.

Speaking of media players, the never-ending parade of patches for QuickTime goes on. Apple has issued another update. Ryan Naraine writes:

Apple has shipped a highly critical QuickTime software update with patches for at least five code execution vulnerabilities haunting Windows XP, Windows Vista and Mac OS X users.

With QuickTime 7.5, Apple corrects multiple buffer overflows, memory corruption issues and URI handling flaws that could allow malicious hackers to launch exploits with QuickTime movie or image files.

The Apple download link is here.

For better or worse, multimedia files have a large and growing presence on the Web. Unfortunately, there is no one format that everybody uses. Many sites use Adobe Flash for video because the files are more compact and almost everyone has a Flash plug-in for their browser or can easily download one. However, Windows Media Player, RealMedia, and QuickTime formats are also common. Each requires a separate player or plug-in. To make matters more complicated, a large variety of compression methods exist so a given format may still require a bunch of different codecs in order to play all files. There are also other less common formats.

In other words, if you like to watch or listen to a lot of multimedia files on the Web, you need a battery of software. Windows comes with Media Player but both RealPlayer and QuickTime have to be downloaded and installed separately. Both are on my list of most disliked software. Steve Bass gives some alternatives to RealPlayer. I have previously mentioned an alternative QuickTime player.

One way around some of the format and codec problems is a universal player that can handle a variety of formats. One that I have sometimes used is VLC Media Player. You may still have to deal with RealMedia and QuickTime files separately, however.

If you have a favorite multimedia player or source of codecs, let us know.

We keep seeing stories about how security has been breached at some company and sensitive data like social security or credit card numbers stolen. Is this because the hackers are so smart? There are, in fact, some very clever hackers out there but a blog at The Wall Street Journal says incompetence makes it easy for hackers:

Hackers enjoy a reputation as computer whizzes who can break into the most sophisticated systems. They may be whizzes, but the reason for their success is that businesses rely on defenses filled with holes big enough to drive a truck through.

A new study by Verizon’s Business Risk team, which performs post-breach forensics, looked at the causes of more than 500 data-loss incidents and concluded that sloppy security procedures were partly to blame in almost every one.

Unless companies are made more accountable for losing data, the sloppy security will continue. Security costs money and companies aren’t going to worry about it until losing somebody’s personal data starts to hit their bottom line.

Tuesday, I went to a presentation on Web 2.0. The audience was primarily senior citizens and many of them were mystified by the term “Web 2.0″. Not unreasonably, they thought that such a term should mean something new and different enough that it was tangibly and obviously different from Web 1.0. Being practical people, they hadn’t realized that Web 2.0 was a nebulous buzzword and that it was nothing that required a new browser or looked all that different. The added interactivity that supposedly characterizes Web 2.0 had not struck them as something distinct from the Web pages that they had been browsing all along. They kept asking things like, “Can I use Web 2.0 with my current computer?”, or, “How will I know I’m on Web 2.0 when I’m there?”

The professional computer types should not dismiss these questions as merely those of the great unwashed masses. In fact, the questions put a finger squarely on the fact that terms like “Web 2.0″ are just jargon, more akin to advertising copy than to actual well-defined terms. They don’t help in trying to communicate about computers with the hundreds of millions of ordinary people who use PCs. Sure, the Web now has many more open APIs, more use of the Document Object Model, and more JavaScript but it’s still the Web. The average PC user doesn’t care about any of these details. They don’t care if something is called a “mashup’ or not; they only want to know if a Web site is useful.

To my mind, if you want to define a second version of the Web, it should refer to the difference that broadband has made. Broadband was a quantum leap. We now use the Web in ways that were totally unimaginable in the days of dial-up. The things that people are calling Web 2.0 are only some of the aspects of the broadband revolution.

What’s your opinion? Does the term “Web 2.0″ have any value for the average PC user?

Gina Trapani has posted a selection of useful sites for anyone who writes or just wants to look up the meaning of a word. She begins her Lifehacker article:

When you need a word’s definition, translation, pronunciation, synonym, or antonym, you don’t have to haul an enormous tome from the bookshelf, dust it off, and ruffle through its delicate pages like your grandparents used to do—you can just hop on the internet. Beside the standard-issue dictionary and spellchecker offered by most word processors and operating systems, there are several web-based language tools at your disposal that can get you just the information you need. Let’s take a look at some of the best online language tools for word nerds and regular people who just want to say that word correctly in conversation.

Did you ever get email sent back to you marked as undeliverable that you never sent in the first place? Do you get messages from some site’s spam filters saying that an email from you (that you never sent) has been determined to be spam or, worse, pornography? You are not alone. You have been “backscattered”. Your email address has been forged in the “From” line of a spam mailing.

A weakness in the current email system is that anyone can enter any address they want in the “From” line. Spammers get hold of your email address and then use it to hide the source of spam mailings. Unfortunately, there isn’t much that you can do about it once spammers have your address. It is just another of the many ways that spammers make the Internet a lot less pleasant and a lot less easy to use.