Neat Net Tricks

My friend Bill Pytlovany of WinPatrol fame, had this to say in his blog about the Recycle Bin. Ain’t it the truth!

Dell says more than one-half their customers are still using Windows XP. Their Director of Product Management reports that they “… have a visible number of customers…who are waiting for Windows 7 and have already put plans in place to target the transition to Windows.” In view of Vista’s really rotten (but well-earned) reputation, this report doesn’t surprise me at all. My main machine still uses Windows XP and if it keeps belching along, I may have to “graduate” to a later operating system but I’ll be kicking and screaming all the way.

Or am I just against progress and innovation?

I read where Microsoft is planning next week to launch a search engine, Kumo, to compete with Google and Yahoo. I’ll keep an open – though skeptical – mind and see what Kumo can offer that isn’t already available in many search engines.

I know that successful search engines with mega-million hits provide a profitable place to display ads. So, the motive as usual is $$$$$$$$.

Meanwhile, I wonder. Do we really need still one more way to look up the same information on the Web? Could the Redmond engineers better spend their time and resources in figuring out how to make Vista (or Windows 7) work? Or is that just not profitable?

NBC’s Today show reported about a recent experiment in Philadelphia in which a teen was asked to give up his cell phone, computer, iPod, and video games for 10 days. This was quite an adjustment since he was sending an average of 467 text messages a day, nearly 30 per waking hour.

He found that he now had much more time available to visit the gym, do his homework, plan for the prom, improve his grades, visit his friends “in the flesh”, and in general communicate with his family.

A psychologist commented that … if you put limits on how much technology your kids are allowed to use and the amount of time they spend on it, it has a huge positive effect on the family and in the child’s life.

So, is this any new discovery?

I was all set for a free lunch (yeah, I know, they always say there’s no such thing as a free lunch). The promotion required installing a program that would crank out a coupon with a unique bar code (thus protecting against duplication). Problem was, our local KFC apparently doesn’t have a scanner for those bar codes and copiers have been busy in this town. Now, they refuse to honor any coupons and gave us instead a certificate we are supposed to mail in to the corporate office to get yet another — you guessed it, coupon!

I suspect their chicken pantry has taken quite a lickin’ this week. Or, put another way, maybe after all this fiasco, beef really IS what’s for dinner.

With three million ATM victim frauds, I’m glad I haven’t visited a cash machine in months. Here’s how the slick con artists do it at http://www.trutv.com/video/real-hustle/cash-machine-hustle.html?link=truTVshlk

Described as “the biggest Internet revolution for a generation”, Wolfram Alpha will be released this month. It’s a search engine, but not just any search engine. According to the report at http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/an-invention-that-could-change-the-internet-for-ever-1678109.html “….If you ask it to compare the height of Mount Everest to the length of the Golden Gate Bridge, it will tell you. Or ask what the weather was like in London on the day John F Kennedy was assassinated, it will cross-check and provide the answer. Ask it about D sharp major, it will play the scale. Type in ‘10 flips for four heads’ and it will guess that you need to know the probability of coin-tossing. If you want to know when the next solar eclipse over Chicago is, or the exact current location of the International Space Station, it can work it out….”

Well, I guess I know why this one’s called a “tortured soul”. Can you imagine downloading 1 Gigabyte to play a free game? Try this one on your dialup connection!