Replies

That thing is pretty cool. I wonder how much it will set you back?

Kim I beleive it has nothing to do with “being tech savvy”. It has to do with the whole reason scams work in the first place. Send someone to your mother’s door and see if they can con her into giving them her SS# in return for something free. Something tells me there is an even chance she’ll do it.

I wouldn’t quite go that far, Doc. Reason to be suspicious? Absolutely. Reason to automatically flag as a scam? Not necessarily. In this case, it’s the content, which is clearly not suitable for a mass mailout, in conjunction with the generic addressing, that elevates this into the “almost-certain scam” category without clicking on anything or checking any links.

Actually I didn’t say this as a blanket statement, forgive me if it came off that way. I stated this in the context of the OP, and to your point about about content. If someone is asking for info, or telling you that you need to click a link to fix your account, or any other such non-sense, and the e-mail doesn’t address you by name, DING! DING! DING!. That’s the dead giveaway.

To Gregwh’s post, it doesn’t take a tech or rocket scientist to recognize the signs of a scam and stop and question something. But scams proliferate because people keep falling for them. Its not just e-mail. The old scam of fixing the roof or sealing the driveway of an elderly person happens every day. Fake magazine sales people “working their way through college” still go door to door. In fact, I think I’m going to open a store that sells magic elixir…

I second Hans’s recommendation for CDBurnerXP.

Here’s the dead give away, “Dear PayPal Member,”. When an e-mail claiming to originate from a company fails to be addressed to your name, its a sure scam.

This is intriguing. It’s like a VM on a stick. I suspect that its not all that slow. VMs don’t need fast disk to run decently. I don’t have a big enough USB drive to test this out.

I really find some of the statements in the article to be very funny and out of touch with reality. “Take these plus small and medium sized firms and you really begin to see the shift to the post PC, mobile world where documents and email are less dominant as contractual and communication devices, and where mobile context is king.” Seriously? Does this guy work in a real corporate environment? Or he he buying into everyone else’s hype? Oh wait, he’s an over paid consultant (I’ve found that most consultants have a very hard time understanding the business needs of their clients unless they actually worked in that business for a number of years). In my world I’m seeing a hybrid. Documents and e-mail are not only still king, but getting them on a mobile device is equally important. Where are all those documents and a good portion of those e-mails created? Not on a mobile device.

That chart crystallizes what it’s all about. Not XBoxes, not Corporate business base, not Microsoft Office and other MS software products, none of that stuff discussed earlier. It’s about what folks are picking up and carrying with them out the door of their home or office. Microsoft wants to remain relevant in the growth of that shifting consumerism, not be relegated to being a mature company, servicing a more static customer base.

Of course MS want to remain relevant in the consumer space, but do you really think “this is what its all about”? MS is a very diversified company. As such all markets they play in are important to them, until their not. So this chart is “what its all about” in only one aspect of their business. In that one area, I agree that they are sinking and need to pull their heads out of the water. Now, note the chart’s title: Personal Computing platforms by Operating System shipment. A big change over the years that isn’t considered in these types of articles is that in corporate IT puchases of PCs, that many companies have gone from desktop refreshes every 3 years to every 5, or even 7 years. Hardware has become that reliable. So one has to wonder what this chart would look like if all installed and currently used OSes were considered. Even from a consumer view, as much as everyone wants an iPad, very few have given up using their full PC. Tablets are a nice extension, but for the most part are still toys. At some point, these same people will buy something to replace their aged PC. And that will either be a Mac or a Windows machine. Keep in mind that MS doesn’t have to sell the most licenses. Just remain competitive.

All that said, the reality of things is somewhere in the middle. Many consumers don’t need anything more than a tablet. Many more want both worlds (I’m one of these). From a corporate perspective, save for specific applications, the desktop PC is not going away anytime soon. Its true, in regard to mobile computing MS is behind the 8 ball so to speak, but mobile computing is still a toddler in terms of technological maturity so there is a lot to expect, and be desired from all players. The best is yet to come. And I certainly don’t see this chart or article as showing MS running around with it’s “hair on fire”.

That second article raises some good points that so many others seem to gloss over and omit from their “Windows 8 will kill MS” articles. The points about MS being entrenched in business are not only accurate, but the crux of their business. Sure, they want to play in the consumer space, but they don’t need it to be successful. Apple holds zero, zip, nada market share in the “real” business space. What is your company’s e-mail system? Probably MS Exchange. What manages your PCs? Likely System Center. What office suite do most companies use? MS Office. I can go on of course, but there isn’t any point to it.

I take this, like any other report using statistics, with a grain of salt. I’d be willing to bet that a fairly high percentage of US adults have not heard of the iPAD either, especially during its first year of prodcution. What percentage of the “US Adults” in this survey are persons over 60 that know nothing about technology, nor care to know? Statistics are a funny thing. They can be presented to emphasize whatever the presenter wants them to regardless of what they really mean when analysed. And consumers fall for it every time. That’s why the media uses them so often in their “reporting”.

“But almost all consumers — and most members of the rank-and-file sales force — are looking at alternatives. That doesn’t bode well for Windows in the enterprise.” Huh??? Where did that come from? This completely unsubstantiated statement well illustrates what I said about the media’s use of statistics.

Some people just hate to admit that their predictions weren’t accurate, and then look for every crumb to support thier position. Yea, Windows 8 isn’t taking the world by storm. But its not dead or a failure either.

Try downloading a CSV file from each of the prospective institutions and see how they are formatted. I’m also curious to know how you are importing the data. In most instances, you can log into your CC account online and will have the option to download statements in various formats. I always have Quicken open when I do this, and choose the Quicken format for the statement. Quicken should import it without any issues.

I’m one who isn’t in love with the UI Start screen, but I don’t hate it either. It’s useable once you know a few tricks. I don’t see MS bringing back the start menu, but I do see them tweaking the UI a bit in SP1. I don’t think they will wait until Windows 9. Remember what they did with Windows 95 SP1? They added the arrow that said “Start Here” pointing to the then, very non-intuitive Start button.

You’re right. I misspoke. It is storage but still leads to useability issues. I don’t recall saying anything about performance, just usability although I have seen some reports of performance issues as well. Can’t recall where right now.

Jerry

Everything, and I mean everything I have read about the so-called performance limitations, as well as the limitations of the storage have been entirely anecdotal.

Traditionalists may start with the concept of the Golden Section, or ratio (you can use your new Bing to look it up in case you don’t know what it is), and swiftly cover the ground from panoramic to 2-1/4 square, and even that dreadful 2 × 3 ratio that turned up when Leitz got the bright idea of turning 35mm movie film on its side and using it in a still camera, wasting a lot of film for the silly sprocket holes, but whatever I start with I always assume that I will end up cropping it. Speaking of formats, I once had a Kodak Bantam Special (828 roll film), that, at 28 × 40 mm, was about ideal. You may also recall the ‘rule of thirds’ in composition.

Yes, a wide screen is convenient when using Photoshop, where you need space on both sides for controls, but I dislike it on a laptop, especially for word-processing something that is typically intended to be printed in portrait orientation. I think it was the wide screen that gave MS the idea for the Ribbon. Admittedly, you can get screens that will rotate in orientation, but the last time I looked they were expensive. I guess I should argue against single wide screens, because it is in the viewing of the finished product (or a document in progress) that I dislike them. Wide screens encourage an excess of landscape in photographers’ mindsets. The ratio of even the best (non-portrait) photographers’ portfolios will normally have a majority of landscape orientations, but a non-square camera does have both orientations (and all points between), and the show-stealers are often portrait orientation.

Sorry, I’m not really understanding where you are going with all that. I don’t know a single photographer who thinks the monitor aspect ratio is what determines the final output. Whether one chooses to shoot a photo in landscape or portrait is more dependant on subject, intent, and artistic presentation than any other factor. In the circles I frequent, I see a healthy mix of both orientations. When I shoot, the last thing I’m concerned about is aspect ratio, cropping, or what Leitz did to 35 mm film. The principles of good photography apply no matter what aspect ratio one shoots in or what monitor is used to process the photo. That being the case, I only find that I crop to a different aspect ratio on a small percentage of my work.

I can’t catch a smile in a shot, but a smart camera can, with the help of its on-board computer. It has better reflexes, if you’ll pardon the expression, than I do.

The day I let a camera do my artistic thinking for me is the day they can take away my equipment.

Photography, you say? Have you noticed how many changes have been made to cameras that make your photographs better before the image ever gets to the computer? That is lightening the load upstream of the computer, even if it’s with simple things like better focus and better exposure. And yes, it’s an onboard processor in the camera.

If you are talking about photography, or a million other things for that matter, how can you view these posts without screaming something about aspect ratio? With a camera you can photograph it, and with a tablet you can view it, in landscape or in portrait view, but I’ll bet every one of these posts about screens refers to these hideous horizontal wide-screen monstrosities (with apologies to genuine panaoramics in photography). I hate them.

I’m not sure we were talking specifically about monitor aspect ratio, but photography is something I know a little about. Perhaps you are just referring to family snap shots, which you are right, who needs a large screen monitor for that. But large wide screen monitors are fantastic, and a must for the serious photographer. I would never want to go back to 2×3 aspect ratio monitor. As far as all the processing in camera that “make better pictures”, if one isn’t handling the camera right in the first place, all the software and processing in the world won’t fix blurry photos.

Not unlike the reaction to Windows 95 when it was first released.