Monthly Archive for January, 2008

IP addresses are private: EU

From the Globe and Mail:

IP addresses, string of numbers that identify computers on the Internet, should generally be regarded as personal information, the head of the European Union’s group of data privacy regulators said Monday.

Germany’s data protection commissioner, Peter Scharr, leads the EU group preparing a report on how well the privacy policies of Internet search engines operated by Google Inc., Yahoo Inc., Microsoft Corp. and others comply with EU privacy law.

He told a European Parliament hearing on online data protection that when someone is identified by an IP, or Internet protocol, address “then it has to be regarded as personal data.”

10 Things Your IT Department Won’t Tell You

MSN Tech & Gadgets has published a Wall Street Journal article about getting around some restrictions that an IT department might be trying to enforce.

Here, then, are the 10 secrets your IT department doesn’t want you to know, the risks you’ll face if you use them — and tips about how to keep yourself (and your job) safe while you’re at it.

It mentions sending large files via email, getting to blocked web sites, and more.

Save Windows XP

InfoWorld has started a campaign to Save Windows XP:

Microsoft plans to end most sales of Windows XP on June 30, despite a deep reluctance by many business and individuals about moving to Vista. InfoWorld believes such an expensive, time-consuming shift with problematic benefits should not be forced on Windows users, so we have decided to rally XP users to demand that XP be kept available.

The web site has a countdown clock as well as a petition which as of the time of this posting, has over 30,000 people who have “signed” it. If you love Windows XP and would like to stay around a while longer, then support the campaign.

What Recession? PC Sales Stay Strong

From the New York Times:

The economy may be teetering, but the personal computer business is still nimbly running at full speed, according to the tally of sales in the fourth quarter of 2007 from the International Data Corporation. Worldwide, 77.3 million PCs were sold in the quarter, up 15.5 percent from the fourth quarter of 2006. That represents almost double the growth rate of 2005 to 2006.

For the year, IDC said, 297 million PCs were shipped, an increase of 14.3 percent over 2006.

Jobs wows the faithful; Wall Street is underwhelmed

From Fortune Magazine (via CNN Money):

Steve Jobs gave it his best, delivering a new must-have gadget called the MacBook Air, deals with a full house of compliant Hollywood studios, and more bells and whistles on his existing products and services in a 90-minute speech than most technology companies do in a year.

But Wall Street was not impressed; shares of Apple got hammered, falling more than 10 points during the course of the keynote despite the impressive sales figures Jobs rattled off: 4 million iPhones, 5 million copies of the Leopard operating system, 4 billion songs, 125 million TV shows, 7 million movies.

Shell Tools - free shell extensions and utilities from Moon Software

I’ve reviewed Password Agent from Moon Software before. I recently noticed they have new utilities called Shell Tools:

Shell Tools is a collection of free Windows shell extensions and utilities. This package contains updated versions of our old shell extensions FontLoader, FileNote, RegisterEx, CopyURL and new ones, including nice control panel that allows you to control all the extensions in one place.

I’ve installed the tools and depending on the folder you are in, it gives you right-click (context) options to:

  • Copy Filename
  • Filenote
  • Show Hidden Files
  • FontLoader
  • CopyURL
  • RegisterServer

The Moon Software Shell Tools page does a great job of explaining each one. It also shows some screenshots.

Need a pronunciation tip? Ask Howjsay

Download Squad linked to this neat site in early December:

How often have you started arguing with a friend over the correct pronunciation of a word? You know, the kind of word that you read all the time, but suddenly realize you’ve never heard spoken out loud. Well, before you beat your friend to a bloody pulp, you might want to check out howjsay, an online pronunciation dictionary.

Howjsay is simple, yet effective. You type in a word and if it has the word, it will highlight it in pink on a new screen and you’ll hear how to say it. If they don’t have the word, it will bring up words that are close to the spelling.

Windows Vista, Office 2007 Expelled From British Schools

From InfoWorld:

The agency that governs educational technology in the United Kingdom has advised schools in the country to keep Microsoft’s Windows Vista operating system and its Office 2007 software out of the classroom and administrative offices.

“Upgrading existing ICT systems to Microsoft Vista or Office 2007 is not recommended,” said the British Educational Communications and Technology Agency, also known as Becta, in a report issued this week.

Becta officials said a study the group commissioned found that upgrading school systems from Windows XP to Vista and Office 2007 would increase costs and create software compatibility problems while providing little benefit.

More free PDF tools

A couple of years ago the only option for creating or modifying PDFs was to purchase Adobe Acrobat. These days there are lots of free utilities that let you create your own PDFs and manipulate them. I’ve previously covered PDFCreator, CutePDF, and doPDF.

The Reader to Reader section of the December 2007 issue of Windows IT Pro magazine mentioned PDFTools 1.3. I haven’t tried it, but the site explains it this way:

PDFTools is a PDF management application. It can encrypt, decrypt, join, split, stamp, create and rearrange a PDF file.
Version 1.1+ includes a very powerful and simple to use XML to PDF converter.

Also, Download Squad recently mentioned a different utility called PDF Split and Merge. You can use the utility to extract pages from a PDF, break up a PDF into sections (a 100-page PDF can be made into 5 20-page PDFs), or merge multiple PDFs into one file.

What Does a Falling Dollar Mean for Tech?

From eWeek:

A weak dollar may not be all bad news for the tech sector.

The value of the U.S. dollar has been sliding for more than 36 months, monitored dolefully by observers who recall the years when the dollar was the rock-solid underpinning of the global economy and are not used to the U.S currency’s chronic weakness.

Yet not all view the effects of the falling dollar as negative, especially within the tech sector.

“A weak dollar can be good—technology is a big exporter, so this makes their products fare well in international markets,” Carl Steidtmann, chief economist with Deloitte Research, told eWEEK.

Some argue that any impact that the greenback’s value has on the tech economy is a long way off, noting its diminishing role in international markets.