JorgeA

Microsoft Works to Get Windows 8/RT Users Updated to 8.1 Paul asks, The reason for that is pretty clear IMHO: Microsoft wanted to herd users into the Windows Store and for them get a Microsoft account. (That maybe could then be utilized to stalk follow them all around the Web.) More interesting than the news article are the comments at the bottom (some of which support the view about the Windows Store). My favorite one: Great summary of events since October 2012. --JorgeA

Office 365 was rechristened Office 364 by Charlotte. Maybe now we should knock that down to Office 363 : Microsoft explains roots of this week's Office 365 downtime --JorgeA

The Surface brand has performed so well that... Microsoft rumored to be planning to replace 'Surface' branding with 'Lumia' --JorgeA

Almost two years into Windows 8 RTM, there's still enough interest out there in Start Menu alternatives to justify articles about them on significant websites: How to bring back the Start menu and button to Windows 8 StartIsBack and Classic Shell both get nice writeups in there. --JorgeA

Fabulous, let Google and the NSA know when you're home: Google's move into home automation means even less privacy What a great idea, I can't imagine how spooks and burglars and cops and stalkers could possibly have any interest in the growing use of this technology. Smart home = dumb homeowner --JorgeA

Idiocracy keeps advancing: Apple kills Aperture -- continues to dumb down its software --JorgeA

The future of the Desktop in Windows 9: What can we expect? There's less than meets the eye in that post, and the writing is somewhat disjointed, but it makes for interesting reading anyway. --JorgeA

The phaseout started in January 2012 with 100-watt bulbs, then it applied to 75-watters in January 2013. As of this past January, 60-watt bulbs are out, too. Stores can sell what they have in stock, but no new ones may be made (subject to the "rough service bulb" exception I described in the previous post). --JorgeA

I was an enthusiast of "save energy / save the planet" alternatives to incandescent bulbs -- until I started actually using these alternatives. We installed CFLs in my wife's office. A few days later, she told me to get rid of them, as they were giving her headaches. Separately from that, I installed CFL floodlights in my office. They burned out just as quickly as regular incandescents, and in addition took several minutes to reach full brightness whereas regular bulbs get up to speed immediately. A few weeks ago, I started installing halogen bulbs in the lamp over the kitchen table. With our usage pattern, regular bulbs typically last 3-4 months there. The halogen bulbs (from GE, not some off-brand) burned out within two weeks. No wonder they were on sale. LEDs are a possibility -- I'm currently trying out a couple of them in my office -- but they are still way more expensive than incandescent bulbs. Remains to be seen whether they last the 23 years the package indicated. As far as I'm concerned, the incandescent light-bulb phaseout is a legalized consumer ripoff. Environmentalists get to lord it over us ignorant peasants, while bulb makers enjoy a bump in income from getting the cheap-as-dirt incandescents taken off the market. Call it the green-industrial complex. All hope is not lost for U.S. fans of real light bulbs, even if the law doesn't get repealed. There is a loophole for "rough service" bulbs of all wattages; these are ostensibly intended for use in factories and the like, but if you look for them you can find some. They, too, are more expensive than regular incandescent bulbs, but at least they don't have the health and esthetic drawbacks of the new types of bulbs. --JorgeA EDIT: clarification

Ooh, crystal clarity (no clouds)! We'll have to figure out how to license one seat for Enterprise Edition... Maybe a group buy? -Noel [source] Still... if I had to, I'd gladly pay that unit amount for a Windows 9 license just to avoid the Bing Search and cloud integration and whatever other Metrofied cr*p they're throwing into the other editions. But then, we wouldn't be so lucky that Microsoft would sell us a single-unit Enterprise license, or would we? --JorgeA

LOL They do stick out like sore thumbs, don't they? Long threads those are, but there were a refreshing number of opinions on the other side, "balanced" largely by sarcasm and non-sequiturs on the pro-Win8 side. I've said this before -- it's amazing to still see some folks speaking up for Windows 8, even after Microsoft itself implicitly admitted they lost the debate, flushed the perpetrators down the drain, and started backtracking on most of their UI changes. +100 --JorgeA

Thanks greatly, jaclaz. I'll look into ddrescue as soon as I get the chance to and see if I can get this procedure to work. The entire contents of the drive are movies and old episodes of TV series, so it's not worth going to a professional recovery shop if that's the only way to do it. In fact, my better half said she felt relieved that suddenly we had so much less stuff to watch. But I do have some programs in there that I'd like to retrieve if it can be done at home, so I will definitely try ddrescue and see what happens. (The three big drives needed were already lying around waiting to be used for something.) With any luck, we'll be able to save something. I'll report back. --JorgeA

The other day my wife went on a vacuuming frenzy in the family room. Luckily (or not; read on), I happened to be right there when she reached the TV area connected to our PC running Windows Media Center and a couple of external USB hard disk drives. The system was live at the time; she went to disconnect the electrical adapter of one of these external drives from the surge protector so that she could run the vacuum over the surge protector, and I think I caught that action in time. (The prongs may have come some distance off the outlet without disconnecting completely.) Next she proceeded to vacuum over and around the external HDD itself. Later that day, I wanted to perform some maintenance on the WMC system by copying shows off the internal HDD to the external USB drives. All the programs that I copied to one particular drive (J:) went fine, but I got an error message every time I tried to copy to the drive that maybe got unplugged (K:). I can't remember the message exactly, as it didn't make any sense to me -- something about the location that I was copying from (meaning, the C: drive) not existing. I tried clicking directly from Windows Explorer on some of the shows that were still listed for the K: drive. WMC would load, but nothing played. Then I clicked on shows that were on the C: or J: drives, and WMC loaded and then played them normally. The listing of recorded programs showed all the recordings on that K: drive. Next I tried de-selecting the K: drive as a WMC library and then re-selecting it. Didn't help -- the shows were listed again but I could not play them. At some point I got a "Video error" message about the files necessary to play these programs not being available. My memory of the events is a bit fuzzy, but IIRC at this point I rebooted the computer to see if that took care of the problem. Windows booted up fine, but now the recordings on the K: drive didn't show up. And now Windows Explorer was showing the drive as empty. Moreover, the PC became slow as molasses. Try rebooting again, and this time the PC freezes at the splash screen showing the various options at bootup. Won't load Windows, can't get into the BIOS or Recovery -- nothing. Disconnected the K: drive -- and now the PC boots into Windows again. I go into Event Viewer, and there are a ton of errors labeled "Event ID 51", with the description reading "An error was detected on device \Device\Harddisk\DRx" (I could check for the exact text if necessary). By this point I know that I have a serious problem with that drive. I connected it to a laptop, which loaded some drivers and assigned it a letter but couldn't find anything on it. Then I hooked it up to a Vista tower. It knew there was something there, but no letter was assigned. Went into Disk Management; not only would that application not finish loading, but then explorer.exe crashed, I lost my taskbar, and the Sidebar background went black. Restarting explorer.exe from Task Manager didn't do anything. When I tried to reboot, that PC froze, too. Hoping to get S.M.A.R.T. data and some repair options, I tried booting the system into a Linux Live CD, but I got a long series of error messages reading something like "device descriptor read/64, error -110". So I disconnected the drive and booted into the Live CD, then reconnected the drive, but while the OS found the drive, it simply called it "File System" and didn't even assign it a device ID (or whatever you call it, it's that arcane "dev/sdx" type identifier). The next step was to remove the HDD from its case and try connecting it directly as an internal drive, in case it was the case connector that had been fried. I'll spare you the gory details of trying to pry the d*mn case open -- I still have the scars on my thumbs -- but when I connected it to yet another PC, that system wouldn't get past the POST screen either. The drive does spin up when connected to power, and various computers find some aspect of it. Two questions: (1) is there any hope of retrieving the data from it?; and (2) what could have happened to the drive? Additional details: a few days before this incident, we had gotten another "Video error" WMC message when trying to play a movie. The movie was probably on that K: drive, but I can't be sure as I don't remember what the title was. We didn't think anything of it and I didn't take particular note of the event. Also, after opening the case and connecting it to a PC, I notice that the drive gets VERY hot. So in light of these two details I wonder if maybe the drive (a Seagate SRD0SD1 2TB external USB HDD) was going bad anyway and my wife's actions had nothing to do with it. A Web search turned up some possible causes but no dominant theory as to what may have happened. What do you think? Comments? Ideas? Suggestions? Thanks for getting all the way through this long post, I was trying to provide as much info as I could remember. --JorgeA

Please - as a confirmation that it is not worth the time - check the spelling for billion in the above article/quote, though it has to be found out if the cnet guys besides not having a basic spell checker run on an article before publication also don' t have a sentient human being proofreading it or if they intentionally left untouched what Brad Smith actually said . http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billon_standard jaclaz That's pretty funny. The quality of the writing online is generally not up to newspaper standards. And even in newspapers, in recent years I've noticed an increase in the number of typos, misspellings, and just plain bad writing, so maybe the trend is broad and doesn't have anything to do with "professionals vs. bloggers" or "print vs. online." Still, I do like it that Microsoft is campaigning for government to keep its hands off people's private data. As to whether they'll succeed, or whether it's just a PR ploy for public consumption ("we've got your back"), we can't know for sure. --JorgeA

More tidbits of Windows 8.1 Update 2 and Windows 9 information leaks A couple of tidbits stand out: If there is a way for a Windows 8.0 user to get to 8.1 Update 2 without having to open a Microsoft account (PayPal comes to mind as an alternative), this might be a plus in the eys of those of us who have successfully avoided getting dragged into the MSFT web all these years. Not sure how the Chinese government's decision not to buy Windows 8 could affect Win9 so much that it would put Microsoft into "panic" mode. I can see them wanting to move up the release date, but why would this affect its "fate"? Anyone have an insight into this... or at least willing to speculate? Windows 9 is in trouble, Microsoft to make drastic changes to its plans? Some more info from the same blogger. China's anti-Win8 decree [emphasis added] If WZOR is right, then China may have done a favor to Windows users all over the world! --JorgeA

A follow-up on the post upthread about how government snooping is hurting tech businesses: Microsoft: Future 'bleak' if gov't continues unlawful data collection --JorgeA

Another step in the right direction: Bill to require warrant for email searches gains ground in House --JorgeA

Good editorial about European public reaction to NSA surveillance in Der Spiegel: Opinion: Where is Europe’s outrage? Perhaps it was cool to protest when the USA could be singled out as the uniquely bad guys, but not so much now that all these governments elected by their own people have been shown to be working side-by-side with the Americans to spy on them. (Sorry for the nationalistic tone, but now one has to wonder what, for too many folks, the outrage was really all about.) --JorgeA

That's a great point. Something that concerns me is that, while we may adopt a "from my cold dead fingers" stance, the problem isn't that our PCs might be taken away, so much as that they'll be rendered increasingly useless, to the point where we have little choice but to submit to the "dumb terminal" model. One way this is going to be accomplished is via the browser and the websites that browsers are utilized to visit. Already, XP machines can't use any version of Internet Explorer newer than 8, and Vista can't use anything later than 9. Sure, other browsers exist, but can you run Firefox 30 on a Windows 98 machine? And how much can you get out of, say, a cable news company's website if you're on IE5?(*) With the frenzied pace of change and development in browser technology, eventually our Windows 7 and 8 systems will no longer be compatible with emerging Web standards and we'll face the stark choice of either getting that dumb Chromebook terminal, or cutting the Internet cord altogether. My hope is that enough in the computing public will resist the lure of the cloud and refuse to buy both dumb terminals and cloud-based software, such that vendors will sense the need to keep offering real PCs and software that lives and runs on our machines. --JorgeA (*) I wanted to test this idea out on the CNN site in IE6 on a Win98 laptop, but Microsoft intercepted my action with its obnoxious "It's time to upgrade your browser" page and the d*mn thing is taking so long to load, I got tired of waiting. Will report back on this if I ever get anything.

Once again , yet another case of meddlesome government hobbling value-producing enterprise. This time, though, in an indirect way: Microsoft’s Top Lawyer Says Government Data Demands Hurting Business --JorgeA

It’s Complicated: Facebook’s History of Tracking You A rundown of Facebook's assurances that it's not as bad as you think it is, followed by admissions that it IS as bad. What isn't yet totally clear in my mind, is whether Facebook's "Like" button can also be used to track people who don't have and never had a Facebook account. Also, note the following statement in the article linked to in the above excerpt: --JorgeA

I've used Classic Shell since Vista. I don't anticipate using anything else, even if Microsoft does bring back theirs. My user experience has been consistent, and Microsoft's software isn't actually as good as 3rd party implementations anyway. -Noel Cool, maybe then there'll still be a use for the Start Menu alternatives sticky (with regular maintenace) even after Microsoft brings back the native menu. --JorgeA

Having worked for an ISP before, I can tell you that anyone at Google who has the ability to log into the mail server or mail exchangers, can read any email they want. That's good to know, in the sense that it'll protect us from the false sense of security given by inadequate encryption schemes. --JorgeA

After my experiences last night, I agree that the problem is client-side. I installed PM and logged into MSFN; everything was great. Then I used their Firefox personality migration tool, and things got screwed up again. So I uninstalled PM (disabling the add-ons didn't improve matters) and reinstalled it, then I reinstalled the add-ons one by one. (At this point, details start getting fuzzy, as it was late at night.) IIRC, everything worked until I told Ghostery to block the Gravatar tracker. Immediately upon reloading the page, things got screwed up again and telling Ghostery to stop blocking Gravatar didn't help; even uninstalling Ghostery made no difference. So I uninstalled PM again, reinstalled it and the add-ons, and refrained from messing with Gravatar. Everything is great again (writing this post on PM in glorious wysiwyg). You might legitimately ask why I would spend all this time with PM but not with FF. The reason is that the FF installation is old (updates dating back to FF 3) and I believe there are a number of tweaks made over time that would be lost if I were to use the nuclear (reset) option; I'm just not familiar enough with FF to remember where those settings might be or indeed what the setting changes might have been, so I prefer to leave it alone if possible. IE has always been by far my principal browser, so trying to relearn where I might have changed settings in FF would have been a much more tedious process than uninstalling and reinstalling PM. As I use PM more (and yes, I do know it's a FF derivative, but for whatever reason it's worked better for me than FF on a different machine), I'll get more familiar with the interface (assuming they too don't start messing with it) and discover what obscure settings there are to change. Heck, I might even find that I hadn't actually tweaked any internal FF settings despite my vague memories of having done so at some point. Thanks very much for offering to help. Norton doesn't support Pale Moon, so if I feel insecure websurfing without their toolbar I might take you up on troubleshooting Firefox. --JorgeA

E-mail notifications definitely seem to be working again. Two more notifications have come in, including one for your posting and another one for Tarun's. Thanks, xper! --JorgeA