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Tablets/phones can have the same computing power as my old XP machine did. If Ubuntu is first out with a device that easily docks to screen/keyboard/mouse (something that doesn’t need any particular operating system), they will get a jump on everyone else who should have realized what the revolt over Windows 8 was all about. It wasn’t about resistance to advancement, it was about loss of productivity instead of a gain, it was about a technical solution to a problem that didn’t exist, something forced on users that wasn’t useful.

Things make sense where they make sense, and nowhere else. Touch screens have their uses, where nothing else will do, and it’s not on the desktop. There is no increase in productivity to be gained from it, and then there is the fingerprint issue.

When it comes to the direction of computer tech, it’s like the music business: I am not the consumer they have in mind. Maybe I am a curmudgeon.

My private and business data is not going to be stored in ‘the cloud’. Unless I put it there, encrypted. Otherwise my terabyte-size drives will hold primary and backup data.

My multi-core multi-GHz multi-GB machine is not a dumb terminal and I will not use it as one for office applications, or any other application. What are they thinking?

My office applications will not default to storing files across any network, and will be actively prevented from doing so unless there is a reason for it.

I won’t type onto a touchscreen, particularly a ridiculously tiny one, unless I have no other option.

Email access on a phone or tablet is fine — for reading. Web on a small screen is torture for old curmudgeon eyes.

I need to be able to run legacy Windows applications. Right now, XP runs inside VMWare, either on Win 7 or Linux. That way I can lock XP away from the internet. I prefer Linux for security reasons. Security through obscurity is not a security approach, but it helps.

I haven’t seen one word about security. Windows is a lost cause for security, Android is even worse. Linux is great for getting a false sense of security. The opportunities for exploits start in the hardware, in the design approach for firmware, and spin out of control from bad to worse from there. I will be an early adopter if ever some thought is given to security at the hardware level and basing a kernel on that. UEFI made the problem worse, not better.

I won’t insult Apple products, I support a few machines and find them about the same as Linux machines to support, but I’m not an expert because I won’t pay the premium to get locked out of all my special software.

Whatever happens to Windows, they won’t be making their products with me in mind anyway. But I expect to be able to keep supplementing my income undoing their UI changes, removing annoyances, blocking useless functionality, patching, firewalling, monitoring, and otherwise restoring the functionality people need that was there in Windows 98 and making it as easy to get at as it was in Windows 98. Not that there haven’t been improvements since then, but … nothing much to improve productivity.

Since I’m on a rant, I might as well state that I am still running some applications that actually ran in Windows 98. Trying to find replacements, one runs into a wall of websites with “Enterprise”, “Paradigm”, “Cloud”, “Extensible” and other such noise blinking away in Flash and Silverlight, with multi-thousand dollar price tags or monthly rent. No way. Not to do the simple tasks I need it for.

Thanks for letting me unload.

Maybe it’s too late to help, but we use Meetup.com for our Neighborhood Watch. It has not only the email listserver function, but event notification, comments on events, a bulletin board, photo section, and files section that we use. There are other functions too, but those are the ones we use, and they are dead easy to admin. It costs, but as someone who has actually hosted mail list servers on my own computer before, it’s worth the convenience. I pay for it myself, that way there aren’t any arguments about what goes on there (some people can’t help themselves, and we don’t need the wrong kind of comments showing up in the newspaper if there is ever an ‘adverse event’). People can set preferences on whether or not to get copied on every message or just announcements, too, which helps with people who don’t like ‘getting spammed’.

Regarding Acronis disk imaging software:

I happily used and recommended Acronis for several years. I purchased it to use its scheduling function to do full backups from a small data server running Windows XP to different network drives on different nights of the week.

This worked reliably until about two years ago, apparently a Windows XP update broke the functionality. The software would begin the backup, get some percentage done, and then report a write failure and terminate the operation. Days and days of forum searches and attempts to fix the problem using suggestions on the forums failed to give me enough information to fix the problem. Furthermore, their own forum was rife with complaints about the issue, with extremely sparse canned responses from tech support, and sometimes outright snide responses from the company itself. There were reports of people buying upgrades to the latest version in their attempt to fix the issue, and failing.

In the meantime, I built another machine and programmed it to back up the hard drive using another method, but that method still didn’t give the multiple days of fall-back needed in case a corrupted database got saved onto the backup, writing over the last good copy before it was discovered. In other words, if you went home and came in the next morning to find your accounting database file corrupted, the corrupted file would be in the backup image too.

I revisited the issue a few months ago, only to discover that those who are unlucky enough to be afflicted with this problem still have no solution, and none promised, in fact no substantive response on the issue at all.

Rather than purchase the upgrade on the chance that it might work, and based on the overwhelming consensus about their tech support (apparently tech support is sympathetic but is kept away from engineering because they can’t get any better answers than you can) I went shopping.

I settled on Terabyte Image for DOS/Linux and Windows. It is not so much of a one-button solution and depending on your needs might require some reading of the fine manual, but it is capable of doing the things that the old version of Acronis did. The Windows version has a scheduler in it that allows me to write a backup to a different network drive on different days. It will allow me to do a bare-metal restore onto any replacement drive that is big enough to hold the archive, from an image stored on the network using a boot disk. The boot disks can boot any machine and use DOS or Linux to do back-up and restore to any attached drive. In my tests it was reliable (I’ve come this far by having disk failures and having two different backup solutions in years past fail to restore from the archive, now that is very frustrating).

Just a word to the wise. Using Acronis is like signing up for an ISP. If everything works for you, it’s great. If something doesn’t work, you’re in for a new kind of adventure. Always test extensively before you commit, keeping in mind the cost for loss of data.

It’s very easy to save files in an older Office format when using OpenOffice.

Though some formatting goes funky in the translation, it’s not enough to pry the money out of me.

I think it will be fine, as long as I can install a classic UI and a file explorer that actually shows me what’s on the disk. I’ll be resisting if I have to teach my parents another type of UI, especially if it brings THEM zero benefits. So what would be the benefit to someone who has zero interest in typing or navigating with a touch screen?

DNS tracking and filtering is ideal for government/commercial information harvesting and control, some versions of it are already in place in jurisdictions where information access is restricted.

In corporate networks, set up your own web proxy, but not for the purpose of catching malware. (Smoothwall is free.) No DNS system can keep one of your trusted sites from getting hacked.

The best way to protect against these things so far is Firefox with NoScript, and a behavior-limiting software firewall (Private Firewall, free, has picked up where KPF left off). Backed up by AVG or the like. This way, a user has to allow the malware to run with two or three different explicit ‘allow’ actions. Works best of anything I’ve ever tried, it takes a determined user to infect a machine. For the corporate dummy users, hide the desktop and menu links to IE but leave it installed for updates, and don’t give them the password to an admin account on the machine.

Bottom line: DNS filtering can only give a false sense of security, in my humble opinion.

I’ve found new versions of the start menu to be an annoyance and a hindrance, rather than bringing anything useful. Likewise with the stubborn insistence on making it difficult to locate files and folders by screwing up windows explorer since forever.

Classic Shell helps. And is worth a review, if it’s not been done already. No charge for it but it is priceless. I can use my machines to get things done again.

http://classicshell.sourceforge.net/

For some of us, the computer is a tool used for work, and wasted time is wasted money. Especially if the learning curve does not bring any benefit.

I’ve long thought that eventually all mainstream operating systems would embrace touch screens. I’ve been using touch screens on machine controls since the day I had to reluctantly purchase Windows 3.1 just to program one because the programming software wouldn’t run in my trusty old stable DOS.

There are some things that touch screens are good for. Like buttons. Other things, not so good. A touch screen interface is positively a pain for any kind of data entry, and worse than useless for a mouse/keyboard app like CAD. My Android phone is a technological wonder, but it is very irritating to try to type anything on it. Accidental touches on the screen making things happen unexpectedly is a major irritant. Selection for copy/paste? Fuggedaboutit. A bigger screen won’t really help much for typing. You see, you need the screen at one angle to read it, and a different angle to type on it. Greasy fingerprints will be another annoyance. Being occasionally stuck with a touchpad on a laptop is already enough torture. How many people who use laptops regularly DON’T have a wireless mouse to go with it?

I’ll stick to my original contention: Eventually all mainstream OS’s will embrace touch screens. And the OS along with the applications written for them will leverage the advantages of the touch screen where it makes sense, and the advantages of mouse/keyboard and other input devices where it makes sense. With both methods of input supported.

If MS makes the OS useless for legacy apps, they will be shooting themselves in the foot. I’ll still cheer them on. I have an industrial application that would be a dream to be able to program in Windows using a relatively inexpensive touch screen (yeah, buttons for the end user with occasional use of a pop-up keyboard). So it is my hope that I can eventually conclude that I can release a product and not have to worry about the OS or the hardware being abandonware. At this point, I cannot conclude that, neither about the OS nor about the hardware out there. I need to be able to support any industrial product for at least 10 years.

Hopefully MS gets it together. It’s not that hard to make a program launch list (start menu). If MS doesn’t do it, other people will. At least Win 8 will keep Windows Secrets in business for a long time to come!

Being someone who likes no-frills email (not interested in stationery or other stuff), I picked Thunderbird a long time ago over OE for security and stability reasons alone.

The ‘preview pane’ in OE was set to go out and run any script off any web page by default. On TB, NOTHING runs unless you tell it to. It won’t grab images off the web (which verifies your email address to spammers) unless you give it permission. It runs no scripts. You don’t have to cripple it to close idiotic security risks. It has never crashed or corrupted emails on me (and I admin a lot of computers) the way OE and full blown Outlook do when they have too many messages stored.

In my opinion, an email client should not expose the user to web-browser type vulnerability. Good riddance to OE, and may Outlook follow soon after.

I have a question that I sincerely hope anyone interested enough in the article to visit here can answer:

Given that the trend is towards continually increasing capacity at decreasing cost for storage, processing speed, and (arguably) network speed; and given the fact that there are open source alternatives that allow all of the most common functions of Office to be done at low cost, and the same argument applies to in-house servers;

Then, for any but the largest ‘enterprise’ customers, why would anyone pay to run their applications off some central server and store all their information on someone’s central server? In other words, wasn’t the biggest advantage to the PC that it freed people from mainframes? Other than applications where such an arrangement provides a clear advantage, why would someone like myself even consider paying a monthly fee to run software or store information? It doesn’t get me away from needing the PC, I still need an OS with all the headaches that implies, I’m still going to need backup, security, and so on. I just don’t get it. What does ‘cloud’ computing bring me that I can’t already beat by myself?

When I read all this hype about how the future is ‘cloud computing’, I shake my head. I think maybe that’s not in my future unless some disruptive technology is invented that gives a compelling reason to even consider it, considering all the possible drawbacks and pratfalls. Unless ‘collaborating in real-time’ means more than one person can edit the same file at the same time (and how badly do we need that?), a secure ftp server and perhaps an in-house forum software server (like this forum) can serve most needs, can’t it?