If you listen to this for a couple of minutes, it would appear that the Senator has no idea what the internet actually is or how it works. Found on the Public Knowledge web site via OReilly.net
You really need to hear the audio, but if just can’t stand it there is a transcript of his remarks and a full closing statement transcript which, certainly captures the flavor of the bill.
Finally! Dell is augmenting and extending their programs for donating machines, as well as recycling. Read all about it here. As you already know, old computers can contain toxic metals, particularly lead and mercury. Around here we can pay a little extra to have them recycled, but if you just chuck them they end up in the landfill, which is not a good place. It appears that for recycling, you can put in the Dell Tag ID, and you’ll receive instructions to print out an airbill. Pack up your stuff. (and pay some bucks for shipping…) and the Man In Brown will come pick it up. I wish I knew about this on Tuesday… I just paid $20.00 to recycle 3 (working) machines and two (working) 17″ monitors.
Note: Be sure to wipe the hard drives of data, using something like Darik’s Boot ‘N Nuke.
IBM appears to have a similar program.
Jensen Harris has an Office User Interface Blog which explains the design rationale behind the new changes in the Office user interface. One fact that came out in the research was that of all current Office users, fewer than 2% of them actually customize the programs, the other 98% leave it unchanged, or suffer when the default layout is changed through a user error of some kind.
One thing that is very slick is the reference capability within Office 2007. The pieces are there to automatically build a bibliography and references using any one of a number of styles such as APA or Chicago. I was wondering about capability with EndNote, which is the standard for maintaining a list of publications and citations. On the EndNote web page, there is a discussion of Enddnote and Word 2007, and it sounds as if they are on the case. EndNote X will work with Word 2007 and is already compatible with the beta version.
The setup was relatively painless. After considering all the options on all the machines lying around, I finally picked up a low-cost Maxtor drive at Staples, and popped it into my main workstation. This is the machine with the video card with 128Kb, and a DVD drive, and 2 gigs of main memory. I assigned this drive a permanent drive letter F.
Unable to boot VISTA from the DVD drive (I could have probably swapped cables to allow the DVD to be the master device intead of the slave on that channel)…I ran the installation from within Windows XP, and directed the install program to install on to the new drive F. This would have worked also if I had repartitioned the existing drive and assigned a drive letter to the extra partition, so if you have the space…20 gigs minimum, you might consider that route.
The only uncertainty was whether the Vista install program would modify the master boot record to allow dual booting. It did….and now when the machine boots, a screen comes up allowing to boot either a “legacy Windows system”, or “Microsoft Windows”
One remaining issue: I have a dual monitor setup using an ATI Radeon 7000 as the secondary monitor. Can’t get this one going…yet, at least. And I can’t connect to my shared laser printer. (which is, um, serious…).
Results of a speed test with Adelphia Cable this morning from dslreports.
dslreports.com speed test result on 2006-06-27 09:12:39 EST:
2209 / 848
Your download speed : 2209 kbps or 276.1 KB/sec.
That is 41.2% worse than an average user on adelphia.net
Your upload speed : 848 kbps or 106.1 KB/sec.
That is 60.3% better than an average user on adelphia.net
I ordered a Windows Vista beta DVD the other day and it came within a few days. Unfortunately, I haven’t got a combination of enough hard drive space on the machine with a DVD, or a DVD drive on the machine I intended to dedicate to Windows Vista. Since Vista is only available as a DVD, (the download is 4.7 gigabytes in size) this is a problem that I need to solve.
I also tried installing on a Virtual PC machine, but again, the hard drive wasn’t large enough, the installation program was looking for 15 gigs at least, and even with a couple hours of fiddling, I couldn’t free up enough space.
One takeaway from all this is that you can probably forget using almost any current hardware with Windows Vista. You need a machine with 2 gigs of RAM, 30 gigs of hard disk (15 for Vista alone), 128KB of graphics memory (for all the slick graphics stuff), and they suggest a minimum of a 450Mhz processor. (which is going to be really slow.)
There is an extensive discussion and review of Vista at Paul Thurrott’s site. Read all this stuff, and maybe your curiosity will be sated until a new Vista-capable computer comes into your life.
Meanwhile, back in beta land, I’ve been running the Office 2007 beta for some weeks, without out any complaints except for the sluggishness of OutLook 2007. For some odd reason, the Office 2007 beta will install side-by-side by all the existing Office applications with the exception of OutLook. OutLook 2007 will replace OutLook 2003, and in the current incarnation, OutLook 2007 is a slug; it takes, say, 30 seconds or longer to open the first eMail from the inbox.
OutLook 2007 includes a new desktop indexing service which essentially replaces the functionality of X1. Not surprisingly, X1 sent a note today saying that their software client is now going to be “free”, and they are changing their marketing plan, which companies must do when Microsoft destroys their business model. (cf. Onfolio.)
So far, I’m scratching my head to figure out what the big deal with Office 2007 is. I was actually pretty excited because they were going to include the ability to print directly to PDF files. This appears to be on hold, not so much because of Microsoft, but because Adobe wanted Microsoft to charge extra for the functionality. Other improvements of O2007 appear to be related mostly with integration with Microsoft’s Sharepoint services. Ehhhh.
(If you want to create .PDFs, Macromedia’s Flashpaper works fine.)
Finally, I’ve been using the Internet Explorer 7.0 beta for some weeks. The big improvement here is that you can now use tabs when browsing Big whoop.
Reviews of software for non-profits at idealware.org
I was giving a PowerPoint presentation in the new Medical Education Center that has been built between our teaching hospital and local university. I walk into a seminar room which is equipped with a huge NEC flat screen on the wall, a Dell computer, wireless keyboard and mouse, microscope projector and Xray light box. Nice room, “high tech”. I plug my thumb drive, containing my presentation file into the computer.
I notice that the wireless mouse doesn’t work. OK, I can deal with the keyboard, so I open my presentation using the keyboard. Since I am fifteen minutes early, I decide to call the help desk and tell them that the mouse doesn’t work (maybe it needs a new battery…)
There is no phone in the room. So, anyone needing help either must leave the room to find a phone, or use a cell phone. I call the help desk on my cell, and they say they’ll send someone over.
Now, recall that even though the mouse didn’t work, I could go ahead with my presentation. The rest of the group files in. MDs, Ph.Ds., IS people.
All of a sudden the screen goes haywire. Slides start changing. A web browser starts up. Things start typing. It is as if a ghost has entered the computer. It turns out that the rooms are subject to interference from adjacent rooms to the side, above and below.
Ten minutes into my presentation, I abandon the slides and just use the handouts. The tech person arrives, and spends 15 minutes trying to reset the mouse and keyboard to an unused channel that isn’t being used by an adjacent room. He finally pronounces it fixed. Says this happens “all the time”. He leaves.
I attempt once more to find my slide in the middle of the pack, and almost immediately the thing goes nuts again. Other members of the group around the table start offering suggestions (we’re mostly guys….of course…we want to fix things). “It should work”. “We never saw this before.” I stick to the handouts, but everyone is kind of disappointed.
As part of my remarks I mention that we had tried a wireless version of the DLink I-2-Eye videoconferencing unit and had abandoned it after finding that it was unreliable. “Why?” they wanted to know. “Couldn’t you find a solution from the vendor?” “Did you talk to their engineering staff?”
Actually I wasn’t sure where the problem lay. We actually swapped out the unit twice, and all connected hardware…routers and cable modems. However, we never got it to work, in the three locations that we tested in. It may not have been the I-2-Eye unit but the point I made to the group was that this particular problem was outside the scope of my inquiry at the time. We replaced the units with wired versions which worked just fine.
Sometimes you have to cut your technological losses and just get on with it.
And as for these high tech rooms, it is an interesting problem. But they ought to get wires.
The Microsoft Office 2007 public beta is out and there is a template included with Word 2007 for blogging. So here I am in the middle of Word, testing the ability to create blog postings from Word.
The most immediate difference in Office 2007 beta is the replacement of drop down menus with the so-called ribbon…which keeps all of the functions previously on a menu, out in front or behind a single button. This makes for a busy top of the screen… but works fine as long as you have a large screen to work with. This could be a problem on a notebook computer.
tfnp 
