COMPUTER Currents
Slow OS startup and shutdown cause payroll problems
JAMES HEIN
The law of unintended con- sequences, which states that any purposeful action will produce some unintended consequences, has been interestingly applied to Vista recently.
A company, let's say one like a call centre, installs Vista. So far so good but employees get paid by the hour and the automatic time keeping tracking software is based on when the user logs on or off.
Since firing up Vista can take 15 minutes and shutting down can also take quite a while. This can mean up to two hours a week of time the employee is actually sitting at their desk working, but thanks to the glacial Vista start and stop processes. This means two hours of work that are never recorded or paid for.
Some large companies that work this way are now facing class action lawsuits against them because it means that they are not paying their staff for their real working time. In this case the idea was good - to check work time based on computer use. Thanks to Vista however the unintended consequence, in the US at least, are a number of lawsuits.
Industry news
Microsoft as announced that in 2009 it will provide free anti-virus software. This is going to cause some feedback from the likes of Symantec, MacAfee and others but the real question is if this is really going to be competition for the usual suspects.
Yes, Microsoft has a long history of bringing out competing products and then charging nothing for them. This is why a lot of you are using IE instead of something else; the real question here is why aren't you using Firefox, but that is another issue.
Let's look at Microsoft's history in the realm of security. They bring out a series of updates, many of them critical ones, on a regular basis. They released a firewall that only works in one direction. Their anti-spyware runs once a month when an update comes out and does not catch everything that say, Spybot, can.
In the anti-virus arena the story starts back in 1992 when they brought out their Microsoft Anti-Virus product. It had no updates until a service pack four years later and the installer file for Windows 95 was in itself a virus. M-AV vanished until 2005 when Windows Live OneCare appeared. This is a subscription based service that is now up to version 2.5, i.e. not yet up to version 3.
Today the announcement is for a free anti-virus tool kit. Yes, of course it has a code name "Morro" and it is targeted for a second-half-2009 release. The announcement promises that Morro will "provide comprehensive protection from malware including viruses, spyware, rootkits and Trojans. This new solution, to be offered at no charge to consumers, will be architected for a smaller footprint that will use fewer computing resources, making it ideal for low-bandwidth scenarios or less powerful PCs." The last bit is of course in line with the new trimmer Windows 7 philosophy.
The software will be made available for XP, Vista and Windows 7 users and it will be integrated into IE8. Microsoft is already bragging about their AV engine but do not expect the product to have all the bells and whistles of the current commercial offerings. I for one will be waiting to see how well it does out in the real world before I consider it for my own machines.
Internet Explorer 8 will not appear now until 2009. This is a change from the announcement in July that it would appear by the end of 2008. Now the plan is for a third beta to come out at the start of next year and then the final release after that. The issue is feedback and more work required to get the next version of IE out the door.
According to MS what IE8 contains will be the result of a very selective process between now and the focus will be on the most critical issues first. The reason for the caution is that the new IE will fully support CSS 2.1 and HTML 5.0. It will also have to support older standards.
This will work by using a tag so web sites tuned to older versions of IE can be viewed in this release without breaking. Microsoft has asked people to test their sites and services, make changes as necessary and then report back with any critical issues. This sounds like web sites may have to be changed so that IE8 can support them.
It has been ratified, specification 1.0 for USB 3.0 is final. Aka Superspeed USB version 3 is about ten times faster than 2.0 at 480 Mb/s. As mentioned previously there is a new port but it is backwards compatible with 1.0 and 2.0 which is good news for those of us with no USB 3.0 devices. Now all that has to happen is a range of new motherboards and new chipsets that are not expected until the latter part of next year.
Unless Firewire makes some changes this could be end of that technology which is sad because Wintel have never implemented USB very well. I am sick of the "sorry you can't remove that device yet" message I get when I try to dump a drive. Worse, Windows doesn't tell you why. I use a free disk ejector I found at http://quick.mixnmojo.com/ but sadly it doesn't work on my XP64 machine.
A while back, the first of the Eee notebooks appeared. They were inexpensive, fairly bare bones, but they did the job and provided a notebook at an affordable price. Since then a lot of different models have appeared and it is getting hard to stand out from the crowd.
Asus was the brand that basically started it all and they have come out with a new model the Asus Eee PC S101 luxury netbook. First of all this unit is not cheap and is basically the most expensive Eee yet at about twice the cost of the earlier ones, even so you can still buy about three S101s for the same sized Apple, or Sony machine.
Your money buys you a 1.6GHz Intel Atom N270 processor and 1GB of DDR 2 memory. The internal SSD is 16GB with a extra 16GB in the box, all solid state. The 10.2-inch backlit LED screen supports 1024 by 600 resolution. There is also 802.11n Wi-Fi on board plus Bluetooth and three USB sockets.
In related news, Samsung is now producing 256GB SSD with improved performance.The next generation of Eee machines should have a lot more storage. Performance figures given include sequential read rates of 220 MB/s with sequential write rates of 200 MB/s.
Email: jclhein@gmail.com.
Prev
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
Next
