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Archive for the ‘Technology’ Category

This essay is not just for the “Geeks” and therefore a little bit of background might help those who are not. In the “Corporate Space” there are a number of email systems but the two big hitters are IBM with Lotus Notes/Domino and Microsoft with Outlook/MS Exchange. In reality and in no small part due to user familiarity, Outlook is probably far more popular than Notes although in my view Domino/Notes is a far better corporate tool.

However, with the recent arrival of Windows 7 and for me the opportunity to overhaul my three main workstations, I thought that I might share something with my imaginary audience to do with email that might be worth a thought for now or in the future and it is the sort of thing not often covered because it has to do with the open Source Movement = Free Software !

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This particular blog is about sharing the actual experience of upgrading PCs to the latest Windows 7 so to a large extent, it is sort of nerdy and to be avoided if such things are not of interest to you. If however you were to ask whether it is a difficult thing to do because of all the “technical horrors” my answer would be NO and the reason being that people like Microsoft make it all so easy for you and fully automated.

Likewise theses days, even the main Linux distributors do the same unlike a decade or so back when a black pointed hat, black robes with stars on them and the mandatory magic wand were very necessary for a Linux install !

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Not having vast amounts of money to play with, I have to plan carefully ahead for things and take advantage of “special deals” as they arise because there are absolutely no prizes for spending more money than you need for anything ! As I mentioned previously on this blog, because of getting involved with 7 during the public beta testing, I got an email from MS when pre-ordering went live and therefore will get my copies at a considerable discount.

However and for those interested in such things, I thought that I might outline my other preparations for the arrival of this O/S and my reasoning. I will not be too technical so perhaps some comments may be of use to those who are not at all.

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I was reminded today via a friend asking whether to order or not, that the new Microsoft Operating system, Windows 7 is due for official launch on the 22^nd of October and for once, that is excellent news. In the normal run of things the advice would be, “Don’t buy a copy until the first Service Pack is released !” As service packs are basically “bug fixes”, the logic being to let every other mug find out the problems, only buy once they are fixed.

However, during the various incarnations of the Windows O/S, there have been some that worked well pretty much out of the box, Windows 95, Windows 2000 and now, Windows 7. I can speak well of it because between the Beta and the Release Candidate, I have been running it on various computers for almost a year.

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The odd thing about most things in life is how when you set off to do something, inevitably other things present themselves that have to be done first and before you can get on with what you really wanted to do in the first place.

This is exactly what has happened to me recently but in a rather odd way over web site design and something called CSS which stands for Cascading Style Sheets the basic principles of which are very good but the “detailed explanations” from the experts very far from clear and one wonders why ? True if I wanted to do a simple web site, I could just create one using a template from within Adobe Dreamweaver and it would take care of the style sheet but sadly, I need more than just that…

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Without being over optimistic and regardless of where the “cuts” come which might be better termed “redistribution”, the current situation may well prove the shot in the arm that this Country needs and oddly this fits rather well with the current Global Recession.

Whilst obviously Government spending must be reined in I believe we are looking at more than that, we are looking at a total realignment of the concept and basis of Central Government itself and a shifting of power away from the centre and it being devolved back to the individual citizen.

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The main problem with all this lies in the type of justification given for it, “To prevent terrorist outrages” which could as equally apply to sanctioning the use of torture. I do not think that the Government, Police or Security Services are “evil” but they are all clearly incompetent as the Bob Quick incident at the time he was in charge of the Anti-terror Unit demonstrated.

There is a complete lack of basic “awareness” which is frightening as for example Heather Blears doing exactly the same thing as Quick, a week later. To be fair to the Midlands Dwarf, she did at least show some humility over it and in her case it wasn’t a security issue but as a Member of the Cabinet – she still did it !

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There are rumours coming from the Cabinet that a majority of them want to scrap the ID Card Scheme as doing so would save money and they have finally realised that the public – ie. the voters, have turned against it.

Personally and as Gordon Brown believes that stubbornness equals strength plus the Tories have already said that they will scrap it if elected, Brown won’t on principle. Blair wanted to join the Euro, Brown invented rules but truthfully, if Blair wanted it…it would never happen so, Cameron will scrap ID Cards…Brown will defend them to the grave.

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There was much talk during the American Presidential Campaign as to how Barak Obama and his team had “harnessed the web” to help him secure his victory. He had not just used it to project his message but also as an effective means of fund raising. The question being posed in the UK was whether a British politician or Party, could do the same.

For a whole number of reasons, I was already looking into various aspects of this for my own reasons and if of interest, in the following I will share my thoughts:

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When running “Beta” software of any kind, the basic rule of thumb applies: Never run it on a PC that contains “mission critical” applications and data because sometimes and indeed the reason that beta testing is done, an unforeseen ‘event’ could wipe out or corrupt, your hard drive, destroy your data.

So I first installed it on an ‘older’ desktop which is more a back up resource to my main PCs than an actual ‘production’ one and of course copied off all the data on it first. As the install on that went well and the Operating System (Windows 7), runs sweetly even in 2Gb of RAM, I decided to become ‘brave’…

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