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ComputorEdge™ Online — 10/14/11

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The Next Internet Boom (or Bubble) is Underway!

Digital Dave and articles based upon the whims of the writers.

Magazine Summary

List of ComputorEdge Sponsors

Digital Dave
by Digital Dave

Digital Dave answers your tech questions.

Calendar Data Transfer; E-mail Refusal; Using Two Networks Simultaneously.

Internet Start-up Boom
by Marilyn K. Martin

Luring Money and Genius—Even in a Bad Economy

Internet start-ups are booming once again, but it is different from before. Technology has advanced and there are new rich investors.

Wally Wang's Apple Farm
by Wally Wang

Siri: Voice-Enabled Personal Assistant

Siri: Voice-Enabled Personal Assistant; The Pointless Complaint of 4G LTE; The Steve Jobs Legacy; Twelve Lessons from Steve Jobs; The iPad Replacing Paper; The Apple Tax vs. the Microsoft Tax; The High Price for the Samsung Windows 7 Tablet; The Multiple Impact of iCloud, iMessage and Siri; How to make scroll bars always show in Mac OS X 10.7 Lion.

Worldwide News & Product Reviews
by Charles Carr

The latest in tech news and hot product reviews.

LA Student Uses Internet to Stop Deportation; Top Trends in Enterprise Communication and Collaboration; Meeting doesn't mean having to remove your shoes; Adobe InDesign CS5.5 Improves EPUB/HTML Export and Lots More.

Editor's Letters: Tips and Thoughts from Readers
by ComputorEdge Staff

Computer and Internet tips, plus comments on the articles and columns.

"Disappearing E-mail," "Speakers and a Mic," "Does Wally work for Apple?"

Send mail to ceeditor@computoredge.com with questions about editorial content.
Send mail to webmaster@computoredge.com with questions or comments about this Web site.
Copyright © 1997-2011 The Byte Buyer, Inc.

ComputorEdge Magazine, P.O. Box 83086, San Diego, CA 92138. (858) 484-1998

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Digital Dave

“Digital Dave answers your tech questions.”
by Digital Dave

Calendar Data Transfer; E-mail Refusal; Using Two Networks Simultaneously.

Calendar Data Transfer

Dear Digital Dave,

Thanks for your many years of service to the readers of this mag. I have learned a lot, but still consider myself an advanced beginner, at best.

Still using Windows XP on the PC, but recently bought a new laptop with Windows 7 pre-installed. Have not been able to find a procedure to convert Microsoft Works 2000 calendar files (ancient, I know) into a form that Google calendar can read. Can you help?

Again, thank you for whatever advice you can pass along.

Don Neilson
San Diego, CA

Dear Don,

It should be a two step process of exporting (File => Export) your calendar from Microsoft Works 2000 to a format that Google can read. The first choice is the iCalendar format which has become the standard for calendar files. Another option is the CSV (Comma Separated Values) format, although I don't know if Works 2000 has that option.

There could be other issues unknown to me, but generally whenever you need to move data from one type of program to another there will be export functions that allow you to create the file in an intermediate format that will enable you to move the data to the new program. In some cases these are found in the "Save as...", but often incompatible programs will use the Export/Import features. If you can use the iCalendar format on both ends then the structures will be compatible.

The most basic form of data transfer is the CSV format. It consists of raw text data separated by commas. Any text will be surrounded with quote marks while numbers are not. The order of data in CSV files is important since the receiving program does not receive any file structure information. (Sometimes the first line of a CSV file contains a list of the fields included in the CSV, so there is data about the format in there that some programs can use, i.e. Excel, where the first line is usually heading.) The exporting and importing program must use the same assumptions about the structure. Otherwise the information will appear in the wrong fields in the program.

Digital Dave

E-mail Refusal

Dear Digital Dave,

The sending computer is a Dell Inspiron 1200 XP located in MN using Gmail. The receiving computer is Toshiba Satellite L455-S5975 Windows 7 Located in CA which uses Mozilla Thunderbird 6.

Problem: Sending computer can not initiate e-mail to receiving computer. Error messages "Recipient server did not accept connect" followed by "connection timed out." Problem began after sending computer installed and uninstalled IE 8 and returned to IE 7. Sending computer can reply to receiving computer OK. Where do we begin to solve the problem?

Richard
Palm Desert, CA

Dear Richard,

While the e-mail process seems seamless, there are many pieces to the puzzle. Each e-mail account has its own server. In this case, the Dell uses Gmail servers and the Toshiba server is probably using the local ISP—if not a service such as Gmail or Hotmail. Next, the sending and receiving process are two separate events. The Dell would be using SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) to send and the Toshiba is using either POP (Post Office Protocol) or IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) to receive. POP is generally used when the e-mail service is provided by the local ISP. IMAP is used by Web supported e-mail services such as Gmail. Both are supported by most e-mail programs (Thunderbird, Windows Mail, etc).

If the Dell is using Internet Explorer to access Gmail, then don't use Internet Explorer 7 if you can help it. If Internet Explorer 8 (or 9) doesn't work, use Chrome or Firefox.

It sounds like the Gmail server is telling you that it cannot reach the e-mail server for the Toshiba. This could be a problem for the ISP who operates the server for the Toshiba. However, since replies can be sent from the Dell without problem, I would suspect that there is a problem in the addressing of new e-mails.

It is possible that the e-mail accounts and address books on the Dell were affected in the install/uninstall of IE 8. The first step is to check all of the settings for the Dell e-mail accounts (user name, passwords, server name). Next check the addresses being called up from the Dell address book.

Sometimes issues will arise between Gmail servers and other e-mail servers. If changing the browser does not work and you are not able to find a problem in the accounts or addresses, then check with the ISP for the Toshiba to see if Gmail is getting blocked for some reason. There are cases where e-mail servers are inadvertently gray-listed and blocked.

Digital Dave

Using Two Networks Simultaneously

Dear Digital Dave,

I have a Windows XP machine connected both to my wired network and via a wireless adapter to the access point in my building which has an IP address of 192.168.1.1. I have set my router's address to 192.168.1.2 so they are both on the same subnet. I've set my wireless adapter to 192.168.1.254. I'm using DHCP to automatically obtain a network address for the Ethernet network. Subnet mask for both is 255.255.255.0.

I've read online that you can use two different network connections on one PC by making sure they are both on the same subnet. I've run ipconfig from the command line to verify the access point and router addresses and to verify that both addresses for each network connection are indeed on the same subnet.

My building has just installed Wi-Fi and they did the job right. I've had download speeds up to 45 Mbps! I will soon disconnect my 1.5 Mbps DSL line, but want to keep the wired network to use my network printer. I print from two PCs via a print server.

Any suggestions on what else I might need to do in order to access both connections simultaneously?

Thanks.

Chris West
San Diego, CA

Dear Chris,

Unlike the letter last week in which I recommended that all the routers be put on the same internal network, in your situation it could be a security issue. If the wireless access point in your building is used by other networks in the building, it is possible that by using the same subnet you have exposed your network to those other networks. In your case, changing your router to another network such 192.168.2.1 would isolate your network.

I don't think that whoever is maintaining the wireless access point would want people manually assigning themselves IPs. That's an odd thing to do unless you're assigned one. There are likely to be collisions with other IPs in the system.

Also, it's definitely a security risk even if you are assigned an IP, as you have no router between you and everyone else on the access point. You need to treat it like public Wi-Fi and defend yourself. You can probably set up one router as a wireless bridge with the access point (make sure it's a router that's capable of this) and then plug another router's Internet port into the bridge. Then put all your machines behind that one to protect your network and provide printer access without dealing with two networks at all. You'd only expose one IP to the world (the inside router) like any traditional home network.

Of course, I could be completely misunderstanding the situation. Each router actually has two addresses. The first, the external IP that the world sees, is assigned by the DSL or cable modem to the router. The second is the fixed IP which the router uses to establish your internal network. If you assign your router an IP on the same subnet, then, depending upon the situation you could experience IP conflicts—although everything seems to be working for you.

As for disconnecting your DSL, it should not affect your networked computers and printers. Your router will continue to serve your network for printing and sharing. You just won't have an Internet connection via the router anymore. You will get your Internet from the building's Wi-Fi.

Digital Dave

Internet Start-up Boom

“Luring Money and Genius--Even in a Bad Economy”
by Marilyn K. Martin

Internet start-ups are booming once again, but it is different from before. Technology has advanced and there are new rich investors.

According to a May 2011 article in The Economist, "Another Digital Gold Rush" is upon us. Internet start-ups are booming. "The speed of innovation is unlike anything we've seen before," reports Ryan Spoon, who runs Dogpatch Labs, part of a venture capital firm that rents space to young start-ups in the vast, hangar like Pier 38 building on San Francisco's waterfront.

The start-ups in Pier 38 are full of young entrepreneurs with smartphones and computers, camped at desks in open plan offices with their bicycles parked outside. Wanting to be the next Facebook or Zynga, the young entrepreneurs have start-ups with names like "Noise Toys," "Adility" and "Trazzler." Some of the most prominent start-ups at Pier 38 are either preparing for stock market listings, or being bought up by big firms with deep pockets.

An example is "LinkedIn," a social network for professionals, which took in nearly $250 million last year. They joined the New York Stock Exchange in mid May with a $45/IPO—which closed at $94.25/share their first day (109% above their initial IPO). And Microsoft is buying start-up, "Skype" (an Internet calling and video service) for $8.5 billion.

This High Tech Bubble—Versus the Last One

The Economist article identifies three powerful forces that are transforming Internet start-ups this time.

1. Technological progress since the 1990s has made it much simpler and cheaper to try out a myriad of bright ideas for online businesses.

2. A new breed of rich investors is excited about backing these new Internet ideas.

3. This boom is much more global this time, with Chinese start-ups causing as much excitement as American ones.

But the return of big Internet IPOs, and the resurgence of large mergers and acquisitions among technology firms, is dividing opinion. Some veterans warn of a new "bubble" (doomed to burst) forming in the over value of start-ups. Or being wary of more mature firms such as Twitter, which is still casting about for a satisfactory business model five years after starting-up. Other veterans point out that many start-ups have exciting ideas and futures, and that there are plenty of corporate buyers (like Microsoft) eager to snap up Internet firms in private hands.

Start-up Financing—Angels or Anglers?

Although many of these high-tech start-ups are too small to interest venture-capital firms, there are tons of eager wealthy individual investors (called "Angels"), ready to invest singly or through lending clubs. Many of these wealthy investors made their fortunes during the 1990s Tech-Bubble, and are eager to put their know how and cash behind today's tiny start-ups. Thus much of the Angel money has gone to consumer Internet firms, and makers of software applications.

Individual investments of one million dollars are not uncommon, and some "Angels" are being gathered into venture firms to pool funds and provide start-ups with even larger sums. According to the Center for Venture Research at the University of New Hampshire, individual investors pumped about $20 billion into high tech start-ups in 2010, up from $17.6 billion in 2009. America's National Venture Capital Association says its members invested $22 billion in start-ups in 2010.

And certain elite venture-capital firms (like Andreessen Horowitz) have raised billions of dollars for "late stage" investments (like Twitter and Skype). This has allowed older start-ups to remain private and independent for longer than used to be the norm. One independent example is Groupon, which spurned Google's offer of $6 billion last year. It filed its IPO on June 2nd, but was in deep trouble by the end of September 2011. After discussions with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Groupon cut their revenue in half. And their COO, a reported "bad fit" for Groupon, left to return to Google.

This Time—a Global Boom

Some even point out that a Russian holding company renamed Mail.ru (and related to the investment fund, DST Global) set off this new bubble boom. In 2009, DST poured hundreds of millions of dollars into hot prospects like Facebook and Groupon, when most American investors were avoiding high tech start-ups like the plague.

DST's investments paid off handsomely, and suddenly American hedge funds, private-equity firms and even some mutual funds started tripping over each other to invest in Internet start-ups. And American secondary markets, like SharesPost and SecondMarket, allowed professional investors to trade the equity of private companies more efficiently.

The rapid globalization of Internet start-ups has finally made Europe into a bona fide "entrepreneurial ecosystem," with impressive firms like England-Sweden's Spotify (music-streaming) and France's Vente Privee (a clothing discounter).

And China, with the world's biggest and fastest growing online population, is no longer sitting on the sidelines. Plenty of venture capital, both foreign and domestic, raised more than $11 billion in 2010, for Chinese Internet start-ups. Such as the Chinese branch of Angel Investment Network.

Luring Talent

The same article in The Economist, says that some start-up firms are using a lot of their investment cash to dangle multimillion dollar pay packages in order to tempt star programmers from Google, Microsoft and other big high tech firms.

But the high tech "talent luring" is going both ways. According to May 2011 article, established (and wealthy) firms like Facebook are buying Internet start-ups just to snag the attached talent—and then promptly shutting down the start-up. Companies like Google and Zynga are so hungry to get start-ups' brainy founders and engineers, that they too are gobbling up start-ups, then deliberately jettisoning the unwanted products.

Start-up Stars Spurn Usual Flashy Bling

According to a June 2011 article in the Los Angeles Times, young high tech stars are rejecting the usual flashy wealth of buying mansions and sports cars, and hobnobbing with Hollywood celebrities. Instead, they are spending their millions on social causes and start-up ventures.

Joe Greenstein, who recently sold his company, Flixster, for about $80 million, still lives in the same one room San Francisco studio apartment he has rented for the last 10 years. Aaron Patzer, who sold his Internet start-up (Mint.com) for $170 million in 2009, still lives in a one bedroom apartment in Palo Alto with an old couch and TV, prefers hand me down shoes, and gets $12 haircuts. "Wealth needs a purpose greater than big houses and flashy cars," Patzer wisely explains.

Facebook's legendary billionaire, Mark Zuckerberg, at 27, just bought his first house for $7 million, in Palo Alto. Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, the world's youngest billionaire at 27, according to Forbes, still lives in his San Francisco condo and drives a Volkswagen R32 hatchback—which he leaves at home in the garage. He bikes to work at his tiny start-up, Asana, which is making project management software for businesses. Both Zuckerberg and Moskovitz have pledged to give away all their wealth during their lifetime.

They value their privacy and avoid publicity, but Zuckerberg made headlines last year when he donated $100 million to help improve public schools in Newark, New Jersey, which are among the country's worst performing school systems.

Skeptics grumble that all this conspicuous self-denial is just a gimmick to project a "common touch" in these economic bad times. But Alice Marwick, a researcher with Microsoft, did her doctoral dissertation in media studies about social status among the Internet stars. She says that this new generation of high tech entrepreneurs do seek status—but do it in different ways.

These young tech millionaires don't value visible wealth, she says, but prefer to invest in things like learning/exploring world travel or funding an incubator. "These things are just as expensive," according to Marwick, "But that's the classic hacker ethos that prizes the mind—not materials."

Although wealth still has its privileges. Aaron Patzer still partied hardy for his 30th birthday, with a $25,000 one week vacation on a catamaran yacht with friends, in the British Virgin Islands. But he's also paying for his younger brother to get a degree in computer science.

Thinking Outside the Box

San Francisco tech tycoon, Peter Thiel (who co-founded PayPal), is going one step further to encourage budding geniuses to head straight into start-ups—and bypass college. According to a May 2011 article, billionaire Thiel is giving $100,000 each to geniuses in training to not go to college, but pursue their high tech innovative ideas instead. These start-ups range from mobile banking for the developing world, to cheaper biofuels and robot helpers.

There are also online Web sites looking for both investors and high tech start-ups to invest in. And one site, Cayenne Consulting, offers a High Tech Startup Valuation Estimator. It offers a series of multiple choice questions like "My product or service will:" and "Global annual revenues in the sub-sector of the market I am competing in is:" and "My primary competitors (who are competing for the same consumer dollar by satisfying the same consumer need) are:"

So clearly there is a loop effect, as the Internet is helping fuel this new high tech bubble or boom, with start-ups hoping to create the next "must have" Internet sensation.

Marilyn is a freelance writer and humorist with many interests. She has sold teen anti-drug articles, as well as had numerous esoteric articles published. She has almost seventy mini-articles on Helium.com, and is writing a humorous Young Adult Science Fiction series, Chronicles of Mathias. Volumes One and Two have received a "Gold Star for Excellence" from TeensReadToo.com, and are available from most on-line bookstores.

Wally Wang's Apple Farm

“Siri: Voice-Enabled Personal Assistant”
by Wally Wang

Siri: Voice-Enabled Personal Assistant; The Pointless Complaint of 4G LTE; The Steve Jobs Legacy; Twelve Lessons from Steve Jobs; The iPad Replacing Paper; The Apple Tax vs. the Microsoft Tax; The High Price for the Samsung Windows 7 Tablet; The Multiple Impact of iCloud, iMessage and Siri; How to make scroll bars always show in Mac OS X 10.7 Lion.

The introduction of the iPhone 4S brought along a new feature called Siri, which is a natural language voice recognition program that lets you control your iPhone completely through your voice. This lets you interact with your iPhone without trying to type on its tiny virtual keyboard. For many people, this feature alone will prove invaluable and may actually be the most important feature that most people overlooked.

While other mobile phones have had voice activation technology for some time, Siri integrates voice recognition into intelligent behavior to understand the context of your commands. In the past, voice recognition meant performing simple commands like "Call 555-1234." Siri goes beyond such ordinary voice recognition to understanding context such as asking Siri, "What's the best sushi restaurant around here?"

As the International Business Times states, the difference between Siri and existing voice recognition technology like Android's Voice Actions is that Voice Actions only recognizes specific words and phrases while Siri allows more natural verbal queries.

While talking to your iPhone to give commands might seem awkward, especially in a public place like a restaurant or office, the real potential of Siri lies with its ability to control a computer with your voice alone. For physically challenged people who don't have control of their hands and arms, Siri would allow complete access to a computer. Put Siri on a Macintosh and it suddenly makes computers accessible to a huge market.

Beyond physically challenged users, Siri's technology could also prove beneficial to people who need to use a computer without their hands. Surgeons in a Toronto hospital are already using Microsoft's Kinect to control a computer without using touching it. Now instead of gesturing in the air, a surgeon could simply speak a command to tell the computer what to do.

Perhaps factory workers, who may need to use their hands for other tasks, could use voice commands to control a computer as well. Hands free computing, through Siri's voice enabled assistant, will eventually allow a growing number of unique applications designed to be controlled primarily through verbal commands.

With a keyboard, mouse, trackpad for detecting finger gestures, a Kinect device for detecting motion commands, and Siri for following voice commands, the controls for manipulating a computer are going to start changing dramatically. Tomorrow's computers won't look anything like today's computers. Unless, of course, you insist on sticking with Windows XP for another ten years.

The Pointless Complaint of 4G LTE

The next generation of mobile phone networks will rely on 4G LTE (Long Term Evolution) technology. When the iPhone 4S didn't support 4G LTE, many people were disappointed. However, if you look at the facts, you can understand why LTE support isn't that important for now.

Sprint claims they will start offering LTE on their network in early 2012. AT&T is still rolling out LTE to select markets. If you want to see if AT&T offers LTE in your market, give AT&T your e-mail address and they'll let you know when it's available.

Verizon offers LTE support in select markets and plans to offer complete LTE network coverage by 2013. If you visit Verizon's Web site, you can see if they offer LTE coverage in your area.

Figure 1. Verizon's Web site offers a map of 4G LTE coverage in the United States.

If you buy a mobile phone with 4G LTE support, make sure your network supports 4G LTE in your area or else you'll wind up buying advanced technology that you can't use. If you travel, don't expect your 4G LTE mobile phone to connect at 4G LTE speeds everywhere you go if 4G LTE networks aren't available in that area.

Given the still limited availability of 4G LTE networks, shoving 4G LTE technology in a mobile phone is a nice feature, but hardly necessary if you can't take advantage of it. Next year when 4G LTE networks are more widely available on AT&T, Verizon and Sprint, that's the time to consider a 4G LTE mobile phone, and that should coincide with the next update to the iPhone 5.

The Steve Jobs Legacy

Before his death, Steve Jobs reportedly left plans for up to four years of new products. What's amazing isn't just that Apple has new products planned out so far in advance, but that most other companies seem to plan no further ahead than the next three months so they can announce quarterly results to justify rewarding their army of executives with bonuses for doing nothing more than being executives capable of awarding themselves bonuses.

When Apple developed Mac OS X as the successor to OS 9, Apple secretly ported it to Intel processors. Each iteration of Mac OS X ran on both PowerPC and Intel processors, although Apple didn't make the shift until several years later. That long-term focus let Apple shift to a new processor relatively quickly. Rivals who lack similar long-term focus tend to react by creating rushed products that don't have time to mature.

The end result is that most companies create half-baked solutions that don't work as well. Just witness the flurry of tablet competitors that failed to compete against the iPad. In the next year, watch how Microsoft struggles to get Windows 8 running identically on ARM and Intel processors in tablets.

With Pixar, Steve Jobs helped change computer animation for making movies, starting with "Toy Story." In the personal computer market, Steve Jobs helped shape the Apple II as the early model for personal computers, complete with expansion slots that the IBM PC later adopted.

Next, Steve Jobs helped shape the graphical user interface controlled by a mouse housed in an all-in-one computer design while displaying fonts on screen for desktop publishing. Microsoft later followed with Windows while PC manufacturers followed later with all-in-one computer designs of their own.

With the iMac, Steve Jobs introduced the idea of all-in-one computers available in different colors, which PC manufacturers later adopted as well. Steve Jobs introduced the iTunes music store, which competitors are still trying to copy, along with the iPod, which rivals failed to successfully mimic.

When Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone, he defined how a smart phone should behave with a touch screen interface, which Android, Blackberry and Windows Phone 7 soon adopted. With the MacBook Air, Steve Jobs defined the future of laptops, which PC manufacturers are still trying to imitate. With the iPad, Steve Jobs defined how tablets should work, which rivals are still struggling to copy.

While Steve Jobs may not have done the actual work in much the same way that a coach never actually scores any points during a football game, Steve Jobs still played a pivotal role in guiding the technology to the public. Without Steve Jobs, it's possible that we'd all still be struggling with command line interfaces based on operating systems like CP/M-80 (which MS-DOS imitated), using smart phones like Blackberries, lugging around cheap netbooks instead of tablets, and buying beige computer towers with a tangle of cables sticking out from the back.

With the death of Steve Jobs, people all over the world realize how much technological progress depended on one man's vision. What's frightening is that if people continue resisting change and arguing for limitations, the next few decades of computer technology may not look any different from what we see today.

We already know there's an army of people stubbornly determined to remain part of the problem by actively blocking any technological progress that exceeds the boundaries of their limited imagination. What we need is more people willing to take risks to become part of the solution to push technology forward. The life of Steve Jobs showed the world that one person really can make a difference.

Twelve Lessons from Steve Jobs

Well-known Macintosh evangelist, Guy Kawasaki, used to work with Steve Jobs and distilled twelve lessons that Steve Jobs taught him.

1. Experts are clueless. "Experts" can tell you what's wrong, but they can never create something right.

2. Customers cannot tell you what they need. Customers only want incremental improvements of what they already know. Instead of trying to please customers, create a product that you would want to use yourself.

3. Jump to the next curve. Rather than create a better daisy-wheel printer, Apple jumped ahead with laser printers.

4. The biggest challenges beget best work. If you tackle a huge challenge, you'll create better work than if you aim for a much smaller goal and meet it.

5. Design counts. Make sure your products not only work, but are aesthetically pleasing as well.

6. You can't go wrong with big graphics and big fonts. This refers to Steve Job's use of big fonts and graphics for his presentations, which enhances a presentation.

7. Changing your mind is a sign of intelligence. There's nothing wrong with being wrong, but there's nothing right about stubbornly staying with your wrong decisions.

8. "Value" is different from "price." People will pay for the best tools.

9. A players hire A+ players. A great leader can attract great people, but a mediocre leader can only attract mediocre people. If your company is run by a mediocre leader, the only people willing to stick around will be mediocre workers content to create mediocre products.

10. Real CEOs demo. Steve Jobs demonstrated the usefulness of his own products. Most other CEOs do not and when they do, they don't demonstrate the product doing anything interesting. Just watch Steve Ballmer demonstrate the Slate PC.

11. Real CEOs ship. The best product is useless if it never ships.

12. Marketing boils down to providing unique value. If people want the unique value that your company offers, you don't have to worry about competitors.

How many of Apple's competitors are creating great products and how many of them are content to churn out slightly improved versions of their current products? Apple's competitors are simply failing by failing to innovate. After all, why bother challenging yourself as CEO when you can collect millions for doing nothing instead?

The iPad Replacing Paper

For decades, people have talked about the paperless office, yet computers wound up creating more paper than they eliminated. That's finally starting to change with the iPad. For those who still can't figure out what an iPad might be good for, browse through this slideshow of how people from pilots and preachers to school teachers and children have found a way to replace bulky paper with an iPad.

Besides replacing multiple pages, the iPad also makes it easy to search and magnify text so you can find what you want when you need it and read it when you find it. In some cases, you may not want to replace paper as much as preserve it. That's the goal of the British Library's first app called Treasures.

Figure 2. The British Library Treasures app lets you browse through historical documents.

The $5.99 app contains the original version of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, the world's oldest bible, Nelson's battle plan for Trafalgar, sketches by Leonardo, a 1664 plan of New York, a handwritten version of "The Tyger" by William Blake, and other historical documents that most people will never get to read, let alone see, in person.

We still need paper, but with the iPad, we're no longer dependent on the limitations of paper. We now have the freedom to use either paper or an iPad for what each does best. By giving us more choices to display, read and preserve paper documents, the iPad simply expands our range of possibilities, and providing more options is always a worthwhile goal to pursue.

The Apple Tax vs. the Microsoft Tax

For years, people have complained that Apple products cost too much, a so called "Apple Tax." Yet no one complains about a similar "Microsoft Tax." Where the Apple Tax costs money, the Microsoft Tax costs time, which can eventually cost you both time and money in terms of lost productivity and wasted resources trying to maintain a Windows PC.

The U.S. Air Force has found this out the hard way with their Predator drone program, which has been infected by a computer keylogger. According to Fox News, "the existence of ordinary seeming computer viruses on what should be the most extraordinarily secure of military systems is far from shocking, said Anup Ghosh, a former scientist with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and chief scientist with security company Invincea."

Ghosh said that "[The drones] are controlled by standard PCs. The system should be replaced or 're-imaged' with a virus free, bit-for-bit copy of the data on the drive in order to get rid of the infection. If they are connected to a larger network they will be infected again."

"The planes were never in any jeopardy of 'going stupid'," the Air Force said, and the virus "is not affecting operations in any way... it showed up on a Microsoft-based Windows system."

How much time and money will people spend protecting their Windows PCs, then trying to repair them afterwards, then trying to trust that they actually fixed the problem in the first place? The next time you consider a Macintosh and a Windows PC, be aware of the so called "taxes" that you need to pay for either system.

Visit any Apple Store where they have dozens of Macintosh computers hooked up to the Internet running nothing more than a firewall. Try to infect a Macintosh by visiting different Web sites and downloading suspicious software. If you do manage to find Macintosh malware, try to get it to spread and infect the rest of the Macintosh computers in that same Apple Store. You may find yourself in that Apple Store for a long time.

Given the choice between a Windows PC with a huge, known list of malware capable of infecting it, or the Macintosh (or Linux) that may one day have a similar huge list of malware in the future (but doesn't yet have that many today), why would the Air Force deliberately choose the most vulnerable computer to control a critical system? The next time you fly in a commercial airliner, ask yourself if you'd feel safer flying in a plane controlled by Windows, Linux, or a Macintosh.

The High Price for the Samsung Windows 7 Tablet

At Microsoft's BUILD conference for developers, Microsoft gave everyone a Samsung tablet with a preview copy of Windows 8 to start developing Windows 8 tablet programs. In case you didn't attend Microsoft's BUILD conference and think paying $499 for the lowest price iPad is too much, you might be happier paying $1,299 for the Samsung tablet running Windows 7 instead.

Figure 3. Microsoft is selling the Samsung Windows 7 tablet.

Presumably you should be able to install a preview copy of Windows 8 on this Samsung tablet so you can start developing Windows 8 tablet programs. While $1,299 might seem like a steep price for a tablet, you can hope that future Windows 8 tablets will cost much less to attract a larger customer base.

If not, then the only customers for future Windows 8 tablets might be corporations who believe a $1,299 Windows tablet is a better deal than a $499 iPad. If you're going to develop Windows 8 tablet programs, focus less on consumer apps and more on enterprise apps. That way you won't be disappointed when your consumer friendly Windows 8 tablet program only reaches the handful of consumers willing to shell out so much money for a Windows 8 tablet.

The Multiple Impact of iCloud, iMessage and Siri

Most people expect revolutionary products to wow and amaze everyone with their appearance. The truth is that most people dismiss the introduction of any revolutionary product as useless and impractical until much later when the full impact of that product becomes so obvious that even these initial critics can no longer deny the facts.

Siri's natural language, voice recognition technology will change the way computers work, but two other features may be just as revolutionary. The first is iCloud, which allows automatic synchronization of data between multiple devices. Talk to Siri on your iPhone 4S to make an appointment and iCloud pushes that appointment to your appointment calendar on your iPad and Macintosh or PC. Modify that appointment on your iPad or Mac and iCloud updates that information on your iPhone. With iCloud, your data is always current and at your fingertips.

A second major technology shift will be iMessage, which allows you to send text messages through Wi-Fi to other iOS devices. While this may sound mundane, it circumvents the phone carrier's steep charges for sending text messages. Despite the fact that text messages require little bandwidth, many carriers charge customers approximately 20 cents to send or receive a text message.

The real impact of iMessage isn't what it does, but how it does it without the carrier networks. The future of mobile phone technology relies on escaping the high prices and low service of the carrier networks. Eliminate the bottleneck of the carrier networks and mobile phone technology no longer remains shackled to an antiquated system.

Just look at how the big three television networks (ABC, CBS and NBC) have lost their clout when rival TV networks appeared through cable TV. With limited bandwidth available, the big three TV networks could crowd out any competitors and dictate what we could watch. When cable broke this monopoly apart, a flood of networks and channels appeared.

Imagine how mobile phone technology might change if we could break the stranglehold of the major carrier networks? Just as cable TV gave us more choices than ordinary television networks, so might competition to the carrier networks provide more choices for mobile phone technology.

The future is changing rapidly before our eyes. You can either look forward to future changes with excitement or dread, but in either case, it's going to happen around you whether you like it or not.

*                    *                    *

If you're using Mac OS X 10.7 Lion, you may notice that scrolling works much differently. Besides scrolling in seemingly opposite directions, scroll bars don't appear until you actually start scrolling. The reason for this is that Lion assumes you don't want to see scroll bars until you start scrolling.

In case you like the familiarity of scroll bars, you can make them always appear in Lion. Just click the Apple menu and choose System Preferences. When the System Preferences window appears, click the General icon under the Personal category. Now click the Always radio button in the Show scroll bars category.

Figure 4. Making scroll bars always appear.

In the early days, before Wally became an Internationally renowned comedian, computer book writer, and generally cool guy, Wally Wang used to hang around The Byte Buyer dangling participles with Jack Dunning and go to the gym to pump iron with Dan Gookin.

Wally is responsible for the following books:

My New Mac,

My New iPhone,

My New iPad,

Steal This Computer Book 4.0,

Microsoft Office 2010 for Dummies,

Beginning Programming for Dummies,

Beginning Programming All-in-One Reference for Dummies,

Breaking Into Acting for Dummies with Larry Garrison,

Strategic Entrepreneurism with Jon Fisher and Gerald Fisher,

How to Live With a Cat (When You Really Don't Want To).

Mac Programming For Absolute Beginners

The 15-Minute Movie Method

In his spare time, Wally likes blogging about movies and writing screenplays at his site "The 15 Minute Movie Method" along with blogging about electronic publishing and how authors can take advantage of technology at his site "The Electronic Author." Wally can be reached at wally@computoredge.com.

Worldwide News & Product Reviews

“The latest in tech news and hot product reviews.”
by Charles Carr

LA Student Uses Internet to Stop Deportation; Top Trends in Enterprise Communication and Collaboration; Meeting doesn't mean having to remove your shoes; Adobe InDesign CS5.5 Improves EPUB/HTML Export and Lots More.

LA Student Uses Internet to Stop Deportation

Jackie Mahendra, Director of Organizing for the social networking site Change.org, writes in this week about a Los Angeles student who successfully halted the deportation of her friend's father after delivering hundreds of signatures from a campaign on Change.org to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement headquarters in Nevada.

Jamie Alegre started the campaign after coming across an urgent plea on Facebook from her friend Astrid, whose father had been detained and placed in deportation proceedings. Jamie launched a petition on Change.org to halt the deportation, bringing her laptop to school and collecting over 500 signatures from students and faculty in less than 48 hours.

"It is amazing my classmates in California were able to keep a family together in Nevada," said Jamie, the author of the petition. "It is proof that distance doesn't stop dreams and that we can help someone even when they're far away."

Before Jamie's campaign, she and Astrid had never met in person, lived in the same city, or met each other's parents.

"What Jamie accomplished in less than 48 hours is remarkable," said Change.org Organizer Gabriela Garcia. "With no budget and armed with only a laptop, she was able to make a powerful impact on a family's life. Change.org is about empowering anyone, anywhere to demand action on the issues that matter to them, and it has been incredible to watch Jamie's campaign take off."

Check out live signature totals from Jamie's campaign on Change.org.

Top Trends in Enterprise Communication and Collaboration

Logicalis, an international provider of integrated information and communications technology (ICT) solutions and services, has identified the top trends in enterprise communication and collaboration it believes information technology (IT) professionals and their business counterparts should be investigating for their organizations:

Voice-mail as you know it is dead. Communication technologies adopted by Corporate America to improve productivity have witnessed many revolutions and evolutions. But none have offered more significant impact than the current crop of enterprise communication and collaboration tools, according to technologists at Logicalis, an international provider of integrated information and communications technology (ICT) solutions and services.

"These tools and technologies have fundamentally changed the way organizations communicate," says Jim Dossias, Cisco Practice Director at Logicalis. Dossias identifies four top trends in enterprise communication and collaboration affecting voice-mail, instant messaging (IM) and presence, full collaboration and video, which add up to huge productivity gains for corporations embracing these changes.

It's not your grandfather's voice-mail.

The traditional voice-mail that earned its spot as a killer application in the early 1980s has been replaced by unified communication systems that offer more flexibility, especially for mobile executives. "We're seeing less and less traditional voice-mail as business users adopt other communication technologies," says Dossias. "When they do use voice-mail, they want to see who it's from before they play it back. No more listening through endless voice-mail messages until you reach one that is critical."

IM wherever UR.

While initially facing slow adoption rates in Corporate America, IM and presence technology are now being embraced as the new killer productivity application for business. IM and presence technologies like Cisco WebEx Connect IM or the new Jabber client enable business users to communicate and collaborate more effectively with colleagues, partners and customers. Presence technology also offers the ability to see when a colleague is busy or available. "Instead of wasting time leaving messages on multiple devices hoping that you'll catch the person, you can find out immediately if he or she is available," says Dossias. "If not, you can decide to connect with someone else on your team, rather than sitting and waiting for a response."

Multi-channel communication becomes real.

There is a movement toward full collaboration where business users can not only call and connect, but send a file while talking, share a video and add another colleague or vendor into a conference with just a click. This is a real time saver for busy executives who can now easily discuss, share and modify proposals, prices and product information on the fly.

Meeting doesn't mean having to remove your shoes.

While the Dick Tracy video watch hasn't become as popular as many ardent fans had hoped, new techniques in video bandwidth and compression technology over IP converged networks and the Internet have made high-resolution desktop video more affordable and practical. It has cut down on office travel and increased team collaboration. "Now when I have an idea I want to bounce off someone across the country, I can see his reaction—that tells the real story," notes Dossias.

What does this all look like in real life?

It's pretty simple, according to Dossias, it looks like a big boost to productivity.

"At any point in time, just like any other business person, I have a lot of information that I need to share and collaborate on with team members and customers," says Dossias. "For example, recently an account manager sent me an e-mail requesting details about a specific solution for one of his customers. I immediately checked his presence information, saw that he was available, and sent him an IM asking if he had time to speak then. When he said, "Yes," I clicked to call him on our VoIP (voice over IP) phone system. Then, I shared a WebEx presentation from my desktop to walk him through the product options. Within a couple of clicks we were talking via full screen video. All of this started with a simple e-mail and ended with a much more engaging conversation and much more enthusiasm than would have happened if I had simply e-mailed him a PDF and a price list."

Adobe InDesign CS5.5 Improves EPUB/HTML Export and Lots More

Over the last few months we've slowly but surely been digging down into the massive and generally wonderful thing that is the Adobe Creative Suite 5.5 collection, focusing primarily on ways individual programs differ from earlier versions. This time let's take a look at InDesign CS5.5.

In Adobe's own words, "InDesign CS5.5 is professional page layout software that lets you design, preflight and publish a broad range of documents in print, online, and on mobile devices. Precise control over typography, built-in creative tools, and an intuitive design environment let you create stunning page layouts faster and more efficiently."

One big difference between InDesign CS5.5 and 5.0 is greatly-improved EPUB and HTML export. According to Adobe, "Unlike PDF and SWF, the EPUB and HTML file formats still do not support high-fidelity design, typography and layout. Despite this limitation, the e-book market has grown significantly in the last few years, due largely to the consumption of e-books on tablet devices and smart phones."

Adobe has addressed this new demand by allowing users to more easily create EPUB/HTML files without needing to know how to do a lot of coding, with an eye particularly for those who create InDesign docs intended for print. When coding is required, verboseness has been reduced considerably. You also now have better control the way text, images and graphics are exported to EPUB or HTML without messing up your InDesign layout.

Another great feature new to InDesign 5.5 is the Cover Image feature which allows you to determine the first page or a specific image you want to use when creating an EPUB document.

InDesign CS5.5 also increases the Image Resolution PPI Setting from 72 (the only res that was available in CS5), to the Windows default of 96, 150 (the average for e-book devices), all the way up to 300 (print quality).

In addition to the default fixed-size view setting, CS5.5 now has a setting called "Relative to Page Size" that allows you to select a percentage value. This setting makes images scale better across different sized monitors relative to page width and adjust to the size of your browser's window—very useful when switching between my 30" desktop monitor and my 17" laptop.

You can now export PDF files in PDF/X-4:2010, PDF/X-5:2010, and PDF/VT-1 formats, allowing for closer integration with Adobe Acrobat X and Adobe PDF Print Engine 2.5.

When you're working with content that is duplicated throughout a document, you can now link repeated text blocks so that any change you make to the "parent" block is automatically made in all the repeated instances.

You can also add inline graphics and other objects by merely dragging them where you want them.

OK, that's a lot, but it's still just a sampling of the features offered by this immensely rich and comprehensive program.

The above improvements over CS5 in addition to the already robust feature set InDesign offers makes CS5.5 one impressive program. I'm not sure if I would pay the $119 upgrade price coming from CS5.0, but I would pay the $199 price it I was upgrading from 4.0 or earlier. Full versions range in price from $699. You can also buy a subscription for $35 per month, an option that might make sense for an organization that does not have an ongoing need for design software. You can try InDesign CS5.5 free for 30 days. Through the end of the year, get 20% off when you upgrade to an Adobe Creative Suite 5.5 individual product or suite edition.

System requirements:

Windows

• Intel Pentium 4 or AMD Athlon 64 processor

• Microsoft Windows XP with Service Pack 2 (Service Pack 3 recommended); Windows Vista Home Premium, Business, Ultimate, or Enterprise with Service Pack 1; or Windows 7

• 1GB of RAM (2GB recommended)

Mac OS

• Multicore Intel processor

• Mac OS X v10.5.8 or v10.6

• 1GB of RAM (2GB recommended)

In addition to being an editor and columnist for ComputorEdge and ComputerScene Magazines, where he has written hundreds of feature articles and cover stories over the past decade, Charles Carr has also penned well over 1,000 non-tech newspaper and magazine articles and columns for various publications, including two widely-read columns each week for San Diego's North County Times newspaper.

Carr has covered such diverse topics as pesticide use in area schools, invasive background checks for county volunteers, asthma awareness, the debate over standards-based grading, potential vulnerabilities in electronic voting machines, and Southern California's devastating 2003 and 2007 wildfires. He has also written many humorous pieces.

Carr has also edited dozens of stories and articles written by others which have appeared in major publications and web sites across the country.

He has been a contributor and technical advisor to L.A. and San Diego Parent magazines and receives dozens of requests a year to appear on Southern California television and radio stations to talk about important events in the tech world.

Carr has judged many writing competitions including San Diego Press Club and Time-Warner Communications contests and was sole judge for the national NAPPA Tech Toys awards for five years (which his kids really appreciated). He was recently a judge for the national "Poetry Out Loud" competition.

He has won many writing accolades, including Press Club awards for Best Column Writing, Consumer Writing and Best Arts and Entertainment, and has repeatedly taken top honors in San Diego Songwriter's Guild competitions for his original musical compositions.

Carr will soon publish his first book, What a World, a collection of his best writings.

Learn more at www.charlescarr.com.

Editor's Letters: Tips and Thoughts from Readers

“Computer and Internet tips, plus comments on the articles and columns.”
by ComputorEdge Staff

"Disappearing E-mail," "Speakers and a Mic," "Does Wally work for Apple?"

Disappearing E-mail

[Regarding the September 23 Digital Dave column:]

If you have a long e-mail to send there are two approaches that work really well. First is to write it and turn it into a PDF file and send as an attachment. Second is to write it in a word processing program and copy to clipboard and paste in the the e-mail and send. An easy way to make a PDF file is to use the free word processing program OpenOffice.org. Just write your file and click on the PDF file. I use Gmail, but I still use these two methods and then save the file on a disk.

-Melba Kalaher, Denver

Speakers and a Mic

[Regarding the September 23 Digital Dave column:]

Just a quick reminder, you will also need some type of speaker system and a mic if your system doesn't already have built-in speakers. For privacy you could also use a combo head set with a built-in speaker.

-Dave, VA

That's a good point. If you're computer doesn't already have a microphone, many of the Webcams have them built-in. Also, it is common for monitors to have built-in speakers. If you're computer comes with a Webcam, then it probably also has speakers and a mic.

-Digital Dave

Does Wally work for Apple?

[Regarding the September 23 Wally Wangs Apple Farm column:]

My question...

Why doesn't Wally talk about the fact that when OSX has had viruses... Apple support techs would tell users everything but the truth. Apple waited until they had a fix and then quietly released it and only admitted the truth after fact.

Wally's writings makes one believe that PCs are on their last leg and that Apple is out selling all other computers by leaps and bounds.

I like to read what Apple is up to... but they are not perfect. Apple is a good company and has solid products, but there needs to be some balance.

So I ask you, "Does Wally Wang work for Apple?"

I've written Mr. Wang directly and never received a reply.. so I'm not counting on hearing from you, either. Too bad back in the day you where a good place for news and information.

-Dan Schmitt, Denver

Do I work for Apple? No.

First, let's clarify your questions. Why doesn't Apple report on Mac OS X viruses? Probably because viruses as a malware technology are obsolete. Viruses depend on infecting a file that people share. Worms can propagate by themselves so worms are more prevalent than viruses. Trojan horses can spread through user error, and no technology can stop that.

Apple most likely reports on Mac OS X malware (Trojan horses and worms) after the fact because they want to announce a patch of the problem. Why assume that this is somehow evil or wrong?

Also take into account that every Mac in Apple Stores all over the world do not run anti-spyware and antivirus programs despite being hooked up to the Internet 24 hours a day so malware on Macs is rarely a problem, unlike Windows.

Next, are PCs on the way out and Apple growing? Just ask the netbook manufacturers what happened to the netbook market and look at how fast the iPad market took off. Look at any college campus and count the number of Macs being used and ask yourself if these students will buy Windows PCs after using Macs throughout college? Still feel positive that PCs have a future?

In response to your complaint that I didn't respond to your e-mail, I have several e-mail accounts that I only access from certain computers to avoid e-mail overload. I'm currently traveling so I don't have access to my ComputorEdge e-mail account on my laptop. That explains why I won't see your e-mail message you sent until after I get home.

Now do I work for Apple? I actually make most of my money from Windows through Microsoft Office. Having used Windows and Mac extensively leaves me to conclude that Macs are superior in most ways. Here's the real question: Do you assume that anyone who writes anything positive about Windows must work also for Microsoft? If not, then why assume that anyone who writes anything positive about Apple can only be working for Apple?

-Wally Wang

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