bruceb news

Microsoft has a reputation as a monopolist but built its dominance by opening the Windows world to partners – thousands and thousands of partners. Microsoft controlled the underlying environment and reserved some highly profitable parts for itself, but the world is a PC world because you can buy computers and printers and software from untold numbers of independent companies, big and small. When Microsoft launches a product or a platform, it is always surrounded on a stage at some convention center by dozens of companies.

In many ways, the result is a mess. By itself, Windows is stable and secure. All too often that is obscured by our unhappy experiences dealing with non-standard installations of buggy software, by devices that don’t work or are badly designed, or by unrelated crapware included as baggage with something else because one company did a bundling deal with another company for its own benefit and with no consideration for our experience. […] continued

You don’t have to leave Windows Live OneCare right away. It’s not broken and you don’t have to replace it. It will be supported until December 2010. Still, we can’t feel completely comfortable with a product that’s being taken off the market. You should consider switching to a current product when your OneCare subscription expires.

If you decide to leave OneCare, you have to cancel your subscription, especially if you bought it online. In that case Microsoft has your credit card number and will automatically renew unless you take steps ahead of time.

The official way to cancel is to call OneCare support at 1-866-ONECARE (1-866-663-2273) and choose “Cancel your account.” Don’t do that until you’re ready! […] continued

The newspaper business is quickly collapsing in waves of bankruptcies and layoffs and rapidly declining readership and ads. Our local paper, the Santa Rosa Press Democrat, just announced that it will be shrinking again, making it an even more pale shadow of a real newspaper.

Anything is possible in this economy but it’s impossible to imagine that the venerable New York Times won’t be the last man standing, still publishing a print edition when all the other newspapers have folded up – although even the NY Times is dealing with a crushing debt load, looking for investors and seeking to sell some of its assets to raise cash. […] continued

On Monday, for one day only, you can pick up a copy of Quickbooks Pro 2009 for free at Staples.

This appears to be a real offer. Staples stores will sell Quickbooks Pro 2009 for $159, after applying a $40 “instant rebate.”

There will be coupons in the store to mail in for a $159 rebate.

There are more details in an email from an Intuit representative here. Quantities at the stores will be limited to stock on hand but this isn’t a bait and switch deal – the stores have been bulking up their inventory. The same offer will reportedly be available online on the front page of the Staples web site. […] continued

I’ve been using my PayPal account more frequently to buy things online. It’s connected to my checking account, so a payment made with PayPal is withdrawn directly from the bank account. Typically the payment requires a transfer to a different browser window for the PayPal authentication, then back to the merchant’s web site, which in the past had sometimes been a tricky dance for Internet Explorer to handle. Lately all the transactions have gone smoothly. The merchant gets all the name and address information from PayPal so it’s frequently faster to finish a transaction.

It’s a little harder to use Quicken to reconcile payments from the checking account that go through PayPal. […] continued

The publisher of PC Magazine announced the end of the print edition – the last copy will be printed in January. I ended my subscription and wrote a eulogy for PC Magazine earlier this year but it still makes me sad to see it go – I’m old school and I like things printed on paper.

If you’re nostalgic, here’s a collection of the “twelve greatest defunct tech magazines.”

I am happy to announce that Microsoft formally unveiled Microsoft Online Services today.

I am a Microsoft partner authorized to sell and support Microsoft Online Services. I expect to set up many of my clients with Exchange Online for their mail. If you’re interested, please call me or drop me a note! I do not need to be in your geographic area to assist you with this.

This is the first big step by Microsoft to deliver online services directly to customers, part of its effort to redefine the entire company and move some of your data to the online cloud. […] continued

The volume of junk e-mail sent worldwide plummeted on Tuesday after a company providing the servers for the spammers was taken offline.

The bad guys install malware on computers that they can control in vast networks, primarily to send spam for counterfeit pharmaceuticals and designer goods, fake security products and child pornography. Approximately 190 billion spam messages are sent every day from more than 1.5 million hijacked computers. The spammers set up servers to control the hijacked computers and to display web pages offering illicit goods for sale.

The spammers don’t buy their own servers. They buy server space from hosting companies, which are shielded from liability in many cases and not directly responsible for the actions of their customers. […] continued

Spammers can turn a profit even if they only get one response from every 12 million emails they send. When you see a ridiculous spam message and think, who in their right mind would respond to that?, the answer is, almost no one – but it only takes a handful of responses for the spammers to think their campaign was worthwhile.

Last year researchers from UC Berkeley and UC San Diego infiltrated a spam network and took over a portion of the network, diverting the spam sent out by over 75,000 hijacked computers (out of more than a million in the entire spam network). […] continued

Acrobat 9 Professional builds on the features in Acrobat 8 that made it an important tool in many offices, especially law offices. There is a vastly improved document comparison routine and enhanced Bates numbering, for example, along with small improvements in transfers to Word, file splitting, and other features.

Acrobat 8 introduced PDF “packages,” single PDF files that contain multiple PDFs assembled from multiple sources. Packages are particularly good at storing email folders; a single PDF can contain messages that are listed individually, stored in the PDF with their attachments, and can be sorted and searched. Here’s a good explanation of Acrobat packages. […] continued