Vista on the other had still keeps underwhelming. A friend managed to drop their battery out of their notebook as Vista was shutting down, oops. For most operating systems this would not be any problem, a quick reboot, perhaps two and XP would be back up and running again. Not so Vista. It just kept rebooting even after the “repair process.” Last known good boot and system restore didn’t work which left, as usual with Vista, the reinstall the operating system. I recommended an upgrade to wither Win 7 or XP. Yes I did indeed mean an “upgrade” to XP.
Enough about operating systems. I also found out this past week how important system testing is. I don’t mean main pathway testing but exclusion testing. The hardly used functionality; validating the business rules and even a few tests of pathways unlikely to be used, just to see if anything breaks. This testing should occur well before production implementation. Sadly it doesn’t often work out that way and you end up fixing some things the day before, this is the existing world of system development.
I did some Excel 2007 training this week. If you are a business owner or perhaps a corporation then classroom teaching is probably not a good way to go when trying to solve individual problems. I was used with a one on one basis working through each person’s individual problems and directly addressing their areas of weakness. Not only did, but the client found this a far better approach than the classroom environment. In most cases it allowed the student to find areas that improved how long it took to do their work. Now that I have taught in both styles the one on one or one on two approach can be a lot better in some circumstances.
Special Section – Playing It Safe With Facebook
These are interesting times. While teaching Excel a few times I had the student use Google to find the answer to their question. In-built Help files are good when you know what you are looking for but questions like “is there a command to check for an error?” are a little harder to find. Google can often provide an answer, with examples in a fraction of the time of looking.
The connectivity presented by the World Wide Web has also changed the way we deal with each other. Instead of phone calls people use Facebook. The latest generation is often put out if you don’t have it or don’t use it continuously. I buy lots of things online, others send people photos of themselves, others watch videos, chat, get a date, grab some music and so on. While not all of this is instant some of it is. The increasing question being asked is “is this safe?” There are connections between Facebook and the real work. IRW or RL are used (in real life, the Real World) to reference this and appointments are made, kept, broken all without any real oversight, control or in some cases safety. In a recent case a man pretended to be a Muslim Lesbian who was being persecuted. A man pretending to be a Lesbian, the leader of a group, caught the first one out before being caught out himself. It is OK to be a little confused as this.
Rule one is to set your Facebook profile to private. This allows you to grant access on a case by case basis rather that it being the default. This is one area where Facebook keeps changing the rules so it is wise to keep an eye on this and check it regularly. There is a have a privacy settings dashboard that enables you to determine who has access and to what on your profile. For more on this check here: http://www.sunbeltsecuritynews.com/CX3MZM/110617-Facebook-Privacy. Remember that you do not have to fill in every item in the personal details area, most don’t and many put in bogus info anyway. Birth dates for example are almost always wrong.
The other issue here is access security in general. Over the past few months there have been incursions into some very large databases. While Facebook may be secure tomorrow that does not preclude a hacker getting in tomorrow and grabbing all the profile information from all the users who thought it was private and protected. The general rule when recording information is the “what if everyone could see this” approach.
So far this has been about people accessing your personal data. The bigger issue is the people who read what you post on sites like Facebook. Is your company reading your posts, your Boss, your partner, your children? Are any of your friends posting pictures that you would prefer never see the light of day, let alone be viewed by millions of strangers? Have you been associated with someone else’s photos, particularly those of les that pristine standards? You can do this by going to your profile and click on photos, scroll down and you will see place that says photos of you. Look through those photos and untag yourself from any you don't like. Simply click "remove tag" next to the name in the list of people in the picture.
So in general put as little personal info out there. Don’t post information about your private life that could give hints to your most common passwords. Don’t post pictures that are geo-tagged or someone may just work out where you live, work and play. Don’t tell people you will be away, why give potential robbers that kind of info. Don’t use simple passwords and change them often. Be wary of new friends who you don’t know at all. Checl people out first, check their profiles and who their friends are. Block those who annoy you. Finally, think before you click on a link. Check the URL first it should read www.facebook.com. If it says something like www.facebook1.php then it is probably some kind of phishing scam so don’t click.
Industry News
Intel versus AMD, who has the best when it comes to notebooks? HP has decided that they both deserve a go. The latest models will come with the new APU or accelerated processing units. These are a CPU the also has ATI Radeon-class GPU cores with DirectX-11 support, Northbridge I/O, and video decoding on a single die, i.e. in a single wafer. How much of an inroad they make into Intel’s "Sandy Bridge" Core i3, i5, and i7 processors is difficult to say. AMD’s new Llano processors or APUs are after all not the only combo wafers as the Sandy Bridge rage also includes CPU cores, graphics, I/O, and video processing on a single die.
In a recent demo video in the comparison between AMD’s quad-core A8-3510MX APU and Intel’s Sandy Bridge i7-2630QM, the latter did not come out very well. Of course one competitor’s comparisons will always make the other look bad. The AMD processor is shown using less power and the latest models do appear to run quite cool. The new models are almost duplicates of the Intel versions. HP is not really making any direct comparisons, they want to keep both suppliers happy. Using MobileMark however the 14-inch 6465b managed a very good seven hours and 15 minutes and six hours and 30 minutes on the 15.6-inch 6565b.
The problem these days is that it is hard to come up with a series of benchmarks that directly compare different architectures at the system level. Normally they compare either CPU or GPU performance but typically not both at the same time. Then it comes down to what weight you put where. If your package has the better graphics, well I think you can see where this is going.
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