Word 2010: Better design, more stability
Aug 31, 2009 Whitepapers
Get a quick peek at a few impending changes in Word, including a less cluttered Ribbon, improved performance, and the new Backstage feature.This download is also available as an entry in our Microsoft Office blog.
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Word 2010: Better design, more stability
Tags: microsoft-word, News, Photography, webcasts, white-papers
Tip of the week: Get free tech support online
Aug 31, 2009 Internet
[Image: Courtesy of Ivan Petrov]
We recently blogged about the frustration many of us feel when we can't figure out how to get balky electronics gear to do what we want it to. Here are some ideas on where to get help.
The user guide that came with the TV, digital camera, or other gadget is the obvious place to start—provided you can find it. If you can't locate a hard copy, see if the manufacturer has an electronic copy on its Web site. Many companies do. We quickly located downloadable manuals for Nikon cameras, Nokia phones, and Sharp Blu-ray players simply by searching for "product manual Nikon cameras" and so on. You can also get manuals from some retailers, such as online retailer Crutchfield, and third-party sites such as Fixya, Retrevo, and DiploDocs.
See what other support services the manufacturer might offer. Many have quite a bit. Samsung's online support center, for instance, has FAQs and troubleshooting and how-to guides. It's possible the answer to your question or solution for your problem might already be addressed. Sony's eSupport center online has much the same. Panasonic, meanwhile, has set up a Concierge service for users of its flat-panel TVs.
Retailers might back you up as well. Costco stands out with its concierge service, which provides free setup and troubleshooting advice on electronic products purchased at its stores or online. Crutchfield offers free tech support for the life of most products, both by phone and online. Its Web site has an extensive FAQ, which you can search by product.
Other users can help too, so check out user forums. Some are sponsored by retailers, like Best Buy. Others are hosted by third parties, including Consumer Reports. AVS.com is well-known in the audio/video field.
Fixya offers free advice and information on a wide range of products, from electronics to appliances, cars, and more—1 million specific products, according to information on the site. You can browse through a list of common problems, chat with an expert, check out service providers, or ask other users for buying recommendations.
Do you have any tips on getting product support? Let us know. —Eileen McCooey
Sagging video game industry looks to price cuts, new titles
Aug 31, 2009 News
While major home electronics are still selling despite the sagging economy, smaller personal electronics are sitting on store shelves, according to the Consumer Reports Index, our new economic survey. I expect that finding is hardly a surprise to the video game industry–sales of video games and game consoles have been dropping for months.
The decisions by Sony and Microsoft to slash $100 off the price of their Playstation 3 and X-Box 360 Elite systems, respectively, could help slumping sales. (With the cuts both consoles now cost $299.) Those price cuts could increase unit sales by as much as 60 percent, NPD Group analyst Anita Frazier told Gamasutra recently. That’s welcome news to both console and game makers: NPD has reported a year-over-year sales drop of 37 percent in console sales and 29 percent drop in game sales.
[Update to expand on new X-Box prices: Thanks to the $100 cut, the Xbox 360 Elite system is now $300, while the
Xbox 360 Pro package, which is being phased out, is $250 following a
$50 price cut. A basic Arcade version is still priced at $200.
One change is that the Elite system, which has a larger hard drive,
will no longer include an HDMI cable.—Ed.]
New game titles may also help not only manufacturers but the retailers that sell their wares, such as game-rental giant GameStop, which reported a 32 percent profit dive in the second quarter. GameStop CEO Daniel DeMatteo sees some hope with the impending release of several new games this fall (including Halo 3: ODST and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2), according to Reuters, but says his company is “cautious” given ongoing concern about the economy and consumer spending.
Less than a year ago, some analysts speculated that the video-game industry could be recession-proof. Obviously, that’s not the case. Nintendo, the third of the “Big 3” game-console manufacturers, is now facing pressure to drop the price of its $250 Wii.
Are you considering buying any video games or consoles this fall, or are they still too expensive? Let us know. –Nick K. Mandle
Tags: games, video, video-games
Live Webcast: Ready, Set, Refresh!
Aug 28, 2009 Internet
Chances are good that your company has not updated its PCs and Notebooks in awhile and it might not be your top your business priority. But maybe it should be. In fact, that aging fleet of corporate computers is probably costing more money to maintain, manage and support than you realize — as much as $170 or more per year for each computer by one account.
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Live Webcast: Ready, Set, Refresh!
Live Webcast: Helpdesks without Boundaries: How Today’s IT Teams Support Worldwide Users
Aug 28, 2009 Whitepapers
Since the Internet opened up the IT world, there’s been an exponential increase in the types of users that internal IT needs to support. Yesterday’s well-defined, everyone-behind-the-firewall organization has given way to organizations that know no boundaries, and include employees, virtual employees, contractors, customers, partners, vendors, and regulators. For today’s helpdesk, this means that the users they must support are often thousands of miles away, on a variety of devices including PCs, Macs, and smartphones, and well beyond the reach of their internal networks.
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Live Webcast: Helpdesks without Boundaries: How Today’s IT Teams Support Worldwide Users
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Maximize the performance of Microsoft Vista and Intel Matrix RAID: Part 2
Aug 28, 2009 Whitepapers
If ever there was a black art in the world of IT, RAID certainly fits the bill.
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Maximize the performance of Microsoft Vista and Intel Matrix RAID: Part 2
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Social networks leak personal information, study finds
Aug 28, 2009 News
A new study suggests so-called tracking cookies used by social networks such as Facebook and Twitter may help reveal users' sensitive personal information to third-party advertisers, hackers and online criminals.
[ PHOTO: Courtesy of Sean Carpenter ]
In our 2009 State of the Net survey, roughly 13 percent of people using social networks such as Facebook and Myspace reported being subjected to some kind of abuse and 17 percent of all online users reported having recently experienced identity theft online.
Now a new study (PDF) raises another, possibly more serious threat to users of social networks: the leaking of their personal information to third-party tracking sites that run banner ads on those social networks.
Such tracking sites are known to compile, over a period of years and using cookie files on people's home computers, anonymous records of users' online behavior. For example, they track which web sites people visit. Having the ability to tie those anonymous records to the identities of social network users would all but eliminate their anonymity.
The study, co-authored by a researcher at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute, examined the practices of 12 social networking services, including Bobo, Digg, Facebook, Friendster, Hi5, Imeem, LinkedIn, LiveJournal, MySpace, Orkut, Twitter, and Xanga.
Those social networks tag each user by assigning him or her a unique identifier. Normally, such a tag is used internally by the social network to access the user's personal profile. But if an outside tracking site were to obtain that tag, it could easily locate personal information in an individual's social network profile.
What the researchers found is this: When a social network communicates with a third-party tracking site, typically for the purpose of displaying a banner ad on the user’s screen, the social network is disclosing the user’s tag to the tracking site. It's not known whether any tracking site has abused such a disclosure. But one could, by combining the personal information obtained from the social network with its own records of that user’s online behavior to compile a dossier on that individual, including his or her name.
Many social network users have access to privacy controls that can protect their personal information from such tracking sites. But, the study found, on some services such sensitive information as the user’s name, gender, age, and location remain unprotected by privacy controls. The study also estimated that between 55 and 90 percent of the users of the social networks hadn't taken advantage of privacy controls to limit access to their profile information. As a result, much of their personal information was widely exposed. (Besides being of use to third-party tracking sites, such detailed information could be useful to online scammers and other criminals.)
The bottom line: Social networks should offer users a wide range of privacy protections and make sure those are enabled by default. Users of social networks shouldn't assume their identity and personal information is private from advertisers and scammers, and should take all necessary precautions to protect themselves.
I'll cover those recommended steps in a follow-up blog. —Jeff Fox
Tags: computers and internet, Internet, News, social, Technology
HP Tech Talk- Customer Log Warehouse
Aug 28, 2009 Whitepapers
Galen Schrek, Principal Analyst, Forrester Research, Kevin Lyons, from HP’s Enterprise server, storage, and network business unit and Rex Wang, VP of Product Marketing at Oracle.
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HP Tech Talk- Customer Log Warehouse
Tags: data-management, Photography, storage, Whitepapers
TIBCO Designer Video Tutorial – Create a Webpage
Aug 28, 2009 Whitepapers
The presenter of this webcast will teach how to create a webpage using the HTTP Connection shared resource, the HTTP Receiver activity, and the Send HTTP Response activity in TIBCO Designer.
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TIBCO Designer Video Tutorial – Create a Webpage
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TIBCO Designer Video Tutorial – Call a Subprocess
Aug 28, 2009 Whitepapers
The presenter of this webcast will teach how to call a subprocess using the Call Process activity in TIBCO Designer.
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TIBCO Designer Video Tutorial – Call a Subprocess
Tags: video, webcasts, white-papers
