Archive for February 2011
Lost in the Cloud
If you’ve been paying attention to technology lately, the buzzword in the industry is definitely the “cloud.” Cloud computing, for people confused yet interested, isn’t some sort of magic technological breakthrough that harnesses the raw power of water droplets and ice crystals to load YouTube videos (although that would be pretty buzz-worthy). Put more simply, the cloud is a method of distributing services (like email, music, videos, documents and even video games) to end-users without having to run a program or save the data on a local computer; even simpler would be to say that it’s a way of computing entirely on-line. Read the rest of this entry »
Bloatware
If you use a computer (and if you’re reading this, you must), you should ask yourself the following questions. Do I really need to update Flash, Java, iTunes, Quicktime and my HP print software every week? Do I really need a half dozen toolbars littering my browser window? Does every program on my computer need a speed launcher running all the time on the slim chance that I’m opening Microsoft Access or Adobe Acrobat or OpenOffice? Unless you have some sort of undiagnosed techno-compulsion, the answer to these is probably “no.”