Some companies choose to minimize their expenses associated with providing customer service by making it impossible to reach them.
Author: Charles Miller (Charles Miller)
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Be in Control of your Computer
Computers today are incredibly noisy! Another way of putting that is to say vendors are incredibly nosy. The noise to which I refer is not of the audible kind emanating from the fan, but the nosy communications that quite literally everything in your computer carries on without you, the user, seeing or hearing anything.
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Too Many Calls Home?
It is doubtful that there is anyone reading this who does not remember Steven Spielberg’s iconic cinema moment “E.T., phone home.” That was three decades ago, and today it is “PC, phone home.”
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Regular Updating is the Key
As I sit down to write this column, I have just finished reading a 30-page report entitled “Of Black Swans, Platypii And Bunyips. The outlier and normal incident in risk management.” This whitepaper, published in 2010 by the SANS Institute, examines trends in computer malware infecting Mac and PC systems. Researching and reading are much of what I have to do in my profession.
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Is Your Hard Drive the Biggest and Fastest?
I imagine a scene that could have taken place in some corporate boardroom of a company that manufactures hard disks. Present at the meeting were the CEO of the company, head of the marketing department, and an engineer. The exchange could have gone something like this:
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A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words
The email message I received read: “I got a message from somewhere and I think it said something about how I have to sign up with Windows or somebody so Google can download my iPad to Facebook in the cloud. What should I do?”
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What is a Computer Virus?
This week I thought it might be a useful exercise to examine some of the constantly changing terms information technology people and others use to name bad software. In vernacular usage, the word “virus” has become a catch-all for any and all kinds of bad software, yet the word virus does have a specific and more restricted definition that sets it apart from other terms.
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The Computer Corner: The Uniform Resource Locator
The technical term for the address of a web site is Uniform Resource Locator (URL) or Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) which is slightly different but similar enough that most people use the two terms interchangeably.
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The Computer Corner: It has happened again
It has happened again, unfortunately. This time it started when a client called me several times over a week-long period reporting an increasing number of troubling problems with a brand new laptop.
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Choosing Password Manager Software
In an earlier column, I promised to make specific recommendations for the best password
manager software to use. There are quite a few from which to choose, and determining the one
best for you might otherwise be a difficult undertaking, so I have a suggestion that will make it
easier.