internet Archive

Yes Virginia. there is a new Operating System from Windows that works? Quite well thank you! I do recommend Windows 7 Home Premium or better. It is, as one tech writer wrote “What Vista should have been”; shades of Windows ME, a road bump on the way to Win XP. A client asked this week if it is worthwhile to upgrade from Vista to Win 7. Yes, in spite of having to shuck out $119 or so. (I’m talking the upgrade from Vista price here; you’re not going to want to do a complete install on an XP machine. Just not worth the bother.) One of the good things Microsoft did with this latest OS release (in response to user requests) was to offer a family pack that allows you 3 licenses for only about $40 more than just the one. But the bad news is that stores are about to run out of the family pack and MS says there are no plans to extend the popular offer. He who hesitates!

This week’s column will address several unrelated questions; sort of a catchall column.

Several of you have asked why do things get mixed up in my browser especially when I haven’t changed anything?

I have run into a rash of browser related video playing problems of late, both with Internet Explorer and with Firefox. Some occurred when a user upgraded from IE Version 7 to 8.0 and others seem to be related to a new Flash Player Version.

There is currently a Flash Player add-on and a plug in that may or may not be required to play videos depending on which version of IE or Firefox you are using. Sometimes when you click on a button to fix this problem you only get the one part and sometimes it just won’t download and install completely and correctly from the Adobe Flash site.

To avoid hassles, go to our old friend filehippo.com and type in “flash player” and you’ll find both the needed flash files. Download them both to your desktop and install from there in a few seconds. Remember, you’ll need to close and re-open your browser(s) before the new add-on or plug in can work. Other problems can also be caused by a software update, but I still recommend you keep your Win Updates on Auto.

And lastly; kind of a sad question. Is AOL headed to extinction? Are they going out of business?

Hard to say for sure; their new CEO is cutting a third of the workforce and foregoing a huge bonus this year. As you know dial-up is a dying business and AOL generates much of its income from phone based Internet subscribers. The new CEO is trying to shift business to their stable of subscription based (i.e. revenue generating) sites; but my guess is that in a couple of years AOL will be completely different and smaller (perhaps renamed) or gone altogether.

Seems a shame, since so many of us grew up with AOL or some other dial-up ISP; not that many years ago.

I read a lot of techie articles, newsfeeds and blogs to research this column. I explore the latest technologies so that I can keep my readers informed. When I began this column I promised to give you just enough information to serve your needs without a lot of jargon, acronyms and other complications. Let me also add, I try to wait until you are ready (and the market is ready) before I mention or recommend a new technology.

This week’s column is for those that may want to step beyond the usual browser and search engine wars into an expanded type of Internet tool. Kick it up a notch? Browsers like Internet Explorer and Firefox which control most of the browser market use search engines (like Google or Bing) that primarily hunt and fetch anything available on the Web that matches your key word(s). And they do a wonderful job in a very short time; even to the point of identifying more info than you can possibly sift through.

But what if you want the answer to a question that can be computed or a comparison between two or more bodies of data? This is where “Wolfram Alpha” might fit in. They call themselves a “computational knowledge engine”: they do not search the Web, but instead rely on their own database of facts and acquired knowledge. The service was first introduced in May of this year and is a work in progress as they develop a larger data base and more computational methods. Without trying to explain further what Wolfram Alpha (WA) is, let’s look at some examples of what it can do. By the way, their Web is www.wolframalpha.com.

They’re great with numerical computations, just type in any computation you can think of using fractions, exponents, geometric functions, whatever and it will spit out the answer. I tried this one that I needed for a recipe: “half of 5/8 cup”. I got the multiplied answer as 0.3125 cups, but I also got these conversions that were easier for me to measure, 2.5 fl. Oz. or 5 tbsp.

When I typed in “Albany Macon” it assumed I meant the two towns in Georgia since my PC is in Georgia and it gave me some stats about the two cities and the travel distance between them. It also allowed me to choose Albany, N.Y., or Macon, Miss., and other possibilities for comparison. Try this with some international cities to get the full extent of the WA database.

Try typing in two stock names and you’ll get comparative data and trend lines for this year’s prices. You can either type the company name or the stock symbol (like MSFT for Microsoft) if you know it.

Here’s one query that didn’t turn out so well. I typed in Georgia vs. Auburn and found out that Auburn is a city in Alabama, Pop. 56,088 and Georgia is a state in the Southeast, Pop. 9.7 million. Guess WA doesn’t know much about the SEC yet.

Written by Jim Hall. Email your questions to geekspeak@mchsi.com . You can find Jim online at HallsTrainingSolutions.com

I try to avoid questions that lead to geeky answers, but sooner or later I must have a go at those that recur repeatedly. This week, I’ll try to explain Java Scripting. Even if I don’t do a good job, I’ll still tell you how to confirm whether you have it and if not, how to get it. Reason being, you do need Java to enhance your Internet surfing experience. It’s like this: you don’t have to know anything about the carburetor under your hood, but you probably need one to drive your car.

Let’s start with a definition which I gleaned (here paraphrased) from Webopedia and the Java Website: JavaScript is a scripting language which allows Web authors to design interactive sites and allows users to play online games, chat online, and view 3D images , just to name a few. Java was originally developed by Netscape and is currently owned by Sun Microsystems. If you really want a geeky earful, try Wikipedia’s current definition. Can we just say that the Java Runtime Environment or JRE (another way to refer to Java Scripting) is like a decoder or filter that allows you to look at coded messages or images and see them as recognizable objects or texts? Without JRE, certain coded Web pages will appear as gibberish or not show at all.

If you navigate to a Web page that has JavaScript on it and you do not have the JRE installed, you may get a pop-up message that tells you to get Java so that you can translate the images. JavaScript interacts with your browser; so not only do you have to have Java installed, but it must be enabled in the browser that you are using. If you use more than one browser, Java must be enabled in each of them.

One easy way to tell if you have Java installed is to open a browser and type just this text into the URL address box: javascript:alert (‘hi’). When you press enter, you’ll get a popup that says ‘hi’. If that doesn’t happen, you need to download Java.

Another Issue with Java is that periodically, it needs to be updated, partly because of new technology and partly for security reasons. You could hope that when you download the latest version the old one would be removed, but that doesn’t happen. I find it easier to uninstall the old version first and then either go to the Java site or to FileHippo to install the new one.

What if you get a message that you need to enable Java Scripting in the browser you are using? Here’s how: In Firefox; from the Tools menu, choose Options/Content tab/check enable JavaScript. In Internet Explorer, from the Tools menu choose Internet Options/Security tab/Custom Level button/scroll almost to bottom for Scripting and enable active scripting.

Written by Jim Hall. Send your questions to geekspeak@mchsi.com. You can find Jim online at HallsTrainingSolutions.com

• Anybody remember how excited you were when you got your first dial-up connection to the Internet?

• How cool was that?
  
• Now, fast forward a few years to the days of broadband or fast access connections.
  
• How does that old dial-up look now?
  

Not only have our expectations changed, but the World Wide Web has changed.

Web pages are very much more complicated today than they were back then and they take much more bandwidth to load all their images, videos, audio files and complicated navigation schemes. What if you had to download Vista’s Service Pack 2 with close to 500 MGBs of files on a dial-up system? Just downloading your email can take forever with dial-up, since people are always sending pictures and videos and the like.

Seems we’re always in a hurry today and surfing the Internet can be just as annoying as Interstate traffic when it’s backed up. Usually when you’re in a road traffic jam, you can guess what’s wrong; maybe an accident ahead or road construction. But, how do you tell when there’s an internet traffic jam?

Is it just you when things slow down, or is it your Internet connection. Or is there something wrong on the site that you are connecting to? Let’s look at these three possibilities in turn.

First is it your PC? If a slow Internet connection is being caused by your PC, you’re probably experiencing a loss of speed on some other operations as well. Are your pictures slow to open; do other applications like Word open slower than usual? If things are slower all over, then you need to address what’s wrong with your PC.

I’ve covered some of these issues in other recent columns, so let’s move on to the second possibility.

Is your connection slow? There are several ways to test the speed of your Internet connection. You can try CNET’s Bandwidth Meter (at: http://tinyurl.com/6rjjlz) or maybe http://speakeasy.net. I like the one from CNET because it shows the relative bandwidths of everything from dial-up to 3 Gservice. The one from speakeasy also gives you an estimate of upload and download speeds.

And lastly, if your PC is OK and your Internet connection is OK, maybe there’s a problem on the Website that you’re trying to access. Could be that there is a lot of traffic, the site may be undergoing some maintenance or updates or the site could be under attack. For example, about two weeks ago, Twitter was the victim of a denial-of-service attack from some evil hackers who disrupted service for users most of a day.

How can you check to see if something of that nature is happening? Try this site: downforeveryoneorjustme.com. Go to the site and type in the address of the site you’re having trouble with; then click the “or just me” link. If that site is not functioning up to par, you’ll get confirmation.

By the way if you have trouble remembering that long address (or like me, too lazy to type it); just go to Google in either Internet Explorer or Firefox and start typing downfo … by the time you get that far, the site name will come up for you to select.

Written by Jim Hall.  Send your questions to geekspeak@mchsi.com.  You can find Jim online at HallsTrainingSolutions.com