Who Needs a Windows Explorer Replacement?
Windows Explorer is the application that allows you to explorer the drive (or drives) that are attached to your computer. Click and it opens. Click a drive and see its contents. Click a file and something happens. The something might be a program runs or a file opens. This is all pretty basic stuff, right? So why would anybody be so dumb as to spend money on a program to replace it? Despite the fact that several people had told me they wouldn't be without PowerDesk, I stuck with Windows Explorer. Over the years, I've learned how to live with its single-panel limitations by opening a second copy as needed. But I have now seen the light.
Although it's true that PowerDesk (now version 8) is a replacement for the Windows Explorer, that's rather like saying that the QE2 is a replacement for a fishing boat. Or that a 15-million candlepower searchlight is a replacement for the flashlight you keep in your glove box. Or that the Library of Congress is a replacement for a small town's bookmobile. You get the idea.
PowerDesk 8 certainly replaces the Windows Explorer and can display the contents of two locations simultaneously, side by side or one over the other. I knew it could do that. Several Explorer replacements can do that. What I didn't know was what else it could do:
- Windows Explorer now lets you open a compressed Zip file and access the files inside without using a program such as 7Zip. PowerDesk does that but also allows you to compress and decompress files and folders.
- Windows Explorer lets you transfer files from one disk to another. PowerDesk does that but also lets you transfer files over the Internet using PowerDesk FTP. (OK, in all honesty, Windows Explorer can make an FTP connection, too, but you can still see only one location at a time and Windows Explorer doesn't handle secure FTP connections as PowerDesk does.)
- Windows Explorer can display previews of many graphics files without loading a separate viewer. PowerDesk does that for more than 150 file formats.
- Windows Explorer allows you to open a command-line window (if you remember the right magic keystrokes). PowerDesk does that and all you have to remember is to right-click the drive or directory (or to choose the command prompt item from a menu.)
- Windows Explorer allows you to keep 2 directories synchronized if you don't mind manually examining time stamps, deciding which directory has the newer version of the file, and then copying individual files one way or the other. PowerDesk can do all the timestamp examining and synchronize directories for you.
- Windows Explorer will color code compressed and encrypted files. PowerDesk allows you to specify the colors you want to use for encrypted and compressed files—and for applications, documents, images, and system files.
- Windows Explorer also doesn't come with 350 pages of documentation. PowerDesk does, but you can begin using it right away without ever examining the help file and then learn new features at your leisure.
Snapshots of PowerDesk
PowerDesk can show 2 directories simultaneously and, if you select an image, an audio file, or a video file the file will be displayed or played in the file viewer panel.
The file-renaming option included with PowerDesk is far from perfect, but the Windows Explorer doesn't make automated renaming possible.
I selected a large number of files and told PowerDesk to rename them. As you can see, the renaming dialog is limited.
Here is a list of my renamed filed. Note that the first file was named "Ballet_.jpg", which makes it appear at the bottom of a list.
The developers should take a look at other file renaming utilities and adopt the ability to add prefixes and suffixes. The first file should be numbered "0" or "1" instead of being left blank. I'd also like to lose the parentheses and make it possible for the file renamer to pad numbers to a length specified by the user.
The Windows Explorer can't convert image files from one format to another. You can even convert images from JPG to GIF (although I can't think of a good reason to want to do that).
Which files on your computer use the largest amount of space? PowerDesk's Size Manager utility will show you.
Although PowerDesk doesn't replace a full-featured FTP client such as Filezilla, it does allow you to copy files easily from a remote site to any of your local drives.
You can launch programs from within PowerDesk. This seems to be an unneeded feature and I disabled the Launch Bar and then combined the Drive Bar, an edited Tool Bar, and a shortened Command Bar.
Here's the interface with the combined Drive, Tool, and Command bars and with the Launch Bar disabled.
Images will appear in the Preview Panel, which can be displayed at the right or on the bottom, or even converted to a floating window.
And something else that the Windows Explorer can't do is directly play audio or video files.
With all this power, yes PowerDesk really does require a 368-page manual.
Bottom Line: PowerDesk Beats Explorer Hands Down
Lots of extra features and no serious shortcomings make PowerDesk an exceptional replacement for the Windows Explorer. At $40, it's a bit pricey, but if you spend a lot of time doing the tasks that PowerDesk does, it would be an intelligent purchase.
For more information, visit the Avanquest website.
Chase(ing) an Error
My wife sent an instant message to me this week, saying that she had opened a message "from Chase Bank" and that she thought she might have done something stupid. She hadn't done anything stupid, but Chase Bank had. The message called my wife by name (but not her name) and cited the last 4 digits of a credit card number (but not the last 4 digits of her credit card number). What happened and why?
Let's cut to the chase (so to speak). According to Tom Kelly (Chase Media Relations), "We recognized the issue on Tuesday and quickly sent follow-up emails to affected customers." When I first contacted Tom, he wasn't aware of the problem even though my wife and I had both reported it to Chase hours earlier.
I had received a similar message with another card holder's name and card information.
The problem "occurred because of a problem with a marketing file," according to Tom Kelly. I asked how many people were affected. "We are not sharing the number of emails involved."
At first, I thought the messages were basic phishing attempts, but I found that the domain of origin (easy to forge) was registered to Chase and that the origin's IP address (difficult to forge) was registered to Chase. When I noticed that the message had been sent to an address used only by Chase Bank to communicate with me, it was clear that the wrong message with the wrong name and the wrong debit card information had been sent to me.
I called Chase Bank and explained the situation and was told that I should forward the message to the "abuse" desk at Chase. Clearly the young lady who took my call either wasn't listening or didn't understand terms such as "domain name" and "IP address".
After listening to a second explanation, she said that she would report the issue to her supervisor and that someone would contact me. That was Tuesday, November 2. I'm still waiting for the call.
This wasn't a security issue. At most, I have the name of a Chase debit card holder and the final 4 digits of the card number. There's not much anyone can do with that, but the system that knows the cardholder's name and the final 4 digits of the card certainly knows a lot more. If Chase can send messages containing another user's information to tens (hundreds? thousands? hundreds of thousands?) of users, what's to keep the system from vomiting up all of my information and accidentally sending it to someone I'd prefer didn't have it?
And it's not just Chase. All financial institutions need to review the processes they use and to find ways not to share data inadvertently and inappropriately. In addition, financial institutions need to hire people who can recognize when someone who understands domain names and IP addresses is on the phone with a legitimate problem.
Just brushing off people who have valid information about your system's security isn't intelligent.
By the way, Chase sent a follow-up message Thursday evening that said "We determined that we experienced a processing error and the e-mail was not intended for you." By most standards, that was too little and far too late.
The Trouble with Smart People
The trouble with smart people is that sometimes they're so far ahead of the curve that anyone of average intelligence will consider them to be quite insane. Ray Ozzie might be in the predicament now. Ozzie, Microsoft's retiring chief software architect, says PCs are dead, the office suite is dead, and (by extrapolation) unless something changes Microsoft is dead. Wow.
Ozzie, who is by any definition a very smart guy, has been with Microsoft for 5 years. Immediately after joining Microsoft, Ozzie wrote a blog post called The Internet Services Disruption and that roiled the waters a bit. Now he's written Dawn of a New Day.
Our products are now more relevant than ever. Bing has blossomed and its advertising, social, metadata & real-time analytics capabilities are growing to power every one of our myriad services offerings. Over the years the Windows client expanded its relevance even with the rise of low-cost netbooks. Office expanded its relevance even with a shift toward open data formats & web-based productivity. Our server assets have had greater relevance even with a marked shift toward virtualization & cloud computing.
Continuous services are websites and cloud-based agents that we can rely on for more and more of what we do. On the back end, they possess attributes enabled by our newfound world of cloud computing: They're always-available and are capable of unbounded scale. They're constantly assimilating & analyzing data from both our real and online worlds. They're constantly being refined & improved based on what works, and what doesn't. By bringing us all together in new ways, they constantly reshape the social fabric underlying our society, organizations and lives. From news & entertainment, to transportation, to commerce, to customer service, we and our businesses and governments are being transformed by this new world of services that we rely on to operate flawlessly, 7×24, behind the scenes.
See the full blog post here.
Before heading west to Microsoft, Ozzie was with Lotus Development Corporation. He was the lead developer of the company's flagship Notes software. Later, he launched Groove Networks an Internet-based suite of collaboration tools that Microsoft acquired in 2005 and promptly mismanaged by failing to support it on 64-bit platforms.
In essence, Ozzie says desktop computing is dead and the cloud is the future: "We're moving toward a world of 1) cloud-based continuous services that connect us all and do our bidding, and 2) appliance-like connected devices enabling us to interact with those cloud-based services."
Forecast: Partly Cloudy
We have short memories and much of what we do tends to be cyclical. School boards start classes at 9 instead of 8 because students do better when classes start later. A decade after that change, the same school board votes to start classes at 7:30 instead of 9 because students do better when classes start earlier.
The same approach is evident in other parts of our lives and this "in the cloud" stuff is ironic:
- In the 1970s, I carried a card deck to the computer and handed it over to an operator for processing.
- In the early 1980s, I had a VT100 terminal on my desk. The word processor (and everything else) resided on a DEC PDP 11/70 in a remote room.
- In the mid 1980s, we received personal computers and I was able to do some work on the PC, but the important stuff was still in the computer room.
- The disks on our standalone computers grew larger, the processors ran faster, and the operating systems became more capable. Today I have on my desk at home several million dollars worth of computing power (at 1980s prices).
So after 25 years of being told (and agreeing) that distributed computing was faster and easier to use, along comes "cloud computing".
In-the-cloud computing will allow me to store files remotely and hope that they're available when needed, use programs with severely limited feature sets, and "enjoy" the leisurely pace that these cloud-based application run at.
Maybe speed is overrated anyway.
I don't doubt that Ozzie is right about many of the advantages of cloud-based computing, but until the infrastructure is available to support fast and reliable communications between where you are and where the cloud is, it's a non-starter.
But maybe that's what Ray Ozzie is trying to tell us.
Be the Master of Your Own Domain
Occasionally I receive a message from someone who claims to be in business but the sender's address is something at Yahoo or Hotmail. Perception is important. If you're in business, a domain name is part of what people use to form their impression of you.
If you're shopping for a car, you'll probably have a much different opinion of the dealership if, instead of "joe.dealer@bigdealership.com" the message comes from "bigdealer@gmail.com" (or "bigdealer@aol.com"), which is even worse because of AOL's sketchy reputation as an Internet service provider.
My Internet service provider includes an e-mail address, but I never use it. I have 3 G-mail accounts that I use for archiving messages and to provide access to current and archived messages if I need to use a public computer, but I would never consider any of these to be my primary account and I rarely send mail from any of them.
When I write to a reader, a hardware company, or a software company in my role as the TechByter guy, I use a techbyter.com address. When I write personally, I use a blinn.com address.
"Being your own domain" has several advantages and perception is just one of them.
Registering a domain name costs around $10 per year for the common top-level domains such as com, org, biz, and info. Certain other top-level domains cost considerably more. A hosting account that includes space for a website and e-mail (usually with an unlimited number of addresses) can cost as little as $40 per year and you can find e-mail only accounts for $20 per year if you don't need a website.
An address such as "you@yourdomain.com" tells me that you're actually in business. An address such as "you@wowway.com" or "you@verizon.com" suggests that you're probably just playing around.
Short Circuits
YouTube Dumps Jihadist Videos
This week YouTube took down several videos by Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born cleric who now lives in Yemen. Al-Awlaki's video have been used to inspire violence against targets in the United States and Europe. The cleric works with Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, the group that shipped explosive packages to locations in the United States in what is seen as a series of tests for future attacks.
US and UK officials have been pressuring YouTube to take down the videos and stepped up that pressure following the discovery of bombs in packages shipped to the US.
Congressman Anthony Weiner of New York provided YouTube with a list of hundreds of videos featuring Al-Awlaki and YouTube's Victoria Grand says that the company has removed videos that violated YouTube's guidelines that forbid display of dangerous or illegal activities such as bomb-making, hate speech, and incitement to commit violent acts. YouTube also prohibits videos from anyone who has been designated as a member of a foreign terrorist organization. (So if you're a member of a domestic terror organization your videos are OK?)
Grand says that Google tries to differentiate between videos that are religious but without call to violence and videos that cross the line and attempt to incite violence. The religious videos will remain; those that incite violence will be removed.
OPINION: This is a difficult topic. The videos may be gone from YouTube, but you can be sure that they're still on the Internet and easily reached by anyone who wants to see them.
Microsoft Beats Earning Projections
With Windows 7 selling well, Microsoft's first-quarter earnings beat the expectations of analysts. Earnings were $5.41 billion, which equates to 62 cents per share for stockholders.
Purchases of software used in the home continue to be depressed, but companies have finally started upgrading systems after being on the sidelines for many quarters. Business sales were largely responsible for the earnings boost.
Earnings were more than $500 million ahead of estimates. A Bloomberg survey of analysts had pegged the expected earnings at $4.8 billion.
For the second quarter, analysts are predicting sales of $19 billion for Microsoft.
A Google Named Sue
Google would like to eat Microsoft's lunch and has now filed suit against the federal government, claiming that contract specifications favor Microsoft over Google. The Interior Department needs to replace an older e-mail system and plans to upgrade its existing Microsoft product. That's when Google stepped in.
According to the lawsuit, the Interior Department said that it would not consider software from any vendor except Microsoft. Google wants the department to consider its Internet-based e-mail service for Interior's 88 thousand employees.
Microsoft's Outlook e-mail, task-manager, and calendar software—combined with the company's Exchange Server products—essentially own the market sector. But Google says it's Internet-based approach is better because the company or agency that uses Google's products doesn't need to install and operate its own servers. Instead, those functions are outsourced.
So far, Google's attempts to derail Microsoft in the office have been largely ineffective. After listening to Google's presentation, the state of California selected Microsoft as the supplier of e-mail services for its 200 thousand employees. Sensing a pro-Microsoft bias in the bidding process, Google declined to submit a bid.
Maybe Google will find the path easier in federal court.
The author's image: It's that photo over at the right. This explains why TechByter Worldwide was never on television, doesn't it?
