Which way, Windows?
Now that I’ve had time to read the US Court of Appeals’ 150-page ruling on Microsoft, some lessons become clear:
Stories by Brian Livingston
Monopoly money
This week completes the stories nominated by my readers as the Top 10 of my first 10 years at InfoWorld.
You heard it here first
This week I continue the top 10 subjects readers have nominated to mark my 10th anniversary as an InfoWorld columnist.
Livingston looks back on 10 years of tips
My first InfoWorld column appeared at the end of June 1991, so it’s my 10th anniversary. I promised my readers they could nominate their 10 favourite columns — but rather than merely looking back, I’ll explore how these topics affect Windows users today. You can read the original columns (the ones published after 1995) by going to BrianLivingston.com and clicking the correct link under Window Manager. This week, the first three:
MetaFrame weighs in
As I wrote last week, a new upgrade makes Microsoft’s useful Terminal Services (TS) remote-access application much easier to manage (see Microsoft Support).
Terminal services tricks
Terminal services is a much-improved feature in Windows 2000. Despite its “dumb terminal” sound, TS is actually a great way to use a full-powered PC to run almost any Windows application on a server from a remote location.
Windows XP opens up DDoS worries
If you think the internet is wild now, security pro Steve Gibson says it’s nothing compared to the problems that will ensue if Windows XP is released in its current form.
The watermark war gets ugly
Suppose you became aware of a problem that was costing people millions of dollars without their knowledge. But just before you were about to present your findings at an international conference that had accepted your paper, you were threatened with a lawsuit by a consortium of large, self-interested companies and compelled to withhold your report.
Why I accept no substitute
I printed a reader’s tip a few weeks ago about making a folder look and act like a drive letter. This can be handy when an application demands that a CD be specified using a drive letter (even when you’ve copied the CD into a folder) or when you want to operate on a folder without spelling it out (when burning a CD-RW, for instance).
Go clean your cache
Reader Willy Chaplin found a problem with Internet Explorer and Outlook Express that I’m sure affects many other readers. Here’s how he tells it:
Get a Windows graphics tool that's mini
Reader Scott Cother would like to use the tiny preview pane available in Windows Explorer in Windows 2000. It uses Web View, which I initially found annoying enough to turn off, but Cother has a good use for it.
Secret commands for Word and Notepad
My readers always seem interested in learning about new and undocumented features of Windows and major Windows applications, and I’m happy to oblige.
Tuning a search engine in IE
When Microsoft bundled its Internet Explorer browser into Windows 98 and then into Windows 2000, the productivity of PC users soared. Workers who once might have wasted time playing Solitaire could now waste time surfing the web.
Free Windows apps collection an eye-opener
Reader Brian Ganley wrote in, full of praise about a website called AnalogX. Sure, there are shareware and freeware sites up the wazoo, and I could write 52 columns a year about nothing but the latest shareware. But it turns out Ganley is onto something useful.
Good ideas about MS's Terminal Services
A recent column of mine explained several tricks about Terminal Services (TS), a remote-access application that’s native to Windows 2000 but that also works with Windows NT and 9x clients (see Save time, money with remote system connections).