Microsoft Windows

Freelancers and the Wealth of Skills Available online

I have posted a small project on one of the freelancers’ site, the project was to work on a 10 pages static website to give it more professional look; within an hour, I got more then 10 bid for my project and most within my budget.

This wealth of skills available on the net makes it very attractive for businesses, especially small businesses, and individuals to find professionals who are ready to work for less but provide superior quality of work.

Having a local company design my website would have cost me 5 times more than if I gave it to one of the freelancers online.

You will not only get a great bargain but you will discover talents in the most unexpected places in the world.

Next time you have a need for any type of skills; do not look further than your computer screen.

Windows 7 Cheaper and better

I still remember the early days of Window Vista, I used to do onsite tech support, the first impression of most clients was “I like XP better”, most client were frustrated by their new hardware “especially printers” not fully compatible with Windows Vista.

As per Microsoft, the new Windows 7 requires less “minimum hardware configuration” to run than Windows Vista. I asked a tech at computer shop “what do you like about Windows 7”? He said, “It is faster and feel much more like Win XP.”

Will Windows 7 make up for all the frustrating years of Windows Vista? Windows XP is one of the most successful OS Microsoft released and if Windows 7 will give the users the great experience they had with XP then Windows 7 will be the OS of choice for many years to come and for millions of users.

The end of Latin Characters dominance of website addresses

I cannot think of the types of security risks and implications this new change of website address naming scheme would bring but the challenge is great.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) said it would declare an end to the exclusive use of Latin characters for website addresses on Friday — the final day of its six-day conference in Seoul.

The full article:

SEOUL, Oct 26, 2009 (AFP) - The Internet is about to get more accessible for millions worldwide with the imminent approval of a new multilingual address system that uses Asian and Arabic scripts, a global regulator said Monday.
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) said it would declare an end to the exclusive use of Latin characters for website addresses on Friday — the final day of its six-day conference in Seoul.
“This is the biggest change technically to the Internet since it was invented 40 years ago,” Peter Dengate Thrush, chairman of the ICANN board in charge of reviewing the change, told a press conference.
Thrush said he expected ICANN’s full board to grant approval on Friday — a day after the 40th anniversary of the Internet’s birth in a computer experiment by researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles.
When the change comes into force, it will be possible to use characters from other languages — such as Chinese, Arabic, Korean and Japanese — for a full Internet address, instead of just part of the address as now.
ICANN president Rod Beckstrom said the change — designed to serve the growing number of non-English-speaking Internet users — would come into effect in the middle of 2010. ICANN aims to start receiving applications next month.
“It will take some period of time to process the applications and then introduce the successful applications,” Beckstrom told the news conference.
“Of the 1.6 billion Internet users today worldwide, more than half use languages that have scripts that are not Latin-based,” Beckstrom said.
“So this change is very much necessary for not only half the world’s Internet users today but more than half, probably, of the future users as the Internet continues to spread.”
He said Internet addresses would no longer use limited “Generic Top-Level Domains” such as .com or .org, and instead use more flexible “Internationalised Domain Names” such as .post or .bank.
Beckstrom said the change would also allow Internet users to type fewer keystrokes to access a website which will “give companies a quicker way to get directly to their customers”.
He said the world would be able to “save roughly 60 to 100 billion human keystrokes a day” by getting rid of keystrokes that are currently needed to find Web addresses ending, for example, in individual country codes.
Thrush said that under the new system, all Web addresses ending .bank would only be available to “authorised” banks.
“Consumer confidence can be greatly enhanced,” he said.
The Seoul meeting will also debate cyber-security threats.
ICANN said in a statement the “threat to the domain name system is always increasing, as the world saw several months ago with the threat from the Conficker worm”.
It said this prompted an unprecedented collaboration between ICANN and top security experts from Microsoft, Symantec and dozens of other companies, software vendors and organisations.
Malicious code such as Conficker can be triggered to steal data or turn control of infected computers over to hackers amassing “zombie” machines for criminal ends.
ICANN, formed in 1998 by the US government, was recently given more autonomy after Washington relaxed its control over how the Internet is run.

http://www.zawya.com/story.cfm/sidANA20091026T112400ZIOP73/lok112415091026?weeklynewsletter&zawyaemailmarketing

Millions of users made the choice not to upgrade to Vista

I am one of the millions of users world wide who kept working with XP and refused to upgrade to Vista. I still recall the many conversations I had when I was doing on-site support; users were wondering why Microsoft would release a new operating system while most of us were getting familiar and comfortable with XP.

In my opinion, XP was a real upgrade that made Microsoft gain back the confidence of millions of users who were fed up with the previous desktops operating systems. But as if Microsoft cannot sit still, in short years after the release of windows XP, the world was hit by windows Vista, which until today, is not the dominant Operating system for millions of users.

Now, after millions of dollars spent by consumers world wide upgrading to windows Vista, Microsoft is about to release Windows 7 and another round of upgrading.

For me, Windows XP is still doing the job.

Bill Gates keynote Presentation at ICTD 2009

I had the chance to attend ICTD 2009 in Doha, and listen to Bill Gate’s keynote Presentation. Contrary to our expectations as IT professionals, Bill Gates presentation focused on how to fight poverty and improve health care using technology.

He talked about how the advancement in technology in the health care industry helped reduced mortality rates in children in last 15 years more than it did in 50 years.

He also stressed on the importance of electronic governments in fighting corruptions and the internet can be used as a tool to monitor governments’ performance.

Then he went on to talk about Digital Green, a research project that seeks to disseminate targeted agricultural information to small and marginal farmers in India through digital video. The Digital Green system sustains relevancy in a community by developing a framework for participatory learning.

He also touched on the growing importance of cell phones in providing various kinds of services.

This is a short summary of his presentation.

Will Windows Vista put an end to Microsoft dominance of Operating systems?

If we look back at the early days of windows based operating systems we can see the huge enhancement Microsoft made to the Desk top operating systems, from DOS to windows 3.1 to win95 to win2000 and finally Win XP.

For many users, win XP was (end still) the best operating system Microsoft ever written, with SP1 and SP2, Microsoft fixed major bugs in the system and the users community was content with winXP.

Only when everything seemed to be working great with winXP, Microsoft released windows Vista, I personally, and I am sure as millions of users, was not ready to let go of winXP and start the journey to learn new operating system with its all new features.

Recently, I had to replace my company’s computer systems with new systems, I wanted to get new systems with XP, but the vendor told me they only can provide us systems with windows Visa. I was not very happy to migrate to Vista yet.

The transition from windows XP to windows vista is not as smooth as it should be, for the average user windows XP is more user friendly than windows Vista. One feature of windows Vista that I particularly find hard to understand for the average user is the Network and file sharing properties in windows Vista.
In its attempt to make windows Vista more secure, Microsoft made setting up network and resource sharing in windows Vista a bit hard to configure, there are many security features the user have to configure.

From a historical point of view, I can tell that Microsoft reached its full potential with windows XP, there was no need to release a new operating system at the time when windows XP was performing real well with the users.

Poorly skilled worker will cost your company

No doubt every business in the world is trying to increase profit and cut costs. Cutting costs and improving productivity is what CEOs and managers get paid to do.

In my traveling and working with various businesses around the world, I have seen this killer mistake over and over again “Businesses hire low-skilled workers to save money.” In my current job, I am working in the country of Qatar, in the city of Doha; I am having some serious performance issues with some of my employees.

The policy of my company is to hire low skilled workers so the company doesn’t have to pay high salaries. This policy has no wisdom in it or any sign of long term planing. As a manager, I am trying to change this policy, which is not an easy task. My job is to work with more important issues than to tell my employees how to perform their day to day job, but some of my employees need constant supervision and I can not take the risk of them not doing their job well.

Living in this part of the world for almost a year now, I have noticed that it’s the general policy of most of the countries in this region to depend on low skilled workers for most of their labor needs. This policy led millions of talented workers to leave these countries and migrate looking for better wages which left these countries with a large pool of low skilled workers who actually don’t have the right skills and experience that these countries need for its ambitious development plans.

When you hire a new worker, look for quality of work first than look to save money, the quality work produced by competent worker will save you the money you will otherwise have to spend in training and supervising low skilled and low paid workers.

Pay to get the best employees

One of the greatest challenges that face small businesses and sometimes even the larger corporate world is unskilled or under qualified labor force.

I have worked and visited few countries in the past 12 months from the US to India to Saudi Arabia to Qatar. As a young graduate, I started my career with a small company in TX, USA, most of the labor force of that company consisted of young graduates with very limited experience. The company strategy was, as most small businesses do, is to hire young workers or workers with limited experience to cut costs. The end results were disastrous, the company was not able to carry on with its obligations, many deliverables didn’t meet client expectations and most projects ran over budget and the end result was “a bankrupted company.”

What made me write about this subject is my current experience. Right now I am working in the Area between Saudi Arabia, Dubai and Qatar, this area known locally by “The Arabian Gulf.” Because of the rising oil prices, governments here are spending billions of dollars in all areas of developments, which is great, but most projects depends heavily on cheap labor brought in from South Asia. As I live in this area, I see why the development over the past 20-30 years has been slow although billions of dollars were spent on thousands of projects, the main reason for that is the total dependency on cheap labor, most projects were not executed properly because of lake of experience, many projects were done over and over.

The management tip here is “don’t really on cheap labor; it will cost you down the road.”

Rising Oil prices and cost management

The continues hike in oil prices is not going to stop anytime soon, if your business is directly affected by oil price fluctuations, it would be a wise decision to plan your budget around higher oil prices.

Many businesses, especially small businesses, may psychologically, get affected by hearing the news of higher oil prices and start to worry about their bottom line.

But as a business you got to look at your numbers. As a consultant who uses the internet and the phones extensively in his work, I saw a sharp decline in my communications bill, from almost $1000 a month to below $100 a month, that’s 90% decrease in cost.

This is only one example of how costs are dropping for other services. Having your employees work remotely from home is another example of cost saving method you can utilize, by having your employees work from home, you can cut on many types of costs associated with the office environment such as (office rent, utilities bills, commuting time, etc.)

The costs of few commodities may be rising, but the overall cost of doing business is dropping.

Domain name ownership rights

In my last post, I talked about the problem facing my company regarding our domain name, basically, some IT guy who worked with our company as IT consultant decided to register our company domain under his name, and now he is black mailing us, asking us to pay him money in order for him to release the domain to us.

This case got me thinking about the latest development in this field, what the law says about domain names? Are they protected by any copy rights? If the company business name is officially registered with the local chamber of commerce or the local court, would that automatically give them the rights over companyname.com domain name?

We all heard in the early ages of the internet about how big corporations would pay millions for domain names; Is there any development on the legal side of this issue?