Month: August 2005

A fine job of debunking bogus quotes

Kevin Maney of USA Today deserves a medal for this article, which looks at a half-dozen widely circulated quotes from titans of the tech industry going back more than a century and finds that only one of them is actually legitimate:

Among the quotes is this widely circulated comment attributed to Thomas Watson, builder of IBM, in 1943: “I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.”

Except it’s doubtful Watson ever said such a thing.

I know this because I wrote a book about Watson. But it also got me thinking: There are about a half-dozen similar quotes that tech people use all the time. These quotes pop up in speeches, on posters, in PowerPoints, during sales talks and in pitches to raise money. They’ve practically become articles of faith in the industry.

But how many of them are real?

As it turns out, only one.

Definitely worth reading and bookmarking, so you can reply next time someone tells you that Bill Gates once said 640K of memory is enough for anyone. (Nope, he never said it.)

Employees unleashing viruses on purpose?

I’m always suspicious when someone selling security services tries to tell me how serious a particular security problem is. For the latest case in point, see this week’s Computerworld:

A recent study sponsored by Risk Control Strategies, a threat management and risk assessment firm, found that an overwhelming majority of 223 security and human resources executives who manage between 500 and 900 employees said workplace violence is a bigger problem now than it was two years ago. As a result, 23% said employees have intentionally and maliciously downloaded viruses over the past 12 months.

That seems really, really high to me, and it makes me doubt the rest of the study as well. If this sort of deliberate virus attack were really happening all that often, wouldn’t you think we would hear more specific examples? Wouldn’t some people have been arrested? I have no data to back this up, but it sure seems more logical that viruses attack organizations because the underlying security systems are faulty and users haven’t been trained in how to avoid risky behavior.

I found the original report (undated but apparently published earlier this year). It claims that in the same sample of businesses, approximately 65% had one or more employees who made verbal threats against senior management in the last 12 months and 36% had experienced “electronic assault/death threats to senior management.” I know the world has gone mad and all that, but I have a hard time believing there are that many psychos in the world.

I definitely don’t want to minimize the problem, but it is noteworthy that this company has a very full menu of (presumably very expensive) services designed to reduce workplace violence.

(via Techdirt)

Tip of the day: Fix problems with your default browser

In yesterday’s tip, I pointed out how to use the Set Program Access and Defaults utility to change your default browser. When you use this tool, the browser you specify appears at the top of the Start menu and should open whenever you click a link.

In theory, that’s true. In practice, you may find that some types of shortcuts continue to open with your old browser. (The problem isn’t limited to Internet Explorer, either. If you experiment with different browsers you’ll find that most don’t do a good job of cleaning up after themselves.)

If you find that your old browser continues to open even after you’ve specified a new default browser, check your file associations to see if you can identify the problem. Open Control Panel, double-click Folder Options, and click the File Types tab. You’ll need to inspect the entries for six file types:

These three file types have no file name extension:

  • Internet Shortcut
  • URL:HyperText Transfer Protocol
  • URL:HyperText Transfer Protocol with Privacy

These three file types have specific file name extensions:

  • HTM – HTML Document
  • HTML – HTML Document
  • URL – URL File

On one of my PCs, I’ve specified Maxthon as the default browser, but as the screen here illustrates, the URL file type is still associated with Internet Explorer.

URL_file_type

In this case, you can fix the problem fairly easily by clicking the Restore button. In other cases, you may need to click the Change button and choose your browser from a list of available options. If that option is not available, click the Advanced button (which appears where the Restore button is shown here) and edit the associations manually. This isn’t a job for the faint-hearted. You may need to enter a collection of obscure DDE commands to make the file type work properly. Your best bet is to look on another computer (one that hasn’t been customized) to see the correct settings and then copy those.

What’s up with Bloglines?

I sent an e-mail to the Bloglines media rep yesterday and have received no response. Have they finished the move to the new servers? Are the problems that have plagued users for the past few months solved? Who knows? There’s no update on the Bloglines site.

On the plus side, my readership at Bloglines has apparently doubled in the past 24 hours. That would be cool, if it were true, but I’m skeptical…

Transparency is a good thing.

Dell pretends to change its policies

Jeff Jarvis says, “Dell has changed its policy on blogs.”

Well, not exactly. Read the comments at Jeff’s site and you’ll see that Dell still doesn’t get it. Not even close.

Personally, I’ll know that Dell is beginning to wake up when I get an e-mail asking for more information about the problems with power supplies that are affecting huge numbers of owners of Dimension 4600 PCs. I won’t be holding my breath.