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Webitz - Checking out the Web from an amateur's point of view
All the fuss about the new iPad is almost enough to make you want to lie down in bed and take one of your sleeping pills. Not that I usually need to - in fact, I don't think I've ever had to. (I was just kidding, really.)
Anyway, for anyone who might not have caught up with the latest and greatest (according to Steve Jobs and co) in e-book technology, here's all the guff.. And on the obverse side, here are some comments about what one savvy reviewer thought of the thing - someone who wasn't paid to promote it, in other words.
I said this morning to my son - who's just recently bought a Mac computer - do you wish you'd waited a bit longer? He reckoned it's getting 'slammed as a piece of junk.' I think that may be overstating things a little, but only time will tell whether it takes off as Apple expects it to, or whether it'll just slide down the hill, like some other Apple products have.
The other day there was a 'join the fight not to pay $3.99 a month for using Facebook' group you could sign up to on the site. It's hard to know what's real and what's not on Facebook sometimes, so I tend not join anything unless I'm fairly confident of it. There have been a few hoaxes turn up on the site in my reasonably short acquaintance with it, not least, I suspect, the one that was going to give away laptops.
But apparently small-scale hoaxes aren't the biggest concern on Facebook, and there have been a number of security issues in recent months. Maybe these have been focused overseas, as I can't say I've been particularly aware of them here in New Zealand.
The outcome of this is that Facebook has now made a deal with McAfee to provide security for all 350 million or so of its users.
This sounds good, except that the free side of this will only be for six months. After that you'll have to pay for a discounted subscription to McAfee in order to keep your virus protection to be kept up.
The hope is that it will stop people's Facebook accounts from becoming compromised by some viral issue. If something does happen to your account McAfee will provide an automatic pop-up offering the user a free scan and repair program next time they log in.
This seems a little odd. It's a slightly bolting the barn door after the horse has escaped approach rather like using acne cleansers once the acne appears. Wouldn't it make more sense for McAfee to do its scanning on a regular basis so that viruses are hit before they affect the customer? Otherwise it just seems to me that it's very much a self-promotion thing by the security company, rather than a proper security underpinning.
At present this option on Facebook is only going to be available to users in the UK, United States, Australia, Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, France, Canada, Mexico and Brazil. Additional countries - hopefully New Zealand will be among them, although it doesn't seem to readily appear on the US radar - will come later down the track.
Just when you thought you were getting a handle on all the e-readers on the market, along comes a new British-developed one from Plastic Logic which has been in the pipeline for a decade.
This one is the Que ProReader. Don't ask me how to pronounce the word, Que - I can only assume that it's the same as 'queue' (which already has more than enough vowels in it, and probably could drop a couple without harm).
The Press Releases from Plastic Logic's Que company read pretty fulsomely; in other words, they sell the machine all along the line with great enthusiasm and inducement to buy (or pre-buy in this case - the Que reader won't be out till around April this year. Not that fulsomeness or inducement are necessarily true or untrue: auto insurance reviews are just as fulsome ).
Meanwhile, the Que seems a little larger than some similar readers, and it's certainly aiming to Really Long Link magazines look good on it. They're not actually marketing this item to the general reader, but to people who need to read. Which means business people, basically. The aim is to save them carting around huge files of material in their bugling briefcases. The reader isn't only lighter to carry than a bundle of paper, or even some magazines, but the '8GB model holds up to 75,000 documents or the equivalent of the contents of up to 75 filing cabinetsą.
If you need to read more than that in a year, you're in trouble. And because all those 75,000 documents are searchable, you can access stuff far more quickly - once you've got it all on there. Pity the poor PA who has to 're-file' all the boss's stuff so he can read it on his Que. And then there are the blokes who write out stuff on programmes like OneNote. Fine, if an e-reader can pick up the info; not so good if it can't.
Anyway, these are small issues. Check out the PR stuff on the Que, and I think you'll be pretty impressed. Check out this short piece from the Guardian as well, for another opinion.
The Christmas holidays (which, in New Zealand, extend from around the 23rd/24th December to almost the end of January, for some people) have rather interfered with my normal blogging on this site. I see that my last post was a fortnight ago, and the one before that almost as long.
Sorry, but the Christmas period is busy in our house. And a chap's got to take a break some time, surely
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