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This is a real situation I have faced in life, and my work colleagues can vouch for it.

The Unwanted Situation of Remembering Passwords in Public Locations

I once had to stay home, and had the convenience of internet access. The problem arose when my internet provider suddenly went offline, and I had urgent work to do.

I went across to a local internet cafe and logged onto Yahoo Messenger to follow up with my colleagues, and let them know that my home internet connection was down.

Unfortunately for me the electricity at that internet cafe went off. Now I moved to another cafe to continue discussing with my colleagues.

After about 15 minutes of chatting with my colleagues my Yahoo chat session started acting very weird. It kept on logging off, and when I did login eventually it kept logging me out.

This kept on happening for 20-30 minutes till one of my colleagues called me and said, “Why the heck are you sending weird messages to us?”.

I was practically bamboozled. I tried logging into to Yahoo over and over again but every time I was logged out. That is when I actually looked at the message. It said, “You have been signed out because you signed in on a different computer or device”.

I was puzzled as I usually use very strong passwords, and there was no chance that someone could easily access it.

What was my mistake?

Little did I realize that while I logged onto Yahoo Messenger in both the internet cafes, I had selected both Sign in automatically and Remember my ID & password. I always did that on my home PC for convenience and followed that trend all over.

Later on I came to know that the electricity in the other internet cafe came up, and someone else who started using the same PC got access to my account, since I had chosen the “Remember my password option”.

I quickly went ahead and changed my password to resolve the issue and then apologized to all my colleagues, explaining about the problem that had occurred.

When Should You Use Remember My Password?

The feature of remembering passwords offered by websites and applications including web browsers is extremely useful. However, never use that option in a public place or you might end up in much worse situation than me.

In addition to that, buy a portable flash drive and dump a portable browser, and a whole host of other useful portable software that will allow you to continue working privately without having to store anything on the public computer you are accessing.

What else? How do you securely and privately access internet in public places? Do share your thoughts and horror stories in the comments.

Image Credit: Unknown Flickr User

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I saw this on the newly launched Retweet.com which is a direct competitor to Tweetmeme both of which aggregate links on twitter and show them Digg style to the users.

However looks like Retweet.com has a lot of work to do before they can even come close to the quality that is maintained on Tweetmeme. What is your take on this, do you like Tweetmeme or Retweet.com better?

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Open source software: Is it hype or just good software? Well, before we go into this question, we really need a definition. Let’s start with this good, basic definition of open source.

They say, “Open source software is software for which the underlying code has been made available for users. Users are then able to read it or change it as they wish.” This is a good definition. But how do we find good open source software, if such a thing exists?

Are you into country music? If so, do you remember a tune called “Dust On The Bottle” by David Lee Murphy? Well, the song is about this young lad, who goes to this country wine maker named Creal, for something to impress a young lady. And he pulled out a bottle of wine, covered with dust.

Let’s examine a couple lines from this song, and relate it to open source software. “There might be a little dust on the bottle. But don’t let it fool ya ’bout what’s inside.” So we get our first inkling about open source. It appears to be dusty on the surface, but it is good inside. And that is the problem. Not everyone has a person called Creal, to tell them what constitutes a good bottle of wine – let alone good open source software.

Now let’s take another verse of the Murphy song, that gives us a better clue. “There might be a little dust on the bottle. It’s one of those things that gets sweeter with time”. Now before we get into this “sweeter with time” thing, let me give you a bit of background, as to why I can speak on these things.

For several years, I was a software developer at Motorola, where I wore many hats. Three years of working with Oracle and Java, and three years of working with ASP.NET and SQL Server. In addition, I wore the hats of technical writer, project manager, business analyst, trainer, and six-sigma black belt. But I ran web servers for engineers, based upon the open source web server Apache, and scripted UNIX with Perl, another popular open source product. So let’s start this “sweeter with time”, with a product called Tomcat.

Tomcat is a Java product, which is under the Apache organization umbrella, and the source was initially donated by Sun Microsystems. Tomcat is basically used to be a java interface between databases, like Oracle, and a web server. There was a lot of rumble initially that Tomcat was really buggy. But when it was released as open source, the worldwide community of super coders went to work cleaning it up. Today this product is in the same class as any commercial equivalent. So it has gotten “sweeter over time.”

Another example of “sweeter over time” is L.A.M.P. L.A.M.P. is a hybrid of four products, named LINUX, APACHE, MYSQL, and PHP. What we have is an operating system (LINUX being the open source version of UNIX), a web server (APACHE), a database (MYSQL, even though I consider POSTGRESQL to be just as good), and a scripting language (PHP).

Each of these products has been successful for many years. But together, they constitute a powerful combination, for running complete web applications, with dynamic (database) content.

Now there are a couple of points here, that need to be shared, so as not to see open source as cut and dry.

1. If you are running critical applications, make sure you give sufficient time, after a new architecture is introduced. So if Apache is going from 1 X to 2X, Tomcat from 5X to 6X, or Perl from 7 X to 8X, don’t be the first on the technology bandwagon. Wait until Apache 2.2 X, for example.
2. Insure there are software support companies available; it is it critical to get a fix right away. I know, for example, that MYSQL has service contracts available, from the commercial company that oversees the software.

I hope you enjoyed this short introduction to open source software.  If you have any questions, please be sure to contact me, or leave post comments.  I love hearing from open source enthusiasts – even those who also need to be converted.

Randy Kemp is a B2B Technology Copywriter  (B2B-TechCopy), Motorola Six-Sigma Black Belt, Computer Scientist, Writer, Psychologist, former IT Consulting Company Owner, and Inbound/Direct Response Marketer.  He is committed to Providing Persuasion Artistry for B2B Technology Marketing Communications (I.E. – white paper, case study, social media).  Please visit his website, for more audio and video social media links,  at http://www.b2b-techcopy.com

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Now don’t get confused, this service is in no way related or similar to Google Wave, however the name does create a confusion.

Just a little while back Microsoft took a direct potshot at popular browsers including, Firefox and Google Chrome with their IE8 campaign, where the Microsoft Australia team launched a $10K IE8 promotional campaign using Twitter.

Well only time can say what Microsoft is thinking, however it is becoming more and more clear that they are using their European teams to take potshots at rivals back in US. Thanks @WinObs. 

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To tackle the piracy issue Microsoft has been lowering the prices of their software in various countries, however one country at-least is getting the better end of the deal.

If you are in China you can buy a copy of Microsoft Office for only $29, now that is a deal not many would want to miss and also almost close to being free.

This price is to tackle the more than 95% pirated copies of Office used throughout China, and yes the pricing strategy does work. Microsoft has been able to increase sales by 800% since they lowered the price last September.

So if piracy winning the war, or are all Microsoft products just overpriced? What are your thoughts about this, do let us know.

[via The Windows Club]

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However more than anything, one thing that changed everything for Microsoft was Windows XP, it actually was really the most accepted operating system Microsoft ever made and will always remain that way, no matter how much Windows Vista or Windows 7 improved, Windows XP will still be remembered by many as a operating system they can always fall back on.

However now that Microsoft has decided to retire Windows XP in the coming year, it would make a great decision to offer a free if not a open source version of Windows XP to users.

This would definitely cut down privacy and stamp Microsoft’s authority on a lot of people who are solely concerned that Microsoft sells operating systems at a cost they cannot afford to buy at.

With Windows 7 already making a huge impact on people, letting out Windows XP for free will not only increase the credibility of Microsoft, it will also enhance their image among people who hate them for the price factor.

If Microsoft makes the decision to make XP free, it will not have to compete with the growing popularity of Ubuntu and other Linux based desktops, since most of the people moving to them are looking to save costs while building affordable personal computing systems.

Will providing free operating system make a loss? Not that we think, in fact it will bring more and more people who are breaking away from Microsoft back home.

What do you think about this? Should Microsoft give away Windows XP for free? Join the discussion and let us know.

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Those documents contained critical information and important information about the growth and future of twitter, however the folks at TechCrunch thought otherwise and decided to make the documents public, which in turn has bought them hate from several quarters.

Twitter had been silent on the issue, but looks like TechCrunch proclaiming that twitter had allowed them to publish them the documents have led to a backlash.

Early afternoon (PST) Evan Williams (@ev) the CEO of twitter, tweeted this, questioning TechCrunch about them saying that twitter had authorized the publishing of documents.

A bit later, they took it further in a blog post titled Someone Call Security. Twitter clarified why the hack happened and also gave a befitting response back to TechCrunch.

Twitter is more than jotted-down notes from a handful of meetings. Our future will be shaped by the passion and inventiveness of everyone who uses Twitter and through the execution of our ideas. Nevertheless, the publication of stolen documents is irresponsible and we absolutely did not give permission for these documents to be shared. Out of context, rudimentary notes of internal discussions will be misinterpreted by current and future partners jeopardizing our business relationships.

Along with a hint that they may sue them in the future.

We are pursuing a path to address the harm caused by these actions as noted yesterday.

There is definitely a battle brewing here, it would be interesting to see what the outcome is, however a big question arises, is it ethical on part of any publications to publish stolen documents that may contain information that is critical to a company?

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Microsoft May Not Sit Up And Take Notice

For 100s of reasons, Microsoft may take notice of this announcement, however there will be no board meetings, there will be no developer talk and there will be no panic.

There have been so many variants of Linux coming up that have just been there, done that and remained, if anyone wants to challenge Microsoft they need to convince people to start using them.

And Microsoft themselves have not been able to convince people to stop using IE6, so forget about others convincing people to change their OS.

Google Is Doing More Than They Should

Agreed Google is really big, they do a lot of things, but most of the times they close down really good projects, for reasons unknown to the rest of the universe, and by good projects we mean really good one’s.

Google Notebook and Google Browser Sync are two real good examples of Google closing down good projects.

Both of these products were really useful and could have been continued, however Google chose to close them down.

It is really a corporate decision, but we would really like to meet people who forced that one onto users.

Coming back to the point, Google OS is still not out for public usage, and we bet that many manufacturers may want to put a Google OS on their systems, but we bet that many people will ask this question “Ok what else can I do other than searching? Where is the operating system?”.

Of course Google will definitely publicize their OS using ads, however will it work, will people relate to Google with a OS like they do with search? A thing we are sure the Google marketing department is thinking hard about with this announcement.

Search, Emails, Calendar and Docs Don’t Make A OS

While Google made a announcement they forgot to tell users how and what applications they would support, agreed that these 4 things are required, but at the end they do not really make a OS, unless you can support applications that people use on a everyday basis, no one is really going to support you.

There is WINE, but hey you are selling this to public not geeks, unless you develop applications to work with your system, no one is going to bother about using you, netbooks are fine as the main aim of it is to provide users with portability without carrying a huge laptop around, however what does portability mean when you can’t access applications that are essential.

Lighter, Faster, Meaner, Google OS Is Just Another Linux

The biggest problem with the open source community is that you can fork and create your own variants, there are so many variants of Linux that we stopped counting, that is where the open source philosophy is lacking, everyone thinks they can do better than someone else, and there is no restriction.

Once Google open sources, there may be ten different OSs that crop up based on that, and then you have to decide which one to choose.

There is no problem with open source, the problem exists because there is no control, there is just forks and forks which are different from each other.

Of course Google will control their own fork, but they are creating something out of something else, leaner and meaner.

OEMs Don’t Give You Free OS, So The Whole Concept Of Free Is Flawed

If you buy a laptop or a netbook from a retailer, your OS does not come for free, no matter whether they give you Windows or Linux.

OS manufacturers make money no matter what you use out of the final retail cost, so the concept of a free OS is largely a flawed medium when it comes to buying computers.

Keep this in mind, no Linux distro comes free when you buy a OEM laptop, desktop or netbook, it is a largely wrong concept people are used to.

Google OS Is Still Not Here, So Why This Discussion?

That is why we are here, to discuss and analyze things before they leave their stables, to analyze and let you know your technology head on.

Of course things may not turn out as we discussed it here, however it may happen and it is our honest opinion.

Go ahead and let us know your thoughts, the post is incomplete without them.

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People usually spend around 2-10% of the time to correct spelling mistakes and typos on an average, the time thus spent could in the end account for a huge amount of time waste.

The one feature we love in the Microsoft Office family is the ability to auto correct typos for common words without having the user having to do it manually, this is a really good feature when you write a lot of mails or documents.

However this feature was lacking when you edited documents, wrote comments or did other things on the Internet, however thanks to the folks behind Google Chrome users can now have the same features while they write using their browser.

Like we had said in the earlier post, we really do think that this feature will help Google Docs and Gmail users immensely when it comes to users who use Google Chrome, the reason is that both these services do not have a auto spell check corrector, however with the help of this new feature in Chrome, both these services will get a immensely useful feature while editing documents or writing emails, just like they had with Microsoft Word or Microsoft Outlook.

That said, auto spell check corrector is not limited to just these two services and can be used anywhere.

It would be great to have auto-spell check maintain a user database like office products, allowing users to specify custom words they want to auto-correct, this would definitely be great as you could use that feature to automatically expand text, the usage could definitely be more than that, but it would be great nevertheless.

What do you think about this feature, would it do you any good? Do you think that we have missed something here? Do let us know your thoughts about them.

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The biggest reason many of these people fail is because they are terming themselves as so called Google killers? Uhm, now I would be glad to have some innovativeness, but hey Microsoft and Yahoo failed for 10 years, tell me something new.

The biggest debacle in recent times has been Cuil, who were big enough to brag about being a Google search killer, but fell flat just within hours of launching, we did have our share of problems with Cuil the so called Google killer.

The more recent examples of making Google a direct competition have been Wolfram Alpha and Spezify, both of these are innovative at their core, however they forgot the basis of their innovativeness by starting to compare themselves as Google killers.

By far that is far from having a realistic approach to begin with, where Live search and Yahoo the other biggest search market players have failed for so long, how can you come straight out of the womb and say that you are going to be a market leader killer.

Like I said I have no problems with these offerings, they are pretty good and innovative in their own sense, but without having evolved and tested the waters, terming yourself, or getting yourself termed as a Google killer is by far the biggest mistake, many companies sank themselves just because they didn’t get the approach right, and there are few who are digging the wells to dive straight down.

As far as I am concerned there will be a time when there will be a Google search killer, however that will only happen when newer search companies take an approach to showoff their innovativeness and build themselves, before starting to compete with Google Search from day 1.

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