Minimum requirements for any customer data location are listed below - most of our services currently run exclusively in Azure or AWS east.

Reliable

Secure

• You receive an email that appears to be from ...

Windows 10 is Here 

You've probably heard about the new version of Windows about to be released by Microsoft, Windows 10.  And you may have even seen a little icon displayed at the bottom right of your screen which allows you to Get Windows 10.  

SureTech wants to be sure you are fully informed about this valuable upgrade BEFORE you consider installing it. 

Microsoft is listing Windows 10 as a free upgrade but this is true only if your computer can support it.  

• If you are still using Windows XP or Windows Vista you cannot upgrade directly and you may need additional hardware.  

Evidence from the U. S. Post Office that even one of the literary greats know how important our dispatcher Zac is to Suretech.

Theoretically this is both annoying and heartbreaking becuase the ideal of all your messages and all your data in once place is not just appealing, it actually feels necessary for any sense of sanity.

How in Dickens can you keep track of 5 or more inboxes and looking for your digital data in 5 or more different places? It sounds like insanity and like no one should ever do it.  That's certainly how I felt about it years ago and when we started SureTech.

And if you're a lucky person that does one thing with one set of people, it's a terrific neat and clean model.

But if you interract with different groups and work on more than one project, I've realized, most people probably need to reconcile using fragmented channels and buckets.

Think of it this way perhaps - would you have all your associates come to your living room and put all of your work on your fireplace mantle?  If the answer is yes, then God Bless You especially if you don't even need a computer.  I would love to imagine myself with a world lived simply in one place with only people that can visit me in that place.  In the world of ideas, collaboration and innovation, however, that simple model might be too limiting from a standoint of quality and diversity of inputs.  Maybe I'll come around to understand how to do it more simply one day - but for now I don't see how to accomplish it.

Safe Internet Use Tips

A client recently went to a meeting where he assumed an email he sent had arrived at his client's inbox. When he learned it did not, he became alarmed and called us.

We investigated and found the email in his outbox, but because it was over 4MB, the end recipient's email box would not accept it.

I thought it important to highlight some key email tips in the current world of spam blocking email inbox overload: We offer best in class email solutions for you. Its simply the nature of email now (versus 5 years ago) that with so much spam and in turn spam software email is not as reliable as it once was. The vast majority of all email sent every day is actually spam, if you can believe it! A few good measures to follow to ensure your message gets across are:

• Never send large files through email. Always transfer them with a DropBox type service or a Thumb Drive
• If you send a mission critical message, be sure to call to follow up that it has ...

Warning Chain Mails

A client recently sent us a copy of an email that warned her in capital letters of a terrible virus that is going around the internet and steps to take to protect herself from getting this virus.

It recommened the kind of files not to open, what titled emails to be wary of, and even cited the validity of these threats by referencing sites like truth or fiction.  It ended by encouraing her to send the email on to everyone shes knows.

These kinds of emails themselves are in effect a spam virus.  The intent is to clog the internet with people sending the message itself around.

If the threat were as real and urgent as noted, the main newswires and newspapers would report it. 

So if you get an urgent warning like this, avoid spam and do not pass it on.

Here are a few reasons why an email address with your domain name is important and what you should expect from your email.

Professionalism: Putting your business name in an email profoundly shifts the relationship you have with your customer. It states that you are a professional and reputable and it builds trust. Plus, your email address is constantly building your brand identity, putting your companies name in front of customers, suppliers, vendors, prospects and partners. Ask yourself, which email would you be most likely to respond to when hiring a business professional john@yourbusinessname.com or john1256@yahoo.com?

Security: Paid email typically has anti-virus and spam filters to keep your inbox clean and secure from dangerous spam. It also has email encryption capabilities with password protection, so the information you send and receive stays private. Are you a doctors office emailing client records? A real-estate agent emailing back and forth contracts? Do you send information of any kind about your clients? If you are not on a secure email exchange that information is ripe for the picking. Dont allow yourself to be attacked and open up a world of misfortune to yourself or your clients.

Privacy: Free email services scan all of your in and outgoing email to get as much information about you and your clients that they can. Your information is a free for all; it is used for advertising purposes and to build an email data base and is sometimes sold. They collect as much information as possible about you as a user. That free email is actually a contractual agreement between you and the ...

1. The Cloud is here to stay.
   If a single combine to harvest Corn now costs $500k with satellite linked thermal and moisture sensors you can bet that technology and automation are changing your industry.
   Your question is not if you will need the cloud, but when, and not only when, but:
   how will you adapt your business focus and technology stack to focus on the key value drivers you offer your customers.
2. The largest IT costs are episodic not chronic. |
   Its the one event out of the blue that is 90% of your actual IT cost, not the day to day upkeep.
   Risk management is the biggest cost driver over capital or maintenance spend.
3. Chronic IT Performance Drags are a far greater costs than all combined IT maintenance and Capex costs.
   For example: calculate the number of minutes per day you wait for your computer to respond. (hourglass time) and multiply those minutes times the salaries of every staff member in your company.
   Productivity drag cost dwarfs any other IT cost except out of the blue episodic catastrophes like flood, fire or other physical calamity.
4. When it comes to back office or infrastructure, standardization rules, and variables and complexity will sink you.
5. Innovation and change cycles are accelerating each year.
   You can win if you focus, focus, focus on your key value drivers and leave back office execution to specialists with deep technical expertise and implementation scale.

To ensure your company is protected, SureTech recommends several key things to keep in mind:

- Change the password for your VOIP account regularly

- Be aware of who has access to this password and how they are storing it

- Know how your VOIP data plan is set up and what alerts you will receive if you exceed your regular minutes. 

- Set the credit card you use to cover your VOIP plan with a maximum charge allowance in any single month.

- SureTech can help make sure that customers using our recommended VOIP sytems are protected.

If we can be of assistance on this or any other HelpDesk request, contact us at solutions@suretech.com or 800-882-8701.
Your SureTech Solutions Team

If we can be of further assistance on this or any other HelpDesk request, contact us at solutions@suretech.com or 800-882-8701.
Your SureTech Solutions Team

IF YOU HAVE TO EXPLORE, ALWAYS USE PROTECTION

Background

Microsofts Internet Explorer browser has been exploited by the Operation Clandestine Fox attack starting on April 26, 2014 - See Business Week article for more details.

This is just the latest security hole to create headlines helped by no less than the Department of Homeland Security, which advises that you not use any version of IE until further notice. Wow!

The Official advice

According to DHS, if your business uses custom applications that require Internet Explorer, avoid visiting any public sites with the browser outside of the application.  Make a direct link to the site from your desktop to avoid going to any other sites but the application site.

According to Microsoft, you should pay your IT company thats us, folks J - between $1,000 and $10,000 per office to implement this temporary work around.  And once we do all that work you will:

May you have a wonderful holiday season and a prosperous 2013!

We are your mobile IT department as a service (ITDaas)

Wouldnt it be great if the glory days lasted forever? But reality is trophies get dusty, records are broken, and what it took to be the best ten years ago, just isnt enough for todays standards. Things get better, faster. And eventually, its time to move from good enough to something much better.

Windows XP had an amazing run and millions of PC users are grateful for it. But its time to move on. Two reasons: 1) Extended support for Windows XP is running out in less than 1000 days, and 2) theres an OS out there thats much better than Windows XP.

On April 8, 2014, security patches and ...

Super Storm Sandy, which hit our area pretty hard about the end of October, gave a lot of people a wake-up call on their preparedness. I know of at least two businesses we work with who had issues with their systems because of the extended power outages and flooding and one organization that we do business with that was extensively flooded and lost their email system for almost a week because of the storm. Im sure there are many other companies that had issues because of the storm, but even if you didnt this time, you should think about the lessons learned and get prepared.
Unfortunately some of these companies lost their email systems at precisely the time they needed them most. One organization had its basement flooded and its power and mechanical systems destroyed so it was going to be closed for several weeks. But because it hosted its email system in the building instead of in a secure data center, the leaders of the organization could not access their email lists to contact volunteers and athletic team members to let them know what was happening and what the alternative plans were.
Another company we work with lost power to their building for a week which meant their website which both supports their existing customers and sells new subscriptions was shut down for that time because the servers that run their website are located in their building rather than in a secure data center.

For one company with a local exchange server, the sudden power shutdown corrupted the server so they could not send, receive or access mai. We migrated them to our secure data center and had them up and running ...

As amazing as software power and features have become, we are sometimes amazed in the wrong way.

We recently spent more than 20 hours troubleshooting OneNote on our SureDesk in an attempt to address crashes and notebook corruptions. We used several different repositories for the OneNote files including, SkyDrive free, SkyDrive business, our own SharePoint, and saving files locally; and this is what I have concluded;

• OneNote is buggy and prone to corrupting notebooks that have images in them.
• SkyDrive has terrible outbound throughout and is both miserably slow when loading OneNote and also causes OneNote.exe to crash. The only way I found to use SkyDrive reliably was to use OneNote online on SkyDrive.

In the end (hit the cymbals) we gave up and moved our notes to Evernote for anywhere access capability and no crashes.

Some people are fine with simply receiving and sending e-mail through Microsoft Outlook, however these tips are for the ones who like to customize, dig deep, and get their hands dirty. If you're the type who wants to streamline their Outlook experience, you'll find more than enough info here. 

With the increasing frequency of heavy storms in the Northeast, we want to ensure our customers have some good steps for Business Continuity in face of storms.  

In preparation for power loss we recommend that you:

- Power down all workstations, printers, scanners, etc.

- Unplug any equipment if not plugged into a surge protector

- If flooding is a possibility, take all electronics off of the floor

- Perform or enforce an offsite backup to ensure your data exists outside your place of business.

- Move essential services away from windows.

- If you have a UPS unit or generator, test these units before the end of today. If units fail, take appropriate actions to eliminate load.

- Check the fuel level of your generator.

SureOffice Products including SureMail, SureDesks and SureBack should not be impacted by storms in our secure data centers. 

As always, we appreciate any introductions to businesses we might help Kick IT to the Cloud anytime.

The American Red Cross offers great overal tips for Storm Preparedness.

And CSO Magazine has a thorough discussion of all Business Continuity planning you should think about.

We are proud that all of our SNAP Certified Clients had minimal downtime during the latest storm and more importantly came back online without a hitch when power was restored!

Using a Parents Account

This is the simplest way to get a kid started using email. It gives you complete control over what is sent and received (just be careful what windows are open and dont leave them alone on your email account in case you have a surprise Christmas gift ordered on Amazon). You can create a personalized email address through your Gmail account using plus addressing (one method of doing that is outlined here http://flagrantdisregard.com/how-to-give-your-young-children-a-personalized-managed-email-address/).

We let our daughter use my wifes account for a while before she got her own account. It worked out reasonably well while she was in elementary school. There were just a few emails a week. We could filter what she saw and what she sent.

Special Kids Email Accounts

Once our daughter turned eleven, it seemed like she had enough friends with email accounts of their own that we should get her one. We decided to get her an account specifically targeted towards kid users. There are a number of services out there, but we went with Zoobuh (www.ZooBuh.com). It gives you a lot of parental control which you can turn on and off depending on your kid and how involved you feel you need to be. The features in particular that we like are:

• Controlling who your child can ...

A few recent email messages that came to my inbox made me think that we could all use some reminders to help us avoid simple (but potentially embarrassing) mistakes.

Pause for a moment before sharing the email addresses of friends. Every few weeks I get an email from someone with seemingly their entire contact list To: line that would have been more appropriately sent by using BCC. Before you send out such an email, think for a moment and decide Does everyone you are sending to want everyone else in the thread to know their email addresses? For example, when I email the volunteers I work with in my sons elementary school I put everyone on the To line. Someone may need to get a sub and we distribute and email list to the volunteers anyway, so that data isnt secret. On the other hand, if you are emailing most of your address book to say Hey, were having a house party this weekend! or Who wants to buy Girl Scout cookies? Id suggest using BCC. Some people you email to may feel a bit odd about having their email address given out to total strangers. Using the BCC line also avoids issues with people using Reply All (to say Yes, well come) when they should use Reply.

In particularly sensitive emails, double check your recipients. A parent on my sons swimming team accidentally hit Reply All on a message from the swim coach to a large number of people and sent a very critical message which everyone saw rather than just his intended recipient. Whether or not such criticism is warranted sharing such an email outside of the people it was intended ...

My work email and work documents were easy because I have those on my SureDesk. I just logged in from my extra desktop machine and was able to use email and have access to my documents instantly. If I didn't want to use my SureDesk I could have used Outlook Web Access (OWA) instead to access my email. One of the advantages of a SureDesk is the safety and security of being able to access it from anywhere and knowing it's backed up.

Unfortunately we don't have the development environment I use on a SureDesk yet, so I needed to set that up on my temporary machine. I use a wamp stack for my development and I had prepared for this by installing the necessary tools on my machine, however the source files I needed were not in my normal backup. That would have been a small problem if my laptop had really crashed. I don't backup all of my source code because I'm only working on a small number of projects at a time and backing up my entire source directory would be too much. Still, I should be backing up the projects I'm actively working on and this exercise showed where I was missing some crucial files.

Key Takeaway: It's important to try to retrieve key files from your backup from time-to-time to ensure that your backups are working and are backing up ...

By 2013, an overwhelming 93% of organizations will offer a flexible work policy. Help your organization adapt to the modern flexible work environment by checking out the Citrix Brief found below.

Windows 8, the tablet-based operating system from Microsoft, is currently available for demo. "This flowchart details the biggest changes and new features in Windows 8, alerts you to potential problems, and guides you through the array of critical decisions you'll need to make for a successful installation and deployment."

To support Princeton small business and our vibrant local community please take a few minutes to read about each company and cast your vote for one, a few, or all of the companies that you want to win.

Voting takes just 60 seconds with your facebook account. To vote you can read detailed instructions HERE or you can just:

1. Visit www.MissionSmallBusiness.com and click login and support (requires facebook)
2. Search for businesses in Princeton, New Jersey
3. Click vote and share

Chase Bank and Living Social have teamed up to give out 12 small business grants of $250,000 each. In order for small businesses to qualify, they need to receive 250 votes by the end of June.

You can vote for as many businesses as youd like, so please take a minute and help out some of our hometown heroes!

Local Princeton Businesses Competing:

Nancy Troske Contemporary Jewelry - Ancient techniques with a contemporary twist.

Neurac Institute - Restore Health. Release Your Potential.

Princeton Dance and Theater Studio

Tiger Hall Play Zone and Activity Center - A spunky learning, play and party space for young tykes and the young-at-heart who love them!

Ron Gordon Communications

SureTech.com - We provide big business tech solutions for small businesses and local communities. Help us Kick IT to the Cloud!

Adamas Concierge - Our owners ...

I'm willing to bet that every smartphone user has at least one ad-run application on their phone. A new study now suggests that those addicting game and news apps end up hitting you where it hurts - your battery.

1. The account you use day-to-day should be a non-administrator account. There is little reason today to be running an account that has full administrative privileges, and it allows malware writers to access your entire computer if they manage to trick you into running their application. If you have kids, their account should be a different one from yours and they never should have access to an administrator account. Yes, it is a pain-in-the-neck to have them come to you to install software, but the point is to exercise some control ...

This buzz is a boon to our business too since our SureFiles offers a better business solution than DropBox and Box.net because it is integrated with Active Directory and standard business network security architecture (Microsoft).  It is also a better price point when you go over 2 users accessing the same data.

Mist

http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/10things/10-immutable-laws-of-mistakes/2633?tag=nl.e099

As I wrote about a while back, we were subjected to a script kiddie attack. Fortunately they were not successful in breaking in to our systems, but, due to some bugs in how we handled some of the requests, they did end up causing a denial-of-service attack on our database server. Normally, this would just mean the website was down for a while, but, due to several other bugs we ended up showing a screen that should only be shown to developers that included our database password and other information needed to connect to our database. Oh #@$%^ is really the only thing to say then (particularly because when we first realized this, we had no idea how long this problem existed). After having visions of user email addresses suddenly ending up in the hands of spammers, we realized we were much better off than we thought. Our database is set to be accessible only from our web server. So, unless someone could break into our web server, they still couldnt access our database (and if they can break into our web server, we have bigger problems).

Thankfully for us, even though several layers of protection failed we had bugs in our search mechanism, we had bugs in our debugging code and some secret information was revealed  our database was still protected.

Another ...

We are proud to have him in this important role and privileged to have his leadership as we continue to grow our operations.  

From: seybert4456eric888@hotmail.com [mailto:seybert4456eric888@hotmail.com] On Behalf Of InterspirePayment.net
Sent: Tuesday, June 28, 2011 11:22 AM
To: John Dow

Subject: 1309274543 Alberto Molinaorder bil

Why is performance important and why is it so hard

I think we all understand inherently why performance is important. We always want the program were using to run faster or get annoyed when the web page we are loading takes too long to come up.

Performance is hard because it takes time just like any other feature (one of my former managers would say Performance is a feature). I love this quote from Blaise Pascal because I think it applies to lots of things, but its particularly relevant to performance I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time. Developers could say I would have written a faster application, but I did not have the time. Speedy code is also hard because anyone whos not working on making a faster application is, almost by definition, working on slowing the application down. They are writing more code and adding more features, which will take more CPU cycles. That slows things down. If you add a video to your websites front page, you will slow down the loading of that page.

Tracking Performance

Since, in general, we all have limited time and resources for our projects, we must decide what areas of our program need to be worked on. The best way to ...

via ZDnet.com

What a Mac malware attack looks like

By Ed Bott | May 6, 2011, 1:09pm PDT

Well, that didnt take long.

Beware of email, websites with 'bin Laden's death video'

SCHENECTADY - A quick Google search about Osama bin Laden leads to pictures of what appears to be a dead bin Laden. Law enforcement officials say those websites could introduce viruses into your computer system.

The FBI is also warning computer users about unsolicited emails reportedly showing photos and videos of bin Laden's killing. Plus, questionable links started showing up on Facebook and other social networking sites.

Officials say cyber criminals have been luring computer users with promises of bin Laden's death photos in an effort to spread viruses.

Computer expert Tush Nikollaj from Logical Net in Schenectady said he's not surprised hackers are taking advantage of one the world's biggest news events.

"It really stirs up a lot of activity among hackers out there to create websites that say hey come to my site we've got real life photos of what happened," said Nikollaj.

What's ...

For getting attention, the only thing more reliable than a train reck is a historic international train wreck like the killing of Osama Bin Laden.

Looking at the bloody pictures is so natural, impuslive and reliable that criminals have a perfect opportunity to capitalize on it before the real pictures are shown.

BEWARE OF BIN LADEN IS DEAD PICS

The email below from facebook is almost impossible to ignore, but it is a TROJAN HORSE designed to download a malicious program to your computer or facebook account.  My friend below clicked on a similar link which then took over her Facebook address book and sent out the email below to her friends.  Also the pics it's refering to are FAKE.

TO SEE THE REAL PICS

You are connected to the internet, trust me, you will know as soon as the real pictures are released.  you won't have to click on a special link, accept a download or agree to any terms.  The pictures will be on the new york times, cnn and major newspapers easily and publicly.  If someone sends you a special attachment in email you can safely ignore it, but you cannot safely open it.

We like to think no user question is too small for a quality and calm answer from our HelpDesk!

<style type='text/css'>
sytle from .css

</style>

Or like this within a div:

style="border: 1px; "

An example:

class .intro

Rather than a mass customer base, advertising on these blogs gives lobbyists unbridled access to an extremely valuable audience: Britains political elite

<font style="margin:0px; margin-bottom: 9px; padding:0px; font-size:16px; color: #990000; font-weight:normal; line-height: 23px;">&lsquo;Rather than a mass customer base, advertising on these blogs gives lobbyists unbridled access to an extremely valuable audience: Britain&rsquo;s political elite&rsquo;</font>

http://imgdr.massmind.com/uploads/suretech/file/Pace Performance talk.pdf

I always hate ads that distract from good content - except when it's that one thing I'm interested in.  But that's not when I want to look at it!

In the old days when we only had to keep track of 7 things a week, we clipped the ad and put it on the fridge.  But now it's 900 things and never in paper of course?  Finally we can clip for later:  

Weve always said that Managed Services for IT is usually a flawed business model.  Pretty much the better job you do the less you make.  Kinda like lawyers, I guess, except at least we talk about it!

13 hours to reformat and upgrade a client laptop is the perfect example of providing GREAT service at a TERRIBLE value.  I worked over a long day and night replacing the hard drive of this particular laptop.  Theres no question the client got a lot of benefit.   3.5x more storage space, 3x improvement in speed.  And almost no worries he handed me the laptop in the morning and came back for it the next day fully upgraded.  I couldnt save him from a couple headaches, though he had to hunt down passwords that needed to be reached in his browser .... and he had to see my 13 hour bill!  Which points to the value problem the work took 13 hours, but no one wants to pay labor of 13 hours for 3.5x space and  3x speed.  Think of it this way the 320GB drive cost less than $100 and the 3x speed was just getting the computer back to the speed it was the day he bought it.  Who wants to pay almost the cost of the computer to simply set (or in this case reset) it up?

Ill tell you: nobody.  But whats the alternative?  It takes hours and hours to set these things up so we as a ...

Complexity and Onsite Maintenance are EXPENSIVE

The vast majority of IT costs for the typical organization are related to emergency repairs and the labor, equipment and primarily, lost productiviyt costs associated with a system not functioning optimially.

Proper maintenance to try to minimize repair costs is the next greates IT expense.

The equipment that most companies associate with IT costs is actually the smallest component of an overal IT cost.

The first place to focus therefore is on the biggest cost - inefficiency or instability in your systems.

Simplify and Outsource

The absolutely biggest cost factor, and source of instability, is simply in maintaining networks and equipment communications.

These days a CPU or most individual computer components are pretty simple.  They are designed to do the same thing over and over with extremely low failure rates.

The source of 90% of failure points is in the connection between components or the configuration of components.

90% of these connections and configurations are standard infrastructure that not only has to be set up UNDERNEATH most business services, but they need CONSTANT MAINTENANCE and updates as different components are continually upgraded and as technology evolves.

What your business actually uses, in other words, is the last 10% of the cost which is the applications and data with which your company interacts.

So why would you figure out how to mine coal, store it, burn ...

As chocolate lovers, we could not be happier to support a client that makes the most exquisite and delectable chocolate we've ever had.

First, you could see your progress and your teams progress building a house just as you can see your progress creating a software program. While I was painting, others were doing other finishing work like installing trim. When I entered the house to start painting, I went up some temporary stairs in the front and when I had to leave, the front porch was about half-way done. That visual progress is great for morale and important to let everyone see that things are happening.

Another similarity is the jobs we did. Chris Peters made a point during the Word for Windows 6.0 project that we should not see ourselves as developers who write code, testers who test code and program managers who work on specifications. Instead each day we should think about what we could do to help ship a great product. Now obviously as a developer that often means writing code or debugging existing code, but sometimes that means sitting down with testers and helping them map out their test plan. Sometimes that means sitting down with documentation writers and explaining how the product works. And sometimes it means suggesting that a feature get cut or scaled back because it wont be ready on time (which would lead to removing code). All of those things help a project along towards its ultimate goal - getting into ...

One downside of using SVN is that it creates .svn sub-directories in all the directories that are enlisted in the project. These directories can have information useful to a website hacker (database passwords, for example). So, we need to make sure that people cannot access these sub-directories through HTTP/HTTPS. You could place a .htaccess file in each of the .svn directories, but that is tedious and you have to remember to do it each time you add a new directories. If you have access to your configuration file for your web server, you can make the directories inaccessible there.

But if you don't have access at that level (and many of us don't) the easiest place to make the change is in the .htaccess file at the root of your website.

The following code does just that, assuming you have mod_rewrite in your Apache installation.

  RewriteEngine on
  RewriteRule ^((.*)/)?\.svn/(.*) http://www.example.com [R,L]

This code checks to see if you have /.svn/ somewhere in the request, and, if it finds it, redirects the request to the root of your website (replace www.example.com with your website root). You could bring up ...

John Wooden was not just an amazing college basketball coach (having won twice as many men's national championships as the next closest coach) but he was also an amazing teacher and leader.  His "Pyramid of Success" succinctly lays out his basic principles for being successful. Traits such as Cooperation, Initiative and Poise. He has written a number of books on leadership and the lessons he teaches are applicable to the business world.

Even his quotes (Woodenisms) are applicable to business. Things like:

"Things turn out best for the people who make the best of the way things turn out."

 Or

"If you're not making mistakes, then you're not doing anything. I'm positive that a doer makes mistakes."

That last one is particularly applicable to business. If we are doing anything important, we are most likely making mistakes. The key is how we learn from those and move forward.

When you have the chance, look up some of the wisdom of Coach Wooden, he is a remarkable person.

You're right, you are overwhelmed.

Essentially infinitely overwhelmed, in fact.

The cost of diseminating information is nearly zero, so information you could never have imagined 20 years ago now finds its way to you.  Storing information is very cheap, so information you would have physically HAD to throw away 20 years ago, now stays with you.

Overwhelmed doesn't even capture the extent of the imbalance between you and the information coming your way, anihalated would be more accurate if it were a battle.

Your only option is not to give up, but fighting is futile.

Even organizing the data is impossible, managing the data flow is impossible.

Here's a graph to show you the futility of managing data:

 A zettabyte is sextillion bytes. That's 21 zeros, kids. Add one zero to get the number of actual information bits.  

For comparison your brain (if you just said no in high school) has about 100 billion cells (11 zeros).  If each cell tried to keep just one bit of data, and that's all your brain did, and didnt' keep track of who you loved, what you wanted to do or take space to admire a sunset, you'd be 11 zeros short of keeping track of the data out there today, and you'd be FALLING FURTHER BEHIND EVERY MINUTE.

Give up trying to store it, don't track it, enjoy ignrorance of 20 zeros and leave space for what you love.

How can yo do this?  How can you let go of information coming at you?  Well for one, ...

I tend to like to write on my keyboard on my lap or on a lap bench... 

In this age of constant change why do most budgets contain very little room for improving efficiency and communications?

Because most IT budgets are maintaining 90% of what they don't need to get the 10% the actually use.

SureTech.com's mission is to allow you to share the basic infrastructure that doesn't provide core value to your business, and allow you to focus your budet on the innovation and efficiency that let's you be the best in the world at what you do, instead needing each of our customers to also be best in the world at managing equipment and networks.

I have nothing against corporations or even republican conservatism. But neither the means nor the end ever seemed as important to me as the manner of the journey; and love, equality and justice have always felt like better principles for a manner than achievement, winning and owning for their sake alone. These fundamentals that ring so true in every heart seemed absent often from the rhetoric of success Id often hear.

But sometimes getting out into the sun reveals more scenery than you guess. I met two brothers yesterday, who described themselves as the original LinkedIn. Though they sold insurance, most of their day was connecting people and businesses to each other and to funding. Their courting of VCs and VC target companies was strategic, to be sure, but a complete indirection to selling insurance. The direction was to expand their network, to participate in community and thereby simply by being known, succeed at insurance.

Almost be existing they are flourishing, Sum Ergo Sum.  This strikes me as a lot more productive than fighting to convince a client of my value. By sharing it is easier to receive, and we get to more malt syrup or is it? Its easier to believe in love and sharing when everybody with ...

Everybody's heard the buzz, but most people I talk to are confused about how to understand "The Cloud." Even for many that understand the buzz or work with Cloud computers, explaining The Cloud can be daunting.

Cloud Explanations and Illustrations

I usually explain it using a napkin network diagram of the internet which is ...

If you are interested in our Flash code, we'd be happy to share it with you. Just contact us or email David.

To see a full screen version, click here. 

To view the Tombola part of the aplication, click on the program and press the space bar.

I'm told by my friends at some more popular sites that this type of thing is standard for them. I guess that means we've become popular.

Ive been thinking a lot about backups recently for a variety of reasons.

First, Ive been involved in setting up a fund to honor the high school teacher who first taught me the importance of good backups. He hired me to help with the high school mini-computers and one of my major jobs was to backup the system every day to magnetic tape. When we lost a hard disk (lighting and computers just dont mix well) we always could recover with a recent tape. I learned a lot of lessons from that first job and one that particularly stuck in my mind was the importance of regular backups and taking backups off-site. Because of that job, I can be a bit maniacal about backups and archives.

Second, I had to recreate a website we worked on a couple of years ago. We had archived the source when we decommissioned our source control server just a few months ago. But when we shut down the website, wed not remembered to download a copy of the database. In my development work, however, I knew Id had at least one copy of the database on my development machine while we were working on it, but Id deleted it a year or two ago. However, I make it a practice to burn an archive DVD of my work at the end of each year before I clean off files that are no longer needed so I had a good feeling that I had some reasonable version of the database archived. I pulled out my archive from a couple of years ago and found the database pretty easily. With that and the source code, we were ...

For SureTech employees, the script is saved away in my user directory on the backup domain controller. You'd want to run this by typing: 

cscript wupdate.vbs

As programmers, we have often been tricked into thinking that we should be writing code all the time and anything less and were not being productive enough. I know I often struggle between writing code which I enjoy, have some skill in, and can easily see my results and doing other important project tasks.

When I was working on Word for Windows 6.0 (and there's a whole 'nother story about why it was numbered 6.0 rather than 3.0, since it followed Word for Windows 2.0 the short quote is 6 is larger than 3) Chris Peters (who has since left Microsoft and brought the PBA back into prominence) at one of our team meetings made it clear to us that, in order to ship Word 6.0 we needed to remember that our job wasnt to write code or test code or any of those things. Our job was to ship Word 6.0. Now often that would mean, as developers, we should write some code (or fix some bugs) but we needed to think each day about what we could do that day to help ship Word 6.0. Some days that would mean not writing new code (and new code is the worst it has to be tested, localized, documented, etc.). Sometimes, the best way to finish the project would be to talk with our program manager and see about cutting a ...

That's pretty much the price of excellent service these days.  If you outsource your service to a place that doesn't care about your customers ...  - view comments

Thankfully, I do keep the CF cards in their plastic case, but I was dubious about whether the card would make it through. I looked the card over and it didn't look damaged. So, I plugged it in to my card reader thinking that it might actually work and - surprise, surprise - it did. The audio looks just fine and I'll get it edited shortly.

Using Google to search for "Compact Flash cards in water" turned up this story about a much more abused card than mine. Guess I didn't really have any reason to worry about it working.

The FSUTIL utility requires that you have administrative privileges.

At which point I wanted to scream - But I Am an Administrator.

So, I looked around to make sure. Yes, I was in the Domain Admins group which was in the Administrators group. Looked like I was good to go. I had logged in with my admin account rather than my normal user accout. Hmm, what was up?

I searched on Google and thankfully came across a comment in this post that reminded me that Windows 2008 requires you to explicitly run the command window as an administrator. I right-clicked on the cmd icon, selected Run as Administrator, and voila! the fsutil command ran. Not that it gave me the information I wanted, but it ran.

It's powered by Postini, so the back end looks good. But, I like to try these things out before rolling them out to customers. So, I decided I'd sign up my business domain for the service. I get a little bit of spam, generally it's caught by the filters in Outlook or on my server. I was using StartLogic, which I'd been signed up with for about five years. To make a long story short, after much gnashing of teeth and trying different things, it turns out that StartLogic's mail servers can't handle the Google Message Filtering service. I believe it has to do with the way the MX records are described and how StartLogic figures out which domain the mail belongs to, but I'm not sure.

So, I decided ...

While I have over two decades of experience with computers, I am a novice with networks and I appreciated the chapters on switches, VLANs, routing and Quality of Service. It was written well enough that I could understand the basics and the graphics he used helped me understand the concepts.

Donahue has some great comments in the back about how to sell your ideas to management and how to be more professional (instead of just a techie).

Overall it was certainly worth my time reading this. If you are interested in a better understanding of how networks and network transports work, this would be a useful read. If you're a network expert and don't need to deal with Cisco equipment, it's probably a waste of time.

I was installing a new VPN client on my main machine and, foolishly I will add, had two different VPN clients (one using IPSec and one using SSL) connected already. When I installed the new VPN client, about halfway through the install both of my current connections were severed and my machine went into an automatic shutdown. No problem I thought, I'll either uninstall and reinstall the VPN or just continue the VPN install and I'll be fine. Well, this install leaves something around to let it know an install was in process. Perhaps I could have figured out what that was and cleared it, but I figured it was a safer bet just to restore the system to the point before the install. Sure enough, there was the restore point waiting for me. I restored back to that point in time and re-ran the install (not connected through the VPN this time!) and everything worked out nicely.

By Alan Cohen from Law.com
Corporate Counsel
October 31, 2008

If there's one tried-and-true way to tackle a problem, it's to make it someone else's problem. It's the strategy that's given us plumbers, fluff-and-fold laundry and lawn services. Yet for a long time, corporate computing didn't really lend itself to the pass-the-predicament model. Sure, you could hire consultants to troubleshoot your hardware, patch your software and get all the PCs and servers talking to one another. But at the end of the day, it was your system -- and your headache.

Delegators take note: The times are changing. An increasingly popular software model tries to make things simple by -- get this -- literally making things simple. Known as Software as a Service or cloud computing, the idea boils down to this: Instead of running an application yourself, using your own equipment and IT staff (not to mention ...

Organizations are increasingly looking to next-generation social networking tools to conduct sophisticated business intelligence and analytics. In many cases, they are mining data and looking for trends and patterns, such as which salesperson has the relationships to pull off a deal or which customers seem to have the biggest influence with others online.

Cloud computing environments will contribute to the expansion of SaaS into areas beyond ERP, CRM and HR management systems. Rob DeSisto, analyst for Gartner, says organizations increasingly see the benefits of moving large-scale software expenses from the capital budget to the operating budget.

Saavy IT managers are now looking for ways to automate and embed security and compliance processes across the value chain, including on mobile devices. Surprisingly, a key challenge is one of perception, not technology. Companies must get over the idea that security and compliance systems are simply insurance against problems, and that they dont improve the business in ...