Oh what sordid stories could fall under that heading! This is quite sordid (ish). I’ll do my best to make it interesting. It is, I suppose about apples and oranges.
Don’t mix business and pleasure: pt 1
Modern technology is wonderful and the web is a great part of that. It is however, likely to bite the uninitiated. This story relates to a few years ago. An old colleague of mine has a very prim and proper wife. She was not technologically blessed. At some point a computer appeared in the house. It was then attached to the Internet. It was purchase to help her technologically savvy daughter who was going to university. It was also for the husband who was starting an OU degree. To help Mum, daughter explained all about shopping on line, search engines and the like.
Daughter was away learning about like in the modern world, Mother sat at the new computer. Having mastered the on / off switch, the windows start button and clicking on the desktop, she felt quite pleased with herself. There connected with the browser waiting on her tentative keyboard strokes. The idea was to browse the Marks and Spencer site. She carefully typed http://www.marks & spencer.com/ and got back “invalid URL” a little pondering and she typed http://www.m & s.com/ . “invalid URL” was once again the inscrutable reply. Confusion and consternation, then she remembered something about search engines. There was this empty box which said “Google search”. Ah! daughter said something about how good it was at finding stuff when she did not know exactly where to look. Not quite so painstakingly she typed M & S into the Google search box and clicked on search. In those days Google returned the results for the letters M and S in the same way as S & M. Apparently quite a fit of the vapours ensued....
Today you will get http://www.marksandspencer.com/ as the top hit. I must admit that frequently enough I find the serendipitous hits from Google, more interesting than the original search. It will be a sad day if ever Google finds a way to show us just what we think we want!
Don’t mix business and pleasure: pt 2
The same is true for the latest iTunes update. It launches an app called com.apple.IE.client.exe. This does a passable impression of a denial of service attack. It gobbles up memory using one and a third gigabyte on my 2 gigabyte laptop. It renders the machine unusable.
It also launches dialog boxes:
The iLounge site has quite a few entries. Some of these quite are negative about Apple's response to user pain. The answer is to rename the file/ folder:
The laptop concerned has both business and (iTunes) pleasure applications on it and it was V. annoying when the laptop ground to a halt when I had a remote session to a customer going.
