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Category: Windows

The war for the family room – Part 1

The war for the family room – Part 1

The 1990’s saw Microsoft invest considerably in IPTV research as well as investing directly in communications providers, in 1998 they collaborated with Sega on the Dreamcast and they acquired WebTV for $425M in 1997. I distinctly recall no end of criticism from the press for Microsoft’s continued investment in IPTV, something that Microsoft felt was a longer term investment, but that pundits missed the wisdom of. The Dreamcast is of course now discontinued, as is WebTV, though it is hard for me to…

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Preying on ignorance

Preying on ignorance

I’ve been spending a bit of time looking into something that has bothered me for awhile. I refer to it as “Predatory Utility Software”, or “PUS”. On Christmas day, I received two pieces of spam. These were admirable because they were able to defeat SpamSieve (my favorite software purchase of 2008). They were frustrating because they offered a piece of… software called “Error Nuker”. For years, I’ve been telling people that so-called “registry cleaners” don’t do anything, and in fact…

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