Some interesting stuff about technology......and of course one joke.....
Have you been crammed? And do you really look at your cell phone bill? Read this column by "The Haggler" in the Times and you will.....
THE Haggler’s last column apparently caused a lot of readers to take a close look at their cellphone bills, and many made a disturbing discovery: they had been crammed.
To recap, cramming is the unsavory act of tacking an unrequested service fee to a phone bill. It’s been a land-line scheme for years and now appears to be full-on scourge in the mobile phone world. Customers find themselves enrolled, without their consent, in a short-message service, or SMS, which delivers texts on celebrity gossip, dating and other kinds of invaluable information. The monthly fees — often in the $9 range — as well as the service come from third-party providers, which is a generic term for what are, in many instances, very shadowy companies that behave very badly.
In our last episode, a woman discovered that a Georgia-based company called Wise Media had crammed a $9.99 charge to her cellphone bill in recent months. Her carrier, AT&T, promptly refunded the charges, which turns out to be standard operating procedure, and may go a long way toward explaining why the outrage about cellphone cramming has not yet exploded like cartoon dynamite.
All of my electronics are Apple, so I was fascinated to read this article by an Apple guy who went totally Microsoft for a month. Microsoft is the complete underdog in consumer electronics but according to this story they are making a concerted effort to reinvent themselves. Go for it dudes......
Although I like my IPhone, IPad and Mac I have become a little uneasy that Apple Corp. is just another evil corporation when the stories came out about the exploitation of the Chinese workers making their products, and also the Steve Jobs legacy which was he was a really lousy parent and a complete asshole in business. And contrast that with Bill Gates, whose foundation is devoted to doing good works.....
Kind of makes you want to cheer for the underdog [?] a little....
Could Microsoft ever be cool again? The company has been out of it for so long that a comeback is hard to imagine. But by some miracle this seems to be happening, and people are starting to take notice. “Suddenly Microsoft is the Hippest Tech Company Around,” says the Atlantic Wire in an article that claims recent stumbles by Apple (China labor woes) and Google (privacy concerns)make Microsoft seem like nice guys by comparison.
In an experiment I called “Month of Microsoft,” I’ve spent the past four weeks using nothing but Microsoft products—Windows computers, Windows phones, Xbox, Bing, Internet Explorer—instead of my usual lineup of Apple and Google products. It’s been six years since I used any Microsoft products on a regular basis. I wasn’t sure what to expect.
The verdict? Microsoft is making some really nice products these days. What it still can’t do is tie all these products into a single, well-integrated ecosystem. Don’t worry; nobody else can either. But that’s where everyone is headed. If Microsoft can pull off this integration, it could very well give Apple a run for its money.
What everyone is after these days is a kind of single, unified experience where all content (music collection, movies owned or rented, plus home movies, photos, documents) is kept up on the Internet cloud, in a single place.
A series of devices—phone, tablet, laptop computer, desktop computer, TV—can fetch any of that content from the cloud. Watch a movie on the phone, then pause it and watch the rest of it on the TV. Edit a document on a work computer, store it to the cloud, work on it on a tablet during the train ride home, then work on it again with a laptop on the couch at night.
All this has to happen seamlessly. And it must be incredibly simple and easy to use.
So far, no tech company can deliver this. But Microsoft has all the pieces. It just needs to bring them together
.http://www.thedailybeast.com/
Getting spam texts on your smartphone? Big problem.......you need to be very careful because clicking 'NO' or "STOP" verifies you have a working number.....
As this article says, click 7726 [SPAM] which will block that number......
Text message spam has started waking Bob Dunnell in the middle of the night, promising cheap mortgages, credit cards and drugs. Some messages offer gift cards to, say, Walmart, if he clicks on a Web site and enters his Social Securitynumber.
Once the scourge of e-mail providers and the Postal Service, spammers have infiltrated the last refuge of spam-free communication: cellphones. In the United States, consumers received roughly 4.5 billion spam texts last year, more than double the 2.2 billion received in 2009, according to Ferris Research, a market research firm that tracks spam.
Spread over 250 million text message-enabled phones, the problem is not as commonplace as e-mail spam. But it is a growing menace, with the potential for significant damage.
“Unsolicited text messaging is a pervasive problem,” said Christine Todaro, a lawyer with the Federal Trade Commission, the consumer watchdog agency, which is turning to the courts for help. “It is becoming very difficult to track down who is sending the spam. We encourage consumers to file complaints, which helps us track down the spammers, but even then it is a little bit like peeling back an onion.”
Todays Joke - A Love Story
Ralph and Edna were both patients in a mental hospital. One day while they were walking past the hospital swimming pool, Ralph suddenly jumped into the deep end.
He sank to the bottom of the pool and stayed there.
Edna promptly jumped in to save him. She swam to the bottom and pulled him out. When the Head Nurse Director became aware of Edna's heroic act, she immediately ordered her to be discharged from the hospital, as she now considered her to be mentally stable.
When she went to tell Edna the news she said, "Edna, I have good news and bad news. The good news is you're being discharged, since you were able to rationally respond to a crisis by jumping in and saving the life of the person you love. I have concluded that your act displays sound mindedness."
She continued, "The bad news is, Ralph hung himself in the bathroom with his bathrobe belt right after you saved him. I am so sorry, but he's dead."
Edna replied, "He didn't hang himself. I put him there to dry.... How soon can I go home?"
Happy Mental Health Day!
Remember to send this email to an unstable friend...
I've done my part!!!
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