Blog of a Long Distance Worker Tech

Personal time management is about focus. The Pareto Principle—also known as the ‘80:20 Rule’—states that 80% of effort generates 20% of outcomes. The other side of the principle is, 80% of the desired outcome can be generated by 20% of effort. While the 80/20 ratio is somewhat arbitrary, it is emphasizes what can be lost or gained through effort.

Thanks to antitrust action in the United States, the European Union, and elsewhere around the world, Microsoft has had to reevaluate bundling certain features with its dominant Windows products. The first to go were so-called middleware applications like Windows Messenger, the instant messaging (IM) application that was previously bundled with Windows XP
. In the Vista release, Microsoft began getting more aggressive about stripping applications out of Windows and making them available as so-called out of band updates; that is, updates that are delivered outside of the normal OS development schedule. So we saw the first examples of Vista applications, like Windows Mail and Photo Gallery, being replaced by Windows Live branded applications.

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Pogoplug, the makers of a device to publish the content of your USB drive to the Internet, has launched Pogoplug Biz. Biz allows a company the ability to hook up to four external drives to the Internet, providing them with "an extensible cloud storage solution with no monthly fees."

If you're tired of your thighs feeling like they're in a slow cooker, by all means, buy a laptop cooling pad, with or without a USB-powered fan.

Windows/Mac/Linux: TrueCrypt, the smart and secure way to encrypt your data, has shipped a seventh version that can encrypt faster on select Intel hardware, as well as configure your encrypted volumes or drives to automatically mount with specific preferences.

Michael Gartenburg has concluded that the Treo should be included in his Five gadgets that changed the World article, and I tend to agree. A worthy read.

Hey guys, I just managed to get my hands on the Asus EEE PC 1215N an gave it a review on netbooklive.net . As you probably know, the 1215N is a 12 incher which packs some powerful hardware, including a dual-core Atom processor, 2-4 GB of DDR3 memory and latest generation Nvidia ION graphics with Optimus management system.

Apple isn’t the only company which is raking in the money at the moment, with Microsoft also posting up some fine fiscal figures.