Technology In Check

For medium sized companies with aspirations of becoming really big, this is one to play close attention to.

There’s a move by ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) to expand the name space used for what are called top-level domains. In short, there are a few top-level domain in the world, such as .com, .net, and .org. However in a news release today, ICANN announced that it is planning to expand the “real-estate” available at the top level.

What this means for business is that there will be a whole range of new names available. For example, if you’re willing to pony up the dough (and if you’re fast enough to get in on the application process) you might be able to acquire the top-level domain name of .acme. Or .yourname.

The possibilities here are staggering from a marketing perspective. Already, the news release cites certain cities that want to have access to their own names as a top level. So if you control the .van top level domain, you would then be able to market websites like canucks.van, dining.van, hotels.van …

The possibilities are staggering.

From a technical perspective, if you know what IPv6 means, then you’ll likely see that thjis new decision from ICANN will speed up adoption of the new protocol. Then again, if you don’t know what IPv6 means, then check back here again next week, and I’ll explain it.

I’m still surprised that many people continue to disparage Vista mercilessly. Having just installed Vista SP1 yesterday, I’m now onto my 12th month of running Vista with comparatively few problems. The biggest difficulty I’ve faced in my own experience comes from attaching external hard drives; if I plug in a USB hard drive, and try to use it too quickly, my PC will sometimes blue-screen. Sometimes.

And after I spoke with a friend this last weekend, I heard more about how Vista is “a bad thing”. Continue Reading »

I received a call from a client who wanted help getting a new computer set up and running on their network. They had purchased the computer at a stationary supply chain a few days earlier for a new hire, and now they needed it that person to be able to access the central network.

Nope, not going to happen. The computer’s operating system doesn’t support business networks.

Here’s why IT has more of an impact on your daily operations than you might think, and how a good IT department can save you some real dollars. Continue Reading »

I was visiting a client his week, and I came across a situation that I’ve seen a number of times. They were running a relatively new version of some software, but they were behind a service pack level (they were running service pack 1, and the current recommended level is SP2).

I was thinking about this a bit, and it occurred to me that this is a tendency I’ve seen a few times previously; a tech support provider feels that things are stable and working properly. So why bother to upgrade to the latest service pack? After all, it might break things, right?

Not always. Continue Reading »

I’m going to continue along the thread of Software as a Service that I started last week, and tell you about a problem that’s developed with one of the more common service offerings. The problem relates to online backup services, sometimes referred to as remote backup.

The basic premise is simple… as a business owner, you want to ensure that your data is backed up safely, and that it’s stored off-site. So you subscribe to a service to do this for you. The service you subscribe to enables you to select data that is sent encrypted over the Internet, so that it’s kept elsewhere in case something bad happens to your office premises. Everything is peachy-keen, right?

Maybe it is. Then again, maybe not.

Update: CPG Systems has started  doing remote/ online backups. Visit their website for more information

Continue Reading »