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And of coarse, let's not forget king of the hill in search now - Google.

I found that as time went by, Google Desktop Search bogged down the system bit by bit (literally?). I ended up uninstalling it as I have no really serious need for a desktop search engine. Don't get me wrong; I liked the program, and I thought it was great that it could index the contents of so many different types of files, as well as email and web history. I simply don't need that kind of capability, particularly when it starts slowing down the machine.

I think we're going to see a lot of breakthroughs in this area very soon, and my prediction is that the "killer desktop search app" is going to come from one of the small development houses that will probably bank everything they have on it and emerge from the "search wars" with a golden standard. But I digress.

In case anyone's interested, Woody's Watch has published a Desktop Search Handbook (in e-book format) that reviews major search apps and includes a lot of tips and such. Unfortunately, for now they only review the "biggies": Google, Copernic, Lookout, MSN, and Yahoo. But they're expanding it, and buyers get free updates for the rest of 2005. It's even cheaper for Woody's Watch subscribers ($10 instead of $15).

• You could simply grab a copy of the file in the morning and then later in the day after some changes are made.
• Or compare the latest version with one on a backup.
• Copies on a server and that replicated to a networked computer.
• Or make use of Microsoft's own Shadow Copy feature that stores multiple past versions of your documents.
• If you are using the backup copy option in Word then there's a near duplicate of the original in the same folder.
• Copies sent back and forth over email could be intercepted and compared.

1. Last document editor's name, initials, and company
2. Computer name last edited on
3. Path (incl server name) of last save (Remember all those hacks that require the miscreant to know specific file path & names?)
4. Previous editor's names
5. Number of revisions and versions
6. Template name and path
7. Any hidden text
8. Comments

Side note: PDF Passwords ARE TRIVIAL to break. Don't try to protect your PDFs from printing/copying/etc. with the built-in "security." It takes about 15 seconds with publicly-available software to crack any PDF.

1. Last document editor's name, initials, and company
2. Computer name last edited on
3. Path (incl server name) of last save (Remember all those hacks that require the miscreant to know specific file path & names?)
4. Previous editor's names
5. Number of revisions and versions
6. Template name and path
7. Any hidden text
8. Comments

Side note: PDF Passwords ARE TRIVIAL to break. Don't try to protect your PDFs from printing/copying/etc. with the built-in "security." It takes about 15 seconds with publicly-available software to crack any PDF.

That's WOPRs.

If this book ends up anything like Woody Leonhard's Annoyances series from O'Reilly, such as Word '97 Annoyances, they'll be useful to more than just your average joe with a problem.

Those books take a critical look at how things work versus how you think they're working, and how to solve that cognitive dissonance. They may not solve every problem possible -- that's a cookbook that you probably couldn't lift. But it will give you avenues to understanding where the problems are coming from. To me, that's even more valuable.

Odds are, it won't have the same authors: Woody is a dyed-in-the-wool Microsoft addict, with all the usual love-hate (and there's plenty of hate). Hopefully O'Reilly will use the same editorial goals, though.

It may not be the first, but it is the most incisive because of the way it dissects the many fundamental flaws in Microsoft's latest creation.

It may not be the first, but it is the most incisive because of the way it dissects the many fundamental flaws in Microsoft's latest creation.

Perhaps the script kiddies were waiting until people got new PCs for Christmas.

"WOWser Rick Tripple alerted me to yet another truly bizarre side-effect to installing MSN Explorer Preview 2. Rick says that if you have an MSN email account - say, woody@msn.com, for example - installing MSN Explorer Preview 2 *permanently* prevents you from ever using Outlook or Outlook Express to retrieve mail from that account.

Yeah. You read that right. If you have an @msn.com email address, and you install MSN Explorer Preview 2, Microsoft permanently re-routes the MSN email account so all of the mail that's sent to your @msn.com address actually gets delivered to Hotmail.

As a result, you can't use Outlook or Outlook Express to look at your @msn.com mail. You have to use Hotmail. Period. And if you change your mind about MSN Explorer Preview 2 and uninstall it - tough cookies, bucko. Your @msn.com account can't be changed back to the way it was.

What's the big deal, you ask? It's all about access.

Many people use Outlook offline. You probably log on to the Internet periodically (by clicking the Send/Receive button, or by setting up Outlook to retrieve messages every 10 or 20 minutes), retrieve incoming messages, disconnect from the Internet (that's usually automatic after Send/Receive is done), then work on your email: construct replies, compose new messages and so on. When you're done with the current batch of email, you log back onto the Internet (or Outlook does it for you automatically), send the messages you typed, and retrieve any new ones that may be hanging around. That's cool. Lots of people will download their messages onto a portable computer, then work on their email while they're riding to work, munching on lunch, or flying to Timbuktu.

Hotmail's different. In order to use Hotmail, you have to be connected to the Web, period. You can't see your messages unless you're connected. You can't reply to them. You can't even compose a new message, unless you're on the Web, and everything (including Hotmail) is working. That's a huge difference, especially if you're accustomed to working on email while you're on the move.

MSN Explorer Preview 2 will only let you compose messages when you're online, connected to Hotmail. If you want to work on email while you're on a plane, well, sorry, that just isn't possible.

This whole situation is so bizarre, I thought at first that Rick must've been mistaken. So I contacted the MSN folks at Waggener Edstrom (Microsoft's PR company), and they pretty much confirmed everything that Rick was saying."

TomV

So, in 5.1, they have "Enable Page Hit Counting" and "Userdata Persistence", and in 5.5 they have "Userdata Persistence", and the page hit counting thing is unlabelled but still present. Damn, I'd like to hear what Microsleaze has to say about this crap. And I wonder, does this all have anything to do with Passport, about which Woody wrote some nasty shit in his latest newsletter. It would seem that Passport is little more than a cookie circumvention process which provides site owners with way more data than cookies can. As if M$ intends to trumpet the unwashed masses with the news that they are now safe from the evil cookie, leaving unsaid of course that the "solution" is much worse.

"I will gladly pay you today, sir, and eat up

No, but you would have to call MS and explain what you have done, and convince them you to give you a new code #.

In a way, I am hoping that this will accelerate adoption on some other office suite, like KDE's or Star Office. I know a bunch of businesses that will simply do without rather than buy a bunch of copies of MS Office (at the current prices, anyway).

Some additional details are available at Woody's Office Watch which I recommend subscribing to. It's a pretty timely resource for a lot of things, including ways to deal with Outlook related viruses (I know, I know - "the best way to deal with Outlook viruses is to use Eudora, etc. - spare me) and other handy tools.