Helping your business to do more business
It is an unfortunate truth that computer hardware fails. One of the most common components to fail is the hard disk, while modern disks are far more reliable than their early counterparts, they are still a mechanical device that spin many thousands of times per minute and as such there is a chance that it could fail at any time.
Recently I read a story about some people who were cautioned by the Police for unauthorised use of a wireless network. It seems that neighbours noticed someone using a laptop in a car and reported them to the Police, the Police found they were connecting to the Internet over someones unsecured WiFi and so they were arrested and had their wrists slapped!
Having written about Windows Vista last time, I think its only fair to mention Office 2007 this time.
One of the tasks that I perform regularly for the family farm is to update our cattle movement details on the British Cattle Movements Service (BCMS) web site. Although I manage the herd records using my own software (written over a number of years to match the way I work, but never published), I've never got around to automating the process of updating our records on BCMS.
Buried amongst the avalanche of software being released by Microsoft at the moment is a piece of software called Powershell. Its a replacement for the venerable DOS command line, providing all of its abilities and much more besides, its actually more akin to the power available from a UNIX/Linux command console than DOS but then I think that's where the inspiration comes from.