ReadWriteEnterprise

The disk maintenance tools that Microsoft ships with Windows have always been, at best, tolerable. Now that there's an entire industry centered around archival storage systems and services, it's about time Microsoft gave its consumer versions of Windows a file archiving system appropriate for the 21st century.

Replacing Windows Backup, Windows 8 File History is the file archiving system that should have been in Windows 7 - and it points the way toward a post-PC future for Microsoft.

Yes, there really are 10 important and beneficial changes you'll find in Microsoft Windows 8, beginning with Refresh. Let's just say it's closer to perfect than Windows Backup. Refresh is Microsoft's first real attempt to address Windows' most touchy consumer pain point: Reinstallation as a solution to problems that no one can diagnose or understand. Now, there's a chance that with this partial installation feature, you can have Windows start over without losing absolutely everything, including your applications and the files in your libraries.

Gartner. Forrester. IDC. And lots of smaller fish, too. You can't read a tech-industy news story, attend a conference or listen to a sales pitch without someone quoting an industry analyst. For tech companies, analysts are big news and big business, promising to help with transformation, monetization and a slew of other things ending in "-ation."

But what do technology industry analysts really do? And how do you find the one that's right for your company's needs. Let me try to explain, from the inside. You see, from 1999 through 2001, I was an analyst at Jupiter Research, now part of Forrester Research.

As part of the Mountain Lion preview last week, Apple put out a beta of its revamped chat application, Messages. If you spend a lot of time connecting with other folks on iOS devices, Messages is a must-have. If not, it doesn't really add much to the mix.

Installing Messages is simple enough, though it does require a system reboot. If you've been using iChat, Messages will automatically import your accounts and you're good to go. If not, it's simple enough to set up your accounts. Like iChat, Messages supports AIM, Yahoo, Google Talk and Jabber accounts. To get the most out of Messages, though, you'll need an Apple ID and Messages on the desktop and/or an iOS device.

Evernote is a tool for keeping track of, well, everything. At least everything as far as digital information goes, or information that can be digitized. Evernote comprises a Web-based service and clients for Windows, Mac OS X, mobile devices, and extensions for Web browsers. It's a service I've been using for years, and over that time I've picked up a few tips and tricks for getting the most out of the tool.

The next time you have to get an MRI or CT scan you might not know it but if the equipment is made by GE it is phoning home. No, the actual scan data is still between you and your doctor, but the broad stats of when and where the scan was taken is reported back to GE. In the true spirit of the Internet of Things, everything has an IP address, even an MRI machine. The analysts at GE have created some interesting data visualizations. About 125,000 scans are taken each day around the world with their equipment, and you can see time series information and other interesting stats on their blog.

One of the things that I'm often asked by developers at conferences is "how do I get coverage for my project?" I had that conversation with several people at Monktoberfest, and thought it might make for a good talk at Monki Gras.

Specifically, the talk was for individual developers, small groups working on open source projects or startups (to a point). It's not meant for people looking to grab press coverage for a business, but for developers largely interested in finding more users and developers for their project.

So, we've shot down SOPA and PIPA. Congratulations Internets for a job well done. Mission accomplished, right? Not so much. While that's two bad pieces of legislation pushed back, there's much more where that came from. Leaving aside existing nastiness like the DMCA, we also have the even nastier Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) (PDF). How bad is it? Bad enough that the European Parliament's rapporteur for ACTA (Kader Arif) resigned over it today (January 27, 2012). Unfortunately for those of us in the United States, President Obama has already ratified ACTA on behalf of the United States.

Many of us take cheap high-speed Internet access for granted. I think nothing of downloading an MP3 album from Amazon MP3 while streaming a movie from Netflix on the Roku and browsing the Web on a powerful computer. That's not a luxury that's available to everyone, and in some parts of the world data charges prove prohibitive for going online for information.

To help counter that, the Wikimedia Foundation and Orange have come up with a plan for free Wikipedia access. Overall, the deal looks like a win for users, but it does raise a couple of questions as well. How is Wikipedia access going to change Africa and the Middle East?

By now, most folks have heard of phishing scams, and know to be on the lookout for fake PayPal and bank sign-ons. But what happens when your co-workers get a link to a site that looks just like the corporate intranet? Using the Simple Phishing Toolkit (SPT) you can find out.

The concept behind SPT is pretty simple: Most companies spend a fair amount of money on trying to secure their environment. How much do they spend on educating users? Very little, and in many cases nothing at all. As the saying goes, an ounce of prevention is much better than a pound of cure.