Point of view: Online ethics and etiquette

Written by Deb Shinder, WinNews Editor

It’s been a long time since I tackled the subject of “netiquette,” and things have changed in the interim. Back then, the primary means of communicating online were email and newsgroups (remember newsgroups?). In comparison to the “old methods” of printed, mailed letters and telephone or in-person discussions, those methods seemed quick, informal, much less in-depth and not nearly as carefully composed. Today, social media is the online communications method of choice for many people, especially younger people. And social networking posts make email messages look stilted and formal by comparison.

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

As our technology changes, common practices and even the etiquette of communication changes too. Oh, the basics remain of course – it’s still not considered polite to call others names or “troll” (posting outrageous statements just to get others riled up and angry). But the rules regarding privacy and sharing are not the same as back in the earlier days of the Internet. Social networking emphasizes openness and sharing of information, and that may be disconcerting to some folks who are used to more discretion.

To understand why the old rules don’t apply anymore, we can start with the Terms of Service that you agree to (whether you realize it or not) when you join a social site. Most people don’t even read the ToS; they just click “Agree,” same as they do for a software EULA (End User License Agreement) when they install a program.

Let’s look at the Facebook ToS as an example. Section 2, Sharing your Content and Information, says (in part):
“When you publish content or information using the Public setting, it means that you are allowing everyone, including people off of Facebook, to access and use that information, and to associate it with you.”

What does that mean, exactly? Well for one thing, it means that even though your settings might prevent others from seeing your posts, the “public” information that you publish – such as your name – can be used by anyone, any way they want. For instance, if you accept someone as a Facebook “friend,” that person can add you to groups, send you game requests, post on your wall and so forth. Ways are provided for you to control various aspects of your privacy, but it’s up to you to figure them out and use them. The default settings will almost always be to share everything with everybody.

I recently heard about a case where a Facebook user was livid that one of his “friends” had added him to a group. It was a local interest group for members of a “real life” organization to which they both belong. The “added party” felt that he had been severely wronged and even threatened to make this an issue within the real-life organization, even after the “adder” removed him from the group.

These kinds of hard feelings can occur when people don’t understand 1) the common and accepted practices associated with the sites they join, and 2) how the technology works to encourage (and sometimes even force) more sharing and less privacy.

Let’s look a little more closely at Facebook groups. There are two different settings for membership approval. The creator(s) and/or administrator(s) of a group can configure it so that any group member can add or approve additional members, or so that any member can add but an administrator must approve all new members. The default setting allows any member to add and approve.

When you belong to a group and visit its page, a list of “suggested members” appears in a column on the right. As with Facebook in general, the aim of the software is to get more sharing going on. Simply clicking the button by a “suggested member’s” name adds him/her to the group. What can you do about it if you’re added to a group you didn’t want to join? Well, it’s easy to remove yourself. Just click the “Settings” button in the top right of the group page under the pictures (it looks like a tiny gear), and select “Leave Group.” You’re out.

Of course, you can also “unfriend” a person. In that case, he/she won’t be able to see your posts unless you mark them as “public.” Remember though, that someone else who is your friend can copy and share your posts with others. A good rule of thumb is: Don’t post it to a social site unless you would be comfortable having it printed on the front page of your local newspaper. Seriously, folks, Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook creator) argued in 2010 that privacy is “no longer the social norm”. Certainly there are many indications that young people today don’t value privacy nearly as much as previous generations did.

Legally, the concept of “expectation of privacy” is an important one in determining whether a person’s rights have been violated. In the context of the U.S. Constitution, this applies to fourth amendment protections regarding the reasonableness of police search and seizure of evidence. The concept is also applicable to determining whether a violation of one’s privacy has occurred in the social sense. For example, it’s generally accepted that a person has a reasonable expectation that the contents of a letter sealed in an envelope and mailed via the Postal Service are private. It’s also generally accepted that no such reasonable expectation exists for a postcard, because the information on it is open to the view of anyone whose hands it passes through.

We can think of electronic communications in the same way. An encrypted email message would carry a reasonable expectation of privacy. A post on a social networking site, because of the nature of those venues, probably would not.

Nonetheless, there are some generally observed rules of etiquette that apply to social networking. Here are a few regarding friends and groups:

1. You’re not obligated to “friend” anyone just because he/she asks, or to “follow” anyone just because he/she follows you but…
2. Remember that a friend request is a friendly gesture so don’t take offense at being asked. If you decline a friend request from someone you actually have a real-world or online relationship with outside the social network, the polite thing to do is send him/her a private message explaining why (e.g., “I use Facebook only for communicating with my close family members and don’t mix business with my private life – but feel free to send me a connection request on LinkedIn“).
3. You can “unfriend” anyone at any time but…
4. If you decide to “unfriend” someone, just do it – don’t make a big issue of it. It’s not necessary (nor polite) to announce it to the world. You don’t even need to announce it to the person you’re unfriending.
5. You’re not obligated to join any group to which you’re invited, or to remain in any group to which you’re added but…
6. If you don’t want to be in a group, just politely decline (or ignore the invitation), or if the site works by adding instead of inviting, just quietly leave the group. It’s not necessary (or polite) to post a nasty message to the group or send one to the person who invited or added you. Again, adding someone to a group is a friendly gesture; taking offense marks you as (at best) overly sensitive and unfriendly.
7. If you send a friend request to someone who might not know who you are (such as that guy you met once at a conference or the author of your favorite blog), send along a private message, telling him/her who you are and how you know him/her, and why you want to be friends. If you send a “bare” request with no personal information, don’t be surprised if it’s ignored.
8. Don’t be offended if you send a nice message asking to be friends, and you get a response that the person only “friends” people he/she knows in real life. Each social network member has the right to decide how narrow or broad to make the scope of his/her friends list.
9. If someone else gets offended because you friended or unfriended him/her, followed or unfollowed him/her, invited or added him/her to a group, etc., don’t respond in kind. It’s hard to have your gesture of goodwill rejected, and if you get an unfriendly or accusing reply, your first impulse will be to answer it with unfriendly words of your own. Resist the impulse.

Related articles

• How to see who unfriends you on Facebook (zdnet.com)
• Filter before you unfriend: how to not be a jerk (siliconbayounews.com)
• Facebook unfriend finder: New browser add-on lets anyone see who’s ‘unfriended’ them (dailymail.co.uk)

Splashtop’s new app brings Windows 8 UI to iPad

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Splashtop on Thursday released a new tablet application that replicates the Windows 8 touch-driven Metro user interface on the iPad, which should help developers test applications for Microsoft’s next OS without investing in a Windows tablet.

Read all about it in ITworld.

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Talking tech: The core(s) of the matter – Up close and personal with your processor

Written by Deb Shinder, WinNews Editor

Intel Core i7-940 for LGA 1366 socket bottom view (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Last August, I began what was intended to be a series of “under the hood” articles in Win7News, beginning with a discussion of excess heat and temperature monitoring. Then we decided to combine WXPnews and Win7News into one big newsletter and during the transition to a new website and a new format, the series fell by the wayside. I did pick up the theme again in recent newsletters featuring storage technologies and physical and virtual memory, and then last week with the discussion of video cards. This week I want to take an “up close and personal” look at the component that functions in some ways like the brain of your computer: the Central Processing Unit (CPU) or more simply, the main processor.

I say “main” because the powerful Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) that I talked about last week are capable of doing some of the general processing that was previously done by the CPU, in addition to handling the actual graphics processing. This is referred to as General Purpose Computing on GPUs (GPGPU or GPGP) or GPU Computing. For certain types of operations, the GPU can calculate much faster than a traditional CPU.

That doesn’t mean there haven’t been great advances in CPU design too. Intel and AMD are the two top manufacturers of the processors that power servers, desktops and laptops. Most of today’s smartphones and tablets run on ARM processors, which are based on RISC architecture (some will recognize RISC as the basis of the PowerPC processors that were first designed by IBM and Motorola and were used in Apple’s Mac computers until the company switched over to Intel processors in 2006.

Intel started making processors for “microcomputers” (the early terminology for desktop PCs) back in 1971, with a 4-bit processor called the 4004. For many of us, our first “real” computer ran on the venerable 8086 or 8088. The former was used in the IBM PS/2 and the latter was used in the original IBM PC (including the PC/XT). The more powerful IBM PC/AT that was released in 1984 ran on the 80286 and subsequent “PC clones” (similar machines made by vendors other than IBM) were based on its successors, the 80386 and 80486 (which were 32-bit processors) – thus the term “x86″ to refer to that Intel processor architecture.

Then along came a new Intel brand in 1993, the Pentiums. This included the Pentium Pro, Pentium II and III, Celeron and several variants of the Pentium 4. Somewhere along the way, Intel also came out with the Xeon (capable of working in pairs or larger groups with a multiprocessing operating system). These were still part of the x386 family. Intel’s first 64-bit processors were released in 2001 and named Itanium; they used a totally different instruction set from the x86 processors. In 2005, we got another line of 64-bit processors that was more like its x86 predecessors. There were the x64 processors that began with the Pentium 4F and Pentium D.

In 2006, Intel introduced the Core microarchitecture with the dual-core Woodcrest and quad-core Clovertown technologies for the Xeon line and that same year we got the Core 2/Core 2 Duo dual-core desktop processors. Next were the Core 2 Quad processors in 2007. The Nehalem architecture was introduced in 2008, and included the Core i7, which is still at the heart of some of today’s most powerful desktop and laptop systems. There are Nehalem designs that support six (Gulftown), eight (Beckton) or ten (Westmere-EX) cores. Core i3 and Core i5 were released as lower-powered, lower-cost Nehalem designs that came out in 2009 and 2010. They’re popular for laptops because they’re more power-efficient than the i7. The latest Sandy Bridge architecture replaces Nehalem, but its processors retain the Core i3/i5/i7 names. The first Sandy Bridge processors were released in 2011.

And that’s just an abbreviated and very simplified history of Intel processors. Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), which licensed from Intel the right to make x86-compatible processors and which merged with graphics card maker ATI, has its own story. The competition between these two top competitors has benefitted computer users as each company tries to outdo the other.

A look at today’s multiplicity of processor technologies can be overwhelming. What’s a core and how many of them do you really need? How do you balance power usage against performance? What’s System on a Chip (SoC) and where does it fit in? Are traditional processors on the way out, as we move into the so-called “post PC era?” Over the next couple of weeks, I’ll try to answer some of those questions.

First let’s look at the relatively new phenomenon of multi-core processing. Not so long ago, if you needed superior processing power, you could install more than one processor in your computer. Of course the computer had to have a motherboard that had more than one CPU socket. Most such motherboards were built for servers, although there were also dual processor (or better) high-performance workstations, too. Multi-core processors consist of two or more independent processors but they’re located on the same die or package. The die is the chip that contains an integrated circuit.

Multi-core processors take up much less room inside the computer case than multiple single-core CPUs, don’t generate as much heat and cost less. But you only benefit from multiple cores (or multiple single processors) if your software is written to take advantage of them. Windows NT was designed to support Symmetric Multiprocessing (SMP). Windows XP Professional supports dual processors; the Home version does not. Windows 7 Home Premium supports two processor cores, but not dual CPUs in two different sockets. Pro, Enterprise and Ultimate support two physical CPUs. Windows Server 2008 R2 (Datacenter Edition) supports up to 256 processor cores or 64 physical processors. Wow.

Not only does the OS need to support those processors, but the applications do too, if you’re going to see appreciable performance benefits. Today’s software developers design their programs to run in multiple threads so they can take advantage of multi-core processing. As with the high-end graphics cards that we discussed last week, those who get the most “bang for the buck” from a multiplicity of processor cores tend to be the hard-core (no pun intended) gamers. If all you do with your computer most of the time is surf the web, organize your photos, post to your blog and work on the occasional Word doc or Excel spreadsheet, a couple of cores will probably serve your purposes.

Next week, we’ll continue the processor discussion. Meanwhile, tell us what you think. How many processors do you need? At what point does more become overkill? Are you confused by the array of processors that are available today? Are you an Intel lover or an AMD fan? Do you find that the processor really matters, or are other factors (such as RAM) more important for the types of tasks you perform?

Related articles

• INTEL Vs AMD (mgitecetech.wordpress.com)
• Intel to introduce first mobile ‘Nehalem’ chip (news.cnet.com)
• Which is best to Buy and what is the difference between Core i3, Corei5 and Core i7 Processors? (lakkireddymadhu.wordpress.com)

Windows 7 tip of the week: Change behavior of taskbar thumbnails

Image via CrunchBase

A nice feature in Windows 7 is the way it displays the thumbnails in “stacks” in the taskbar for open programs. It saves taskbar space (by not having an icon for each open window) and it’s easy to use – you just hover over the icon and see the stack of thumbnails. However, you might prefer to automatically open the last window you were working on, instead of hunting through the whole stack. You can do that with a registry edit. As always, be sure to back up the registry before you begin.

1. 1. Open the registry editor and in the left pane, navigate to the following key:
   HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionExplorerAdvanced
2. 2. In the right pane, right-click in an empty space and select New | DWORD (32-bit) value
3. 3. Name the new value LastActiveClick
4. 4. Double-click the new value and set the value data to 1
5. 5. Click OK
6. 6. Close the registry editor

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• How to: change the login background in Windows 7 in 5 easy steps (newkgaming.wordpress.com)
• Work With Two Documents, Side-by-Side (techpaul.wordpress.com)
• Is Your Microsoft Outlook 2010 window stuck In The Windows 7 Taskbar? (lcitnetworks.wordpress.com)

Image via Wikipedia

Do you know what obstacles are blocking your way to success?

Any obstacle can be overcome. The trouble is, sometimes you don’t know you have an obstacle or sometimes you don’t know just how to lick it. Open Forum offers some tips from career coach Nancy Linnerooth on how to identify and overcome obstacles.

Read full article in OPEN

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What Happened to Fall? It’s went by so quickly!

We have only five or six weeks left of true business time left in the year with Thanksgiving and Christmas right around the corner.  So, what can we do to keep ourselves, and staff, as productive as possible.  The key is to take advantage of these pre-holiday weeks to elevate our focus on year-end tasks such as meeting operational objectives, achieving customer deadlines and refining budgets.  Schedule time to meet as a collective team to recalibrate everyone’s focus on year-end goals, expected outcomes and current performance levels.  Schedule a focused meeting – not a routine, run-around-the-circle staff meeting. Call it by a different name, such as ‘Year-in-Review Discussion Session,’ so that expectations and behavior change for the meeting.

I came across an article in the Small Business Center of Fox Business that offers some good thoughts.  Take a minute or two to read it and comment on any other thoughts and ideas you might have.

Read the full story at Fox Small Business Center.

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If you had less stuff, would you be happier?

Here is an interesting view on this topic from Graham Hill suggesting it may in fact be true.  Take a look and comment with your thoughts.

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Image by cambodia4kidsorg via Flickr

What mistakes are we making with blogging?

Like me, many small businesses have turned to blogging as a way to engage and further connect with customers. Although it takes time, it can go a long way to moving your business to the next level, However, making mistakes in your blog can also kill your business. While reading through several business journals, I came across some thoughtf from Inc. Magazine on some of the biggest things to avoid.

After reading please comment with any additional lessons you may have learned with your blogging experiences.

Read the full article.

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2012′s Top Trends for IT

Read about some of the projected business trends for the coming year from Baseline Magazine.  2011 was a big year for mobility and social networking, with cloud computing also moving into the spotlight.  With more users, more devices, and more automation are driving big data, we are likely to see companies continue to invest in technology to drive bottom-line growth.  Many will choose to invest in technology to improve customer service and support, analyze data for better decision making, and generate more productivity from the employees they still have.  Please comment and let us know your thoughts on what you see as upcoming trends.

Check out the full article at Baseline.com.

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Image by aforgrave via Flickr

The Steve Jobs biography is due out tomorrow. Many excerpts have been leaked over the past few weeks, so here are some of the more interesting tidbits about the man. You may find some of them quite interesting.

What’s in Steve Jobs’ biography.

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