The Distribute IT Fiasco: Risk Management Done Wrong

“It is not the strongest species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the ones most responsive to change” – Charles Darwin.

In today’s business world, where organizations face ever-escalating customer demands and expectations and little room for downtime, logic dictates that businesses today are seriously revamping their business continuity and risk management plans, or developing one if they did not have any.

This is even more pertinent given what we have witnessed in recent months in the areas of data breaches, hack attempts and the underground “war” being waged in cyberspace that has put most of the world’s powerful organizations on the defensive.

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How To Fix “No Printer Installed” Error in QuickBooks

Occasionally, one runs across some application problems that “just happens for no reason”. Such was the experience with the “No printer installed” error you may get in QuickBooks.

This error comes up when you try to print a form in QuickBooks, or try to access the File | Printer Setup menu. In some cases, installed printers will not show up in the Printer Setup drop-down box even though there are printers installed on the computer.

The culprit is usually a corrupt QBPrint file and the fix is very easy, in this case at least.

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How to Fix Windows 7 update error code 8007000D

Recently, I have been having all kinds of problems with Windows update, especially after the release of Windows 7 SP1. One of the frustrating things about Windows errors is the silly “Get help with this error” message that tells you absolutely nothing about how to fix the errors. Rants aside, here’s how to fix one of those cryptic errors, specifically error code 8007000D also represented by its hex variant 0x8007000D.

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The iCloud and Another Cry of The Death of Windows

Apple has thrown its hat into the cloud “gold rush” ring and all of a sudden, we have started hearing the old but boring cries of the death of Windows. A lot of noise is being made about Steve Jobs’ statement that “We’re going to demote the PC and the Mac to just be a device – just like an iPad, an iPhone or an iPod Touch. We’re going to move the hub of your digital life to the cloud”

Linux tried it, it did not work, Google has taken its shot, Apple has been at it for decades with no luck. And it actually abandoned that fight. It is 2011 and the world still runs on Microsoft Windows with a dose of UNIX/Linux helpings. The problem here is that people seem too fixated on the result of user access rather than the origin of such access. Yes, we have the cloud, yes, almost everyone has an isomething, but at the end of the day, many of us will still plug our ithingy into our computers to sync or do whatever, and we will still access that “cloud” with a “PC”. And the last time I checked, the “PC” was still overwhelmingly running Windows.

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Open Source Options for Small Organizations

The tough economy is taking its toll on small businesses and organizations and many are still using old hardware and operating systems simply because they cannot keep up with the high cost of licensing, or the perpetual upgrade fees.

Believe it or not, some organizations are still using Windows NT 4 Servers and Windows 98 desktops. A few are still on Exchange Server 5.5 and a lot of print shops are tied to the Novell Netware and Solaris systems their vendors installed decades ago.

For the cash-strapped small organization, there are a few options provided by the open source community that they may not be aware of. What makes these options even better is that unlike the scary days of command-line only access for system management, most of these systems can be managed via a web browser.

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The RSA Breach: Time for Full Disclosure?

As more companies with national security interests come forward with admission of breaches related to the hacking of RSA’s SecurID technology, one wonders if it is time for RSA to break its stubborn refusal to tell the public what exactly was stolen or when the breach actually occurred. At this stage, it is not just enough to tell the public that it had been hit by a phishing email exploiting a zero-day vulnerability in Adobe Reader.

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