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Vol. 7, No. 12
3-22-07
1 File names The Finale
2 IQ Test
3 New XBox, No Googlephone, iTV, Vista Business deals
4 Secure deletions
5 Spam and net neutrality
To wrap up the fascinating foray into file names I give you… the wildcard.
Wildcards in computerese are symbols that can represent individual or groups of characters, just as wildcards in poker are cards that can be used as any card the player wishes.
In PC terms wildcard characters are “?” and “*”, with “?” representing a single character and “*” standing in for any number of characters.
These are extremely useful when searching for files of a specific type or on a specific topic, such as all .xls files on a PC or all dated documents with the year in the title. If you’ve ever misplaced a file you’ll realize the value of this procedure immediately.
Let’s say you keep budget spreadsheets for each month and you can’t find the one for February of 2006. If you use a standard file format for these files like (M/Y)budget.xls you could simply click Start and Search and choose All Files and Folders, then search for 0206budget.xls on Local Disk C:, but what if no files are found?
Since you may have munged the file name or saved it in the wrong format you can use wildcards to narrow your search to specific file types or files with specific names of any type. Here are some examples:
*.xls will search for any Excel spreadsheet files.
*budget.xls will search for any Excel files that have characters before the word budget in the file name.
0206*.xls will search for any Excel files beginning with 0106.
Feb*.xls will search for Excel files beginning with feb (you may have slipped up on the file name).
0206budget.* will search for files of that name of any type (you may have goofed and saved it as a Word file)
As you can see, the “*” can mean any individual character or group of characters. The “?” is the idiot cousin of the “*” because it only replaces one character, hence its lack of regular use.
An example of its use would be if you have a collection of Evanescence music, both audio and video. Assuming that all the audio is in the .mp3 format and all video is in the .mpg format, you could search for all of it with:
Evanescence*.mp?
It works, but it’s usually too inflexible for most needs. I just mention it because it’s there.
The last three weeks haven’t been exactly riveting but I hope you’ve all picked up some helpful tips and have a better understanding of how and why things work in Windows.
Next week, back to things that will get me banned in Iran and arrested by the Boston Police ;)
Kevin Mefford, Editor
Terry Wise
Tech News of the Week
Rumors of an upcoming revision
of Xbox 360 hardware have been brewing
since last year, and this week have once again been fanned to an
intense heat:
http://gear.ign.com/articles/774/774855p1.html
Google has poured cold water on claims it is developing a mobile phone:
http://www.smh.com.au/news/mobiles--handhelds/google-quashes-mobile-phone-talk/2007/03/21/1174153139660.html
After many delays, Apple TV finally went on sale Tuesday for $300:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/22/technology/22pogue.html?hp
Microsoft Corp. yesterday unveiled a second promotional deal for
Windows Vista consumer and small business users, allowing them to buy
additional licenses at a 10% discount over suggested list price and
upgrade as many as five more PCs:
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&taxonomyName=windows_and_linux_pcs&articleId=9014018&taxonomyId=64&intsrc=kc_top
Copy us on the good stuff ;-)
Matthew Dattilo
thepcgurus@gmail.com
http://mattstodayinhistory.podshow.com
Download of the Week
As we've explained in the past, it takes
effort to truly delete files from your system. In most cases, files removed
from a hard drive (using the recycle bin, a disk format or even fdisk) actually
remain there until new files overwrite them. Data Eraser claims to let you
erase the content of any file without it being recoverable by a data recovery
expert or, according to its Web site, "even the most hated spy
agencies."
The program doesn't actually delete any
files; instead it makes the file unusable, and "just about impossible to
recover". It's free here:
http://mhtit.hypermart.net/util/dataeraser.html
Art Maley
Email Question of the Week
Q: Hello, Could you guys explain to me how
someone can legally send me
spam at my cost. I pay for my ISP by the minute even if I have an
unlimited amount for the month. I have to pay extra for that service.
It seems to me all of ISPs could get together and put a stop to this.
The spammers and pop ups cost me minutes and money every time I get on
line. Is their any way we can band together and put a stop to this?
Thanks.
A: That argument doesn't really
work. Think of it as the USPS. You
pay a certain amount of your taxes to fund the Postal Service (they
claim to be self sufficient but I'd have to see the books to believe
ANY governmental agency can be self sufficient). The spammers pay for
stamps to send you junk mail. The payment has been made on both the
sending and receiving end so the system works, even though you get
mail you don't want and throw away without reading.
The same can be said of the Internet. You pay for your
connection, which includes unlimited web browsing and email sending.
The spammers pay for their connection which includes unlimited web
browsing and email sending. The spam is paid for at both ends and you
don't pay any more for 100 incoming emails a day than you do for 10.
You do raise an interesting point about Net Neutrality however. Let's say you pay $20 a month for unlimited
access to BellSouth and Google pays metered access fees per gigabyte of data
transferred to Verizon for searches done on their site. That's paid for
at both ends by you and Google when you do a search.
The communications companies arguing against Net Neutrality want
to say that BellSouth users like you do a boatload of searches on
Google, therefore Google should pay a fee to BellSouth as well as to
Verizon, even though Google is already paying Verizon for access to
the network.
That's a little like my Post Office in Carrollton saying that most
of the mail I get comes from Louisville so Louisville should pay the
local office money even though everyone in Louisville sending the mail
has already bought the stamps.
It's inherently unfair, which is why ISPs don't take that approach.
Hope that explains it...
Kevin Mefford
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