Category: technology

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e-mail internet microsoft technology

Hotmail Awakens With POP3 and SMTP

It’s only been a quarter into year 2009 when Microsoft had awakened to realities of the simple things on the web. Like e-mail.

As of March 12, 2009, POP3 access is now available to Hotmail users WORLDWIDE.

When you set up Hotmail in the e-mail program on your PC or mobile device, you may be asked for the following information:

POP server: pop3.live.com (Port 995)
POP SSL required? Yes
User name: Your Windows Live ID, for example yourname@hotmail.com
Password: The password you usually use to sign in to Hotmail or Windows Live
SMTP server: smtp.live.com (Port 25)
Authentication required? Yes (this matches your POP username and password)
TLS/SSL required? Yes

As you can see, in about 10 – 15 years Microsoft will add IMAP support. Stay tuned.

On the other hand, if you simply check Google, you will see that:

@aol.com and @aim.com (those poor souls who got themselves an AIM instant messenger) total around 350 million results
@live.com yields about 281 million results
@hotmail.com – 325 million results
which totals around 600 million
@yahoo.com – 1.48 billion resuls (first place so far)
@gmail.com and @googlemail.com in total produce well below 200 million results.

Or in other words, second largest e-mail provider has just realized that people may want to check their e-mails outside of the flashy advertising interface. Personally I have abandoned Hotmail a long time ago because the loading times were awful (compared to any other web mail back then) and all the advertisements were so in-your-face that I barely saw actual messages. Of course, Firefox was in early alpha (if that), there was no AdBlock plugin and Hotmail simply refused to work in any other browser except Internet Explorer. Add to this the fact that my Hotmail ID was even more popular target for spam then one with Yahoo and spam blocking options were largely non-existant… well, let’s just say I have logged into Hotmail today for the first time in three years. The ID was still alive primarily because of a few services that were tied into it, like MSN messenger, Webmaster Tools and MSDN subscriptions.

Of course, you may want to argue (at least those of you who paid attention during Outlook initial startup) that Microsoft had long availed checking Hotmail/Live.com e-mails from Outlook and Outlook Express. Guess what? I only been using Outlook since 2007, I have been using a lot of other e-mail clients before. Even more so now, I use Outlook from home and Thunderbird on the go. And all my work-related messages are copied into Google account (both received AND SENT!). All this have been done using IMAP/SMTP. Which Microsoft, probably, hadn’t researched yet in their version of Civilization game they’re playing. Which is, honestly, surprising, given the advances the company makes with operating systems and developer tools.

Staying tuned for company’s response, there were a lot of requests for IMAP as far as I know…

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business technology

How To Delegate Your Tasks or A Story About Brand New Branded PC

Dell Desktop Studio XPS 435 There’s a brand new thing I just tried. Having around 16 years of IT experience under my belt (out of 14 years of official work experience overall) I just did something I haven’t done in a long long time. I just ordered a brand-name PC. I did bought two or three custom-built PCs before at computer fair, but never ever in my life did I purchase a brand-name desktop before. All my PCs were custom-built, from carefully researched and hand-picked components. But there’s something I have realized recently.

I realized that I don’t care. Or rather – I don’t have time to care that much. Instead of spending countless hours researching why certain memory brand is better then another, which letter in motherboard name means what feature and which revision supports what I am just going to order pretty much same configuration for pretty much same amount of money. If there will be a difference – it will justifiably offset by the work I’ll be able to get done instead of doing a research. In fact, I really believe that I will be able to earn more money in time I saved by not doing a research then I will be able to save by doing a deep and convoluted research.

This all comes as a part of my new (i.e. new to me, not to the sane people of the world) time management strategy – to manage my time with more scrutiny than ever. Down to a 15-minute intervals, if not less. Buying a branded PC instead of spending an estimate of 20 hours doing research should yield those 20 hours to earn money. If I can charge half that time to the median of my regular rates I would probably earn about $300 – 500 on top of covering an overpayment for this branded PC. Being able to delegate the responsibility of building and delivering a PC to my home allows me to concentrate on money-making activities instead of money-saving ones. What’s good about it is that there’s certainly a ceiling on how much money you can save. In the case of a spherical horse in a void space you can save only as much as you make. There is, however, no limit on how much you can make, so making money by default is much more profitable, than saving.

Time management, on the other side, is a bit different creature. You cannot make more time since there’s only 24 hours per day and only 7 days in any given week. Trust me, I checked. You can, however, save a lot of time by delegating second and third-grade activities (“should do” and “nice to do” things) to other people or institutions. Having custom-built hundreds of PCs I didn’t come easy to the idea of purchasing a PC off-the-shelf. Having been a small business owner for just a few years easily justified the rationale behind delegating this activity.

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cellular technology

Customizing Your Smart Phone – Part 3

This is part 3 of the Customizing Your Smart Phone series (part 1, part 2). This time we will look at the most important part of customizing your phone – installing a new software for the radio in your smart phone. If you look at the specs of any phone, you will see a bunch of frequencies that phone is capable of operating on. The most universal is considered a GSM quad-band that consists of four bands of GSM/GPRS/EDGE frequencies: 850, 900, 1800 and 1900MHz. Whenever you hear a 3G moniker, or lesser known in Northern America UMTS/HSDPA/HSUPA bands they usually refer to 800/850/1900/2100 devices operating in UMTS frequency bands (data interchange bands, as opposed to voice interchange). While these numbers mean little to an unprepared mind, it’s important to understand that a connection possibility and quality of the call directly relate to which bands are supported by device and cellular service provider.

What the radio (and it’s software part) does is basically take care of how well your cell phone radio and your GPS behave when doing directly what they supposed to do. Interesting enough, certain versions of radio software behave better in certain markets, so you might want to go through a little testing. Pack an extra phone (don’t forget to charge it too) in case your updated radio version really suck. I spent about an hour per each version of radio and I only tested last three, so you shouldn’t do any worse than that.

If you have a HardSPL installed, then flashing the radio (i.e. installing a new or updated software package for your radio) should present any surprises. There’s a belief, although with little, if any, backing to it, that between radio updates it is a good idea to flash a stock radio (i.e. one that came from either original equipment manufacturer or cell phone company). I can hardly believe it’s true, but you’re welcome to acquire your own experience. Do your homework and follow the instructions to the letter, as missing the steps that might look small or insignificant may result in bricked phone or a failed flash.

There’s not much to the process of flashing of a new radio except for following the instructions. Make note which exact version did you test and what were the results. Pick a few spots where you know for sure the reception was good, decent and bad and test there thoroughly. Number of bars, no matter how heavily promoted by AT&T’s commercials, doesn’t mean anything – make calls longer then 3 minutes, note the call quality during the call. Take note on a battery drain as different versions of radio may consume power differently and the last version does not necesserily means the best. Remember, that you are testing same hardware in the same locations and the only thing different is your phone radio’s software. Pick the one that works best for you and move on.