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Thursday, 16 July 2009

Meshing about

I've been using one of the litttle publicised services provided by Microsoft for a few months.

If you go to http://www.mesh.com/ you can open a free account that allows you to save 5GB of files online at no cost whatsoever. But it does more than that.

Your account provides you with what Microsoft call a Live Desktop. This is a storage area on one of Microsoft's servers and you can synchronise folders on your PC or laptop with folders on your Live Desktop. But you can do more than that. You can also synchronise the folder with additional computers. Depending on the operating system, you can also keep an identical folder on two computers in different locations.

I first tried this for a work application but then set up my own accounts during the time I was doing a lunchtime session for the Parish Walk site.

Last night I created a website backup folder in an attempt to get my website backups even more secure. Only last week I started a new backup to copy all the files on the web servers back to a backup device at home. Now, through Mesh, these files are replicated back to the Live Desktop. So I should always have two complete backups in addition to the original files on my own PC.

The backup includes the http://www.manxharriers.com/ site run by Paul Jackson. I can't make the walks at St Johns tonight but if my system works then soon after Paul updates his site to cover the 10km walk at St Johns the files should be backed up in my house and somewhere on Microsoft's wall of servers.

Microsoft are not all bad after after all!

I wonder how many people have "pre-ordered" Windows 7. This is a term that lots of retailers use but in plain English you order something or you don't order - you can't pre-order it. What they mean of course is that you are ordering something that is not yet available. But pre-ordering makes no sense.
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2 comments:

Slim said...

There's a crucial difference; you order something that exists, you pre-order something that doesn't yet.

16 July 2009 at 09:26
Murray Lambden said...

I know the context in which it is used but grammatically it makes no sense. My dictionaries use terms such as "before" and "in advance of" for "pre". So "pre-ordering" should mean that you are doing something before ordering.

I will have to concede that clever marketing people have been a new word into the language as one them as even written the following definition of pre-ordering in wikipedia:

"A pre-order is an order placed for an item which has not yet been released. The idea for pre-orders came when people found it hard to get popular items in stores due to their popularity. Companies were then given the idea to allow people to reserve their own personal copy, before the release, which has been a huge success. Pre-orders allow consumers to guarantee prompt delivery on release, manufacturers can gauge how much demand there will be and hence how large initial production runs should be, and sellers can be assured of minimum sales."

My definition would be more like:

"A pre-order is an order placed for an item which the buyer has no opportunity to test and review before purchase and guarantees a huge income to the seller in advance of any proven success of the product. Pre-ordering is only possible for companies with huge marketing budgets."

20 July 2009 at 07:59

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