SCOTIA SYSTEMS BLOG

Things are certainly starting to come together for Google in the Telecoms arena for 2010.    The impending release of the Nexus One – Google Phone could be their foot in the door for greater things to come.   By selling the phone direct to customers, they’re gradually becoming another Telco.  Â

“But they still need the networks” (such as T-Mobile) you might think?

That may change in 2010 as Google Exec Bradley Horowitz  confirmed that following the purchase of Gizmo5 – they’re moving into the VoIP market. Â

So now you’ll be able to make VoIP calls on your Nexus One over WiFi.  Let’s face it – anyone with one of these handsets is probably going to have WiFi at home, and in their workplace, so the phone only needs to “hand-over” to the traditional networks whilst travelling.

I can see the VoIP, mobile market taking place of traditional fixed wired phone connections, and once again – google will be the dominant player.

Call me cynical, but I wonder how they’re going to fund the service?  Adverts at the start of each phone call?   Maybe there will there be a free service where you allow Google to index your calls?

Posted in Google | 3 Comments »
Tags: Google, VoIP

Thought I’d do a quick post to help those out who bought the SIMS 3 for Christmas and are having trouble running it.

This comes from helping a friend who bought this for his children and then found that it wouldn’t work!

The symptoms here were that when launching the game – the following error would appear:

Service Initialization Failed – 0×065d0274

Looking around on google, this appears to be a fairly common problem.    In this particular situation – an update to the latest graphics drivers (for an ATI x1300 Pro) fixed the problem.    However it also appears there’s a trend of similar errors for Vista users.  Â

If you’re seeing this error and are using Vista – try right clicking on the SIMS icon, and then select “Run As Administrator”.

Happy Holidays!

Posted in IT Hints and Tips | No Comments »

Have you ever wanted to open multiple PowerPoint or Excel windows, but found that they always open up within the one window?    Yes, you can look at two open files, but they’re always within the same window.

The problem is, Powerpoint and Excel limit one instance of the program to each logged-in user.   Here’s an inspired “bodge” to get around the limitation!

1) Create a new local user account, say “office”

2) Use the built in “runas” account to start the program as this new user:

runas /user:office “c:\program files\microsoft office\office12\powerpoint.exe”

You can do this with multiple usernames to create multiple instances!

Posted in IT Hints and Tips | No Comments »
Tags: Excel, Office, PowerPoint