lojack_laptops : LoJack For Laptops

At least that's my fantasy. In fact, the reality may not be that maybe far off. Well, maybe not a swat team and maybe there wouldn't be a whole nest of bandits involved, but there is a recently renamed software product that promises pretty much that.

Absolute Software's LoJack for Laptops used to be called CompuTrace, and now it's back with a new name and a new identity. It's also in some respects a little scary. More on that in a moment.

Meanwhile, I did spend some time playing with LoJack for Laptops. The folks at Absolute Software delivered a disk to my office and, after a few glitches having to do with my outdated laptop software, I successfully installed it, made the appropriate calls to an 800-number in Vancouver, British Columbia. And lo and behold, they told me just where my laptop was located.

Load it onto your laptop, and it dials into a computer in Vancouver, it logs you on, registers your computer's serial number and who you are along with a password. Then, you (or him or her) sit back and wait for it to be stolen.

If that happens, that's when the "recovery team" kicks into action. Those are the go-to people. If your computer does walk out of your office, hotel room or the trunk of your car, you simply call the 800-number, or go to another computer, and report it stolen. Within seconds, your computer goes on Absolute Software's "most wanted" list.

It works like a charm, as soon as the bandits use your stolen laptop to go online. By the way, all the time your computer's been sitting in your office or den, it has been regularly checking in with its master in Vancouver. If the computer gets into the wrong hands and is reported stolen, Absolute's recovery team will see that status pop up on their screen.

Within seconds, Absolute can use one of three ways to determine where the wayward computer has gone. If it's a dial-up modem, it can tell what phone number the computer is using to get online, and trace the address. If it's broadband, it can track the IP address and then, with cooperation from the Internet Service Provider, locate the street address where the IP is installed. And then there's a third way that even John Livingston, Absolute's chairman and CEO won't tell us about.

"At the beginning, we wondered whether law enforcement would really care about laptops," Livingston confessed. "But they were very supportive. Property theft is a situation where they don't get a lot of success. But this is stolen property with a built-in electronic tip where it's located. They also realized that, in 5 per cent of the cases, the location they go to other criminal activity is taking place."

Last month, for instance, a distress call came from a laptop in McKinney, Texas. The local police stumbled onto a big chop-shop location with drugs and weapons. They also got the stolen computer back.

This is also one tough little piece of software. LoJack for Laptops-Absolute licensed the Lojack name from the car theft recovery company-can survive the entire stripping and reformatting of the hard disk. And, to make it even more invulnerable, most of the big laptop makers-IBM/Lenovo, Dell, Hewlett-Packard and Gateway-have just begun embedding a recovery chip on their system boards, so that even if the thief replaces the hard drive, the computer will still be able to make that SOS call.

Sounds a little like Arnold Schwarzenegger in The Terminator. You can almost hear the computer growling, "I'll be baaaack."

Which is where a few little concerns come in.

Now that's great, if you don't want your last five years' tax returns falling into the hands of a greedy whistle-blower. But, despite Livingstone's assurances, I was a little worried about just how much Tania in Absolute's recovery department was able to see on my hard drive back there in Vancouver.

Finally, there still isn't a version for Apple Macintosh computers, at least not a consumer version, though there is a corporate product. Absolute says one will be forthcoming by year's end.

And, when we tried to install the software on my wife's ancient Dell laptop, it didn't take to Windows98 operating system. There is a version that works on Windows98, but you have to get it straight from the Web site. Type www.lojackforlaptops.com. There'll be someone out there listening!

The second was based around the double keyboard and involved using two or four fingers while still looking at the keys. A double keyboard has twice the amount of keys, with the capitals above and lowercase below. Both claimed to be the fastest way to type. This dispute was finally resolved when a Mr. McGurrin (an advocater of touch-typing) and a Mr. Tubb, had a competition using the two methods.

The challenge took place in Cincinnati in July 1888 and attracted worldwide attention. The winner was Mr. Gurin who beat Mr. Tubb with ease and at the same time introduced the method that would be used by typists in various forms from then on.

Though this argument had been settled it did not stop the competitions. Many typewriter manufacturers saw the potential of selling their products by creating typing challenges and the craze continued. However, one person and one type of machine prevailed. Charles. E. Smith continually won the speed-typing competition on an Underwood machine until the public lost interest and the contests stopped.

It has been argued that Sholes' intention in creating such a keyboard was not to produce a more efficient machine but to slow down the typist deliberately so that the flaws in his typewriter were never seen! Either way the QWERTY keyboard is still with us today. Attempts have been made to alter the design but none has been successful at winning over public opinion. Other designs have included one by Dr. August Dvorak, who attempted to simplify the keyboardand increase speed typing by 35%. However, like others before him, his ideas were not well received. He claimed changing the keyboard format was like proposing to "reverse the Ten Commandments and the Golden Rule, discard every moral principle, and ridicule motherhood"!

Those machines which adopted the accepted design, such as the Underwood,proved successful; those who tried to break with tradition, such as the Hammond typewriter, generally failed.

It was in America that the idea of employing women to type was first formed. In 1881 the Young Women’s Christian Association bought six typewriters and began a typing class for eight women. Within five years 60,000 were working throughout the United States.

As typing classes began to develop, some typewriting manufacturers' including Remington, began to set up their own schools. It was within these schools that the skill of shorthand began to be taught alongside the all-finger touch-typing technique. In some cases companies would train up women and then offer their skills when selling their machines to an office.

The evolution of women in the office has had impact on the development of women's rights in all areas of professional life. Before the advent of the typist most women were working in shops, factories or domestic service. Only if they had received a high level of education could women improve their prospects by pursuing nursing or teaching. With the development of the typist and typing-pools, women could take up a 'respectable’ job which did not demand such high levels of education.

The increasing number of women in the workplace cannot just be explained by the development of the typewriter. What the machine did do was establish a role that allowed further opportunities to grow. However, there was also a drawback to the rise of the typist. Many women began to be sterotyped as only able to carry out this level of work and had to struggle to improve their position.

1. One of the first times a typewriter was mentioned in a fictional book was in the Sherlock Holmes detective story 'A case of Identity' written in 1892. Holmes solved the mystery by identifying the impostor's typewriter.

2. Mark Twain, the American novelist, was the first known author to submit a typed manuscript. He was supposed to have typed his most famous story, 'Tom Sawyer', but it is more likely to have been 'Life on the Mississippi'. Twain’s typewriter was a Remington No.1, invented by Christopher Sholes and Carlos Glidden.

3. During World War One, secret writing machines were developed which wrote unintelligible text. This information could then be deciphered on the same type of machine. Many attempts were made to break the codes written by the secret writing machines.

4. During World War Two, the Japanese thought that they had created the perfect secret writing machines, thinking their codes were unbreakable. However, the Americans did manage to break them, and Japanese war secrets were discovered.

5. The Science Museum's collection includes a Japanese typewriter ca. 1930, which has to accommodate thousands of characters. These characters are called ideograms, which are used instead of letters. One example within the collection includes several trays of ideograms, with each tray containing 2,380 separate ones. Each ideogram is placed within the typewriter and a print is made onto the paper.

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