Caroline Kennedy

I used FileDen's file-hosting and online-storage service for about a year. So I transferred my files to the new site and changed my links. Then I realized that I could save money by getting my own Website to host files.

However, I forgot to cancel the FileDen service. I can't find a telephone number or e-mail address on FileDen's site. After PayPal notified me that my annual $49.95 subscription had been renewed, I canceled it, but three weeks later I still haven't received a refund. I've sent several messages through their "Contact Us" page and written to the addresses I found within PayPal, but haven't received any response. Joan Fischer, Reinholds, Pennsylvania OYS responds: Fischer filed a claim with PayPal, but the online payment service denied it, stating that "PayPal's Buyer Complaint Policy applies to the shipment of goods but not to disputes about merchandise quality." After we contacted FileDen about Fischer's problem, the company's CEO told us that when customers cancel their subscriptions, FileDen doesn't offer a refund for the remaining time unless the customer complains of a valid service problem (excessive downtime, for example), or the customer requests a refund within 30 days of signing up. Can you help?

However, as a goodwill gesture he refunded Fischer's subscription fee. We recommend keeping track of renewal dates. It's easy to forget about subscriptions that renew automatically. A month before each date, consider whether to continue the subscription or to cancel it. If you don't get a response, be persistent.

If you decide to cancel, you'll have plenty of time to notify the company. You may need to say-politely but firmly-that you'll involve a third party such as the Better Business Bureau if the company doesn't reply in a timely manner, and that you'll dispute the charge if your subscription is renewed despite your request to cancel. A Cooler Master power supply he'd bought online broke after about six weeks, so he returned it. Missing Modular Cables Daniel M. Golding of East Greenwich, Rhode Island, contacted us when he couldn't get some cables back. Cooler Master sent him a refurbished unit, which he says works fine, but the company failed to return most of the modular cables that it had asked him to send in with the dead unit. She wanted to know the names of the reps he had spoken to before, but he didn't have that information.

Golding contacted Cooler Master several times and was told, twice by chat and twice by phone, that his cables would be returned-but they weren't. After we contacted Cooler Master, a representative had the cables shipped to Golding right away. We recommend that you write down the names of any company representatives you speak to, chat with, or get e-mails from. If you need to contact the company again, try to follow up with the same person; if that isn't possible, at least you can identify who gave you the instructions or promises. Also ask if they have a direct line. Do you have a problem with a hardware or software vendor involving customer service, a warranty, a rebate, or the like? We can't address every issue, but we will try to handle those of greatest interest.

E-mail onyourside@pcworld.com.

If Bill Gates is hoping for a quiet retirement he may find it interrupted by technology. Ballmer predicted the technology is just a "few years" away, although development seldom brings about such advances in a short time. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer envisages being able to call out the Microsoft co-founder's name and have an advanced IT system spring into action and track Gates down anywhere on the planet within the next ten years - and he wants to give us the same power too. "In the next few years I know I'll be watching my favorite golfer, Tiger Woods, play in a tournament and I'll see him hit a particularly brilliant shot," Ballmer said at a Tokyo news conference on Thursday. "I'll shout at my television set, 'Hey Bill, did you see Tiger make that putt?' and Microsoft software will wake up in the TV, it will recognize my voice, it will know when I say 'Bill' I mean Bill Gates, it'll find him wherever he is, it will see whether he's willing to be interrupted for the call." "He'll say 'Of course, for Steve I'm always able to be interrupted'," said Ballmer. "'Hey Bill, did you see Tiger make that putt?' Maybe Bill will say, 'Yes Steve, but what golf ball is he using?' I'll literally take my finger and I'll point at the golf ball, a search will go on across the Internet to figure out what ball it is, and I'll say 'Hey Bill, that's the new Nike ball, shall I order some for you too?'" Interacting with contacts via a television set ties in to Microsoft's recently announced "Three screens, one cloud" vision that sees customers using PCs, TVs and cellular phones to access data and applications stored on servers, both real and virtual, residing on the Internet or "the cloud" as it is becoming known.

While many of the necessary building blocks in voice recognition, user interface and artificial intelligence already exist, tying them together and getting them to work reliably could be a significant task. "The next five or ten years will be amazing," he said. "Ten years from now when we sit together we'll look back and we'll say, 'Wasn't technology primitive in 2009? Computers didn't recognize our speech, our voice, our intention. We've gotten rid of paper as a means of note taking and communication.'" Earlier in the week Microsoft announced plans to launch a project to forge closer ties with Japanese universities. We didn't have instantaneous access to the world's information. Its Microsoft Research unit will start a number of initiatives intended to put Microsoft money to work on projects being studied in Japan, bring Japanese scientists into its own research labs and promote information exchange within the research community. "The world has so much to invent in this industry and I'm very excited about what Microsoft is doing to drive that innovation," he said.

A lot of open source advocates like to rage against the machine at Microsoft, but when a former Microsoft Research employee says that Windows 7 won't stop Linux from market domination, that's an opinion to note. But he goes further. Keith Curtis, author of the book After the Software Wars, says just that. He thinks Microsoft and its customers would be better off if the company ditched Windows and instead built its own version of the Linux operating system.

It was an interesting conversation with someone who has crossed over worlds, from Microsoft employee to free software advocate. Microsoft to 'open source' its Outlook PST filesFive fantastic open source tools for Windows admins These topics came up Tuesday during my interview with Curtis for Network World's Panorama Podcast series. But it raised as many questions in my mind as it answered. His answer was surprising: Microsoft Linux. For instance (at 13:10 in the interview), I asked Curtis how he thinks Microsoft can meet its obligations to employees, shareholders and customers while also morphing itself from a proprietary software maker to an open source company.

He noted that Ubunto was started with about $10 million - an amount that Microsoft could lose unnoticed in the cushions of a couch. I sent an e-mail to Steve Ballmer about this and he said he wasn't interested," he quips, but is only partially joking. "Microsoft could very easily dominate the Linux market if they wanted to. Listen:   "I think we could all be running Microsoft Linux. I don't think they should release all their source code ... nobody would use it." Given the likelihood of Microsoft Linux (zippo), I asked him if he thought the IT industry, with its giant Microsoft ecosystem, would somehow be better off if Microsoft vanished rather than having the folks in Redmond figure out how to become more open. "There is an ecosystem around Microsoft but if you look at the ISV ecosystem, that's mostly disappeared. But that's almost gone. When I joined Microsoft in '93, there would be boxes of software that people would install.

Microsoft's partners are service providers and hardware vendors. ... whether Microsoft should whither away is a difficult question. From the day I started using Linux, I no longer used one line of Microsoft code - it's been four years now." I am not a programmer, but as a user and a journalist who has spent over 20 years covering the IT industry, I can see how the open source model, where source code is visible to all, makes a lot of sense. I just look at their code bases and the world doesn't need any of their code bases. Along with that, the various open source licenses that allow anyone to change code, as long as they keep the code visible, also make sense. If someone wants to give it away, that's up to the individual. But I also worry about this idea that "open" software must also somehow be "free" software.

Shareware and freeware have been around as long as the personal computer itself. Curtis doesn't see it that way. However, I can't reconcile requiring programmers to donate their work, leaving them to figure out how to earn a living with some kind of subscription or services model. He says the programming can become similar to lawyer-ing (listen to him at the 3:25 mark). Lawyers get paid a pretty penny by clients that need their expertise, but they don't own the documents they produce - those go into the public record as part of court cases. "As long as software has bugs, as long as computers stink, there will be a market for computer programmers," he says. It was a lot to chew on. We also discussed what it will take to get Linux to become a popular choice for mainstream consumers who today buy Windows or Macs and why driverless cars are made possible by free software.

What do you think? Follow Julie Bort on Twitter and follow all the Microsoft Subnet bloggers on Twitter. Could Redmond own the open source world if it released Microsoft Linux?

Ncomputing is launching a device that can be used to add a virtual client to a host PC via a USB connection. Multiple U170 boxes can add extra users to a host machine, which can be cheaper than buying separate machines, said Carsten Puls, vice president of strategic marketing at Ncomputing. The U170 can run full multimedia applications when it is connected to a host machine's USB port. The device has a video port, audio port and two USB ports for the keyboard and mouse. "The only thing you have to connect back to the PC is a single USB connection," Puls said.

Users must still buy a monitor and peripherals to complete a workstation. The device is priced at US$99 and will be available by the end of the year, Puls said. Beyond reducing the need for a PC, the device also helps reduce energy costs, Puls said. Virtual desktop software from Ncomputing called Vspace on host machines sets up individual desktops as new U170 boxes are connected. It draws about 2 watts of power, Puls said, far less than a full clients PC. In this case, the USB cable takes the place of the Ethernet cable for a client to communicate with a host machine.

One host PC can support up to four boxes. The typical USB cable extends up to five feet, but USB extenders can lengthen that. Vspace is compatible with multiple versions of Windows, including Microsoft's upcoming Windows 7 OS. The company is targeting small-and-medium businesses with the device. The company has set up configurations where the device connects to PCs from up to 50 feet. The company has other products that let users access host PCs over Ethernet.

USB has advantages as the ports are included on most PCs, but over longer distances it may be better to use Ethernet, Puls said.

Click here to watch this week's World Tech Update. Intel will pay its rival US$1.25 billion and has agreed to a set of business practice provisions. Topping this week's World Tech Update is the news that Advanced Micro Devices and Intel have settled all antitrust litigation and patent disputes. In return AMD has agreed to drop all regulatory complaints worldwide and all pending legal disputes.

CEA economomist Shawn DuBravac said, "We believe the recession has ended and that it ended in July ... but that certainly doesn't mean that we're out of the woods." He said that the consumer electronics industry will have its "ups and downs" but that consumers will gravitate toward technology with their purchases. The Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) held its annual CES preview in New York. Some Australian iPhone users with jailbroken phones got a surprise when they discovered their wallpaper was changed to a photograph of '80s singer Rick Astley. A new phone from Fujitsu can split in two so that the top half contains a 3.4-inch touch-screen display and all the electronics needed for the handset, including the radio module and antenna. The Ikee worm infected some users by exploiting a Unix utility called SSH running on some phones.

The bottom half has a QWERTY keyboard and a slide-out numeric keypad. Intel started selling a new e-reader on Tuesday that can snap pictures of books and newspapers and then read them back to people who have a hard time reading the printed page. In our news in brief this week we take a quick look at HP's planned acquisition of networking vendor 3Com, the European Commission's formal statement of objections over Oracle's planned acquisition of Sun Microsystems and a recall notice from Nokia concerning faulty mobile-phone chargers. Our last story is about the AIDA robot under development at MIT that will act as a companion to help drivers save gas and find more efficient routes. World Tech Update is a recap of the week's technology news. Click here to watch this week's show.

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