An unsavory connection from your past. An annoying link to your name that's dragging down your career. A spicy quote you tossed off to a reporter that you wish you could take back.
As time goes by, more of us are being tailed by some little thing out there on the Web, an awful bit that emerges when someone Googles our names, a black mark that we'd like to erase before a colleague or a prospective employer sees it.
A whole industry -- known as online reputation management -- has grown up around helping individual clients and corporate clients suppress negative information online by creating more positive and search-engine-friendly postings.
But what if you don't just want something massaged, manipulated or suppressed? What if you want it gone? Is it possible for an ordinary person to get some damaging tidbit entirely erased from the Web?
Computerworld decided to find out. We gave ourselves a week to try to expunge unwanted online mentions, using three real-life......
Numerous Microsoft employees, including some top executives, urged their company to hold the line on the graphics requirements for the "Vista Capable" marketing campaign, both before and after the decision was made to loosen the rules, according to insider e-mails recently unsealed by a federal judge.
Relaxing the requirements for the program, which was designed to promote currently-available PCs as capable of running Windows Vista when it shipped months later, allowed the entry-level Intel 915 integrated graphics chipset to qualify, a move that pleased Intel but made another major partner, Hewlett-Packard Co. (HP), furious.
In the months leading up to the late-January 2006 decision to drop support for Windows Device Driver Model (WDDM) as a requirement for a Vista Capable PC, Microsoft employees lobbied hard to hold fast even as some computer makers started to complain. WDDM was Vista's revamped driver architecture.
In June 2005, for instance, Dell Inc. essentially......
