technilife

A serious low-cost machine suggestion

2012-01-22T21:46:00.001Z

After yet another computer blow up, I fingered dust as being an important factor in its death. I needed to switch to a passive system and I asked the YouTube community for help.

Damarious25 came up with the following combinations, which are serious value for money...

UK (amazon)
MB - Intel D525MW dual core with passive cooling
GPU - Nvidia Geforce FX 6200, PCI, DVI
RAM - Kingston ValueRAM 2 GB SODIMM DDR3 (x2)

US (newegg)
MB - JetWay Intel Atom D525 dual core with passive cooling
GPU - SPARKLE GeForce 8400 GS, PCI, DVI
RAM - Crucial 2GB 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM (x2)

Team these up with a decent Micro ATX case and you've got a reasonable machine for not much money.

Damorious25's suggestions have another advantage over the Sedatech that I ordered, namely that the Radion card in the Sedatech, shares main memory with the main system RAM; so the suggestions above are probably going to give better performance than the machine that I ordered.

Of course, none of these come with a hard drive, so you're still going to have to think about that. They also don't come with CD/DVD drives either, but if you are one of the increasing number that don't have a real use for a CD/DVD beyond initial installation, then you can always keep a portable unit around for when you do need one.

When you weigh up the total cost of these machines, they're much more cost effective than some full sized desktops, for the average person, let alone laptops.

UK political stupidity knows no bounds

2011-10-28T11:06:00.001+01:00

This stupid trial will cost a fortune

They tried it decades ago - it failed - but it seems that they'll keep on pushing until they get their way. Bastards.

They obviously don't realise what this will cost in re-working IT systems worldwide, to cope with this "trial" - the expense will be horriffic and at a time of austerity, it is thick headed and daft beyond belief - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-15490249

Some IT News

2011-10-26T12:25:00.000+01:00

It is finally starting to hit home about teh cross roads of technology, human rights, internet freedoms and government control.

Two reports on speaches from the SVHRC...

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/10/26/michael_posner_at_svhrc/

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/10/25/bob_boorstin_at_svhrc/

...and one on Apple's latest patent ...

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/10/25/apple_unlock_patent/

Crystal Ball Gazing

2011-10-21T12:59:00.000+01:00

I've been watching things on the side lines lately and I thought I'd do some crystal ball gazing.

Firstly, I forecast that Apple will likely have their five year share rise, reversed in roughly the same period.

Google will also likely face a strong competitor to Android within five years; the community will get fed up with the "closed" way that Google interpret, "open" and things will move off in another direction.

Skype will likely stop supporting Linux now that Microsoft have their hands on it.

Adobe will probably be gone in five years.

If Microsoft manage to really tie motherboard bios chips to specific "trusted" versions of windows, then the world will likely rally against them and that could prove to be a major hit in the bank ballance.

Intel will see their market share reduced to much smaller margins as the ARM chips work their way through the laptop market and in to desktops and entry level corporate servers. The power/performance/cost is just too attractive. Even MS have ported Windows 8 to ARM.

Oracle will likely loose out big style as customers of the Sun systems move to RHEL.

So, we'll look back on this in five years time and see if any of my predictions come to pass. Set your alarm now!

Todays news that caught my eye

2011-09-07T10:45:00.001+01:00

Among todays Register news is a report on a workplace guide to social networking which I'll read ...um ... at home, obviously :-)

It looks like Yahoo is set for a shake up so what that space. Do you, YahooOOOOoooooo......?

E-cars aren't going to be generally affordable for another two decades and on the subject of renewable energies there is grief after a report cited that the cost was unfair to the most poor in society; at a time when energy prices are causing record numbers (in recent decades) to slip in to fuel poverty. Is the government having second thoughts?

On the face of it, then the government is set to replace the already created inter-government GCSX network with ... another network. I'm going to have to read this in more detail.

Apple, China, environmentalist and sales.

2011-09-02T09:56:00.002+01:00

I don't know what's more shocking, that China HAS environmentalist, or that they're not rotting in some comunist jail - http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/09/01/apple_environment_report/

A big question is whether Apple will really shift this many iPads in short order - http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/09/01/20_million_ipads/ - I'm usually willing to hedge a bet or two on how sales of various tech will go, but in among all the talk of a poor economy against strong sales of Apple, against all the rest of the variables at work here; I couldn't honestly predict whether Apple will shift all these, or whether Apple love has had a byte taken out of it. (Yeh, poor joke there, but I honestly haven't got a clue what is likely to happen. I only know that I won't be forking out for one of these things.)

Some news snippets...

2011-08-31T12:53:00.000+01:00

Companies start to reject Apple's 30% cut of their revenue stream - http://www.reghardware.com/2011/08/31/apple_ejects_financial_times_app_from_itunes/ - perhaps Cupertino's grip isn't as tight as they thought.

In other news, China is planning on severely messing with the worlds supply of rare materials - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-14455224 - but they have managed to trigger a hunt for alternatives; perhaps shooting themselves in the long term financial foot.

How to lose a customer in one easy chat session.

2011-08-06T19:43:00.002+01:00

Believe it or not, this is the "live chat" session I just had with O2. Way to go O2! Absolutely fucking superb show on how to handle a potential customer ... NOT!

Remember that I was already irate at having to deal with an automated selection system that absolutely refused to put me through to a human being.

Welcome to O2. A Guru will be with you soon.

You're through to Guru Ricky.

Ricky: Hi I'm Ricky. How can I help?

Michelle: Hi! I've been trying an O2 PAYG SIM to check coverage. I'm currently an Orange customer.

Michelle: I wanted to try and speak with someone about the options of coming over to O2 on a contract, but just trying to get a human being on the phone is a nightmare.

Ricky: I'm sorry about that. I'll check this for you.

Ricky: I'll connect you to our sales team and they'll help you with it. Please be online.

I’m just going to transfer you to O2 Shop.

You are now chatting with Lynn at O2 Shop.

I’m just going to transfer you to O2 Service.

You are now chatting with Anita at O2 Service.

Anita: Hi I'm Anita. How can I help?

Michelle: Hi, can you see the previous chat?

Anita: Do you want a new SIM card for Pay & Go?

Michelle: *slaps forehead* Sigh. Hang on.

Michelle: Ricky: Hi I'm Ricky. How can I help? Michelle: Hi! I've been trying an O2 PAYG SIM to check coverage. I'm currently an Orange customer. Michelle: I wanted to try and speak with someone about the options of coming over to O2 on a contract, but just trying to get a human being on the phone is a nightmare. Ricky: I'm sorry about that. I'll check this for you. Ricky: I'll connect you to our sales team and they'll help you with it. Please be online.

Michelle: As if not being able to talk with someone was bad enough, being batted around like this in chat is worse. I'm starting to become disenchanted with O2 already.

Anita: I'm sorry for that, but can you please tell me whether you want a Pay and Go SIM card or a Pay Monthly contract?

Michelle: "I wanted to try and speak with someone about the options of coming over to O2 on a contract," - didn't you read this?

Anita: If you want a new contract please contact our sales team as I'm from a customer service I don't deal with sales.

Michelle: Ricky put me through to sales, who bounced me straight to you.

Anita: Please contact our sales team on 08702 257 879

Michelle: What cost rate is that number? I do have a PAYG sim, so is there a shortcut number?

We’re putting you through to the right person, won’t be long.

You're through to Andy.

Andy: Hi I'm Andy. How can I help?

Michelle: Hi Andy, I'm Michelle, and I'm getting thoroughly disenchanted with O2 already and I'm not even a customer yet!

Michelle: I take it that you can't see the previous conversations?

Michelle: Hello?

Hold on. You're being put through to Anita.

You're through to Anita.

Michelle: Didn't we just speak?

O2 has ended this chat session.

British Fucking Telecom

2011-08-01T08:56:00.003+01:00

The cheek of it. After all the grief I had yesterday trying to pay my bill, resulting in my credit card getting stopped for a security check before I could eventually get the bill paid, BT THEN had the guts to get an automated android call me up this morning and tell me I hadn't paid! To add insult to injury, there is no option on their automated call crap to say, "If you've paid your bill and want to confirm we've received your payment..." I had to continue dialling 0 until the system gave up and put me through to someone in Bangalore who was just as automated as the frigging computer. Fucking arseholes. Now I'm in a BAD mood.

Frequent infrequent tech round up.

2011-07-28T12:20:00.003+01:00

Here's one of my frequently inrequent news round ups, with comment.

First off Digital Sales are all the rage in Europe but revenue is down. That seems to hit the perpetual argument of the money that record companies are losing to pirates; they're actually losing to lower margins instead. It was time their gravy train ended, IMHO.

"The music industry still looks to faithful older CD purchasers for the bulk of its income." smells to me like the music industry would like to turn back the clock! Oh dear.

An interesting thing for BT is that revenues were down 5% however profit pre-tax was up 20%. That is in stark contrast to Microsoft who reported record revenues and trumpted that fact from the highest mountains; but we don't seem to have their profit figures yet; especially as they are in the habit of spending money to generate revenue in the form of PC subsidies, etc.

Microsoft were downgraded to normal stock status last year in the reports of failure to innovate in the last decade. They (and others) are also now facing licencing problems over their latest hit; the game controller that uses the body rather than the traditional button controller. That is going to be interesting to watch.

A Tory MP is facing investigation for finding out what his constituency staff really thought of him by hiring private investigators! He'll actually get hit with a double whammy as apparently his constituents didn't think much of him. It does beg two questions. Firstly, why did they vote him in. Secondly, why did I include this in a technology round up? Answers on a postcard please, to a private eye near you.

UPDATE - Apparently, Oh no he won't but I think he has suffered enough; although there are calls for the investigators to be investigated.

Birmingham has backtracked on sending IT jobs to India. Hoorah! The lack of detailed comment speaks loads by itself.

Improved functionality and convenience in car secutiry may be more convenient for the thief!

The Police can't find any of the key figures of Anonymous or LulSec so they arrest the spokesman instead. Way to go!

As people start to become more desperate in this economy, criminals are cashing in. If it sounds too goo to be true, then it probably isn't. Be vigilant.

ITV are looking to micropayments for Coronation Street webisodes to try and offset a falling advertising income. Interesting article. For me, the most interesting thing was the information that advertising revenue is falling. This has the power to alter the media dynamic considerably.

More military encryption bites the dust. Encryption has good and bad points to it, but keeping communications secret during military operations is one of the most critical. Cryptography is always a cat and mouse game these days, with the chase getting ever faster. That's part of the problem. Imagine if a bank had to make a change to its systems that would necessitate changing all its customers cards or all its cash point machines. The ever quickening encryption chase has serious implications for public service financial security.

And here is a lesson for those relying on plastic to conduct their daily business. Carry cash.

How about the technology latest in designer pets ... a fluorescent dog that you can turn on and off depending on the food you give it. Personally, I think this is dog poo rather than mutts nuts, but that's just me. I just don't like the degree that they're messing around with nature.

FINALLY - Anonymous listen to the WBM (Wise Beard Man) and get legit about their protests, this time calling for a boycot on PayPal.

The interesting thing about this is that the chatter has highlighted that PayPal has a monopoly market. Trusting other sites directly with your credit card details has always been very risky, but we'll have to wait to see whether the competition comissions can force the likes of e-bay, etc. to actually use an alternative; because if you boycot paypal, then how else are you to pay for your goods?

There is more weight to come on this as Paypal is to cut funding to web sites deemed "illegal" by the music industry. Now, how the heck this is going to work, is debatable. If this extends to credit card companies and then to banks, then other services will simply cash in. The banks will wake up to find that world wide populations have gone back to the bead as a method of currency. Now THAT would really screw up stocks and shares!!!

It looks like Google are aping Apple even more, by pissing off the developer base and not telling any body what they are doing, or why. In Google's case, however, I'd be willing to bet it was because they simply didn't know!

Apparently, the UK was the most challenging retail market during the financial year for gadgets. Personally, I would hope that this represents people waking up to reality and not falling for the advertising junk that comes their way. Well, I can dream.

The Frauds

2011-07-21T07:33:00.002+01:00

Some people wonder why I'm so down on China when it comes to technological stuff. Well, it's because of the fraudsters. I mean, you can't even get a decent SID chip any more.

The quality of these Chinese manufactured parts is so far through the floor that it comes out in ... um ... Britain. It takes a Western company to oversee manufacture and impose quality controls in order for product to come out at a decent standard; and even then it is designed to be thrown away in a year or two.

Most of this low quality crap seems to be coming out of China these days. A fraction of the cost of a decent chip and, that's why; it's a fake. Stuff don't work right. And we waste our money on junk while putting the real deal out of business. Myford actually went to the wall recently. They introduced the "Super 7" lathe in '53 but their competitor was offering stuff at a quarter of the price. No wonder they died ... but here's the stupid thing ... given a choice, people would still prefer to own a Super 7.

Go figure.

The science of bulbs.

2011-07-14T15:15:00.002+01:00

I've had to get myself a desktop magnifying glass on an arm. It came with an Osram E14 SES candle bulb. Being the energy conscious person that I am apparently turning in to, I decided to look in to energy saving alternatives.

I ended up spending £17.99 on an LED replacement, as I didn't need the ability to dim the light.

The maths were straightforward. The lifespan of the standard incandescent came in at 1,000 hours while the LED is rated for 50,000. That means the incandescent would need to cost 30p each in order to match the LED for lifespan.

The incandescent pumps out 640 LA for its 60W whereas the LED pumps out 564 for its 4W consumption. No contest. The extra money for the LED is well worth it, especially as the temperatures for both are advertised at 2,700 kelvin.

I did try some other low energy light bulbs, but I couldn't get a straightforward answer for them. At £3.49 the best I could find was five times as cheap as the LED, but using 11W, it was eating nearly three times the power.

The balance of the more common power saving bulb would then be facing off against the LED on terms of life span and light output. Output of 550 was fractionally lower than the LED, but the lifespan figure wasn't an honest one; it claimed a 10 year life span, but you'd have to use the LED bulb for more then 13 and a half hours, every day, 365 days in the year, for ten years in order to run the 50,000 hours to the extent that it would last the same time as the conventional energy saver.

Conclusion is that the incandescent can't hold a, "candle bulb," to the LED, but although the more conventional energy saving bulb gives the LED a good run for its money, I think that with my usage, the LED still knocks the tradntional energy saver in to a cocked hat.

I'l update you with how well it works, when it reaches me.

Yes, there was a 60W LED candle bulb available for another pound or two extra, but I thought that 564 lumens was more than enough for my needs.

The combattents...
Traditional low energy Bulb
LED bulb
Conventional incandescent
- the figures for the incandescent were taken off the packet. The others were taken off the technical specification listings.

A comment on Dell

2011-07-10T10:00:00.002+01:00

I just posted the following comment on my FaceBook page. I thought I'd share it here on a more open forum...

"If you want to know more about computer manufacture and the behaviour of companies ... and why I self-build my computers ... then not only is this article on Dell worth reading - http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/07/08/dell_optiplex_lawsuit_expanded/ - BUT ALSO read the comments as well. You'll never buy a cheap laptop again! - http://forums.theregister.co.uk/forum/1/2011/07/08/dell_optiplex_lawsuit_expanded/"

Retro v the Flea

2011-07-07T20:10:00.000+01:00

Subheading - "Flea infestation gets treated at the Retro Clinic."

So what is this up coming video going to say about the comparison between RetroClinic and E-Bay BBC Bs?

It will start with the Flea Bay machine. Fifty squids for a beeb that had been stored in a garage. It came with a dead spider thrown in for free along with some real estate in the form of webs attached at various points above and below the motherboard. There was also a chemical research plant in the form of a rust experiment on the UHF port. It was so brown that I could have mistaken it for ... well, something else that is brown and causes you to screw up your face in disgust.

All this necessitated removal of the mother board and a good clean ensuing. As usual, foam clean brought the case up a treat, as it did with the key tops.

Unfortunately, the tops were the only parts of the keyboard that came up trumps. The keys themselves were very sticky and some of them were wobbly on the inside; not delivering the crisp feel that a new keyboard brings, but you couldn't really expect perfect performance after being stored like that.

This was, of course, to be expected and I was pleasantly surprised that after a good bashing (very enjoyable after a hard day at work) all but one of the keys came back to life and a replacement key was easily sourced and fitted; such is the BBC's superb design.

Some of the wobbly keys remained but there was another problem lurking. Timing problems.

Despite passing a Watford Electronics Diags test, there was a hidden problem in the keyboard. This is easily seen by a lagging game of Defender, or a game of Arcadians becoming extremely jerky when the shift button is held down at the same time as guiding the craft.

The problem is somewhere in the chips at the top of the keyboard. I'm determined to find out which ones but, the keyboard has now been in and out of the machine so often that only a replacement will do; and trust me, for £15 a replacement, "tested," keyboard is a worthwhile purchase in this kind of case. A bit of foam clean and a tested board can be as good as new.

Replacement chips plus a handful of replacement keys will start to come close to this total anyway.

The power supply can be exchanged for £15 also. If you've got the courage to get the replacement capacitors then you'll be facing different mountings inside the PSU, so I wish you well with that battle.

There are two 6522 chips, one which handles the timing for the keyboard and audio, while the other controls ports like the User port. One died after about a week (the bright, "Beep Boop," started to morph in to a rather pathetic, drone on switch-on) and eventually it failed to start. The other one failed not long after. £14 for two new chips.

There is one to the right of the processor; I forget the number, but that is such a common one to fail that a replacement was waiting for the Beeb before it landed. I didn't wait for that to cause me any problems. Call it £1.

If you're using RGB then there is another £1 chip that you don't need to worry about, but if you're like me and are not only using composite, but are also using the header to make it colour, then this chip could, on overheat, send you straight back to mono again.

The problem with this chip is that it is soldered to the board so you're going to need to be handy with a soldering iron; and you might as well replace the diode to its left as well.

So all this comes to £100 once the failed parts have been replaced.

Another £25 needs to be added for the MMC system so that you are at least able to mount SSD images on the machine. The MMC system also pages at 1B00 which does give it a few problems when running some disk based games.

In terms of cash difference, that's £35.

But I tell you ... that £35 counts for nothing when I tell you what is in store for you on the RetroClinic beast ... and I'm not kidding. If I were to walk in to RetroClinic's workshop, I wouldn't be surprised to find the cast of, "Pimp My Ride."

A look underneath the motherboard reveals that the tag lines (used to patch the ROM sockets) are heat glued in to place and are neatly soldered and cut to the right length. The icing to this cake was finding a rubber sleeve around the ribbon cable which led to the data centre; to protect it from the solder points. Nice touch.

We'll take the issue 7 board and the Watford disk controller as read; it is expected from R.C. What isn't expected is the degree of work that has gone in to those sockets and it isn't fully appreciated until you stick *ROM in to the prompt.

14 - DFS 2.26
13 - RAM FS 1.0
10 - Basic
09 - EXMON II
06 - Combi ROM
05 - The BASIC Editor 1.32
02 - ADFS Controller 1.14b
01 - ADT 2.00

Those eight ROMS are a damn good foundation for any serious BBC. When you learn that they are delivered by the two chips in sockets 13 and 14, then it becomes even more of a surprise.

Yep, socket 12 is empty allowing for further expansion and socket 15 contains 32K of RAM (mine was a test for a RAM chip that has a built in battery that is rated to last ten years) in to which can be loaded either of R.C.'s ADFS controllers. A switch at the back disables the RAM chip if needed and when the battery in the chip finally packs in, you can change it for another; there isn't any soldering work to be undone. R.C. has made this really easy.

The only down side to this is that a ROM expansion board can't be fitted but, given what comes in here, I can't see many people having a serious complaint against that.

The location of BASIC in slot 10 is interesting as this allows another language ROM to either be installed physically in socket 12 or logically in RAM sockets 11 or 15 (although 15 is best used for the ADFS) and BASIC can thus be over ridden with another language by default without having to mess around changing chips and having the associated damage risk.

It is obvious that a considerable amount of thought and work has gone in to this ROM configuration.

Finally, we come to the DataCentre itself.

The *RAM command puts you in to a RAM drive environment that contains the traditional drives 0 to 3 (plus another little spare bit that I haven't really messed around with) and this is able to interface with the USB port.

The *EXPORT and *IMPORT commands are able to read and write SSD images from any Fat/Fat16/Fat32 device that is attached to the USB port. That means memory cards, memory sticks and even USB hard drives.

There isn't free flowing file data, it is a case of load an image, do what you need and if you want to save it again, then don't forget to export the image again before you switch it off, or you'll lose it.

The RAM drives aren't battery backed up so they die when the power does, but thrown in to the deal was a USB memory stick, so there's no excuse!

A more recent, full 16 bit IDE interface replaces the 8bit interface but like its predecessor is limited by ADFS to two half gig partitions on the CF card. This could be replaced with an IDE device if you wanted, but I can't see the point as there would be no really significant extra storage or performance gain.

It comes with a range of games and other software already installed. Right out of the box you can use this baby.

The ADFS that supports this is another bit of classic engineering. A standard ADFS is loadable (*YADFS) which has page at 1F00 but there is a second, re-engineered ADFS (*XADFS) which has been stripped of a few commands in order to bring page in at 1900. This delivers maximum compatibility with floppy disk game images.

As is traditional, the CF card contains one file which holds the images for, "Winchester," drives 0 and 1.

There was one issue I had with the R.C. machine, in that it suffered the same mono-overheat problem when using the composite. R.C. considers most people to be using the RGB port for display so this isn't on the regular test list.

While I had to do a replacement, I have found R.C. to be extremely approachable and if asked to change this chip with a socket then I dare say that they would most likely accommodate such a request; so if you think you're going to be making use of the composite, then ask them.

Supplied software comes with a CD that has pretty much everything you could need, plenty of stuff that you didn't realise you needed and shed loads of stuff that you'll likely never get around to loading in your life time.

The compilation and organisation of the CD is as well thought through as the ROMs. Overlook the gems on the CD and you will be missing out.

Lastly is the documentation. Freshly printed and well bound documentation covers the concise user guide, the DFS, the ADFS, the DataCentre, the EXMON II system and the ADT commands. A letter also accompanies to get you up and running quickly.

I do keep a standard, traditional user guide handy because I use the index a lot to look things up, but this isn't present in the concise user guide unfortunately.

CONCLUSION

The E-Bay machine being stored in the garage for that length of time, did damage which cost another £50 in repairs. Even though it still costs less than the RetroClinic machine, the amount of work put in to the R.C. machine far, far outweighs this cost difference, as well as the ability of R.C. to accommodate reasonable requests.

Part of the problem is that with an older machine, you never know when anything is going to fail or what it is going to cost you. That's part of the risk you take with a second hand machine that hasn't been stored very well.

But if you're wanting to do serious computing then R.C. is the way to go, because there are parts of it, like the ROMs, which unless you already have the kit and images to produce them, you're not going to be able to easily add this kind of power to a flea bay Beeb.

The BBC Latest

2011-07-07T12:58:00.000+01:00

The comparision between the E-Bat BBC and the RetroClinic BBC is hotting up and the RetroClinic machine is emerging to be by far and away the clear winner.

As the months have gone on, more and more parts in the E-Bay BBC have failed, taking the total price up to £35 short of the RetroClinic machine ... and that's doing a favour to the e-bay machine. I've taken the prices to be tested and exchanged parts rather than fully refurbished and outright purchases.

But there is far more to this story than meets the eye. There are two videos. The first discusses what I went through before. The second video, which I'm still filming, will show the incredible amount of thought and planning that has gone in to the RetroClinic machine.

Honestly, for my money, there is no longer any choice. E-Bay can go to hell; it's RetroClinic all the way for me.

Here's the one video - the other one will take a few weeks to finish...

Film piracy arguments still ignore studio wrong doing.

2011-07-07T11:19:00.014+01:00

This report on the BBC News web site states that the number of illegal film and TV show downloads has increased more than 30% in the last five years.

The top four reasons, according to Dr David Price, are reported as being...

*) "We've seen increases in technology like faster broadband," he said.

*) "The methods of piracy have become easier, with quicker downloads and easier to find content.

*) "We have a generation online now who aren't really bothered about downloading things illegally.

*) "Finally it's an issue of availability - there's a lot of American content which a lot of people are desperate to download that they can't get hold of legitimately."

But is there more to it than this? Well, one thing is that catch up services like iPlayer, are not always working. I know that I've been caught quite frequently by material that simply isn't available. The most recent problem was Channel 4's "Dispatches" program two weeks ago that broadcast a program discussing the seedier side of the conservationist organisations. I wasn't going to be in to watch it so I thought I'd see it on Catch Up, only to find that it wasn't available; presumably because of some form of copyright or licensing issue. It always seems to be the programs that I want to watch, that suffer like this.

Whatever the issue was, the result was that I couldn't see it on catch up. Cue one very frustrated viewer.

Television services are touting these catch up systems and when they don't deliver it can be understandable that people turn to download services to get hold of the TV shows they wanted to view. I mean, how else are they going to watch them when there is no reasonable advance warning that they won't be available?

Even if they broadcast a warning, before the start of the show, that it won't be on iPlayer; you won't be there to see it because you literally aren't there to see the warning! This really is pathetic and companies have a long way to go to sort out this issue.

The rest of the arguments haven't taken a look at the other side of the coin. Namely the public perception of the image of the manufacturers and distributors of the content.

From my side, I have to put up with considerable grief from content manufacturers. They try all sorts to restrict the material and are out of touch with modern living. We are watching things on tablets, mobile phones and lighter, more power conscious equipment. Yet they still sell the media on out of date DVD and Blue-Ray which chew power on our devices and require bulky players. Their, "protection," against hackers stop us from transferring our legally bought content on to other devices.

None of this stuff actually affects the pirates, though. It only seems to be a few days and the protection mechanisms are ripped asunder. It is the paying customer like me, that has to suffer this junk. I pity the parent who buys a Disney DVD and even on Fast Play, the kids are watching adverts for other products and there is no way for the parent to bypass this. Enforced advertising like this is an obscene abuse of position and brings a massive shame on the industry. It is getting the kids to nag the parents in to buying more product. Excuse me if I say of Disney ... BASTARDS!

I mean, I run Linux so I can't use the heavily encrypted, "mobile," versions of the films that come on DVDs. The message from the studios is that if you don't do it their way, then you can't do it. Full stop. From a consumers point of view ... that sucks, and my personal opinion is that they can go burn in hell. ... Slowly ... with barbecue sauce. ... you get the idea.

So long as the content manufacturers remain in the dark ages and abuse their customers in a bid to keep as much money rolling in to their coffers as possible, then it is no wonder that peoples attitudes towards them are the way they are. Region encoding is actually a device to let the studios massage the pricing of their wares in different regions; enforce a few hundred percent mark up in countries where they think they can leach it from people. I'd rather miss the rush and grab the film in the bargain bucket a few months later for less than a fiver. I'm not paying inflated prices (well, not as inflated as the hype tries to make out it is worth)

This state of affairs can only be changed by one party; the content providers. And as has been proven by the music industry; trying to get tough and throwing sue balls around will just waste shed loads of money and alienate people even more.

The problem is, given events over the last few years, the only thing that will knock any form of sense in to the studios heads is a slap round the face with a building demolition ball, well either that or a change in the laws to actually give the legitimate, paying consumer some defence against the studios strong arm techniques. As long as our politicians are accepting weekend breaks on private yachts, however, that isn't going to happen any time soon.

All this boils down to pathetic customer service and the extension of bullying corporate attitude in a world where the corporations think that they can dictate their policies on to the population at large. The days where customer is king are over; until these giants eventually hack off the public so much that it results in a boycot and a bringing down of these services.

That day needs to come very, very soon. The air could do with a good clear out.

A real reason to not buy "Made In China"

2011-07-07T10:09:00.001+01:00

If a company moves its manufacturing plant to China, then it is time to boycot them. A real reason to boycot "Made in China," before they take control of serious chunks of the world economy.

Sony 1 - Other formats 1 - winner takes all?

2011-07-06T12:54:00.002+01:00

It looks like Sony is kicking off another format war by rejecting YouView which could see it enter a format war with TV manufacturers who will support YouView and those who won't.

Expect this to take as many years to come to a head as the Beta/VHS (which it lost badly) or the Blue-Ray/HD-DVD (which it won, but only a luke-warm victory as the world had already moved on to Internet on-demand viewing) battles have, but given that the populace is starting to move to on-demand viewing on things like iPlayer and the like, the scene is set for Sony to lose big style as their refusal to bring YouView to their TVs could very well see them lose masively on sales, as other television technologies plummet in price.

It does beg the question though; if Sony is rejecting YouView then if it wants to stay relevant then it will have to offer an alternative. It would be damn stupid not to.

My latest tech news round up

2011-07-06T12:01:00.002+01:00

If you read The Reg, then stuff like this has probably caught your eye, but a number of things are concerning and, as usual, Apple leads the pack.

Among the most startling events is that Apple is apparently censoring users outbound messages and is seriously alienating loads of people.

Another note of interest to Apple is that even as it launched the iPad2, the sale of tablets slowed while e-readers have started to heat up. Has the world started to fall out of love with Apple?

This article on customer lock in is an interesting read and something that is well worth keeping in mind whenever you are considering switching your services.

In the mean time, Americans are under continuing pressure to see the end of all-you-can-eat Internet and succumb to caps.

Lastly, a more thought out follow through article on the incoming mini-ice age that we're headed for. I didn't know that we used to be able to skate on the Thames!

So what's all this Microsoft and Google thing?

2011-07-01T15:05:00.002+01:00

On forums throughout the IT industry there are Google haters and Microsoft haters. There are also Apple haters, Adobe haters and if you can imagine it then you can probably find someone who hates it.

We'll leave Apple to one side for the minute. I've bashed it enough of late; or rather, it has done a good job of putting itself in the firing line so that now all but the fanbois are willing to follow blindly and thanks to the, "Super Brands," programe we all know how their marketing messes with our brains.

One of the other large battles (because there are many licensing and customer wars raging) is between Google and Microsoft.

Let's face it, neither of them are exactly very nice companies.

Google have trampled all over the free world, slurping up data whether it be information on individuals or works of art or writing in the hope of throttling money out of what would otherwise be free works.

Microsoft have strangled innovation and continually locked its users in to its formats; refusing to properly allow Microsoft Office users to deal with documents from other systems that it deams a competative threat, and still refuses to ship drivers for other file systems like Ext or ZFS.

Their attempted dominance of market places, like making their IE browser such an integral part of Windows that it wrecked free choice for the user. Their shipping of a cut down office "Works" package to lead people in to MS Office and their more recent attempt to ship free anti-virus systems and tie down Windows 7 in an apparent attempt to corner the market in anti-virus which would put the competition out of business.

Google don't have such a base; or at least, they didn't until they came out with Android. Their fight against the proprietary licences for closed code systems like codecs, has been questioned by the community. Are they trying to out-Microsoft, Microsoft and would they turn on the fee tap for future versions of improved codecs? No one knows and, as Google have not been completely open with their dealings as they said they would, their actions in various other arenas has firmly put the flag up the pole which states that they most likely aren't as trustworthy as their, "Do no evil," mantra would seem to suggest.

So in the market place of bashing Microsoft and Google, it seems that there is plenty to be concerned about from each of these corporations. Taking sides isn't actually achieving anything for the common end-user. "Open," still only really lives on within the open source community itself.

So how do we tame these beheomoths before they get a stranglehold on all we say and do?

Well, Microsoft are doing a bang up job of shooting themselves in the foot. Steve Balmer has loudly resisted shareholder call for him to go, after a decade of his leadership has seen innovation stagnate and the companies image suffer on the stock market. The inability of their coders to properly get to grips with security has seen a recent lambasting of Windows at the hands of the indestructable botnet TDL. This probably won't phase corporations, but some home users might get spooked enough to leave Windows.

The corporate landscape is set to have a major change. Cloud services mean that the OS on the desktop is going to become irelevant. With the porting of Linux KDE applications to Windows workspaces and open source software being compiled for the Windows platform (eg. Gimp and Libre Office as well as many more), the technical landscape has changed beyond recognition. The only thing now maintaining Microsoft's dominance is the application vendors insistance on only linking with MS Office and using their libraries. This probably won't change until the customers start banging on the vendors doors demanding progress.

Google used to thrive on advertising revenue. Now, they have diversified in to Java and Android and are overtaking Apple in the mobile phone market. Oddly, they have out Appled Apple as the users I talk with (I'm still on Symbian so I have no particular usability axe to grind myself) prefer the operation of the Android handsets to the iPhone.

Fortunately, Google are being held back by the courts. The restriction on what they can do with our information and the protection of things like orphaned works, are things that all sides are battering them on, costing them money in court fees. It also has the extra benefit in that Google are testing laws, and our ability to defend them, that otherwise stand the chance of going unnoticed in society. People are starting to become more aware of the value of data and as time goes on, I can see things changing. Blocks against cookies and the like are already coming in to force as the legal eagles and politicians play catch up with the information implications of Google's actions.

How do I think this will end?

I think Microsoft are a spent force. As the link between applications and the desktop is broken, their hold on the desktop will go and with it, their monopoly. It is likely that they'll be relegated to the world of entertainment.

Google are likely to have to respect the shackles that will be placed on them in terms of information. Their products will eventually get around the patents that other companies are chasing them with and they will likely be the next kings of the devices; Linux being their most likely nemesis to take over the new, modern version of the dumb terminal.

But that's just where I see things going. What do I know?

Today's news that caught my eye

2011-06-30T12:53:00.000+01:00

At the head of it, there is more news on the indestructable root kit; the one that has drawn Microsoft's official advice to be, wipe your computer and start again. Apparently in three months it has racked up 4.5m PCs. Ouch. I hope Microsoft's update servers can handle the extra re-install traffic!

The long running patent spat between Oracle and Google continues on with neither side willing to back down. After the patent office slashed Oracles claims against Google, they look to be on the losing side of this fight, but the twists keep turning.

Another long running spat between Samsung and Apple could potentially see iPhones being barred from import in to the US. It looks like Samsung has a point and might actually achieve this goal; but Apples counter claims having shifted balance to look and feel won't save them from this, even though it could potentially cost Samsung a wad of cash if Apple win on that field.

If you thought that handing out free food to homeless people was a good thing, apparently Orlando authorities don't seem to think so. This has gone way beyond a permit issue and it could get ugly. Well, it's prety ugly already, but although Orlando may be in the official right, the ethical fall out from their stance might see them ending up with public relations egg on their face.

Sony. Batteries. Recalls. Do you need to say more? But when the US DOJ threatens a full scale investigation, you know that this isn't going to be nice.

Retro Clinic makes sense

2011-06-08T12:39:00.004+01:00

Take a look at this... £160 delivered.

Now think about how I got my hands on my other BBC this year. E-bay auction for £50 delivered. Sound like I got a good deal?

Well, first things first, remove from the Retro Clinic machine, the "Data Centre" and the sideways ram chip. That brings Retro Clinics price down to £90. A difference of £40. Keep that in mind.

Now lets take this the other way. Add the lowest cost solid state upgrade you can get, to the e-bayed PC, namely the MMC system at £25. That's £75 against £150, (I've knocked a tenner off for the sideways ram) a difference of £75, but the difference in functionality and usability is considerable.

So initially it looks like the e-bay unit has still saved a chunk of cash. But is that really so? I mean, look at the extra manuals and materials that come with the Retro Clinic offering. 2gig CF card in the IDE slot for a start. A 2gig USB stick. Plus, the whole thing has been refurbished; no fear of the smoking death when you turn this baby on.

Buying from e-bay has taught me a few lessons that I'm going to pass on to you. A computer that has spent decades in the attic or the garage, has been subject to temperatures that are more extreme than in the household itself. That causes serious problems that could end up costing you a chunk of cash.

The problems have required two timing chips to be changed that were in sockets, two other chips had to be changed, one of which wasn't in a socket so I had to solder the board, and a diode had to be changed which also required soldering. There were a number of dry joints on the circuit board that had to be seen to and the lack of a Utilities disk meant that even once I HAD gone through the routine of getting some floppy drives hooked up, I didn't have access to a format command; an ADT chip had to be bought and that took up another socket.

Talking of sockets, there was corrosion in all the chip sockets, requiring quite a cleaning process. I even found a dead spider under one of the chips. The UHF socket at the back of the machine was also badly coroded.

If you add up the cost of the spares alone, you've added around thirty pounds (including postage) to the price and that is assuming you've already got the soldering iron, anti-static mat and all the rest of the tools needed to carry off this kind of maintenance.

Should you add my time on in doing all this, then the cost of the e-bay machine actually overtakes that of the RetroClinic machine, it can't match the RC machine for functionality, it is well short of manuals and not only that, but on buying an e-bay machine you don't know what issue mother board you're getting, you don't know if one of the timing chips has been harvested (which isn't needed for the machine to power on, but renders the user and printer port useless) you haven't got a clue as to what, if any, DFS chips are in there and you can be sure that at the very least, the power supply will likely need maintenance to replace the classic three out of date capacitors.

If you're after a good value retro BBC for serious use, then I can only say one thing, the real money saver is at Retro Clinic. If you ask him nicely, he might even chuck a tape cable in for you, for free ;-)

My view on the news - The Footballer and the Super Injunction

2011-05-23T08:37:00.001+01:00

So what do I reckon to this footballer super injunction malarkey and the social media? Should it really be allowed to threaten our Internet freedoms? Short answer - no, it shouldn't and tell the footballer geezer to get a life and face the music.

*) For a start, social media is showing the law to be an ass, which is what it is in this case. Unfit for purpose. In the modern world of global communication, it can't cope. The Scottish paper publication being able to go ahead without any regard to the English law courts actually highlights that the real problem here is not the social media, but the jurisdiction of laws themselves. That is what needs to be tackled.

*) It has also highlighted another issue. We seriously risk throwing the baby out with the bath water. At the heart of this, for me at least, is someone in the public eye is trying to play with fire and to protect their career. That's having your cake and eating it. Not fair. That football player has to answer to his peers, the fans that support the club and his own family, for his actions. He has no right to screw around, get discovered and then try and shield the events from the people to whom he has commitments.

The problem is that we are ignoring all the other cases where orders have been maintained by the media, such as adults and children in court cases that can't be named. These things have happened and been respected for what they are. That is, in my eyes, shows that court orders are respected where they deserve to be respected. If court orders are being used for purposes which are dubious, then of course they should be torn to shreds and shown for being asses. In this case, from the little I know, the footballer deserved to have his injunction torn to shreds. Until someone gives me information that proves otherwise, then I'll continue to hold that view.

*) Oddly enough, it is exactly this lack of control which is enabling populations to organize and to free themselves from tyrannical governments all over the world; the trick with the western governments is that this frees the population from their control as well. What is good for the goose is good for the gander and it is right that a government should be afraid of its people, not the other way around. Any form of governmental control over the Internet and our freedom of speech needs to be fought, hard, even if it is speech that we don't personally agree with; otherwise we could find ourselves on a very slippery slope, giving up this new, empowering tool that we have.

*) As for the people tweeting the event on twitter, then how are these people supposed to know that there is an injunction taken out if the injunction is secret in the first place? The whole secret super injunction thing is doomed to failure when it comes to the average person; the real culprit is the one who knew of the injunction and then broke it.

Well, for a start, the legal team do seem to be doing the right thing; ie. tracking down the person who leaked the original information. However, it also wonderfully demonstrates that trying to gag something will only make people want the information more.

And the flip side; stopping someone from spreading lies? How the heck are you supposed to stop that? There is recourse for it, however. Someone that does lie about you can be prosecuted. (If you have the financial resources to sue for slander) Is there going to be a gag on commediens from taking the piss out of public figures next? This whole super injunction thing is on a knife edge to begin with and while barring the reporting of child offenders or victims names or things like that have, for years, being respected and very effective, hiding the identity of some footballer or celebrity who wants to play the field while still protecting their career, was never going to gain any kind of respect at all.

As a society we have moved towards naming and shaming our criminals for the crimes they commit. Isn't adultery supposed to be a social crime, if not a legal one?

The Cost Of Contactless Transactions

2011-05-20T18:45:00.000+01:00

I can't believe how many of these television reports have completely missed the fact that paying for goods through a credit card, a debit card or one of these new contactless payment systems, is COSTING US MONEY.

If we pay for our purchases in cash then the middleman is cut out and the banks won't get their greasy hands on the 2% or whatever is being charged on all of our payments. After all, it is us that are paying for being able to pay like this.

...and it is costing us MONEY.

The Threat Is Real

2011-04-27T11:32:00.002+01:00

Well, it happened. It finally happened.

I tell people that if they don't secure their wireless connections at home, there is a risk that someone could use it to download child pornography and then they'll have the police at their door.

I swear many of them completely disregard this as being total fancy. However, it is the truth. Not only does this report detail just that, but also accounts for people driving around with high sensitivity comms equipment and the hardware to hack wireless networks that have been secured.

It's enough to make you go back to cabled systems - http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/04/26/open_wifi_networks/

In other news, Microsoft have joined the ranks of mobile phone operating systems that record you're whereabouts. This will likely see the new Nokia handsets getting a frosty reception before they've even been launched. More here.

Sony Boycot

2011-04-13T12:27:00.002+01:00

If you've been abhored, as I have, by the actions of Sony then you might want to consider never owning another Sony product again, and signing the petition.

This is actually the latest in a long line of Sony faux pas which include the time they removed the code from their laptop Bios which prevented XP compatability mode in Windows 7, from working; despite the processor being capable.

The time when Sony sold audio CD's which had a protection mechanism that installed itself secretly on customers machines with the aim of preventing them from copying the CD; something that I don't think they were ever properly prosecuted for under various state laws concerning hacking.

What a way to treat your customers.

It's a Jailbreak

2011-03-07T23:29:00.003Z

There is a very large battle going on right now, between corporations and jail breakers. Sony is currently going all legal guns and taking people to court. They've managed to win court permission to identify anyone who looked at a hackers video on how to jail break the Play Station 3. It doesn't matter than the PS3 is old technology; they are fighting for the principle to stop people adapting the products they've bought.

When you buy a car, a house, a book, a cup, anything you like, it is yours to do whatever you wish to it. Ford don't care if you wrap your Mustang around a tree because you're likely to need to spend on another car.

When it comes to electronics manufacturers, though, they try and tighten those screws down tight; because when they control the product, they control the flow of money ... straight in to their pockets.

The flashy games and high performance of the kit draws you in to the product and once you've bought it, you're hooked. You're addicted. To get your fix, you're buying things which feed the company financially. Whether it be branded items, authorised items which generate a licence kick back, your future money flows to them long after you've paid for the initial kit itself.

That is because there is another serious difference at work here. When you buy a car, you're paying the full on cost of owning it. When you buy a console, you're paying a subsidised price because they hope they'll make the money back on the future game sales. That is why consoles are cheap but the price of the games is so high.

It is the same tactic used by printer manufacturers; sell you a cheap printer at a subsidised price and then force the machine to only use cartridges from the original manufacturer; at an inflated price. To do this, they stop the machine from using any ink other than the manufacturers ink.

This is obliterating the rights of the individual in favour of the manufacturers ability to present a false cost model to the customer. ie. make the product appear to be really cheap and affordable. In reality, it isn't.

To put this further in to context, when you buy a personal computer, you are actually free to put whatever operating system and software on there that you like. The manufacture can't dictate to you what you use it for. With a console, that is different; everything you put on there has to be sanctioned by the console manufacturer. In the modern world, that is just daft.

Apple are going further than anyone else has gone before; trying to force news agencies to sell their subscriptions via the itunes store, rather than their own web store. That means the news companies don't get to see or control their customer base and Apple also get 30% of the goods.

This is akin to Microsoft getting Internet Explorer to block any web site that doesn't pay them a percentage of their transactions. If you did some shopping on Amazon, then Amazon would have to pay Microsoft a percentage of their profits; this would automatically mean that anything you bought from Amazon would likely have to go up in price to protect the profit margin. If they refused to do that, then Microsoft would instruct IE to block Amazon. Do you call that fair? I friggin' well don't.

It is when restrictions like this start to come in to play that the white hats restore our freedoms. This is the difference between white hats and black hats. White hats are hackers that work towards the good of society and try and protect our rights from being flattened by the corporations. Black hats are hackers that do damage; turn peoples computers in to robots, etc.

As an example, I have to admit that I never thought I'd own an Apple product, but now I do. The Apple TV2. For less than £100 it is a device which can sit between the TV and the home server; allowing me to watch my films, pictures and music collection, on the TV.

The problem is that with the original TV2, you're very limited. You can't even feed from a non-official iplayer feed any more. You've got to have official Apple equipment, accounts and be subject to the control of the all mighty Apple. Jailbreaking is, for me, the only way to actually make the device of any use to me, as there is no way that I'm going to fork out serious wadges of money for other Apple equipment which will strait-jacket me in to Apples way of doing things. I want to do things my way, not theirs.

Jail breaking is the only way to get around this. Greenpois0n allows non-Apple software to be installed on the kit and once that is there, other systems like XBMC can be loaded. These don't care what they attach to; so you don't need an Apple server to feed content to the TV2 any more, you can run off any Samba share.

And that is what I've done. Got an Apple TV2, jailbroken it and loaded XBMC. It will take the place of the Xbox which is now too badly underpowered to run my video collection any more. It just can't handle the higher resolution of the media.

Jailbreaking the TV2 was a bit of a pain. Firstly, you've got to get a machine with iTunes on it, so that means Windows or Apple. Then plug the TV2 in and let the system detect the device. By holding down the Menu and Pause keys together for seven seconds, the little light on the front of the TV2 blinks fast and that means it is in DFU mode (maintenance mode) and that will trip another driver installation.

The most efficient way is to let the device boot, then hold down the Menu and Down buttons together until the light blinks fast. Then immediately hold down the Menu and Play buttons until the light blinks fast. That should get it in to DFU mode reliably.

Once you've got the Greempois0n software, iTunes has been loaded and the operating system has got the drivers loaded for the Apple TV2 (in both normal and DFU mode) then you're ready to proceed.

Make sure you've got a reasonably short cable for the USB link to the Micro USB port; nothing overly long. Also make sure you have not got anything plugged in to the HDMI port because that also mucks up the jail break.

Just turn the Apple TV2 on, use the Menu+Pause key press to put it in to DFU mode and then run the GreenPois0n software. Remembering that after the jail break is complete, give it another minute, maybe a little more, to ensure that all the operations that the PC has transmitted, has cleared all the buffers and that the TV2 has completed all the pending operations.

Once done, then power the TV2 down, hook it up to the TV as normal, and then GreenPoison should be installed. You are then free to continue as usual to configure and download other software.

Once NitroTV is on there, you can SSH to the box...
ssh root@appletvip

...and change the password (alpine) to something else...
passwd root

...finally changing the local time...
rm /var/db/timezone/localtime

... using ls to view the different options...
ls /usr/share/zoneinfo/

..and eventually find out the right location for you and insert it in to the following command; mine was Europe/London...
ln -s /usr/share/zoneinfo/Europe/London /var/db/timezone/localtime

...and if you want to enable BlueTooth Keyboard support (useful in the beginning, but not much use afterwards...
apt-get install ch.ringwald.keyboard-atv
apt-get install org.tomcool.btstack-ui
killall AppleTV

For more information, check out this thread on the XBMC forum.

There is one thing that I don't seem to be able to change so far. The device seems to take it for granted that it is plugged in to a 16:9 ratio TV. If you decide to use a standard square monitor then you're going to have squashed output.

Media, copyright and consumer rights

2010-12-29T12:02:00.002Z

This was sent to my MP the other week...

I am aware that the copyright laws are being discussed at the moment and I
have some issues, from a consumer stand point, which might be of value to be
fed in to this process. Here is a summary...

*) Physical copyright protection devices not only protect the product, but
they protect the sellers ability to abuse the consumer.

*) Region encoding allows the seller to artificially distort the market at
minimal cost to themselves. No other industry enjoys this protection.

*) Encryption allows the seller to prevent the consumer taking advantage of
laws which allow them to back up the media and carry it among their devices.

In detail...

The companies have taken advantage of their technical abilities to harass the
paying customer. On inserting some DVDs, I am forced to watch five to ten
minutes of advertising and logos. Disney are the worst, followed by Fox. The
remote controls are locked out. This is an abuse of the consumer as children
are deliberately exposed to advertising; as are adults but we are at least
more resistant to this behaviour. Some smaller companies I have corresponded
with have seen sense and have agreed to move their advertising to the,
"extras," sections of their media, but the big guns refuse to respond.

Disney films are not cheap. The best that can be done is to usher children out
of the living room while the advertising plays; that is assuming that adults
are present when the child watches the film. This kind of attack on our
children creates friction between child and parent, especially in households
where money is tight, and is not fair on the consumer.

What is needed, however, is the law to state that future units are not allowed
to prevent the consumer using the controls; this will at least make the large
library of media already present, easier to handle for people who invest in a
future player.

VHS eventually gave way to DVD. These were physical media and investment in a
collection on VHS had to be repeated to buy the same media in DVD in order to
preserve that collection and investment. The physical disc which is the form
of DVD and Blu-Ray is now a dead media. Netbooks, tablets, mobile phones and
other such devices do not have DVD units on board. For some years commercial
units have been available that have the capacity to read USB memory sticks and
SD cards. The move to solid state has meant gains in performance and power
consumption. Through the emergence of these devices, the film companies have
resolutely failed to move from their protected position and the encryption
technologies prevent consumers from protecting their investment and taking the
media to the next generation of devices.

I have bought a considerable number of DVDs. Why should I be expected to pay
more money for the same films, only on a different media? Not that the films will
be available on solid state any time soon, as the film corporations don't have
a technical encryption/DRM solution yet and are unlikely to have one in the
near future. I shouldered the cost to move from VHS to DVD, but not again.
Where are MY rights?

There has been a failed attempt by some companies to include, "mobile,"
versions of their presentations but this is not only limited in the present
time to requiring certain operating systems and devices in order to de-encrypt
them, but because of their static nature, once the operating systems change in
a few short years time, these mobile presentations will very likely not work
at all as their programming will likely not run on future operating systems.

The corporations have enforced the region protection code in order to
manipulate the market place and protect the higher margins they charge for
their product in certain global regions. This has resulted in extra cost to
manufacturers of playing devices as they have had to adjust their players for
various markets. It also prevents media from being bought outside the market
place; eg. some of the titles I want are available in the US (region 1) but I
can't buy them in region 2. This is unfair. The region code for DVD's has been
flouted by some manufacturers who have brought region free units to market,
which has gone some way to helping consumers.

If the media companies wish to protect their market place, then they should do
as all others have done; make their products only usable in those regions.
Limit the audio and subtitle tracks to the market places for which they are
aimed. They should not enjoy preferential treatment at the cost of other
companies and the consumer.

We are entitled to make back up copies of the media that we invest money in,
but as that media is protected we are not allowed to break the copy protection
in order to make a copy. The situation is a legal stalemate. The media itself,
however, is only schedule to last for a few decades; a few years better than
VHS admittedly, but there is no technical ability for the individual to make a
back up without breaking the protection.

It is time that encryption of DVDs and region encoding was dropped and the law
changed so that consumers can move the digital files to any media device that
they own. It is time that the companies were forced to remove advertising from
the main presentation and were denied the ability to lock the consumer out of
control of their own devices.

It is time that the law protected the consumer and left the corporates to
employ the same mechanisms of defence and protection that everyone else in
other market places has had to endure; namely the court of law.

Yours sincerely,

Web Site Stats. Truth or lie?

2010-12-09T17:40:00.002Z

The old saying goes that 45.8246% of statistics are made up on the spot.

Nothing could be more true for licence sales or browser statistics.

I mean, think of it. What do you think would be the most common web browser to hit Firefox's web site? Why, fresh installations of Windows who have to use IE to get Firefox in the first place!

Those who know enough about Linux would have enough knowledge to build their own PC instead of buying a pre-built machine. Even then, with laptops mostly coming pre-installed with Windows and actually in some cases subsidised by Microsoft (as was the case with the NB-200 I bought from Toshiba last year. If I wanted it without Windows, I'd have paid more; but they wouldn't have sold an NB-200 without Windows; too much hassle for them. The customers wishes could go screw.) even though it was immediately trashed and replaced with Ubuntu, it still counted as a Microsoft licence sale.

So who's statistics are correct? Well, some web sites that count unique IP's are also at risk of being skewed. Some web sites that serve Apple users won't even let you in unless you're using an Apple computer. No brainer to work out what their browser statistics will be! Also, thanks to bad coders who can't write proper programs to save their lives, the browsers have to tell the system that they are one thing in order to get code that will work. Yet others mask their identity or deliberately fake it in order to kill tracking.

Take a web site that serves users of an application which is more popular on one platform than another. That'll result in skewed statistics as well.

So why should W3Schools statistics be considered more highly than others? Well, it is at least neutral in terms of subject. Anyone on any platform can want to learn more about the various aspects of web design that are being taught there. It is one of the neutral sites. If you can gather more statistics from sites such as this, then we stand a chance of building a stronger picture.

Also, it is worth while looking around you. 2010 was a remarkable year for me. I have helped a good portion of my friends to move to Linux; done at their request. It was they who came to me and asked to be taught Linux and to have it on their machines. They've just got fed up of Windows. Some didn't like the changes in Windows 7 and resigned themselves to switch to Ubuntu because XP is eventually going to go end of life. Another friend is bringing his laptop with him when he next comes, as he wants to investigate Ubuntu. Where are the statistics recorded for all these conversions? There aren't any. I can guarantee you that they won't be running IE though!

Most UK government bodies are still on Internet Explorer 6 because 7 was a failure, 8 doesn't play well with certain earlier versions of Office and 9 is only on Windows 7. I've heard of some companies that were early adopters of Windows 7 and while some went smoothly I've heard more horror stories (mostly down to compatibility issues) than good ones. So I believe that the majority of UK government are likely to remain on XP for another year or two and, hence, IE 6. It was only a mater of two or three weeks before my own work installation of Windows 7 managed to blue screen.

Another reason for staying on IE 6 is that a good portion of companies web sites are programmed outside standards. They won't work on anything OTHER than IE, thanks to bad programmers. Reversing this will only come with time. If I'm reviewing a system and the web interface fails to work with Firefox at least, then it looses a mark.

So, align yourself to a neutral site and pray that the users haven't been messing with the reported browser strings.

I hate computers

2010-11-29T20:43:00.002Z

To the tune of Frosty The Snowman

I hate computers
They're a pain in the *BLEEP*ing arse
When the thing blue screens
I could just go "Scream!"
And smash it with a vase.

I hate computers
They are just so *BLEEP*ing slow.
It's got 18 cores
Super cooling flows,
But my Word takes years to load.

It must have been malevolence
That caused Bill Gates to crow,
"You'll upgrade every thirteen months
And there's no escape you know!"

I hate computers
But there's no escape for me.
My pocket rings
And the crazy frog sings,
Every time I go to pee.

The moral minority are at it again

2010-11-26T22:55:00.000Z

Following this report on ... you guessed it ... The Register, I ended up sending two e-mails to Ed Vaisey. If you want to join in, his e-mail addy is vaizeye@parliament.uk and I dare say that his secretary will be filtering all these sensible responses out of his in box with such alarming regularity that anything resembling the remotest sign of common sense on the issue, will never reach Vaisey's eyes.

We can but hope...

Dear Mr Vaizey,

I write in the belief that you will be brokering between ISP's and a pressure
group against pornography on the Internet. I read this in an article contained
on The Register -
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/11/26/vaizey_perry_meeting/

I have some information and opinion on the subject and I would be grateful if
they could be fed in to the process.

*) Lack Of Purpose.

The original Obscene Publications Act and various subsequent amendments did
not have a clear purpose beyond protecting the morality of society. As such it
lacked a clear definition of what it wanted to achieve and so it was left to
the Crown prosecution Service to try and add the definition which the
politicians of the time could not create. The application of this act has
failed to be upheld in recent years.

The recent sections of the Justice and Immigration Bill likewise had no
definition of purpose. It also suffered other problems which the then Minister
for Justice, Ms Maria Eagle could not defend. An example of these questions
was what would happen to public displays the like of, "Seduced: Art & Sex from
Antiquity to Now." which occurred at The Barbican in London in 2008 and
displayed works from the likes of Maplethorpe. Even one letter containing that
single question, failed to draw any response whatsoever. There were significant
holes in the bill which were waved through nonetheless, ushering in a very
dark day in British politics where sense, reason and research had been thrown
away for hasty reports (The REA that was put before the house, actually made
comment in one part on the short time span that it was given to investigate
the issues requested of it) and selfish policies that disregarded any argument
and evidence to the contrary.

Throughout all these actions, there is no actual defined aim beyond the age old
cry of, "won't somebody please think of the children." While the protection of
our children is an important subject, to engage in legislative measures which
impinge on other peoples freedoms without examining the other side of the
argument is irresponsible.

There is considerable discussion and consideration to be had on this subject
which should be undertaken and finalised before our society goes to the degree
of penalising the segments of society which are perfectly at home with the
subjects of sex, sensuality and all the areas therein, for the sake of those
who are not only not comfortable with such subjects, but wish to force the
rest of society to capitulate to their personal desires.

Society has its needs, however unsavoury these are. Prostitution is often
cited as the longest trade in history, but people would seek to eradicate it
without a full understanding of the service that it has provided for many,
many years.

*) Technical

Barring material on the Internet is extremely difficult from a variety of
technical and legal standpoints.

Technically, China's Great Firewall is a failure. Despite one of the largest
and most influential government repression systems in existence, their
population is perfectly capable of defeating the firewall because of the
principles under which it operates. Connection with a proxy server will defeat
the protections of IP and Domain Name filtering.

On the technical level, these are the kinds of solutions which the young
technically savvy are most at ease in defeating. They are widely documented
and will offer no defence against children having access to inappropriate
content. Any child who wants to get it, can have it. The parents will simply
continue on in the incorrect belief that their children are protected.

Legally, Deep Packet Inspection is against privacy laws at a European level.
Australia attempted a control method, promising their population that they
would be responsible and properly oversee a fair and just system which would
be free from mission creep. After numerous humiliating episodes which, among
their disasters, saw a Perth Dentist's web site being labelled as
inappropriate and blocked, the government suffered a considerable humiliation.

To either put public money, or to force ISPs to put money (which would simply
be passed on to their customers) in to technological solutions which do not
work, is shameful.

*) Solution

The upbringing and protection of a child is the primary responsibility of the
parents. For society as a whole to suffer for the parents who are too lazy and
irresponsible to allow their children to have unsupervised access to what is
the largest library of information and content on the planet, is not fair.
Especially not when there are alternatives to hand.

There is a technological solution which is used by businesses to protect their
employees from inappropriate material. These filters work at an organisational
level and thus have no impact on other individuals who are outside the
corporate network. These units are regularly updated from a central source so
that changes in Internet content is reflected in the corporate filtering.

In homes today, there is a device called the Broadband Router. It is possible
to build the commercial intelligence in to such a router so that families who
want protection can have it at their home level. Such a solution would thus be
applied to all internal network connections, be they physical or wireless. It
would be always active as long as the Internet connection is active. Also, it
would be technology that is near impossible for a child to defeat. Without the
correct account details, not even a replacement router could be used to bypass
the system.

I put it to you that if this solution is dismissed out of hand by the
campaigners, then this would highlight their desire not in protecting their
children in a manner which would be fair to society, but their unfair and
dictatorial desire in enforcing their beliefs on to society as a whole.

I look forward to your response and if it is possible for me to play a part in
the debate, then I would very much welcome it.

Yours sincerely,

Miss Michelle Knight

Dear Mr Vaizey,

Further to my previous e-mail, I would like to add a few more thoughts.

Firstly, although Deep Packet Inspection is not practical or legal at an ISP level, it is perfectly legal in the home. It is thus another technology that could be added to a home broadband router which deals with only one stream of traffic, instead of at an ISP level which could be overwhelmed and cause a significant bottleneck.

It is one thing to DPI traffic that is running through the system (as is being done with advertising scanning) as no immediate decision has to be taken on it. A DPI system which would have to analyse every single packet and perform an analysis on it (which would likely increase with time) before letting it pass to the destination, holds the potential to bring the Internet to a crawl.

Secondly, regarding the morality of society which the Obscene Publications Act wished to defend against.

As society changes, so does the judgement of what is moral and what is not. A good deal of material is passed by our censors and graded for adult consumption. I can list three titles, "The Pony Channel," "Pony Passion," and, "Undercover." These DVD's were awarded 18 certificates by the BBFC yet deal with the adult theme of pony play. It is the viewers choice to purchase and view these titles, and many more like them, perfectly legally.

From the point of what is legal and what isn't in the world of pornography, deciding what to block and what not to block is an awkward decision which could lead to legal challenges in the European Courts. Indeed, you don't need me to remind you of the impending defeat of deep packet inspection at an ISP level by Europe - https://nodpi.org/ - wilfully filtering legal content within the UK networks at the ISP level will open a very large can of worms.

However, the exact aim of the campaigners should be clarified. What exactly is it that they want protection from? Do they want to stop children accidentally coming across material? Do they want to stop under age children from actively pursuing this material?

It concerns me that from what I have heard of the campaigners so far, there are no actual accounts of how, where, when and why the filtering solutions are not working. It is only by having this evidence that the flaws in the current system can be identified. The campaigners must be made to present this evidence to the process so that their concerns can be quantified, otherwise any technical solution might inconvenience and restrict the freedom of others and still not meet the campaigners concerns.

From what I have read of the campaigners wishes so far, they clearly do not have a technical grounding on the Internet and how it works, otherwise they would not be making some of the demands that are being put forward.

More responsibility needs to be placed on the campaigners to make a solid case and provide proper evidence that what they say is happening, is actually happening. The moral high ground should not be taken for granted; its case needs proper study.

Above all, there needs to be a significant test as to the objectives of the campaigners; whether they have a genuine case and concern for the protection of the children, in which case they deserve a complete and thorough process to be gone through in a documented and considered manner, or else if they have an axe to grind with pornography itself, in which case we are dealing with a modern equivalent to a sit-in in front of newsagents who stock top shelf items, which does significant damage to their case.

The issue can not be approached with the simple aim of putting a gun against the heads of the ISPs. That wouldn't be fair and proper. Restricting the Internet is a serious event which needs to be methodically approached and treated with due respect.

Incidentally, The Register is a technical site and the people who view and comment on it are technical people who are in the IT business. You might want to read some of the comments on the article - http://bit.ly/gRA7It - particularly comment number 9 from Ian Stephenson which reads...

"I have a child.
He is 4 and very bright (I would say that though wouldnt I)
He can navigate his way around both a Linux and a Windows desktop, prefers Firefox to IE, and has his own bookmarks (Cbeebies and Playhouse Disney sites) in his own passworded login.
Who is responsible for his surfing?
His mother and myself. No one else.
He only gets access when at least one of us is in the room with him, and yes the pc is in the living room.
We are the judges of what is suitable for him to view/play not the government and and certainly not the moral minority who yell louder than anyone else.
Wont somebody think of the children??? I damn well do and dont you forget it."

Yours sincerely,

Miss Michelle Knight.

What the hack's going on?

2010-11-26T13:25:00.000Z

Alarmist or otherwise, this report on The Register is perhaps highlighting the fact that, along with the bad cyber-neighbour activity attributed to China and the fact that governments are being loud about setting up cyber security divisions, hacking, viruses, trojans and all the rest of it are a pretty real threat.

I mean, when you look at the shear number of computers, worldwide, that have been turned in to subservient robots without the knowledge of their owners, it does make you balk at how many people could be so stupid as to allow their machines to be treated like that.

The sad reality is that it usually comes down to a lack of proper education. People think that they simply purchase and run some anti-virus system and that's it. They're protected against the worst of the worse, or else that it is someone elses problem.

Unfortunately, it isn't. The human being still remains the weakest link in the chain. The West are starting to wake up to this. Coupled with the change from dumb modems to ISP supplied firewall units, the numbers of infections in the West are slowly dropping.

Sadly, the understanding of the situation among the general public, is not really changing.

The average Joe Public who nips in to a high street shop and drops three hundred quid on a laptop, isn't going to know about the various attack vectors, different payloads and all the other technical mumbo jumbo that comes with talking about viruses. They seem to forget that the anti-virus firms are always a step behind the virus writers and that being careful is the only way to minimise the risk.

Also, various individuals don't actually appreciate the necessity of backups until the worst has already happened and their family photographs have vanished in to the digital ether, never to be seen again. Even after such an event, I know of a good number of people who remain blase about the whole affair. I can recount a few cases where I've stood there and said, "You've just seen the grief it has taken me to get your data back. You've been without the machine for a week and been at serious risk of losing EVERYTHING and you're STILL not going to back up your system? YOU'RE MAD!"

Data has gone the same way as cash money. Numbers in a bank account make it difficult for some people to get to grips with the value of the data they are handling.

People still haplessly plug private USB sticks in to other peoples machines to transfer data and then bring them in to work and stick them in there. Despite the fact that most companies have policies that state an individual can be summarily dismissed for this kind of action, people are still dumb enough to risk it. They really won't get the impact of the policy until they're stood on the front step of the office, with P45 in hand.

Sadly, by the time that happens, a virus has been released in to a company and computer systems have been wrecked. Data is money to a company and anything which puts corporate information at risk is sure to attract the most severe of consequences for the individual that brought in that malicious piece of code ... providing that IT can track them down.

Even if you are careful about whos machines you connect your USB sticks, cameras, mobile phones, etc. to, and you are careful to browse to safe web sites, and you do use a hardware firewall and your wireless hub is password protected, you can still get caught out.

In over twenty years of computing, I've been caught out twice by viruses. Fortunately, the way that I build my computers means that I don't suffer as much and I do keep backups.

As for the people that believe they've won a lottery that they haven't even entered and open the attachment ... well, they're beyond salvation.

Off-line File Sharing

2010-11-06T07:39:00.001Z

I came across this site courtesy of someone tweeting it recently. Aram Bartholl is reported to be behind the idea of the urban data pump. With the size and low cost of USB hard drives it has enabled him to turn this idea in to an incredible reality, leaving USB drives permanently fixed in walls, pavements and the like.

Who needs to share files on-line and get caught when you can share them off-line and not get caught. Or at least that is the theory.

In practice this could open up to all sorts of cyber possibilities. Hooking up to an open USB storage stick could come with all forms of risks. Instead of syphoning off data that you want, you could find there is malevolent programming behind the key that sucks data from your system. You could end up being injected with the computer form of HIV. The possibilities here are endless.

That is perhaps what has made this statement by Bartholl very interesting to me. It is almost as if the criminal freedom of the Internet is becoming translated in to physical and therefore social form. Worth thinking about for a while and seeing where you're thoughts are taken to by this possibility.

Science fiction does have a history in some cases, of becoming science fact. In this case there is the added social aspect. It will be interesting to see where this goes. Sadly, as it is in NYC and not London, I don't stand a chance of experiencing this first hand, but it is interesting to think on.

For all that the Internet could be...

2010-10-17T18:54:00.015+01:00

It seems that the explosion of the Internet has, from my perspective at least, turned in to an implosion. Or possibly it has become merely the modern conduit for our present society rather than giving us a whole new world.

To explain. Before the Internet, if the average person said anything the number of people who heard it was limited. If anything was to be shouted across society it took the press or a celebrity to do it.

In the early days of the Internet there wasn't much content around. It was much easier to find what you wanted because there wasn't that much white noise. As time went on, however, more and more people have hooked up. Twitter has succeeded in that it requires relatively little effort on the broadcasters part and its smaller chunks enable an individual to listen to lots of people at the same time.

Facebook has, in my opinion, transferred the real life social fencing in to the Internet. Now, our voices are only heard by those we have some other connection to, be it in the physical world or a pre-existing contact. Sometimes through games, but there is little time to go through everyone and read their walls ... and we've got to do it because their walls don't come to us unless we step outside our operating environment; unlike Twitter where everything is small enough to all happen on the one page.

Blogs and web sites have also changed. Whereas once my name topped the search engine results with good content and no advertising, others have bought me off the top spot.

Whereas a decade ago I could write web sites which would achieve readerships enough to provoke correspondence, my latest effort for beginner photographers, Shoot Start hasn't seen anyone get off the front page this month.

As more people jump on to the Internet and the amount of information grows, so people have to filter the information that is coming at them and this means increasingly they will follow things that already mean something to them and I am left to wonder as to how much new material will make it through?

Another thing that I'm experimenting with is how far my voice will reach. I have a belief that the only people who can make a difference to how supermarkets behave are the shoppers, and if we boycotted Tesco for a week next year, then maybe they could be persuaded to pass on more of their 1.6 billion pound HALF YEAR profit back to the farmers and suppliers. With milk farmers reported to be giving up at the rate of eight a week, something is very wrong somewhere.

However, I have a suspicion that the closest the ordinary person like me will ever come to going viral on the modern Internet, is if someone digitises and sends me influenza. Time will tell.

The one way street needs to end

2010-09-26T09:10:00.003+01:00

Welcome to my modified Xbox. It was bought brand new with an Xecutor X3 chip installed, slightly before it became illegal to sell them pre-modified in the UK.

Here are some Xbox 360 case modifications and here are some other serious mods as all those cool original Xbox mods (including the Millenium Falcon mod) have dropped off the search pages.

But it brings to question the range of modifications you can do. I mean, you can buy a car and you can modify it. You can change the engine, the suspension, the whole sodding car but so long as it passes safety checks, you're good to go and the manufacturer won't even chase you for having their badge on a vehicle that was no longer representative of what they sold you.

When it comes to electrical equipment, however, they seem to have bought themselves a whole different branch of law that prevents anyone doing anything serious to the machines. This is just plain wrong.

It's wrong for the following reason ... it grants them protection of their systems. Given that their systems are used to deliberately lock people in to having to buy everything from them, it is unfair to the consumer on a massive scale. Xbox 360 which will only accept Microsoft memory expansions; that closes the whole damn competitive market. Not even camera manufacturers can shut out third party lenses and flash units.

Sony had, in the Play Station 3, an option that allowed users to get to Linux. Later on, they issued a software update that revoked it. This puts them in the firing line for removing features that were present when bought and they are being sued for their draconian actions.

It wouldn't be so bad if they didn't then rip off the ideas that the modifiers created. Take this modified console controller. It has a power button under the "X" circle so that I don't have to go to the face of the console; (it wasn't my idea; it was around in modding circles long before I got an xbox) Just like I can turn my TV off by remote, I can do it with my X box as well. Microsoft ripped this idea and installed it in the 360 controller.

Jailbreaking is common place for a reason. The product doesn't deliver the goods. It ties the customer in to only one source of purchases and THAT is against all anti-competitive legislation that is around. I'll support any politician that tells these greedy corporate monsters where to stick their heads ... where the sun doesn't shine ... and stop using their legal might to bankrupt people in to being meek little piggy banks for the big boys.

This is the XBMC, the X Box Media Centre. It is a community grown piece of software that allows me to connect to my server and play my videos on the TV. I love it. It was another community idea that was ripped off by Microsoft for inclusion on the 360.

But what else is going on here? This original Xbox has lasted more than 5 years and because I have unlocked the equipment and wrestled it out of Microsoft's control, I can look after the thing myself. I expect this reliable machine to last me many years yet. I'll likely upgrade the hard disk to an SSD unit which will make it respond much faster for me. If I hadn't modified it, and it went wrong now five years after purchase, I expect that if I went to Microsoft, they'd say it was beyond economic repair and refuse to do anything for me. THAT is the kind of behaviour that needs to be stopped.

The Xbox 360, on the other hand, is reported to have suffered a failure rate of one in 4 units worldwide. One survey reported a 54% failure rate.

We need the law to stop giving these manufacturers the ability to dictate what we can do with the equipment we buy. We need the law to protect us from technical product lock-in, and give us access to an open market. That the manufacturers can get away with what they are doing, is obscene.

As much as the law changes, the modifications and jail breaking won't stop. There is a moral battle here and good evidence to support the modifiers. There is also evidence right here, as I type, of one customer that won't buy a 360, won't buy a Playstation, DS, iPhone, iPad or anything of that ilk, because it restricts my freedom in a way that I can't live with. So the selfish nature of the corporates is denying them one customer, right here, right now.

Come on, legislators; the people need your backing here. We want freedom from anti-competitive practices.

Update - here is a video of one X box Millenium Falcon mod - you can see the DVD rom drive ejecting out of the right hand side, the network and hard disk LED's flashing and the blue LED's giving the overall ambiance.

When the recession eases, will the giants grow again?

2010-09-20T17:45:00.002+01:00

The tills are alive in the world of Open Source reports The Register as the recession bit and took sales of proprietary software down with it. But the question is, what will happen when the recession lifts in a few years. Will the needle swing the other way once more?

In the corporate market, desktop infastrucutre still hasn't seen any mass replacement so while Windows is still in charge of the desktop then that means the back end authorisation structure will also likely remain. Only the steady rise of Apple in the office is likely to upset things, but then Apple plays nicely and very easily with Microsoft's Active Directory.

In the home market, things are changing. As noted previously, the American money moguls have their eye on Microsoft as its failure to inovate over the last ten years has seen it left with only Windows and Office as its main product thrusts, and its products are getting stale. That's ten years of failure. So too are Adobe's offerings. Let's face it; there is only so much you can do with a photo editing system unless you want it to expand in to other functions. There are questions to be asked about whether another PhotoShop relese will actually bring anything to the table which will prove to be compelling enough to part people from their money. If they can't then Adobe will have lost a significant source of financial income.

In Dec 2008 Adobe lost roughly 10% of their staff. The same happened in Dec 2009. Anyone betting on 2010? Microsoft have also resized, dumped some of their good extra products like Money and are down to 80,000-ish staff. They are still big and have a lot of clout, but if they fail to really innovate then the markets will likely not look kindly on their static behaviour and their future will look bleak.

Many people have stuck with XP for a reason. On the weekend I was talking with someone who switched to Windows 7 and hated it. I also introduced someone else to Ubuntu so we'll see how they get on with it, but if they like it then the number of Ubuntu followers among my friends will continue to rise. However, the home users are still failing on a critical point; the high street. Unless people start going in to the shops and asking for Linux machines and being prepared to walk out if they don't get them, then the high street will continue to be Windows, Windows, Windows. There is no reliable way to track the statistics of the people who go out, buy a machine with Windows and then re-load it with something else; as far as the world is concerned it is still a Windows licence sold, regardless of whether anyone is using it.

So it might not actually be the consumer market or the corporate desktop that actually brings down these giants; it could very well be their own lack of innovation.

Windows, Photoshop, Office and all the rest of it in corporate world ... they can not simply remain static. They must continue to make money. It is like the person who sells the everlasting gob stopper. Once everyone has one, who is there left to sell to? The business must wind up and die or else find the next thing and move on.

Microsoft are returning to the days of obsoleting systems, but XP has demonstrated customers power. Enough people did not want to move from XP that Microsoft were forced to continue with support. The customers have finally realised (perhaps with the assistance of a tighter purse) that they have the option to stay where they are and ... more importantly ... they are exercising that power of choice. This will make things very uncomfortable for Microsoft as without their previous strong income stream and a possibly degrated reputation in the financial world, they might not have the resource to innovate with. If they don't get it right now, then this could be a long downhill slope.

They can have faith, however, even Apple managed to bring itself back from the ashes, but let's face it, Steve Balmer is no Steve Jobs. I highly suspect that the board will put him on the street before its fortunes will turn around. Time will tell.

What is the future of internet TV?

2010-09-15T16:41:00.000+01:00

A survey was done recently revealing that there was a low number of people who would hook up their computer to their main TV. One of the reasons for this is probably because the TV is doing the things that people might hook up a computer FOR, anyway.

Take this example with the Sony Bravia coming with iPlayer direct access.

There is one thing worrying me, though. A TV will be with you for many years to come (unless you can afford to throw away a grand on a new telly every few years) while internet services are changing at an ever increasing rate. You Tube is starting to lower its watches as more media gets up to speed with the internet age. Things on the net change at a fairly fast pace and the big question is ... can your TV keep up? Or will you end up using a TV that has an internet connection to services that don't exist or aren't relevant any more?

If it can't be reprogrammed or doesn't have a good degree of flexibility, you might actually witness the wonder of your TV working its way accross the room to your sofa, turning in to an albatros and attaching itself to your neck, faster than any device before it. Well, OK, with the exception of a certain Microsoft smart phone, that is.

Now .. where'd I put that PC with the HDMI interface?

One of the bad things about working in I.T.

2010-09-13T15:55:00.006+01:00

I'd like to recount an incident which represents one of the worst parts of the job, namely being the person responsible for someone losing their job and being escorted from the building. The stunning thing is how quickly it all happens. One minute everything is going great guns and then, within a matter of an hour or two, it is as if there is a roughly human shaped hole at a desk, where a person and all their belongings has been ripped almost from the fabric of time itself.

And a chill in my stomach that, while it would do justice to any Martini, would be responsible for the most bitter taste in my mouth that I've ever experienced. I've even gone home and cried on occasion.

This particular incident was back in the days when I worked in the private sector. When information really did mean serious money. No names, no pack drill, but I was a low level techy contracted to an International company. I was in the UK at the time and a member of staff had turned his corporate laptop in for repair as it was misbehaving.

Depending on what is wrong we've got two main options available to us. We can erase the machine and put a new, "build," on it, or we can start poking around and see if we can find the trouble. On this occasion I decided to poke around. It wasn't long before I had to call him to the machine.

When he came to the IT room, I pointed to the screen. His face went white as a sheet. In his eyes, I could see his whole life in his mind as it turned to tatters. The terror of not being able to pay the mortgage, the wonder at how to meet the bills, all those things that run through your mind when you realise not only your job is gone but your professional reputation is shot to hell. "I thought I'd de-installed that," was all he could manage as he stared at the regsitry entries that declared the previous installation of none other than Strip Poker.

On the one hand, I hate it when people screw up their corporate machines and bring them to me to be fixed. Battling with legitimate issues is hard enough and this, I see as a completely unnecessary waste of my time and is certainly not why I'm in I.T. as a career choice. On the other hand I don't like ruining people's lives. I did him a favour; I wiped his computer and put a fresh build on it. All trace gone. But he was under no illusion that I never wanted to see something like that on his corporate laptop again.

I don't actually know of any organisation I've worked for, where deliberately messing around with a corporate system has not come with some very serious consequences. Even the public sector have seen people leave its hallowed walls for such abuses; not usually given a second chance, either.

Of course, there are some things like child porn, which will result in my picking up the phone and dialing 999, and while working for a different International corporate in mainland Europe I did see some nasty stuff on occasion; but fortunately diplomacy ... on those who are open to listening to reason ... has worked wonders.

On those who don't listen to reason and insist on wasting hour after hour after hour of my time ... well ... I'm sure it wouldn't strain your imagination too much to work out what happened to them.

You know what is galling about all this ... some of them actually have the guts ... the audacity ... the cheek ... to blame me for doing my job ... keeping the company systems working and keeping our data safe.

Why I won't go Apple

2010-09-01T14:42:00.003+01:00

I am not anti-Apple for the heck of it. I have taken a look at the situation before and to help explain my position, I'm going to do so again with current equipment and prices. Note that the Apple prices here are the basic unit prices without any extras added on.

The problem with Apple's closed attitude is that I'd have to replace most of my front facing equipment at the same time, because to get the best out of Apple equipment it doesn't play well with non-Apple gear. The back end like the storage servers could stay; they'd still be accessible. But just take a look at the cost...

(by the way, I found the "circular" country flags really annoying when trying to switch the Apple site to UK region - made it harder to spot the Union Jack)

*) Phone to iPhone - no cost, built in to the contract.

*) Laptop - mobile photography use, my £400 Toshiba does me proud - let's say a Mac Book pro, 2.66Ghz basic model at £1,249.00

*) Desktop - to replace my twin monitor quad core desktop, that cost me less than £500 and I built it myself... we're looking at the 27 inch iMac at £1,649.00

*) Netbook - When going mobile and not doing photography, I get much better battery life and a good keyboard with my NB200 for £300 which runs Ubuntu Netbook Remix so all my desktop apps can come with me providing I can put up with the speed differential. The best that comes down to this sort of size is the iPad, whcih starts at £429 but no keyboard, no flash and a shortage of software. Also, my 160gig hard drive would sail in to the sunset to be replaced with a much smaller flash offering; plus I'd lose the built-in camera and other features.

Hardware cost of 400+500+300 = £1,200 would require a stunning 1249+1649+429= £3,327 to replace my machines with base level Apple kit.

Software cost .... well, to put it bluntly, my software is free. Ubuntu on all systems, utilising the cloud to sync files between them all and purchase music from the Ubuntu One store. (except the Nokia smart phone which is mildly annoying to couple with Linux) Assuming the OS comes for free, I'd be then faced with the following ...
Office - Free, Open Office comes on Mac although I'm told it is fussy to use.
Picture editing - Free, Gimp comes on Mac
Script writing - Free, Celtx comes on Mac
Video conversion - Free, Handbrake comes on Mac
Web Browsing - Free, Firefox comes on mac
Video editing - Cinelerra doesn't come on mac, so let's pick Final Cut Express 4 at £129

So software-wise I could continue on for not much dosh outlay. That just leaves functionality.

Loss of Flash on the iPad and iPhone. I could live with not on the iPhone but not on the iPad.

Loss of ability to load software like Celtx on the iPad would dull the edge of its usefullness. I'd also lose many of the other free tools that I use on an irregular basis; the stuff that just happens to come with Linux. I already kissed goodbye to my games collection when I moved from Windows to Linux, with the exception of Unreal Tournament 2004 which came with a Linux installer and I still enjoy the game even today.

Loss of using other technologies like ZFS; there are open technical solutions out there that just won't work and likely won't be implemented.

Support. That, I'm not sure about. Building my own PC's is useful. If it goes wrong, I can get it fixed reasonably quickly. My colleagues in the office, however, have had run ins with Apple support over the last few years and I wouldn't like to be on the receiving end of their experiences. This includes Apple updates that have wrecked the phones; to be honest, the phones are what get most of the issues; the PC's and laptops seem about as stable as everyone elses.

Long story short, the cash outlay for the hardware, I can't justify. Replacement every three years; that's an expense I couldn't cope with. My equipment now has options that aren't available on Apples and if Apple continues to release these every year with new features, it would drive me insane. I mean, look how many iPhone versions had to come out before they caught up with the rest of the world and put a front facing camera on the iPhone. Everyone has just caught on to the iPad craze and if the rumour is correct, Apple will now release one with a camera on it; something they should have darn well done in the first place.

Then you've got the app store debacle. Censoring things without having to give a reason. OK, I accept that having the ability to remote install and remove applications is a necessary evil, in particular in response to security threats and nasty apps; but when it starts coming down to censoring apps that are of political satire and other such content ... that is a step too far.

So, I'm not getting on the Apple show boat. It can sail without me. The total cost of owning a Mac seems to be down to the extra hardware costs and a few other creases in corporate attitude. Stuff only seems to work at its seamless best when you're all-Apple and I'm just not going there. The other price is that it feels like I'd be giving up a degree of freedom, and perhaps it is this price that I'm not willing to pay.

The UK Digital Economy Bill Consultation

2010-08-01T07:55:00.000+01:00

The UK telecommunications regulator, Ofcom, has just finished a consultation process for the new Digital Economy Act that is now law (but not yet active) in the UK. I only just got my response in on time, so I thought I'd post my views here for others to see.

Dear Sir/Madam,

Firstly, because the cover sheet you request and also your other request for submissions to be in Word format, I'm afraid that you will have to make do with this submission in this form.

As a Linux user I do not have access to Microsoft products. May I suggest that for your next and future consultations, that you provide documents in an open format and that you accept submissions also in open format.

I would be grateful if this letter could be taken in response for the consultation on the digital rights act and associated issues.

I have a number of concerns which dovetail together.

Firstly, asking ISP's to police a transaction which they have no legal authority to properly examine, is destined to failure. Deep Packet Inspection violates privacy issues and is currently against the law. It is therefore concerning that Virgin have already been running their experiment examining customers packets.

This raises questions of not only why Virgin have not been brought to book for deep packet inspection but also that if DPI is allowed, (unlikely given Europe's privacy position) it is easily circumvented by using encryption. To decrypt packets on-the-fly, as would be necessary, is a game of cat and mouse that would never be won as consumer processing power would increase at a similar ratio to that available to ISPs at reasonable cost.

It is not acceptable for any corporation to think that they have the right, or that it is possible for them to be granted the right, to examine peoples personal communication streams.

The cost of this process would also be born by the ISPs customer base and the taxpayer. To engage in such a wasted process would cost the country dear and as far as I can see, would be politically impossible to justify the British public footing an expensive technical bill on a failed process, for what should be civil proceedings brought by the entertainment companies concerned at their own expense.

The level of proof required at present for a customer to be held of a degraded status is not socially acceptable. With the amount of Internet traffic in to a household rising, a simple comparison of an entertainment companies claim against the traffic being consumed by the customer on a particular day, is not socially acceptable as proof to hold a person as being guilty of a crime.

This situation is compounded by the state of wireless security in our current age. It is for a court of law to determine someone a criminal, not an ISP or an entertainment company.

Last year saw the successful attack of WPA-TKIP, seeing weak passwords fall in three minutes when run against a prepared dictionary database. This leaves WPA-AES as the only secure consumer wireless security available. With the "n" series wireless allowing ranges of 70 metres indoors and in excess of 200 metres outdoors, any would be hacker can sit back at a safe distance in a property several houses away from their intended victim.

MAC address black/white lists easily fall to any hacker; simply listen to the traffic and then spoof any client MAC address seen on that channel. Not that MAC address filtering is enabled by default on any consumer wireless router that I know of.

There is the question of routers that come to the customer pre-programmed by the ISP themselves; how dare the ISP then hold the customer responsible for any breach of security on a wireless system that they have not only programmed, but also locked the customer out of.

With some systems and routers being unable to communicate properly at the higher security settings (PS2 and some Belkin equipment among them) the customer has no other way forward than to lower the security settings and leave themselves open to attack.

There is also the question of how is the average consumer supposed to know the difference between WPA, WEP, TKIP, AES and the rest of it. The average consumer won't have a clue, which is what led to the ISP's pre-configuring the units for them in the first place.

Bad practice by manufacturers and ISPs are responsible for gaping holes in consumer wireless security and the consumer is then held responsible for this. It is an unacceptable situation and needs Ofcom to correct this.

Our communications systems are not secure. Even on the subject of mobile phone communications there is the following taken from an article on The Register at this address - http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/07/29/cell_phone_snooping/

Quote

“The whole topic of GSM hacking now enters the script-kiddie stage, similar to Wi-Fi hacking a couple years ago, where people started cracking the neighbor's Wi-Fi,” said Karsten Nohl, a cryptographer with the Security Research Labs in Berlin who helped spearhead the project. “Just as with Wi-Fi, where they changed the encryption to WPA, hopefully that will happen with GSM, too.”

The suite of applications now includes Kraken, software being released at the Black Hat security conference on Thursday that can deduce the secret key encrypting SMS messages and voice conversations in as little as 30 seconds. It was developed by Frank A. Stevenson, the same Norwegian programmer who almost a decade ago developed software that cracked the CSS encryption scheme protecting DVDs.

End Quote

A move to complex certificates should be considered. This need not be overly complex; an SD or Micro SD card slot on the router should enable it to write its certificate to the card at the touch of a button. The client device, mobile phone, PC, console, etc. should then be able to read it in from said memory card. Wireless security could thus be taken in to the world of certificates and actually make the process far simpler for the consumer than it is now.

It is impossible to escape the fact that the entertainment industry has long had an image in the UK of being a legal criminal; the charges for media in the UK being double some other European countries in recent years. It is not socially acceptable for public money and effort to be spent in trying to uphold an out date business model practiced by companies that have been considered to be over charging the UK consumer for many years.

Indeed, the actions of Sony and other corporations that distributed music CD's with root kit software which illegally installed itself without permission on to customers computers, is an indication of the contempt with which these companies hold their legitimate, legal, paying customers; yet I haven't seen these corporations being prosecuted by the UK for these actions.

It is time for this country to stop spending public money and holding its own citizens as criminals on the basis of the entertainment companies say-so; especially after their behaviour in the market place and the poor state of security on consumer equipment.

Treatment of software piracy should be dealt with on the same basis as many other campaigns, public education and awareness as was done with drink driving for example. However, for this to work it would require the entertainment companies to treat their customers with respect and unless these entertainment corporations show willingness to come half way across the bridge, public money should not be spent on their cause.

Microsoft future

2010-07-24T23:27:00.000+01:00

The Register reports that Microsoft made a profit this year but that all the figures prove that the operating system Windows is still the centre pillar of their fortunes.

They have failed to make a go of search, their Xbox division is still losing, they have failed with mobile phones and they've even shrunk their staff numbers and killed off a few software lines such as Money. Embedded systems are also turning to Linux as well for the speed and reliability.

So what does the future hold for Windows? Well, the netbook and tablet offer best performance from the likes of Android and Ubuntu Netbook Remix. With the netbook remix offering full Open Office suites and more with good response on a netbook and Android looking likely to win through on the non-Apple tablet front, Windows will likely not make itself a winner on these key platforms and this will see it hanging on to its traditional segment, the working office and the home PC.

Windows supporters in the office are making much of the financial cost of retraining and porting over in a big bang approach in a bid to detract managers from looking at open source. The move away from Windows, however, will be inevitable.

I believe that as companies want to incorporate tablets and netbooks in to their organisations, IT departments will have to find ways of opening up the data and programs to these systems. The way to do that will likely be web services; internal clouds and Citrix sessions which will run under Ubuntu with ease.

Once that happens, then the door is opened for the death of the Windows desktop and Microsoft will be isolated in the server room.

How long this will take and how long Microsoft will survive in the server room environment, who knows? Tablets haven't taken off in the real world yet. I'm looking forward to evaluating the JooJoo in a few weeks time. My managers are already asking questions about whether it will run Citrix.

With talk that the upcoming star of the tablet world, the Adam, being able to run Ubuntu as well as Android, that is most likely to become the largest threat to the traditional desktop and could see a reduction in traditional PC's and monitors which dominate the desks; but only in certain business areas.

Are there any likely saviours? Well, to thrive tablets will need Wi-Fi and the insecurity of this has been on most peoples minds for a number of years. Also, encryption of portable devices is threatening to throw spanners in the works from Android's perspective. Ubuntu has long had the ability to encrypt the home directory and that is the critical area, but the portable USB drives and the like only come with encryption control software for Windows.

Are there any threats? Well, Microsoft are threatening to upset their own apple cart. In the recession, some licence deals took a double digit percentage jump and that is causing some organisations that I know of, to look more seriously at open source; more seriously than if Microsoft had kept the licence pricing low.

There are also compatibility problems. With software houses tying themselves in to .net and other elements of systems, customers are having to load office suites on servers; in some cases if different software requires different versions of office, then new servers have to be created in order to separate that software. IE has issues with some sites and services; updated IE 8 components break other systems and then force effort in to re-programming software which should otherwise be running for years.

The legacy of bits and pieces are a burden in the here and now for organisations that need more than Office, IE, Outlook and Exchange.

What about home computing? Running from sales statistics is not reliable. Microsoft has the power to buy market segments. When I bought my netbook, Toshiba had canned all their earlier Linux offerings; it was Windows or nothing, and within a few hours of it reaching me, it was installed with Ubuntu. We are thus reliant on information gathered from machines which are in operation, in the field and reporting on the Internet. These reports are the most reliable thing we've got.

It is not only the tech savvy, sandal wearing, beardies that are using Linux. My own personal experience is that friends have come to me being fed up of Windows and once I set them running on Ubuntu, they are liking the change. I reckon that fear of the unknown will keep the majority of people walking in to their high street shop and picking up whatever is on offer, which will likely be Windows. The only people who are likely to switch are those that have got personal tech support.

A big risk is the pre-loaded software on such machines which requires people to shell out more cash. The biggy is MS Works which needs to be replaced with a purchased copy of Office Home in order to do things. As other software increases in versions, upgrades cost more money and previous versions of software no longer work, representing a loss of investment. My own shelves hold collections of games that I can't play any more. I could mess around with emulation systems, but it shouldn't be like that.

Windows was propelled by people being frustrated with the current version and being only too ready to embrace the next one. We had a nice quiet period with XP, but those days are likely to be over if Microsoft gets its way again.

The irony for those who push the cost of switching a business from Microsoft to Linux is that if their managers ever did the maths of what it costs to upgrade their existing Windows systems when new versions of servers or desktops come out, it will cast a different light on things. Not only that, but it will be interesting to compare the supported lifespan of the long editions of Ubuntu against the new upgrade cycle that Microsoft attempts to impose on customers.

Could tablets change the workforce?

2010-07-17T15:26:00.000+01:00

I've received a firmer date for the JooJoo to arrive with me. Hopefully, one will reach me on the 10th of August and I'll have my hands on it for three or four days.

My boss is interested in it as well. If it can run Citrix, I think he'll be very interested in taking another look at it.

You see, there is one thing that I am expecting the tablet to succeed where laptops and netbooks have failed. The interpersonal aspect.

Some people may believe that handling tablets has been built in to our genes since the year dot when we handled tablets of stone, clipboards and the like. Whether you believe the history of it or not, the handling and interpersonal aspects will be strong on my mind when the JooJoo arrives.

Microsoft Windows failed on the tablets I've had my hands on. The key reason was the user interface not only with the OS itself but also with the applications; everything is designed to expect a traditional mouse and keyboard interface and Microsoft had to work the interface around emulating this.

Interfaces like Android and Symbian were designed for the touchscreen phone and stand a better chance of transitioning up to tablets than Windows stands of transitioning downward. Ubuntu's Netbook Remix also stands a good chance of making a good transition.

The iPad seems fine for personal use but I wonder about its use in a business environment.

The Home

Home users want a laptop because a desktop takes up too much room. The problem for these people is that a decent laptop costs two to three times more to do the same as a desktop. They don't have the money and typically settle for a cheap laptop worth three to four hundred quid that doesn't do anything very well.

By settling for a decent tablet, this makes browsing and things much easier. Most of the people I know have their e-mail on web systems anyway such as Facebook, Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo and the like so storage on the local machine isn't usually an issue.

If they get a USB external drive then this solves the issue of storing the family photographs. But this is unlikely to be an issue for long as the price of good quality flash drives keeps dropping.

Also, although there have been attempts recently to provide homes with a good, solid, reliable mass storage system, they are still out of the average budget once the hard disks are costed in as well. However, this could be where a family will be heading; one large fault tolerant storage device and lower cost tablets that feed from it. I mean, the ability to plug a keyboard, mouse, headphones and microphone in to it when required will be all that many people need.

The Office

A good few segments of people will never be able to do without the PC as we know it. I doubt that customer support or the like will ever be better served by a tablet as they would with a PC. However there are segments that work with paperwork as their standard format. Desk space is more valuable if a PC could be gotten rid of, and even better if they could take their PC around the office to do things like stock checking or desk side visits having access to all the necessary support documentation; it does away with having to think about what you might need to take with you.

Meetings could be revolutionised. Why print off reams of paperwork when having all your network files available to you saves you much hassle. The key is to get rid of the barrier than a laptop screen brings to the table. I've been in meetings where people have used laptops and it has been a real barrier to negotiations; these people have seemed aloof and not part of the discussions. A tablet would fare much better not only from the personal perspective but it would be easier to share among people.

The only problem that I can see is that wireless access is the key to pulling off successful use of a tablet; and wireless security has taken a hammering over recent years, with WPA-TKIP falling within minutes. To really make it, the confidence of certificates are going to be needed for wireless.

The right tablet, with the right usability and connectivity, can change the face of sections of information and people interaction.

Technology helping with the finances

2010-07-11T11:39:00.002+01:00

For the last eleven years I've used the free software Gnucash to record my financial dealings. As I've got to re-evaluate my spending patterns, I've spent most of the morning creating categories and putting things right. If I'd actually done it right in the first place, I wouldn't have to put in the extra work, but this is the kind of thing that I'm getting out from a report on just the last year, and also a report on the last ten years.

This is an example of how investing some time in technology has given me the vision to help me to help myself.

In the last ten years, I spent 6% of my income on fuel. The last year has seen that drop to 4.5%. Stands to reason now that I don't have to commute from Nottingham to Sussex. Also during that time I had a company car for a few years so not all the fuel I purchased was for private use. This has come down, but there is scope for more saving there.

Believe it or not, in the last ten years, 8% of my income has been withdrawn via cash point. This last year saw that rise to 10.5%. Not surprising given that people have been helping out on the house and some of that was covered by cash for bits and pieces as they've happened.

The mortgage/rent outlay for the last ten years was 20% which has risen to 24% this last year. As a good five years of this time was spent in a cheaper district in Nottingham, it doesn't surprise me that the mortgage in this area is more expensive than the last ten years worth of average rent. The one bonus is that in the long term rent payments will likely rise more than the mortgage payments will get affected by interest rates.

It was also comforting to find out that I've got more financial ability to cover this should interest rates rise in the short term. Providing nothing serious happens and I don't lose my job, I shouldn't be without a roof over my head; even if my wages don't rise for a few years.

Over the last ten years I've spent 0.7% on Cd's and DVDs. That rose this last year to a staggering 3.2%. A good portion of that was replacing my VHS collection with DVDs, but I've got to cut down on that expenditure.

Books have also risen from 0.2% in the last ten years, to 1%. Some of that is photography books and now that I have a small reading pile, it is time to stop that expense.

Amazingly, I've gone from spending 0.1% of my income on gifts for other people, to 1.1%. Hmmm... time to get smart on the gift front, I think.

My mobile phone costs have dropped dramatically. From 4.4% of my income over the last ten years, to 1.8% now. Switching from Vodafone to Orange is a large part in this. My £50 monthly bill has dropped to below £30.

Computer hardware accounted for 4.3% of my income over the last ten years, but this last year has seen me spend a massive 14.5% of my income on computer hardware. Although a portion of this was for other people and I was paid back, this figure has to drop.

Other equipment that I haven't been able to classify yet, was 7%, now down to 6%.

Photography equipment was 2.3% and has shot up to 8%. Now that I have pretty much everything that I need, this spending should drop off a cliff.

Household expenditure was 6.4% and is up only slightly at 7.7% which is expected as settling in to a new property.

60% of my income over the last ten years has gone on these categories, while a staggering 83% has gone this way over the last twelve months. A good chunk of the difference is in payments which are only listed as, "paypal," which I stopped using in earnest a couple of years ago, but having no detail, I can't track them.

So by investing a little technology in my daily life, I can reap the benefits of seeing just how I've been spending my money and I can adjust appropriately.

My tips for using this system is to get a good list of categories and don't be afraid to adjust them over time. Gnucash made it relatively easy to track transactions and change their category. The only ones I can't trace is where I didn't keep the detail.

If you're buying a gift voucher for someone, then check out the market first. For example; buying someone a book token that can't be used on Amazon can be money wasted, because Amazon are by far the cheapest seller out there and better value for money can be had. Best to think any gift cards through.

I've bought cheap and sometimes I've won, sometimes I've lost. On balance, I've lost and in future I'll tend to save a little more and get something a little further up the range.

Birthdays or Christmas times, maintain a wish list of things you can't afford and let your friends and relatives know about it, so that they don't waste their money on something you might not like.

A world without Microsoft

2010-07-09T07:20:00.001+01:00

The insiders at Microsoft are getting edgy and demotivated if you believe the comments section on this blog.

Damning words, "Please understand that we went from being a high functioning, extremely passionate and driven organization to a dysfunctional organization where decisions were made by politics rather than logic."

Cuts were made and yet more cuts are rumoured as coming for the 80,000-ish microsoft work force.

Coming outside the politics, it looks like the edge has long gone and there is little chance of it coming back. Turkey's don't vote for Christmas and unless the shareholders do something in short order, Microsoft could very well become the latest giant to fall.

Heck; wouldn't it be funny if Apple bought them out in a few years time!!!

But what does this mean for the consumer? Well, it means the days of being lazy are over. When Microsoft was at its peek, whatever the customer wanted was right in front of them; they didn't have to make any effort. Not so any more.

Some of the important household products like Microsoft Money, were canned a year or two ago. This is where open source systems like Gnucash fill the gap. The solid open source projects have been escaping the Linux corral and have been trotting all over the O.S. landscape for some time. When Digikam finally becomes stable on Windows, (it can be run on Win7 with a bit of fuss) then Adobe will likely shit a brick and pump more money in to advertising than ever before to try and keep knowledge of Gimp out of the minds of its populace of hobbyist photographers.

This dilutes the Microsoft experience and that leads to a downward spiral.

The next project that will feel the pressure in coming years is the Office suite. You see, Office isn't open. I don't think that even the latest version of Office will be able to save files in Open Document format. This could eventually signal the death toll for Office.

There has been a large rise in non-microsoft machines. The iPad has championed the tablet format and the netbook will suffer as a result. This is a problem because as the tablets start to take over, devices running other operating systems like Linux, MacOS and Android will become the dominant forces while netbooks which are predominantly Windows will fall. The embedded market is already switching to Linux for the performance and speed, leaving Microsoft to sweep up any technology licensing deals it can. When the industries finally move away from FAT as a file system to save themselves the licensing costs, then that will be another cash cow put to the slaughter.

People using tablets for internet commerce will thus start to demand open documents. We've had PDF for a while, but when it comes to working on files there will be pressure built up for documents to be provided in a more portable, workable form. At that point, Office will start to suffer as more government departments realise that they've got to move to Open Office. The licensing handcuffs that Microsoft have applied to their bundled licences will no longer hold government to MS Office. Once that happens, the rest of the commercial world will inevitably follow.

I reckon in five years the Office team will be sweating as much as the mobile teams are sweating now and my Microsoft slinky will fetch large sums at auction. Well maybe not that last part, but you know what I mean.

Broadband Barmy

2010-06-23T07:41:00.004+01:00

This post is written after a rather disconcerting event in which my wireless was hacked. Yes, I did up the security level but as can be seen in this video the highest available consumer wireless encryption (WPK2 with TKIP on a hidden SSID and even MAC address filtering) can be kissed goodbye in a matter of three minutes.

The best defence you have against this is to use a complex wireless access password that includes things like $, %, numbers and whatever special characters your router will let you have. (and for crying out loud write it down in case you forget it)

However, it came to pass that Paramount Pictures accused me of downloading, "Up In The Air," on the 14th and I duly got a notice on the 21st from my ISP. I mean ... George Clooney? In MY house? (OK, so I've got O'Brother Where Art Thou and I even went as far as to buy the CD, but that's as far as it goes.)

Firstly, the level of proof is ridiculous. It is a case of, Paramount say you did this and we saw a lot of data got transferred, so we're going to assume you're guilty. You WHAT!!!!? No packet traces, no deep packet inspections, nothing. Guilt by circumstance. No actual proof that it was me.

I have to admit that due to the wireless hack it is likely that it did actually occur, but being on the receiving end of this level of so called, "proof," is bloody scary.

Secondly and of more concern, my ISP determines that one check, half way through a month and if I'm over half my usage then they'll let me know. Anything above this is my responsibility.

This persistent data downloading took me to 33gig, that's 8gig over my 25 gig limit and I received no warning. I'm now facing extra costs. As far as I'm concerned, I'd expect an e-mail if I hit, say, 80% of my bandwidth allowance and DEFINITELY an e-mail if I blew my cap and started incurring extra costs. But no. Perhaps you want to contact your ISP to determine their own policy on this ... and be warned.

Apparently my ISP considers it reasonable for me to log in to my bandwidth meter two or three times a week (which is what it would take to spot runaway stuff like this) on an ongoing basis for perpetuity. Yeh, right, I don't think.

You see, we're facing a problem. BT are currently engaged in a project which will see optical fibre delivered to many peoples homes and optical to the cabinets everywhere else. It'll be complete in a few years.

What WON'T change in that time is the cost of bandwidth. If I was in one of those homes that had 100Mbs optics and I maxed out the line, I'd eat through my 25GB monthly allowance in a little over half an hour. After that, I'd be incurring extra bandwidth costs for the other 30 days 23 and a half hours.

Perhaps now you can see why it is vital that in an age where we will be able to consume faster than ever before, that there is some form of check on what goes on here before some people ended up getting landed with bills that could incite heart attacks.

In the good old days in the nineties, there were physical service stops. If your web site went over its allowance then they'd pull the plug for the rest of the month. I've asked for this to be incorporated on to my account, but apparently this is not technically possible. Knowing full well that it IS technically possible I can only conclude that this is a stealthy way for the ISP's to legally take us for even more cash.

Unexpected bills are not funny at any time; says I who one month created a popular program which I published and ended up with a charge for ... well, I don't have a record of what happened on that early December that threatened to wreck my Christmas of 2006, but the bill was in three figures. (To be fair to the ISP, after some correspondence, they did waive the charge and even went a little further; this is at least some proof that there is a subject here that needs discussing)

Also, if your ISP pre-programmed the wireless security on the wireless access box they shipped you, it might be entertaining if you asked them who they hold responsible if that wireless security is breached.

It's enough to make you ditch your wireless and go back to good, old fashioned cables and ask your ISP if you can have a pay-as-you-go meter fitted.

The long story short, however, is that all the onus is on you, the customer. Even if the security was programmed by your ISP. If you have a broadband line or a web site, the restrictions that used to prevent you from unexpected, very high bills, is gone and the ISP's have no impetus to bring it back. It is not far short of legalised daylight robbery; and the way that technology is going, it is only going to get worse.

Especially as people are staying in more because of the recession, the ADSL line could get more of a hammering than usual and it is getting ever more probable that there could be an unexpected surprise waiting for you if you're not careful.

The UK all but abandoned all-you-can-eat broadband packages a few years ago. The US is not far from following on our heels on this. If you're on a package with no limits (as I was before I moved) then check any new package before you change as my ISP had removed the all-you-can-eat and I had no option but to go on a bandwidth cap.

If you're lucky enough to get a cable supplier where you are, then you might be lucky; but if you're not in one of those towns graced with such connections, you'd better check the small print.

The other persons shoes

2010-06-18T15:49:00.000+01:00

I'm not important. I'm not famous and perhaps of more of a relief I'm not infamous either. However, I'm doing things and I am having life experiences. I want to share these things with other people; the people that want to listen, because they do contact me every now and then to say that what I've been writing is of use to them.

What I write (and in future, record) isn't going to win any awards or change lives. In fact, it is probably to help me as much as help anyone else.

However, even Strobist was eventually too large. You can't easily dip in and out of a blog, no matter how well it is indexed. It was realising that which meant I took the information out of my shutter-fug blog and transferred it to my main web site.

But I am slowly realising that this isn't working either.

Tablets are with us. Android is likely going to be the next major operating system for people on the move. HTML5 will likely be more of the same and probably won't make the splash that the consumer is being led to believe will happen.

The more inteligent and reactive presentation systems up to this point have required Adobe's flash. This is too heavy, especially for mobile communications. Things still need to be light on their feet and flexible at the point of delivery.

I am going to have to put myself in the other persons shoes when they come to my sites; what information do they want? There is a bridge between the questions that people want the answers to, and the information that I'm prepared to offer.

Time after time I come back to the interface as being the major problem. I have just got myself a book on Android programming. 2010 is turning in to a year for tidying up some of the messes that I've got myself in to. 2011 will likely be the year when I turn the design part of my brain to the issue at hand and should actually have an Android device on which to work.

That issue is the design, index and presentation of the information that comes from life itself.

The Android programming interface is also intended to solve the problems that I am having with the way information is handled in life. So many systems have ordered structures when in reality we're coming accross different types of information at different times and everything is fluid. I've tried all sorts of systems, including mind maps, but nothing really handles it well especially on a portable device.

Much of this is down to the crazy programming that is going on. It is strange that in a world of open source, I find that so much of the thinking is still closed. Why, on my mobile phone, for instance, can't I look up a contact, hit the psot code and transfer that to the Sat Nav program? I still can't.

I am convinced that there is a better solution out there and if I can't find it, I'll damn well have a go at creating it.

Have encryption won't travel

2010-06-16T19:47:00.010+01:00

We're in a conflicting time. On the one hand, we've got the realisation that information has a very high value and if you work in the UK government you'll by now know the little letters GCSX which requires all data on all portable devices and information communicated outside government to be encrypted. Oh yes, stronger encryption and control are coming to devices and networks near you, if they aren't already in place. That way, even if unauthorised people do get their hands on sensitive data, they've got to crack the code before they can read it; hopefully by which time, the timeliness of the data has rendered it useless.

The problem is that these products will all work on Windows and a few on Mac. There are encrypted home directories on Linux, but we'll have to wait and see what happens regarding the new mobile devices promised in early 2011.

As the majority of mobile phones and tablets that are going to offer us new ways of working, are either Linux, Android, Symbian or else locked off from tampering, while workers start to want and need these devices, businesses are going to deny them on the basis that they aren't secure and can't be secured.

Even high security USB sticks only come with Windows software. Lunacy in today's market place, and I don't see the opportunity for them to get around it. Aslo, what the heck is going to happen when you put an encrypted USB stick in to a tablet? That would be worth watching.

Let's face it. I honestly can't understand corporations actually letting high flyers and those in management and sensitive positions actually communicate using unsecured devices. After all, it doesn't take the key code to get in to most phones. The right electronics mean you can blow all that away. The only tool that actually impressed me was the Palm which encrypted the files when I closed the application.

So I believe it is inevitable that the high flyer will shortly hit a brick wall; between wanting the new toys but being denied them by their company because the data can't be secured. Or, they can have the toy, but it will be at the cost of doing any productive work for the employer. That means the staff will likely have to pay for their own toys.

Clear Out

2010-06-14T21:51:00.008+01:00

Every now and then it takes guts to have a clear out. This collection of CD's goes back a good number of years and covers all sorts of operating systems and other stuff. Versions of Windows and Office in German, Novel Netware, bits and pieces of all sorts.

They don't exist any more. They were shredded last month. I feel better for it now that I'm on Linux; rather than cherishing the operating system CD's as I used to, I've let myself skim along the free winds and go with the flow.

For a good number of years, the physical possession of CD's and licence keys was a position of pride, of power. The same as music CD's and DVD's. It has been a change in mentality to just download your operating system from the Internet and burn a CD whenever I need it.

I seem to have lost the feeling of power that having various operating systems gave me, but in one way it was also a burden and I now feel that I have more choice. So what if I don't own a copy of Windows 7; I don't need it and I'm not jealous of those that have it.

Strange feeling to have after all these years.

Another reason why I hate Microsoft

2010-06-12T21:43:00.000+01:00

If you weren't already certain that I hate Microsoft, here is another piece of proof that I receive all too often. The long story short, explorer can become so unstable at the drop of a hat that Windows has to kill it. Good grief.

There wasn't anything particular running when this happened. I was in the process of building the machine. However it seems that I all to often have to kill explorer and use the task manager to restart it. Not good.

Could the Internet be in for a change of funding?

2010-06-10T17:30:00.002+01:00

There is a disturbing trend. Much of the money behind the Internet is the advertising dollar. However, Apple have enabled a button that allows the adds to be stripped from a page. In fact, they're following Google in doing this.

It didn't make much sense for Apple to do this, but it made even less sense for Google to do it. I mean, even if Google manage to secure funding from services and no longer need advertising funding, smart business sense says that they need to keep the funding coming in to their coffers; if only to stop it from flowing in to the competition.

Why would any advertiser put money in to a medium where their adverts are deliberately being blocked by the very people who are supposed to be serving them? It would be like ITV giving you advanced warning to nip out for a cuppa while the adverts are on.

This does not bode well.

A byte out of Apple.

2010-06-08T06:24:00.004+01:00

Well, it looks like the Apple has lost its grip on the tree and Newtons law might just send it down towards the ground.

Not all these articles are from The Register, either. Some are from the BBC.

Two big things are taking place here. One is Apple's changing of the rules and the other are the issues at their supply firm, Foxconn.

To start with the Foxconn issue this marks ten suicides and three failed attempts so far in 2010 alone. They're putting up the wages for the second time in one week. Conditions apply, but I feel that if these conditions are too onerous in the small print, then they could actually see a rise in suicides, not a fall. All this, of course, means more money and that will likely have an impact on the price of more products, not just the iPhone and iPad. Either way, Apple's reputation has certainly taking a hammering, particularly the number of years it has taken to get to this point. Suicides have been happening at Foxconn for a few years. It is all part of the Chinese catch up to the civilised societies where worker welfare comes high up the agenda; and that welfare will cost them their price advantage.

Talking about pricing, the UK ended up paying more money in the UK, even once sales tax, etc. was taken in to account. No big surprise there.

And people are complaining about the latest piece of equipment, the iPad. It is apparently a lot of money for not a lot of usability. Basically, it is an expensive web browsing tool. Productivity? Forget it. I also can't find the article I was reading a while ago, but once the shine had worn off one man's iPad, he doesn't use it any more. One month attention time and that was it. It didn't fit in to his life. Apple might have all the flash(y) look and feel, but their substance is failing. Even the new iPhone is starting to fail against increased competition. This will be a tough fight if their meteoric rise is not about to be followed swiftly by a stupendous dive in to the big blue sea.

The problem here is that Jobs regards the devices you buy as not yours, but HIS. If people were actually OK with this, there wouldn't be jailbreaking going on, but applications get banned from the application store just because Apple feels like it; and that is in the terms of service, no reason has to be given for Apple to ban an app. But it goes beyond there. At the bottom of this article you can read how Apple is deleting widget apps from its App store. More on that here as one app developer ends up eating his own words on Apple's evil status and finally gave up and denounced Jobs' crew.

Behind all the flashy stuff lies some dark secrets also. Firstly that Apples tying down applications to its own products might land its developers in court if they don't take disabled access in to account. "If a web product has been optimized for a particular platform, there is likely to be a stronger case for arguing that it needs to be accessible to disabled users of that platform," says the Standard. Also there are questions about the HTML5 that Apple have been banging on about.

The final questions come about the man at the helm. Directing a companies actions based on his own prejudices is not good business practice. He would also turn back the clock on the freedoms that blogging have given us; returning us to a dark world of media that is heavily tainted by the publishers eyes. In Job's world, we would all be paying to view controlled and indoctrinated media streams. The world of untainted personal voices would be curtailed.

So if he keeps this up, Apple will once more return to the small audience of its dedicated fan base. A group of people who have to set up dating agencies that cater for people who love Apple first, and their potential life partner second. Yep, you can also only log in if you're using an Apple device.

How wonderful. In this age of open web systems and international participation, the pillocks decide to close themselves in and return to the days of the gentleman's club. Man, I thought we left discrimination like this behind decades ago.

While the rest of the world goes forward, Apple take the shining technological light they gave us a few years back, and ride arrogantly and head high, in to the setting sun of the past. Goodbye, Apple. You won't be missed.

The PC is dead, long live the PC.

2010-06-07T07:10:00.000+01:00

The PC has been with us in its current form for many years; more than two decades now. Consisting of a classic box, keyboard, mouse and monitor, this year will see the final developments which mark the end of the traditional PC as we know it.

The components that make up a PC are now small enough and powerful enough to be merged in to the monitor, the keyboard and with laptops taking up the hotter seller spots there is also the tablet to contend with.

Thanks to the advances made in wireless keyboards and mice, there are now more options on offer such as merging the PC with the TV. Indeed for some applications like playing and streaming video, the once separate box for this is now also being merged inside the TV set.

Whereas some decades ago we went for separate boxes to do everything, we now seem to be doing the reverse and TV sets are even containing DVD players.

Those who are clever enough to actually sit down and think what they want to do, before they go to the shop, will be the ones who make the most out of the massive but yet shrinking array of products on offer.

There is the argument that the inability to choose individual components will take away the customers choice of flexibility. However I've seen docking bays in TV's so it may simply be a case of being able to choose a component and, rather than have it sitting beneath the TV in a rack, you just install it straight in to the TV set itself.

We have come so far, but there is still a long way to go.

For gamers, there will likely be no alternative to the separate box and the associated heat sinks, fans and beefy power supplies to deliver ultra fast, high-def graphics. For the rest of us, there is an ever growing choice.

Toshiba continues to both dissapoint and please

2010-06-02T06:44:00.000+01:00

Something is going wrong at Toshiba. Either that or I'm just not spending enough money on my equipment these days.

In times of old I supported the Tecra range. I went through a series of Tecra laptops and never had a problem with them. However, when I got out of bed and stepped on the screen of my beloved Tecra 8000, I could only afford a Satelite Pro.

The Sat Pro went faulty after about two years (lesson number 1, never deal with E-buyer; they think UK trading law doesn't apply to them.) and after a Tosh fix, it has been great.

Now, the NB200 has failed. No post. This indicates a probably mother board problem; that doesn't bode well for the machine family, they could have cut too man corners on the internals. At least, that is what I think of the Dell mother boards, I haven't seen inside the NB 200 itself.

Fortunately, it is inside warranty. The phone conversation with them was quite easy and straightforward. They'll send a courier to pick up the net book and return it to me. No hassle, no fuss, no having to mess around finding appropriate packing and waiting in long queues at the ever suffering post office. That is what I call service. Depending on the cost, it might actually be worth investigating an extended warranty ... might, you understand.

It only serves to reinforce my opinion that you get what you pay for and in the world of portable computing, the proper target for a decent computer is about a thousand pounds.

Textbook Trouble

2010-05-26T12:55:00.002+01:00

The battle to replace paper with electronic readers has been a long one and it isn't over yet. It is only in recent years that technology has actually made it possible to create an electronic reader at a reasonable price. However, as The Register reports, books that are, "used," and not simply read for entertainment, are not working well in electronic format.

Stragithforward reading for leisure seems to score them as a hit, however.

Also of interest is a comparison between the Kindle and the iPad in this regard, with the iPad coming off the obvious looser. It will take the Adam to effectively merge them both and give each a run for their money in their own fields. one tablet to rule them all...

Desktop Dis-Organisation

2010-05-23T13:55:00.001+01:00

First, let me define the problem....

As you can see, things are in a bit of a muddle. I just need some way to organise this mess. An easy task, you think? Well, not if you're in the UK.

Look through and you'll find charging stations for all sorts of things from iPods to Playstation controllers. Those generic ones that you can find are either vertical chargers (no good for me) or else cost a bleedin' fortune. I mean, look at this for £50...

Fifty Friggin' Quid! And I need TWO of them. Surely there must be something cheaper than that? Well, frankly, there isn't. You can get all sorts of fancy versions with interchangeable tips, but those ain't gonna' power my camera battery charger or my toothbrush dock either.

The most sensible thing I can find is this...

The Shift3 Executive Charging Station. $20 each. Can I get anyone to ship them to the UK? Can I hell. What the fuck ARE they? Some form of US secret weapon? Come ON people. There is a customer here. Gimme, gimme, gimme. For crying out loud. Excuse me while I bash my head against a brick wall.

Video Patent Trolling - Ding, ding, round one.

2010-05-20T16:43:00.002+01:00

The Register reports that Gogle have now open sourced the VP8 codec after earlier spending $124.6m buyng On2. This places an open source alternative to H.264 on the market. It is now a game of wait and see as to whether Steve Jobs uses his patents to attack Google.

With a company like Google using VP8 coupled with the Ogg Vorbis audio codec to present its video to the world, this could mark a turning point not only in portable video but also audio.

The strength of licenced MP3 technology on devices has seen it take over and steel the march on open source Ogg. With YouTube requiring Ogg audio to be on board devices, then this will finally give Ogg a foothold in to any device where YouTube video is destined to go.

The problem for those that follow Ogg is that, because devices don't support it, sellers don't sell it and they can't buy it. With the sellers claiming lack of demand, they won't install it on their devices. So the circle continues and locks out the consumers that genuinely want Ogg.

It also isn't usually a problem because MP3 can be converted to Ogg with little trouble, so those that want Ogg can buy MP3 and convert it anyway. No need to loose their voice shouting at a brick wall that doesn't want to hear them. The problem is that it has to be converted back again in order to use it on portable music players that don't support it.

This, finally, offers Ogg a foot in the door of future devices. There is a switch over from MP3 to ACC happening anyway, so Ogg can easily ride on the back of this also. Finally, manufacturers and music sellers might actually be forced to listen to their customers for once.

ZFS, fault tolerance and mirroring

2010-05-16T06:38:00.006+01:00

There is one thing in my head; more so now that SDXC is on the scene. It is also one of the reasons why I feel exFAT is more irrelevant than ever on removable media...

Fault Tolerance.

I mean, think about it. The opportunity is actually already present. Not only that, it remains such a massive possibility that I can't imagine why someone hasn't done it already.

It goes like this...

Firstly, a device such as a camera, has two SD card slots. Instead of running a weak file system like FAT or NTFS, they engage with ZFS to mirror the two cards. I mean, in a professional world where fault tolerance and reliability is highly prized, why not?

With the capacity of the XC card it would completely eliminate the need to run to an external backup system. After all, many of the backup systems out there have weak file systems anyway; the best they can manage is mirroring.

So what happens when you get home or want to send the SD cards through the post or something.

All you need at the recipients end is an external card reader, just like we have now. Such a card reader would have two SD slots, it can take the pair of cards (or even one, ZFS is fault tolerant remember) and present one file system to whatever device is attached. If you wanted to go the extra mile, the SD card reader could actually be smart enough to present the files as if they were a different file system! This also allows you, if absolutely necessary, to hand one card to the client at the end of the shoot and have one copy yourself without having to add on the hours it takes to dump the card to another media; that is at the expense of the fault tolerance, however, but it would then be an option.

Don't have ZFS support on your OS? No problem, just flick a switch and the device will present in ext3 for you. Or if you absolutely HAVE to, exFAT. This kind of ability could also be built in to the camera for its PC USB connection. Imagine the power of being able to switch presentational file formats to match whatever system you're connected to!

Got a problem? Want to get deeper in to the cards? No problem, a GUI will interface with the card reader and tell you of any problems and give you the opportunity to fix anything which the card reader itself isn't able to fix. Oh yes, the file system can fix itself up like you wouldn't believe...

But why put the effort in to ZFS? Fault tolerance of ZFS goes far beyond many other file systems. It can detect data errors that others can't even see. As Synchronet writes, "As a matter of fact, ZFS is the only file system that's self-healing and automatically fixes bad blocks with 99.99999999999999999% certainty - the odds of a collision on a 64-bit checksum."

Sol why the fuck are we still stupid enough to buy products that are based on FAT, forcing us to carry around external mirrored hard drives when there is the ability to have faster, superior fault tolerance right in the very devices we are using?

I tell you ... just look at the cost of FAT file system licensing and the prices being paid by the big companies who's products we buy. They could develop and bring such a ZFS open source solution to market with ease for a fraction of that money.

Madness. The whole damn thing of continuing to licence an archaic file system for our portable media is madness.

An interesting view on society

2010-05-13T22:13:00.000+01:00

I was watching the links on a couple of articles today. There were a few counters that I watched. The ratio was 16 people interested in the issue of no flash on the iPlayer/iPad for every 1 person concerned about the number of people (8 this year) who had committed suicide while working for Foxconn, the company in China making the iPhone and iPad for Apple and has a bad record of mistreating its staff.

To me, this says a lot about us Western democracy lovers. Anyone can get killed or mistreated to produce the goods that we want at a price that we like, so long as it isn't us.

I don't know about you, but this is weighing on my conscience.

Manufacturers might blow it

2010-05-13T06:37:00.000+01:00

Wikipedia has an article on exFAT for SDXC. It looks like it is going to be the next file system for SD cards.

There is a massive chance here for manufacturers to use ZFS and ship a driver with their devices so that Windows, Apple, etc. can read it. After all, the fault tolerance abilities of ZFS blow FAT out of the water. Also, once they have done the work, it will save them an absolute fortune in licensing fees to Microsoft; and the work to do this would be much, much cheaper than licensing exFAT.

This will likely not happen, however. Despite the cost of supporting an open source file system being much cheaper than licensing FAT, even though we're in an age of austerity, many manufacturing companies continue to baffle me by their choices.

Fortunately for XP users (including me) service pack 2 will have a driver to read exFAT and Linux users could either see a proprietary driver built in or use an open source read-only driver which is reported by Wikipedia to be under development.

So for PC users at the moment it remains business as usual. For device manufacturers, however, they continue to piss in the file format wind and we all suffer extra costs as a result.

Battle of the pads

2010-05-12T21:13:00.002+01:00

It is the battle of the tablets. The ultimate question for many people is whether a tablet will make much of a different in their lives. Well, for me is turn on time and power consumption. If this thing is going to make a difference in my life, it had better respond quickly.

As iPad is out of the gate first, we'll take a look at its specs. Starting at a 16gig flash and working up to 64gig, that is not an unreasonable amount of storage. The processor is a freshly designed A4 and has been revealed to also be in the iPhone 4.

The iPad scores and lets down in the usual ways. The pluses that I've seen are the stylish and simple interface which is backed up by the classy design in both the hardware and software. As usual, Apple think beyond the unit itself and it shares the same connector as the iPhone which opens it up to some of the dock solutions that have wide docking areas. The downsides are the product lock in and the battery power isn't great. Also, connectivity sucks and there is no printing ability as yet. For a socially expanding world the absence of a camera is also a bit mystifying. The only thing that saves it at the moment is that it supports "n" over wireless connectivity. A usb adaptor is rumoured to be available for extra money.

The iPad, like the iPhone, controversially doesn't support flash. While HTML5 is on the horizon, that doesn't help in the here and now. If I'm looking for a tablet in 2010, this cripples the iPad for me.

HP are making waves about their Slate but there aren't any serious details out there. Indeed, rumours suggest it has been pushed back because they want to replace the OS on it. However I think it is one to keep an eye on.

A cool device out of India is the Adam and the video is worth watching. A 9.4 inch screen like the iPad, it uses some ground breaking chips from nVidea to deliver massive power performance. Also interesting is the screen which can switch modes, including an e-paper reader. Add on to that 3G and WiFi support (b and g only), but also a 3.2 megapixel swivel camera for either photography or web cam action; 16 or 32 gig models, but both a micro AND standard SD slot with not one, but TWO USB sockets mean this is going to be a killer device if the price is right. Very likely worth waiting for.

Last on my mind is the JooJoo. Mired in legal controversy, the JooJoo isn't a bad looking unit with a 12.1 wide inch screen. It also boasts a fast 9 second on-time. It is let down by the 4gig solid state drive and again only b/g wifi and also short battery life. It lacks any form of SD slot but does at least have a USB port and sports a camera. The price is currently $500 in the US which isn't likely to rate it against the iPad for specs, but I've asked the JooJoo team if I could borrow one for a couple of weeks. So far, they haven't said an out right no; the American team have passed my details to the UK team, so I'm really hoping that I can get my hands on one to try it out for myself. I also don't think that this first incarnation is where they will stop, either.

There have also been reports about the JooJoo's flash implementation as well. That news is a few months old, however so I don't know whether they've moved on from the 10.01 flash release, but I doubt it.

That is what it comes down to. Tech specs only go so far on a device like this and it really does come down to what it is used for. It is, after all, worthless wasting power on devices that you really don't need. At the moment, I can't see the need for "n" wireless, g does me fine. USB connectivity and an SD card slot are high on my shopping list, so the Adam is looking to be the better option for me.

My eye is definitely on the Adam. It is big on promise and promises to be low on price and power, using massively innovative nVidea chips which will likely blow the Intel portable series out of the water. The JooJoo, however, is also worth watching; they could end up being another Cherry Pal but I hope not as with their styling and team work, they could go far. HP seem to have temporarily lost their direction while Apple have all the shallow bling but none of the connectivity substance that I want.

I'll be passing the iPad by and I've just registered for news on the Adam.

Nokia Survey Text

2010-05-08T06:58:00.002+01:00

Nokia invited me to give them some feedback. Sadly, their text window restricts the number of characters, so I'm putting it here for them to think about...

Support of Open Document standards like odt. Support of Open Source CODECs like Ogg. With Apple and Microsoft trying very hard to make H.264 the worldwide standard for video, if they succeed, that gives them the opportunity in 2016 to hike the licences and put companies out of business. Apple could be in a position to charge Nokia so much to licence the codec that Nokia would not be able to offer video on devices and would suffer badly; just like Green Witch when one of the MP3 patent holders, Thompson, bought a stake in a company that competed with Green Witch ... they then charged Green Which $60m to license MP3 for the year ... Green Witch couldn't pay and then went out of business, leaving the way clear for Thompson and their company, Music Match, to clean up the market.

The only way out of this mess is to use open source standards and codecs ... and I hoped that Nokia was a company that wanted to embrace the future ... but apparently not.

*) I can't open any of my Open Office documents on the X6.
*) I have a, "quick office" application that is useless to me because it reads Microsoft office only, and I can't de-install it from the phone to free up memory.
*) I have a music and video collection stored in open source codecs and I have to convert them before the X6 will play them.
*) I have three laptops and four desktops ... they all run Ubuntu ... but Nokia doesn't make software that runs on them.

Why does the Linux thing matter? Because in the 90's Microoft released new operating systems on a bi-annual basis. It was a never ending upgrade cycle that cost a lot of money collectively. XP lasted a decade but now Microsoft are returning to the old days, because forcing people to pay for upgrades is a good money spinner. Windows 7 has barely touched the floor running and 8 was rumoured last year along with the WinMin engine. I just can't afford to keep giving my salary to Microsoft.

MS Office is a mess; so many different organisations on different versions and people can't open each others documents ... with Open Office being free, everyone can just upgrade automatically, and it can handle MS documents as well.

Plus, Ubuntu 10.04 is really simple to use these days. You don't have to be a geek to use it any more. It also has multimedia and social systems built in.

Nokia is, perhaps, one of the most backward looking companies of this age. The X6 is tied to proprietary software and licences. Unless Nokia rectifies this situation in short order, my next phone will be a Nexus One ... at least it plays ogg files and talks with Linux clients.

Open letter to Ellen DeGeneres

2010-05-06T15:58:00.002+01:00

Hi,

You know, I read that you're an iPhone and iPad user and I started to think that, as a customer, there are questions that you should be asking.

Firstly, why is there no flash? You know the situation, you're out for the evening with your buddies and the group of you are in the bar and you want to take some snaps but the light is too low. What's the deal with that?

Secondly, Why did it take a cartoonist having to win a Pulitzer Prize before Apple would remove the block they placed on him for having objectionable material. Don't you think that it is strange that in the land of the free, Apple is telling you what you can and can't do?

Thirdly, why has Jobs banned Flash? So many web sites use it these days and here they are, shunning it in two ways...

1) Would it have something to do with the fact that Apple are along with Microsoft in licencing H.264? By closing flash out of the game that leaves their codec as the one likely to become the dominant force for video on the Internet and on devices, and that means lucrative licencing moular for them. Think I'm kidding? Nope, Steve Jobs has already written that he is preparing his patent lawyers to go after and kill any open source video codec that threatens to challenge him.

2) Would it be that he wants the coolest applications to only be available on his devices? if a developer writes something in flash, there are tools that convert it for the majority of platforms out there. By stopping it, they force the developer to think twice before re-writing it for any other platform. If Jobs makes the iPhone big enough then he will strave the competition of applications.

Fourth, take a look in to the chequered history of the Apple App store. Check out the applications that have been approved, banned and approved again. Check out the rules that the developers work to, that say even if they abide by all the rules, Apple can ban their application from the App store and not even have to give a reason.

Has anyone asked WHY they have to go through Apple for all their applications?

Also, check out the way that Apple has changed those rules to stop developers using flash interpreted code. Long story short, they not only moved the goal posts, they changed the whole darn game.

For a country that thrives on freedom and choice, you sure have found the very bad Apple at the bottom of the barrel.

If you contact The Register, I'm sure they'll give you all the proof and evidence that you need to really put Apple on the spot ... because Apple is one company that is giving America a really bad name for corporate abuse of public freedoms. If Apple say it is their way or the highway, I'd encourage you to think about switching to another smart phone

Kind regards,

Michelle Knight

Paying for Internet Video in 2016?

2010-05-05T11:18:00.005+01:00

You likely know what the Jpeg picture format is. But did you know about the GIF format; or more importantly do you know what happened to it in the late 90's?

To cut a long story short, Compuserve invented the Gif format in the '80s. It was to the fledgeling Internet what water is to a desert crossing and everyone was using it.

However, it contained code on which a company had a patent. That company then wanted licence payments in 1999. If you were using GIF images on your web site, you had to pay a one time licence fee of around $5,000 to use them. The Internet community collectively choked.

The community rallied and created the PNG format, an Open Source format which didn't require a licence. That action, plus the patent expiring in 2004, averted financial and technological disaster on the Internet; but it left a bad taste in everyones mouths and the aftertaste still hasn't gone.

So what has all this to do with the here and now?

There are modern day versions of GIF and PNG. MP3 is a licenced format while Ogg is not. If you buy a product that plays MP3 files, then some of the money you pay for the item is going towards the licence fee. If the device only played Ogg files, there would be no such licence fee to pay. MP3 lience fees have already put companies out of busines. To quote a section from page 5 of this Register article "Fraunhofer, one of the MP3 patent holders with Thompson, bought a stake in Music Match and charged Green Witch $60m to license MP3 for the year. Green Witch couldn't pay and was sold to a company that owned another web radio provider, iCAST. Ogg Vorbis was created to escape the MP3 noose and avoid a repeat of history."

This is about to apply to the video we watch. The age of Adobe's Flash is coming to an end and will be replaced eventually by HTML5. HTML 5 can use any number of, "codecs," either proprietary or open source. This is where it gets ugly.

Apple and Microsoft are among the companies that have a financial interests in H.264, which is a licenced codec for HTML 5. What is more insidious, however, is that Steve Jobs is actively threatening legal patent action against any open source video codec that pops its head above the parapett. Microsoft and others are performing other actions to ensure that open source codecs don't get off the ground. For example, when Internet Explorer 9 comes out, it will only use proprietary, licenced codecs and nothing else.

At the moment, H.264 seems to hold a low-cost licence, but this is due for review in 2016 and the logical question to ask is this....

Why are they actively threatening any, "open source," alternative to their codec? The only logical conclusion is that if they corner the market, they can hike the licence fee to whatever they like in 2016 and with no competition out there, the International community has no option other than to pay ... and who knows how much.

Reading the reports on Apple's behaviour over these last few months, Steve Jobs seems to be a very controlling man indeed and he seems to want all his customers money coming his way. This is a recipe for consumer disaster as anyone knows that once someone has a monopoly, they are in control of the price we pay.

This will likely sound the death knell for video on the Internet as we know it today. There will start to be cost implications and there would, legally, be little that can be done about it. Small players; small publishers of video material like you and me, the independents, would likely have licence bills that are too much to pay. As you have seen, it has already happened with MP3.

So what can you do? Well, basically do your research on products that you buy. If consumers start demanding products that work on open source codecs, the manufacturers will have to listen. You can change your browser to one that supports open codecs; stop using IE and Safari; instead use Firefox, Opera, Chrome or something else. Hunt down devices that use open standards like Nexus One and stop using closed, censoring systems like the iPhone. Ask the retailer ... does it play Ogg Vorbis files? If it doesn't, don't touch it.

There are mass conversion programs that will translate your MP3 collection to Ogg files and even though you can download MP3 files from on-line stores and then convert them yourself, you really do need to ask the question, "when are you going to sell Ogg files?" Keep asking that question every month or so until they do ... and when they do, buy them. This is the only way to change the market place. It is the only way to ensure that we retain the freedom of an open market and protect ourselves from corporate censorship.

I know ... all this sounds very right wing and sensationalist, but the history is there, it has been done before and it is only through our actions that we will stop it from happening again.

The alternative is too scary to contemplate.

The Codec Gamble

2010-05-04T13:41:00.002+01:00

Think this doesn't matter to you? Do yourself a favour and read the next few paragraphs. There are a number of articles on The Register which make interesting reading. Let's start with this ...

"How much money are we talking about? If you want MP3, you have to pay Thompson, which helped create MP3 along with three other companies. Decoding costs $0.75 for a patent and software license per unit, but if you want to encode the media - which, of course, you have to - then that's priced at up to $5.00 per unit. On consumer devices where margins are tight and prices competitive, that can hurt." - (full 5 page article here)

Cameras that use FAT 32, music players that not only use FAT 32 but also MP3, are liable for licencing costs. Portable video players that will likely use H.264 will also have to pay a licence.

On a £100 digital camera, £5 of that coulld be for the FAT 32 standard. You could get it cheaper. On a £40 music player, about £10 for MP3 and FAT 32 licensing. On a £150 portable video player, or even a mobile phone that plays media, who knows how much that would be in licensing; storage, music AND video format licensing would all add up.

Using, "open standards," that means licenses like this don't need to be paid, which means your devices and media purchases get cheaper.

Still think that this doesn't matter to you? Well, if you have a purse or a wallet of iron, it might not.

However, the major players are trying hard to make a proprietary video standard the next one to be common on the Internet. That means more licensing fees that are payable, increasing the cost of all sorts of devices and operating systems. A contravertial move by Canonical, the backers of free Linux distro, Ubuntu, have opened their new shop offering DRM free MP3 files; licensing is still a portion of the cost despite there being a free standard, .ogg, available. Not only that but all sorts of devices that use flash memory, are using FAT 32 despite there being plenty of other file systems around.

When it comes to Ubuntu and the music store, I believe that they could have, at least, offered people the choice of MP3 and OGG. But that is just my opinion; I do understand the pressures. There is mass conversion software around, though, so I can buy MP3 and convert it easily enough.

The ultimate pressure, however, has to come from the consumer. Me and you. As long as we are happy to hand over our money for devices that don't play these open formats, we're the hrabringers of our own demise. If you're going to buy Apple or Microsoft, then you're buying in to a mentality that will see you continue to pay money unnecessarily for some time to come.

What can you do about it? Well, you can switch away from Internet Explorer for a start. IE9 will only use proprietary standards so make the move to Firefox; after all, IE's share of browsing traffic on the net has dropped to 60% and is still falling. Make the jump to an alternative that operates as many standards as possible.

You can switch from the iPhone also. Take a look at the Nexus One or any other hand set that will support a wide range of video formats. Let's face it, with Steve Jobs' attitude in actively going after free systems to kill them off, do you really want to be at the mercy of such a companies censorship? Take a look at the Nokia X6 and keep an eye out for its successor. All the X6 needs is a faster processor and it will kick ass.

After all, how many people have yet to feel the pinch from the lack of flash on the iPad? I can spent less money on other devices and get more functionality, plus I've got cash left over to go out and about to show them off! Not that I'd actually do that, however; I've got more pressing bills like the increase in fuel prices and the higher cost of food.

When you buy a camera, you can ask the retailer a simple question, "How much of the price am I paying for the FAT 32 licence?" If enough people starting asking this in on-line shops and retailers, the feedback will start making companies think twice. Even e-mail the manufacturers themselves. After all, listen to this ... there are drivers out there, open source, that will allow Windows machines to access other file systems ... the manufacturers are being lazy by just stumping up for the FAT 32 licence and passing the cost on to you.

If you start to add up the money spent on licensing, it is a serious chunk of money. A chunk of money that we don't actually have to pay.

So, it is up to you now. Are you going to sit there and just pay dollar after dollar that you shouldn't have to pay, or are you going to start making a point in your choices?

You could even send the manufacturer a letter such as this...

"Dear X,

I was thinking of purchasing Y, but I am aware that it stores information in FAT 32 and for this, there is a licence to be paid which is added to the cost of the product. As a customer, I would rather you provide, on the support CD, a driver for an open source file system and lower the cost of the device, rather than burden me with the cost of unnecessary licences.

Can you tell me what proportion the FAT 32 licence fee is of the overall cost of the device please?

Yorus sincerely,

Z."

...on the off chance that they do respond and tell you the cost of the licence fee, at least it will open your eyes to how much money you're being stitched up for. And yes, I know it would cost a little extra time of one of their programming teams to bundle and test a new device driver, but that is a lower overall cost than the large number of licensing fees that are being charged through bulk sale of devices.

Secure erasing a hard drive

2010-05-02T10:21:00.002+01:00

I thought I'd detail something that I happen to be doing right now and thought might be a good thing to share.

There are shed loads of security erasing systems on the market these days and plenty of them can cost you a packet. However, I've got a computer running in the background which I booted from a USB stick in to a, "live," copy of Ubuntu 10.04.

By simply dropping to a terminal window and issuing the command...
sudo shred /dev/sda -f -v -z --iterations=6
... it goes away and totally trashes the hard drive by writing garbage all over the sectors.

Firstly, you might have to change sda for whatever your hard drive happens to be. sda is usually the first hard disk on a SATA system, so for your average PC, this should work fine.

Secondly, how fast it is depends on a number of factors. These are the size of your hard disk and the speed of both the data channel and also the speed of the hard disk itself. Some hard drives also have secure erasing subsystems to help you out.

However, rather than my bland words, I think estaticd puts it much more eloquently in their video...

The electronic apple is a little rotten.

2010-04-15T13:25:00.000+01:00

Steve Jobs appears to be doing a good job of killing Apple.

He hacks off European mac fans by delaying the European launch for a month while he diverts Europes supply to the US market.

He behaves as if the word, "ipad," is his after buying it off Fujitsu ... but only for some countries; and I believe there are going to be sueballs flying around shortly; I can't think of any other reason to do so. Also, I'd like to know just how much of the companies fortune he gave Fujitsu for the privilege.

He hacks off developers by removing apps from the store for reasons that don't add up, retaining the right to kick apps even if they fully comply with Apples app rules and now he is banning any app written with a tool he doesn't like. They also stop developers talking about the agreements. Then it tries to ban people from mentioning Google Android ... the competition.

Have Apple gone paranoid?

Now Facebook are strating to push their weight around by banning applications in an apparently disorganised and un-even handed way.

Lets face it, what we're facing here are a bunch of suppliers who have so little faith in their product that they got to employ complete lock in to have any faith in keeping their customers.

I'm perfectly happy in open source land ... for the moment ... thank you.

We told them so.

2010-04-15T13:02:00.003+01:00

It was inevitable as The Register reports that systems would be developed to counter the authorities from being able to track illegal file sharing.

I, personally, told Mandlebrot (or rather, his offices) that the only way to technologically win the war against illegal downloading on a physical level, is to unplug the Internet. Outside that, they've got no chance.

Did they listen? No.

As I detailed to UK.gov, the only way to sort this issue is to change peoples attitudes. As a reasonable portion of peoples attitudes are against what is perceived as a long running financial stitch up by the music moguls, then it would be the music industry that has to flinch first .. becuase they're up against the might of international people. They can't win this one.

I, for one, as a taxpaying member of the public, am outraged that our government has put public money behind the required electronic mechanisms not only by public money being given to ISP's to implement this garbage, but that the ISP side of the funding is going to have to ultimately come from the customers ... ie. me again. (and you .. don't forget it is your money too that these idiots are spending.)

Will somebody kindly put the country out of the misery of Mandelson? After all, it isn't as if the figures banded about on the amount of money and job losses are actually real. He must have been fed lies as well as food on that private yaucht trip by the courtesy of the music industry.

What's in store for TV?

2010-04-13T07:43:00.002+01:00

The latest I've been reading on the 3D TV set saga is that people want them to come down from the £2,000 price level to about £500 before they will get major sales in the UK.

The more interesting development, however, is that TV sets are now starting to come network enabled. The Register has a good report on the situation here. All that extra functionality that you bought an extra box for, so that you could browse your media collections, YouTube and all the rest of it, is staring to become merged in to the TV that you buy.

While it means less mains cables at the back and a reduction in the number of boxes that we have to stash, this could also have a significant impact on the third party, after market box producers. Unfortunately this could mean a limit in choice.

When all is said and done, I pick particular units because of how they function. I also prefer to have separate controllers as having everything on the one controller means buttons galore, small, unreadable text and generally a harder time of things.

Some manufacturers like Sony, have a reputation for putting the customer last. Lets face it, their illegal root kit activities are still fresh in my mind. Also, their reluctance to switch to SD card format and continuation on pushing their proprietary memory stick system also sticks in my throat. That's why I don't buy Sony, or Apple for that matter. Customer lock in is something I hate.

So, at the end of it, it looks like we are moving towards a corporate ethos where politics could dictate what video and Internet formats a particular TV will or won't play for you. Simply read the Register article and you'll see the biased limitations of the boxes currently on offer; services bundled talking only with systems that the manufacturer wanting them to talk with; and you can bet your bottom dollar that most of them will be subscription services. This could prove to be the saviour of the third party box that doesn't suffer these political problems.

Even after all this time; yes, all this time; none of them have thought through usability and menu structures properly, which makes using the damn things like a trip to hell and back. That major manufacturers haven't put the effort in to thinking of the customers experience says a lot for them and that, unfortunately, speaks a lot for their products.

All it would take is the facility to hook up a bluetooth keyboard or something, and that would make a major difference ... but no. The battle to get Internet access from TV sets has been raging for more than a decade that I can remember; but despite advances in radio technology and wireless keyboards and mice being readily available on the market, the manufacturers just haven't seen fit to take that option. Damn ... make my life a lot harder pressing repeated small remote buttons, why don't you!

While mainstream commercial players continue to honour region coded DVD players even in this very day, despite the system being knocked to hell and back by the third part market, and being walked all over by pirates, this kind of thing is what will keep the door open for the box suppliers. I talked with, I think it was Panasonic, telling them that I have region encoded DVDs from America, which were never released in the UK and I wanted to know if I'd be able to play them in their new boxes. No, came the answer. They still honour region encoding. Well, that means I'm not buying their product.

So maybe the nest of cables at the back of the TV cabinet isn't gone for good just yet.

Nokia X6 - fast review

2010-03-23T07:25:00.006Z

Light phone even when the battery installed. Processor is underpowered; chokes when multi-tasking. Needs a more powerful processor. Doesn't charge off the USB which, given the delicate thin jack connector for the power, damage here will render the phone useless. Plastic build quality is a concern, it took a while for the plastic back to sit properly after fitting the battery.

Control

Capacitive screen has good points and bad points; forget controlling it with gloves but at least it won't answer the phone for itself while you take it out of a holster. The side flip switch to activate/protect the touch screen is a reasonably intuitive design; left handed people should be able to easily flip this with their middle finger.

Front Information

The front of the phone is relatively easy to configure from the profile section and I have preferred the default mode where I have four quick buttons at the bottom, a common contact strip at the top and a list of e-mails in the middle. If music is playing, that also pops up in the middle along with basic controls. I did also change the clock to digital; much easier.

Audio

Music playback is not too bad. Plan your music storage ahead of time and work out what goes where. If you're music is all properly meta tagged, that will make life easier but if you have a larger collection with bits and pieces from different sources, the lack of folder organisation will make life difficult; the best technique in this case is to create play lists; but be prepared to scroll through a complete list of your music to add tracks.

Much of my problem with the music selection is down to slightly mis-presented meta information which then makes things awkward; if all meta information was the same across the board it wouldn't be a problem. For someone like me that has a digitised vinyl collection, this really is a pain. PLEASE just give me a folder browser and I'll shut up and go away.

The supplied bluetooth headset is cool, but clips for a man's shirt, not a woman's blouse. (upside down, so I can't use the mic unless I'm wearing a jacket.) Wired headset (not supplied) is needed for radio but it seems any wired headphones will work; reception seems to be better with badly shielded headphone cables. The radio can take a little time to get your head around tuning it; I didn't find it intuitive and there doesn't seem to be a free tuning option easily to hand.

Video

Direct copy of things like AVI files ended up hit and miss. Nokia PC Suite had to be downloaded separately from Nokia's web site; it didn't come bundled with the phone. Even in high quality, the program pixilates and if something else happens on the phone, the video stutters. The 2 hour film Avitar was taken down to a 364 Meg file in mp4 format. The videos were also slung in with the photo gallery so not so easy to find unless you start going in to options and change the sort order.

So long as you pause the video and then hit the white "-" then the video will sit there waiting for your return. If you hit the red handset key, then the app stops and you lose your place. At least all is not lost, though, as you have capacitive control over the slider.

Still Images

Image playback is a pain; Nokia photo browser just throws the whole picture directory at you and the only slideshow app in the shop rated for the X6 costs £8 with no try before you buy. "Photo Frame Touch" isn't yet available for the X6; you'd have to be more computer literate to find and install an application outside the Ovi store. Processing power showed badly here with thumbnails taking far too much time to generate on the one large list of images.

I would have LOVED a way to tell the Ovi store to notify me when an app becomes available on my OS version. Ah well.

Camera

Camera seems to be a reasonable device, but it doesn't remember things like the flash setting, so every time I open the camera I've got to turn the flash off, which is annoying. Picture quality is respectable in good light. Lacks some of the control features of the i8510, though.

GPS

Ovi maps and GPS seems reasonable for a free app. Different modes of viewing as well as traditional 3D in-car sat nav. Seems to have a powerful GPS receiver, much better than the i8510.

Communication

E-mail handling and messaging is the best I've seen on a phone so far and I think I can get away without needing an external keyboard, even though it is still slow going. "Mail for Exchange," (free) is great for hooking up to works e-mail, but I seem to have problems synching tasks and calender entries. Supplied e-mail system easily syncs with any pop3 server and was easy to set up, especially through the wi-fi links which are still nice and easy to configure. Only serious problem with Mail for Exchange is that it doesn't scroll the subject. Many of our automated system notification e-mails contain detail in the subject line; that makes it difficult to read those kinds of e-mails on a small screen. You have to open them and retrieve the mail content to get at the subject.

Y-Browser is my fave for getting out of scrapes, (damaged transfers that lock files; deleting directories in one fell swoop, etc.) at £1 it doesn't break the bank and I prefer to have it around at that price.

The phone does all the usual stuff, speed dial, etc. I like voice dialling, but this phone seems to be tied up with some form of voice command system that I haven't got the hang of yet. The contact section has an intelligent keyboard which cuts down the available letters depending on what options are available, for example for "home," after I type "h" I'm left with a choice of, "A, e, i, l, o and u." After I then hit "o" I'm left with three entries on the screen and the letters "l and m." As a touch typist, this annoys the hell out of me because I never know what position the next letter will be, but people who don't type heavily will probably like this feature. I do, however, wish that there was a side swipe gesture to scroll between contacts rather than the small scroll bar at the top.

Voice control still isn't intuitive for me, yet, and I'm still not sure it actually does voice dialling properly; the manual isn't a great help, either.

Software

Windows only but the Mass Media mode allows any OS to see it as a USB drive. Some updating can be done over the network, but it is easier with the software.

Oddities

I lost a few calls and got myself in a mess if people called while I was in other apps; some apps were better than others. Not good.

Accelerometers were too willing to go in to "side view" when the phone was being lain down to rest or picked up ... wouldn't be that much of a problem if the processor was fast enough to keep up with real time movement.

Mass file transfer over the USB worked better when the phone was plugged in to the mains. It had a nasty tendency to drop out and when it did that, it was usually a case of reset the phone. It REALLY could have done with a memory card option.

Alarm system can STILL only handle one definition of what are week days, so someone like me who wakes for work on Tues and Thurs but gets up earlier on Mon, Wed and Fri is STILL not catered for.

If the music library is running when you use the USB connection, the library reports the USB connection as active and you have to reset the phone to get the library back again.

Conclusion

The phone was relatively easy to get out of the box and get working. It seems to be a perfectly capable communication device with roughly average signal reception capabilities. Potentially large amount of music could be held on board but the over-reliance on reading the meta data from music files can be a pain; I'd prefer it to read a folder structure. Image handling "gallery" software is basically non-existent. For a device that can store a considerable amount of data, the supporting software is below par when it comes to music or image file selection.

They could pre-load better software than this by default; with some of the basic software coming in at £1 a time, I'd have thought that Nokia could have spent the cash and pre-loaded it so that customers had a better out-of-the-box experience. The phone interface could be more intuitive than it is; I'm having to go in to sub menus and poke around in different menu structures for the options that I need.

The iPhone still has nothing to worry about, but if Nokia up their game in terms of processor power and improve some of the included apps, then I would class this as a serious contender.

What would help are a series of short explanatory videos on Nokia's web site on where to go in the menu structure to find the various options; that would really kick start someone in to using the phone. I'm reasonably happy with IT and I had to hunt around for various options; as for people who aren't IT literate, this could be the next step that would make these powerful phones more easily accessible and usable for people who aren't IT minded.

Nexus one nixed

2010-03-19T06:30:00.000Z

I asked a straightforward question of Google. It took two e-mails and the response I got was this link which doesn't prove promising.

The question was to do with what happens to data that I enter in to the phone. Does it get copied to Google's servers? So far, all I have is that link, but I've thrown the question back at them again. If I get an update, I'll let you know.

As I have a dislike for Apple's attitude, the iPhone will never grace my pocket, but the Nokia X6 will be with me on Monday. Orange gave me the phone, 400 free minutes, a couple of hundred free texts, 80Meg a month of data for £25 a month including VAT. That's not a bad deal. You won't get that in an Orange shop, though, you have to call them for that kind of price. The shop have an extra £50 purchase price on the phone.

More on the X6 after I have it in my hands for a few weeks.

Soft off isn't full off

2010-03-17T07:42:00.001Z

If you think that pressing the soft off button on your monitor switched it off, or that when you're computer was off, that it was, "off," then unfortunately it isn't. Unless you've got a hard switch, your computers and monitors are still chewing a not inconsiderable amount of power.

A soft-off power button is one which doesn't actually cut the power, it simply sends a signal to the monitors control circuits that you want it to go to sleep. A hard-off switch is something like the switch on your wall socket. In the days of the C.R.T. monitor, most of the power switches were heavy, clunky actions and those were normally hard-off switches, but with our modern day, light touch switches, they don't actually cut the power.

A sleeping monitor can actually be chewing between a third and a half of its regular, "full on," power consumption and the only way to really stop this from happening is to switch it off at the mains. If your power switches are in an awkward position, however, you might want to think about one of these natty devices; I got mine from E-on for the main PC, the price was to fill in a questionnaire. They are explained and shown in the video.

One of the other things I thought I'd show you for fun, was wake on lan actually working. Not only as proof that powered off machines aren't actually powered off, but that it is cool just to see it happening and it is another trick in the armoury.

More normally there is a setting within the BIOS that tells the computer how to behave after there has been a power cut, but wake on lan was one of those tricks used for quite some time in order to recover from power cuts. It is possible, for example, for one machine to send a signal to another every hour, just to prod it in to ensuring that it is still on.

Having said all this, of course, the only way to find out for yourself is to get one of those wall socket monitors and check each device on its own merits. The long-worn out argument of wasting power on stand by is being improved on by manufacturers and it is no longer the case where one argument fits all; so if you've got the ten or fifteen quid to get a mains power consumption monitor, then buy one and use it to work out what you're home equipment is actually using ... because a monitor or TV that chews 15 watts in, "sleep mode," is a quarter of a 60 watt light bulb. If you leave a TV, a monitor, a laptop transformer, your mobile phone charger and a couple of computers in sleep, you might as well just leave a light or two on.

Also, are capacitance units a likely feature to be found in many homes of the future? Anyone know why these haven't been widely adopted yet? Is there a catch?

Panorama missed key points

2010-03-15T22:04:00.001Z

Sadly, as a result of the automatic responses I got (both of which contradict each other) I don't think Panorama will ever actually read this, which is a crying shame.

Dear Panorama,

You need to revisit this issue because you missed some key arguments.

I used to file share in the days when we were on keep-alive dial up; broadband wasn't around.

While you covered some great ground, that the technological race will change to create anonymity and that the first computer analysis showed material that isn't available commercially in this country, there are other issues.

Firstly, the manufacturers keep you tied down. When you buy a CD, you can play it in any CD player. Certainly in the beginning, music you downloaded from iTunes was stuck to the iPlayer; it wasn't transportable. Digital Rights Management is still something which the music and film industries want to hit us over the head with. Even the BBC is at it by preventing open source systems from being able to read streams; because some of them are being used to record shows.

What is the point of buying clothes if the manufacturer gets to say when you can wear them? What is the point of buying music if the manufacturer can dictate on what device you can listen to them on?

Secondly, you missed the packet examination techniques that are being used to monitor traffic; that deep packet inspection is the digital equivalent of the postman opening up our post. You didn't really put the rights issue in to perspective.

Thirdly, you missed the initiative Virgin tried, but the labels trampled on - http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/01/23/virgin_puts_legal_p2p_on_ice/

Fourthly, you missed the ability to investigate what people thought of where their money went; how the money pie was split between the label and the artist; an important feeling to gauge ... how many people are sharing because they don't believe the artist is getting a fair share. You need to run a serious poll to get a large sample of opinion. I remember as a child, more than twenty years ago, seeing a pie chart showing how little of the money the artist was getting and it disgusted me.

Firth, you missed the cost of music here compared to other countries; that it was one of the biggest drivers behind rip off Britain; we were being charged about twice as much for our music CD's as were other European countries.

You need to go back in to the history here. This isn't just a result of the Internet; there are some languishing attitudes here that the music industry are a bunch of money grabbing corporations that will spoon feed us what they want.

DRM has largely been dumped on music downloads; it hasn't worked. DRM is still happening on videos. Personally, I download occasional videos and I even rip DVDs that I own for the following reasons...

Firstly, I don't believe the hype that surrounds a film release. I can only judge for myself. If I like a film then I will buy it. Once a DVD has been bought or a film ticket bought, it is difficult to get your money back if the film didn't live up to your expectations. The consumer needs protecting, or if they are protected, the public need to know more about it.

Secondly, the DVDs are primed with adverts for other films. There is nothing as annoying as putting a DVD in a player only to find that the manufacturer has locked the controls and forced you to watch five minutes or so of adverts for their other productions. Ripping the DVD gets rid of this junk. When I want to watch, M*A*S*H for example, I actually have to go through the 20th Century trumpet sequence FOUR times before I can watch the film.

Region encoding is a pain; some things are not released in this region and I have to import from the US to get the films I want to see. Region encoding is designed to restrict the user to protect the artificial market prices that the film makers are putting on their product .. protecting their ability to rip off the customer and force their profit margins on us. In reality it is restricting our choice to only what the manufacturers think will sell in our regions.

You also missed the other trick about who is going to pay for all this packet snooping ... the consumer. The ISP's as a commercial enterprise will by default have to pass their portion of any investment in packet sniffing on to the customer. The portion that will come from the government will be coming out of public funds. The public and the customers will be paying for the policing of the enforcement that the media industries are demanding. We're footing the bill for all this impractical junk and it is about time that we put our collective foot down.

The last technical trick is encryption; I know of no system that is able to decrypt packets in real time. If the pirates switch to encryption systems, then the packet sniffing technologies just get completely gummed up.

Finally, you missed the complete coup de grace here ... that the music industry are a bunch of criminals ... don't believe me ... then read what Sony and others did to their customers by selling CD's with secretive software on it that created "root kits" on customers computers without their knowledge.

Yes ... that's right ... they broke the law. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/12/07/sony_cd_security/ among total disrespect for their paying customers by assuming that they were all criminals themselves.

I finish by giving you the last example that I sent recently to **** *****; I haven't had a response from him yet on it...

-----
Example 6

This is a civil matter, not a criminal one. What the heck is this doing in legislation? It should have been blown straight out of the door.

The Australian government have already proven that political mission creep is a fact when their firewall, brought in on the political back of blocking paedophiles, spectacularly backfired. No one trusts politicians, especially when bad laws are brought in to being, by flying in the face of all facts to the contrary. The Australian web filter managed to block a dentist, satanic sites, Christian sites, wikipedia pages and even a travel operator!!! Despite all this, the Australian politicians are still pushing for the filter. They are committing political suicide - http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/03/19/australia_list_leaked/ - and the same is going to happen here. No amount of politician talking will ever reverse public opinion ... because all experience to date, shows that politicians are lying.

To date, no one has done anything to seriously reverse that point of view.

So, if I'm such a big mouth, then what is my solution?

Well, technological solutions won't work. They are a waste of the public money. What costs aren't covered by government (taxpayer money) will have to be covered by the ISP (customer money) and once the public in general wake up to this, they will be crying for political blood; the heads of the politicians that signed up the British Public to footing the bill for what should be civil action funded by the recording industry with a level of proof that would stand up in a court of law.

Digital Rights Management only actually inconveniences the paying customer. Once an encryption system is in the public domain, either hardware or software, it will be hacked. Period. The hackers won't be bothered by the same grief as burdens the paying customer.

The companies have actually resorted to illegal means ... the most classic example is Sony installing a rootkit on to peoples computers without them knowing when they played a music CD on to their computers... http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/12/07/sony_cd_security/ ...and they didn't learn; they repeated it... http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/08/29/sony_rootkit_controversy/

DRM doesn't work.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/02/09/steve_gordon_drm/

The big music companies that are crying for legal protection are actually criminals in themselves.

What are the politicians going to do about it ... cut off Sony's internet connection? Social injustice is what it is. Big corporation so arrogant that it actually tried such a stunt. And British politicians did .. absolutely nothing.

The problem is not new. For some considerable years the public have known that the UK market is artificially inflated; that we are paying well over the odds; considerably more than other countries. The public also know that the actual artists are treated as cash cows. The blame for this situation rests to a good proportion in the laps of the music industry themselves.

There is only one way that I can see to reverse the piracy trend, and that is to make it untrendy. Make it so that piracy is as socially unacceptable as drinking and driving.

The only way to do that is for the music industry to stop trying to revive the goose that laid the golden eggs ... those days are over. Transparency over money is what is needed, and to play fair with the artists as well as the public. Once the public see that ... once the record labels cease to be the villains of the piece, then that only leaves one villain left in the picture ... the pirates.

Unfortunately, as long as politicians like Mandelson accept holidays and trips on the private yachts of the music industry executives, those executives will think that they still have a chance to continue to treat the artists and the public, like their own private piggy bank.

Regards,

Michelle.

Plain Envy

2010-03-03T15:19:00.002Z

El Reg did an article on the German courts deliveirng a telling off to the police on their data retention policy, saying that the 9mm toting green guards didn't have sufficient clue on what data they were keeping and why they were keeping it. It thus ordered masses of data to be destroyed.

The obvious discussion ensued among the Brits in the comment field. The one that moved me to report this was and Anonymous Coward who reported thus...

"I wonder what our great grandparents would have thought, if they knew their descendents would look at Germany's democratic freedoms with envy."

Home Server Build

2010-02-27T09:26:00.001Z

If you are feeling particularly suicidal, then you can spend an hour and a half watching these videos.

In the first part, I talk about some of the hardware options available for building a fault tolerant home server. Providing that you are happy with command line entering, then you can follow the how-to and the theory plans in order to create your own Open Solaris home server.

Along the way you'll learn how to plan your directory structure, learn how to apply user and group permissions to control who can see what, and also a little about the security aspect of design.

I chose Open Solaris for a few reasons...

1) It is free.
2) It has Sun Microsystems engineers behind much of the design.
3) It is secure out of the box
4) It uses ZFS

You can get Open Solaris from here but I would STRONGLY recommend that you wait for the 2010-3 build first.

I have a good deal of respect for many of the Sun Microsystems engineers. Yes, it is true that Sun's philosophy ran it in to the financial mire and that Oracle ended up buying it out, but that philosophy allowed some really wonderful stuff to flourish. People really seemed to be free from the managerial grief and I think it ended up in some wonderful product.

Technical translation...

At work, I play my part in looking after Ingres databases on Sun Sparc hardware running Solaris (the non-open version) and in terms fo money and actual footprint of hardware, I don't believe there is anything in its league which can touch Sun. If we were to translate the systems on to i386 hardware running Microsoft, we'd be dealing with something probably four times the physical size and, with multiple copies of the operating system (we would need multiple copies of Windows Server and Windows SQL ... and even then each database is so big that the consultants that deal with these databases day in, day out, say that MS SQL wouldn't be able to deal with one of our database instances.) The costs would rise and the performance would drop off a cliff ... and even if we did it, there would be no way that they would support us. It would be a suicide move.

Non-Technical translation...

Microsoft products don't scale up, can't play with the big boys and ... well, if you chose the MS path ... good luck.

So Open Solaris has many sections that are locked down. If you want them, you have to open them up. It is a philosophy which ensures that you are safe.

One of the people teaching a Solaris course that I went on, told a story about some of the customers complaints. "I've installed this, but I can't telnet to the box." "Exactly. Telnet is insecure so it is disabled. If you want it, you just have to enable it, but it is at your risk." The customer wasn't happy with this; they wanted all the features to be ready and switch on after installation. They just didn't get the security philosophy. More on this later.

ZFS is the acronym for Zetabyte File System. You remember the problem we had with FAT reaching its storage file limit so FAT32 came along to replace it, and then that hit its limit and NTFS came along to replace that? Well, ZFS can handle a Zetabyte of data in a pool before it has trouble. A Zetabyte is many, many terrabytes. It is going to be around for a long time.

ZFS has much more to offer than this, however. Even in this tutorial I'm only going to show you a mere fraction of its flexibility and power. It has powers of error correction and file system maintenance that other systems don't have. While some file systems would come across an illegal block, there are times when it would just naively serve you that bad block fully believing it to be valid data. ZFS can detect these blocks and do something about it.

And there is more to ZFS than even this. However, if you've got the stomach for it, here is a complete home server build, in an hour and a half. Strip out the funny stuff, and once you are used to the concepts, you can have a secure home server completely installed on your hardware in under an hour.

Software won't last forever.

2010-02-23T12:05:00.001Z

Portability of data is actually the prime cause for my concern on this subejct. This news from Google that it is shelving its entire Gears platform after only a few years of life, is perhaps a sign of things to come.

Now, perhaps more than ever, is a good time to sit back and think about the portability of our data.

Those of us on mobile phone contracts already face an annual or bi-annual headache of getting our contacts and data moved from one phone to another. Wouldn't it be great if we could just shift the memory card between phones and have all our contacts accessed that way ... like we used to have on the SIM cards before the data got to complex for the small SIM memory? I have recalled in other posts just what a nightmare it was for me to upgrade from one Samsung phone to another. Nah, the mobile phone manufacturers have other fish to fry ... customer convenience and experience just isn't on their road map.

The era of XP is nearly over. If Microsoft manage it, we'll be back to upgarding our operating system every couple of years ... again ... and the applications along with it. Actually, even Linux seems to be upgarding twice a year and some applications get dumped on there as well. Microsoft are already trying to claw back the document format, trying to keep people locked in to their proprietary formats, before it loses even more customer share to the Open Document Format.

I have always preached the separation of data from the operating system. Now, it looks like I have a new angle to preach; separation of data from the application. One thing is for sure, however; as technology progresses apace, we need to keep our data in as open and widely accessible format as possible ... who knows when the application suite will change again.

Any one in the audience have a Word Star import filter? (joke! ... or is it?)

First Freeview HD-TV goes on sale

2010-02-20T08:01:00.000Z

Much is being made of the new Panasonic TV. Personally, I'll be interested to see sales, especially now that 3D technology has been trumpeted to a waiting world. Which way will people jump now that their pockets aren't as deep as they used to be? Will people go for this, or hang on for wonderous 3D?

We've seen some interesting moves lately; among them is that Sony has abandoned its OLED TV sets (presumably due to the price) and has launched wholeheartedly in to 3D LED TV. The statistics talk as if LCD technology is increasing at a rate of knotts. OLED might very well be stuck on a portalbe deivce niche; not a bad outcome in itself although the green purists might not welcome that news.

However, the sales of this Panasonic unit will be interesting to see.

The other thing that has caught my eye is that producers seem to be moving away from the separates state of affairs and seem to have gone back to putting all the functionality back in the TV set ... with the option to outsource the audio, of course, for those probably decreasing few who will go to the trouble of a separate surround sound processor.

Separates do have advantages; the different components die at different times thus making replacing one component cheaper than buying the whole thing. In the all-in-one department, finding one device that does everything that you want it to, in the way that you want it to do it, is a much tougher prospect and one that would have to be repeated whenever the set dies.

Personally, I prefer separate remotes; there is nothing as annoying as jam packed remotes with tiny buttons. Give me two or three comfortable remotes; one for the TV, one for the recording system, another for the DVD/media player and I'm happy. It gives a clear dividing line between what is for what. However I haven't seen any manufacturers pick up on this; just because all the functions are in one box, that doesn't mean that everything has to be crammed on to one remote control. More customer choice please!

While I am unlikely to go for any of Sony's offerings, it will be interesting to see where the other companies go. I'm perfectly happy with my old CRT unit for the time being.

I'm also anxious to avoid regionalisation if I can. Region free is a boon to me becuase not everything gets released in all teritories, and that sucks. A not inconsiderate portion of my DVD collection is of old programmed that are only brought out in the US. Even some old UK shows. That annoys the hell out of me; but then, when did companies ever take any notice of their customers.

Our IT students future

2010-02-05T10:45:00.001Z

It is about time that this happened.

The UK should follow suit. It is an unfortunate circumstance of our Microsoft ways that many, "technical," people can't get beyond the button pushing stage. If the option isn't in the registry, control pannel or an HTML control interface, it can't be handled.

Not only that, but we've got instances of teachers thinking that Linux is a virus, so what chance do our students really stand when it comes to the crunch of serious IT knowledge being required to do battle? At the moment, I believe that much of our specialist IT knowledge is down to those individuals who pursue these avenues on a personal basis; we really need to change our attitudes and alter our view on this situation.

On the economic side, if companies like Cisco and Nortel go under, then the only country providing serious IT communications kit will be the likes of China, and the security implications of this are already very much feared; rightly or wrongly.

My opinion is that we need to get our IT students out of the dumbed down microsoft environment and instead give them the tools to think for themselves and the ability to drive any piece of IT that they come accross. The consequences are quite serious already; consider the implications of failing the next generation and not teaching them to survive in the modern information age.

The Great Leveller

2010-01-31T21:07:00.000Z

I've just finished watching, "The Virtual Revolution," on BBC 2 in the UK. It has started discussing the Internet; most of the big players are involved in the program.

The crux of the show so far is that the Internet began on the ideals of being free; not only monetarily free but also idealogicaly free; free from any form of central control.

It has, however, brought in to stark focus the immense power that has been wielded by the few players in the market today. The searches being done through Google; the goods being bought from Amazon; the tat traded on e-bay; the communication being undertaken on Facebook ... etc. although it has not yet ventured in to the impact that these services are having on our high streets; at least not yet.

These monopolies, however, are not as stable as they may seem. They are made powerful by one force and one force alone ... us. Also, the Internet is far from free. Our connections must be paid for; the information that we request and also the information that we publish carries a charge, a cost. Even though the information itself is free, we have to pay to have it shuffled around.

The monopolies have to take care to deliver good service and good value for money, or else we will go elsewhere. Make no mistake that these global players should never underestimate the commercial world and the readiness of others to step in to the gap.

This discontent could happen for any reason; any act which resonates with sufficient user base could see large swathes of people move from one service to another at the touch of a button. It could be a spat over money, like e-bay has done in changing the rules. It could be political like a stance that a company takes. The disaster could wreck havoc in a short amount of time. Careers have been ruined by people saying the wrong thing, at the wrong time, to the right audience. Company fortunes can equally change as quickly.

At the moment, this blog; my free voice, is riding on the back of a service provided by Google. It is paid for by money they are making somewhere else. But what if the market changes and Google start getting short of cash? What is to prevent them from changing the rules and pressing that, "monetise" button for me; what power do I have? What legal redress do I have? Realistically ... none. So much for my free speech.

However, there are always other services hanging around; if I didn't like Google's attitude I could just take the backup of my blog and import it in to another service ... (you DO have a backup, don't you? Enough on-line services have vanished overnight and taken peoples data with them, so that anyone who values their on-line voice should have learned to back it up!) ... 'cause you can bet your pretty little behind that should Google piss of their bloggers, that some other service will be there, ready and waiting with import tools at the ready, to pick up their hacked off bloggers ... knowing that the advertising dollars will certainly follow. All they have to do is avoid making the same mistake with the community that Google did and they are sitting pretty.

It could happen ... overnight.

I think that Dr Aleks Krotoski has it right; that the web will constantly re-invent itself. No one entity will ever gain control, but rather than being a great leveller, there will be lots of peaks and troughs.

Windows 8 next year?

2010-01-29T12:57:00.000Z

It seems that Microsoft have no intention of suffering like they have with the long reign of Windows XP when their revenue stagnated. However, have they gone too far this time? If The Register are to be believed from the information they have gleaned, Microsoft could be set to ramp up the Windows releases.

This tactic could well come back to bite them. I believe it is unlikely that customers will want to put full steam ahead on every release and this could end up with a legacy of out of step products which everyone gets hacked off with. The amount of cash outlay for updates will increase and I beleive that people will feel this too hard on their pockets.

Personally, I'd say get ready to jump ship as the iron ship that is Microsoft looks to be on course for an iceberg.

In limbo

2010-01-28T11:18:00.002Z

My, "personal," technology support seems to be in limbo. Has been for a while. With previous mobile phones being unable to store anything of serious consequence, I have used the Palm for a number of years to hold the things which were beyond the phone.

After five years, however, the battery is useless. The Palm software was a pain for synching between multiple PC's and my requests for help from Palm themselves met a brick wall. The company didn't endear themselves to me so I've scrubbed the Pre from my shopping list.

Also, companies are throwing patent litigation at each other like confetti in a bid to either wrestle money from each other or to deal their competitors a fatal blow. In one such battle, Tivo enforcing a patent against EchoStar caused their customers to loose their ability to record TV shows; a serious loss of functionality. With various other spats going around, staying Open Source seems to be the only way to avoid much of the potential headache that the screwed up US Patent system is causing customers.

Phones, however, are growing up. There is a possibility that the barrier of Linux support might well be smashed thanks to Android, etc. and my mobile phone contract isn't due for renewal until March; I can even hold on a little beyond this point. However, much is still in flux. That single common power connector hasn't materialised yet and if we don't watch it, Google might manage to end up as the only provider of open source kit by closed licencing deals like it tried with the book scanning effort; that really would be a stupid kettle of fish for the open source community to find itself in.

Turn-by-turn sat nav is close to being free on a number of platforms as the various big players try to use their financial clout to hammer the opposition in to submission. This already threatens to deal fatal blows to the TomTom's and Garmins of this world.

There is no doubt in my mind that by the time I am ready to upgrade, there will be a mobile on the market which will render the Palm obsolete. Good news for me as I can chuck another crable and charger in the bin; less to carry and keep in the home. I do need to be aware, however, that with all my eggs in one device basket I need to be much more protective of that device. It is too easy for the phone to simply fall off my hip.

Also, mobiles still haven't grown up in my book. Flexibility and portability of contacts across platforms still hasn't completely happened yet; there is always proprietary information that gets lost, or isn't importable in to a new device. Some manufacturers are deliberately keeping information tied to their device as a way of keeping customers loyal to their brand; others are simply inept, not even providing a proper upgrade path for customers who have bought their latest model. My key hope is that the open platforms will knock this stupidity on the head for good.

I shall see what a March market brings me.

Starting to crack

2010-01-18T23:25:00.000Z

Oh, what a comparison.

The current server has three hard drives in it and is pulling 0.38amps and transferring a large read at a steady 22MiB/s from a mirror set.

The three external hard disks are pulling 0.12amps and are transferring a large write at 8.5MiB/s and perform the same read at 10MiB/s from a raid 5 set.

By the time that an actual computer is factored in to run the external hard drives, this is looking to be about even stephens for amps to performance.

At 240 volts, 0.38 amps comes to 91.2 watts, on a 700 VA UPS, that equates to about 32 minutes of run time.

If we do the same for the hard disks that comes to 29 watts. Add on the 26 watt average of the Tranquil system and that is 55 watts which comes to about an hour on the UPS.

The extra equipment cost is going to be around £200 (for two flash drives) if I use the existing PC and about £450 if I get a Tranquil. (including the flash hard drives) Both the Tranquil and the existing PC would be 64 bit and have 2 gig of RAM.

Conclusion -
Desktop - 30mins on UPS, 22MiB/s transfer and lower cost to implement. Needs fan maintenance.
Fanless - 1 hour on UPS, 10MiB/s transfer and higher cost to implement. Doesn't need maintenance.

I've made up my mind. I'm going to stick with the existing desktop PC for now. Technology will go further in a few years and things will only get better.

Flexible newspaper is here

2010-01-18T10:45:00.001Z

I have to admit it came sooner than I thought. The Register has the lowdown. Can't yet be folded like a broadsheet, but we can't be too far off it now; all it will take is a hinge material and some rugged flat connectors and it is job done.

Surely, from here, it can only be a few short years before we face the death of the newspaper as we know it. However, I only take this to mean the distribution, the physical printing. In terms of content and layout there has been no sparkling step forward yet.

And colour is on its way too.

The plan - where did it all go wrong?

2010-01-17T16:42:00.017Z

I think it went wrong on a couple of scores. Firstly, I failed to recognise that hooking up a drive of greater than 1Tb to a 32 bit system would be asking for trouble. The hard disks I chose were thus out of the reach of the FitPC2, with its 32 bit processor.

The second problem seemed to be a mismatch between the SD-SATA converters and Solaris. At the moment, after two days of testing I can assure you that Solaris will happily install and run on an SD card which is on the USB bus. It installed on the SD card slot on the NB200. It is currently installing on the SD card, in a SD/USB converter plugged in to a USB socket on the back of the PC I've been testing on.

It looks that the SD-SATA converter is unable to function as a boot device; but I'll test that later on when I try and install Ubuntu to an SD card through it, rather than Solaris; that'll determine where I went wrong.

So what to do going forward? Well, it is probably just as well that I have to go for a 64 bit version of Solaris anyway; as this is designed to go forward and be expandable I'd have hit the 1Tb drive problem when I upgraded the hard disks anyway; so this is a case of sooner rather than later and at least I haven't got the machine itself.

With newer machines now coming with 64 bit processors as standard, if I transferred the operating system to another machine in the future, I wouldn't have been using the full capabilities of the processor, and, again, I'd have hit the 1Tb limit problem.

Conclusion is that although I've got it badly wrong this time, it has brought out issues that I'm glad I now know.

So what has the wasted cost been? Well, the three IDE and SATA SD converters are the main wastage, plus some USB cables that I now won't be using because of the different hard drives. There is coming up to £100 wasted right there. The chances that I'll be using those cards myself in the future is minimal, but there is still a chance that I might use the USB cables ... there is still a thought that I might use some passport hard drives in this fashion in another machine ... I'm not sure yet.

The 16 gig SD cards cost about £100 for the two of them, and while only being Ultra II rather than the Extreme III that I normally use in the cameras, the cards will be used and won't go to waste. Indeed, with the fact that Solaris is capable of running off them on USB converters, there is still a possibility that they will be used for the intended purpose.

So, I hope that if you're following this, that my screw ups and wasted money will help save you from making the same mistakes. Bugger me but if this keeps going the way it is, I'm actually liable to be using more amps by the time I'm finished, than the machine I'm replacing. The hard disks are already slated at 0.8 amps each; 2.4 amps draw for all thee. (on paper) Not good.

Dream power saving server - shit, meet fan.

2010-01-16T16:22:00.001Z

Well, plans for my dream low power server have taken several knocks.

Firstly, the FitPC2 is likely to be a 32 bit processor. If it is, I've got a problem as the 1.5Tb USB disk drives I have bought, are too large to work on a 32 bit architecture ... or so says Solaris on my ageing A10 laptop. Funny, as Kubuntu on my NB200 is perfectly happy with it. Further testing, installing Solaris on the NB200 proved that I'm going to need a 64 bit architecture. Damn.

To replace the FitPC2 is going to be the Tranquil T7 PC 230 system. With two 80gig hard disks inside it (not much option as my efforts to use the SD cards via the SD-SATA adaptors have turned to complete pants) my energy saving ideas have gone straight to shit.

Also, instead of the three Passport hard disks, that were going to cost £450 for the three, I ended up with three 1.5Tb drives which each have their own transformers. Well, at £260 that was a significant price saving and a storage gain of about 1Tb. (you never get a full Tb out of these things, they are always a bit short)

My credit card has taken a hammering this month due to the kitchen, and will take a hammering next month because of the work on the car and the car insurance, among other things. I'll likely order one of the Tranquil systems in March ... finance permitting, as one of these is going to come in at...

T7 Atom 230      
RAM - Type: 2GB DIMM PC-4200 (240 pin) (+£24.18)  
First Hard Drive - Type: 80GB 2.5" (+27.97)  
Second Hard Drive - Type: 80GB 2.5" (+27.97)  
OS - Type: None  
Wall Bracket - Type: None  
Price:    £261.12 (Excluding: VAT at 17.5%)

... £310 ... but for a fanless system with two 80gig hard drives and 2gig of RAM ... that sounds like a reasonable deal to me. Postage will probably be extra.

If you want an operating system pre-installed on top of that, then get ready for the price shock...
XP Home (SP3) (+£78.46)
XP Pro (SP3) (+£129.23)
Vista Home Basic (+£80.18)
Vista Home Premium (+£103.15)
Vista Business (+£131.20)
Vista Ultimate (+£170.75)

China having problems

2010-01-13T07:42:00.001Z

Well, this is an interesting turn up for the books.

Last year I ordered three devices. These devices allow me to take an SD memory card and put it in a computer; the computer would believe it was a traditional hard disk drive.

One of the three was faulty. I sent it back. Guess what ... they can't supply a replacement citing, "the supplier just informed us that they couldn't deliver the item to us any more because of shortage of raw materials."

If Chinese suppliers are having problems because of raw materials already, then the rest of the world are going to have issues; prices of equipment are going to rise sooner than expected; they were slated to rise at the latter half of this year; not because of actual shortage of materials but because manufacturers, sensing a drop in demand because of the recession, have slowed down their production.

For people at the bottom of the chain like me, this is going to translate in to higher prices and some things are no longer going to be available at all. This is not good.

There is one other thing that is coming out of dealing with China ... they don't seem to care. They don't care that the higher failure rate of their products costs other people more money because of returns postage and also lost time. They don't care that they can't get an alternative. (incidentally, these items were originally bought before China executed a mentally ill British Citizen.) If China is gaining an increased sense of balshieness with their increasing economic power, then that is a bad signal for the rest of the world; those test fired missile units that China pretended were meant for a space program, is another bad signal.

The other thing is that we don't have any consumer rights when dealing with China, which is why when things go bad as they have done now, there is sod all in the way of come back.

The low power server plan

2010-01-11T07:01:00.002Z

Welcome to the plan. It is going to cost about £700 by the time it is done. It delivers future proofing, ease of maintenance, the minimum chance of data loss and ultimately, I have control of it; unlike something similar to a DROBO.

It is based on a version of the Fit PC2 which is due out sometime in April, so I'll get the parts between now and then.

The particular Fit PC has a bay for a hard drive and a Mini SD slot at the font. That allows me to use two 16gig SD cards to hold the operating system; one is a mirror of the other so if one of the cards fails, the other can still keep on truckin'. Also, having 2gig of RAM will mean the operating system doesn't have to keep writing back to the memory cards, further lengthening their lives. I would have loved the card port at the front to be SD, but I've been told that isn't happening. The original SD card is put in the hard drive bay by means of a converter card.

It has four USB ports at the back. Three of these will feed to the hard disk drives while the fourth connects to the powered USB hub. The hard disks are expensive because they receive their power from the USB cables. If I went for units which came with separate power bricks then I would easily halve the price, but that would also introduce separate transformers in to the array; probably the most power-wasteful part of all this. The powered USB hub therefore provides power to the three hard disks. It also is the means by which the mouse and keyboard are attached, because with three ports at the back of the unit being occupied by hard disks, that only leaves one USB slot left ... except for the two at the front which are Mini USB so adaptors are necessary.

So, here you have it. About £300 on the FitPC, about £300 on the USB hard drives and another £100 on the memory cards. Probably a little over £700 in total.

The other reason is that I've got to do something to my present storage unit anyway; I'm facing upheaval of the data because I've run out of space on the hard disks. One thing I can do with Linux/Unix is that I can transfer the operating system hard drive between computers and it won't blue screen on me; (Windows hates being moved between computers) so long as the base architecture is the same, it will work. You can't ask for more flexible than that. The hard drives will also be using a system called ZFS, which is also portable. I can remove them from this system, put them in another system and ... bam ... they'll work. Not only that, but I can upgrade the drives with replacements in a few years ... or even as I go ... and once they are all replaced they will use the extra space they've got ... no reconfiguration, no nothing. Pain free future-proof computing ahoy.

Disaster strikes if two or all three of the hard drives go down at once. Then, I need my backup; so there is still going to be a need to back up the data. I'm not getting away that lightly; but the odds are minimised by the introduction of surge protectors and also a UPS to help smooth the spikes that we get when the power comes on and off rapidly before it finally fails. Hopefully, if they draw so little power, I'm hoping they can ride out the storms of the power failures.

If the Fit PC itself dies, then the system is down until a replacement gets here; I'm not going to be able to afford to have a complete replacement unit. If I replace all three primary machines with FitPC units, then I'll have a spare here, but that is way in the future.

If the power supply for the USB hub fails, then I have a separate USB power transformer that can feed power to the hard drives, so I'm covered there.

Surviving the weather

2010-01-07T21:42:00.006Z

Modern homes. Power cuts. The threat of gas supplies running low and the UK running out of heat. This is a very real threat we're facing. Half the UKs gas supplies come from abroad and we have coal fired power stations which will go off commission shortly with nothing to replace them. What the hell are people to do? Also, what the hell has this got to do with a blog on technology anyway ... what use is technology when the power gets frazzled?

I'm a believer in being self sufficient. I am not impressed by the fact that this country can not survive isolation and keep its population warm and fed. While I'm not about to grab a gun and head off to live in the woodland, I've got to take precautions.

Well, technology plays a big part. Perhaps more than we think. Technology is everywhere in our lives. It is technology that has given us A, A+ and A++ rated machines; conserve power and save our energy bills. Also, our home technology; trust me, if it was cost efficient to install an underground heat exchanger in the house, I'd have damn well done it by now. However, pre-built homes like ours can only do what we can with more efficient double glazing and better loft insulation.

In many ways, I count myself lucky to have bought the house when we did. Yes, most of it needs replacing, but that is exactly what we are doing and the time is right to do it. In all aspects of technology, monumentous leaps have been made forward. We are going to benefit from serious improvements in modern double glazing and energy efficient appliances. There are even good arguments for scaling down your computers, but not necessarily losing out as I'll explain in future posts as I work my way through one recipe of a new power efficient storage server.

Computers have become more efficient, however. My office, normally hot, is seeing me type this with cold fingers and chilly legs. Yes, the new computer I built and posted about is running at less than 30c at the processor surface. The hard disk was also an energy efficient choice; running one is not as safe as running multiple, but when it comes to energy usage and heat generation, I can't beat it.

I have to admit, however, to find myself turning my thoughts to what happens when we have to be self sufficient. In my youth, I remember a trip to a fire station and getting the chance to use breathing equipment in a smoke filled room. It opened my eyes to the risks and effects of fire; the balance of cost of equipment against the risk of life means I'm more prone to spending the money; it is more worthwhile to me than any insurance policy.

There is a fire blanket and extinguisher in the kitchen along with a first aid box. The house is protected by two mains powered, battery backed up smoke alarms which are linked ... one goes off, they both go off; we're not going to be caught sleeping in a fire. There is also a first aid and fire extinguisher in the car ... not only that, but thanks to work needing a certain number of first aid personnel, I volunteered for the course. I'm equipped and trained. If the worst happens, at least I've got a plan that I can toss out of the window.

If in doubt, ask your local fire service to come around and help you plan; you're requirements are going to be different to mine and the fire personnel I have known have been all to ready to help with advice and cost-effective solutions. At the very least ... and I mean the very least ... plan an escape should fire occur.

Technology only goes so far, and then you've got problems. The critical question I am asking myself now, after suffering the outages we've suffered this last few days is what to do if there is no power and we're stuck.

I have concluded that our most likely worst scenario is going to be three or four days. Any more than that and the county is in serious trouble. On top of that, there are the inconvenient power cuts that happen now and then. With this house, the principle threats are high winds, snow and low temperatures; I don't think we're at risk of flooding. That means our worst enemy is having no power.

Let's start with the inconveniences, which actually happen in this village on frequent occasion. Loss of power in the short term means about an hour. By that time we've got no problem with heat or water; the most inconvenient is that the entertainment suffers and we can't boil the kettle.

I've focussed in on two cheap-ish UPS systems - This is one and this is the other. The former is designed to take control of the broadband router and will feed a low power device like that through a small power outage. Internet is becoming more and more important in our communication system. I'll have to run a test to find out for how long it will maintain it. News on that after my testing is done.

The second type will be designed to run the newer low power server I am building, or a PC or a laptop. Again, more news after I build it and manage to complete some test runs. I'll be using a new version of the Fit PC2 which will be out in April, coupled with some USB hard drives. Again ... more on that as I do it. There will be a post on my plan, here, in a few days.

This should keep the core computer systems running through small power cuts; but the problem with UPS systems is that the large batteries inside them have a limited life span, so if you throw too much money at your UPS solution, you might have to replace it in a few years. When the UPS units at work fail, it is usually cheaper to buy a new unit than replace the internal battery. This is the one area where we haven't hit the crest of technology yet ... battery life. Better UPS will come in a few short years.

They also won't run kettles or heating appliances; not enough juice. That leaves the UPS fine for our communications, but not the big TV, the kettle or the electric fire.

The larger question of what to do when the power loss is more pronounced ... say from six hours to a few days. No gas, no electricity. What do you do?

In terms of low cost, low maintenance and low space, I think I've now got almost all the problems sorted.

My thoughts turn to two methods of attack; firstly making the house efficient so that it doesn't lose too much heat. I'm already near completing replacing the loft insulation; I'll probably add another layer at some point in the future. This is a long term situation. The walls are already insulated so that just leaves replacing the double glazing units for more efficient ones, which we have to do anyway because of the state of the ones that are installed ... and probably most importantly, get them fitted properly this time. Draughts are the number one enemy. A longer term issue.

Light is a done deal thanks to the humble LED. I have a wind up camping lamp similar to this one which means there will always be light. On the other hand, you can get many hours use out of an LED torch which can have something like 20 LEDs in it. Plenty of light options which are now cheap to run, keep and are reliable. I've actually got a mixture of both wind up and battery.

Heating food is a no brainer inside the powerless home. A camping gas stove and enough gas to last a while. Mine is like this one. That will also provide some heat while being used, but that won't sort out the final problem ... keeping the house heated ... or more appropriately, a nominated room. Care has to be taken over any fumes and as most modern houses have no solid fuel burning ability, choice is limited.

So, how do you generate heat when there is no power and no gas? Well, one generator of heat is the human body. The space blanket is a classic; however they are thin and tear. If surviving for a few days you want a degree of comfort. That is why I've got a couple of these coming. One of these under conventional bedding and you'll be toasty and warm without needing the extra space to store, wash and maintain full sized sleeping bags.

Of course, that kind of solution is nothing like the comfort of having an entire room heated. However, I've got an emergency situation covered for around £150. By that time, rescue services should definitely have reached us or the power be restored.

Generators are a conundrum for the home. A 2Kw generator can be had for as little as £300 but you've got the issue of storing the petrol/diesel and it will only run for as long as it has fuel. It also requires maintenance and there is the risk of the fuel storage itself. If I can not find a more elegant solution, then I may have to turn to one of these generators.

Chemical heat could have an answer. Many of us are already familiar with the hand warming kinds of pads and of the self-heating food cans. There must be possibilities there, however scouring the Army surplus stores for some form of small, cheap device that can heat a room without causing fumes, is still not turning up results.

The last few words I'll give on this general subject is planning an escape route in event of a fire and also having some communication channel in the event of power failure. In the UK, always ensure you have a telephone connected which doesn't require power in the home ... something which will feed off the power supplied by the telephone exchange.

All this stuff doesn't actually take that much time to plan and sort out. At least, should the worst happen and I'm stood at the pearly gates, I can at least say that I did my best!

TV - Funny I should post that

2010-01-05T16:55:00.000Z

The Register has posted a report about various dedicated 3D channels starting up. 2010 is definately going to see what might be the final shake up in television hardware - Once OLED is in TV, the only next major change that I can personally see, is when residential broadband looses the bandwidth cap and TV on demand becomes a factual reality.

Coming up I will share my thoughts on the future of the licence fee and also advertising.

TV - the next moves

2010-01-05T08:01:00.000Z

Well, here we go. 3D TV is going to be with us shortly and by the end of 2010 should be affordable enough for peoples homes. That is the point at which I'll probably change the downstairs, main TV.

DVB2 TVs are around and about, although in some places you've got to be eagle eyed to spot them. This is necessary if you're like me and don't like a satellite dish on your home, considering that the standard TV areal is bad enough. DVB2 is needed to bring high definition video broadcasting to the HD-TV that you've likely bought recently. Either that, or you're happy to reserve it for the Blue Ray system.

DVB2 won't make that much of a price difference to TV sets but it is worth the wait for the new tech if you don't have a sky dish.

Perhaps the other big news in the tech field is the death of Teletext. The services available will be drastically cut down, but the long story short is that the Internet has killed this long running information service.

The start of 2010 is still seeing high cost flash hard drives, so I wouldn't expect TVs to come with built in flash hard drive recorders just yet; maybe in another couple of years ... perhaps smaller sixed drives of 64gig might see an appearance before the end of the year. Other than that it will likely be a traditional platter hard disk ... but if you are considering a new TV with built in recording, see if you can ensure that the hard drive is swappable for flash in the coming years if you want a TV to last.

It seems like the cheaper, smaller sets are still favouring the all-in-one approach while the larger sets are still focussing on the screens being as thin as possible, which means audio processors, tuners, recorders, etc. being in a separate digi-box or boxes. I'm going to wait until the 3D phenomenon settles down before I look in to this market ... but now I'm going to start to look for a DVB2, small, TV set to replace the one in Mum's bedroom ... she has wanted a new one for a while now to get rid of the bulk.

The other big thing to watch is the possible disappearance of SCART, or at least the severe reduction on SCART import ports ... with my original X box and my VHS recorder using SCART as a high quality output, I'm still going to want to use SCART to connect these, but it is likely that the HDMI connectors will now take over the back of the TV. Maybe I'll be back to UHF for the VHS and the X Box ... fortunately, the DVD format has to be carried forward to the new machines.

People were reluctant to ditch VHS to DVD; it took many, many years for sales to switch and the main format to become DVD with the picture quality being the main drive ... the switch from DVD to Blu Ray has been much slower than this because there is little actual gain in the system.

DVD will eventually die when the compact disk is replaced with solid state, perhaps crystals, but the information on the DVDs is capable of being backed up, so even though the DVD format itself will eventually die, at least it can be easily separated from the media much more easily than VHS ever could be.

Petition Approved

2009-12-18T19:05:00.000Z

Well here it is. Any UK citizen or ex-pat can support this petition. Um ... yippee?

Fit PC not as fit as I thought.

2009-12-16T12:57:00.001Z

A good look at the device leaves me wondering.

Firstly, the power button is a soft switch which appears to function the same way as any other soft switch, however the BIOS doesn't contain a function to restart the machine when power is returned.

"Auto resume," as Fit call it, is done "through a hardware re-work that is carried out at the board level and is thus not something that can be added post-purchase or through a BIOS change." That sounds alarm bells.

It also probably explains why Open Solaris doesn't respond to the keyboard when, during the installation routine, it fails to listen to the keyboard. Sounds like someone is cutting corners as there is also no legacy USB option in the BIOS either.

The situation sound to have a remedy in the pipeline, "This is a temporary situation for the Fit PC2 product line as the Auto-On functionality will be standard on all models and version from the middle-to-end of Q1 2010, but for the moment customers do need to specify when ordering whether they want their Fit PC2 with or without it." ... but if you check out the ordering process, all is not that straightforward.

Auto Resume is only available if you order Windows, but then you can't have wi-fi. If you order the diskless, as I did, you can have the option of wi-fi but not auto-resume. If you order the Linux model then you can't have either wi-fi OR auto-resume. Excuse me? What sort of insanity is this?

On top of that, the box it came in listed the wrong specs and be aware that if you don't go for the wi-fi, then they leave an empty hole in the back for dust, spiders and things that go bump in the night to intrude in to the unit; they don't even plug it.

At the moment, I'm very dissapointed with this. Be bloody careful of the small print and examine the ordering information very carefully ... don't do what I did and read all the blurb, decide, "This is exactly what I need," and then just hit the order button. Also, given what I've now found out about the hardware I'd have to give this a serious run through before I could trust it.

I thought it was too bloody good to be true.

The Fit PC II reaches me

2009-12-15T10:39:00.000Z

It has arrived this morning. The Fit PC II. Running an Atom 1.6Ghz processor, but only with 1Gig of RAM. I got the diskless version.

Good points...

Great size.

Reasonable processor

1Ghz network

HDVI - comes with a cable to conenct to a DVI monitor (more later)

Six USB sockets

Space for a user replaceable hard drive

Bad points...

The memory could be a bit faster on the bus (more later)

Mini SD could be a full SD

The machine has a reasonable processor but the RAM looks a bit small. I can use it for my purposes, but for desktop use it needs 2gig ... a 2gig model is coming in January, but it was more cash. I expect this machine to be a good little runner, just like my NB200 - but the NB200 has its performance boosted by faster memory running at 800Mhz which I boosted to 2gig; the 1gig just wasn't enough and was straining the storage.

Overall, the interfaces are good. It comes with a wireless option (for extra cash) which gives portability, but the built in network interface is a screaming 1Ghz; more than enough.

The IR sensor is a bit questionable, but if meant to sit beneath the TV (which, with the HDMI port, it could easily) it would benefit someone to have a remote control (however, the HDMI doesn't carry audio, I am told, so the stereo output would need to be separately jacked in to an amp.)

The Mini SD card is a bit of a puzzler. Many cameras have SD cards in them these days, so not having the option to directly insert an SD (easily) in to the machine is a small handicap.

All in all, it is an elegant, cheap solution to a thin client media machine, although it can't go the full hog of surround sound digital audio.

For my purposes, how does it fit?

Well, I have been weighing this up against the dual network model due out in January and I have to admit to being a little puzzled. That model seems to be aimed at firewall applications, but it still has a hard drive bay. For my mind, this could be better served by being replaced with two SD card bays which are externally accessible ... hooked up to two SATA channels.

Hard drives can suffer head crashes, etc. as we all know, but also a solid state version of the drives can take up considerable space. Seems more sane to have two SD card bays in a network/server type solution ... especially as the SD/XD format is available and SD cards go up presently to 16gig and above; an ideal size for a server OS ... while Micro SD cards seem to be choked at 8Gig, not totally comfortable.

I have a concern about the soft power button, but as this has been advertised for 24/7 server on the box, I'm presuming that there will be a "last state" option in the BIOS that will bring it back up automatically if there is a power cut.

The future?

Well, with 2gig of faster RAM, a full SD slot and minus the IR, this would look to be a nice little desktop replacement for people who don't do that much heavy work, don't use 3D games and don't do video processing. I think it would likely work well for people doing image editing, though.

The newer version with 2 network ports, with solid state memory options rather than a traditional hard drive, should rock for long term firewall and ruting applications, local DHCP and DNS service provision and ... with the USB ports as well, could even be a great little print server.

Petition submitted

2009-12-11T21:27:00.000Z

Well, believe it or not, I've submitted a petition to Number 10. We'll see if it is accepted. The long story short is ...

Items such as mobile phones, cameras, drawing tablets, webcams, wireless broadband etc. are only supplied with Windows and sometimes Mac drivers; very rarely Linux. It should be made law that any manufacturer bringing goods to market should include software and support for any operating system which has at least 1% market share. To do otherwise is anti-competitive and prevents upcoming operating systems from even gaining a foothold in the market place. People who choose any operating system other than those favoured by the manufacturers, are thus penalised for their choice and the operating system market place becomes stagnant. This is allowing domination by whomever the manufacturers favour and removes customer choice and fair competition.

Not-so-smart energy meters

2009-12-02T12:24:00.001Z

It should come as no surprise to anyone that the energy companies are happy to install these meters at no charge. They will, as a result, be able to fire their entire metre reading force.

What it delivers to me, as a customer, is nothing. I know how much energy I'm using. Only a dimwit will not be able to realise that spending half the time in the shower will halve the electricity used.

I already let the energy company know the meter readings so I don't get estimated bills. This doesn't save them from having to send someone to check up on me, however, to ensure I'm not lying.

I already know the time spaces where I get cheap rate, so that the washing machine goes on in the early hours of the morning and finishes just as we are waking up.

To me, the consumer, the new meters will deliver nothing. To the energy companies it will deliver a considerable saving in saff numbers, pension responsibility, vehicle and transport costs for these staff, etc. and you can bet that this saving won't be reflected in our energy bills.

I would say that if you wanted to keep British jobs, then pettition your MP. However, legislation can not actually stand in the way of progress; there is no point. However, when I look at my new meter, whenever it actually comes, I will be glaring at it and resenting the 2 watts of energy it consumes, for all the reasons stated above.

The companies should, however, be forced to pass the savings on to the consumer. If only that it will ease the financial burden of those meter readers who are being thrown on to the scrap heap and will have to survive on the dole.

Broken Promises

2009-11-28T08:01:00.001Z

A good video, but I don't trust Microsoft OR Apple. The only thing is that Apple doesn't make any promises about not locking you in to their solutions. The news articles about Apples behaviour just keep on growing. Guess they are not immune to a bit of corporate greed either.

Will the iPhone keep its crown?

2009-11-12T10:26:00.000Z

There is no doubt that with the iPhone propelling Apple past Nokia as the number 1 handset manufacturer, Nokia are shaking in their boots. But will it keep hold of this?

Personally, I would argue not. At the moment people are using their iPhones in intuative ways, but there is a lot about the Apple technology that prevents innovation. As quoted in this article, "Apple's end user licensing agreement for the iPhone SDK forbids applications from downloading and running interpreted code." and that means a firm grip on innovation and customer choice.

This is, I believe, the thing which will bring the crown from Apples head and, once nestled on their shoulders, will contract around their throat. Nokia has to move fast, however, not only on their patent enforcement but also on the next generation device. They have to get themselves out of their current box.

Samsung has to also get themselves out of their fug. Android support might just do it but we'll still have to see where it goes; and Samsung have a very, very long way to improve its customer services and a massive leap to make in its software support arena, which has so far contained the worst examples of programming design failure I've seen this side of the turn of the century.

I reckon it is just a matter of a year or two and the iPhone will be yesterdays news; shame it can't wrap up a cod and chips.

And my opinion on the portable gaming arena? It is a dead and gone issue; no game has been about platform, it has been about playability. Always has, always will be. A great game on a crap phone will always play better than a crap game on a good phone. Nintendo have nothing to fear from the iPhone; where it looses in the hardware game, it should win in the software arena ... it has one thing that its competitors in the gaming arena don't have ... innovation.

How to build a PC

2009-11-09T06:36:00.000Z

Building a PC from scratch can seem a daunting thing to do, but it has its value. Firstly, the value of the hardware. You're not dealing with the kind of cut down, proprietary systems that you'll find from Dell or the like, and you're not usually dealing with shop overheads so in terms of bang for your buck, you get a good deal.

There are still good reasons for buying a desktop as opposed to a laptop. If you've watched the Open Source Part 1 series on my You Tube channel then you'll know that the larger manufacturers mess around with the hardware and in some cases cripple entire feature sets. (Those wanting to use the XP virtual machine feature of Windows 7 will likely know of the much publicised Sony and Fujitsu killing of the VM part of the processor) Also, in terms of performance there is no way that a laptop can match a desktop of equivalent price.

If you genuinely want a machine which will do what you want it to do, when you want it to do it, then building your own is still the best way to do it. You could, of course, pay for someone else to do it for you, but it is still, in theory, the same thing.

So if you have the best part of fifty minutes spare with your life and you want to see me build a PC from the parts that can be bought, and explain how I do it while I go, then these videos should help explain the whole process and, hopefully, give you the confidence to give it a go.

Time to play with the big boys.

2009-11-06T17:18:00.000Z

So what the hell is going on? Well, it is straightforward. If you get a new PC then it is usually going to be multi core and capable of handling a shed load of RAM.

So what is the problem with this? Well, the problem is that many people will try and load XP on it. The majority of the benefit is not there. When it comes to the crunch, XP is of an age when it needs to be left on the shelf.

Bottom line - people need to get up and take the step in to the next generation. Whichever way you jump, whether it is Linux or Windows 7, you just need to make the jump. It can not be avoided for that much longer; maybe another year, two at the very most.

It will be this comming twelve months that Windows 7 will need to prove itself, because people will need to make that jump and by this time next year I believe that will be the crunch.

If Windows 7 lets people down over the next year, then that is when Apple and Linux will probably see the largest share gain they have had in a long while. All eyes are on W7.

The other thing is its licence protection system; if hackers can't get past it then they too will have to abandon XP for Linux. Microsoft have to step up the war against freeloaders; they have no option other than to protect much needed revenue in such difficult times.

But one thing is for certain, XP is very much nearing the end of its life; hardware has moved on. The winds of change are a-blowin'

This is what I call ... nuts!

2009-11-04T09:27:00.000Z

OK, let's start with a kick arse eco friendly AMD 64, 4 core Phenom II processor running at 2.5Ghz per core for £130. Only taking 65 watts it has four cores, each of which has 128k level 1 cache, 512k level 2 cache and a combined level 3 cache of 6meg as well as a max running temperature of 70c. It also includes AMD Virtualization (AMD-V) AMD64 Cool'n'Quiet 3.0 technology and Enhanced 3DNow! as well as running at 4000Mhz FSB.

(if you were crackers, you could go for the 3.2Ghz version which chews 125w, has a max temperautre of only 64c, none of the CPU features, runs at only 3600Mhz FSB ... and save £1.50)

Sit it on a Gigabyte motherboard which has one SATA 3 slot, on board ATI graphics with VGA, DVI, HDMI and 7.1 surround sound for £70.

Give it 4GIG of RAM for £80 ...

...and attach that to a 500gig SATA 3 hard drive for a miserly £37

That is one shit hot system for £320-ish. All you need is a case, a power supply and a DVD writer, and most of us have those floating around (so long as the power supply is modern enough)

... and if you are interested in this, and you are thinking of loading XP on it ... you're fucking nuts.

Time to grow up and play with the big boys without smashing your wallet.

Linux and Windows - one and the same?

2009-10-31T21:01:00.000Z

Well, here you are ... a computer with twin display, running Kubuntu and then, under a Virtual Box system, running Windows XP. The mouse flows between them as if they were one system, as does the clipboard. If you want to know more, watch out for the series that will be coming up on Linux Crusade as I go through installing Kubuntu and also install the Virtual Box from Sun in order to do this. I'll also be showing you around Kubuntu itself as well.

Why do this? Well, the prime reason is to enable a smoother transfer from Windows to Linux. I would recommend a new hard disk so that you can go back to your old system if you find that you just can't handle Linux; but if you decide to give it a try, then I hope that my videos will make things easier for you.