Apple responds to Microsoft’s Laptop Hunters… with a Megan

According to Apple, there aren’t any PCs with fast processors and big screens that work without viruses, crashes or headaches. But folks, this isn’t reality, this is advertising. In fact, this is Apple’s first jab since Microsoft took off the gloves with its Laptop Hunters series of pokes against Apple.

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The MX Revelation

If you approached me about 8 weeks ago, I would have told you that spending $100 on a mouse was absurd. You can get any optical mouse from the nearest store for about $5. When purchasing my laptop, my father’s superbly charismatic nature kicked in, and he managed to convince the salesman to throw in a free Logitech MX Revolution. At the time, I was boisterously excited, but would have been no less happy without it. A mouse is a mouse. Or so I thought. A quick glance at the MX Revolution will reveal your usual left and right-click buttons, a scrollwheel, a quick search button, a thumbwheel on the side, and two adjacent thumb buttons. Novelties.

Logitech MX Revolution

But the truth is, the mouse quickly began to have an effect on my computing experiance from all aspects. The laser feature meant that the mouse was surprisingly accurate. I was able to move the pointer around the screen a lot faster without having to add in correctional movements before every click. This also had a lasting effect on gaming. Wireless mice are usually useless when it comes to first person shooters, but the MX Revolution doesn’t have the same transmission lag as other wireless mice, and the precision is excellent, which was great when sniping.

The quick search button was useful, but although I search frequently, it’s not a very difficult and long-winded feat. Something I found a lot more useful was to replace it with the Vista snipping tool. This now means that I can take screenshots and send them to people in a split second, rather than my old long-winded Ctrl+Alt+PrintScrn followed by Paint or Photoshop.I assigned the thumb wheel to volume control, and this meant I could mute the volume without thinking. Highly useful in numerous situations which I’ll leave for your imagination to discover.

The scrollwheel also has a freespin feature which means on flick of a finger could take you through over a 100 pages in a document. You can also scroll left and right by nudging it either way. The back and forward thumb buttons do exactly that on webpages, but can be re-assigned like every other button in the mouse.

Something which used to annoy me about my old mouse was how I had to replace the batteries every 3 or 4 weeks. The MX revolution is rechargeable, and comes with a charging stand, even though the battery lasts about 2 weeks without charge. Plug and play means plug and play with this device as well. No scrabbling, waving, or endless clicking in order to try to get the computer to reconginse it. It’s also very comfortable in your hand, and looks extremely stylish.

What I realised after about 2 months of use was that I could no longer live without this mouse. It’s features were so useful they quickly became second nature, and my overall computer efficiency improved dramatically. Almost all interactions with computers nowadays are through a keyboard and mouse, and when browsing the web, you couldn’t do without a mouse. For those who use computers on a regular basis, you should greatly consider getting a good-quality mouse like this. I spend so many hours on a computer every day, that this mouse is irreplaceable. And it only kicked in after I found myself trying to use a non-existent thumb wheel on another PC a couple of days ago.

The cake is a lie: IE team bakes a treat for Mozilla

In honor of tuesday’s Firefox 3 release, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer team gave a cake to Mozilla. The tasty treat, which prominently displays IE’s blue “e” icon, arrived at Mozilla headquarters in Mountain View.

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Call of Lebanese Duty

My first post in a while now, been keeping busy…

Lebanon, my home, is a country well known for the ability to go skiing in the morning, and be on the beach in the afternoon. The weather is wonderful, and there is a lot of scenery and history to the country. Although located in the middle east, where countries are stereotyped for their conservativeness, the country is quite liberal, and with the tourism it was attracting, should have been the country Dubai is now. The civil war stopped that from being a reality.

On the technological side, Lebanon is not well known for it’s rigid laws on Data Rights Management. This is most probably because none of these laws are enforced, and it is very easy to find a copy of any software imaginable for around 5,000 Lebanese Liras (Just over $3). Indeed, I was offered the Adobe Creative Suite 3 Master Collection – worth $2500 – for only 50,000 LL, and I remember declining the offer thinking it was a rip off.

Lebanon’s capital, Beirut, is full of Internet Cafés called “networks”, in which teenagers play large LAN games. Admittedly, the games are a lot of fun, with sometimes over 30 people sitting on adjacent computers playing Battlefield 2 with you. It is very popular, and the networks themselves usually sell pirated games and movies and sometimes even software.

I am not an advocate of piracy, but I don’t have anything against it either. No, I’m not one of those people that buys a pirated game and then can’t sleep at night worrying that the staff at Crytek won’t be able to feed their kids. But there are disadvantages to pirated software, and I know this out of experience. First of all, Operating Systems are the one thing I would never buy pirated. It’s not worth the hassle of getting around all the updates, warnings, errors, support, and the rest of the problems caused by purchasing a pirated operating system. With the hours you are to spend avoiding getting caught, you might as well buy the real thing. Productivity Suites like Microsoft Office or iWork should also be purchased because they both get valuable updates and fixes from the net, and even some features like templates. I can see why someone would buy CS3 pirated however; some software is simply way too expensive.

When it comes to gaming, if you’re not going to play online, then buying fake games is understandable. But I do want to play online. I really do. In fact, I have been wanting to play online for quite some time now. So I decided this morning to make that dream a reality, and to go out and buy the original Call of Duty 4. So I called Virgin Megastore and it took me about 10 minutes to hear anything other than a menu or the piano piece, the entertainer. Once through to Customer Service I told the lady I wanted to know how much Call of Duty 4 would cost me. She told me that they didn’t have Call of Duty 4. I didn’t believe her. It was simply impossible that Virgin Megastore didn’t have a single copy of Call of Duty 4 for the PC. She put me through to the Multimedia section, as the strength of my disbelief made her doubt herself. The guy there, a gamer himself, told me that Virgin didn’t bother bringing any original games into the country because people didn’t buy them – they only bought fakes. The game was available for games consoles if I wanted them, but not for the PC. I was stumped. The young chap then proceeded to tell me that he sincerely doubted I’d find the game anywhere else in the country. So if I wanted to play Call of Duty 4, i could find a pirated copy on every street corner, but it was near impossible to find a legit version. Do the people at Activision know this? If I produced a game, and it was selling tens of thousands of copies fake in a country, and original copies weren’t even an option, I wouldn’t be too chuffed to be honest.

In the end, I am forced to play the only game I can online – Worms:Armageddon. Don’t judge me by it, it’s actually a very good game, with quite challenging roping games which make the game quite fun. I guess I won’t be able to play Call of Duty 4 online until I purchase it abroad – which is exactly what I’m planning on doing.

Twitter Saves Berkeley Student Arrested in Egypt

Buck, 29, used the ubiquitous short messaging service to tap out a single word on his cellular phone: ARRESTED. The message went out to the cell phones and computers of a wide circle of friends in the United States and to the mostly leftist, anti-government bloggers in Egypt who are the subject of his graduate journalism project. He was released the next day. You can link twitter to you facebook and IM service. I think it’s a really innovative idea.

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The end is coming

How much media are we fed on a daily basis which tells us we are going to be overthrown by robots or AI? It has to be the biggest cliché on the face of the planet. It’s as if everyone can see it coming. In fact, it’s such a widespread idea that films made on the subject are becoming boring and repetitive. So it’s a possibility.

The matrix happens to be one of my favorite movies of all time. It covers this idea of humans being overtaken by robots.

If it hasn’t already happened, and we aren’t actually in the year 2199, then it’s a very thought-provoking idea, and to be honest, despite all the inspiration given to us by the media, we still feel the need to progress in this field; we still have to produce AI which is smarter than us.

It’s like being told that your house is going to be burgled and not doing anything about it. Senseless.

Can we please stop the progress? It’s beginning to send chills down my spine.

External Reading:

• BBC – Robots could demand legal rights
• Times Online – We’re getting carried away
• BBC – The ethical dilemmas of robotics
• Wired – Robot Shrink does Psychology on the Cheap

Malware

There are a bunch of lonely people with no social life whatsoever who have nothing better to do than make other people’s lives miserable. They are called malware writers. They have advanced programming skills and are very well-educated in networking and therefore decide to infiltrate other people’s computers with malicious programs “just for fun”. Well, that’s how it used to be.Our bored losers have realized that they are losers and have no money, no jobs and instead are exploiting the growth of online finance. Now you have malware that comes in all shapes and forms, but you rarely get viruses by themselves any more. In fact, malware is the new robbery. You want to make money fast? Learn how to program in Java. There are several different methods of exploiting people and by far the most frustrating are the flash-drive infections. They spread from computer to computer infecting people by the seconds. There are many different types, but all of them can be removed using this tool. Make sure all your flash drives are plugged in and run the tool.

The trojan horse is named after the trojan horse of Troy, for those of you who have read the iliad or seen the motion picture. The greeks failed to enter the walls of the city of Troy and tricked thetrojans into thinking they gave up and left them a gift. The gift was a giant horse. Little did the trojans know that the horse was stuffed full of Greeks. They therefore brought the horse within the city and in the middle of the night the Greeks burned down the city. The trojan horse is an application which pretends to be a software which a naive user might willingly install, and then damages the system by either providing a way for the hacker to access the victim’s files or take control of the computer.

Phishing is a method of gaining victims’ financial information using an e-mail which looks almost identical to one sent from a bank or paypal which requests that you verify your user information. It is a relatively new form of online fraud but one which has gained sky-high popularity and had been extremely successful.

Spyware is a general term for anything such as a trojan horse or a keylogger (an application that stores everything you type into your keyboard and therefore can determine your passwords) or anything which stores information about the victim.

Adware is a general term for a program which generates pop-ups and advertisements on your computers. You can imagine how much a corporation would pay to have their logo pop-up on victims’ monitors every 5 minutes. Also very frustrating.

So there’s a lot of stuff out there. But how can you stay immune? Well, there is a very wonderful program called HijackThis. Recently purchased by the security company Trend Micro, HijackThis is a diagnostic application which tells you what runs on your PC when you turn it on, what attaches itself to your browser and basically looks in every place an infection would hide. HijackThis reports are not easy to read, and there are experianced experts out there in the online community who are more than happy to help you solve your problems using HijackThis. Do not attempt to fix your computer using HijackThis yourself! You can very easily cause substantial damage to your PC.

The best thing to do is to download HijackThis from here and save it to your desktop. Extract it from the compressed folder and run it. Click on “Do a system scan and save a logfile”. Remember; don’t fix any entries. Copy and paste everything in the text file into a forum online giving details about any problems you are experiencing and wait for a reply.

I recommend any of the following forums:

• Tech Support Guy
• Bleeping Computer
• Castlecops
• Spyware Info
• Tech Support Forum

You can also learn how to remove malware from other people’s computers and become part of the online community against malware. If you want to learn how to remove malware and fight for the good side, Click Here. But bear in mind that training will take a couple of years and is not easy, so only join if you really feel dedicated.

Alternatives to the iPod

Over 140 million people own an iPod worldwide. People nowadays don’t go out to buy a digital audio player any more, but the go out to buy an iPod. This is a real shame as people fail to understand the potential of the other DAPs on the market.

Creative, Samsung, Sony and Microsoft all have alternatives which are cheaper and better than the iPod. Yet the iPod still sells much more units.

Please, look at everything on the market before you buy an iPod. Please.

External Reading:

• Samsung P2
• Microsoft Zune

The timid NAS

The Network Attached Storage has always been, in my opinion, one of the most useful pieces of hardware that one could find in a household of 3 or more computers. The reason I believe this to be the case is the pure practicality of having such a device. Let me explain.

Unfortunately, in this day and age, the majority of end-users still seem to be unaware of the importance of backing up files. There are over a thousand different ways that you PC could lose all its data immediately making it very difficult to recover anything. Investing in a device such as an external hard disk is very important and becoming more and more popular. But a NAS is one step ahead. So what is this NAS thing I keep referring to?

A Network Attached Storage device is something which is attached to a computer network and made accessible to all the users on that network. It houses one or more hard disks which can be used for multiple purposes; the first and foremost being a central backup location. If you have many computers in your house and want to back them all up regularly, you can simply set all the computers to back up on a daily, weekly, or even monthly basis. This means you no longer have to worry about backing up your computer. Just leave it on before you sleep and it’ll back up and turn off by itself. Beautiful. You can also use the NAS as a print server. The majority of printers on the market today are USB 2.0 and do not usually allow for network expansion which therefore means only you can print from it. Yes, you can always connect your printer to a PC and share it, but that means the PC connected to the printer has to be on all the time. Nicht Gut. Most NAS devices come with one or two USB ports so this solves your problem. You can plug your printer into your NAS! You can also use the device as a central storage location for you household. You can put all your music files on there and set up your music library to simply link to your library instead of duplicating a library 12 times. All your family photos and valuable info can go on there for safe storage, and best of all, you can set it up as an FTP server. This means that if you’re on holiday in Taiwan and really want to listen to access your files, it’s only a step away. Type in the IP of your NAS in a browser (or a domain name if you’ve set one up for the NAS) and type in your username and password. The Network Attached Storage device is a necessity for “wired” households and, although it’s been around for years, it hasn’t been exploited to its pull potential.

Microsoft has obviously seen the need for such a device and made a new operating system called Windows Home Server. This software is seen by Microsoft as “better than NAS devices”. I don’t think this is entirely true. Windows Home Server is just extremely easy to use whereas NAS requires a bit more networking knowledge to set up and maintain. It’s up to you to make the choice. The home server option however, is going to be a lot more expensive. The Microsoft OS costs a dollar under $600 for the 500MB version and increases for the terabyte version. Then you have to take the price of the hardware into consideration. NAS suddenly becomes considerably cheap when you can get it for about $400 for a 1-terabyte device.

I hope you see now why the NAS is such a useful device. My personal favourite is the Maxtor Shared Storage II. Check it out.

My p2p dilemma

File-sharing is illegal. I’m sure everyone is well aware of this thanks to the large amount of anti-piracy and anti-theft marketing schemes such as the “you wouldn’t steal” advert below which is shown before you watch a rented movie:

You see, I am in a huge dilemma as to whether I should download or not. The problem is, all the software and movies and games and music are just too expensive for one to consider buying in the real world when there is an alternative such as the Internet. In this aspect, I agree completely with the greens. Why should consumers have to suffer the prices which monopolies such as Adobe attach to their products. Has anyone purchased the Creative Suite 3 Master Collection recently? That’s a huge hole in one’s pocket which can be dodged with a simple download. Who in their right mind would spend $2,500 on buying software when they could download it for free?

What’s the risk of downloading? Well, for one, it’s illegal. You could get fined thousands of dollars for downloading and get your computer confiscated by your government. You might even spend some time in jail if you’re a major offender. Demonoid, my favourite bittorrent tracker, was shut down early November by the authorities who raided their servers and took them off the Internet. Since then I have been using The Pirate Bay and still take great joy in reading their response to legal threats from Multi-national corporations such as Microsoft.

If firms didn’t try to rip off all their potential consumers, I doubt there would be as much downloading as there is. Until then, The Pirate Bay is staying on my bookmarks.

Extra Reading:

• Jean-Claude Elias – With software, rent is always due.