The BNP and double standards over data leaks

Thursday, November 20th, 2008

“Now two MORE discs containing personal data go missing at bungling Ministry of Mayhem,” screamed the headline of one national newspaper, following the HMRC missing disc fiasco.  The discs could “could put people at risk of ID fraud” the paper rightly moaned.

Today’s headline in that very same paper: “A doctor, a musician and a man of God… leaked list reveals unlikely members of the BNP.” It goes on to reveal the names, ages and professions of those on the list, giving even the most amateur Googler a surefire way to find one of the many copies now circulating online. A list that contains the names, addresses and telephone numbers of children, who are guilty of nothing more than having a mum or dad who signed for the BNP.  

The name of the paper involved? I’ll let you Google it and find out. 

Do you get paid for booting?

Wednesday, November 19th, 2008

Do you get paid while your PC boots up? I hope for your sake that you’ve never even had to think about it; an office where that’s an issue sounds like an awful place to work.

Unfortunately, these offices do seem to exist, though. In fact, several companies in the US have been sued by employees in the last year over claims that they lose hours a week to startup and shutdowns, for which they aren’t paid a penny. (more…)

Just in: Zoostorm Netbook

Wednesday, November 19th, 2008

We often get a first look at products before they hit the shelves, but this is a first – right now, the “Zoostorm Netbook” doesn’t even have an official name. What we do know is that companies like Argos are already showing an interest, and from the couple of days we spent with the Zoostorm we suspect they’ll sell quite a few.

The bad news is that you’ll have to wait to buy one: PC Nextday, the company behind the Zoostorm brand, won’t be putting them on sale until the second week of January. Unlike the Fizzbook, Zoostorm’s first and ongoing foray into netbooks, which was based on Intel’s Classmate PC and aimed squarely at children, this is a unique design that it’s created in partnership with a third-party manufacturer.

And more importantly, it aims to set new benchmarks for what you can expect for the price.

(more…)

Google voice search finally arrives

Tuesday, November 18th, 2008

Google’s had a dedicated search application for the iPhone for a while now, but the long-rumoured voice-recognition update has belatedly arrived in iTunes after a few hiccups last week. If you haven’t tried it yet I’d strongly recommend it as a way to pass a dull few hours – it’s livened up my morning no end.

Now, it’s important to realise that this isn’t a high-end dictation program, with training exercises to improve its accuracy and accomodate regional accents.

It’s just a basic free app, created and (we assume) trained in-house by Google’s Californian engineers – when enabling the feature you’re even warned it works best for “North American English accents”. It doesn’t speak Geordie yet, then.

To use it, you simply load up the app, hold the phone to your ear and wait for the beep, then speak. (more…)

10 random facts about Windows

Tuesday, November 18th, 2008

Here are ten entirely random, but interesting, facts I learnt during my week with Microsoft at its recent Professional Developers Conference.

1. Just under a fifth of new PCs sold in the US are now running 64-bit Windows

2. 95% of Windows users change their desktop background

3. “Techy” users are twice as likely to use a solid Windows background colour (19.4% vs 8.1%)

4. 70% of Windows users have between eight and 15 windows open at any one time

5. Vista has 23% fewer Blue Screens of Death than XP Service Pack 2

6. About 30% of people customise the colour of the Vista glass

7. About 1,000 developers work on the Windows operating system – although if everyone who used Windows sent an email to a member of the development team, each inbox would be stuffed with a million mails per person

8. Only 1.5% of new Windows PCs are bought purely to browse the internet

9. 18% of application compatibility problems are caused by faulty installations

10. Windows Live accounts for 11% of all minutes spent online 

The planet will shortly be saved. Thank you for listening.

Tuesday, November 18th, 2008

Spectacular news from the Verdiem corporation. It’s offering a free tool to help to save the planet!

“Today Verdiem is announcing the availability of Edison, a free energy monitoring  application that allows eco-conscious consumers to actively control their PC’s energy consumption. Verdiem helps Brits save money on their energy bills and fight climate change by reducing carbon dioxide emissions from homes across the UK.”

And how does this fabulous tool work? By, erm, changing your Windows power-management settings. It gives you a little slider that you can slide between ’save less’ and ’save more’. And it changes three – yes, three! – settings: display timeout, hard disk power-down, and suspend timeout.

It does offer one feature that Windows doesn’t – you can switch between work-time and non-work-time settings based on a schedule. But a moment’s thought will reveal that there’s no point. Set your computer to suspend after two hours and, well, it will suspend after two hours. And stay suspended all weekend. One lot of settings is all you need.

Before you can take advantage of the altruistic philanthropy of Verdiem, you’ll be needing to register so it can send you an activation email.

The cynic in you might think it was a data-gathering exercise rather than a gift bestowed upon the world by a concerned company. Who knows? Anyway, it’s quite pretty, it estimates how much energy you’re saving and some people might find it useful. You can download it from here.

Loving the Papermaster pinata

Monday, November 17th, 2008

I can’t imagine that when Mark “is this really my surname” Papermaster decided to ditch IBM’s boring old blade servers for Apple’s ever-so-hip iPods he could have forseen the fuss that would ensue. Trade secrets, accusations of desertion, shattered promises and a thousand broken hearts are just a few of the gems that have fallen from this legal pinata. And yet my favourite, my absolute favourite, is that just before he left, Papermaster was reportedly told by the company “to consider the effect of his decision on his family.”

How brilliant is that? IBM pulled the family card, and what a card it is… because obviously when a man decides to upsticks from Texas to California, to throw 26 years of his life in a truck and turn his back on his friends, he does so on a whim. He wakes up in the morning and says “honey, forget the toast, I’ve decided to ditch my suit for a polo neck and work for Apple, I don’t know if there’s a position available but by lord I intend to find out. I’ve spent nineteen years designing servers and now I want to follow my dreams… what do you mean the children? Oh, who cares, Tom’s always been a nuissance… his name’s Mark you say, well that proves it. Come along darling, the bus for Cupertino’s waiting!”

(more…)

Don’t tell Microsoft, but…

Friday, November 14th, 2008

We’ve got in trouble with Microsoft on a number of occasions, as for some odd reason it’s quite protective about their logos. Something to do with brand identity, I believe, so when we may have taken a liberty or two with the Windows logo in the past it’s always been keen to have a word with us shortly after.

But it probably hasn’t seen this beautiful piece of, well, creativity from CnM – makers of the minibook or, as it’s sometimes called, the CnMbook.

Now this is a fascinating piece of kit that’s being sold for £115 exc VAT by Scan, and for a little more by Maplin. Indeed, if you search around you’ll find it on sale at various online stores. (more…)

Is BT boss losing his bottle?

Friday, November 14th, 2008

“This is a bold step by BT and we need others to be just as bold,” – BT chief Ian Livingston, announcing the company’s £1.5bn fibre broadband rollout in July.

“I have to tell you there are some shareholders who say ‘you know something, don’t do that, don’t do a whole lot of other things. That leaves you with a lot more cash and cash today is worth a lot more than cash in a few years’ time. I personally believe if it is the right thing to do as a 20-year decision it is the right thing to do. But we need to have the environment in which our shareholders feel there is a good chance of us making a return. If we cannot have that environment this is not the time to be taking on sure-fire losses.” – BT chief Ian Livingston quoted in The Guardian today.

Not looking quite so bold now, is he? 

Dual-core Atom 330 benchmarked

Wednesday, November 12th, 2008

The big arrival in the Labs yesterday was a barebones PC chassis from Shuttle, with something very special sitting inside: the very first dual-core Atom processor we’ve seen. The original Atom has been at the heart of the huge shake-up in the laptop industry over the past year, with the vast majority of the big guns opting for Intel in their netbooks. If the new dual-core model can live up to the hype it has the potential to trigger a whole new wave of more powerful netbooks.

Called the Intel Atom 330, it runs at the same 1.6GHz frequency as its single-core predecessors, with a 533MHz FSB. With two cores and support for Intel’s Hyper-Threading technology, it appears to the system as four cores (as shown right). Being a desktop part, it comes soldered to an improved mini-ITX motherboard, now with a single DDR2-667 slot, Gigabit Ethernet and six-channel audio to go with the usual array of inputs and outputs.

We used a 7,200rpm SATA hard disk and 1GB of DDR2 to get our test rig set up, slapping on a fresh XP SP3 install to best compare the Atom 330 to the existing netbooks that will make up its primary competition. After installing all the drivers and running Windows update we installed our benchmark suite and set it to work overnight. (more…)