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Firefox 3.0.8 Security update
There’s a security update for Firefox. I’ve just applied the update, I hope you have too. Sadly not all of my add-ons are claiming compatibility, I shall have to wait before being able to download Flash videos again.
Hopefully, your About window will look like this.
The snoopers' charter, data mining and little elves
News reports today suggest that the British government is about to embark upon a full-scale assault on our civil liberties through surveillance of everything we say or do online.
The Home Office is proposing that social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter be monitored to check on people who may be about to commit acts of terrorism. It's scary stuff.
The BBC says: "It is part of a plan to store details of all phone calls, e-mails and websites visited on a central database," adding that "Civil liberties campaigners have called the proposals a 'snoopers' charter'," which is predictable enough.
It's true, of course, that such a system would enable the authorities to snoop on everything we do, and any safeguards put into effect would likely not stand up to the holes certain to be present in the system (the government has a lousy track record on big IT projects - just look at the NHS National Programme for IT - and it has form in this area).
Now, the usual response from the other side of the fence is: "If you've nothing to hide, you've nothing to fear". This is fatuous and disingenuous. We talk and joke over email and the web about things we'd never do - there are plenty of George Bush jokes online, none of them written by people who want to kill the former American president.
Besides, as the comedian Robert Newman points out, the logical conclusion of that argument is that anyone who has anything to hide should be persecuted.
But then even if the proposals get put into place, there's the 'little elves' problem to worry about. This was theorised by John Grisham, of all people, in his novel The Brethren:
There were two types of phones at [the prison] Trumble, secured and unsecured. In theory, all calls made on unsecured lines were taped and subject to review by little elves in a booth somewhere who did nothing but listen to a million hours of useless chatter. In reality, about half the calls were actually taped, at random, and only about 5 percent were ever heard by anybody working for the prison. Not even the federal government could hire enough elves to handle all the listening.
A real-life example of this can be found in Peter Wright's controversial 1980s docu-drama Spycatcher:
So much raw intelligence was flowing out from the East that it was literally swamping the resources available to transcribe and analyse it. MI6 had a special transcription center set up in Earl's Court, but they were still transcribing material seven years later when they discovered that George Blake had betrayed the Tunnel to the Russians from the outset.
Both of the above quotes come from Quentin Campbell of the UK Crypto mailing list.
Aside from the question of how it'll be able to function (and how much that will cost), can it actually do its job?
The technique of going through this kind of information automatically is called 'data mining', and it can be used in quite interesting ways. The diligent Ben Goldacre has produced a fine analysis of why it can't work in this case:
Even with these infeasibly accurate imaginary tests, when you screen a general population as proposed, it is hard to imagine a point where the false positives are usefully low, and the true positives are not missed. And our imaginary test really was ridiculously good: it's a very difficult job to identify suspects, just from slightly abnormal patterns in the normal things that everybody does.
He points us in the direction of security guru Bruce Schneier's 2005 essay on the same topic, in which he says: "In hindsight, it was really easy to connect the 9/11 dots and point to the warning signs, but it's much harder before the fact. Certainly, many terrorist plots share common warning signs, but each is unique, as well."
So is there anything to worry about over this plan? Yes. The government's record on such projects makes it highly unlikely that the project will be useful for what it's designed, and highly likely that it'll be costly and will be open to abuse in specific cases. But the likelihood is remote that any of us will find ourselves in the British-American prison on Diego Garcia with unspeakable things being done to our nether regions, simply because in this case probability is on our side, not theirs.
Picture from Flickr user André-Pierre.
The Office Ribbon revisited
Well, there’s nothing like some controversy to keep life interesting and my posts about the Ribbon keep attracting comments. Anna left a comment that caught my attention yesterday evening.
I hate the ribbon! It takes up way too much screen space and it is not intuitive at all. I consider myself an advanced excel and word user and it takes me three times as long to do things than it used to because of the ribbon. Why did Microsoft go to this silly design? Maybe it's good for graphic artists, but not hard core Office users like me. The prior tool bar had everything you need in one view; with the new one you must toggle between the various ribbons to get what you need, and many basic functions are "hidden" behind what simply looks like a masthead icon! Please Microsoft, with Office 14 bring back the old view!
I think what irritates me about 
the Ribbon is that lack of choice. That’s partly timing. About two months before Office 2007 came out I worked hard at customising the Office 2003 toolbars to my tastes (partly following the advice of Designing the Obvious author Robert J Hoekman, Jr.). As you can see I’ve pared it down to only show the icons I actually need*.
Sadly this isn’t possible in Office 2007. This doesn’t mean I don’t like the Ribbon. Nothing has got me using Styles like Office 07 and that’s a good thing.
I don’t think it’s quite as bad as Anna finds it. There’s a certain logic to the Office button and it is possible to pin some icons to the area just to the right of it. I’ve also found the automatic tab switching to work quite well.
Where the Ribbon doesn’t work for me is that it takes up a lot of vertical space. Given that the trend is towards widescreen monitors it isn’t always the best use of space, especially on a notebook monitor. Of course, I can minimise the Ribbon by double-clicking on one of the tabs, but then there’s less on screen than there was with the toolbars.
So, yes, I’m hoping that Office 14 will come with the ability to go back to the old menu system. But I’m not letting my hopes get too high.
Great guitar themed desktop
The days of being able to show off a flashy image on your desktop and think that's enough to impress are sadly over.
If you want inspiration of just what is possible, you won’t go wrong by taking a look at Lifehacker.com. The most recent is a rather good picture of a Fender Stratocaster guitar with some clever custom menus.
The good thing about Lifehacker is there are explanations of how to work on the bits round the edges; it’s not just about the image any more.
One day I will get round to following the instructions for my Ubuntu laptop.
Hotmail gets POP3 access
You can now use your own email client with Hotmail because it has been given POP3 access worldwide. Having said that there’s nothing wrong with Live Mail. But if you use a different client the details you want are as follows.
POP server: pop3.live.com (Port 995)
POP SSL required? Yes
User name: Your Windows Live ID, for example yourname@hotmail.com
Password: The password you usually use to sign in to Hotmail or Windows Live
SMTP server: smtp.live.com (Port 25 or 587)
Authentication required? Yes (this matches your POP username and password)
TLS/SSL required? Yes
Here’s how it should look in Thunderbird
And then the SMTP
Thanks to Lifehacker for this one
Update your PDF software
I hope you’ve all done this already but there are some important updates for Adobe Reader and the Foxit PDF Reader. Adobe Reader should update itself automatically, but it’s worth checking.
Thanks to the F-Secure blog for the update.
New net scam arrives... by phone
A reader has contacted us with news of a new take on a relatively old scam.
He received a call from someone to say his PC had been infected by a virus and that if he cared to boot up, the caller would kindly take him through the process of removing it.
Fortunately, the reader had his wits about him and challenged the caller for his company's details; a click and brrrrr indicated the caller wasn't keen on that idea.
Many PC users are familiar with pop-ups that claim to scan your computer and then cleanse it of the many threats it finds. None of which exist of course but as long as you're willing to pay, why ruin a good scam with facts.
Taking this approach by phone is a new one on us.
My favourite Google tribute page for some time
I was only reading this the other day. The challenge is reading everything that the caterpillar ate on Saturday in one breath!
Internet Explorer 8 released!
It’s finally here. Internet Explorer 8. I’ve got high hopes of better standards support and performance improvements. Both of which were promised by Microsoft when I saw them last week for a quick preview.
I see a vision of what my evening has in store. Well, it will keep me off Ubuntu if nothing else.
Don’t forget to check out our preview videos one and two for a taste of what is to come.
How to complain
Luckily I’m not normally on the receiving end of complaints but in interests of all those that do, please read this post about how to complain and get the results you want.
Speaking from those times when I have had to deal with unhappy punters, those who have followed the advice given here have been more likely to get better results that those who just rant and rave.
I’ve also found I’ve got better results from being polite and objective when I’ve had to complain. Well at least to begin with…
National Rail's iPhone app: what's it worth?
The National Rail website is rather good. In the old days of Railtrack it was quite hard to get any useful information on train running times from the web, but the current site, which is run by train operators' group ATOC, is easy to use and well designed.
Now, it's not too hard to access the site from a phone, particularly as newer phones have full HTML browsers that can cope with the design. But ATOC has released an application for the iPhone and iPod Touch that makes it even easier.
It's been quite a PR success - there's been plenty of good coverage for the app on the web.
The problem, though, is that the application costs £4.99, quite a lot by App Store standards, where many titles cost just 59p. We wouldn't go so far as to use the phrase "rip off", but the program is going to have to do quite a lot to justify that kind of cost, particularly when it's only a couple of clicks on the phone to get into Mobile Safari and browse the main site.
Admittedly the app makes use of the phone's location finder to offer relevant information, and admittedly we haven't used the app (we're too cheap to stump up the fiver), but we're not convinced.
We asked ATOC's press office what the justification was for the cost. Its representative said: "The price justifies both the development cost and the application's functionality," adding that updates, adding functions, would be free to buyers.
Never use this list!
New look for Zoho writer
The word processor in the Zoho online office suite has been given a redesign.
It’s a big improvement on the old Writer, not that there was much wrong with it. I like the fact that the word count is now always visible, very useful for a wordsmith like me.
There are new views but sadly there is no view that shrinks the width of the text to fit the browser window. I suppose that’s because I often end up writing notes about something in a window squeezed into a corner somewhere.
The BBC buys a botnet
The BBC's technology programme Click has bought a botnet.
As part of an investigation into online crime programme makers bought access to a network of 22,000 compromised PCs through which they were able to send thousands of spam email messages to two test addresses. They also launched a denial-of-service (DOS) attack on a test site using the same network.
The programme will be broadcast on Saturday on the BBC News channel.
Bad ads: the perils of stock photography
Today's second bad ad is nothing like as bad, or as important, as the first one - it's just rather silly.
It comes from an unnamed department, but it's likely to have come from the stupidly named BERR (formerly the more staid-sounding DTI). It's promoting the Act On CO2 campaign and asking people to stop using the power-leaking standby function on their electronic equipment.
The entertaining this is the stack of electronic equipment, as shown above, which is something like 10 years out of date. Bearing in mind that this ad is running in newspapers in 2009, what do we see in the stack of gear? There's a CRT television set, which is fair enough - after all, many people still have them and they use a lot of power in standby (click to see the full ad).
Then there's a fairly old-looking DVD player, a VCR, a first-generation Playstation and, the coup de grace, what appears to be an old dual cassette deck. What's happened here is that the ad's designer has used a piece of stock photography to illustrate the kind of electronic equipment you might find in the average family home.
It's just a shame he or she couldn't find one that illustrates the kind of kit you might find in the average family home in the current century.
NB This post previously linked to a stock photography agency (it now points to the Wikipedia explanation of stock photography). We'd like to make it clear that the agency linked to is not responsible for this bad ad.
Bad ads: "Games will kill you", says the British government
So the British government thinks kids shouldn't play computer games. Well, it doesn't, but its the Department of Health's new ad campaign, called Change4Life, features a picture of a child with a Playstation3 controller in his hand, and in large type the words "RISK AN EARLY DEATH, JUST DO NOTHING".
Leaving aside the poor typesetting and the annoying use of the comma splice in the middle of the sentence, there's a fairly clear implication to parents (at whom the ad is aimed) that games are bad.
The games industry has picked up on this, with trade paper MCV lodging an official complaint with the Advertising Standards Agency.
Now the government has told MCV that it's not anti-gaming. Well, of course it isn't - that's obvious from the pro-games work done by various arms of the government. But the fact remains that the advertisement as it stands is ill-considered and scaremongering.
Cebit 2009, Hannover: Day Three
After spending two days looking mostly at new notebooks and all-in-one PCs, Computeractive spent its final day at Cebit 2009 searching for some interesting new peripheral products. One that caught our eye in particular was this photo frame with a difference: it has a built-in scanner, hidden behind a flip down cover, that can import 6x4" photo prints:
The Skyla Memoir frame has an 8" screen will be on sale from May, and although the price is unconfirmed we expect it to cost less than £200. Skyla is a new brand but the frame is made by Lite-On, a firm well known for its CD, DVD and Blu-ray drives. It also makes the photo frames sold by HP, so it has experience in the area.
The first 24x DVD burners with LabelTag will be available in May.
Another neat product for inside your PC comes from Cool IT Solutions. This company has built an all-in-one water cooling system for PCs that, it claims, is easy to fit: you simply fit it over the processor then mount the radiator unit at the back of the PC using four rubber plugs. We've brightened up this terrible photo taken at the stand so the cooler and two pipes that carry the liquid are more visible:
This "Domino A.L.C" system can be used to keep the processor cool while producing very little noise, and unlike most water cooling products there's no need to fiddle around fitting tubes and pouring liquid: it's all ready to use. It has several cooling modes and a built-in alarm to alert you if anything goes wrong. Expect to pay around £70 for the whole thing.
This ebook reader also caught our eye. It's small, very light and far cheaper than most other ebooks - no date or price has been confirmed, but we spoke to one business that was interested in bringing it over to the UK, so watch this space.
Finally we were exclusively shown one prototype computer that we're not yet able to talk about just yet. We'll bring you more details as soon as we can, but for the moment suffice it to say that there you can expect some really interesting products to appear over the next twelve months.
What does 64-bit mean, then?
Microsoft doesn't seem to know. Its UK site about Windows Vista refers to "computers running 64-bit editions of Windows Vista, typically with 4GB of memory or more".
That's true enough, but it's a circular piece of logic, and it's pretty much useless as a piece of advice for consumers.
We can see what they've tried to do, which is to keep things simple in order to denote the fact that there are two versions of Windows, one for 32-bit and one for 64-bit.
But that statement ignores the point, which is that the difference between a 32-bit computer and a 64-bit one is the processor. In its effort to simplify things for consumers (an admirable effort, admittedly) Microsoft has failed to provide the one piece of information that would allow them to make an informed decision.
It says: "Compared to 32-bit systems, which top out at around 3GB of memory, 64-bit PCs offer added responsiveness for people who are running a lot of applications at the same time and switching between them frequently."
That's sort-of true but it misses the two questions that users will have:
1. What version of Windows should I use?
2. Is that version compatible with my computer?
The answer to 1 will usually be "the 32-bit one" (see below), but for users who've already decided they want the 64-bit version, how do they know whether their computers are compatible? The answer is nothing to do with memory - it's to check whether the processor is a 64-bit one. The word 'processor' is not mentioned once on the Microsoft Vista page.
A number of manufacturers sell computers with 4GB of memory, a 64-bit processor and the 32-bit version of Windows installed. That's not Microsoft's fault at all, far from it, but it means it's not true to say that 32-bit computers top out at 3GB of memory.
Admittedly it's not easy to figure out if you're not technically inclined. The easy way might be to plug the model number of the processor into Wikipedia, but that will elude most people. It's not Microsoft's fault that it's impossible to tell at a glance whether your computer has a 64-bit processor (the blame for that lies in part with processor makers) but the page doesn't really help find the answer.
The industry, while trumpeting the benefits of its latest hardware and software, often fails to provide the information that consumers require to make an informed decision, of which this is a case in point.
Live CDs can be dangerous
I know I shouldn’t, but I couldn’t help laughing at this story of a server wiped by a live CD.
Sorry to sermonise, but there is one important lesson. If you do run a server, DON’T use it as an ordinary computer. It’s not worth the risk of an innocent mistake. Servers like my Excito bubba have a definite advantage in that you cannot use them as an ordinary computer; there’s no monitor or keyboard sockets so all access is remote.
On an interesting aside, Windows Server won’t let you shut down or restart the computer without giving a reason for the system log. It’s a good way of making people think before they do something.
And set up user accounts properly if you don’t want people to do things they shouldn’t.
Maybe also disable booting from CD until you need it.
They’re a lot of work these computers aren’t they?
New version of Java
You have probably received automatic notification that there is a new version of Java available.
It’s not quite as straightforward as clicking on Next as a Firefox toolbar is selected for installation by default. It might be useful if you use Yahoo for email and don’t have any other anti spyware protection, but it does irritate me that it’s opt-out rather than opt-in.
On a positive note, it seems that the old version of Java is now being removed as part of the installation process. I quickly checked Add/Remove programs and couldn’t see the last version of Java. I’m pretty sure the Java 2 Runtime environments
Video first look: Logitech G19 gaming keyboard
Here's our first look at the brand new Logitech G19 keyboard designed for gamers. It's an impressive piece of kit but also an expensive one. We'll be posting a full review soon.
Pick and mix security and utility software
Here’s an interesting idea. Tell Comodo Software what sort of stuff you get up to on your computer and the website will suggest the software you need.
Personally I didn’t get on with their firewall, but the backup software was particularly good with the option of backing files to an ftp location. Most important was the option to run differential backups; only copying files that have changed to avoid hitting bandwidth problems.
Cebit 2009, Hannover: Day Two
Yesterday we caught up with Asus, so today we went to see the latest products from one of its biggest rivals: MSI. MSI's Wind range of netbooks compete directly against the Asus Eee portables, but the focus at MSI's stand seems a little different: rather than the dozens of netbooks Asus is showing, MSI seems to be focusing on fewer models with more unusual features. Here, for example, is its forthcoming "hybrid" Wind U115:
It may look unremarkable, but there's some interesting technology inside. It uses both a solid state disk (SSD) and a hard disk, but the hard disk can be disabled at the push of a button. This gives you loads of cheap storage space when you want it, but allows you to save battery power when on the move. MSI claims a battery life of nine hours, and we expect it to cost around £400.
More unusual still is the X-Slim series notebook, which looks a little like a white plastic Macbook Air. We got our hands on an engineering sample to take some photos:
And here it is from the side (note the two USB ports - one more than the Air):
This new "X-Slim" range will initially include two models. The X340 pictured here will use an Intel Core Solo ULV (Ultra Low Voltage) processor and include an HDMI output, and is expected to cost around £800. The X320, however, will use an Atom processor and should come in at between £500 to £600, making it a potentially interesting choice for those who want a really thin and light notebook on a budget. The notebooks will be on shelves in May.
Like Asus, MSI is also creating low cost desktop PCs. Here's the Wind Top AE1900, with a 19" touch screen display, DVD writer and an Atom processor:
It should cost around £600 and will be available by the end of March. Several other models are in the works, including one without the touch screen (the AP1900) as well as 20" and 22" models. A 24" version could appear later this year. Slightly more unusual is this model, the Wind Box DE200:
It has a Blu-Ray drive, HD video output and runs Windows Vista Home Premium - making it an interesting Media Center PC. Expect it in May, but prices are not yet confirmed.
And there are many other interesting products tucked away around the show. Icy Box, makers of hard disk enclosures, was showing a few new media player products that support H.264 video:
This model, the IB-MP309-HW, should appear in March, while one with a slot that accepts a 2.5" hard disk caddy will follow in May. Over in another hall, Zotac have what must be one of the smallest PCs at the whole show:
We'll bring you more of the latest products from the show tomorrow.
A 21st century typewriter
Something for the nostalgic amongst you, an onscreen typewriter. It makes realistic sounds of both keys and bell, and you can select how hard you are typing. Perhaps not as fun as the real thing but about as close as you are likely to get.
It’s a function limited demo rather than a full app but it’s not excessive at $20.
Cebit 2009, Hannover: Day One
Hannover's Cebit is the world's largest technology fair, and the place where manufacturers from the world over come to show off their latest and greatest products. Computeractive is there too, and today started trekking between the 26 (yes, 26 - our feet hurt already) exhibition halls of the Hannover Messe to find the latest and greatest products. Over the next few days we'll show you what to expect over the coming six months.
One of the most striking stands at the show belongs to Asus. The company is showing off a vast selection of Eee PC notebooks and Eee desktops, not all of which will be available in the UK. A few in particular caught our eye, though. First, the Eee PC 1000HE:
This looks similar to the Eee 1000, but with a new Macbook-like keyboard and a battery that, Asus claims, will run for 9.5 hours - perfect for a full day's work, a long flight or just if you tend to forget to plug your laptop in. It'll arrive in the UK in March, at a price yet to be confirmed.
Other interesting Eee laptops included a tablet:
And this newer, shinier, thinner netbook:
Aside from the mini laptops, Asus was showing off its Lamborghini notebook range - now available in a rather nice ivory white as well as gaudy yellow - and the Eee Keyboard, first shown at CES and now, unfortunately, locked safely away in a cupboard when we attempted to find and photograph it.
We spoke to Asus CEO Jerry Shen, who suggested an interesting future for the Eee computers encompassing both low-cost netbooks and more powerful and featured products.
"We will try to provide more value", he told us. "In the future, when the Eee Top, Eee Box and Eee Keyboard become more popular we will try to separate into two markets".
He denied, though, that the more powerful computers might outgrow the Eee name, saying that "the most important thing for the Eee is "easy"... ease of use is still the key. We still want to keep the soul of the Eee" [in the more featured computers].
One major focus of Cebit 2009 is the environnment, and one of the biggest displays in the "green" hall belongs to Fujitsu-Siemens computers, here to demonstrate its "zero watt PC" - a computer that, unlike most, draws zero watts of power when turned off. A demo unit was on display, complete with power meters for us to examine:
We switched it on and off a few times and, as you can see, it seems to work quite well - that's the PC power meter in the middle. The zero watt PC will be available from July, in two versions - a desktop and a small form factor PC - at prices to be announced.
Away from computers, we spotted a few other interesting products. Synology, makers of network storage devices, were showing off this tiny NAS, designed to hold up to four laptop-sized hard disks:
That's the DS409 Slim, available in the UK from April. And finally for today, we caught up with Absolute Software. It'll be launching its laptop recovery system, LoJack for Laptops, in the UK in the next few months - it'll initially be sold online. The software buries itself in the computer's BIOS, calling home periodically and, if you report the laptop stolen, either wiping its contents or attempting to pass its location back to the company, and so to the police: Absolute told us it has a 75% recovery rate for stolen equipment using its business Computrace product.
We'll bring you more from the show over the next few days.
Ka-50 Black Shark screen grabs
What did I do at lunch? Fly a Russian attack helicopter.
First I went for the instant action button and got the arcade version of the game.
A nice touch but I’m really after the proper action. So back to the training video. I selected the one of starting the helicopter. This is because I can’t be bothered to keep switching between the Flight Guide and the keyboard shortcut list. Much easier to let the instructor take care of the complicated stuff. Even on the third time through, I’m still not keeping up with the instructions. Though at least this time I remembered to turn on the power to the ejector seat system (more on that later)
Here you can see the cockpit. The centre display is the TV based targeting system and the one to the right is the advanced moving map. So far I’ve been able to turn them on. There are more controls to the left, right, above, and in fact behind the pilot too.
The Ka-50 is very responsive, much more so that the Huey that I flew in Med-Evac or Sea King in Search and Rescue 4. The manual recommends using the trim control, which I shall find in the shortcut guide soon. However, as long as you’re careful it’s not a hard helicopter to control.
And here’s the Black Shark in flight. I did manage to land a couple of times but thought I would end up with the ejector seat.
If you thought that ejection might be a little risky from a helicopter with the blades over the pilot, you would be right. Luckily the designers spotted this and came up with quite a novel solution.
There are explosive bolts fitted to the blades designed to fling them out of harms way. As the picture to the right shows it all seems to have worked ok.
Hopefully I should start to learn how to fire some weapons soon.
Maximising network performance
This is a very techie post, if you don’t want to play around with network settings and possibly put them back if things go wrong, look away now.
There’s some very interesting thoughts about getting the most from your home network by increasing the size of the information packets over at Coding Horror. All information sent over the network (and that includes requests for information) are broken down into manageable chunks first. In theory it doesn’t matter what order they appear in because they are reassembled at the other end.
What Jeff points out is that the amount of data included in each packet hasn’t really changed for a long time even though the performance and reliability of networking equipment has improved.
One reason for keeping packets small is that they must be resent if there is a problem. The larger the packet the more network traffic if there is a problem. But if you can rely on the network there is less need to keep the size down.
I couldn’t find the setting on my network card here, but then it may have been disabled as I’m on a corporate network and, in any case, I would probably make myself very unpopular with our System department if I did.
This is a project best left for small networks that you’re in charge of because settings must be changed on all the equipment on the network.
The performance benefits were quite impressive; copying files from a network share was about 28% faster and benchmarking software reported a 20% improvement.
If you are considering giving this a go, I strong recommend reading the whole article carefully, and the comments below as well.
Ka-50 Black Shark very first impressions
A reputation for being able to land helicopters and aircraft in (mostly) one piece rewarded me with a copy of Ka-50 Black Shark earlier this week.
The Black Shark is the Russian alternative to the Apache attack helicopter. An added challenge for the simulation is that it is only a single seat, so you have to fly and fight at the same time.
Installation was nice and simple and I have been impressed with the graphics and performance. I set the resolution to match my gaming notebook (affectionately called ‘The Beast’ thanks to 22in monitor) at 1680x1050. Black Shark exceeded my expectations by playing fine at this rather extreme setting without having to turn anything else down.
I decided to give the training missions a go and it quickly became clear that this is a proper simulation. There is a start button for each of the two engines, but pressing this is just one step of 35! Thankfully there is a quick start-up button if you don’t have a checklist to hand.
Speaking of checklists, there is an impressive amount of documentation available to help play the game. PDFs for my downloaded version of course.
| Quick Start | 56 |
| GUI manual | 162 |
| Flight Manual | 383 |
| Keyboard shortcuts - simulation | 9 |
| Keyboard shortcuts – game | 5 |
| Total | 615 |
The keyboard shortcuts in both the PDFs and in game have one problem, modifiers such as Shift or Ctrl are listed after the key rather than before as we are normally used to. Given that there is a distinction between the left and right Shift, Ctrl and Alt, this may take some adjustment.
I’ll be back in flight at lunch so there’ll be more detail soon, and hopefully some screengrabs.
Windows Vista, CPUs and power management
One of the oddities of computing is that even though your computer is never fast enough, the CPU spends most of it’s time hanging around waiting for something to happen.
That presents a problem because the CPU is then wasting power so there are all kinds of clever tricks for slowing them down or reducing the voltage to save electricity. You might think this is only of interest to notebook users, but remember that this could have a reasonable impact on your electricity bill.
Following a tip from a reader (thanks Ashley), I did a bit of digging into the power plans on Windows Vista. I have to admit that I’ve never really paid that much attention apart from making sure that Power Saving is selected when I’m running off batteries.
What I discovered was the difference between the Full and Balanced power schemes. I’d flitted between them but hadn’t noticed any difference.
It turns out that Balanced mode scales the CPU speed (or frequency) depending on how busy it is. If there is nothing going on it runs at half speed and gets progressively faster as the work load increases. It’s impressively dynamic, compared to the slow/fast that I’ve seen in Ubuntu with the CPU frequency utility.
There’s some interesting analysis over at The Metaverse showing how the CPU frequency is automatically throttled in Balanced mode. But I decided to do some of my own.
There’s a lot of boring figures but the upshot is that in the PC Mark tests we ran there was no performance drop when using Balanced over Full Performance.
Given that power consumption should be reduced with the CPU speed reduction, I’m struggling to think of when Full Performance would be a good idea.
At last, a way of being green with no drawbacks!
Open office tip for hiding unwanted zeros
The Open Office help blog has an interesting tip about suppressing unwanted zeros from large spreadsheets. I’m all in favour of options like these; it makes a spreadsheet far more accessible to the people who didn’t make it and avoids the time consuming workaround of adding an IF condition to every cell.
There are also instructions for turning the zeros off when printing a document.
Shapeways: see your designs in three dimensions
Recently we spoke to a company called Shapeways, which offers consumers the ability to create three-dimensional versions of designs they make.
While a conventional printer makes two-dimensional copies of things on a computer, it's hitherto been very hard to create solid versions of designs you make, unless you happen to have access to a CNC machine and you have the the time to learn how to use it.
What Shapeways offers - there's a Youtube video explaining the process - is the ability to use the company's machines to 'print' your designs in 3D.
What's more, the company offers the technical expertise to turn those designs into the models the machine can understand. Unlike with a printer, it's not a simple matter of clicking Print and getting a document a few seconds later. It's a complex process to turn a 3D design into a full model that can be created by the prototyping machines, which is where Shapeways's custom software comes in.
You can produce a design in any 3D software from professional tools such as 3D Studio Max to free programs such as Blender and Google's Sketchup. Once you upload it to Shapeways the company's technicians will make sure it's actually a possible design* (which is to say, it's something that can actually exist in three dimensions and not an optical illusion) and the company will then quote a price for the built item.
Finished articles are posted around the world in 10 days, the company says, and designs, once approved, can be shared with other Shapeways users so they can create their own models (you can of course set designs to 'private' too).
If you're not a 3D modeller but the idea sounds interesting, you can browse the list of existing models that people have created, or select one of the pre-set products. The candle-holder above is one such creation, and the words on it can be chosen by the customer using the Shapeways Creator.
There's a choice of materials from flexible nylon to hard plastic. At the moment there isn't much in the way of colour but the company says it may offer painting as a service in future. Its manufacturing facility is in the Netherlands and delivery charges and taxes are included in the quoted prices.
*That said, because of the way the models are created, Shapeways can also make designs that aren't normally possible, such as a small ball inside a larger one, without a seam.
