Blog Currents – 2011, 31 Aug

I’m sick of the boot time it takes my aging PC to start up. At work I just got a new PC that had a SSD, solid state drive, for the operating system and programs and it is very fast to start up. I could speed things up on my old unit by clearing the boot drive and reinstalling again but the hardware is starting to age and a couple of ports are broken.

As usual my approach to PC buying is not to go for the latest and greatest products because they attract a pricing premium. Start with a CPU price list. Scan the numbers until you see the first big jump in price. This typically happens for the second or third to top CPU. The one before the price jump is the sweet spot. At the moment this is the 2600 series for Intel. There are two versions of this chip, one that can be overclocked and the other, slightly cheaper that can’t, easily.

Next look at the motherboards that support the CPU you have chosen. AMD boards are different from the Intel ones but the series will normally have a version for each. I like to spend a little extra for the motherboard and these days either ASUS or Gigabyte is the best. You will want something with USB 3, SATA 6 support and depending on your needs HDMI out and perhaps decent sound. Most boards these days have the latter.

If you play games then a separate graphics card is the next step, if not get a motherboard with on-board graphics. Something like the GX 550 or 560 is a good mid-range card with 1GB of RAM. Once you have the bits and pieces identified then get a power supply that can handle the load add 20% or more above the requirements just in case you want to add something else to the PC later.

At this point you have a number of options. If you want to play with putting a computer together you can do it yourself. Option 2 is to go to the local computer store pick out the bits and have them put it together for you. In Thailand this costs next to nothing in other countries it will cost a bit more. Another option is to check on say eBay for units that are similar in configuration but with enough options to enable you to match you specifications.  Depending on where you live and who you order from delivery may even be free. Option 2 above will also allow you to pick the case you like. I am going to get one that allows for a plug in drive.

Finally there is the operating system. If you get a lot of RAM e.g. 4GB or more then you will want Windows 7 64 bit. If you want a 32-bit OS you will need to spend some time getting the right options to support the extra RAM. This is often BIOS and motherboard support settings so make sure your selected board can do this for you.

The big news of the week is of course the departure of Steve Jobs as CEO. Of course he will never really be gone. Apple is Steve Jobs and Steve Jobs is Apple. It is directed by Jobs, and ruled by Jobs so just because he doesn’t have the letters CEO behind his name is really quite meaningless. If you think I’m joking then you don’t know Jobs.

Look at the history of Apple. Right from the start it was a Jobs enterprise and anyone who got in the way was gone (remember Steve Wozniak anyone?). This wasn’t just hardware but software and standards as well if he didn’t like or want them, bye-bye e.g. OpenDoc. The current team over at Apple be they the inventors, the makers, the fans and so on are all followers of Jobsian Way. They are also all believers to the extent that nothing Apple does could ever be wrong.

Jobs rewards those who keep the organisation afloat and when you are right he respects those who point out problems which is why someone like Gray Powell is still working there. You do not want to be wrong however. There are also plenty of people who want to work at Apple. You also cannot argue that the company has been a success and has a very strong core of supporters who will buy just about anything released whether they need it or not. In general people buy Apple devices because they like them, They look nice and shiny. These people don’t care how locked down the iTunes store might be, or that the device cannot play Flash media; it is an Apple.

You also have to admit that Jobs has really built Apple back up from the doldrums of the 1997’s. When he came back he really shook the organisation up from top to bottom. He got rid of most of the rubbish projects, simplified production and is ‘leaving’ something that will keep on the path for some time to come. Will it last forever without him? Short answer “no.” It will fade because those left behind are not Steve Jobs and over time all things fade when the primary driving force is no longer there. Apple is right now at the top if the heap.

Industry News

Apple versus Samsung. They seem to have won in Europe, at least for the moment, but the battleground has now shifted to Australia. A new case is starting there and the Galaxy Tab 10.1 is not being sold at the moment while the case proceeds. Like an increasing number of these cases it has devolved to the level of idiocy with Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey being cited as prior art for tablet computers.

It looks like the price of RAM is about drop significantly. The reason strangely enough is the current love affair with tablet devices. This has caused a drop in PC purchases and a growing glut in the memory market. It is estimated that DDr3 will be available for around $1.60 per 2GB in the next quarter. It may even drop down close to the $1.25 mark being the approximate cash cost per unit for the suppliers. A year ago the price was $4.70. This will also drive a push for more NAND memory production, the kind you find in flash drives.

The NHS in the UK is tendering for a contract to supply digital pen technology. The aim is to capture hand written notes and form information. While such technology has been around for a while now this will be the first comprehensive push to get it out to a wide range of users including government departments, police, emergency services and other agencies. The tender includes the pens, smartphones, printers, software and other support elements. So if I was to guess the underlying reason for the adoption of this technology in the health sector? Yes you guessed it, handwriting recognition for a doctor’s scrawl 

Finally for this week are torrent sites on the way out? Short answer “no” longer answer is that alternatives are starting to pop up. Enter a Rapidshare knock-off called BayFiles from the people who bring you Pirate Bay Posted. It works like this: anyone can upload stuff without creating an account. If you don’t have an account you can download one thing per hour, if you pay about $8 / month you can download as much as you like.

At the time of writing the site does not scan for infringement of copyright and the site claims it will follow take down notices from copyright holders. In reality this means that a handful of a huge number of files will be affected and even those can reappear in different forms. Bayfiles.com itself is registered with a Panamanian contact address. One member of Pirate Bay calls it the alternative to Bittorrent for file sharing. There is of course the program JDownloader that bypasses many of the restrictions after all how much can you trust pirates.

Blog Currents – 2011, 24 Aug

It is difficult to work at two places at the same time especially if they are using different technologies. In my case this is the Delphi versus the VBA world and I often find myself using the wrong function name or the wrong kind of comments indicator as I swap between the two. As I’ve transitioned between the two platforms I have also found, once again, how important the testing procedures and bug documentation procedures are.

In this case I am finishing up one project and working on another. Being at different stages in development/implementation is also making it interesting because there is a different mindset. In the first case I am always waiting on the user to do some testing, find some bugs and then call me in to resolve them. In the other case I am working primarily without any road blocks to get a first draft of a new system out. The find and fix programming process is a lot different from the ‘create and test’ one. If this is a daily process then efficiency is degraded. In my case it is a once a week for a few hours on the fixing part but as the work gets more critical I am finding that it is important to find the right time to do the debugging work. For this to work flexible schedules are necessary and an understanding manager user set on both sides of the process.

Language is a dynamic process. In a recent letter to the editor I noted a rather pedantic individual complaining that the singular form of agenda is agendum.  Yes, sometime in the past agenda was the plural of agendum, meaning a thing to be done. In modern times this has been changed to mean a list of things to be done. Language is dynamic and in all the meetings I have attended it was always the agenda never the agendum so being pedantic does not change modern usage.

That being covered some of the new words added to the dictionary this year include woot, retweet, cyberbullying, denialist, gastric band, mankini, jeggings, sexting, slow food, upcycle and
domestic goddess. There are others but this is a representative set of what we are using out there over the past few years though can’t we do with a word like mankini? Of course my spell checker is not accepting most of the above.

Industry News

What a surprise as Android takes off Apple is getting more aggressive in attacking companies like Samsung. Europe represented by the EU, being somewhat Apple loving, has bent over backwards to accommodate Apple. Since there are some serious doubts as to the validity of Apple’s claims I don’t expect Samsung to rush to meet the recall notices. The latest Apple attack is on both tablets and phones.

UK readers are moving across to eBook formats at a record rate no accounting for half of all European sales in that area. To put this into perspective the UK accounts for about 15 per cent of book sales in Europe. Overall eBook sales grew more than 400 per cent in 2010 with over 10 million books sold.  This is expected to hit around 32 Million in 2011 not counting the free books from sources like Project Gutenberg, nor of course the Torrent-sourced books. The introduction of a UK version of the Kindle a year ago has helped sales there as I expect the similar introduction of an Australian one recently will boost eBooks sales there.

Just to make you feel that much safer about online security cryptographers have discovered a way to break the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) used to protect everything from top-secret government documents to online banking transactions. The technical paper can be found here http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/cryptanalysis/aesbc.pdf. The technique was revealed at the recent Crypto 2011 cryptology conference in Santa Barbara, California and it allows users to ‘recover’ AES secret keys up to five times faster than previously possible using a technique known as biclique cryptanalysis to remove about two bits from 128-, 192-, and 256-bit keys. The process is faster than a brute force attack for single key AES implementations.

The good news is that the technique does not really compromise AES because stronger AES keys are still quite secure as the technique still takes a very long time to process this kind of encryption. Since we are talking millions of years AES looks secure for now. What it does mean is that weaker AES encryptions are vulnerable.

As a side note you will read that AS has been ‘broken’ using this technique. The term “broken” simply means faster than it would take with a standard brute force attack, 5 times faster in this case. AES is not broken in the sense of being useable or reliable. Give that these kind of technologies get better with time then expect to see the number five here grow in size as time passes and techniques are refined or improved.

The rumour is that HP is going to divest its PC business and spend $10b to buy Autonomy a s/w company they have ben partners with since 2007. In the last financial quarter they made only $533m from their Personal Systems Group on revenues of $9.4bn driving the sell rumours.

Remember quite a while back I wrote in a Bangkok Post article about how performing a Microsoft update resulted in the most prolific viral infection of a series of Web Browsing tests. You will not be surprised then that Microsoft has deleted code on its MSN website that secretly logged visitors' browsing histories across multiple web properties, even when the users deleted browser cookies to elude tracking. In other news Microsoft has been secretly logged visitors' browsing histories across multiple web properties.

This was not a magnanimous gesture by Microsoft but rather one forced upon them when that a researcher in Stanford University's computer science department found that MSN and three other Microsoft websites hosted JavaScript that uniquely identified users in the event they deleted tracking cookies from their hard drives and that the code had a date-time stamp of 2007 which implied that they had been doing it for 4 years or so.

MS secreted some JavaScript in the browser's cache folder that held two separate ways to uniquely identify visitors. One held the MUID, or machine unique identifier, with code to recreate them if it was no longer held in the browser's cookie folder. The script also included the MUID in as an ETag that was also stored in the cache. The researcher could not find a single legitimate reason why Microsoft might have been doing this. Microsoft's outside PR firm declined to answer any questions about the practice and no one inside Redmond is talking either.

Other sites like Hulu.com, Spotify, and GigaOm have also been found to be using respawning techniques called supercookies and zombiecookies. Many are facing lawsuits for doing so. Microsoft was using the technique to sync browsing histories across at least six of their sites.

About a month ago there were some very excited signals from the Large Hadron Collider about a possible series of detection of the elusive Higgs Boson sometimes called the God Particle.  There is still a 95% confidence level the readings will be verified but for scientists, unlike those in the AGW world, 100% certainty is required for confirmation. It is expected that the Higgs will be confirmed by the end of 2012.

I read an interesting article on what programmers might put on their tombstones. The text would of course be in a programming language of some kind. I particularly liked one example that I have modified slightly.  While { Not Crocodile; }  Or put another way, Not in a while crocodile :)

Blog Currents – 2011, 17 Aug

The tablet world is not going very well, for everyone who isn’t Apple that is. A strange phenomenon is occurring in the computer world at the moment many people will only buy a Tablet PC if is made by Apple. Sales of the iPad 2 have not diminished in the US but for every other manufacturer sales have been very flat. This is causing a strange problem for Apple in that as the gap widens between their prices and the rest it is opening up a new market, those who could not afford to buy a tablet but now can. The real question, and one HP is asking, is will the discount be enough?

Probably not. The exception might be Samsung who Apple is attacking on a copyright front because their model sales were making a little dent in Apple’s market share. The lawsuit is of course frivolous and there are some indications that Apple may have doctored some of the photos to make the devices look more similar than they are. Acer and Asus are also taking some of the share from Apple. I’ve seen the recent Samsung and Acer models and I’m finding that the latest larger form factors need two hands to hold which takes away from the whole tablet experience for me. I have yet to see any device that can challenge the notebook in terms of getting reasonable amounts of info into it.

I do prefer the Android versions to Apple’s however. They include a provision for far more connectivity than Apple allows for and the biggest draw card for me is the removal of the need to install what I consider a virus, the iTunes store software. Give it a few more months and the Android software offerings, already far more in number will match or exceed anything Apple currently provides. These will all be at a lower price and more compatible that the Apple alternatives.

Google has bought Motorola. Apple has created a big patent mess. How are these things related? Android has bumped iOS off the top of the phone pyramid. According to the Gartner group Google is activating a whopping 650,000 Android devices every day, yes that is every day. Some are still saying that Apple dominates the mobile phone profit sector.

So let’s look a little deeper. Adults are buying the iOS devices while the younger group are buying the Android devices, because they tend to be less expensive both as hardware and for the software. Which of these two groups will be buying devices for longer into the future?

Google makes money from the indirect sources of advertising and the like. They don’t make money from Android directly so they don’t care so much how much the OEMs make from the technology. The more that are sold the better off Google is. Yes Apple makes mobile advertising dollars but as Android grows that become less and yes Google wins. Once the tablets drop in price they will eventually move, again Google doesn’t care how cheap they get because their revenue stream is not from these sales.

The real issues here are around the patents. Apple has been quietly and loudly patenting everything from the word “App” to rounded corners. They have so many patents on tablets it’s amazing they haven’t tried to patent the story of the Ten Commandments or retroactively sue Moses.

So why did Google buy Motorola? The company has about 17,000 patents with another 7,500 in the processes of being granted. This should stop Apple dead in its tracks because Apple is suddenly open to any infringement they may have made on those 75K. The Apple patent threat was looking like it was going to cost Google over $2B per year. It is almost certain that some will overlap with Apple’s. Let the patent war begin.

Mini Review – Latest Samsung Tablet

It might be contraband at the moment but it is a nice piece of hardware. The problem, and a similar one for tablets in general, is the available software. One reviewer described tablets as halfway between a computer and a dumb screen. It is worth noting that the iPad has no killer apps that keeps it apart from the others, marketing, brand recognition and fawning Apple lovers are doing that. Add the law suits against any challengers and the iPad holds a rather protected position. So once again great hardware shame about the rest. Samsung has relied on Google to fill that gap in for them and like many others Google is not sure where to aim in that regard as well.

The hardware is very nice. It is landscape oriented (compared to portrait) so aimed at movie watching and game playing rather than eBook and Web page reading. It is light and well made with a very nice screen. It fails by not having a HDMI or USB slots in this case going for the annoying iPad like one slot for all design paradigm. Performance is very speedy and makes the TouchPad look slow.

The browser is nice and beats Safari hands down. Sophistication however falls behind iOS but has better font rendering than say the HP alternative. One annoyance is the iPhone like rendering of websites, why? As a scaled phone it does poorly with things like the small back button. Honeycomb as the latest Android experience is still too messy and has too many screens and panels to work through. You need a nice simple user interface on a tablet device.

For some reason having the interface a two year old can work out is fine in the Apple world but when it moves out of that arena it lacks something. Apple gets away with it because they are maintaining a kind of consistency. Multitasking etc. are not necessary for the average Apple user (there is a joke in there somewhere I’m sure).

Honeycomb then is somewhere between the media player world and the computer world and it leaves the user with a what do I have in my hands feeling. The iPad directs people to approved things through their iTunes store. The Android experience leaves you with a device that lacks definition and you feel somehow cheated of your expectations.

Industry News

Bored with your iPad2, waiting for that iPad3 with the "retina display" sorry nothing before 2012 because LG and Samsung, they guys they are suing, can’t make the 9.7in, 2048 x 1536 fast enough. So the production has been cancelled for a while. If the current production figures had been met then Apple would have been selling both iPad2 with iPad3s perhaps this is another reason to slow things down. So it remains to be seen if the iPad3 now becomes a less expensive alternative to the iPad2 instead of its replacement.

ScaleBase a service provider for MySQL. ScaleBase is a startup founded in Israel and located now in Boston. Their first product the Database Load Balancer is out now. It is a proxy server that sits in front of a database and breaks a single relational database into pieces and spreads it out across multiple physical servers. This is called sharding and people have been doing it for years. However, if you shard your database, you have to basically rewrite the entire data access layer of a database management system. The ScaleBase Database Load Balancer tricks those applications, backup programs, and report writers into thinking they are talking to one database; it looks exactly like a MySQL or Oracle database would at the network level to any application. The database proxy then accepts SQL commands and depending on what those commands are, it either runs the query against the appropriate subset of the database or across all the shards at once. You don't have to change one line of your application code, but you may have to work out a different license with your database vendor.

The product currently works with MySQL but depending on customer demand, ScaleBase will add support for IBM's DB2, Microsoft's SQL Server, and other open source databases such as PostgreSQL. The target is databases that are 50GB or larger and that have to field tens to hundreds of requests per second.

Blog Currents - 2011, 10 Aug

According to Acer founder tablets are a passing fad. He is either right or not. According to Steve Job’s “we’re living in a post-PC world.” So who is right? History tells us that apart from the ‘toy factor’ of a new electronic device real work tends to be generated on a PC or a notebook. Efficiency is often a driver of this and while getting information into a tablet remains difficult it will never replace the notebook equivalent. Even a Netbook level device having a keyboard and mouse is more useful than a tablet in a business environment. I am excluding the presentation level process here where a tablet can be used for such a purpose quite well.

I don’t see the tablet vanishing but I don’t see it making much of an in-road into the traditional PC and notebook areas either. If you need to carry two then given the notebook can do both jobs why also carry the tablet? If all you want to do is play chess on the bus ride home or watch that TV show then the tablet will be perfect. If the tablet makers come up with more creative input mechanisms or some specialised application s/w is developed for them to keep people interested then once the new toy interest wanes I expect to see tablet sales drop. Going forward then I see a round or two of new devices, then a drop in pricing levels until either a new paradigm is revealed or interest wanes and the tablet returns to a niche or vertical position in the marketplace.

According to Steve Perlman the new DIDO wireless technology promises to give us infinite and endless capacity. You will need to start here http://www.rearden.com/DIDO/DIDO_White_Paper_110727.pdf which is the White Paper on the technology.

The Distributed-Input-Distributed-Output approach actually states that it is “a breakthrough approach that allows each wireless user to use the full data rate1 of shared spectrum simultaneously with all other users, by eliminating interference between users sharing the same spectrum.” Or in simpler terms it claims that you can use the full bandwidth without any sharing issues. Yes, the paper reads like a car salesman advertising brochure, even if it isn’t. The paper, possibly for patent reasons, is fairly short on how this is all supposed to happen.

What is does tell us is that there is a central data centre of some kind. This centre will check for a shared channel and modulate accordingly. This will somehow bypass Shannon’s Law. To save you looking this up says that the maximum possible data speed that can be obtained in a data channel, the highest obtainable error-free data speed, expressed in bits per second (bps), is a function of the bandwidth and the signal-to-noise ratio. Or the fastest you can get from a data channel after noise is taken into account.

While I, and many others, would love to see such a technology implemented there are a lot of questions unanswered after reading the paper. The first and rather obvious question is how are all those data centres going to be created to service the system? Actually strike that how about the issue that all of your communications will be given over to one organisation to pre-process. The hacking implementations are enormous.

Of course Shannon’s Law applies. The paper writer is simply playing with one of the parameters in the rule. In this case the available channel capacity for a given state. For any given channel however the rules still apply. They claim tiny millisecond latency but what about the processing time in the data centre, that must be taken into account. So air transmission latency may decrease but in centre processing increases giving, probably, a larger total. “More power” as the actor in the well know TV program used to say. Power is limited in the WiFi network so it won’t interfere with things like your cordless phone and other reasons.

Of course as soon as the technology announcement hit Australia it was used as a rather blunt club against the NBN. Ignoring the limitations it at the very least highlighted that spending huge sums of money on an end to end fibre network is unnecessary, especially in a world where most people under 30 use their mobile phones, their tablets and their other mobile devices to communicate either by voice or digitally.

Industry News

If you are going to have optical (photonic) computers you need a linear optical diode rather than a non-linear one. Well that at least is what the boys over at Caltech are saying since they just came up with one. It isn’t really a diode like you know one but the equivalent component for light based computing. Diodes are used to isolate signals from each other. The ability to allow light to move in a single direction is one scientists have been trying to construct for over 20 years. The result is again not really a diode as we know it but one that sends light out in one form and it comes back in another so the two do not interact. The next step is to build something that will connect to existing integrated circuit technology.

Readers will be pleased, and I use this term in a very ironic sense, that the Anonymous hacker group is developing a new tool to better facilitate DDoS, or denial of service, attacks. It will be better than their current LOIC (Low Orbit Ion Cannon) DDoS utility. LOIC does not hide the user’s identity; the new version Refref will. It uses a different and more sophisticated approach by launching from behind targeted Websites. This is another response to the recent arrests of some Anonymous members.

In a related story Anonymous has also hacked the website of the Syrian Minister of Defence. They embedded their logo in the middle of the Syrian flag. They also added a massage attacking the regime of Bashar Al-Assad with a number of links to video examples of injustice, violence and civil unrest in the country. According to one of the group’s members “(Anonymous) is against oppressive regimes, corruption, police brutality, government cover-ups, the arrest and murder of people in any nation.”

As a follow-up to last week as expected Anonymous has released a 10GB data dump including personal information, email addresses, social security numbers, and credit card details swiped from an online sheriff's store. The batch also covered data on informants. The scope was 76 law enforcement websites in 11 states

You have heard of Facebook, how about Shagbook? You can do your own research on the contents of this site the issue I want to cover here is Faceboo0k’s ‘trademark’ attack on the site name, i.e. anything ending with the word “book” appears to be a no-no as far as Facebook is concerned. One immediate defence is that the term ”facebook” was in general use before Zuckerberg used it as a site name, it even appears in the American Heritage Dictionary as originating in 1983. This makes it a generic term that cannot be claimed as a solo trademark.

The other line of defence in this particular case is definitive. Facebook has publicly stated that facebook.com is not a dating site and in fact has removed individuals from the site upon discovering that said individuals had been using the site as a 'dating site' to meet new people for sexual encounters. In this sense Facebook does in no way provide the same services as Shagbook. Others like Teachbook, Placebook and others have faced and beaten similar claims from the heavy handed Facebook group. All in all the whole issue is somewhat silly. Phacebook.com if it existed might legitimately be targeted by Facebook but Phacébook, with a different pronunciation could be a different matter. As I have pointed out in the past, this whole issue of copyrights and trademarks passed well beyond sensible a while back.

Blog Currents - 2011 - August 3

I saw recently that LG has a new phone with a 3D display. LG’s 3D technology uses the cinema glasses that are passive in nature. This makes the technology easily accessible because the glasses cost next to nothing which is a plus. Then I started thinking about the result of a 3D phone in the wider world e.g. on a bus. I imagined a bus load of passengers wearing 3D glasses and watching 3D content. Not a lot scarier than them watching a video on a phone I admit but it is another layer away from interfacing with the real world.

Now take this not too far into the future where the glasses are sending the information directly to the back of the eye and providing an even more realistic experience. These days in the Western world at least people are becoming more and more dissociated from each other. The family dinner now consists of the older generation talking to each other with the newest generation focused on their Nintendo DSI or equivalent. Sometimes they are in their own world, other times there are communicating with one or more people in the same room. The call to eat requires multiple attempts.

People locked into the latter paradigm send pictures of themselves, often altered or avatar in nature, that rarely match their real life images and attributes. It is interesting to imagine how our perceptions of each other will change over time as the lines between reality and fantasy become blurred. Recent examples have shown that it is easy to confuse and be confused by imagined age, sex and orientation that can end up being the opposite of the reality.

When is an unlimited connection not an unlimited connection? When AT&T says it isn’t. The following is an example of where I seeing many others going in the future. If you're a heavy downloader with an unlimited AT&T wireless data plan then according to AT&T you have another two months before you will be throttled, if you are in the top five percent of heavy users. In official speak this was expressed as “smartphone customers with unlimited data plans may experience reduced speeds once their usage in a billing cycle reaches the level that puts them among the top 5 per cent of heaviest data users." They plan to give out warnings and only hobble repeat offenders, promise.

There are others in the US that throttle after a certain point and I expect that the NBN in Australia will have the same conditions and others at many places around the world as connectivity and connected speed increases. My current plan for example allows me to pull down about 200GB of data of which I use only a fraction of that, unless I have some kind of exploit in operation. As content improves it would however be easy to pull at least that for say streaming BD level materials. Given that restrictions are being imposed in the US it shows how bandwidth is being outstripped by technology.

Mini Review – The Classic Shell Replacement for Windows 7

Those that have been around for a while, e.g. those who used XP for a while, will have complaints about Vista and Windows 7 as far as the interface, the Start Menu and Explorer. For those that still use it this also includes Internet Explorer. A work associate pointed me to Classic Shell, an add-on for Windows 7 and Vista that brings back some of the better and most missed features of the XP shell.  You can find it here http://classicshell.sourceforge.net/ and it is free.

The add-on is essentially the classic start menu from XP that in some cases adds a few features. I dropped it into Windows 7 where a Shift Click will bring up the regular Win 7 menu. A regular click displays the traditional format. You can drag and drop to reorganize the apps. Recently used documents are easy to find and how many show is customizable. A right click allows renaming, deleting and other options. The Search option is back and you can even skin the menu to your taste.

The Classic Explorer replacement adds a toolbar to Explorer for some common operations like cut, copy, and email and is fully customizable. The Copy UI is more compact and useful. Alt-Enter shows the folder properties and has a range of customizing options including showing the free disk space and the total size of the selected files in the status bar. It fixes a lot of ‘broken’ features in Win 7 like the jumping folders in the navigation pane and the missing sorting headers in list view. Classic IE9 shows the load progress, adds a caption and shows the security zone. There are regular updates.

Industry News

Here is an interesting study. A fairly detailed study of 100K Web users was carried out by recording the Web browsers people used as they completed a Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (IV) IQ test. The firm was AptiQuant from Canada and they found that Opera users had the highest average IQ followed by Camino and Internet Explorer with Chrome Frame. Next came the group of Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox and Apple's Safari. At the bottom of the list were those using any standard version of IE ranking “significantly lower on an average than others.” English-speaking users from the US, Canada, UK, Australia, and New Zealand were drawn to a free IQ assessment test on AptiQuant's site. Age and gender were collected and those below 16 redirected to a different site. The results were compared to a similar exercise from 2006.

Essentially the results indicate that those with a higher IQ have moved away from IE in the past 5 years or that the smarter you are, the less likely you are to be using IE. The real result is also that individuals on the lower side of the IQ scale tend to resist a change/upgrade of their browsers. The study also found that IE was somewhat of a downer for web developers viz "Any IT company involved in web development will acknowledge the fact that millions of man hours are wasted each year to make otherwise perfectly functional websites work in Internet Explorer." You can find all the details here http://www.aptiquant.com/news/is-internet-explorer-for-the-dumb-a-new-study-suggests-exactly-that/.

Anonymous, the hacking group, claim that they have broken into the networks of Mantech International and stole internal documents belonging to the US government contractor. Members then posted a 390 MB download that looked like it contained NATO, the US Army and personnel files. An attached note file said the hack was intended to defy the FBI after they charged 14 people for being part of an Anonymous-led web attack in December.

In even later news hackers have posted the names, addresses, and other personal information of 7,000 law enforcement officers that were stolen from a training academy website they hacked into. The data included social security numbers, email addresses, and the usernames and passwords for their accounts on the internal training website. The group responsible was AntiSec an affiliate of the Anonymous hacking collective. It was no surprise that many of the passwords used were either normal ones found in a dictionary, their names or their badge numbers. Given that many people also use the same passwords in multiple places this would have also compromised other accounts. There was other information compromised including other websites in other places. All due to the same reasons given above. I suspect that US law enforcement has not seen the last of these attacks and information release.

So will DIDO save us all? Distributed-Input-Distributed-Output (DIDO) Wireless Technology made the news recently in an announcement from Steve Perlman that the wireless technology would make things like the Australian National Broadband Network (NBN) redundant. More on this next week after I have read through the paper a few times.