franticindustries

franticindustries has moved to franticindustries.com

2006-12-17T13:57:00.000+01:00

The transfer of this site to franticindustries.com is now complete. The switch to Wordpress has been relatively painless, and almost all of the content has been transfered to the new site - except the comments, sorry.

The RSS feed should be automatically transfered to the new location.

Please point your bookmarks to the new site, as this site will no longer be updated. Thank you.

Microsoft homepage gets a redesign

2006-12-15T13:51:00.000+01:00

Microsoft.com received a complete redesign, featuring lots of unused space and less clutter (that's good), no tables (that's also good), and, most importantly, a menu that gives you quick access to all Microsoft products and services.

Microsoft's pages have mostly been hell in the last couple of years. The homepage itself wasn't bad, but god help you if you tried actually finding some precise info about a Microsoft product or service.

Since Microsoft's pages are a never ending jungle of tutorials, help articles, technological explanations, updates and whatnot, I don't reckon they've actually managed to set all that in order. But, at least the new home page is clean and pretty. And, they've added a menu which at least points you in the right (general) direction - on the upper right side of the page you know choose between "Products and related technologies", "Downloads and trials", Using Microsoft products", "Security and Updates", "Training and events", "Support" and "About Microsoft". Click on "Products" and you actually get info on all Microsoft products in one place. Well, almost - each link leads you to a part of the old Microsoft site, but at least it's all there in one place. Finally - less confusion, less noise, more actual info.

iPhone might be launched on monday; how hot will it be?

2006-12-15T12:39:00.000+01:00

There aren't many sites big enough that they can say something like "iPhone will be launched on monday. It's completely different than what we expected" and have people actually pay attention. Gizmodo is one of them, and since they can't afford being dead wrong on news like this, I guess we'll all have to believe them.

As far as iPhone hype goes, I never rode the bandwagon. The cell phone market is a completely different beast than the MP3 player market, and same rules do not apply here.

Although (for some strange reason) none of Apple's competitors in the multimedia player market managed to create an equally intuitive user interface, when it comes to cell phone UIs, Nokia, Sony Ericsson and others call the shots - and people who use cell phones - and that's pretty much all people - are used to their UIs. So, fancy touchwheels won't be much help here.

Furthermore, while iPod is popular all over the world, Apple is strong only in the US. Here's an example. In Croatia, where I live, I reckon 3 out of 10 people on the street would know what an iPod is, but maybe 1 in 20 would know what Apple or a Mac is and what they do. On the other hand, they all know what Nokia is. Croatian market is a small one, but this is indicative for all other eastern-european countries. So, I reckon, while it may not be the case in the US, that the rest of the world might react to the news of iPhone rather mildly.

There are also those pesky things called mobile operators, which kinda own much of the cell phone market right now. Apple has to reach an agreement with them, because if they don't support the iPhone, including it in their device+subscription cheap bundles, it will be a lot harder for iPhone to get wide acceptance.

If you ask me, the multimedia-player-meets-cell-phone functionality is where Apple needs to make a breakthrough. Althouth all big cell phone manufacturers have multimedia capabilities in their products, none of them has been able to really nail it down perfectly yet. Photo functionality? Sure. Video recording? Yes. Occasional MP3 listening/video playing? Well, sometimes, but not really. If iPhone manages to offer a good cell phone with great multimedia player capabilities (and I mean great, not just good enough), it might have a chance of a big worldwide impact.

All this said, let's wait for monday and see if Gizmodo was right about the launch in the first place.

Adobe Photoshop CS3 beta available

2006-12-15T11:57:00.000+01:00

Adobe has released a beta version of Photoshop CS3, sporting some interesting changes, most notably the one-column toolbar.

Photoshop CS3 beta is shippped with a a pre-release version of a major upgrade to Adobe Bridge, and a new tool integrated in CS3 called Adobe Device Central, which enables you to optimize your content for devices with smaller screens.

If you want to give CS3 beta a test run, you need a serial number from either Adobe Photoshop CS2, Adobe Creative Suite® 2, Adobe Creative Suite Production Studio, Adobe Design Bundle, Adobe Web Bundle or Adobe Video Bundle, and you can download Adobe Photoshop CS3 here.

I haven't gotten my hands on CS3 just yet, but you can read a review of the new features in this article. The most interesting change seems to be the new user interface with the all-new one-column toolbar, which - luckily for people that don't like change in their life - can be reverted to the standard two-column version. I'm also quite excited about the new Quick Select Tool, which makes selecting objects from a background much easier.

3.2 million Wii straps recalled

2006-12-15T11:18:00.000+01:00

Nintendo decided to recall all of the hand straps delivered with their Wii console because of user complaints that the strap simply isn't strong enough.

I hope this news doesn't spur as much controversy as the Sony battery recall, because it simply isn't worth it. Nintendo weighed the options they have, and they decided that the best thing to do is to recall the straps and replace them with better ones. Good move.

According to Nintendo, the recall will not cause a big financial loss for them.

Franticindustries moving to franticindustries.com over the weekend

2006-12-15T10:47:00.000+01:00

There's no sense postponing the inevitable. After a month-long experimental phase, franticindustries is moving to its own server and web domain - www.franticindustries.com. Don't go there just yet - there's nothing on at the moment. The move will be done on Saturday/Sunday, so don't expect too many updates over that period.

Hopefully, all the links to articles on franticindustries.blogspot.com will be redirected to the new domain. The RSS feed at feeds.feedburner.com/Franticindustries should also automatically start pointing to the new website.

In case of any bugs, or weird behaviour of the site, don't hesitate to contact me at franticindustries@gmail.com.

Google releases Patent search beta

2006-12-14T10:10:00.000+01:00

New service from Google lets you search the entire text of the U.S. patent corpus (that's over 7 million patents), together with images.

Google Patent search lets you search by criteria - patent number, inventor, and filing date. It is similar to Google Book Search, which means that you can scroll through pages and zoom in on the text and images.

I've tried it out and got several server-not-responding errors, which were probably just coincidence. Other than that, it works fine, and will surely be an invaluable resource to all those folks who think that immeasurable wealth is just one patent away. I've immediately tried searching for a "Car seat with integrated side light", and - damn! - it already exists. So much for my dreams of wealth and glory.

When blogging becomes business - Techcrunch UK on hold

2006-12-14T08:53:00.000+01:00

Techcrunch UK, the United Kingdom + Ireland arm of the popular Web 2.0 blogging authority Techcrunch, has been put on hold and its editor, Sam Sethi, is fired by Mike Arrington, the owner of all things Crunch.

Problems arose from Sam Sethi's negative (and kind of half-assed, if I may add) comment on the Le Web3 conference, which spurred some insults from the conference organizer Loic Le Meur. Sethi fired back by trying to make Loic look like a jerk in front of everyone, although Loic had apologized, and Mike had specifically asked Sam not to do that. So, Sam gets fired. It's basically your standard editorial stuff, happens every day in journalism. You can read Mike's account of the whole incident here.

This will all be very well covered by, well, everyone, so I hope you'll forgive me if I give a bit of a personal commentary myself.

I'm not saying that Mike was wrong or right, but this type of thing is exactly why blogs should never become big business. When you have one guy behind the computer, working on his blog, then his only concern is quality of content. On the other hand, when you have ten or more websites, dozens of people working for you, conference organizers calling you because they didn't like your post, and, ultimately, hundreds of blogs writing about your decision to fire someone, then you're no longer a blog; you're a business, and we all know that business don't only think about quality of content.

This is not to be taken as an attack on Techcrunch or Mike Arrington; it's just my view on the advantages simple blogs have over traditional journalism. Working professionally in IT journalism for over three years, I very well know that you have to compromise all the time. You're doing a laptop test? If you say (it's just an example) that all Toshiba laptops are crap, Toshiba won't advertise with you any more. It's what happens - it's reality in IT journalism. That's why people write blogs, that's why people READ blogs. Because bloggers can truly write what they really think.

Looking back at Sam Sethi's comment on the Le Web3 conference, from a professional, IT journalist point of view - it's bad. It's short, it's not really objective, it makes things look worse than they are (The wifi for the event did not work and this has annoyed many people - that's your main argument for the whole event being horrible?). But from a blogger's point of view, it's perfectly OK. The guy came to the conference, it was boring, Wi-Fi didn't work, soda was warm, whatever.

So, even if Mike Arrington doesn't consider himself to be a pro journalist, firing Sam was a real pro journalist move he had to make. Welcome to the club.

Google Toolbar 3 beta for Firefox released

2006-12-13T12:06:00.000+01:00

Google has announced the release of the beta 3 version of Google Toolbar for Firefox, which sports some really interesting options.

Among other things, the new Google toolbar lets you share pages via Blogger, Gmail and SMS, and add custom buttons to your Toolbar, and share web pages via Blogger, Gmail, and SMS.

But the most important feature which might make me a user (I'm not a big fan of any extra toolbars in Firefox because they take away my precious screen space, so I don't use Google Toolbar) is this: it now lets you access your bookmarks from any computer. Finally, an end to the torments of having two different sets of bookmarks at work and at home.

Get Google Toolbar here.

The future of Digg-like websites

2006-12-12T17:27:00.000+01:00

New social content websites are appearing every day, but I don't see any of them gaining a really big following. I've done a little research to find if there is a secret ingredient that can make a new social content website successful.

If you've compare the traffic of the big 5 social news sites - Digg, Reddit, Care2, Netscape and Shoutwire, like I did in my Top 5 social news sites roundup, you can see that the top 2 are growing. Care2 seems to be slowly losing momentum, Netscape's real quality traffic is indistinguishable from the huge amount of traffic they get on their name alone, while Shoutwire seems to stall (and if they keep having 2-3 days old articles on the front page, they'll probably start plummeting pretty soon).

But what about the newcomers? Are there still some cookies left for them, or have the big ones scooped the entire bowl, leaving only scraps for the little sites? Unfortunately, it seems so.

As you can see by this fantastic list over at 3Spots, there's more than enough new social content services around, and new ones are probably being created every day. But a quick Alexa check shows that not only are most of these sites poorly visited (which isn't that surprising, given that they're, well, new), but their traffic doesn't have a strong tendency of going up - it mostly just stalls with occasional peaks when news of these sites appear on Digg or some other big site.

Still, careful examination of these sites can give us some valuable info on what works and what doesn't in the social news arena.

First of all, let's divide these sites into some broad categories so we can notice the trends easier. Bear in mind that, for simplicity's sake, I'm leaving out many new somewhat similar services like Spotback, Megite, or Tailrank, and focusing only on the more or less "standard" social content websites.

1. English Digg-like social news sites. This means sites which cover a broad range of categories, and are in concept similar to Digg, with standard browse-submit-vote-comment functionality. This includes Pligg sites, which aren't that much different from Digg, but tend to be similar between each other.
2. English specific social news sites. These are sites with functionality similar to Digg, but instead of covering all possible topics, they focus on one category.
3. Non-English social news sites. From Meneame to Fresqui.com, these are the sites that cater to the social news needs in a language other than English.

I've extracted the Alexa traffic data for all of the sites on 3spots list (yes, all of them), and I've compiled a list of top 5 sites for these three categories. (*I've excluded pornography sites, because I their rate of success probably depends on vastly different factors than other sites. I've also excluded the five big sites I've covered in my recent article.).

In the first category, the list is:

1. Newsvine.com - traffic stalling
2. Blinkbits.com - medium growth
3. Hubpages.com - medium growth
4. Thebeststuffintheworld.com - medium growth
5. Wikio.com - slow growth

The second category looks like this:

1. Flurl.com - theme: videos, slow fall
2. QJ.net - theme: gaming, slow growth
3. Dzone.com - theme: developers, medium growth
4. Bestweekever.tv/ble/ - theme: TV, slow growth
5. Bad.webpagesthatsuck.com - theme: bad web sites, medium growth

NB: at this point between 50 and 100 in Alexa's charts you can find as much as 50 new topic-specific social content websites. I'll name some of the ones that are doing well: dogster.com, videosift.com, indianpad.com, blosker.com, dealigg.com.

In the third category, instead of making a top list I decided to just randomly pull out some of the big growers, as it is difficult to me to discern which of these sites get most of their traffic from the social news component and which get it from completely different sources (btw, the obvious winner is Meneame.net):

- Meneame.net - fast growth
- Fresqui.com - fast growth
- Fuzz.fr - slow growth
- Overmundo.com.br - medium growth
- Mywowo.com - traffic stalling
- Wykop.pl - slow growth

So, what have we learned from this exercise? The top 5 lists might not show all that much, but sifting through all of the websites I've learned a lot.

1. There is no viral growth. If you make a social news website, do not expect exponential growth or a boom of new users overnight. Like any other website, the users you get are the users interested in your topic(s), they will only stick if you have quality content, and you have to fight for every one of them.

2. Growth is hard to come by at all. Of all the sites mentioned here, only about a third is actually growing at a noticeable rate. Moreover, huge spikes (probably from Digg or Slashdot traffic) didn't help them at all, the traffic almost universally goes back to the same volume as before the spike.

2a. Non-English websites are the only ones that are universally experiencing growth.

3. Specific topics don't do much better than general topics. This came as a huge surprise to me, as I was pretty certain I'll see a pattern of growth amongst websites that cover specific topics. But, lo and behold, there aren't many that made it big. However, there's definitely more specific-topic sites appearing, and they have a tendency to grow - up to a point. My conclusion here is this: if you have a big web portal or a service behind you with an established community and lots of traffic, you might do well with a site that covers a broad area of interest. If you're a startup, go with a very specific topic.

3a. Technology news are not dominating, nor is any other specific topic.

4. Websites in other languages do much better than English-based websites. However, I think that this is simply due to language barrier winning over Digg. It means that non-English users, if given an alternative, will rather use a good Digg clone in their own language than Digg itself. Consequences of this are easy to predict: if a country doesn't have its own Digg yet, go ahead and make one; you'll do well. But if a good Digg-like site exists and has at least decent traffic already, then it's the same as fighting against Digg itself.

4b. Social news sites are most popular among the Spanish, Chinese, and Japanese population.

5. Technology, design and approach DO matter. Sites that are more technologically advanced, better designed, or have an original approach, tend to do better than run-of-the-mill Digg clones. Examples of this are Newsvine, and thebeststuffintheworld.com. This might seem natural, but on the Internet design and technology often yield to virality and content; just remember MySpace.

Conclusion:

The prospect for upcoming social news websites is grim. It seems that it takes a combination of an interesting specific topic, great design and functionality, and an original approach to achieve at least moderate popularity. And even then there's a chance your website will just stall at the same traffic volume for months, and maybe years, before it finally shuts down. There's still some room for growth if your website is non-english and/or covering a specific geographic area. Of course, I cannot rule out that some ingenious site will show up and take the world by storm, but from what I've seen in this research, none of the newcomers show signs of greatness.

The way I see it, the concept of social content websites does not work on its own - except in rare cases of Digg and Reddit. It's a great addition to a website that already has good content, or plans to build good content in the future, but it's definitely not driving growth by itself. For now, the Digg effect seems to be reserved for Digg only; the future lies somewhere else.

*Disclaimer: the data used for the comparisons in this article are taken from Alexa and need not be correct or exact. Furthermore, I did not use any exact statistical means of comparing data; all comparisons in the article are my own interpretation of Alexa's data and many other individual factors.

Wikio.com (.es, .de) launches; first impressions

2006-12-12T12:08:00.000+01:00

A social news service was launched today at Wikio.com (together with versions for Spain and Germany at Wikio.es and Wikio.de). Wikio was already live and quite active in France and Italy, where they have around 700.000 users altogether. I tried out the service and while I can't say it's bad, it failed to really impress me.

Social news (if you're wondering, I've changed my terminology from community news to social news. It relates better to social networking and social bookmarking) sites cannot succed with the "standard" design and the "standard" features anymore - unless they have a lot of traffic from another source already, like Netscape and Care2.

I've tried out what Wikio has to offer, and I have to conclude it's just that - a standard, run-of-the-mill social news sites. It's not bad by any means (although I have found bugs really quick, more on that later), but it doesn't offer anything really new.

So, a quick rundown of the features:
- you have the standard post, browse, submit, comment functions. Not many news here, except the fact that you can use a bit of advanced formatting in your descriptions, like bold, italic, font color, paragraph positioning etc.
- There are editors, so it's not all completely society-driven. However, the editors aren't really visible as in Netscape.
- no e-mail registration is required to post.
- there are 14 available categories, items are colored according to the category - nice touch.
- tags are also available, which is good. You can browse articles via a tag cloud on the front page
- if you sign in, you have a personalizable page, but there isn't really much you can do here except write some text.

Those were the good points, let's go over the bugs:

- "lastest contributions" should probable be "latest contributions"
- while browsing through latest contributions, you can't choose just one category to browse, which is annoying
- if an article you're trying to publish is already published, you get a message "An article has already been written on this news item. Do you want to comment this article?". First, I'd like to see the article immediately, so I can compare it with mine. Secondly, when you do try to click on "comment this article", you get a HTTP Status 500 error.

All in all, these minor bugs will probably soon be ironed, and they're not the main problem of the service. Wikio's biggest problem is that it simply doesn't offer enough novelty to separate itself from many other similar sites. What it does it does relatively well, but there are other, bigger sites that do it better. Furthermore, it has a broad, general scope, with standard categories, which will probably make it harder for them to create a solid and devoted user-base. Wikio.com will probably drive some traffic from its international sites, but will it be enough to make an impact? We'll see.

Google steals design from Yahoo; apologizes

2006-12-12T11:47:00.000+01:00

Google blatantly stole a design template from Yahoo for their get IE7 campaign. It wouldn't be a big deal if they had just used Microsoft's template, but it's pretty obvious that they actually stole from Yahoo. Matt Cutts of Google apologizes to Yahoo's designer team, but doesn't forget to point out how Yahoo copied their AdSense template.

To be honest, the fact that big G stole a design for the promotion of a third party product would hardly be newsworthy, but the fact that their design actually has Yahoo's recognizable 'Y' all over it, and badly erased in Photoshop, makes it funny (and worth firing the guy/girl who did it).

What Matt points out about Yahoo stealing their AdSense template, is actually far more important, since this is their original product that makes money. But, it's a little too late to be digging through old design mistakes now; Google will have to take some public beating for their dumb move, and will probably make sure stuff like that doesn't happen again.

iRiver S7 - Shuffle clone done right?

2006-12-12T09:21:00.000+01:00

It's no big secret that I'm not really a fan of iPod Shuffle, because to me the absence a feature (in this case, the display) isn't really an advantage. However, if you're gonna do it, at least make it look nice. Apple has done it with its Shuffle, and now iRiver announced S7, a nice little piece of MP3 art.

As far as features go, iRiver S7 connects to the computer via USB 2.0, supports MP3, WMA, ASF and OGG Q10 formats, and it also sports an FM tuner.

Its front side consists entirely of control buttons, and the whole thing is just 30mm long and 9.6mm thick. More pictures at iRiver site.

New York Times wants you to Digg it

2006-12-11T12:32:00.000+01:00

New York Times stories now include links that enable users to submit them to community news services, in this case Digg, Newsvine and Facebook.

Seems that even the biggest and the most "traditional" are yielding to the trend of increasing exposure through community news services. Sites like ZDnet and The Register already have them, and now New York Times has also joined in.

However, for some weird reason, they decided not to make direct links to Digg, Newsvine and Facebook but to use popups instead, which will surely annoy many users.

According to this report, NYTimes did this mostly to keep the pace with new trends, but I think that they also realized that additional traffic surely can't hurt them.

Lacie's USB hub matches your Mac perfectly

2006-12-11T10:50:00.000+01:00

Innovations in the field of USB/firewire hubs aren't really that common, but LaCie thinks different. Their LaCie Huby is one hub you simply have to see.

This gadget is available for quite some time, but I've just noticed it now. LaCie Huby has 4 USB 2.0 ports & 2 FireWire 400 ports, a USB fan, a USB light, a USB extension cable and a FireWire 400 extension cable. Furthermore, it has different-colored lights which light up as you connect devices to the ports.

It looks like...well, just check out the picture. I'm sure it's at least partly aimed at Mac users who will appreciate the clear white lines and the overall coolness of the product.

The price, though, is pretty steep for this type of device - $79.99. You can find the full specifications over at LaCie's site.

Vista will create over 100.000 new jobs in IT, says IDC

2006-12-11T09:59:00.000+01:00

A report commissioned by Microsoft and created by IDC claims that Vista will create 157.000 new jobs in the IT industry and generate $70 billion of revenue.

Basically, what IDC claims to have done here, is compare their standard prediction of IT growth in 2007 and then compare that to their prediction of Vista's impact on the IT market, which they call the "Vista effect".

Among other things, the report claims the following:

- that 60% of growth in Windows-related employment will be driven directly with Windows Vista, which approximates to over 100.000 new jobs (1% of 10.3 million currently employed in the IT industry
- that every dollar of Windows Vista-related revenue Microsoft in 2007 translates to $18 dollars for the entire Windows-related IT industry, which means $70 in revenues

Although IDC clearly states that it has taken into account the growth IT market would achieve without Vista, I'm still not convinced that these numbers have much to do with Vista. The simple fact that there is a new Windows OS coming is what creates these numbers; it has nothing to do with the quality or any feature of the OS itself.

Full report here.

Vista's Gadgets - Microsoft's poor naming decision

2006-12-11T00:01:00.000+01:00

Every time I see one of Vista's "gadgets" it reminds me of a bad naming decision by Microsoft.

This is not really anything new, but I have to say it: Microsoft's decision to name small specialized desktop applications that show up on Vista's desktop (or Windows Live) "Microsoft Gadgets" is poor for at least two reasons.

1. Everyone else calls these types of applications "widgets". Yahoo's Konfabulator and Apple call it that, why couldn't Microsoft simply adopt the name? They didn't invent anything new, it's the same thing. If copyright issues were involved, they could have invented some variation of the word, or a completely new word - it's what all the new web 2.0 companies do.

2. The word "gadget" already has a widespread meaning in the IT world - an often small mechanical or electronic device with a practical use. Using that name for something completely different only causes confusion.

It's not the end of the world, but it's annoying, it's confusing, and - most importantly - when two different things have the same name, it's harder to distinguish among them when you use search engines. Lesson to software developers: don't try to take over the word.

Gmail introduces Mail Fetcher; still far from perfect

2006-12-10T17:29:00.000+01:00

Gmail introduced a new feature called Mail Fetcher, which lets you read mail from other accounts in Gmail. It's a great feature, and Gmail has already been declared perfect because of it, but let's not get too enthusiastic yet

This great new feature (currently available to only a small fraction of Gmail users) enables you to use only Gmail for all your e-mail purposes, which is great. Gmail, which is in my opinion already the best web-based e-mail client, just got a little better.

However, I don't think it's time to call it 'perfect' yet. It's a great service, but as an e-mail client it's far from the best. I use Ritlabs' The Bat, a sometimes quirky and moderately buggy e-mail client, but also the most powerful client out there.

While Gmail is good and simple to use, The Bat! has at least 50 features that Gmail doesn't. Instead of listing them all here, I'll just name a couple I really use:

- Threaded view. You can set your view to be threaded with sender's address being the thread anchor, which makes your e-mail infinitely more organized and less cluttered than in standard view. Since i receive a lot of email, this feature is invaluable to me.

- Different passwords for different accounts. A minor feature that I use in the following way - I have some simple password for my business accounts, which I share with some of my colleagues, so they can read it on my computer when I'm not in the office. On my private accounts, I have a different password.

- Fine tuning of your spam filter. Gmail's spam filter is nice, but you can't really fine tune it as you can in The Bat!

The list goes on. As I've said, Gmail is great, it offers a lot, and maybe in time it will render all desktop e-mail applications obsolete. But not yet.

Dual LCD setup - on a mobile phone?

2006-12-10T17:02:00.000+01:00

When it comes to mobile phones, I've seen many innovations that will probably be forgotten in history as just another curiosity, but this one is one of the most bizarre - a cell phone with a dual LCD screen

Credit for this invention goes to Seok Hong Jeong, who revealed this weird-looking device at the Seoul International Invention Fair 2006.

The phone does give you a lot of screen estate, but at the cost of looking pretty clumsy. Since mobile phone manufacturers are always desperate for a larger screen, this might look like a good idea, however it seems to me like a kind of device that would perhaps sell only in the innovation-hungry market of the far east.

The device was spotted at the Fair by Aving.

5 great ways to ask for a donation

2006-12-10T15:00:00.000+01:00

Like many seasoned web surfers, I too barely notice pleas for donations on websites, even those I've frequented for years. Strangely enough, in the last couple of days several websites have attracted my attention with their donation request. Here's what they've done right

Just to clarify, I do not at this time ask for any donations, nor have I ever done it before, so this text comes strictly from a user perspective. When you browse literally hundreds of websites daily, like I do, ads and donation requests that you actually notice must be doing something right.

1. Cuteness and good intentions

It may not seem like much at first, but Abandonia's donation link on the upper right side of the page seems like a perfect donation request to me. Abandonia is a site devoted to freely distributing abandonware games, so the cute pixel character hits the mark perfectly. It's subtly animated to drag your attention to it. It's practically begging for money, however it doesn't come of as cheesy because it fits into the site perfectly. Lastly, when you do click it, you see that the authors are spending all donated money only for web hosting costs, and if they raise more than they need, they give everything back to the users as prizes in various contests. I don't know how much donations they receive, but if this doesn't work, I don't know what does.

2. Be precise, make a progress bar.

When I work, I mostly listen to chillout/downtempo music for relaxation. One of my favorite web radio stations is www.lounge-radio.com, which is more or less completely donation-driven. Since they reached their donations goal for 2007 they changed the donation page to a thank you page, but I'm going to describe what it consisted of. It was a detailed explanation of how much money they exactly (down to the dollar) need, and what they will spend it for. They've made it perfectly clear that the site will cease to function if they don't get that sum until the end of 2006. They've made a progress bar, showing how much funds they've raised so far. And lastly, they included a list (which is still visible) of all donors. Needless to say, they easily got the required sum of money, which will enable them to keep on lounging for one more year.

3. No ads, only donations.

DropBoks, a simple free online file repository service, simplifies things to the extreme. They have no ads, the design of the site is very minimal. They make it clear through a small, unobtrusive yet visible button on the bottom of the page that the site is donation-driven, which enables them to have no ads whatsoever. So far, it works for them.

4. Be completely honest about everything.

Kottke.org, one of the most famous blogs on the net, currently has no ads and asks for no donations. However, when he needed donations, Jason Kottke wrote a very detailed post explaining exactly what he asks for and why he does it, going into somewhat personal details of his life and work. And it worked fantastic; the response was overwhelming.

5. Ask for something specific and important to your audience

This particular donation wasn't completely successful, but I still think it was a great way to attract attention and to communicate directly with your fans. Scott Kurtz, the guy who draws the comic at PVPonline, was constantly bombarded with fan-mail from Mac users who thought it would be cool if he bought a Mac. In this post, he asked them to put their money where their mouth is, asking for just one dollar from each visitor, which would be spent by him to buy various Apple hardware. He even included a cool progress bar showing how far had he got - as you can see, he barely made it to a 15'' Mac. Not perfect, but not bad also.

DropBoks - simplest online file storage yet.

2006-12-10T11:24:00.000+01:00

When something is really simple to use, it stands out. The folks over at DropBoks know this, so they've made their online file storage service as simple as it can possibly be.

When you open the site, you're greeted with a window which shows the contents of your online folder. Sign up, and you can upload your files from any computer connected to the net. It's fast, it's simple, and it works.

The total size of your files must not exceed 1 GB, while an individual file can be as large as 50 MB. This pretty much sums up all that can be said about this little service, and I wouldn't want it any other way. I reckon the size limits might increase in the future, but the service is really new - give it time.

What's better, the site doesn't have any ads - it is funded entirely through donations. According to Luke, the site founder, this funding model is so far working well. This doesn't surprise me, because when there aren't annoying 'YOU WON' flashing banners, people probably feel more inclined to click that 'donate' button.

www.dropboks.com

Yet another redesign of the site.

2006-12-09T18:39:00.000+01:00

Franticindustries has had another redesign, I hope you like it. It's 98% done, expect some minor quirks, especially if you use IE6 or earlier.

The simplicity of the Blogger template makes me constantly want to redesign everything, but I think I'm now close to the final version that will serve the site for at least several months.

To make all this work the way it does, I've done a lot of different hacks, both for Blogger and to display stuff correctly in IE6. If you want to know how I did something on the site, don't hesitate to ask. And, if you like the site, by all means do send us words of praise (:

Paying Diggers to Digg? Why not just give them traffic!

2006-12-08T19:14:00.000+01:00

An interesting discussion is hot these days about top diggers getting paid to Digg someone's story. Kevin Rose stated clearly that "Diggers will never get paid" because it would create an inequality among those that do get paid and those who do it for free. I offer a solution: give the Diggers some of Digg's traffic.

It's obvious that many Diggers consider they should have some benefit from their hard work (and it is hard work; just try and get 20% of your stories promoted to the front page and you'll see).

What I propose is very simple: instead of the line:

submitted by XXX 2 days ago (via xxx.com)

put the line

submitted by XXX (website: XXX.com) 2 days ago (via xxx.com)

Or, even more simple, make the submitter's name a link to his website, not his profile.

This way, Diggers would get some amount of traffic from their submission, which they can use as they please. The top Diggers - the ones who put in the most effort and have most stories promoted to front page - would receive more, in proportion, than Digg beginners; but that's only fair.

What's important to say here is that this traffic wouldn't make anyone a millionaire. People will still click on the story in 99.999% of cases. But, if you're good enough, you're going to get a few hits by Diggers who will undoubtedly be interested in your success.

I tried out the Wii, and it's great

2006-12-08T18:30:00.000+01:00

After a long and painful wait, Wii is finally available here in Croatia. And would I be a respectable geek if I didn't try it out immediately? Of course not
The only games available at the moment are the ones you get with the Wii - Golf, Baseball, Boxing, Tennis and Bowling.

I didn't actually play the games to finish them, I've just tried them all out to get the feel of the controller, and I must say that I'm impressed with its responsiveness. You can especially see that while playing Boxing - every movement you make is correctly registered by the Wii, and you actually have to hold your hands up to protect yourself.

I can understand why they initally wanted to call it Revolution - it definitely will revolutionize gaming as we know it. Can't wait to try out Zelda, which should be available soon.

One third of imprisoned journalists are bloggers

2006-12-08T16:55:00.000+01:00

More and more journalists end up in jail for their work every day. There are currently 134 imprisoned journalists all over the world, 49 of which are bloggers and Internet journalists. Is blogging real journalism or not, you ask? Well, the jail is certainly real.

As reported by CPJ (Committee to Protect Journalists), 134 journalists all over the world are imprisoned because of their work, which is an increase of 9 since last year. What you would call "regular journalists" - print reporters, editors, and photographers are still the largest category with 67 cases of imprisonment, however, it's interesting that Internet journalists are now imprisoned in 49 cases, which is over one third of the overall number.

This means that, although some (especially the traditional media) still don't perceive bloggers and rogue journalists as real journalists, the absolutist governments and regimes definitely see them as a threat. On top of that, it's probably easier for them to imprison bloggers because the public outcry is far less than when a renowned journalist is jailed.

China, Cuba, Eritrea and Ethiopia lead on this sad list with 31, 24, 23, and 18 cases of imprisonment respectively. If you're wondering, US also made the list, with one journalist in detention at the infamous Guantanamo Bay. You can read about each of the cases in detail here.

The ultimate silent dream machine of 2006

2006-12-08T13:20:00.000+01:00

It's time to start with the 'best of 2006' lists, and with all the good stuff happening in the hardware department lately, what better way to start with than with the ultimate dream machine for the year 2006.

Although I usually write mostly about Internet-related topics, I'm also a hardware enthusiast, tracking new stuff and its prices all the time. I always have a list of components for a budget machine and an ideal, no-holds-barred, I'm-really-really-rich kind of machine, so why not share it here? My approach is a bit different than that of most hardware sites, who usually just recommend the most expensive stuff. I also take great care to choose the most silent components - even if they don't crank out maximum power. With that said, let's start.

1. Case

Antec Nine Hundred. This new product by Antec distinguishes itself from the rest by including spots for 5 120 mm fans and an additional 200 mm monster fan on top of the case. All these fans can make your computer really cool if you crank them up, but they won't produce much more than a hum if you keep them at 5V. Ideal.

2. PSU

Seasonic S12 Energy+ 650W. Judged by Silentpcreview to be the one of the quietest PSUs on the market, Seasonic's Energy line will give enough power to your hardware and still keep at whisper quiet levels. Some might complain that they want a stronger PSU, but from my experience, no computer today draws more than 500W power. A stronger PSU will just make more noise.

3. Motherboard

Asus Striker Extreme. Simply put, the most powerful and versatile platform today offers me little choice than to include it in this list. For a (long) list of all of its features go here. I chose Asus because of the heatpipe cooling design, most effective I've seen of all n680i implementations.

4. CPU

Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6700 2.66. Sure, you won't feel much difference between it and Core 2 Duo. But 4 cores are future-proof, and although I don't think that a quad-core CPU pays off at this moment, this is a dream computer, right? It's still quite cool and not nearly as power hungry as AMD's FX-70 (not to mention that you need two of those if you want 4 cores).

5.CPU cooler

Scythe Ninja PLUS Rev.B Scythe has positioned itself as one of the top manufacturers of high-end cooling equipment, and their latest cooler and its 12cm fan will keep your Core 2 Quad cool with a minimum of noise.

6.GPU

2xBFGTech GeForce 8800 GTX in SLI mode. Here the choice is easy, as noone disputes that 8800 GTX is currently the best GPU on the market. Why did we choose BFGTech? Well, this is supposed to be a silent computer, and BFGTech really went out of their way to please the enthusiast with this water-cooled version of 8800GTX. Personally, I don't use watercooling, but someone who does will appreciate the effort.

7.RAM

OCZ Dominator XMS2 2x2GB DDR I'm cheating a little on this one because 2GB Dominator modules are not yet available, but they should be by the end of the year. 4GB of RAM memory wouldn't make much of a difference compared to 2GB on WinXP, but in Vista you'll definitely notice it. OCZ's Dominator memory was used in many hardware benchmarks lately and it is generally accepted as one of the best modules available. They come with a cooling heatsink included.

8.Optical drive

Blu-Ray Sony BWU-100A Usually, I wouldn't give this much cash just to have a Blu-Ray reader. Especially if I were able to get a PS3, because I get a nice gaming console and a Blu-Ray reader for the same price. But in a dream machine, Blu-Ray is the logical choice.

9. Audio

M-Audio Audiophile 192. Most reviewers usually choose one of Creative's products here, but I'm going for the audio card for the true hi-fi enthusiast. It's not a sound card for professional use; it's just an affordable card that will produce really great sound from your PC. You can plug it into your receiver and it will sound good even on an expensive speaker system.

10. Speakers

Klipsch ProMedia Ultra 5.1 If you're not really into all that hi-fi stuff, but you still want a really good sound from your system, you won't go wrong with 5.1 system from Klipsch.

11. Screen

Samsung CX305T 30-inch LCD. With this model, Samsung positioned itself as the proud owner of the fastest 30-inch panel available, with just 6ms response time. Other characteristics are 2560x1600 resolution, contrast of 1000:1 and 400 cd/m2 brightness. And with those dual 8800GTX cards, you'll actually be able to play in this insane resolution without having to reduce the quality.

So, that's it: we have a real beast of a machine here, but also one that - if not overclocked - won't even make much noise. I hope someone has the money to actually buy all this stuff, because I know I don't. Cheers!

Ctrl+Shift+T - very useful new feature in Firefox

2006-12-07T19:24:00.000+01:00

When Firefox 2.0 first came out, I was one of those who claimed that it basically didn't bring anything new. However, the more I work in it, the more I discover new features that are really useful. Here's one - Ctrl+Shift+T

I usually don't remember keyboard shortcuts, and I rarely use them. But this is one Firefox shortcut I made myself remember, because it turned out to be really useful. It's Ctrl+Shift+T, which opens the last tab you've closed. If you press it several times, it opens several last tabs you've closed, in the reverse order. It's basically an undo function for Firefox.

When you surf as much as I do, you often close tabs, just to remember that you forgot to check out the URL, or some detail, like a name or a number on the page you just closed. No problem - Ctrl+Shift+T, and it's back.

Your baby for a PS3? Sure!

2006-12-07T18:17:00.000+01:00

Dave Ryan, a radio host over at the KDWB station, promised to give a Playstation 3 to the whoever leaves their baby at the station for one whole day. Results? People calling and offering their babies like mad!

Well, OK, maybe not like mad, but at least 20 parents were willing to exchange their baby for a PS3, and one woman was ready to even leave the baby for several days.

What worries me, if these people are ready to leave their child in exchange for a PS3, what would they do for a Wii? "Yeah, just wrap it up. And the baby? What baby? Oh, that baby. Well, you can just keep it if you like!"

It's not Dave's first stunt of the sort. A couple of days ago, he dared listeners to do something crazy to win a PS3. The winner? Tattooed the sign PS3 on his leg - upside down.

You can find the video lips here and here, while the audio clip is here.

The top 5 social news sites roundup

2006-12-07T15:25:00.000+01:00

In the beginning, there was Digg. And it was good. But there's never too much of a good thing, right? I've dug out (no pun intended) the 5 strongest community news sites and compared them according to their features, design & usability, and quality of content.

First of all, let me say that this was supposed to be a top 10 article. However, the biggest 5 community news sites - Digg, Reddit, Care2, Shoutwire, Netscape are so far ahead of the rest of the pack that there's no point adding any other service into the comparison. *let me just remind you that there are several other great news services but which do not work quite the same as the 5 I've mentioned, for example Sphere, Techmeme, Tailrank, and Crispynews, of which I've already written.

To illustrate this, in the following two pictures, you can see the traffic ranking for the big 5 and then another 5 smaller sites. However, since there are many nice and promising services out there, as you can see in this fantastic list on 3spots, I'll follow this article with a list of 5 most promising community news services.

So, here we go, in alphabetical order (grades are from 1 to 10):

1. Care2

a) Design & Usability

Care2 is not just a community news site. It sprung out from a large web portal focusing on health, human rights and protecting the environment. And, while the news part of the site is more or less independant, and covers different topics, the fact that it's all a part of something else shows, so the site lacks the clarity of Reddit or Digg. The design is professionally done, with two columns of news which turn into one column when you click on a category. The voting icons, which are here called "note it!" are visible enough, and most of the stories have pictures, which sets the site apart from its competitors. All in all, most people won't have trouble getting around the site, however, the other features of the portal do get in the way of the news part itself.

Grade: 6

b) Features

The basics - register, vote, comment, are here, but there are also some interesting additions. When you open the news archive, you can choose your channels like filters - for example, you can have all the Science & Technology and Offbeat news in one place, you can have just one category, or you can browse all 8 categories at the same time. Similarly (and at the same time) you can filter stories with more or less votes. Lastly, you can filter stories from this day, week, month and year. This is a solid concept which enables you to customize your channel almost exactly as you want it. Another feature is pictures next to users in the comments, which are bigger than at, for example, Digg. But, where Care2 really shines is the user profiles, which enable users to do a LOT. You've got friends, comments, picture galleries, favorites, videos - basically, it has all the features of MySpace. In this department, Care2 is way ahead of the pack.

Grade: 8

c) Quality of content

Not surprisingly, content on Care2 gravitates towards themes of ecology, nature, and human rights - even on the Science and Tech channel. The available channels are Environment, Healthy Living, US Politics, Animals, Society & Values, Science & Tech, World, and Offbeat & Fun. If your primary interest is technology, then I don't think Care2 is for you, since there are more science-flavoured stories than pure IT news. However, if you are into the aforementioned topics, Care2 has a lot to offer. In fact, the overal quality of the stories is really great; their help doesn't mention that they have editors, but it looks like they do. After half an hour of browsing, I've yet to find a poorly written story or just plain spam. Excellent. Grade is not perfect simply because the site doesn't cover some areas, especially IT, enough - compared to the other 4 sites.

Grade: 8

2. Digg

a) Design & Usability

I must confess right away that I adore Digg's design. I'm working on a web portal that's pretty cluttered with pictures and ads, so Digg's simplicity was a revelation, just like Google once was. There's simply no way you will be distracted from the main content on Digg, even with the Google AdSense ads that are present on the site. However, the usability isn't always perfect. For example, once I was wondering why my search doesn't work, only to find out that the context of the search changes with part of the site you're on. This is actually a good option, but it can confuse the beginner. Such minor quirks, together with the ads, are the only thing that are keeping Digg from reaching a perfect score.

Grade: 9

b) Features

Here, I should first point you to my detailed analysis of Digg's nonexistant features. But the fact that Digg doesn't have some features doesn't mean it's featureless alltogether - quite the contrary. For example, Digg Spy, Swarm and Stack are tools none of the other sites have and they're nothing short of fantastic - fun to use, useful, and they definitely give you the feeling you're a part of a live site with real people. All in all, I must grade Digg's features highly, although it's still inexplicable why some pretty basic options, like advanced search, are missing.

Grade: 8

c) Quality of content

Oh, boy. The thing with Digg is, it has it all. Practically everything has been submitted to it - just try and find a story that isn't already on there, and you'll see what I mean. But (and it's a BIG but), you will enjoy this wealth of content only if you're a poweruser, staring at Digg Spy and Digg Upcoming stories cloud and digging the good stuff. And by enjoy I don't mean actually enjoy, because you'll be swarmed with spam, fake stories, old news, and duplicate stories in an overwhelming amount. It's all becoming more and more like looking at random Google searches by thousands of users and choosing what's good among the trash, and I'm not sure it's the best way to find good news. If, on the other hand, you decide to stick to the front page only, you might be surprised that some of the good stories never come up there, because they can't break through the clutter. Or sometimes news comes two days too late. Yes, there is good content there - hell, ALL the content is there - but, and it pains me to say it, because it's the contrary of what community news sites stand for, it needs an editor. On a personal note, I think that the quality of Digg content has gone in a downward spiral from the moment Digg stopped being a technology-only site and broadened its scope.

Grade: 5

3. Netscape

a) Design & Usability

Netscape, just like Care2, bears the cross of "being a site that did something else before it started to be a community news site". This means that it's a bit more cluttered than Reddit, Shoutwire and Digg, but not as much as Care2. By the way, the famous browser Netscape once made is mentioned only as an afterthought. However, the overall design of the site is still very good - content is in the front row, and users will have an easy time getting around the site. Ads are present, but not overwhelming. Categories, which are called channels, are clearly visible. All in all, although I wouldn't call the site the prettiest of the five, I'd say that it's as usable as the best of them.

Grade: 7

b) Features

I've explained the Anchors - probably the most unique aspect of the site, compared to other four - below. Let's see what else Netscape has to offer. Besides the usual browse-submit-comment, you can choose from a relatively big number of categories for your posts, which is nice. You can also browse posts by tags, which is even nicer. Netscape also has a unique way of choosing content for their home page. Here's a quote from the site: "The Home Page consists of a list of 25 stories. These 25 stories consist of 2 stories from each of the top 10 most popular channels and 1 story from each of the next 5 most popular channels." When you open a story, it opens with a Netscape sidebar with some additional info, like similar stories, on the left side. I personally don't like this option, but some users might, and since you can turn it off, it's a plus. Finally, you can upload videos, and Anchors can also add videos to stories. Generally speaking, Netscape has quite a number of options, and they're all focused on content, which is very good. It seems like the Netscape team is really thinking on what's really important, and my grade reflects that.

Grade: 8

c) Quality of content

Here is where Netscape shines. The content is really solid, there's no spam and not many fakes. In the Gadgets&Tech category, which is my area of interest, I think I can safely say that Netscape is the best of the five when it comes to quality of content. And you know why? They have editors. They're called Netscape Anchors. Here's another quote from the Netscape site: "We have a team of full-time "Netscape Anchors" in our newsroom that monitor the site 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. These anchors do a number of things to keep the Netscape experience clean and compelling. First, they remove spam (we all hate spam). Secondly, they select the stories in "Netscape Anchors recommend..." box at the top of the page. Finally, they do followup journalism on many of the stories you vote to the Home Page and create original video on topics they feel you would enjoy.". Being an editor in an IT mag myself, I see nothing wrong with this, although many Digg users would probably start yelling Censorship!!1. The only possible weak point of Netscape's content, compared to Digg and Reddit, is the fact that there aren't so many stories submitted every minute, so you can't keep an eye on the freshest of what the web has to offer. But I would say this is only due to lesser popularity of Netscape compared to Digg.

Grade: 9

4. Reddit

a) Design & Usability

Design-wise, Reddit is the most minimal of the five. This means you'll get the minimal possible amount of distraction while reading your content, which is great. This minimalism is present even in the controls of the site, which might confuse some users; for example, you can sort your stories by "hot, new, top, ups", and it might not be immediately apparent what's the difference between "hot", "top" and "ups". The voting button, also, might be too small for people with less-than-perfect eyesight. In general, though, Reddit focuses on the content, and for this type of site, it's the most important feat.

Grade: 8

b) Features

Besides the basics, Reddit offers some interesting features. One of them is "Recommended". While you browse the site and vote on stories, Reddit remembers what you voted on and creates a list tailored exactly for you. Also, the comments are threaded - one of the most-wanted options on Digg. Another option is the Reddit toolbar, which - if enabled - opens the links with a small toolbar on top, from which you can vote or comment on the story. The last big feature I'll mention here is subreddits - subdomains of reddit.com like web2.reddit.com which cover specific topics. For example, web2.reddit.com is for listing and voting on your favorite web 2.0 applications.

Unfortunately, Reddit also lacks some pretty basic features. I would guess that it's on purpose, but I still can't understand the lack of categories. I, for one, don't want to see a story about "Chipmunks gansta rap" amongst IT stories. Since the feature of subreddits is already here, I think categories could easily be added as subreddits. Or perhaps filtering, like in Care2, could solve this problem. Also, like Digg's, Reddit's search is pretty basic. Generally, Reddit has what it takes to stay a major force in community news sites, but it also lacks a few important features.

Grade: 7

c) Quality of content

As far as quality of content goes, Reddit is little Digg. The content is similar in topic, and although there's definitely less spam and fakes at Reddit than at Digg, you get the feeling that the only reason for it is the fact that Digg is more popular. Also, the mentioned lack of categories, in my opinion, severely cripples the overal quality of content, because it's much harder to filter good content. To Reddit's credit, its content seems to be just a bit more serious than Digg's, so I guess it will appeal better to...well, the serious crowd.

Grade: 7

5. Shoutwire

a) Design & Usability

One of the nicer and cleaner looking sites of the bunch, Shoutwire doesn't hide its purpose for a second. You get your news, search, login, submit button, and categories right on the front page, all clearly visible, which makes it probably the most usable site out-of-the-box, if you will. The comments for the stories (together with the map, which I'll cover in features) are also easy to read. If I were pressed to find a flaw, I can only say that it might not stand out of the crowd enough (it looks a bit too much like all the other Pligg sites). Unfortunately, quite prominent AdSense ads and the fact that there's a whole entirely empty column on the right bottom part of the page take another point from the otherwise great design.

Grade: 8

b) Features

Remember the categories as filters feature that Care2 has? Shoutwire has it also. Unfortunately, there are some problems with them. Everything is fine until you try to subscribe to an RSS feed for a category - it doesn't work, you get the regular non-categorized front page news. Search is also quite lacking, it doesn't search the actual URLs of the submitted sites. Another feature is the fact that the links open with a frame from which you can vote on the site - a feature quite common as Reddit and Netscape also have it. But the most original feature is the Shoutwire map. Click on the number of comments on any story, and you'll see the comments for the story, but also a Google Map which shows the location of people who voted on the story. It's not really an essential feature, but it adds to the fun of browsing the site. In conclusion, Shoutwire has some nice options, but not enough to actually set itself apart from the others in this department; and some options are clearly lacking.

Grade: 6

c) Quality of content

The content on Shoutwire is good. The site doesn't break any records in amount of stories or in speed in which new stories show up, but there's also a limited amount of spam. The categories and the filtering capabilities are making Shoutwire a joy to use - if only I could find a way to have them in RSS. The site perhaps lacks a few dedicated fanatics who would push some really fresh stories, which would make the site a bit more authoritative, but it might also be a popularity thing which will come in time. *exploring Shoutwire further, after I've finished the article, I've discovered that it wasn't just a bad day for them as I've initially thought - the stories are actually much older than one would expect from a news site, ranging from 2-3 days, even on the front page. I had no choice but to lower the grade for the content from 7 to 5. I apologize for not being thorough enough in my research in the first place.

Grade: 5

And now, the final scores:

Care2 - 6 + 8 + 8 = 22
Digg - 9 + 8 + 5 = 22
Netscape - 7 + 8 + 9 = 24
Reddit - 8 + 7 + 7 = 22
Shoutwire - 8 + 6 + 5 = 19

Although the scores are similar, they are very revealing, as different sites amass their points in different areas. This means that there's no perfect community news site yet, and that - however advanced - all of these sites still have a long way to go ahead of them.

If you just scrolled here to see the grades, without reading the text, then the grades will be meaningless. Each service has its own quirks peculiarities, pluses and minuses, and the final grades can only be a pointer of the overall quality of the site. For example, someone who falls in love with Digg Swarm will probably sorely lack the feature on other sites, although it's by no means essential. Someone who prefers the minimal looks of Reddit will find a hard time switching to Care2, while users used to MySpace will love Care2's personal profile page which none of the other sites have. This text should make the decision easier, but you must try the services yourself and see how you like them. And if none of the above fit your needs, wait for next week, when I'll make a writeup of 5 most promising community news sites.

HD-DVD or Blu-Ray? How about EVD

2006-12-07T14:38:00.000+01:00

A number of Chinese manufacturers are trying to once again establish a new DVD alternative/successor, called EVD (Enhanced Versatile Disc). After a somewhat failed launch of the same standard back in 2003, the Chinese companies are once again claiming that EVD is the true successor of the DVD, and are switching to the new format in 2008.

However, an EVD is quite a different beast than Blu-Ray and HD-DVD. It's physically the same as a DVD, but the bigger storage capacity comes from using a different audio (EAC (Enhanced Audio Codec) 2.0.) and video (VP5 and VP6) codecs for better compression. It didn't make much of an impact worldwide when it was introduced in 2003, but now, when the big Chinese manufacturers completely switch to the new format, it might end differently.

The move to EVD was announced a week ago, however, according to Xinhuanet, yesterday Chinese vendors (Thomson, Haier and others) announced 54 EVD players which should push the format to wider reception. Furthermore, Chinese companies which are members of the EVD Industry Alliance will completely shift to EVD in 2008, and the worldwide exports of EVD players will start next year.

James Kim found deceased

2006-12-06T21:36:00.000+01:00

James Kim, the CNET editor lost in the wilderness of southern Oregon for the last 11 days, has been found deceased

There's nothing much for me to add, as the news will be covered in detail by all big media agencies. I follow Kim's work and I rooted for him all along, I'm really, truly sorry he didn't make it.

Read the full CNN coverage here.

The absolutely, positively longest domain name in the world

2006-12-06T17:03:00.000+01:00

Ever wondered what's the longest meaningful single-word domain in the world? I did. And, needless to say, I got the answer pretty quickly - in Welsh, of course.

Ready for it? Here it goes - llanfairpwllgwyngyllgoger
ychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch.com. (Sorry for the breakdown, if I leave it in one piece it messes up the formatting of the page). It looks like my cat ran over the keyboard, but it actually has a meaning. It's a Welsh town, whose name means: "The church of St. Mary in the hollow of white hazel trees near the rapid whirlpool by St. Tysilio's of the red cave" Guess they were lucky there weren't any other landmarks around.

You can read other fun information on long town names on the site itself, but I was actually interested in something else. After a fun article about Google and its many O's over at Mu Life, I realized I don't even know what's the character limitation for various domains.

The answer? Most sources say 63 characters, although many sites are wrong - some say 59, and I've seen a claim of 67 characters.

So, since llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrnd
robwllllantysiliogogogoch.com is only 57 characters long, it still means I haven't found the absolutely longest domain in the world. I've tried with the most logical choice - Sex, and it did not disappoint - for example, check this out: www.sexxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx.com. (link is obviously NSFW). But it still didn't reach the goal of 63 characters.

So, I've searched some more, and I found a likely contestant - brace yourself - www.thelongestdomainnameintheworldand
thensomeandthensomemoreandmore.com. Nice.

www.abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefghijk.com gets a honorable mention too, because you can even get an email on the domain (they proudly point out that it won't be accepted by most web forms).

So, we have 63 characters, that's it, no? But then it dawned on me - it's still not the final answer! And I've found it in my old friend Google - again.

You see, .com just doesn't cut it when there are 4-character top level domains around, like .info. So, it took a little more research to find the king, the absolutely longest domain name ever:

www.gooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo
oooooooooooooooooooooooooooogle.info

I even clicked on the link (thinking it was spam, but hey, the guys deserve some credit for their efforts) but it leads nowhere. So, thus ends the mystery of the longest domain name ever. Phew.

Swivel goes live, data gets compared furiously

2006-12-06T14:47:00.000+01:00

Swivel, a web site that enables users to upload sets of various data and compare them, is now open.

In arguably one of the best new ideas to come up out of the web 2.0 wave, Swivel lets you view and compare data - any data that is comparable. Of course, users will probably upload huge amounts of useless data, but there are already lots of datasets online that show that this will be a tremendously useful service.

The data you upload is public and available to everyone - unless you pay a fee; then you can keep it private and compare it against public data.

While I don't expect enormous popularity of Swivel (for example, of YouTube magnitude), this service will be invaluable to professionals. I, for one, can already get some very valuable info here, for example, the number of subscribers for different MMORPG games.

It will be interesting to see how big analyst companies, like IDC or Gartner will react if someone publishes some of their data; although I don't expect to see a huge wave of lawsuits here, I'm sure some of these companies will be less than pleased.

Cellphones do not cause cancer, Danish study shows

2006-12-06T14:23:00.000+01:00

A 20-year study conducted by the Danish Cancer Society concluded that using cell phones does not increase the risk of cancer.

The Danish Cancer Society has been tracking health conditions of 420,000 users which started using cell phones somewhere between 1982 to 1985, and concluded that - to this day - this group did not have a cancer rate higher than the average. The group will be continue to be monitored in the following 30 years.

This seems to be a pretty simply yet effective way to track the effects of cell phones, and it covers the largest group of users yet. You can read the full results of the study here - if you know Danish.

No YouTube for Iran

2006-12-06T12:53:00.000+01:00

The Iranian government has shut down the access to YouTube, continuing their policy of strong censorship of, well, everything they don't like

Iranians who tried to access YouTube in the past couple of days were able only to read this message: "On the basis of the Islamic Republic of Iran laws, access to this Web site is not authorized".

It is uncertain whether the Iranian Shiite government decided to do this because of sexual content, Iranian pop video which are sometimes posted on YouTube, videos by the groups that oppose Iranian authorities, or a combination of all the above.

In any case, Iran is on a good way to become the country with the strongest censorship, its main competitors being North Korea, China, Syria, Cuba, and a few others.

Yahoo and Reuters want you to be the witness

2006-12-06T11:30:00.000+01:00

Yahoo and Reuters' plan to institutionalize and organize (and profit from) rogue journalism is called You Witness, and the campaign is underway. Expect to hear the phrase "The death of journalism" a lot from now on.

Yahoo, who is doing a little reorganizing of their company, is together with Reuters the first big news player to openly embrace rogue journalism, asking people to submit photos and stories about interesting incidents they've witnessed.

The idea is good, except for one thing - Yahoo gives nothing in return. You send the story, photo or a video, you get some credit (for example, you can see the email of the person who submitted a photo but not even a link back to your page or Flickr profile), and that's all. Which isn't bad at all - I'm sure that many people will want to do it for free. However, anyone who's in it for a buck will keep to their old way of submitting news, so the stories about the death of traditional journalism (or rogue journalism, for that matter) don't hold water. Yahoo and Reuters will just be big players in the field, that's all, and kudos to them for thinking of it first.

The million dollar guy WILL make a million again

2006-12-06T11:03:00.000+01:00

A few days ago Pixelotto.com was announced, the new project of Alex Tew, famous for his original million dollar homepage site. At the time of announcement, the site wasn't operational, but now it's online, and judging by the amount of ads on it, it works great.

Pixelotto is basically the million dollar homepage all over again, but the pixels cost double (100px = $200) and one lucky advertiser gets a million, while Alex keeps the other million.

The initial comments of many experts and others were basically that 'it's not going to work again'. I must honestly admit that I had no idea or an intelligent prediction of whether it would work great or it would be a total flop.

Now, however, one look at the few-days-old site, and you can see that Alex most definitely will cash in another million, as he already cashed in over $110.000, so he's selling pixels several times faster than on the original Million Dollar Homepage.

The real question now is: would it work if someone else came with the idea? The idea is not bad, but I'm quite positive it wouldn't work this good or this fast. There were many good projects based on the original Million Dollar Homepage out there, and I don't remember any of them actually making a million. So, it's a case of fame, virality, and a good idea working together here. Alex Tew is still the golden boy of the Internet, turning pixels into $$$ while the rest of the world is watching.

AMD introduces first 65 nm chips - Brisbane

2006-12-05T15:26:00.000+01:00

AMD published a press release in which it announces new 64-bit 65-nanometre CPU chips codenamed Brisbane. For the general public, these will be called AMD Athlon™ 64 X2 5000+, 4800+, 4400+, and 4000+.

All four processors are dual-core and will have 2x512MB cache. The fastest of the four announced processors, X2 5000+ will work at 2.6GHz.

Unfortunately for AMD, these processors won't completely bridge the gap between AMD's finest and Intel's Core 2 Duo chips, which will stay in the lead. This is just a step in their transition to 65mm, which was necessary for AMD if they want to keep putting out energy-efficient chips.

The prices for the four chips will be as follows: 4000+ will cost $169, 4400+ $214, 4800+ $271, and 5000+ $301.

Britney tops Yahoo search results for 2006

2006-12-05T14:02:00.000+01:00

Contrary to what your mom may have told you, wearing no underwear apparently does pay off. According to Yahoo, Britney Spears just reclaimed her throne of being the most searched for term for the year 2006.

As usual, terms "world peace", "war in Iraq", "end poverty and hunger" and the like must take a bow to game consoles, celebrities with no panties and similar themes - at least when we talk about Yahoo search results for 2006. I doubt that Google's results will be much different, though.

Yahoo video report here.

Zamzar - convert any document into another format

2006-12-05T11:56:00.000+01:00

Zamzar is a service that converts files from one format to another - of course, if such a conversion is possible. Generally, you can choose between audio, video, text and image formats.

This works as following: you upload some document, for example, a .gif picture, choose a format you want it in, for example .jpeg, and send you e-mail. Then, you get a confirmation that your document has been converted and you download it back to your computer.

Zamzar currently supports the following format conversions. The list is pretty long, although we could remember a few formats that it doesn't support, for example Matroska files (.mka). Still, it's a really useful service, especially for those less tech-savvy users who don't want to spend hours on Google (ok, it's minutes actually) figuring how to do this themselves.

www.zamzar.com

AMD breaks into top 10 semiconductor makers

2006-12-05T11:04:00.000+01:00

The latest iSuppli report shows that AMD is now finally among the top 10 semiconductor makers in the world. AMD pushed quite a lot of places since last year, advancing from number 15 to number 7

The first 10 list looks like this: Intel, Samsung, Texas Instruments, Toshiba, STMicroelectronics, Renesas Technology, AMD, Hynix, NSP, Freescale Semiconductor.

AMD's revenue went up 90.7% from $3,917 millions in 2005. to $7,471 millions in 2006. It now holds 2.9% of the total semiconductor market, with its closest competitor being Hynix which holds 2.8%, and is also in the top 10 list for the first time.

Full report here.

New 'high-end sound' audio chip announced; call me skeptical

2006-12-05T09:32:00.000+01:00

According to AP, audio engineer Tony Bongiovi (cousin of the infamous Jon Bon Jovi, best known for the fact that he gets younger as the years go by) has developed an audio chip which creates fantastic sound in compromised sound environments

According to Bongiovi, the chip "adapts intelligently to the music to give even cheap speakers a full, robust sound and compensate for the deficiencies of the listening space". As far as technical explanations go, in the original article you can find only this: "it can be described as a very sophisticated equalizer".

Any audio enthusiast knows that equalizers have their use in high-end hi-fi, but the good ones come at a very high price. If Bongiovi managed to reach great levels of performance with a cheap chip, then this is indeed newsworthy.

But the claims that the chip will make the sound from cheap computer speakers "rich", "clear" and "free of distortion" seem very suspicious to me. Because, when it comes to cheap, small computer speakers, they are not limited by the electronics - they are limited by the physical properties of the case and the membrane and the size of the membrane. In other words, no amount of magic will make them sound good. A bit better, maybe; great - never.

Another use of the chip that is mentioned is car stereo, and it makes much more sense to me. If the equalizer is preprogrammed for the exact topology of a certain car model and then sold for that exact model, the results might be really nice. The price for the car audio system is said to be $700 - $1000, depending on the model (and we guess this doesn't include the speakers).

TiVo DRM cracked

2006-12-04T23:15:00.000+01:00

TiVo's copyright protection has been cracked, and a software is now available which converts a .TiVo file to a regular MPEG file

You can find the details about the project here: tivodecode.sourceforge.net. I don't have access to the actual TiVo service, however as far as I know this lets you watch TiVo content on any device - which is how it should be in the first place (TiVo files are normally viewable only under Windows). I guess Linux and Mac users deserve loving, too, and had TiVo gave some to them, this probably wouldn't happen.

Why pirated software is better than bought software

2006-12-04T19:28:00.000+01:00

This article does not advocate piracy in any way; it's just an objective look of the benefits of using pirated software vs. the benefits of official software you've bought and paid for. This is an argument I've been wanting to prove for a long time, and what better time to do it than right now, with the coming of Vista.
The argument mostly boils to one word - DRM. Digital Rights Management are what many software companies today use to protect intelectual rights of them and others from piracy, and the more they use it, the more they're degrading users' experience with their products. Name me one direct benefit users have from DRM. There are none. DRM is there to protect the creators, not the users, and although it can be relatively unobtrusive, it can also be very invasive, even dangerous for your computer.

Don't believe it? One word: Starforce. The supposedly unbreakable protection (it can be removed, but it takes time) that many game publishers have used was so disgustingly invasive that users protested en masse - so much that most publishers gave up on Starforce and today we see less and less games protected by it.

Although not nearly as annoying and dangerous as Starforce, the idea of product activation is also a major annoyance. Remember the days when you didn't have to activate Windows? Once the installation is done, it's done - no more nagging. Now, you have to do the extra steps the activation requires, and you must - among other things - be careful not to change your hardware configuration too much or Vista might just stop working.

It might not be too big a deal for most users, but I'm a tech kind of guy. I do lots of testing, fixing, installing and reinstalling. I have 3 computers working in this room right now. I do not want to think about activation - I bought the software and I want it to work.

And then there's the DRM again. Vista has several DRM features built in - Protected User Mode Audio (PUMA) which restricts the copying of copyrighted audio. Protected Video Path - Output Protection Management (PVP-OPM) and Protected Video Path - User-Accessible Bus (PVP-UAB) do the same thing for video. Lastly, we have Rights Management Services (RMS) support, which allows setting DRM restrictions to documents and email.

Now, I could go into a long elaboration of what these things do, but I'm going to keep it simple - they make my life harder. If I want to burn a CD from songs I bought on the iTunes store, I've got problems - although I paid for those songs. If I want to listen to the stuff from my friend's Zune, I only have three days to do it. They're making my life miserable, and they're making me spend money, and that's what it boils down, ladies and gentlemen - greed.

I know there's many a good argument in favor of DRM and similar measures to protect content. But let's simplify things. What are they protecting? Information. Think - if a company thinks it can capitalize on a song, or a part of a song, or the note of a song, or lyrics to that song written on a piece of paper, or a guitar tablature of the notes of the song published on a website, how far can they go? Can they also capitalize on small chunks of information, making you pay a small fee whenever you utter the words 'Apple' or 'Windows'? Hell, maybe you should pay a fee whenever you think those terms, or visualize them in your mind. How far, exactly, will they go?

In the days before the Internet, noone cared if you copied music from one cassette to another - although it was done daily by millions of people. The Internet brought a whole new ball game, but the big companies didn't react positively - they chose to restrict, to sue, to punish and to repress. It seemed they feared this new technology, and maybe they did at first, but then they saw an opportunity in it - an opportunity to protect more content that they could have ever done before, and to create even more content that couldn't have been protected before.

Think you can't do it with positive approach? I think you can - or, better said, it could have been done. It was ages ago when I last heard the argument that MP3 sound quality sucks compared to the CD, but it does. The difference is there if you're listening on anything better than sub-50$ computer speakers. It's a point for the big guys, which could have been and should have been marketed. They should have said: buy the CD - you'll get great artwork, better sound quality, we'll add extra stuff, like posters, stickers, coupons in it, it'll be great. Sure, take the MP3's off the net, and we'll sell them on the net also, but if you buy them at our site we'll send you a bunch of extra goodies. But they didn't do that. They simply chose to go down to the MP3 level and screw it up for the consumers. And where are the pirates in all that?

The pirates are doing us a favor. And by pirates I simplify things here - I mean the crackers, the hackers, the reverse engineers, the kids who follow the warez scene and the ones that hold the big sites and get money of it. Some of them are in it for the money, and some of them should probably be in jail. But they're still doing us a favor.

They're stripping software and content from the crap the owners put in to protect it. When Vista comes out, I'll buy my copy (well, I'll probably get it for free, but you get the point). But if some pirate group releases a good, DRM-free, activation-free version of it, I'll just install that. It might be a tough concept to grasp for the IT suits, but the pirated version is actually better than the original. I have a friend who buys lots of games, but he was also happy as hell as Reloaded (a well known pirate group) released a StarForce free version of the game X3: Reunion. There's no two way about it: the Reloaded version was a better product than the original bought in the store, because it didn't have StarForce. And it worked, it worked perfectly: contrary to what companies say, most pirated software works well.

Which brings me to my last point: big IT companies should learn from pirates. Pirates have a very effective network. They have very strict standards, which they follow. They have lots of social networking going on. Go to a site such as www.nforce.nl, which lists new warez releases (the site itself doesn't offer anything for download, so it's not illegal, although I'm sure if the authorities find any legal loophole to make it illegal they will use it). Every release has an .nfo file with data about the product. There's a system at work here. Releases can be internal, a proper, a clone, a repack. If any release fails to follow the strict standards of the warez community, it will be nuked. If you're unsure about something, you can find the answer on the forums.

The releases themselves are also packed and distributed using strict standards which I won't go into now - suffice to say that the manufacturers don't really adhere to any standards of the sort. You can officially download some games off Steam, and you can download some other games through some different service, and some games you can't officially download at all. But in the warez scene, you can get them all neatly packed in nice little .RAR packs. I'm telling you - this isn't some hellhole with zillions of ads where no sane person would search for anything, let alone software or content. It's Web 2.0 at its best.

The manufacturers have one major thing going for them - official support. It's a huge thing for businesses. But the average individual user should probably do better searching the solution to his problems on some forum than calling tech-support, because we all know how bad tech-support often is.

Should we all stop buying software and start downloading pirated stuff like mad? Of course no. The point of this post is that most manufacturers act like slow and clumsy dinosaurs and aren't actually losing money (and don't get me started on the numbers reported as 'money lost because of piracy' because they are ludicrous) because there are some evil pirates out there and even more evil people that buy stuff from those pirates, but because their approach sucks and hasn't changed for decades.

Big software and other IT execs, let me give you a wakeup call: the Internet is here. I don't want to wait till my game arrives in the mail, and I don't want it to be ridden with DRM because you're scared of losing money. You need to learn from the warez community, and see what they do, and try to be better; don't just try to be stronger.

One final example: learn from what Valve has done. How much is that Half-Life: Episode Two? $19.95? And I can just download it off the net the second it's out? From a really fast server (OK, Steam's servers have been known to die occasionally, but you get the idea)? Hey, where do I sign?

This is just one of the ways in which you can beat piracy - well, not completely beat it, but make sure you aren't losing money because your product sucks compared to the pirated version.

TCritic - Best blog I've seen in a long time

2006-12-04T18:18:00.000+01:00

This is a bit off topic (except the fact that it's a blog, and is on the internet) but I've just found out a blog that focuses on cool T-shirts.

Being somewhat of a fan of cool T-shirts myself, this blog is a revelation for me. Add to that that it's a pretty well-made blog with a reasonable amount of updating, and you have a winner. Go visit it at tcritic.com

CrispyNews - create your own little Digg

2006-12-04T13:43:00.000+01:00

I stumbled upon this service from a comment on this site, so I decided to give it a go. It's an interesting concept - the site allows visitors to create their own mini-sites, post articles, which are then voted on by the community, similar to Digg, Reddit and others. However, after using it for a while I must conclude that while the site has potential, it also has a really long way to go.

First, let's elaborate on the concept. In Digg, you have categories, which are created by Digg and cannot be changed by the users. On CrispyNews, instead of categories (well, you also have standard categories if you want) you basically have mini web sites created by the users on the CrispyNews subdomain. Every user can make his/her own web site and post articles, and the other users can vote on the article, therefore pushing the article (but also the entire mini-site) up or down in the overall popularity ranking.

Another relatively new concept on the site is AdSpace sharing. Basically, users can put their own ads on the site (for example, Google AdSense) and make money off them, but the owners of CrispyNews also reserve the rights to revoke that privilege in the future or to put up their own ads. This pretty much means the following: the idea is nice for startups and possibly earning a few bucks, but don't expect it to become your main source of income soon.

For testing purposes, I created my own mini-site at franticindustries.crispynews.com. There is quite a bit of options here, for example themes (which you can modify yourself or clone from other users), simple analytics for your site, or multiple administrators for one site. However, it took me a while to find the most basic one - how to create a new post (tip: it's back at your site itself, not the administrator panel).

The site was at times a bit slow, but that's the least of its problems. And those problems can be summed up in two words: lousy GUI. Frankly, the entire site isn't too pleasing for the eye, and it needs much improvement in this area until it can get a wider reception. This goes for all parts of the site: main site, default theme for the mini-sites, administrator panel, everything. When some of the user-created themes are much better than the official, standard layout, it should give you a hint that something's wrong. Case in point: deals.crispynews.com or pandorastations.crispynews.com

The other big problem, which goes hand in hand with the poor design, is the positioning of various elements. In other words, I'm having trouble finding things around here. The site doesn't lack options, but I think those options should be better organized

In conclusion, CrispyNews leaves the impression of a site done by good coders but without the help of a good designer. It does a few things going for it; its unique (as far as I know) features make it an interesting alternative to other social networking sites. I can imagine that many users will love the possibility of making their own site there, earning a few bucks from it, and be a part of a larger, social networking site. However, to succeed it sorely needs improvements in the design department.

A weird Digg occurence - idea for a feature?

2006-12-04T10:01:00.000+01:00

A few days ago I was checking out Digg Spy and a part of Digg's CSS didn't load for me, but the site was still fully functional. It's not uncommon for things like this to happen, however I've found that this format of Digg Spy is actually quite usable.

So, it's another idea for a small feature - a compressed view of Digg Spy. Due to the huge amount of data Digg produces, I often feel the need to see more items on my screen, although some users might find this a bit too cluttered.

Actually, perhaps the best usability would be achieved with a cross between the look of Upcoming stories in Cloud mode and real-time updating of Digg Spy.

Redesigning the site

2006-12-03T23:47:00.000+01:00

The site is currently undergoing a redesign. I apologize in advance for any strange occurences, which will probably happen throughout the next day.

At this point the redesign is 95% done, all that's left is tweaking (especially for IE6 which refuses to cooperate). However, it's still possible that some images go missing or something like that - but don't worry, all this is just a test before switching to my own domain and hosting, which will hopefully happen soon. Thank you for your patience.

Make your PC silent in 7 steps

2006-12-03T00:22:00.000+01:00

Silent computing: once a myth, today a necessity. Learn how to quiet down those annoying noises from your PC in the easiest possible way

I've seen plenty of articles on silent computing, however the pros usually talk about advanced techniques that scare most people not willing to rip apart their hardware parts. In fact, silencing down your PC to a quiet whisper is usually a relatively simple task, and it can be done by most users. Since I'm quite a silencing fanatic, and the weekend is always slow on tech news, I'll write a simple how-to for people who want their PCs to be quieter but just never took the time to learn how to do it.

First, let's go over some of the basic concepts of silent computing. In your PC, the main source of noise are the fans. Usually a PC has 4 of them - CPU fan, video card fan, motherboard fan (usually cooling the northbridge chip), and the PSU fan. Additionally, some PCs might have one or more intake/outtake fan, which blow cool air in and warm air out of the case, effectively cooling most of the components inside a PC. Other noise sources are CD/DVD drives, floppy drives and hard disks, but when you're at the stage that your hard disk is the loudest component, your PC is already very quiet.

Since there are many different PC configurations out there, I'll base this article on the most common one - aforementioned 4 fans, midi tower, one or two hard disks and DVD drive.

One other thing - I'll also presume that you're trying to quiet down a PC you already own. If you're buying a new PC, it's another matter and it's out of the scope of this article, but I can recommend you to buy a quality CPU fan (Zalman and Scythe are among the companies that make some really quiet fans) and a silent but quality PSU (Antec, Seasonic, Tagan, Zalman, OCZ are the companies I recommend). Also, get an intake and an outtake 12cm fans if your case allows them - their presence will actually reduce the overall noise in the end, because they will cool all components and allow for other fans to spin more slowly). The rule when you buy fans is simple - the bigger the better (which in this case means the bigger the quieter). Best fans are made by Silenx, Nexus, Papst, Adda. Zalman also makes some solid and pretty cheap ones.

OK, let's move on to the actual steps.

1. Get Speedfan

The first and most important item you need is a freeware program called Speedfan. It's a fantastic program which monitors temperatures of your hardware and in many cases enables you to slow down the fans which are connected to your motherboard's fan headers.

When you install it, in its main window you should see some temperatures and some fan speeds, if there are any fans connected to the motherboard (usually it's the CPU fan and the northbridge fan). Learning which temperature is which can be tricky for beginners. However, the most important one is the CPU fan temperature, and it's easy to find out which one is it. Get Prime95 (a program usually used to stress-test your hardware), open it, click on options, select torture test and start any of the tests. Monitor the temperatures in Speedfan - the one that starts climbing very fast is most likely your CPU temperature.

Now that you know what your CPU temp is, you should do some research and find out what are the recommended/max temperatures for your CPU. As a VERY general rule of thumb, 45 degrees and lower is pretty cool, 45-60 is moderate but tolerable, 60+ degrees is the upper limit, 70+ degrees is always too hot.

Now, try to control a fan in Speedfan by reducing its speed. Monitor your temperatures and the noise carefully - you should be able to know if it's working or not. Even if it's not working (sometimes it happens, Speedfan doesn't work perfectly with all motherboards), Speedfan is still useful for monitoring your temperatures. If it's working you can now reduce some of the noise, but be careful not to turn down the fan too much - it does have to cool the computer. Play with Speedfan until you're sure which fans are you controlling, how loud they are, and how much you can slow them down without compromising the temperatures of your hardware.

2. Automating Speedfan

Presuming that Speedfan is able to spin down your CPU fan (and possibly others), and that your CPU isn't too hot even when the fan is working at this reduced speed (test it under load, use Prime95 or play a game - if the CPU temp goes over 60 degrees forget about spinning the fan down for now), it's now time to automate Speedfan. Open it and click configure. Click on the "+" next to your CPU temperature, and select all fans that you can control. Select it, and type in your desired and your warning temperature. In my case, I have an Opteron 144 working at 37 C at idle; my desired temperature is 40 and warning is at 52. Now click the speeds tab, select the speed of the fan you are able to control, and set its minimum and maximum speed values, for example 20% speed as the minimum for when your computer is idle and CPU is not that hot, and 100% for heavy load when you're playing games, watching movies or doing something else that heats up the CPU. Now open the main Speedfan window and select Automatic fan speed. Speedfan should soon start lowering your fan's speed, and it will keep it low until your CPU heats over the desired temperature mark, after which it will spin it back up to high. *warning: in the first couple of days you're doing this, monitor your temperatures closely. You CAN burn your hardware components if you're not careful and spin down your fans completely while your CPU is burning or something similar. Standard disclaimer: I cannot be held responsible for any damage caused by following the advice in this article.

3. Rivatuner and DVD/CD speed control

Although sometimes real results can only be accomplished with hardware modifications, my philosophy is that you should always have all the software options for silencing in place. A simple one is some kind of DVD/CD drive speed controller to spin down those noisy drives while you're watching a movie (The CD/DVD doesn't really have to be spinning faster than 1x while you're listening to music or watching a dvd). There are many programs that can do it, one of them is AnyDVD.

Secondly, if you have an nVidia graphics card, you might be in luck (I'm not sure if it's possible to do this for Radeon cards as I only have passively heated Radeons). A piece of software called Rivatuner supports tweaking all imaginable options of nVidia cards, including fan speeds on some cards. In its main window, click the arrow next to Customize (under Driver settings), click on System settings, and then on Fan. Here you can choose the speeds of the fans on your video card when in 2D, low power 3D or performance 3D mode. Same rules apply as with Speedfan: monitor the temperatures of your video card (you can find them in the main window, upper Customize, hardware monitoring) and don't let it get too hot. Video card chips can generally withstand higher temperatures than CPUs, so around 70 degrees at full load is acceptable here.

4. Undervolting the fans.

This might not be the logical next step, but it's number 4 because it's very easy. Buy a voltage regulator and connect all your intake/outtake fans (CPU fan is also a possibility; again, be careful not to spin the fan too low because your CPU might burn. Also, have in mind that Speedfan cannot control the fans which are not connected to your motherboard) to it if you have them. A voltage regulator can be a rheobus, like this one, or a simple voltage regulator like this one. These usually aren't expensive, and every decent hardware store should carry a couple of brands. The procedure is simple: plug your fans into the regulator, the regulator is usually connected to the power supply, and you can control the speed of your fans as you please.

If you don't have any fans that you can connect to the voltage regulator (it's best for controlling intake/outake and CPU fans), I would even go so far to advise you to buy at least an intake 12cm fan (if your case permits it) and install it to blow cool air into your case. It will dramatically reduce the temperatures inside your case, even when completely undervolted (and therefore quiet), which will allow to slow down the other fans inside the case.

5. Removing the Northbridge fan

This is the tricky one, but it's often necessary. If your motherboard has a northbridge fan, chances are it's now by far the noisiest thing in your PC. The good news is - you can safely replace it (if you're overclocking, you should definitely have intake/outtake fans to cool the northbridge heatsink) with a completely passive fan (I use Zalman's, and before you ask, no, I'm not endorsed by Zalman in any way - I just like their products). The bad news is - for most people this will be a step too far. It also possibly voids the warranty on your motherboard, so be very careful before you attempt it.

If you do try it, the procedure is the following. Disconnect all cables from the motherboard, remove it from the PC, and cut off the plastic pins holding the northbridge fan in place. Then, install the Northbridge fan following the instructions provided with it. Usually it looks like this. Then put the motherboard back in its place, connect everything, turn the PC on and enjoy the silence. *warning - this procedure may vary from motherboard to motherboard; from my experience, the plastic pins are usually used by manufacturers for securing the stock northbridge fan.

I know, it is a huge annoyance having to do all this, but unless you were lucky enough to get a motherboard with passive northbridge cooling, there's no other way around it.

6. PSU

This is simple: if your PSU is too loud, buy a quieter one. If you're a beginner, I simply cannot recommend any kind of modification to the PSU whatsoever. Leave it to the pros, like me (don't ask me how many I've burned so far). In addition to what I've said about PSU brands above, the general rule is that PSUs with 12cm fans will be quieter than others).

7. Finishing touches.

If you followed the above steps, you should now have a decently quiet PC, at least when it's idle - which is usually the most important, because you probably don't care so much about silence when you're blasting aliens or doing some other CPU intensive task. However, there still are a couple of things you can do to further reduce the noise from the PC. First of all, if the CPU cooler you had sucked in the first place, then Speedfan probably can't help it much. Exchanging it for a better one is always an option. If you're wondering why haven't I included this quite logical step while I did include the annoying business of exchanging the northbridge fan, the reason is this: CPU coolers are lately quite well made, even stock ones, and aren't that noisy (especially with a little help of Speedfan). Sure, you can exchange them for a better one, but I wouldn't consider it a necessary option for a beginner. On the other hand, if your motherboard has a northbridge fan, it's almost certainly annoyingly loud, often twice as loud as everything else, which is further emphasized by its small size (usually 60mm) which makes the sound even more annoying. Someone who doesn't want to open their PC will of course skip the business of changing the northbridge fan, but I'm afraid that most of the other measures we've taken here will be in vain.

Secondly, you can buy noise reduction matting and cover the insides of your case with it to reduce the noise. One of the companies that makes them is Akasa. This takes time, but I don't consider it too dangerous for your hardware, so you can try it if you like. You can also try using rubber bolts and padding for your case fans, and special noise reduction cages for your hard disk(s), although the differences will probably be minor.

* Hey, I thought this was going to be simple!

Well, some of the software I mentioned here takes time to get used to, and removing the northbridge fan is definitely not a task I would recommend to everyone. However these are the techniques that give you the biggest decibel decrease for your efforts. Those are the things I do first when I want to quiet down one of my PCs, but you can, of course, choose only to do some of them. For most people even reducing the fan noise with software like Speedfan will make a big difference, and they will leave at at that, which is ok.

For the real "silence enthusiast", however dumb that must sound, there are still many advanced techniques to try and things to consider. For a good place to start, I recommend one of my favorite pages: www.silentpcreview.com

1,000,000 Wiis sold in the first two weeks

2006-12-02T18:58:00.000+01:00

According to this source , a million units of Nintendo's Wii console were sold in the first two weeks on the market, however, a number of 1,100,000 is already circulating as the latest number

Wii's 80.000-units-sold-per-day rate of success is not showing signs of waning. It's not a matter of whether it's a success or not anymore, but whether it will turn into a global phenomenon. In USA alone, over 600,000 units were sold, according to USA today. In Japan, 400,000 units were shipped, and, guess what? They're already sold out.

On a side note, if you really have to know exactly how many units of Xbox, PS3, and Nintendo were sold so far, check out this site. You can even pick your favorite and cheer for it.

Atlarge tells you which airports are connected

2006-12-02T15:07:00.000+01:00

CNET has recently launched atlarge, a community website which collects information on internet connectivity at airports around the world

The site has a pretty comprehensive database of both U.S. and international airports, and it's up to users to supply data on the available internet connectivity (wireless or wired), its quality and cost.

You can navigate the airports via a drop-down menu or you can use the search function. A tiny Google map is also included for every airport in the database. It's all very simple but also pretty usable, although the huge CNET ad is diverting the users' attention from the main content.

As far as available data goes, well, the site is new, so there is very little information at this point. Airports in cities like Vienna, Zagreb or Barcelona yield no results, and even in the USA I had to click a couple of times until I got any info; actually, the only city I've managed to find info on was New York. However, CNET will probably push it a little, and I don't doubt it will be swarming with information in a couple of months. Nice idea, well done, CNET.

Free Movies Cinema - Youtube with a brain?

2006-12-01T13:46:00.000+01:00

A friend pointed a relatively young interesting website to me, www.freemoviescinema.com. It collects free movies but categorizes them carefully, putting a lot of effort in choosing the best quality videos.

At this time there is only 139 movies on the site. However, (in contrast to Youtube and similar services, where you can find zillions of movies but don't know where to start) I'm interested in almost all of them.

The movies themselves are just (supposedly free of copyright) Google video or Youtube clips embedded in a nice GUI, but they are well categorized, with year of release, duration, plot, cast, a link to IMDB info and even a poster of the movie.

The news section of the site brings a couple of RSS feeds - nothing spectacular but nice enough.

As far as social interaction goes, you can rate the movies, and that's pretty much it. However, the site is more about the good editorial choice of the admin than about socializing.

The site itself is pretty ad-ridden, and even most of the ads are standard, unobtrusive Google ads, at some points it does become too much and pulls the viewers' attention from the content.

Final thoughts? Well, although I expected something more Web 2.0-ish, I must say that I'm not disappointed. The site works - it's just a nice little place to go and check out a good movie or two. Yes, there are a few ads too many, but the content is free, so I doubt anyone will complain.

Top 10 features Digg doesn't have

2006-12-01T10:14:00.000+01:00

In the couple of months I've been using Digg, I've really got used to the service and I love it. However, there's always room for improvement...

Here are 10 features that I feel would make the Digg experience better:

1. Advanced search

Digg's search has the AND operator by default, recognizes phrases, you can search last 7, 30 or 365 days, and that's pretty much it. Where are the advanced options: boolean operators (+, -, OR...) or precise time frame search (for example, search only stories between two dates? Also, if you want to search a particular category, you must click that category (two clicks if it's a subcategory) and then you can search it - it would be much better if you had a central search page with all that options in one place.

2. Organizing your Diggs

Many people use Digg primarily as a bookmarking service. It makes sense: the community diggs the best stories so they come on top, you digg them to remember them. However, there's currently no way to organize the stories you dugg, commented on, or submitted - just a long list of stories which gets pretty unusable if you're a digg veteran and have hundreds of dugg stories. For starters, it would be nice if you could at least sort them by their category.

3. Better user interaction

As far as user interaction goes on Digg, you can add someone to friends, or reply to his/her comment. No way to leave someone a public or private message. You don't even get a note when someone makes you his/her friend - I just discovered I have some new friends and I had no idea about it. One argument against this is that personal messaging might make some users to pester other users to digg their stories. However, it's still a thing to consider - and it has been done on some other services similar to Digg.

4. Spy on a category

This is probably more interesting to veteran diggers who use the Spy option a lot, but still it would a very useful option if you could have the Digg Spy only for a certain category. For example, I only closely follow Technology stories, I would like to be able to spy only on them.

5. More categories

How many times, while submitting a story, were you unable to find the right category? That's because there just ain't enough of them. An Internet category comes to mind; also, some sort of fun/comedy category would be nice (The current Comedy category is only for videos). I'm sure some more improvements could be done in this department, and I don't think new categories are hard to implement.

6. The dupe police

Digg has some basic duplicate protection, meaning that you cannot submit a story whose exact URL was already submitted. However, what is basically a same story usually appears on tens of different sources, which leads to a number of dupes. And this lead to "the dupe police", a much maligned group of users who (not always unjustifedly) swarm the comments and protest: Dupe, DUPE!. Well, Digg itself could do more to protect from dupes. Perhaps an algorithm that compares a story with other similar stories and gives out a percentage number next to the title. Example: This is a story (43% dupe - see other similar stories). Similar stories could also be listed below the story that might be a duplicate, so the users have the choice to see them also and decide which one is the best.

7. Digger map

This is definitely not an essential feature, but it would certainly be fun - a visual, geographical map of Diggers. It would work simple; when someone diggs a story, you can see a dot at his geographical location on the map. Related to this, it would be possible to use this data for various statistical data, so you'd know not only how many diggers dugg a certain story, but also which stories are most dugg in a certain country/continent, etc. (and we all know geeks like me love statistics).

8. Buried stories

In every user profile, you can see which stories were dugg, submitted, or commented on by a user. However, you can't see which stories the user buried. This could help evaluating the credibility of a user - if someone just goes around and buries story like a madman without any reason, he/she's not going to be very popular.

9. Firefox extension

Yes, I know there already are a few Digg-related Firefox extensions out there, most notably Digg This!. However, it would be nice to have a Digg spy extension in your browser, so you could always have an eye on upcoming stories.

10. Themes/skins

Personally, I like the way Digg looks. But themes/skins are always a nice addition, even if it's only a slight change of color. The simplicity of Digg's design practically begs for visual customization.

This is my list, what is yours? I'd like to read ideas from other users, so feel free to comment on this.

First 4x4 reviews trickling in

2006-11-30T13:16:00.000+01:00

AMD's 4x4 platform is finally available to reviewers, and the reactions are pretty positive

4x4 is basically two dual core Athlon 64 FX-70 CPUs, working on a Socket 1207 n680 motherboard, which is seemingly a reworked version of an Opteron workstation motherboard.

Without further ado, go read the review here. Personally, I like the results, but I don't like the fact that it's a powerhungry, extremely hot beast. Sorry, AMD - I'm still looking at n680i motherboard + Core 2 Quad combination as my dream computer.

Need something? Find it on Ewidi

2006-11-30T12:02:00.000+01:00

Ewidi is an interesting Web 2.0 service that has just been brought to my attention. It brings together the features of a search engine and an ad service, and enables users to connect and interact with each other using simple text messages

Ewidi basically consists of searching and publishing. You need to buy a used car in San Francisco, you either search for it, or browse tags/categories/locations for text messages corresponding with the subject. On the other hand, if you're an unemployed coder in need of work in Amsterdam, you'll post a message saying just that.

It is an internationally-oriented (the whole service is translated to 27 languages), service, and many users might find it odd that ads are not all in English. But why should they be? You can filter only the ones that you're interested in, and if someone needs to post information that will be of interest to anyone, no matter at which location' they're based, they'll probably post in English.

Ewidi also allows for creation of sub-domains, which correspond with tags/certain interest groups. Some of the ones that are available at the moment are film.ewidi.com, macedonia.ewidi.com, and osijek.ewidi.com (Osijek is a city in Croatia; it's no wonder they chose it because one of the authors of the service, Marko Kovač, is from Croatia.).

After you register, you are able to publish your own messages and to interact with other users. The registration doesn't even require an email, so it's really simple to try, but I personally like when at least an email is required to register for a service, because it keeps spammers at bay.

Unfortunately, currently by far the best way to use the service is by using search - the categories and tags aren't really well established yet. But, judging from the swarm of Spaniards which are currently overwhelming the service (the story about Ewidi has been published in the Spanish magazine El Mundo), the idea is working well in its current state. Looking forward to see how this one will develop.

Real features new to Windows Vista

2006-11-30T10:50:00.000+01:00

Among the hundreds of Vista reviews I've read, I don't recall seeing one that actually mentions real features that are new in Windows Vista. That means OS-specific features, not bundled applications such as Internet Explorer 7 or Windows Media Player 11

The problem is, Microsoft has been pushing their bundled apps as features for so long people have probably forgot what an OS-specific feature is. IE7, WMP11, Windows Photo Gallery, Windows DVD maker...hell, even Windows Aero GUI, those are all nice and dandy, but I for example use Firefox, Media Player Classic, ACDSEE Classic, Nero and BBlean as shell. Not much there in Vista for me, eh?

Wrong. Contrary to the popular belief, Vista does carry a significant number of new, important features. Here's a rundown of some of the interesting ones:

- User Account Control - asks for the admin password whenever some app or part of the OS requires administrative privileges. The idea isn't new - all Linux variants have something similar. At the moment it's relatively poorly implemented - it will be annoying to the end user who will want to turn it off at all cost.

- Various security measures, including ASLR (Address Space Layout Randomization) which prevents exploits, Windows Service Hardening which prevents services to edit registry or the file system, Data Execution Prevention (DEP), and PatchGuard, which prevents third-party software from modifying the kernel. Most of these sound good, but we'll have to wait and see how they really work.

- Hard drive encryption. Hopefully Microsoft wasn't forced to include backdoors in there.

- DRM measures. One of the bad ones. One is Protected User Mode Audio (PUMA) which restricts the copying of copyrighted audio. Protected Video Path - Output Protection Management (PVP-OPM) and Protected Video Path - User-Accessible Bus (PVP-UAB) do the same thing for video. Finally, there's Rights Management Services (RMS) support, which allows setting DRM restrictions to documents and email. Not much to say about these, except that we can all hope that someone will be able to reverse engineer them.

- Desktop Window Manager - handles drawing of all content to the screen. Uses more video memory than the previous one, enables all those fancy Aero effects. Lets hope we'll never see the dreaded 'dying window' effect when the system is low on memory, which was a common occurence in WinXP.

- DirectX10. This one was covered well in the media, probabyl because people actually care about playing games.

- Windows Color System - should make color calibration easier. Nice for designers.

- Audio stack completely rewritten - basically, it should make all things audio faster and more stable under Windows. Audio professionals should be able to get lower latencies. Oh yeah, and if anyone ever used speech synthesis under Windows, there's a new voice doing it, and it should sound less robotic.

- Network stack completely rewritten - native support for IPv6, better performance, better encryption, better support for P2P networking, and *much* better support for wireless networking which is good, because the old one sucked

- Stand by and Hibernate are now combined into a single 'Sleep' function, which basically does both: writes all the data from memory to the hard disk, and then goes to stand by mode, waits for a specified amount of time, and then shuts of completely (goes to hibernation).

- ReadyBoost - the ability to use memory from USB flash devices as RAM memory. You can also use RAM from other networked PCs running Vista as your RAM. The idea seems nice, until you remember that the idea of RAM memory is to be fast, and USB drives aren't fast enough, nor is ethernet. A USB 2.0 flash drive is better at sending small chunks of data than the hard drive, which is obviously better when it comes to accessing and copying big amounts of data. Microsoft says that this works in combination with SuperFetch, which is a new and improved version of Prefetch, and that we should expect 'impressive improvements in system responsiveness'. I think it all boils down to: if you need more memory, buy more RAM. If you're desperate, stick a USB drive and hope for some minor improvements.

- Improved memory manager and processes scheduler - these, together with other Kernel and core OS changes, are IMO the most important features of Vista. These will actually determine the real performance of Vista. When you switch all the fluff for third party apps, and when you start doing some real work, this is what you will care about. Although I don't explicitly see it in any lists, Vista should also be better at using multicore processor power.

This is just a short rundown, the most complete list of features new to Windows Vista, (but also possibly tiresome to read), see the Wikipedia article under the same name.

Vista gets out today; I'm scared of flying

2006-11-30T08:56:00.000+01:00

Vista is officially out today for business costumers, and the local Microsoft office decided to do the presentation in the air. I passed on the flight (hey, I'm not scared, it's a foggy day), but I sure hope they'll still give me my test copy

Last version of Vista I had installed was Beta 1, and I was quite unhappy with it (unfortunately, I don't have a review in English), so I decided to skip RC1 and wait for the real thing. Expect lots of 'how to remove this or that' kind of tutorials here once I install it.

In the meantime, in the next post I'm going to write a short overview of really important Vista features which reviewers seem to skip in favor of non-features like IE7.

Google kills Google Answers

2006-11-29T15:58:00.000+01:00

Google is shutting down one of its services for a change, and - lo and behold - it's one of their rare services that's not free, Google Answers

At this time Google Answers is still operational, however according to the official Google blog, it's not receiving any new questions, and new answers will be accepted until the end of the year. The answers to old questions will stay online though.

Although it's weird to see Google shut down one of their services, it's not a big surprise - they've tried so many different things over the years that some of them were bound to ultimately fail.

Bye, bye, AllOfMp3.com

2006-11-29T13:19:00.000+01:00

The Russian government signed an agreement with the US government to close down the Russian half-pirate/half-legal online music store AllOfMp3.com

AllOfMp3.com fell into a weird category of 'we actually pirate MP3's but sell them through a supposedly legit online store and still claim it's a legitimate business', so I guess noone will be really sorry about this.

According to this document, in which allofmp3.com is explicitly named as a bad example, Russia has agreed to 'fight Internet piracy' and 'fight optical disc piracy' (yay for magnetic disc piracy - ed.).

Let's stop the business notebook charade

2006-11-29T13:14:00.000+01:00

For years, manufacturers have been pushing Intel's subpar integrated graphics chips in their 'business notebook' categories. Now, with the coming of Vista, business users will also want better graphics, if they plan to use (and why shouldn't they) Vista on them

Checking the hardware prices as usual, I still notice tons of laptops for sale with old integrated 945G (or even older 900) Intel chips which supposedly fall under the 'business' category. Well, these can only be called 'business notebooks' if the manufacturers and retailers think that business users don't plan on using Vista, because using Vista on Intel's 945g is not a really good idea (although it will work in lite mode).

The age of "business notebook = crappy graphics" is over, and we can thank Vista for that. Either Intel's widely used integrated graphics chips will become more capable in the future (See under: GMA X3000), or manufacturers will switch to other graphics solutions.

Bottom line is: if you're a business user looking for a laptop, and have even a remote desire to maybe sometime run Vista on it, think twice before you buy a 'business laptop', because you might be disappointed. If you're not a tech expert, don't believe the 224 MB of VRAM claims or similar nonsense; in fact, you should probably only go with a laptop that has ATI or nVidia slapped on it.

Nintendo sells 600.000 Wiis; invokes even more bad jokes

2006-11-29T09:58:00.000+01:00

In the battle between Xbox and PS3, Nintendo's Wii seems to be winning. 600.000 of them have been sold in 8 days, and the buzz around the console seems to be huge. And to think that some thought that 'Wii' was a dumb name

First 8 days of sales in the USA = 600.000 sold. Those are the number Nintendo guys are currently looking at, and I can imagine them sipping martinis with little umbrellas. That's over 80.000 per day, folks.

Sure, maybe the PS3 would also sell that many - IF they were actually able to make them. However, the brass at Sony can only ponder what may have been as they watch people spend their money happily on the competitor's product.

And, the more videos I see of it in action, the more fun it seems.

In which countries were people sued for p2p music sharing?

2006-11-28T17:52:00.000+01:00

Since it's an incredibly slow tech news day today, I'm going to go back to the stories I did over the years and try to count in which countries lawsuits have been filed and won against individuals for pirating music.

I know it's of little comfort to US citizens, but there are still some countries where people haven't been receiving lawsuits for a little Emule or Soulseek downloading. And by this I don't mean people who earn thousands or millions by selling pirated stuff - I mean users who don't do this for profit. However, the plague is spreading. Let's see which countries have been struck so far (feel free to comment and add to the list, I'm sure I missed some).

1. USA - the obvious one. It's basically RIAA's playground, as they can do their "john doe" lawsuits here without bullying other countries into changing their laws, and in the USA they've been happily pursuing their tactic of "lots of stick and an old withered carrot", arresting people left and right and advocating DRM-laden crappy formats in exchange. First wave of lawsuits were launched back in 2003 (263 people were sued), and to my knowledge this number is near 20.000 American individuals at this moment.
2. Germany - as far as I know, over 7000 German citizens have been sued for pirating music by the IFPI (International Federation of Phonographic Industry). As a result, these people mostly had to pay a fine of 2500 Euros.
3. United Kingdom - At August 2005, first lawsuits were handed to some unlucky individuals in the UK. The fines were hefty - up to 6500 pounds.
4. Ireland
5. The Netherlands
6. Finland
7. Iceland
8. Japan - the above 4 countries and Japan got hit in April 2005, in a wave of 963 lawsuits. This brought the total number of worldwide lawsuits to 11.000 (it's now well over 20.000).
9. China - according to this news item, a year ago there have been over 1000 lawsuits over music piracy in China. They weren't filed by the IFPI, and by the look of it it seems that the people targetted were sellers, not regular users, but people got sued nevertheless.
10. France - Oh yes, they have been preparing it for a long time, and the first lawsuit, against a teacher who did some p2p-ing, was filed at the beginning of 2005.
11. Norway
12. Belgium - well, for these two I haven't yet seen any "John Doe" style lawsuits, but people have been sued and/or arrested, that's for sure. Read here, and here.
13. Austria
14. Denmark
15. Italy
16. Portugal
17. Sweden
18. Switzerland - the latest big wave, or, as our friends in the IFPI like to call it, "fresh wave" of lawsuits, covered some of the aforementioned as well as these 6 countries. Networks affected were FastTrack (Kazaa), Gnutella (BearShare), eDonkey, DirectConnect, BitTorrent, Limewire, WinMX, and SoulSeek (I use eMule, suckers - ed.)(oh, wait... - ed.). This fun little exercise in righteousness brought the number of international lawsuits (USA excluded) to 5.500). Average legal settlement - 2600 Euros.

If you think that it would have been an easier task to simply count the countries with no lawsuits, you're almost right, but there are still a few good examples. Australia is getting really close, but there have been no lawsuits against individuals yet. In most Eastern European countries there has been no talk of such lawsuits, yet. I guess most of the former SSSR territory is also still lawsuit-free, as well as Africa and a large portion of South America. Well, if you plan on moving to another country, choose wisely...

10 reasons why Netvibes is better than Google Homepage

2006-11-28T09:45:00.000+01:00

I love Netvibes, and I also love and use many Google free services, so I was troubled when I had to make the choice between the two as they basically offer the same functionality. After some tinkering with both, I've easily switched to Netvibes because it's, simply, better. Here's why

1. Nicer looking interface

Possibly not the most important of features to some u, but just look at beautiful Netvibes boxes compared to Google's bland ones. Also, you can change their color (you have 6 colors to choose from) by clicking "edit" in the upper right corner.

2. Visual Customization

Google Homepage is designed to simply work without much hassle. However, if you're a customization freak like me, you'll love Netvibes' advanced options. First, get the Netvibes Customize module here. You can now set a background wallpaper for your page, set opacity options for your modules, plus some other minor options. Better yet, you can change this stuff all at once, using themes (there are a few available under Settings).

3. Number of Columns

In Google Homepage you're doomed to use a maximum three columns. However, in Netvibes you can change the number of columns from 1 to 4. Personally, I use 4 columns and I certainly think people with bigger screens and resolutions will appreciate the extra column. Better yet, you can change the number of columns for each tab, which is explained in...

4. Tabs

Yes, Google Homepage also supports tabs. However, in Netvibes they're much more advanced. Click the little arrow on the tab, and you get tab options. You can change the number of columns, add a little icon (you can even add your own icon by pointing to its URL), and you can publish this entire tab on the Netvibes Ecosystem. That means, if you create a super-duper tab showing all possible info on, for example, upcoming movies, you can simply share it with your friends and everyone else.

5. Netvibes ecosystem

And this brings us to the Netvibes Ecosystem, which really is more than a fancy name for a bunch of feeds. The Ecosystem consists of modules, feeds, podcasts, events and tabs. We've explained what tabs are, and you probably know what feeds and podcasts are. Modules are advanced little programs which can do almost anything - from showing the weather to displaying your bookmarks. Events are little calendar apps which show certain dates - basically, they're public Google calendars, but a nice thing to have. On top of all this, the Ecosystem is well organized, easy to browse and search, and from it you can add modules to your page with a single click.

6. Filtering

One of the new Netvibes features is filtering. It works simple - you have a little text box on the top of your screen. Type a keyword, and all modules not containing the keyword will shrink, while those that do contain the word will have it highlighted. Nice, fast, and handy.

7. Digital Life Assistants

Recently the Netvibes crew created a couple of new, advanced modules called Digital Life Assistants. Basically, these are search modules but with many convenient options - for example, video search with full screen viewing. Find more about these here.

8. Keyboard controls

I don't personally use this (I find it hard to get used to keyboard shortcuts in general), but it might be handy for some users.
For this to work you need to enable it in Settings. Your focus also must be in the right place - click somewhere inside the Netvibes window before using keyboard shortcuts. You can find the list of all available shortcuts here.

9. Calendar

This calendar module is just one module, but it's so much better done for Netvibes than the Gcal for Google. It has several views and generally looks much nicer, as you can see in the picture. It also supports everything in iCal format.

10. Name for your page

Not really a dealbreaker, but it's nice to be able to see TechShrine or something cool like that above your page (it also appears in the page title). You guessed it - Netvibes can do it, Google can't.

*By the way, if you're interested in an alternative to Netvibes, you can always try Pageflakes, also a very nice service of the same kind.

People watch less TV because of online video

2006-11-27T13:56:00.000+01:00

What, the good old traditional tube is slowly dying because of Youtube and similar services? Don't worry, TV execs, I'm sure the dinosaurs also gave a good fight before they became extinct

It really doesn't come as a suprise that a Great Britain study shows that 20% of users watch a lot less traditional TV because they spend their time watching mobile and online video, and additional 23% say that they watch a bit less normal TV for the same reason.

This is because old-fashioned TV is boring, folks. And it keeps hammering commercials in your brain at least 10% of the time. On YouTube and similar services, I can watch what I want, when I want it. God help the traditional TV and media houses when online video quality improves.

Full results of the study here.

The era of ultra-expensive motherboards is upon us

2006-11-27T12:53:00.000+01:00

We already know that the best nVidia has to offer in the motherboard area, n680i chipset based mobos, cost around $270. Reports say that motherboards which support AMD's 4x4 technology will be even more expensive at $300.

The $300 number comes from Inquirer, so you might want to take it with a grain (pinch, bucket?) of salt. The number is considerably lower than some predicted, but it's still a hefty sum to give away just for the motherboard.

To think that you also need to cash out for two dual core chips and four video cards...well, it makes my wallet hurt. I still remember when I bought my DFI nForce4 SLI motherboard, and gave over $170 for it, which seemed like a fortune at the time...

Of course, these products are aimed at hardcore enthusiasts, but it somehow it seems it's always the highend motherboards which have the best support and stability, so everyone ends up using them anyway.

Plasma TVs giving ground to LCDs

2006-11-27T11:50:00.000+01:00

If you must bet on one technology that will win the TV market in the following years, bet on LCD
According to this report by Reuters LCD TV prices will fall at least 30 percent in 2007, while Plasma TVs will fall 15 - 20 % in the same period. LCDs have better resolutions, so given the same price, costumers choose them over plasma TVs, and TV makers tend to focus on one technology only to reduce costs. Guess which one is it? LCD.

According to the study, the plasma TV market will reach a maximum od $24 billion in 2009, and it's downwards from there, while LCD TVs should bet at $75 billion and rising in that same period.

Yes, big screen (over 40 inch) plasma TVs have certain advantages over LCD panels, but the LCD camp is getting bigger and bigger, and when it gets big enough, it usually means game over in the IT world.

CX305T - a brand new Samsung 30'' screen

2006-11-26T21:45:00.000+01:00

Another one of those 30'' monsters for us to drool over, this time with response time as low as 6ms, 2560x1600 resolution, contrast of 1000:1 and 400 cd/m2 brightness

Looks like CX305T puts Samsung ahead of the pack, as far as 30'' screens are considered. Dell's 3007WFP has the same resolution but the response time is 8 ms. Same goes for HP's LP3065.

The price for the CX305T, if you believe the good folks over at Akihabaranews, is 1,267.00 Euros.

Does SLI ever make sense?

2006-11-26T16:19:00.000+01:00

I never really bought into the SLI hype. It's a nice technology, but I was never really sure it makes sense financially. Recently I began considering adding another video card to my (a bit aging) setup, so I did some research about whether an SLI is worth it. The answer = mostly not, unless you have a big monitor.

First, lets cover the one possibility where SLI does make sense (although I wouldn't call it a good choice). If you're building a new system, and money is no problem, and you want the absolute high end, then by all means go and buy the best two graphics cards and use them in SLI mode.

Why I don't think it's good choice? Well, game developers usually want as many people to play their games as possible, not just the wealthy. So, new games always work perfectly on high-end single (and, in most cases, midrange) video cards. By paying 1300$ bucks for two cards you have a clear case of overkill. Yes, you are futureproofing your rig for a few months, but it's not too good an investment. You can always buy a top-notch card, and then buy a better one in a few months, and it will always be good enough for even the most demanding games. However, some people like their FPS in the hundreds, so let them have their fun.

In all other cases, SLI doesn't really fare so well.

First, let's establish a few facts about SLI in general.

- SLI motherboards are more expensive
- Two cards draw more power, hence you might need a more expensive PSU, and you pay a bigger electricity bill
- Two cards make more noise and generate more heat
- Two cards take more space in your case
- One card is usually easier to overclock than two cards in SLI mode
- SLI can compromise the stability of your system (although it doesn't have to be the case)
- SLI setups seem to perform better at high resolutions

Now, let's look at two possible SLI scenarios.

1. You're buying a new computer.

Let's check out some lowrange cards. (The prices are taken from Newegg) An XFX 6800XT costs $129. Two cost $258. Also, 7600GS is $119 (x2 = $238).

And what are the single card options for that kind of money? Well, for $185 you can get an 7900GS, 7900GT is $209 and 7950 costs $289.

Now, observe the following comparison. Or switch to any other benchmark, it's pretty much the same.

7900 GS beats all 6800SLI setups easily in all tests. It's also very near to 7600GS SLI setups, although it's about 50 bucks cheaper. 7950GT costs a bit more, but it easily wins against all mentioned setups by a fair margin.

OK, let's see what are the options among the midrange cards. An XFX 7900GS costs $185. Two of these = $370. XFX 8800GTS currently is $479, and bear in mind that that's a very bad price, because this card is very new. It will probably go down a fair amount in a matter of weeks. Also, a 7950GT is 289$, and it performs pretty similar to two 7900GS in SLI.

I can't find a benchmark where two 7900GTs or 7900GSs beat one 8800GTS; in fact, 8800 GTS beats all 7xxx SLI setups quite easily. The price difference here is $100, but when you consider the fact that 8800GTS supports DirectX10, and not only equals the performance of 7xxx SLI solutions but beats them by a fair margin, I'd say that a single card is, even here, a better option.

2. Second scenario: you have a SLI compatible motherboard, a computer with one nVidia card and you are considering buying another identical card for SLI.

Answer: don't. Whatever card you have, you're better off with buying a new, better, single card, and selling your old card.

Let's examine my case. I have a 7600 GT card. If I bought another, it would set me down for $139. However, a 7900 GT costs $209, and it performs nearly identical as two 7600 GTs. I can sell my 7600 GT for at least 80$, which means that I'm getting a 7900 GT for $130, and i get less noise, less heat, and less power consumption (and a new card, which means new warranty). (BTW, if you don't believe Tom's Hardware's charts, which don't always make sense, here's another benchmark. In it, you can see the (only?) positive side of SLI - it performs well only if you go to crazy resolutions, so if you have a 24'' or bigger monitor, it just might be a viable solution.

If you like, you can do your own math with other cards as much as you like: you can always find a single card solution that's better than an SLI one. Even if it's not, you can probably overclock one card more than two cards, bringing the gap closer.

Don't get me wrong: SLI is nice for hardcore overclockers, benchmark maniacs, showing off, high-end setups, and hardware review sites. My point is that it's rarely a good solution for the end user. I can only recommend it to users with really big screens, because here is where SLI shines, but taking into account the additional noise, heat, and power consumption, I'd think twice before buying a second card.

Categories in Blogger

2006-11-25T17:28:00.000+01:00

I'm pretty new to Blogger, so I'm - as usual - already tweaking everything in sight. I was dissapointed with the fact that there is no support for categories, but I was delighted to see that there are at least 30 hacks that show how to do them anyway

In the end, I chose to do it the old fashioned way - by hand. I created a bunch of articles named "Category: something", and I update them manually, adding links to new articles by hand. Then I simply create links to them - in this case in the top menu.

Why I chose to do this manually, you ask? Well, this way I don't have to use any external services like del.icio.us for it, so I rely only on Blogger, and users never navigate off my blog. Also, I choose not to use extra javascript on this page if it's not absolutely necessary. If you overdo javascript, especially on a blogging platform like this, where you have no absolute control of the code of your webpage, things can get messy.

Since this is not really my idea, I won't go into details, but there's a really nice and long list of all possible category hacks for Blogger here at Freshblog. Enjoy.

How many hits does the Internet get?

2006-11-24T10:55:00.000+01:00

Unique hits and other statistics are often seen for websites, however I was interested in how many unique hits does the Internet get every day. That's right: how many people connect to any web site daily.

This turned out to be a trickier question that I imagined. After an hour of Googling, I was able to find out what are the Internet usage stats per country, how fast do servers respond in various parts of the world, and even (though this data is pretty old) how much data the entire Internet contains.

The closest I got to the answer was at the sites of the big analysts - Nielsen/Netratings and comScore, which has the approximation of world internet usage of people over 15 years of age (why the age restricion, I don't know - I guess they're marketing oriented so they're interested in buying power more than anything else).

This number, cited from comScore's site, which I reckon represents the number of people who use the internet regularly, is 712,976,000. Yes, that's a big number, but it's not exactly what I was looking for. Besides, www.internetworldstats.com says the number is 1,086,250,903. On the other hand, Nielsen/Netratings seems to be more conservative, citing their "Current Digital Media Universe Estimate" at 482,821,770.

What I (mostly) don't know is the methodology behind this data - do these people use the internet daily, once every week, or, for example, once every month? Things get more complex if you want to count the unique hits the internet gets, because one person can connect, disconnect and reconnect several times per day, and every time they do that it would technically be a unique visit. To complicate matters further, it would be interesting to know the sum of daily unique hits on all websites in existence.

However, with the help of this little chart, I can at least approximate these numbers.

Bear in mind that I used data from different sources, obtained with different methodologies and from different samples, and I did some huge simplifications to make my life easier. The numbers in this final paragraph are very rough and possibly very wrong.

So, if the average person has approximately 33 internet sessions per month, that would mean approx. 1.1 every day, which would mean that the internet gets somewhere between 531,103,947, 784,273,600 and 1,194,875,993 visits every day, depending on whose numbers you trust.

According to Nielsen/Netratings, an average person visits 1446 websites per month. (1446/30) = 48.2*482,821,770= 23,272,009,314 (if you trust Nielsen/Netratings) or 48.2* 1,086,250,903 = 52,357,293,525. (if you trust internetworldstats.com). This is the number of webpages visited daily.

Looking at these numbers I can't help the feeling that I might have screwed them up for a billion or two. Looking forward to constructive criticism (;.

About: author

2006-11-15T13:13:00.000+01:00

franticindustries is a blog covering IT technology, featuring only original material and the author's unique standpoint on a variety of IT topics, which inexplicably seem to elude everyone else.

The author is known under the internet name 'frantic' for 15 years, hence the name of the blog, and is actively involved in the IT industry, working - among other things - as the editor of an IT section of a web portal and writing for various IT magazines (written in Croatian language). Here, you can find his no-holds-barred, and possibly more controversial standpoints on IT (and, occasionally, other subjects.)

The site features early news and reviews of interesting new internet services and various other net-related phenomena; news, reviews, comparisons and insight on the latest software and hardware, and practical how-to advice. Working in a different time-zone, we often manage to feature important news articles early, while the USA is still asleep.

Contact us at franticindustries@gmail.com