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Wifi risk doesn't quite square
The papers this weekend have been full of stories about calls for an investigation into whether Wifi can damage health, particularly of children. The scare, along the lines of 'mobile phones fry your brains', was started by the lead story in the Independent on Sunday the weekend before last.
This lengthy piece failed to mention the inverse square law, which states that radiated energy drops off with the square of the distance from the source, meaning that a transmitter held against your head is potentially far more dangerous than one a few feet away. Nor did it mention that we have managed to survive despite bathing constantly in a sea of natural radiation.
The story did give the increasingly tabloidy Indy a chance to produce another of its lurid Mail-style scare-of-the-day headlines. The paper had a point, but the views of experts on the subject have been generally more measured. There is no evidence, apart from a few questionable anecdotes, that Wifi poses a significant danger. There is, however, good reason to check out the health risks just in case.
Chris Taylor, supreme commander of the Supreme Commander development team, speaks to PCW
We've spent some time speaking to Chris Taylor, the top man at Gas Powered Games and one of the most respected figures in the real time strategy (rts) gaming world, about Supreme Commander, how to get to a position of power inside a computer game company and his future.
Notably, he also told us DirectX 10 would probably be a feature in expansion packs, and not the current game.
In many people's eyes, from the avid gamer to the lay-about, he has the ultimate job; he directs, overseas and storyboards a computer game and although he comes from a technical background, he doesn't think that's the quickest and easiest way to get to his position of power.
So young, creative people might want to read his words and see how you too can 'create games'. By the end of the interview though, one thing was made clear to me. Chris, who can fire off words like a tommy gun, obviously got into his position simply by being a nice guy. It also helps that he's very excited by his work…
Fujifilm releases S5 Pro firmware update
If you caught our review of Fujifilm's excellent Finepix S5 Pro digital SLR and then rushed out to buy one, you'll be pleased to hear a firmware update has just been released.
Version 1.06 lets you lock additional settings (including Noise Reduction and file tag options) as well as improving on the S5 Pro's barcode scanning capabilities.
Read our Fujifilm Finepix S5 Pro review
Download the firmware update
New drive for floppies
An odd effect of the phasing out of floppy drives in PCs may be to increase demand for the devices as standalone modules. Floppies were for years the back-up and archiving medium of choice for home users and there must be petabytes of valued information still held on the 3.5in disks.
Lindy obviously thinks so because it has just launch a new £29.99 USB floppy drive. The USB transfer rate is given as 12Mbits/sec, so it sounds like a older USB 1.0 link. But given the glacial transfer rate of the floppies themselves, few are likely to notice.
Slouch your way to gaming success
If you're fed up with getting carpet burns and aching knees from gaming on the floor, or your favourite armchair's finally expired, perhaps the Slouchpod Interactive XT might be worth a look. Made by the Churchfield SofaBed Company, it's a polystyrene bean-filled wipe-clean gaming chair that costs £299 and features built in 5W speakers and a 10W subwoofer, plus audio input and output ports. You can even plug your Mp3 player into it.
And don't worry about it matching your decor - it's available in silver, black, cream, lilac, red & fuschia pink colours. Yummy.
Hotmail, why hast thou forsaken me?
Hotmail has, for some reason, taken a sudden dislike to my Pop3 email account.
For the past couple of weeks it's been bouncing mail I try to send to any Hotmail addresses, including my own.
As usual, I got a fairly quick response to my first email to Hotmail customer services. And, as usual, it followed the cringe-worthy Hotmail template reply - "Hi Will, I understand how important it can be to properly receive the messages sent to your account" etc. etc.
HP cartridges cases won't carry ISO page yields - but printers may
HP may be offering of two capacities across its range of cartridges – but the packages will carry no information on page yields you can expect. In previous years this would have been meaningless, because the figure will depend on how much you put on a page.
Now ISO standards have been agreed for everything but photographic prints. They are only an indication of actual page yields, put they should provide an accurate comparison of different cartridges. So why not print them on the cartridge case?
Andrew Forsyth, UK sales director for supplies in Britain, said the reason is that page yields vary according to which printer the cartridge is used on – some are used across a range of models. Cartridge cases will carry a web address where information on page yields can be obtained.
This will be little use, of course, if you are in a shop trying to make an informed purchasing decision (as the marketers say).
But it seems HP may print the ISO yields on the boxes of new printers, which would be a real advance in reducing the confusion (obfuscation, in the case of some companies) over true costs. We await confirmation of this.
AMD R600 launch
AMD has invited 200 journalists from across the world to see its new DirectX 10 cards, set to compete with Nvidia’s Geforce 8800, 8600 and 8500 boards.
All the journalists have signed none disclosure agreements, which is a kind of legal document meaning we can’t report what we’ve seen until May 14th.
So apart from reporting that I’m sunburnt and I’ve become a big fan of semi-fresh dates, I’m can tell you that Tunisia has a serious degree of internet censorship.
As well as talking about the dangerous lack of pavements in Tunisia and that nice guy from Sapphire having his graphics cards confiscated at the Tunisia border, journalists have been nattering about various image uploading websites, political websites and some pornography websites being blocked. Apparently the OpenNet Initiative states 10 per cent of all sites and barred from Tunisia, and all you see is a 403 error.
Medion ultra-mobile's button-down keyboard looks hard work
Got a chance today to take a close look at Medion’s new ultra-mobile PC
and I have to report that it confirmed the impression I got from a glimpse at Cebit earlier this year. I do not like the keyboard, which has calculator-style button keys that are not up to heavy-duty work. There is no way I would use a keyboard like this for anything beyond
putting in a web address, though suffering intermittent RSI symptoms I am very
choosy about what I type on.
Why on earth did Medion not use proper keys? I suspect that the designer got carried away with the success of Blackberry keypads, but the only reason these are popular is that they are not quite as bad ergonomically as a number pad.
The old Psion Series 5 palmtop had the smallest ‘proper’ keyboard I have used in earnest; at 17cm wide it was just about up to serious work. The Medion is 19cm wide, which could have put it further into the comfort zone; instead the designer has used buttons in two clumps separated by wasted space.
The slide-out keyboard also makes the design rather fatter (2.83cm) than the Samsung Q1, though that is a pure tablet.
The design is not quite as confused as Sony’s Vaio UX ultra-mobile, which also goes for button keys suitable for 15-year-olds with hawk eyes, and manages to be both tiny and bulky.
The Medion has some nice design touches, like a thumb-pad that can be used instead of a mouse. But, again, it demands the kind of movements that would make anyone who has had trouble with their hands wince.
Incidentally the 6.5in screen is at the lower limit of what Microsoft and Intel now regard as minimum. The Sony has a 4.5in screen.
Personal taste comes into to this, to an extent. I note that even the Vaio UX, which seems to me to be generally misconceived, got some good reviews. Both the UX and the Medion can be used standing up, held in both hands, using your thumbs to type, which is useful for some tasks... doctors filling in e-forms on wards, for instance.
We should be getting the Medion in soon, and it is unlikely to be reviewed by me, so watch this space and you can get another view.
Microsoft starts Vista Media Center 'Fiji' beta testing
Microsoft has posted an invitation for beta testers via the The Green Button blog, indicating the start of the beta program for the next version of Vista's Media Center application. This project is generally thought to be codenamed 'Fiji', although it's not clear whether the planned Media Center update is just a part of a major reworking that also affects other built-in Vista apps.
What new funtionality is going to be introduced is unknown, although for us Europeans satellite TV support (including Freesat) would be a good start, followed by support for more than two tuners.
Word bug survives in Office 2007
Hit a bug today
that seems to have survived the transition from Office XP to Office 2007. A
good quick way to clean up text copied from a web page is to use Paste Special,
choosing the Unformatted Text option, when pasting it into Word. This also gets rid of unwanted graphics. I have to
do this often and so recorded the sequence as a macro, triggered by
Shift-Control-C.
But it didn’t
work. Word translates recorded macros like this into Visual Basic, but it
screws this one up. To make it work under Office XP you have to go to the
Visual Basic editor (ie, select the recorded macro under the Tools-Macro menu
and press Edit) and edit the line:
Selection.PasteAndFormat (wdPasteDefault)
to...
Selection.PasteAndFormat (wdPlainText)
It turns out that you need the same work-round with Office 2007, accessing the macro features via the Developer ribbon.
Mid range DirectX 10 cards arrive
We've just finished testing MSI's NX8600GT graphics card, the first DirectX 10 card we've had in our hands that costs less than £100.
We were offered an 8600GTS to test, and that will come later, but we plumped for the 8600GT because it's cheaper and I had hoped for the perfect price/perfromance balance. Ultimately it's cheap DirectX10 card but my day-dreams about the performance possibilities failed to materialise.
In a press release, Nvidia quoted Sony as hyping up the 8500's and 8600's high definition capabilities. Either Sony supports the use of Blu-ray ripping software AnyDVD, or it's been mis-informed by Nvidia because our 8600GT did not have the HDCP codes onboard necessary for Blu-ray playback.
This is what they said: "Sony Pictures is enthusiastic about the ability to play Blu-ray movies on the PC," said Don Eklund, executive vice president, advanced technologies at Sony Pictures. "The new state-of-the-art NVIDIA GeForce 8500 and GeForce 8600 cards will enable consumers to enjoy Blu-ray movies on mainstream PCs."
Ignoring any copying ability, AnyDVD HD bypasses ACSS on the fly. You install the program, don't have to go into any settings whatsoever and you can successfully play back Blu-ray movies on any old DVI monitor. It works a treat.
Downtime and the Pingdom of meaningless statistics
The average downtime for websites in March was a minute under two hours, according to monitoring site Pingdom. The figure is based on a sample of 2000 sites. Pingdom says that because an estimated 51.3 million sites were live over the month, this represents a total downtime of 4,239,375 days or 11,614 years - a time span that would put us back into the last Ice Age, when Britain was still joined to the continent.
By the same token if the average human sleeps eight hours a night and the world population is 6.59 billion then we doze for a collective six million years each night, which would put us way back beyond the first known proto-humans. Meaningless statistics, but curious nonetheless.
Flat-rate broadband hits a snag
There is a supreme irony in today's Broadband Stakeholder Group (BSG) report on next-generation broadband deployment in the UK. It seems that flat-rate charging, one of the major factors in turning the British on to broadband, could actually hold us back in the longer term.
The problem is that it gives operators no incentive to invest in new infrastructure rather than squeeze more out of today's systems. Data rates of 100Mbits/sec are available already in places like Hong Kong - an order of magnitude faster than those in Britain - and the BSG reckons homes here could actually need that kind of speed within five years.
The optimum solution, taking fibre all the way to home, would cost around £10b in the UK - and that would leave out 10 percent of homes. This is not that large a sum, when you consider the £24b paid for mobile licences a few years back, but operators need to be persuaded that they are going to get a return on their investment.
There are other interesting figures in the report, and I'll be writing more about in in the next edition of PCW. But there is one factor it did not mention, in reference to the possibility of Britain falling behind.
This is that emerging economies can be at an advantage when deploying new technology simply because they have little or no existing infrastructure to compete with it. If they are going to link homes up physically (as opposed to using wireless) they might as well use fibre rather than copper.
Card readers need mind readers
ENlight has launched what it calls a 26-in-1 internal card reader. The box sits in a 3.5in bay (the floppy drive slot), supports all the main flash memory card standards and will retail at £9.50 inc. VAT.
In my view it is as capable as Sony's recently released 17-in-1 card reader, since the smaller cards Sony doesn't support (like a Micro SD) come with adapters making them act like full-fledged SD cards.
Just to prove numbers game manufacturers play is stupid: I have a 54-in-1 card reader at my desk and it can't do anything the other two can't.
On the politics front, Sony's 17-in-1 reader is its first to support SD cards. I hope this is a sign of the company softening its stance towards the dominant technology. We're in a real mess with rival flash-memory technologies and I for one would like to see a single, open-standard, royalty free flash form-factor (which even SD cards aren't).
A warning from Sputnik
As perhaps the only person at PCW Towers old enough to remember the launch of Russia's Sputnik, which ushered in the age of satellite links, I noted with interest the International Telecommunication Union's celebration of the 50th anniversary yesterday. It was also, incidentally, the 46th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin's flight, which made him the first man in space.
One of the oddest aspects in retrospect was everyone's surprise that Russia got there first, as if everything new had to come from America, or at the very least from Western Europe. The Russians (and the Americans) did get a lot of German technology after the war but many pre-war rocket pioneers were Russian. And Russia's excellently designed T34 tanks had hammered the Germans back to their own country during the war.
One reason the British crumbled so quickly in the Far East during the war was that they held similar attitudes to the Japanese, underestimating both the people and their technology.
This view persisted well into the sixties, partly because in the immediate post-war years Japan did manufacture a lot of poor copies of Western goods. At around the time of the Sputnik launch, the word Japanese was synonymous with "cheap and nasty". But it was not long before the country was beating the West at its own game.
The fear in Britain now is that too few students are taking technical subjects, and there is talk of paying sixth-formers to study maths. This lack of enthusiasm is hardly surprising when the mainstream media, dominated by arts graduates, routinely sneers at geeks; and when an arts degree requires a fraction of the effort needed for one on the science side for little or no more reward.
If we carry on like this, with China and India churning out millions of technologists, we will be overwhelmed by eastern know-how in a manner far more devastating than the Russians managed with Sputnik .
Firewire 2 disk caddy offers data transfers at up to 800Mbits/sec
A new storage caddy from Dynamode has a Firewire 2 interface supporting a data transfer rate of up to 800Mbits/sec. But it does not have an Ethernet port, as I reported in an earlier version of this posting after being misinformed by Dynamode.
The EzeStor FireCaddy, which also has USB 2.0 port, will take any Sata or e-Sata hard disk to be used as external storage. A second e-Sata interface allows an additional drive to be daisy-chained.
It costs £75, with all the necessary cables, plus the cost of the drive.
Hoj Parmar, of Dynamode, said: "It is perfect for any application that needs to transfer large data files at blistering speed."
Watch out for a review in PCW soon.
All Nokia phones to get GPS
We've had a brief go with Nokia's 6110 mobile phone, one of the first consumer phones to sport GPS. The software comes from Route 66 and it zooms and pans smoothly.
Although the N series have started to get GPS (see N95 review), Nokia is apparently aiming to put GPS into every one of its phones in the future, according to Route 66's account manager for Britain, Mike Goodenough. He told us "Nokia's goal is to be at the top of navigation", bar none.
In essence we'll see GPS in everyday mobile phones - even pay as you go cheapies. It's another selling point in the great mobile phone upgrade push. The downside is, of course, that it'll batter battery life. GPS can be turned off though and it's a damn sight more efficient than using a separate GPS dongle and using Bluetooth for the two to talk.
Nokia N95 review now live
We've just posted our review of the N95 - Nokia's long-awaited smartphone.
With features including Wifi, GPS and HSDPA, it's set to be a massive hit. The Carphone Warehouse, who supplied our review unit, has responded to demand by restricting their stock of N95s to one per customer.
The N95 also sports a whopping 5megapixel camera. But as you'll see in our sample photo gallery, image quality is far behind that of standard digicams.
PS3 price drops in UK
Play.com and WH Smith (albeit briefly) have chopped £25 of the price of a PS3, giving UK gamers the opportunity to buy one for £400.
Looking back over the years, it's easy to see a more serious price cut coming - the original Xbox had a hard time in the UK, partly because it cost £100 more than the PS2 when it launched. Microsoft dropped the price by £100 just six weeks after launch to stimulate sales.
If big, proud Microsoft can do such a thing, I'm certain Sony could too, especially since market data (Chart-track) shows that after the roaring first week, sales of the PS3 have plummeted in the UK - below the levels the Wii was managing in the weeks following launch.
Journalists can buy PS3s directly from Sony for £385, however I've not seen many people take Sony up on this offer.
For anyone who still thinks the PS3 is a bargain, it's worth looking at a comparison the Wall Street Journal recently did. No suprises who came top:
London €627
Brussels €600
Paris €600
Frankfurt €599
Rome €599
New York €487
Tokyo €381
Hong Kong €363
Goodbye to the Office ribbon
An enterprising bunch, Addintools, has obviously been listening to disgruntled users of Office 2007 and come up with a 'Classic' menu bar replacement for the new 'ribbon bar'. We remember suggesting to MS that this should be an option, but we were ignored..
Read the full story over at the main PCW site.
Freedom of the web does not mean freedom from responsibility
A call by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales and techie publisher Tim O'Reilly for a code of conduct for bloggers has sparked a predictably vitriolic debate. The draft code, as outlined by O'Reilly, is mild compared to the constraints most professional journalists have to work under, even in the soi-disant Land of the Free, and much of it amounts to simple courtesy.
The suggestion is that blogs that subscribe to the code should carry a badge of civility. The more coherent objectors argue that this would be the prelude to legislation limiting the hallowed freedom of the web.
This ignores the fact that the web is not free: it is rightly subject to the same predominantly sensible laws that govern traditional publishing in mature democracies. The problem, commonly exploited, is that those laws are not so easily enforced on the internet.
Few would argue that it is acceptable to send anonymous hate mail, or spread unfounded rumours or malicious lies about someone by word of mouth; yet to do the equivalent on a blog is commonly regarded as a legitimate exercise of "freedom".
There are fears that the 'badge of civility' would end up as a badge of boredom. But it need not happen: there is no shortage of wit within the constraints of traditional publishing, and a notable lack of the invective that passes for wit in many blogs.
Still, there is nothing wrong with a dash of incivility where it is deserved, and Wales and O'Reilly could perhaps come up with a better name for their badge. Whether or not their initiative comes to anything, they have done well to raise the point that the freedom of the web should not mean freedom from responsibility.
Nokia N95 - first impressions
Over the Easter break I've been playing around with Nokia's new smartphone, the N95.
Update: Full Nokia N95 review now live
Boasting built-in GPS, Wifi and HSDPA, the N95 takes the idea of convergence to another level.
The front of the phone is dominated by its 2.6in (240x320) display - slide this up to use numeric keypad, or tilt it horizontal and slide to the right to reveal video navigation buttons.
Mobile phone payments afloat
The great unwashed can now sell their own music to audiences that don't have a credit card or bank account.
OneBip's service looks identical to Paypal's on the face of it. You have 'buy it now' buttons, simple HTML code insertion (you don't need to know any code, you simple copy and paste into your own website) and an array of tools for monitoring sales.
The difference is you pay for goods using your mobile phone. It uses premium text messages to pay for digital downloads and services that cost £5 or less.
The potential market for this kind of payment is huge, since there are more mobile phones in Britain than people and not everyone has a credit card or bank account (especially kids).
This kind of payment is being held back by though:
Firstly, premium text messages have got a bad reputation in the UK due to misleading subscription based services selling crazy frog tunes.
Secondly, mobile phone operators in the UK charge a 20-25per cent commission and that's before OneBip takes a cut! Some eastern European operators take as little as five per cent and I can't help but think mobile phone telecos are shooting themselves in the foot by pricing merchants out of using these kind of payments.
Thirdly, there is a 45 - YES FOURTY FIVE - day holding period where the phone operators keep hold of your cash. That makes for an unstable selling environment (in my humble).
Low-cost 26in 'HD screen' may not give give true high-def experience
PC World today is advertising HD TVs "from only £349 inc Vat". The cheapest "HD ready" model is branded a Polaroid, a name that gained fame as a range of instant photography products that have been rendered more or less obsolete by digital cameras. The brand is now used on a variety of consumer-electronics goods of obscure provenance.
There is nothing wrong with that, of course. Many of the products we buy are not made by the owners of the brand under which they sell. The value of a brand rests on how people perceive the goods it is attached to, which raises the question of whether Polaroid is wise to give its name to a 26in "high-definition" screen.
According to research by the BBC, you need a screen with a diagonal of at least 27in to get the benefit of high-definition. Which means buyers may be disappointed, and so in the long term may be Polaroid.
Pick your Top Ten tech products of all time
PC World in the US (no relation) has listed what it considers to be the Top 50 tech products of all time. It is an absurd exercise, in many ways, but fun. The top 30 are:
1 Netscape Navigator (1994)
2 Apple II (1977)
3 TiVo HDR110 (1999)
4 Napster (1999)
5 Lotus 1-2-3 for DOS (1983)
6 Apple iPod (2001)
7 Hayes Smartmodem (1981)
8 Motorola StarTAC (1996)
9 WordPerfect 5.1 (1989)
10 Tetris (1985)
11 Adobe Photoshop 3.0 (1994)
12 IBM ThinkPad 700C (1992)
13 Atari VCS/2600 (1977)
14 Apple Macintosh Plus (1986)
15 RIM BlackBerry 857 (2000)
16 3dfx Voodoo3 (1999)
17 Canon Digital Elph S100 (2000)
18 Palm Pilot 1000 (1996)
19 id Software Doom (1993)
20 Microsoft Windows 95 (1995)
21 Apple iTunes 4 (2003)
22 Nintendo Game Boy (1989)
23 Iomega Zip Drive (1994)
24 Spybot Search & Destroy (2000)
25 Compaq Deskpro 386 (1986)
26 CompuServe (1982)
27 Blizzard World of Warcraft (2004)
28 Aldus PageMaker (1985)
29 HP LaserJet 4L (1993)
30 Apple Mac OS X (2001)
The list is inevitably US-centric, and there are some odd positionings: putting Tetris above Photoshop, for instance; and PageMaker, which prompted the biggest change in publishing since Caxton, is down at number 28, below Doom.
Also, I'd argue that it was Mosaic, the non-commercial precursor of Netscape, that pushed the World Wide Web into the mainstream. Mark Andreessen, one of the college team that wrote it, formed Netscape with Jim Clark, of Silicon Graphics, to capitalise on its success.
And what about Tim Berners-Lee and the WWW protocols that underlay Mosaic's success? Perhaps they don't count as products.
My view is that WordPerfect Office, not WordPerfect 5.1, was the great product of that stable. PCs of the DOS era, indeed for many of the early Windows years, lacked the legs for a satisfactory graphical interface.
WordPerfect started its decline when it went graphical with 5.1. But Office, with WordPerfect 4.1, provided in just 640KB of RAM the kind of task switching and data swapping within a comprehensive application suite that could not be matched in Windows at an acceptable speed for getting on for a decade.
My UK Top Ten, excluding devices like the Colossus at Bletchley Park which were not 'products', would be:
1. Leo. LEO I (Lyons Electronic Office I) 1951. Based on Maurice Wilkes' Cambridge EDSAC. The first computer used for business applications.
2. Intel 4004 (1971) First microprocessor. Precursor of the classic x86 PC chip.
3. Apple II (1977) First commercial personal computer.
4. IBM PC 1981. Mother and father of most modern computers
5. Hayes Smartmodem (1981). Start of data comms for the masses
6 Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet (1983);
7 Psion Organiser 1 (1984). First commercial handheld computer
8 Aldus PageMaker (1985)
9 Amstrad PC 1512. (1986) Alan Sugar's TV persona irritates me to the extent that I can't watch him. But this IBM almost-compatible created the PC mass market in Britain.
10 Mosaic. Made the web usable by non-techies.
Feel free to suggest your own Top Ten
A single Microsoft decision responsible for more carbon dioxide than Kingdom of Tonga
In response to Microsoft's recent announcement that Vista is greener than XP, I believe it's actually a lot worse.
This is mainly because a lot of XP PCs will get chucked out; I was once told by a green campaigner that it takes as much energy (and therefore carbon emissions) to create a PC as a car, due to the intensive process that happens in high tech fabs.
There is another issue though, Microsoft's decision to make the main start menu power button a 'low-power state' button in Vista is wasteful.
I believe vast swathes of users will believe this the off button. It's actually a sleep mode, like XP's, except that there's no risk of losing your documents in the event of a black out.
Using the PCW power meter, I found my Vista sleep mode consumes 4Watts. The hybrid sleep mode consumes 3Watts. When Vista is shut down, the intricacies of the ATX standard mean my PC consumes 2Watts - so Microsoft is adding 1Watt per PC.
For 40million Vista PCs, Microsoft adds 142,496 tones of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere per year – that's more than Kingdom of Tonga is responsible for!
There are 1bn PCs worldwide and Microsoft holds a 90 per cent share of those PCs, so things can only get much worse.
Freeview at 156mph
Digitimes reports that Taiwanese mobile TV chip specialist Asuka Semiconductor has just announced a new mobile DVB-T (Freeview) tuner called Frigate. This uses diversity antenna techniques to enable uninterrupted reception in cars at speeds of up to 250km/h (156mph). Most ordinary handheld Freeview tuners won't work at motorway speeds or in fast trains.
US takes sledgehammer to UFO nut
PCW Towers got hit by a virus late last week, causing us no end of hassle (and me a working weekend), so we are hardly in the mood here to have patience with net vandals. But it is hard not to feel sympathy for Londoner Gary McKinnon, who has lost the latest round in his fight against being extradited to the US to face charges of hacking US military computers.
By all accounts, he did nothing particularly clever and he was looking for suppressed evidence of UFO sightings, which says little for his judgement but in no way represents a threat to the US or anyone else. Rather the reverse: it is better that people like him expose security gaps, rather than have them exploited by more sinister elements.
The US has every right to take action against McKinnon for what amounts to trespassing. But in the fevered atmosphere of the so-called war on terror, the US authorities seem incapable of displaying a sense of proportion. He faces a military tribunal and a sentence of up to 70 years.
Graham Cluley, of security firm Sophos, showed little sympathy today. He said McKinnon should have thought of the US hard line on cybercrime when he went UFO hunting, and he pointed out: "Even if the extradition order had not been approved, McKinnon would almost certainly have stood trial in the UK courts."
And perhaps the UK courts would have considered that after four years of being pilloried in public he has been punished enough. It could still happen, as there is talk of an appeal to the House of Lords.
Wireless keyboards can be troublesome
We've just reviewed the Cherry Marlin and found that while it was a good keyboard for the price, it will displease those who don't like thin keys with only a small amout of travel to them. Thanks to its slim design, I found myself using it on my lap for long periods of time.
Repetitive Strain Injury (RSI) hits people in different ways and, although there's no conclusive proof, using a slim keyboard like the Marlin might offer some relief to sufferers who have tried everything else.
We reviewed the Marlin because it represents the best Cherry can achieve in the consumer segment, however we did spend some time with the Cherry Stingray - a similar but cheaper option.
The main difference between the two is that the Stingray uses a 27Mhz operating frequency and is extremely prone to interference.
In our office the Stingray was completely unusable; keys might not work at all, it would skip certain characters and a key couldn't be 'held' down for more than a couple of seconds without noise causing the signal to stop. What's more, to make sure we didn't have a faulty board, we tested two.
We had this very same problem a few years ago when wireless keyboards first started coming out – since then keyboard manufacturers have come up with encryption and channel coding to avoid these problems.
Although it worked better in the home, the Stingray is one of the worst keyboard's we've used in a long time.
