Into Tech

Just last month we pointed to a study that showed that more experienced internet users checked their email a lot less, as they had realized what a distraction it could be. Of course, there are some people who just can’t resist — so it’s interesting to see companies and services trying to deal with it. First there was the launch of a service called HitMeLater, which lets you forward your email to an address that determines when it will resend that email again. That is, if you get an email that you don’t want to deal with right away, but know you’ll forget about it once it scrolls out of the main pane of your inbox, you can just forward it to 4@hitmelater.com and it will email that message back to you four hours later. You can replace the number with any number of hours you want, or with the name of a day, and it will resend the email on that day.

But apparently it wasn’t just HitMeLater thinking about this type of service. Microsoft is apparently experimenting with its own email snooze button for Outlook. It’s different than HitMeLater, in that this is really a solution for those who simply can’t resist checking email. Instead, you can have the system put up a virtual “Do Not Disturb” sign — and Outlook won’t sync up your email for whatever period of time is specified. Of course, there will be those who will say that people just need to learn some discipline on their own, but knowing that’s not going to happen, what’s wrong with some tools to help people out?

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So-called “cloud computing” has taken a beating over the past few weeks. The concept is simple enough, and hundreds of millions of people have been doing it for many years via Microsoft Hotmail. It just means accessing an online application - in this case, email - via a web browser, instead of running a separate program on your personal computer.

Of course, the number of online applications has grown tremendously. It now stretches from simple to-do lists via office-style programs such as spreadsheets and project management to more specialised business services such as accounting and customer relationship management. Users can also store their photos and movies online.

This certainly has advantages. People can access their online applications from any computer at any time, and collaborative work becomes easier. Often, too, these online applications are “free” (paid for by advertising).

But cloud computing also has drawbacks, which the pundits may be much less keen to tell you about. One has been highlighted recently: reliability. Google Docs, Gmail, Twitter and Amazon’s S3 service have all been out of action, and some of Apple’s MobileMe users have had a torrid time. At Webware, Rafe Needleman has posted a list of the 10 Worst Web glitches of 2008 so far.

Alas, even if the online application works, users may not be able to get to it. They may have local problems with their browser or their internet connection. Their internet service provider may have network problems. Remember, the internet is never guaranteed to work: it just operates on the principle of “best efforts”. (We tried. We failed. Hard luck.)

Even if an online application works and you can get to it, things can still go wrong. The company that provides the application can change it in any way (turning the interface you loved into one you hate, for example), without asking, or they can simply close it. Nikon is about to close its Fotoshare photo service, and AOL may well close its Xdrive online storage. If you were a paying Streamload user, all your data has already been dumped. Hard luck.

Still, at least when services close, users are usually given a few weeks to rescue their stuff. It’s much worse when people are locked out because the supplier thinks they have done something wrong, or because their account has been hacked.

Nick Saber, for example, recently found himself locked out of Gmail. That was bad. What was worse was that he was automatically locked out of every other Google service that uses the same logon. If it happens to you, you won’t be able to use Gmail, Google Talk, Google Docs or your calendar; you won’t have access to your photos at Picasa, and so on. It’s devastating.

Yes, people can also lose access to their data when they fail to back up their PCs. We’ve been telling them that for decades. But online data also needs to be backed up, and supporters of cloud computing should be telling people that as well.

How far cloud computing can go is another matter. Applications run much slower online than they do on a local PC, and a browser provides a much more limited interface than a desktop application, so there are sacrifices as well as advantages. Still, it’s not either/or: I think there’s plenty of room for both.

But anybody who thinks the cloud is going to replace personal computers completely is welcome to put their PC in the bin. Indeed, if you have a very recent high-end PC or Mac, I might take it off your hands for free.

Student laptop

My son is about to go to university to study architecture. What sort of laptop would you recommend, for up to £600?
Cathy Matheson

JS: The final choice depends on the use, and there are at least three possibilities, so you will need to talk to your son and perhaps to his university. The first idea would be to get a lightweight portable to carry everywhere for note-taking, email and web browsing. A good cheap example would be the Acer Aspire One running Windows XP on a 10-inch screen. The keyboard beats the Asus Eee PC version. A spare battery would be useful.

The second option would be a desktop replacement laptop that he could use in his room. This would provide computer functions plus home entertainment, doubling as a DVD player, sound system, and games machine. There are plenty of portables with 15.4in widescreens from Dell, HP/Compaq, Toshiba and other suppliers, but aim for a Core 2 Duo processor and 2GB or more memory for Windows Vista. Look for a Kensington lock to tie it down.

The third option would be a portable workstation, intended to run specific software that is used on the course. Unfortunately, the software used for serious architectural work - such as Autodesk’s AutoCAD and Bentley MicroStation - needs lots of memory and a separate graphics card, rather than the Intel integrated graphics chips built into cheap laptops. To handle complex models with AutoCAD 2008, I’d be looking for something like a Dell Latitude D830 with 4GB of memory, 64bit Windows Vista Ultimate, nVidia Quadro or similar graphics, and probably a screen upgrade: Autodesk recommends 1,280 x 1,024 pixels. You might not get much change out of £1,000, and it’s not worth cutting corners: having 2GB instead of 4GB saves £40, and having 32bit XP Pro or Vista Business only saves £34. Before spending this sort of money, your son should talk to his university department and preferably to more advanced students to find out exactly what is required. A simpler and cheaper laptop may well do.

If a course involves the use of specialist software such as AutoCAD, the university will usually provide access to shared computers that have it installed. Students who want to run it themselves can usually obtain an educational version at a reduced price. The cheap LT version of AutoCAD 2008 costs around £1,500, whereas the student version costs about £100 for a 14-month licence.

Books for Kindles

I am considering an Amazon Kindle. However, I’d like to use it for ebooks freely available in text format, and others in Microsoft’s Reader format.
John Borgoy

JS: The Kindle can handle books in plain text (.txt) plus the Amazon (.azw) and Mobipocket (.mobi; .prc) formats. It can also handle Microsoft Word documents and web pages, but you have to email these to your kindle.com address. Amazon will convert them and send them wirelessly to your Kindle for a small fee. You can convert Microsoft Reader (.lit) files by using a free converter such as ABC Amber LIT.

Movie rescue

My DigiFusion Freeview recorder died when its power unit fried after a power cut. Is there any way I can transfer the movies and recorded programmes to my PC from the hard drive?
John Rogers

JS: If you remove the hard drive from the recorder, you should be able to mount it in an external drive enclosure and connect it to your PC via a USB port. I’d guess it’s a 3.5in drive. If you are lucky, it will be in the FAT32 file format used in Microsoft MS DOS and recognised by most operating systems. If you have a proper desktop PC, a cheaper alternative is to fit the drive internally, but this can be a little trickier.

Searching for data

My computer died suddenly and I had to get another. I can read the hard disk of the old machine via USB, but how do I get at emails and the address book?
Alec Williams

JS: You should be able to copy the old data from your backup CDs or external hard drive! Since the hard drive still works, however, you can copy the data to your new PC in the usual way and then import it. You can find the data by running a disk-wide search for the types of storage file your software uses. If you used the Windows address book, search for *.wab (with an asterisk) files. If your email program was Outlook Express, search for the Inbox.dbx and Folders.dbx files and copy that whole folder across. For help, click here and here to read the Microsoft Knowledge Base articles.

Backchat

As mentioned in Technophile (August 7), I struggled with the Linpus version of Linux on an Acer Aspire One subnotebook. Alan Cocks comments: “Information forums are appearing. This one might have helped some of your frustrations”.

On copying cassette tapes etc using Audacity software, Tim Gossling points out that it does have track splitting: go to Analyze and select Silence finder to automate the process “with probably varying degrees of success, particularly for classical music,” he says. “Manual splitting is done via Project and Add label at selection: click in the label field and type in a title. File|Export multiple will then generate multiple files, each named with the track label.”

· Get your queries answered by Jack Schofield, our computer editor at jack.schofield@guardian.co.uk

If you follow the patent world, you know of Gary Odom, who is known as The Patent Hawk. To say he’s a big supporter of the patent system would be something of an understatement. He’s been known to comment here on occasion, employing the style seen all-too-often among patent system apologists commenting on Techdirt posts: insult repeatedly and broadly, offer no actual points, refuse to actually counter anything we say, provide absolutely no evidence and (for good measure) insult again. However, as reader Jon has pointed out to us, Odom recently received a new patent (he’s got a bunch) on tool group manipulations and he’s now suing Microsoft for the way its toolbars work in Office 2007.

I won’t comment on the patent itself and whether or not its obvious — read the claims and judge for yourself. However, I will question just what sort of patent system we’ve created when simply putting a toolbar in your software that can be changed and manipulated by the end user can get you sued for patent infringement. With patents and lawsuits like this flying by every day, it almost seems as if software companies are better off not doing any actual innovation, because it’s only likely to get them sued. Have an idea on how to make a toolbar function better? Don’t bother unless you’re willing to pay a tax. At some point you have just sit back and look at the system as a whole and wonder how we got from the vision of Thomas Jefferson to here.

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There’s some good news for rock wannabes from both Sony and Microsoft today as both companies have confirmed cross-compatibility of instruments for its range of virtual band titles.

Sony actually announced yesterday that PS3 editions of Rock Band 2, Guitar Hero: World Tour, Rock Revolution and SingStar would all be compatible with each other.

Not to be left behind, Microsoft has swiftly followed up with a similar announcement and confirmed that upcoming titles from Activision Blizzard, MTV Games and Konami would enjoy similar support.

It was just a couple weeks ago that we pointed to some research coming out of Microsoft suggesting that the somewhat-discredited theory of “six degrees of separation” may be accurate, though those degrees may have changed over time, thanks to increasingly powerful communications technology. Of course, if it’s true that communications tech is decreasing our degrees of separation, then it should continue to decrease at a decent pace. But could we have already made the jump down to just three degrees of separation? That’s the headline that’s going around following a study released by UK mobile operator O2. Except, when you read the fine print, it’s not quite accurate. The three degrees of separation are only true within “shared interest networks.” So, for example, among folks who are fans of a certain sport, or jazz aficionados or whatever. Basically, the researchers changed the details of the experiment a great deal, narrowing the overall population for each “connection” — so it should be no surprise that the degrees of separation are a lot smaller.

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Microsoft might want the world to believe that Vista is a massive improvement over XP but, according to new research in the US, the public strongly disagree. In fact, some startling figures indicate that 1-in-3 are downgrading their Vista PC or laptop to good old XP.

Devil Mountain Software said nearly 35% of the 3,000-plus PCs it examined had been downgraded from Vista to XP. Microsoft has already had to extend the life of XP due to furious customer demand.

Craig Barth, the chief technology officer of Devil Mountain, explained:

It would appear that Google is discovering some of the differences in the legal system in India as compared to the US. Just after we wrote about how Google (along with Microsoft and Yahoo) were sued over ads, there are some stories coming out about how an Indian court has ordered Google to hand over the identity of an anonymous blogger who was criticizing an Indian company, Gremach Infrastructure Equipments & Projects Ltd. While anonymous speech is somewhat protected (within certain limits) in the US, that’s not the case in many other countries. As the link above notes, this may force Google to change the way it does business in India.

In some ways, this is just another example of a problem that many folks have been asking about for years. On a borderless web, how do you know whose jurisdiction covers what? If the blogging all occurred on US servers hosted by a US company, should they be covered by US laws… or Indian laws? Or, even, some other country entirely? If you agree that once it’s on the internet, it can be covered by laws in other countries, you end up with a bad result: the worst, strictest laws suddenly become the laws everywhere. That’s a ridiculous outcome, but it’s exactly where things go when you start suing an American company concerning content hosted in America under laws from another country.

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India unfortunately doesn’t have the equivalent of section 230 of the CDA, which prevents service providers from being sued for the actions of their users. That’s why Google, Microsoft and Yahoo are all facing a lawsuit over certain types of ads in India. Apparently it’s illegal in India to advertise any technique or product designed to influence the sex of a child. However, such ads have been appearing on all three sites. The problem, though, is that the liability should be on those who are actually buying the advertising. They’re the parties who are really breaking the law. Yet, because Google, Microsoft and Yahoo are easier targets (and have a lot more money), that’s who gets targeted.

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CNN Alerts

How do I stop them?
John Kirkham

JS: You can’t, but they should be sorted into your spam folder. If not, create a rule to do this. These emails are not really from CNN, though they are a good imitation. Click a link in the latest version, My Custom Alert, and it takes you to a Russian website, where you are asked to download a malware version of Adobe’s Flash player (adobe_flash.exe). This installs a Trojan downloader which runs a service called CbEvtSvc and connects to a remote host. Your anti-malware software should remove this. If not, try running SuperAntiSpyware.

Photos to share

I have used Nikon Fotoshare to send photos by email. It was very quick and easy. Nikon is now offering My Picturetown. This is very slow to upload, and I cannot find out how to email the photos.
Robin Hood

JS: Fotoshare is an online photo album. Nikon plans to close it on September 10 and will then delete all the photos people have uploaded. MyPictureTown.com is similar but has drag-and-drop uploading and is claimed to be easier to use. There are a great many alternatives, including Photobucket (owned by MySpace), WebShots (American Greetings), Flickr (Yahoo), Picasa (Google) and Windows Live Photo Gallery (Microsoft). SmugMug is good but not free.

They all have their fans, many of whom use more than one, so now there is framechannel.com to manage multiple services. There are even more sites that cater for people who want to upload one or two images, such as Imagevenue.com. You can use them without opening an account or signing in. When you upload a photo, these sites usually provide several links to cater for web pages and different types of message board.

Unfortunately, many of these sites make their money by displaying popup adverts, and some may even try to install malware. The best rule is to copy the “direct link” and email that instead of the photo. Avoid any links that contain the letters php.

What’s Kontiki?

I have installed the BBC iPlayer, but every time I activate it, a program called Kontiki pops up.
Denis

JS: When you download TV programmes using iPlayer - as distinct from watching streamed versions online - they are downloaded using Kontiki. This is a peer-to-peer file sharing program, which is also used by similar services such as Sky by Broadband and Channel 4’s 4oD. Kontiki seems to load and use your bandwidth, even if you are not using iPlayer: use the Windows Task Manager to see if Kservice is running.

The BBC has a page that explains how to stop it running on startup and when you are not using iPlayer. You can remove it altogether using the kclean.exe program. However, if you do, any Kontiki-based programs such as iPlayer will stop working.

Printer disposal

I have a not-that-old HP OfficeJet 6110 all-in-one printer/scanner/copier which I’ve recently replaced. It works, but is a little streaky on some printing. I’ve been trying to get rid of it in an ecologically sound way, but to no avail.
Chris Rowbury

JS: You could offer it on eBay, noting the fault and offering it as for “spares or repair” and probably “collect only”. Otherwise, try Freecycle.

Backchat

· Paul Niemiec wanted a cheap way to digitise cassette tapes, and I suggested using the open-source Audacity software. John Blackburn suggests the shareware CD Wave instead: “This software is simpler than Audacity and has the very useful (and, indeed, important) feature of being able to split the music into tracks, either automatically or with manual assistance. CD Wave will save the resulting tracks as WAV, MP3, OGG or FLAC files. WAV is for making audio CDs and MP3 is for the car. FLAC files are lossless, as you say, and are about half the size of WAV files.”