How to Use Windows

Are you worried Fermi is going to make your GeForce 8800 look a bit long in the tooth? Well just be glad you’re not stuck trying to run Crysis on the Secret Service’s mainframe featuring state of the art technology from the 1980’s.   A classified review of the aging computer system has revealed that the system is now only operational about 60 percent of the time, and frequently prevents them from accessing the master database of mission critical information and apps.  ”We have here a premiere law enforcement organization in our country which is responsible for the security of the president and the vice president and other officials of our government, and they have to have better IT than they have,” said Lieberman, who is chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee. Currently the NSA runs 42 mission-oriented applications on a 1980s IBM mainframe, and are hideously underpowered based on the agencies current requirements

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  Back in November we found ourselves sympathizing with a UK bar owner who was facing a $13,000 fine for copyright infringement as a result of operating an open hotspot, but little did we know this was only the tip of the iceberg. It was a clear cut case of misplaced accountability , but it looks like the UK government is planning to go one step further to keep this from happening in the future. A new ” Digital Economy Bill “, if passed, would ban the use of open Wi-Fi hotspots outright anywhere in the UK.

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Ex-DICE boss and hardcore game designer Fredrik Liliegrin has labelled the Nintendo Wii a “virus” and says that it is “not a video games machine”. Liliegrin is CEO of Antic Entertainmen t, a developer that claims to produce ‘casual games for the hardcore’. The ex-DICE boss told GamingUnion: “Wii, to me, I would describe it as a virus, that doesn’t stick. Everyone comes home, it’s a toy, people have got to realise the Wii is a toy, not an entertainment-focused product.

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Microsoft has been demonstrating the first official hardware prototype of an LG-manufactured Windows Phone 7 Series handset which is due for commercial release later in 2010. Windows Phone 7 Series was the big news to come out of Mobile World Congress in Barcelona earlier this month, and a Microsoft rep pulled out this first concept handset when filming the Engadget podcast in New York this week. Keyboard and touch As you can see from the above picture, courtesy of Engadget, Microsoft’s new mobile handset will feature a slide-out QWERTY keyboard and a touchscreen. Engadget mention that the new Windows phone is slightly thicker than an Apple iPhone, which one would expect from a handset featuring a slide-out keyboard. The phone also features a 5 megapixel handset.

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Sir Clive Sinclair released the ZX80 thirty years ago this week. A small plastic home computer that cost a mere £79.95 in kit form (and £99.95 assembled) that was to fundamentally change the ways in which we interacted with our TVs for ever. In a recent interview to celebrate the thirty year anniversary, Sir Clive made the remarkable admission that he doesn’t use a computer these days and that he despises the distractions of email. ZX profits and email nightmares Sir Clive also recalls how the ZX80 and its successor the slim black ZX81 made Sinclair and amazing £14m profit in a year, which he admits would still “be a lot today.” “The sad thing is that today’s computers totally abuse their memory – totally wasteful, you have to wait for the damn things to boot up, just appalling designs,” Sir Clive told The Guardian. “Absolute mess! So dreadful it’s heartbreaking.” Rather shockingly, Sir Clive adds that he doesn’t use a computer or email at all, but that “the company does.” He continues: “Well I find them annoying

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Fans of distraction-free writing are well catered for on the Mac. Full-screen editor WriteRoom is excellent, and the superb Scrivener offers a similar mode, as does Pages and the idiosyncratic ‘writing environment’ OmmWriter. myTexts snow is another option in this field, although one perhaps even more unconventional than OmmWriter. In a way, myTexts snow feels more like an iPhone app than a desktop one – it abstracts file management, aiming to be an all-inclusive environment

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The Digital Economy Bill in the UK could well wipe out free public Wi-Fi access in universities, libraries and independent cafes across Britain, if new reports are to be believed. Some British legal experts think that the penalties associated with failure to comply with the new requirements of the Bill might well mean that independent caffs, universities and local libraries may face huge liabilities – and thus that it would be safer for them to simply switch off un-password protected free Wi-Fi access for their students, visitors and customers instead. Outlaws open Wi-Fi Lilian Edwards, professor of internet law at Sheffield University, told ZDNet that the Bill will effectively “outlaw open Wi-Fi for small businesses.” She continued: “This is going to be a very unfortunate measure for small businesses, particularly in a recession, many of whom are using open free Wi-Fi very effectively as a way to get the punters in. “Even if they password protect, they then have two options — to pay someone like The Cloud to manage it for them, or take responsibility themselves for becoming an ISP effectively, and keep records for everyone they assign connections to, which is an impossible burden for a small café.” You can see more on the scenario described by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) in this explanatory document

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When it comes to Mac security, Intego is a veteran, publishing blogs and bulletins as well as producing software. It even has the dubious honour of being taunted by a line of malware code; high praise indeed. They have now combined VirusBarrier and NetBarrier (a personal firewall) under one banner. Enter VirusBarrier X6

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Stop, relax and take deep breaths. If shutting down your PC, and bringing a halt to its grinding whirrs, hisses and juddering clicks, ever gives you the same sense of relief as finishing a gym session, then it’s time to drag your PC to the sound doctor. As with fast cars, there’s a conventional expectation that powerful computers have to sound like they’re trying to break the land-speed record, but with a bit of understanding about airflow theory, and a few bits of specialist kit, you can transform any PC from a furious elephant into a sleeping kitten. Whether you’re attempting to quash the intrusive drone of a top-end gaming PC, or stop your media centre PC from distracting you during intense, quiet moments in movies, there are loads of ways in which you can calm the noise from your PC’s mechanical guts

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As your hard drives fill with photos, music files, images, documents, movies and apps, you could waste substantial storage space by holding duplicate copies of the same file. Tidy Up! 2 is here to seek them out. There’s a comprehensive range of search modifiers on offer, and you can set specific exclusions, which is especially useful if you use Time Machine. On completing a search, you can manage or delete duplicates, with options to burn them to disc, archive in another location or label them in Finder for later identification, among other things. You can replace deleted files with aliases or symbolic links, which is excellent if you want to dump the duplicates but retain the overall organisation

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