Newspaper advertisements congratulating Australian Idol winner Casey Donovan have mistakenly directed fans to a gay porn web site. Telstra indulged in an overenthusiastic display of censorship by redirecting all Bigpond subscribers through to the Australian address
Primus Telecom has launched a new DSL broadband Internet service claimed to deliver high speed services at up to 6Mbps. The new high-speed Internet service is available to Primus customers in major cities around Australia who are in access range of upgraded facilities installed by Primus Telecom
There’s a chainsaw-shaped controller for the Nintendo GameCube, intended for use with the new Resident Evil game. It’s spattered with fake blood and emits chainsaw noises, but it also has all the buttons it needs to sub in for your regular GameCube controller — via boingboing
Microsoft has been accused of developing policies stressing the systematic destruction of internal e-mail and other documents crucial to lawsuits it has faced in recent years
The UK’s Office of Communications is publicly toying with the idea of funding a public service publisher (PSP) to complement the BBC’s role as a public service broadcaster. The idea of a PSP is to publicly fund an entity that publishes books, games, interactive material and other published
items that are commissioned from British creators and that reflect and deliver British values. It’s a brilliant idea, and one that’s ripe for Creative Commons licences — the specs say that Content distributed by the PSP must be widely available throughout the UK, with at least near-universal availability
Despite media reports and industry pundits over the years relegating Netscape to Internet history books, AOL has restarted the browser’s development. The company plans to bring back a refreshed Netscape browser based on Firefox
California’s budget problem has led the state to consider desperate measures: taxing you based on how much you drive. The only problem is the way they propose to do it. California is now proposing to put GPS devices on all new cars to track how far people drive and tax them accordingly
Not content with simply outsourcing their call centre, Optus plans to offshore it to India, claiming the move will supplement
its domestic call centre operations. Considering how poor Optus customer service is at the moment, I doubt this move could make it any worse, but it’s still a bad PR exercise from Optus
First Samsung and now LG.Philips have worked out a way to create thin CRT displays. Thin CRTs offer the best of both worlds — superior picture quality with a slim size. Thin CRTs are expected to be more expensive than current CRTs, however they are also expected to drop in price rapidly. Both companies plan on releasing Thin CRTs in late 2005
Speaking to an audience of technology entrepreneurs in Sydney last week, Hotmail co-founder Sabeer Bhatia revealed he will shortly unleash a new product to liberate in-boxes of unsolicited offers of sex, drugs, and scams
RCA has released its Astro TV, which is styled to look like a classic 1950s set, save that it is built around a modern CRT.
Nothing like having a telly kitted out in bakelite and chrome
Microsoft alum Nathan Myhrvold so strongly believes intellectual property is the next software that he’s studying for the patent bar exam. His company, Intellectual Ventures, doesn’t actually make anything — only patent attorneys roam the hallways. Myhrvold isn’t the only true believer. Microsoft, Intel, Sony, Nokia, Apple, Google, and eBay have contributed to a $350M bankroll which the firm is using to buy up existing patents that can be rented to companies who want to produce real products — via Slashdot
Bendable, foldable speakers from Mikasa Shoji of Japan are made from cloth woven with copper wire, polyester fibre and magnets. When the cloth vibrates, sound is produced.
Philips Electronics invented cloth speakers 14 years ago — but these sure look impressive. As if you could wear them around your neck, like a sonic choker — via boingboing
According to Security firm Finjan, the flaws mean that attackers can silently and remotely take over an SP2 machine when the user simply browses a web page
, Microsoft has rubbished the claims
I have a friend who is a hairdresser, and a very good hairdresser indeed. In fact, out of all the people who have taken scissors to my head, she is the only one who can produce a result that makes me happy (a caesar cut in the Derek Jacobi / Paul Darrow vein). Earlier this year I found myself overdue for such a haircut, so we arranged a barter: she would trim my locks for free if I could get her sluggish computer back to a decent speed.
After the choppage was done, I fired up her ancient no-brand WinMe box and took a look around. The desktop was cluttered with various novelty .exe files (xmas lights and such), and windows explorer had mysteriously grown a few extra toolbars that scrolled weather info and provided input boxes for various dodgy search engines. Clearly the box was drowning in a cesspool of spyware and viruses.
An infestation of this sort was pretty much what I had expected when she offered the barter, so before I came over I had burnt a CD of free virus / spyware killing software, as well as the latest Firefox (at the time, 0.8). I sat my hairdressing friend down next to me and ran AdAware. After fifiteen minutes of disk grinding it reported six hundred pieces of spyware. A few more clicks and it had removed them all bar one solitary beastie. The remaining bit of spyware refused to budge, but offered an ‘uninstaller’ as it was masquerading as something semi-useful. It wasn’t my box, and I was curious as to what it would do, so I gave it a stab. Good to its word, the spyware uninstalled itself! This was a bit too easy for my liking, so I ran AdAware again and found that the departing spware had installed three new bits of evil on the way out. Happily AdAware knew how to squash these and we were soon spyware-free.
I told my friend about IE, and email attachments, and the easy things you could do to avoid spyware. She said that novelty .exes and toolbars were the best thing about her computer.
Next up I scanned for viruses. Again, all were removed but one, but this time, the remaining nasty could not be dislodged by hook or by crook. I googled it and it seemed relatively harmless, so I left it in place and sandboxed the file it was lurking in. After that I installed Firefox, removed the visible links to IE, uninstalled all the OEM printer wizards and other unwanted apps, defragged it, gave it a final scan for spyware, and rebooted it. Now that six hundred processes weren’t phoning home simultaneously, it went nice and fast. I showed my hairdressing pal how to use Firefox and set her wallpaper, then strolled home, satisfied with a job well done.
That was in June. I visited her for dinner a few days ago.
Her boyfriend took me into the study to show me a CD-ROM of novelty Flash games he’d been given. Alarm bells began ringing in my head. They were still using Firefox (tabs and all), which was great, but the spyware toolbars had returned and the computer was once again plodding along at a snail’s pace.
And that, my friends, is why you shouldn’t ever bother.
Pikmin 2 was released here on Friday, and being an enormous fan of anything vaguely resembling Lemmings, I bought a copy. Actually, the word ‘bought’ oversimplifies the transaction somewhat… it went more like this:
SPOTTY TEENAGE SALES ASSISTANT1: “Would you like to buy that? It’s $100.”
(STSA1 takes the video game, and swipes it to disarm the security tag thingy.)
ME: (offering STSA1 a pair of fifties) “Here you go.”
STSA1: “Oh, I can’t serve you right now… the register is occupied.”
(At this juncture I wait half an hour while a second teenager — STSA2 — tries to stuff a giant Warcraft Battle Chest into a teeny bag clearly intended for PSX games. Eventually he goes for a larger bag and all is well.)
STSA2: “Can I help you?”
ME: (offering STSA2 the pair of fifties) “I’d like to buy Pikmin 2. The other guy has already swiped it. Here’s money.”
STSA2: “You’re a gold club member, right?”
ME: “Nope.”
STSA2: “Let me tell you about our great gold club!”
ME: “No thanks. I just want to buy the game.”
STSA2: “Okay, sure. What’s your name and phone number?”
ME: “I AM WILLING TO PAY YOU ONE HUNDRED DOLLARS FOR A 3 INCH PLASTIC DISC WITH A GAME ABOUT CARROTS ON IT! TAKE THE FUCKING MONEY!”
Anyway, I eventually got the game home and took a look at it. The manual is comphrensive (as one would expect from a first party Nintendo game), and the artwork is all photographs of modelling clay scenes (including one of the various pikmin walking across a rusty piece of barbed wire, and a great one of a wonky clay controller on the which-button-does-what page).
When you first fire up the game, you’re greeted by a little prompt that asks you whether your TV can can handle 60Hz or whether you’d like to use the default 50Hz (oddly, the game doesn’t remember your choice, and asks you every time at startup). After that, you’re through to the main menu, where you can play through the story mode, the challenge mode (when unlocked), or the 2P split screen ‘capture the marble‘ mode. There’s also an options screen where, in addition to the usual guff, you can choose between sharp high-contrast graphics or washed-out Ico style graphics (which look very cool indeed).
The main game plays as per the original Pikmin, i.e. like the three-dimensional bastard child of Lemmings and Command & Conquer. There are a few notable differences, however, and these are chiefly to do with the game’s multitasking aspect. Firstly, you are given a extra little guy to control (name of Louie, perhaps in a nod to Luigi), and secondly, the 30-day time limit has been eliminated from the game. While these seem like good things initially, I am concerned that, taken together, they unbalance the game. In the original Pikmin, the time limit encouraged multitasking; if you didn’t collect multiple pieces in a single day, you had no hope of getting all the pieces before your time ran out. This meant that it wasn’t enough to merely complete a level — you had to complete the level using an optimal solution. Anyway, I haven’t played a huge amount of Pikmin 2 yet, so I’m hopeful that later levels will use the daylight timer to encourage more frantic multitasking.
Other new additions include a hand-holding tutorial (annoying, but exhaustive), and lots of nifty underground cave levels. The cave levels (thus far) are quite unlike the spacious watery caves of the original, and are cramped multi-level dungeons evocative of Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance as much as anything. The cool thing about the caves is that they contain lots of weird new species of flora and fauna. Purple and white pikmin can be obtained via colour-changing candypop flowers (which now wilt after you’ve changed five pikmin), berries can be harvested to make the pikmin equivalents of cocaine and tear gas, and exciting new monsters can beat the tar out of you. It’s all good downstairs, except that the time pressure is slackened ever further by the daylight timer pausing while you go spelunking.
So, first impressions versus the orginal: there’s more of it, it looks better, and it’s not as hard. If you’re a westerner with a Game Cube it’s not like you have a huge variety of games to choose from anyway, so purchasing Pikmin 2 is pretty much mandatory. While doing so, you may wish to join our great gold club.
A Boeing-led team has successfully fired for the first time a powerful laser meant to fly aboard a modified 747 as part of a US ballistic missile defence shield. The test called First Light
has a budget of $474.3 million in the fiscal year 2005 and is part of a larger $10 billion dollar missile defence system
Jason Dowdell over at WebProNews has written a piece questioning a tactic Microsoft might be using to beef up its new search engine. He thinks they might be dipping into Google’s results to supplement its own. Dowdell likens it to leaving your garbage on the curb — anyone could conceivably go through it and take whatever is there for their own
At a security roundtable discussion in Sydney on Thursday, Ben English, Microsoft’s security and management product manager, told attendees that IE undergoes rigorous code reviews
and is no less secure than any other browser. Because IE is ubiquitous, you hear a lot more about it, but I don’t think that Internet Explorer is any less secure than any other browser out there,
English said. Steve Vamos, Microsoft Australia’s managing director, agreed, saying he does not believe IE’s market share is under attack following the recent high-profile debut of the Mozilla Foundation’s Firefox browser — via Darren Barefoot
Pioneer is developing an ultraviolet laser for data storage. Since the wavelength of ultraviolet lasers is shorter than the wavelength of blue lasers, the beams are finer and they can pack more data into per square inch. This gives a data rate 20 times more than the blue laser Blue-ray disk
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