Yes, watch out if you are using naughty Windows to read this, be weary over the next few days over which updates you allow to install. And the reason why is this: a new version of Windows Genuine Advantage is being rolled out to make using an illegitimate copy of Windows less convenient to use.

Last December we covered the changes on Vista’s WGA program, which was being downsized to leave the PC in question still usable but leaving the background of the system blank, but no changes to XP, until now. So as of now, the Windows XP pirates have had it light, all they’ve had is a little bubble pestering them and a small delay to log on. In the new update that will be changing to become more like vista, ie. your wall paper will be coming off.

As ever, something like this will cause a stir, but there are mixed emotions on it. Someone will be winging away elsewhere that is unfair that Microsoft has a monopoly and they’re blackmailing people to pay them by restricting their use of the computer. My opinion is not this, after all, you wouldn’t steal a videotape and complain when the video store want it back. The approach is more than generous, leaving the computer fully functional, for reducing the user experience for pirate users.

With the old WGA, people could easily ignore it, the new one people can’t, it really raises awareness and adds more of a sense of urgency. I can see a number of being being genuinely alarmed by it and encouraged to upgrade. It is likely many people do not realize the seriousness of what they are doing, and furthermore, Windows Vista does not cost much these days anyway. Especially with the Vista Ultimate Retail Upgrade only £50 when you buy a PC at the mo. Naturally, someone will manage to crack it, they always will, but this does encourage the people who don’t participate in such activities to go legit.

PIB

P.S Legal Disclaimer: Cracking software to run without owning the full licence is bad, we really don’t advise you do it, I don’t do it. If you do then Santa Claus won’t come, instead you’ll get a wallpaper that’s coal colored.

Got one of those lovely statistics from Windows today while copying some stuff over to my USB drive. With 29mb remaining, going at a speed of 1.14mb a second thats 9608 days remaining, of course. When does Windows 7 come out?

PIB

P.S Sorry we’ve been gone for a while, busy week…

Yes, as is the procedure for games in the Grand Theft Auto series (and most games actually), Grand Theft Auto IV, will be released for the PC, in November.

So, if your PC can handle it, the game will feature a top level of 2560×1600 resolution graphics and greater draw distances. Also a nice little extra is the replay feature, letting you replay your last 30 seconds of game play.

Multi player has also been given some more attention, there’s rumor of extra player slots to allow more than 16 players to play. It works online using the Games for Windows Live system but there’s not a great deal of info there yet. It also works online with the Rockstar social club so players can be part of the 100% club like all we console owners. It is due on November 21st, but I’m dreading to think what its system requirements are going to be.

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Yes, a new PSP is coming this October. It was announced at the Leipzig Games Convention during Sony’s keynote and has better hardware stuff inside it than the current PSP has. The new model will have a built in microphone and a better LCD which should work better outside, a good idea seen as that’s where I’d of thought one would use the PSP most. Improvements have been made to its ability to output to a TV so it can now also output to non progressive TV’s. It will also have Skype support out of the box to make use of the built in mic.

It will be sold with a number of bundles including a 4gb memory bundle aimed at the heavy downloader and a Ratchet and Clank bundle which is pointed towards family use. (If I may add at this point, not biased at all, that Ratchet and Clank does rule.) The R&C bundle will be supplied with a silver PSP. It is due to hit stores on October 15th (ie. in time for Christmas).

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I liked the old Skype phone, that was widely because of its price not only to run, but to buy as well, and also because it arrived conveniently at time I started the site. It didn’t cease to impress me, until unfortunately it showed signs of wear and tear very quickly and a number of software glitches became apparent. But we’re not going to dwell on that because fingers crossed the S2 will have fixed it.

So, what’s the difference here? Metal keys, steel back, bit more streamlined in its appearance, larger screen, better camera, more memory, and a new, easier to use UI. As with the old Skype phone, you can use it as a modem for Internet access on your PC, using the HSDPA connection you can achieve broadband speeds just the same as using one of those modem dongle things you can get these days. Pricing appears to be the same for the tariffs, but no info yet on the price of the handset itself.

Having owned a Skypephone the first time round (I’m sorry to say but I wont be buying another one), I am in a position to comment on its usefulness, I’ve only benefitted from having the Skype feature a couple of times, once to call a friend who also had a skypephone, which I must say worked well, and the other time was to receive a pre arranged phone call from a friend out in the states, the latter was very satisfying, and impressive, but it didn’t justify it for me, what made me buy it was the price, it is a feature packed low cost phone, which operates generally well, although as I mentoned above, looks now worse for wear.

So my hopes for the next one are, same price range, more hard wearing and more reliable. It arrives with us on the first of September, at which point we will pipe more info your way.

PIB

A few months ago, Toshiba lost the so called format war and the internet became ripe with speculation, what was going to happen with the Xbox 360’s HD-DVD capacity, would Toshiba be offering any compensation schemes to those who bought their players. But the last thing people anticipated was Toshiba coming up with a new system for high definition content.

Yet that is what they did, and that is the new XDE DVD. We covered it a few months back, but it’s here now with some full details. It upscales normal DVD to get it as close to high definition as possible, and has a number of different tweaks.

Sharp mode, does what it says on the tin, and sharpens the image where needed to make the picture seemingly more detailed. Colour mode, improves colours to make it more vivid, emphasizing on natural colours, to make it all more lifelike. And last of all, contrast mode, which improves the picture in darker scenes or foregrounds.

The thing about these features is that it does it intelligently. We had a sharpness dial, and a contrast dial on our old TV, which started life in the 1970’s but it didn’t make it high def, in fact if I remember rightly, playing with those dials made it worse. So this isn’t just a DVD player that fiddles with a few settings.

So it’s good, but it’s not that good. When I say that I mean it still isn’t Blu Ray, and isn’t a Blu ray killer. But with a rrp of $149 (about £80), it’s a nicer idea for people with a sizeable DVD collection. Blu ray will replace DVD, and is currently doing, but the average consumer isn’t ready for it yet, and I envisage this slowing it down. That’s actually quite a good idea, nice one Toshi!

It on Toshiba’s website

Via Trusted Reviews

PIB

When the Elonex One came, people were very impressed, yes sure it wasn’t and isn’t nor will it ever be fast, but for £99 you can’t go wrong. Or can you?

You see the issue with the Elonex One laptop is that as of yet, nobody has actually managed to get hold of one. And the other issue is, it’s no longer the cheapest laptop anymore…

This, which is infact sold as the worlds cheapest laptop, only actually cost’s about £65 (after the exchange rate), the only catch is however that they come in packs of 100. But that isn’t so bad either, when you think it is a laptop intended for school students, and the school can buy the systems in and pass the savings on to the students.

Not only is it better looking than the Elonex One, it’s faster too, with its 400mhz processor.

It does have faults though, it is missing Wifi, which can be added later using a dongle, and I bet that will consume batteries like a sumo wrestler in a cake shop. But as with the One, the same principle applies, (as long as you can get 100 people who want one), its £65, you can’t go wrong.

Here’s some more detailed specifications:

1) 400 MHz MIPS CPU
2) 7" Analog Screen
3) 128 MB SDRAM
4) 1 GB Flash Memory
5) 80 Key English Keyboard & Touch Pad
6) Linux O.S.
7) Connectors: SD Card Slot, VGA Port, USB x 3, Mini USB, Microphone and Earphone Jack
AC Adaptor and Accessories
9) External USB LAN or 802.11g WiFi dongle (optional)
INCLUDED APPLICATIONS:
1) Excel File Viewer and Editor
2) Word File Viewer and Editor
3) Internet Browser
4) Media Player
5) Flash Viewer
6) O-Image Photo Viewer
7) Typing - Word Processor
Drawpad - Paint Application
9) Pointer Application

Currently it is in available in batches of 100 at Alibaba.com, a sort of middle man site that puts you in contact with the Chinese supplier of them. There would though be inevitable taxes if someone were to import it to the UK, but it would still be quite reasonably priced, I think.

By the way, just a thought, does anyone think it looks at all like the Elones One t?

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Ok, you may remember a few months back a guy called Steve from Microsoft wanted to buy Yahoo, Jerry from Yahoo said no so Steve got his mate Carl who was bigger than him (financially anyway) to oust Jerry and all Jerry’s gang. Then Jerry made a deal with Carl so Carl could go in Jerry’s gang and bring some of his friends too.

So last month Jerry’s gang had their AGM, and with Carl Icahn joining the board, as well as Frank Biondi and John Chapple, the latter two recommended by Icahn were chosen by the board.

So what’s the plan? Has Icahn forgotten Microsoft and will now work with the Yahoo board to bring improvement to their business? New faces in the board room should liven things up, or are they going to throw a few spanners in the works, devalue the company and then have Microsoft take over that way?

PIB

As some people will have noticed, I, as a rare exception support Microsoft, I don’t think they’ve done anything particularly bad in the last 20 years. Yeah sure they have a monopoly over computer software with Windows and Office, but I dont think either product is actually over priced, and as an exception, they are good pieces of software.

Writer for the New York times, John Markoff, wrote a piece for his newspaper, to try and convince the world that Microsoft is being anti-competitive by using Silverlight, in conjunction with NBC to bring the Olympic games to everyone, for free.

This is one of the prime things that gets my goat, any slight thing that Microsoft does is anti competitive, unfair, foul play, cheating, exploiting. So having read through this good story in the New York times, I’m going to argue with it.

As far as the internet is concerned, Microsoft couldn’t even dream of having a monopoly. They have live search, I don’t remember the last time I used that. Fair enough, they have messenger, and Silverlight is very very new.

Let me put this to you another way, if NBC has used Adobe’s Flash plugin instead, which is installed on roughly 99% of all computers, and comes pre-installed on nearly every brand new computer purchased, would that be anti competitive? No. Why? Because Flash is Abobe’s product, not Microsoft’s.

Oh sure, the software to produce Silverlight content is currently only available from Microsoft, for Microsoft’s price, but that’s the web designers choice of which platform to use to make the site, it isn’t anti competitive because you have to download a free plugin.

Anyway, enough of me, lets see what the other side has to say:

That perception that the software publisher is still looking for ways to gain proprietary advantage was underscored late last year in a filing by seven states and the District of Columbia that asked a federal court to extend the set of restrictions under which Microsoft has been operating as a result of the antitrust lawsuit.

The lawyers for the states argued that if Microsoft were to favor Silverlight in the next version of its operating system — as it tried to favor its desktop search program in Vista — it would give the company a significant advantage in competing against Adobe.

Open systems like the Linux operating system and standard protocols, like HTTP, which is the basis for the World Wide Web, have become a growing economic force. In some cases, standards complement proprietary systems. In others, they compete with those technologies.

I think this guy has a chip on his shoulder. Of course they’re still looking for ways to gain advantage over their competitors, what sort of rubbish business would they be if they didn’t? What do they mean by favour Silverlight? Bundle it in like they did with internet explorer? And that’ll give Microsoft an unfair advantage over adobe? Because if the manufacturer of your PC didn’t bundle adobe too you’d have to spend a minute downloading it before you could go on Youtube? The thing they did with internet explorer was different, people used IE because it was convenient, because it was there. And it will be convenient that Silverlight is already there too, means they wont have to wait an extra minute for that to download too.

I somehow don’t think that the first site people come to that need’s flash will make them turn around and think ‘Oh sod this, I’ll go on a site that uses Silverlight instead’, now does that sound silly or does that sound silly?

At the end of the day, I don’t care who makes the software I use, as long as it is convenient, and it works. It’s not nice to try to stifle competition, but on the other hand who ever heard of a business who decided to sit back and let others take all the market share?

Read the article that annoyed me here.

PIB

It may be cool, but it is by no means original. It’s a miniature laptop (netbooks they’re calling them now) with an Atom processor.

Not a huge amount of info yet but we do have this picture. It has an 8.9 inch display and will carry the Amilo name; full details will come at the IFA later this month, apparently anyway. As is usual with this things, Fujitsu Siemens deny all such suggestions that this product exists. More details will follow in coming weeks.

PIB