Once again, I was reading some user questions on CNET  and found one asking why Apple doesn’t patent their innovations so they don’t get copied so much. Original reply here.

Apple has a lot of patents but even they are working off the efforts of many others that have come before them. One example of innovation attributed to Apple was touch gestures used in the iphone. That was pioneered by another company but was copied by Apple. As great marketers, Apple has copied as much as any other company has copied from Apple and from each other, but have not suffered for being branded a copy-cat. One reason I think this is so is because they copy early enough and add their own flair and improvements that they gain the mindshare of the public.

You may have heard of the ‘Innovator’s Dilemma’, where the first to innovate are often worse off than those that copy them later. Patents are supposed to make this better for the innovator, however, at least in software, what gets to be patentable is too broad that it is stifling innovation instead. There is a case where one company (EOLAS) is suing other companies (including Apple) for the use of plugins in a web browser. Embedding has been a part of web standards and this is akin to patenting the use of paragraphs in a document (as mentioned by Gina Trapani in a recent episode of TWiT).

So be careful what you wish for. If you can’t use a gesture of flicking a page on your next touchscreen device because some company patented it, you may regret that wish.

I’m quite sick of Windows ‘gurus’ bagging vista/win7 because it did something differently to XP. All that’s saying to me is that they are set in their ways. They always complain about having less ‘control’ than they had with XP, when in fact, if they bothered to educate themselves about Vista/Win7 as much as they know XP, they could get as much control as they used to have. If it took them so many months/years to become the XP guru that they have become, how much personal experience time are they allowing Vista/Win7 before they cast their judgements on how less useful the newer Windows OSes are?
Sure, criticize the newer OSes for doing something unintuitive or having a crappy implementation, but if the main excuse is that they don’t know how to do things the Vista/Win7 way as opposed to the XP way, I have no sympathy for them.

Disclaimer: I’m an early adopter of Vista and Win7 but have been working with computers since DOS 4.

PS, I also posted this here.

I have the Acer Aspire One A150. Last time I used it, I just installed the Windows 7 Release Candidate. The next time I tried to run it, it won’t boot at all. All I get is a black screen. Even attaching an external monitor and pressing the Fn+F5 key to switch the screen output was not making a difference. So Google comes to the rescue and I found these two pages that pretty much say the same thing on how to fix this issue: Link1, Link2. Thankfully, I won’t have to worry about sending it back to Acer.

As the solution requires a bootable USB flash drive, I believe the following is a way that will let you convert any ordinary USB flash drive to a bootable one. This technique works with Windows 7 Beta and RC. I’m not sure about XP or Vista, though. I got it from a blog that shows how to put Windows 7 on a netbook. You can find it here.

I once was in a discussion with my work colleagues about whether to leave our computers on or off when we go home at the end of the day. Being a bit of an environmentalist, I was of the opinion that the computers should be turned off. My colleagues, however, were quite adamant that on power up, the computer consumes so much power that any savings I would have gotten from turning them off overnight would be wasted. I have no idea where they got that idea but I was not able to convince them. These are quite techy IT people but I guess electronics was not their strong suit, but that applies to me too.

I looked for websites to back up my opinion and found this: Here, “Mr. Electricity” shows the typical energy consumption of some common computer models. He also has a question and answer page here where he recommends using a kilo-watt hour meter to see for yourself that no, “it doesn’t take extra energy to start up a computer”. I think the kilo-watt hour meter is not fine-grained enough to show it but other sites have shown that starting up a computer does require slightly more electricity i.e. up to about 70 more watts than their idle load, but remember that this only happens for a few seconds while the computer is starting up. A typical computer uses less than 300 watts while idle.

I’m reminded of the Mythbusters episode where the show tried to find out if “the energy to turn on lights exceeds the savings of turning them off”. They found that with a 90 watt incandescent bulb, leaving the light on instead of turning it off would only pay off if you were going to turn it back on within 0.36 seconds! When extrapolated to computers, this figure should be only a few seconds worth, so it is still not worth leaving your computer on.

There is also the argument that the life of the computer will shorten with the higher amount of power cycling. Mr. Electricity says that computers are not that fragile and will easily pass into obsolescence (about 2 years) before it fails from power cycling. I can confirm this as I have been shutting down my computer frequently and they have lasted me for years.

Some argue that Windows start too slowly and they don’t want to wait for the booting to finish so they don’t turn their computers off. With the faster computers these days, Windows usually starts within two minutes, and with the use of hibernation (where the computer saves its state so that the next time you start the computer, it returns to the same state as when you hibernated), you should be able to have Windows ready within 30 seconds, or at worst, within 1 minute.

The thing is, there are so much urban myths and “common knowledge” out there and it takes a bit of analysis to realise that, sometimes, what you thought was true may have no basis in reality.

I really should make a few more posts like this. My colleague was using his phone until it was almost dead because of the “memory effect” in rechargeable batteries. Actually, the memory effect only affected Ni-Cad (Nickel Cadmium) batteries. Most phones these days use Lithium-polymer batteries and somewhat older ones use NiMH (nickle metal hydride), both of which do not suffer from the memory effect.

Take a look at this link. This shows Mark Russinovich, formerly of SysInternals, and now Microsoft, demonstrating how to clean malware off a Windows system. He shows how certain SysInternals tools such as Process Explorer and Autoruns can be used to help identify malware and deactivate them.

I’m an avid listener of podcasts. It lets me consume information while doing something else. And to be even more efficient, I like to listen to podcasts at about 1.5x speed.

For the PC, I use mplayer. There are optimised versions for particular CPUs here and here. You will also need to drop this file in your mplayer folder. Mplayer is a media player that supports Windows, Linux, Mac OSX, etc. There is a GUI version but the one I use is command-line-based. In Windows Vista, I just make a shortcut with the commands I prefer and then drag media files to that shortcut. The command-line options that I use are: -vo gl2 -idx This basically says, use OpenGL to display the movie and generate an index if it is missing to allow jumping backward and forward through the media. I use the OpenGL switch so that Vista does not switch to Aero Basic mode whenever I play a media file. The following are the keystrokes that I use the most:

For my PDA, I use The Core Pocket Media Player (TCPMP). There is a mplayer version for the PocketPC but it doesn’t work on my HP iPaq.

Update: I have “rediscovered” that Windows Media Player has the ability to speed up the playback of media files. Unlike mplayer, the audio retains the original pitch, so voices don’t sound like chipmunks on caffeine. I think this will now be my preferred player for podcasts.

Okay, I’ve heard the phrase “reformat and reinstall Windows” too many times and I really think that whoever says it probably doesn’t know enough about what formatting does and why it’s usually not necessary if all you want to do is reinstall Windows. So this is my rant on the subject.

I’ve been reading at the CNET forums and ended up here. For some unknown reason, I got motivated to actually write up my own answer to the question as comprehensibly as I can: How to Reduce Spam and Virus Email.

Hopefully, I’ll also get around to making up some tips to avoid and combat spyware. I’m quite sure I’ll have lots of gaps in my knowledge on that one as I hardly get infected.

Okay, I’ve switched to a blog (my very first) because I’m fed up with the spyware that cjb.net adds just by forwarding my site. Oh, and because my previous site looks very plain and outdated and I can’t be bothered to design a better one.

Use the navigation links on the right to go to the pages containing links to my programs and some ways to suppress web ads while you browse. I won’t bother adding my other less useful programs here but you can find it from my old site.

The programs that I do have here are the same old ones that I haven’t updated for a while now. I just never get around to doing it. If or when I do, you’ll see it here.