I’ve been slowly saving up for a new PC, and ordering the parts one by one, mostly from bulk sellers on Lowyat forums.

Nowadays the greatest proportion of the money you spend on the computer is ideally the monitor. Prices have been slowly going down, but the average screen size has gone up - 22″ LCD monitors are basically today what 17″ CRTs were 10 years back.

So you can imagine that I’ve been doing a lot of price and product comparison before shelling out my cash.

One of the manufacturers that I’ve been considering is Dell - they make practical, affordable monitors.

What’s confusing though is how they come up with their online discount schemes. It’s worse than the stock market, the way their prices change.

Something is seriously fishy about their new product line though, specifically their new 22″, the SP2208WFP.

I was checking out the site today because I’d heard of their new 24″ model. I noticed that the SP2208WFP was marked as “RM440 off”.

Sounds like an incredible deal for a new model, right?

The thing is that I’ve been visiting Dell’s site regularly, so the prices have stuck in my mind. I distinctly remember that the price when it was first introduced was also RM1,159.

I tried looking to Google Cache for an old copy of the page, but couldn’t find it at first. After much digging however I found a cached copy of the Singapore Dell page.

Firstly, what the SG Dell site looked like then (the cache retrieval date is 1st November ):

This is what it looks like now (advertising “$70 off” on the unit):

Something’s wrong here… I hope they don’t have a dartboard they use to decide the “discount” on their units.

Popularity: 31% [?]

For some reason, whenever Malaysia makes international headlines, it’s hardly for flattering reasons - last I checked, the first post on Google News under “Malaysia” is Beyonce cancelling her concert here because she’s too sexy for us.

In contrast, New Zealand recently turned heads for using wikis to gain feedback on the drafting of their new Police Act.

NZ Police Superintendent Hamish McCardle, the officer in charge of developing the new act, said the initiative had already been described as a “new frontier of democracy”.

“People are calling it ‘extreme democracy’ and perhaps it is,” he said.

“It’s a novel move but when it comes to the principles that go into policing, the person on the street has a good idea … as they are a customer,” he said.

…

“The wonderful thing about a wiki is we can open it up to people all around the world - other academics and constitutional commentators interested in legislation - and make the talent pool much wider,” he said.

This is exactly what a modern democracy should be like. The reference to the people as “customers” is just gold.

How about you? Can you think of any ways you would like to change our laws ? :)

Popularity: 36% [?]

Odex, the main distributor of anime in Singapore, has forced Starhub (a Singapore ISP) to give up names of people involved sharing anime titles which are licensed by them - even a 9-year-old was not exempt (a copy of the letter here). DarkMirage has some solid criticism of the issue.

Even blog posts regarding the issue are being frowned upon.

Someone pointed out on Lowyat though that since Malaysia doesn’t have official anime distributors, we’re unlikely to suffer the same fate - at least for now.

Popularity: 31% [?]

One of my resolutions as a new wage-earner :) is not to buy pirated software, or at least as sparingly as possible.

The foremost reason is to support game companies, especially the small ones which need the money. Felt guilty about the fate of Troika and Interplay especially.

Another reason is that there’s strong reason to believe that all the fake DVDs you buy and install don’t come with unrequested “extras”. It’s like eating food without knowing where it came from. I doubt the syndicates producing the DVDs are using the profits for charity either. I’m not saying that software prices aren’t expensive; they ARE. Imagine the cost of a movie ticket in Malaysia being converted directly - would you pay 3.4 * 8 = RM27 to watch a movie? I don’t think so. So it’s no surprise when people say “no f***ing way!” when they see a game costing RM150-RM200 - but at least if you wanna pirate something, download it; don’t buy it.

Here’s an article from CodingHorror.com listing the stuff GameCopyWorld.com (how many of you have been to this site, hmm?) tries to do to your PC the minute you surf there.

Webroot SpySweeper detected the following spies after allowing the installer to run over night.
Virtumonde
Visfx
ZenoSearchAssistant
PurityScan
Trojan Downloader Matcash
Trojan-Downloader-Zlob
BookedSpace
Trojan-Downloader-WaveRevenue
Trojan.Gen
Trojan-Downloader-Prez
MaxiFiles
TargetSaver
Trojan-Poolsv
Trojan-Dropper-Zomavis
Webhancer
Web Buying
Command
Core Adware (CoreAdware is known to use Rootkits {core.sys} to mask its presence.)

Popularity: 31% [?]

Warning: techie/artsy territory ahead.

I said in my previous post that despite all its shortcomings, Vista does look good (at least compared to XP) and not just because of pretty glass. Microsoft Typography has been busy, and they’ve come up with ten new fonts for Office 2007 and Vista. You can get a look at all of them here, and more importantly you can download them here.

It’s actually been ages since Windows had decent new fonts - the only one I can remember was the introduction of Tahoma in WinXP.

The Sans Serifs

You’ll probably remember Arial - the default Windows san-serif font in older versions (all article examples taken from Wikipedia):

Easy to read, very no-nonsense, but boring to look at after more than a decade.

Tahoma was the default font for Windows XP, specially designed for computer screens. It’s a cousin to Verdana, also specially designed for screens and meant to be legible even at small sizes (I’m showing Verdana at a smaller size).

Now enter the new Office default font, Calibri. Calibri has a slightly rounded, modern feel. Compare its lowercase a with the other fonts’ for example, Calibri’s is more “laid-back”. Its lowercase is also unique for a font that’s officially san-serif; it uses the “double-storey” version. Like Verdana, it was designed for the screen in mind, being highly readable at small sizes, but it also looks good in print. I printed a 50-page report with Calibri as the body font and can already smell an uppercase A :). [Update: Yep, top marks!]

There’s also Segoe UI, the new UI (user interface) font, which means you’ll be seeing it in every MS product. It’s rounded, tall, and widely spaced. Decent enough at small sizes but shines in captions, titles, and the like. I’m not a big fan of the stylized tails though (see the lowercase g, y, j, etc).

Corbel doesn’t look good in large sizes, but IMO it is indisputably one of the best fonts in small sizes (the picture below is in font size 9), retaining legibility and looks cool as well. I like how Corbel plays with the baseline of numbers to make them more prominent. The only quibble is that because of this, the (lowercase) letter o is indistinguishable from the number 0.

The Serifs

Times New Roman (and its variants) is the first font that comes to mind when it comes to the serif class - not only in Windows, but in most print media. For good reasons, actually: it’s the epitome of readability, and has a decent style. There’s such a thing as overexposure though…

There are also old stalwarts like Garamond, which doesn’t look good on screens but lends an elegant, medieval feel to print media (it’s used in hardcover editions of Harry Potter). I’ve also always been a fan of its italic variant.

Georgia, like Verdana, is a font designed specifically for screens, emphasizing contrast. The drawback is that it doesn’t look as good in print as its other serif brethren.

The newcomer to the serif stable is Cambria. It looks like a cross between Times and Georgia: renders well on screens with decent contrast, but not too wide; elegant enough for print.

The Monospacies

The letters in fixed width or monospaced fonts all have the same width, which is important in plaintext emails and coding so that the text can be laid out in tabular form. Courier New has been the de facto standard for ages, with a retro, typewriter feel.

Microsoft’s new alternative, Consolas, is well designed. It’s compact without sacrificing readability at small sizes. Zeroes are prominent; common programming symbols like the semicolon, dollar sign, question mark, etc are easy to pick out.

That’s it

Whew, that took a while. If you missed the link above, you can download most of the new Vista fonts here.

Popularity: 24% [?]

I Got Vista Cheap!

MMU’s IT society pulled off a coup recently by persuading Microsoft to launch Windows Vista in MMU: RM20 for a trial version of Vista Business edition. For students in the IT faculty, you could get a product key as well for an additional RM10 - basically getting a full version of Vista for RM30! Not a bad price at all (considering that it retails for RM1130).

Of course, they were obliged to do quite a bit of marketing for MS: Spot-the-car-sticker contests, booths showing off Vista PCs, Xbox games, quizzes and all that. And they had to produce the DVDs and print the covers themselves. But hey, as long as it works, right?

Vista features

It’s been six years since the release of Windows XP, the most recent edition aimed at home users - notwithstanding the lame “Media Center Editions” MS unveiled in between. It seems to be more secure than previous versions, which is good, as well as nifty new features. The downside is that it has a better interface.

How is that a downside? Well “better interface” for MS doesn’t just mean more accessibility, or easier navigation. It’s also a synonym for stuff that bumps up the system requirements without a corresponding increase in productivity (hm, can’t think why MS would want to make its system requirements higher…)

Let’s go through the list of features in the Aero interface, from Microsoft’s page:

1. Glass:
   Whoopee, windows and borders are transparent. Yes it makes for good eye-candy, when you’re making presentations or showing off your PC. But that’s all it is: a graphical improvement. Serious users care more about how fast the windows appear than what they look like. I also suppressed a laugh at this statement:

   the new “glass” windows convey a sense of lightweight openness that frees you to focus on your content rather than your environment.

   They are referring of course to the blockiness of Luna (the XP interface), which takes up a lot of unnecesary space and why most users (like me) just use the classic look in XP to “focus on our content”. Trumpeting the removal of fat title bars and the like as a feature is like telling us that IE7 is better because it adheres to standards more.
   Transparent windows aren’t a new thing either. There are separate programs that enable it, and it’s a feature in a number of other OSes. The only time this is more useful than having windows render faster is when you need to refer to stuff in another window - something tiling, copy/pasting, and having a bigger monitor will do.

2. Dynamic windows: When minimized, windows animate to their place on the taskbar. Oh come on, this is a very old feature, and is usually turned off anyway.
3. High-resolution support: Only useful for people with high-res monitors, could be useful.
4. Live taskbar thumbnails: Not new, and only useful if you can’t remember the windows you have open.
5. Windows Flip:A more resource-intensive version of Alt-Tab. Ho-hum, also available on XP if you get the Powertoy plugin.
6. Windows Flip 3D: An even more resource-intensive, impractical version of Alt-Tab that rips off Mac OS X.
7. Smoother-performing desktop: No rendering bugs and fewer crashes. MS is getting good at the “fix-it-and-promote-as-feature” thing…

Now I’m not saying that Vista is all bad, just that I’d prefer more focus on actual (new) features. Everyone has to admit that it looks a helluva lot better than XP. There are several “real” features that you have to give it credit for:

1. Support for hybrid hard drives: Hybrid HDDs use a large amount of RAM-like memory as a cache, lessening the need for reading from disks, translating into less time spinning around, which translates into longer disk life and less energy consumption - good for notebook users. But talking about power: be warned, Vista’s Aero interface eats notebook batteries for breakfast.
2. ReadyBoost: Lets you plug in a USB memory stick to effectively give yourself more RAM. Very nifty, especially since USB sticks are so ubiquitous now and cheap to boot.
3. Improved Remote Assistance: I have to admit I haven’t tried this out myself yet, but if RA works better in Vista, it’ll be great. Invaluable for troubleshooting and helping the less-savvy with tasks without getting them to describe everything to you. The security vulnerabilities in XP’s version made it more often a risk than a boon.
4. Internet Explorer 7 is no longer integrated into the OS: Yes, another “fix-and-promote” thing, but notable. OS-browser integration with old IE versions was just asking for security problems, and was irritating as well.

Office 2007

I was at first very unimpressed during the IT Society’s promo of MS Office 2007 (not included in their Vista promo). They were emphasizing features that were either redundant or in the “fix-and-promote” category. The new Ribbon interface for example does a better job at grouping tasks and making them accessible - but that’s more because how convulted the old Office interface was getting, with the gazillion toolbars to wade through. It was highly customizable though. You can in fact build a Ribbon-like interface using the old Office if you have too much time on your hands (click to view the whole thing):

You also have interface improvements like formatting toolbars appearing over text you are editing, and a real-time font-sizing toolbar like the one in Flash. Problem is that these “improvements” are only useful for the users who don’t use computers often. Simply taking the time to memorize keyboard shortcuts works just as well - Ctrl + [ or Ctrl + ] for example does as good a job at resizing your text.

When I dug deeper though, Office 2007 does have features that will be useful for all users. The Autotext and Template selection is vastly improved, and there are global themes you can apply - useful when you want to change the look of a bunch of documents. You can compare between two versions of a document and see the changes that were made. Word also gives you the option of saving into PDF or XML format - very useful!

All Good, But…

The thing is, I can’t actually install my copy of Vista because my computer can’t run it… and no, I can’t sell it to you - we had to sign a very strict agreement.

Tomorrow: Vista fonts!

Popularity: 18% [?]

I read a blog today about Sitemeter installing “extra” stuff on the clients that load pages with the Sitemeter code.

Digging a little on the Net found more information: Apparently Statcounter, a competing website counter provider, was approached by an advertiser and offered $ to install data miners in all member sites. From their original post:

A few months back, StatCounter was approached by an advertiser, offered lots of $$$, and asked to include a spyware cookie on all of our member sites…we refused on the spot.

You install StatCounter to track visitors to your site NOT to open yourself and your visitors up to being spied upon by phantom advertising corporations.

It appears, however, that other players in the world of webstats were happy to take up this offer…

We were shocked to discover just today that another well known stats provider is allowing up to 9 cookies to be installed in the browser of every visitor that hits one of their member websites. This means that the provider is making money by transmitting data on you and your visitors to a third party advertiser. Not only that, but to add insult to injury, the cookies are causing the member websites to load very slowly too.

Although Statcounter didn’t name the “other well known stats provider”, it didn’t take long for people to realize that it was Sitemeter, which led to people migrating away in droves. You can read an explanation from Sitemeter here (in the comments section).

To make things more clear for those who aren’t tech-savvy, most stat counters work by putting a cookie in the browsers of everyone who visits your page. This is so that the stat counters can identify unique users. What Sitemeter does is to place nine additional cookies from advertisers in your visitors’ browsers, not to track their visits to your page, but to track their browsing habits, which is valuable to advertising companies.

Sure, you can opt-out from this data mining (which is ironically done by placing another cookie) if you visit a page that they’re not going to tell you about unless you ask, but the point is that in cyberspace, many people value their privacy. In their eyes, Sitemeter has sold them out.

Popularity: 20% [?]

If you’re a subscriber to DiGi - although this should apply to other lines - you’ve probably been receiving spam daily promotional SMSes from DiGi. I can’t give examples because I immediately delete them. But they’re still highly annoying, especially when you’re expecting an important SMS.

Today it got worse though. When I was walking to class (in the rain, I might add) I actually got a call.

A female voice announced that it was a promotional message from DiGi. I was about to complain when she continued:

“Press 1 for English, tekan 2 untuk Bahasa Melayu…” - damn automated calls. I hung up then but was still pretty pissed.

Pissed enough to go to DiGi’s website for the first time. Fortunately they have an opt-out solution:

If you wish to opt out from DiGi’s SMS and MMS Promotional Messages, please send either one of the keywords OUT or KELUAR to 1994.

Talk about fine print…they should have included this in every unsolicited SMS. I hope this stops the calls.

[Update]

It may not have. I got a missed call while out jogging at 7:30ish pm. 2 calls in 3 hours! Same number as before: 016-0160160. Is anyone else getting these calls from DiGi?

Popularity: 16% [?]

PenangFON is advertising a 2Mbps @ RM 60/month on a dedicated fiber-optic line (cue oo’s and aah’s). If your housing area is in the service area list, go try it and tell your friends what it’s like.

Competition is always good…

Popularity: 17% [?]

What separates humans from animals is our ability to reason. Hence how we reason should be something we all reflect on.

Information is the basis of all our reasoning. Our beliefs, our abilities - they all rely on the input of information, be it from a person, a book, a webpage, a TV show, etc. The information comes in, and is “filtered”, and whatever makes it through this filter we take to be “knowledge”.

What’s interesting is that this metaphysical “filter” is itself built on information. It separates us into those who are gullible and those who are discerning. Or should I say - into those who think they are gullible and those who think they are discerning.

The printing press was the most important invention of the millenium. Scientists could publish their research, writers could pen their books, and churchgoers could read from Bibles. Information became cheaply available and no longer the domain of a select few. Fast forward into the present and we now have the Internet, where anyone can say their piece and anyone can read it. We hear “information age”, “information explosion” — “information overload”.

In 1997 two Ph.D. students registered the domain www.google.com. Their vision: to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”. Today nearly everyone uses Google as their search engine. Search engines are powerful: they are the gateway into the Internet, the librarians that tell you what books to read, what suits your needs.

Google uses a “democratic” model:

Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote… pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages
“important.”

While Google works most of the time, its weaknesses are apparent. Like any democracy, popular opinion is always suspect. That everyone believes “A” is the best option doesn’t make it so. The “right” option can truly be known only if all information pertaining to it is filtered - but again, what happens if someone controls the filter? Google may be objective, it’s mission admirable, but it’s far from infallible. Many website owners routinely try to “bump up” their Google ratings by creating sites linking each other.

Another popular information source is the Wikipedia, “the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit.” Also founded on democratic principles, anyone can edit or start an article on Wikipedia. It relies on two assumptions: that its self-governing community will weed out pranksters and malicious writers, and that as an article is edited by more and more people it will gain objectivity and accuracy. Again a noble intention, but prone to the same fallacies. Robert McHenry, former editor of the Encyclopedia Britannica, was scathingly critical of Wikipedia in an article written November, 2004: “The Faith-Based Encyclopedia”. He asserts that the common user simply lacks the experience and knowledge to provide others with an accurate source of information. He likens it to a public toilet:

…it may seem fairly clean, so that he may be lulled into a false sense of security. What he certainly does not know is who has used the facilities before him.

Another, more vociferous anti-Wikipedia site claims that Wikipedia’s perceived objectivity is a false front. Behind the scenes, it claims, there are cliques of elitist “editors” who hold considerable clout, who have the final say over what edits make it to the final article - in effect, making it no less subjective than any other source. Maybe even less so, as being popular in cyberspace isn’t an indicator of how accurate your writing/editing may be. To its credit, Wikipedia itself has articles documenting the controversy, even linking to sites like Uncyclopedia which parody it.

But still, whenever I find myself wanting to look something up I turn to Wikipedia almost every time. Same thing whenever I need to search for a webpage, I Google it. I suspect there are many others like me. It’s only recently that I have begun to question my sources of information.

Ours is an age where information flows more freely than ever before. On one side it can give us immense knowledge. On the other it can also misle us. It’s up to all of us to be careful in what we allow through our “filter”. Knowledge is power - people who control the flow of knowledge are even more powerful.

Popularity: 14% [?]