The ExtremeTech website is updating its top tips of 2003, expanding it to 60 and giving some very useful advice down the way (not unlike the advice you’ll find here, I might add). Check it out.
News: Buy Some Razor Blades And Get Your Photo Taken!
Yes, it’s true! All you need to do is pick up a packet of Gillette Mach3 razor blades at Tesco’s in Cambridge, England, and you’ll trigger a CCTV camera. A second camera takes a picture at the checkout and security staff then compare the two images. Apparently the aim of the trial, The Guardian reports, is to provide stock information, but the manager of the store has already described how he presented photos of a thief to police.
Retailers have hailed the technology as the “holy grail” of supply chain management but civil liberties groups argue that the so-called “spy chips” are an invasion of consumers’ privacy and could be used as a covert surveillance device.
News: Phew. Search Engines Are Safe, For Now
From the I Didn’t Know I Was Breaking The Law Dept, you’ll be relieved to know that deep linking is now legal, at least in Germany. Thank God for that. Er, what is deep linking?Basically a deep link takes you from one webpage to another page that isn’t the homepage on another website. Nothing wrong with that, I hear you say. But what if the link takes you to an article in a pay-as-you-surf database?
The excellent TechDirt website alerts us to a report that says the German Federal Court of Justice last week issued a verdict “holding that an online service which offers links to articles in a protected database is not in violation of copyright and competition law”, rejecting arguments that deep links deprive folk of revenue because they take users directly to news articles, bypassing introductory pages and advertising.
As the article says, a decision the other way may have eventually put an end to search engines, which are nothing more than a list of deep links. “Try to imagine the Internet without search engines!” the article concludes.
Update: Would You Fork Out $700 For It?
Wired says Sony’s new handheld, the PEG-UX50 Clié due out in September, is a neat, neat thing. But are people going to shell out $700 for it?
it has built-in Wi-Fi connectivity for wireless Internet access and Bluetooth, which allows users to sync wirelessly with other Bluetooth-enabled devices. Sony has even developed its own Handheld Engine to ensure that the device does it all without taxing the battery life.
It comes with a host of Palm applications. It has an MP3 player and supports all of the Microsoft Office applications. A Memory Stick media expansion slot lets users play up to five hours of continuous video or 16 hours of continuous audio. The UX50 contains a 310,000-pixel camera, a lower resolution camera than its previous product, the NZ90, which comes with a 2-megapixel version. But will people splash out?
Mail: PaperMaster Pro Is A Big Disappointment
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An email from reader Fred Bennett sounds ominous. He’s tried Papermaster Pro — which I mentioned a few weeks back — for two days and says he is not impressed. He says the look and feel is worse than the old model, important features won’t work, and has seen files simply disappear when he’s tried to email them. The licensing method, too, is “scary and troublesome” and may mean that should the company go out of business and your computer crashes, there’s no way to reinstall the program. “Papermaster 98 is such a great program,” he concludes. “The new release is very disappointing.”
I’ll pass the comments onto J2, the company that now make the product, and try to get a response. I have yet to test the program simply because I couldn’t get it installed, but I shall now give it another shot. For those users in a similar predicament, I had a couple of suggestions in my earlier post. <