Windows Phone 7 is now in the technical preview stage, and that means reviewers are getting their chance to just what it is, and what it’s not. And I must confess I’m more than a little stunned by what Microsoft and the reviewers are saying. Windows Phone 7 is a complete rewrite of the OS that Microsoft developed for the last decade and some as Pocket PC and then Windows Mobile. And in completely rewriting the OS they have left out critical, previously available features such as copy/paste and multitasking and they provide no compatibility with the thousands and thousands of apps developers already produced for their previous mobile OS. They are admitting their previous OS was a complete failure, and they undo the efforts of all those developers who wrote all the great apps that made the iPhone look elegantly stupid for its first three or more years of existence. Microsoft’s mobile platform was seriously flawed, no doubt about it. The paradigm they were using centered around the use of a stylus and this colored every aspect of OS and software design for the platform. There was no elegance in Windows Mobile, it was all the ugliness of PC applications shoved into the discomfort of a small screen; but it was powerful and flexible and unfettered by rules. Perhaps the underpinnings of the OS were so badly written and so inappropriate to a mobile device that they had to be replaced, but even if that’s the case it’s ridiculous to try and out-Apple Apple while simultaneously removing the only good things that Windows Mobile had long represented. With all their billions, surely Microsoft could have at least delivered a technical preview that assured the real thing was going to be at least as good as their old OS while making all the vital finger-focused improvements they desperately needed, and supporting the phenomenal feature-rich apps that developers had already invested all their energies and monies in creating (letting the user make the choice of whether to run these uglier UI apps while the developers have an opportunity to rewrite them). No doubt Microsoft will find success with their copy-catting, I didn’t think the X-Box would stand the test of time when they first decided to get into that game, and they’ve managed it. And while Zune is not succeeding, they’re at least rebranding things to make Zune not about a device but instead about accessing content (on a mobile device, on an X-Box, etc.). Must be nice to have money enough to make people like you.
Wanting the iPad form factor but not wanting the limitations an Apple product represents, I went with the Viliv S10 Blade, a Windows 7, Atom processor-based PC in a 10” screen tablet convertible form factor. It is roughly the same height and width as the iPad, but twice as thick, and 50% heavier. This is no iPad killer, but it’s not meant to be. It is instead a fully capable PC in a pleasingly iPad shape. I’ve been using it for three weeks now and I must say it’s a very good device, and if the right software were to come along to address its software-based shortcomings this could truly become great.
The machine I bought is the 2 GHz model, 60 GB SSD, no WWAN, with Windows 7 Home Premium for $1127 from Dynamism.
Hardware
I must confess my first impression of the computer at the time of unboxing was that the case felt a little cheap. The plastic they used, or perhaps its construction, feels a little unsatisfying. When you pick up the unit the case creaks like a floorboard in my dead grandmother’s house. It even creaks when your palms press against the top as you type. You just don’t expect that in a device which cost as much as this one did. I’ve been able to move past it and not let it get on my nerves, and in fact the longer I’ve had the S10 the better I’ve felt about its aesthetics and construction. It may make unnecessary creaking noises but otherwise feels solid.
Switching to and from tablet mode is a typical convertible tablet affair, and the screen hinge feels solid. Some people had written in reviews that the lack of a latch to secure the screen in place on the screen was a problem, but I’m pleased to say I’ve had no problems with it.
The keyboard is solid. I was struggling with my previous netbook’s keyboard, which had almost no action and routinely failed to register 20% of my keystrokes (the keys would bind if my fingers were a little off center). I can type on the Viliv’s keyboard for hours and hours and be quite happy.
The multi-touch supporting touch padis good, but its buttons are lousy. The rocker design they use for the mouse buttons is unfortunate because it requires quite a lot of force to depress, and the force required depends on how far you are away from the fulcrum. And that wouldn’t be awful if there was some tactile indication that the click had been registered, but instead you just have to press until it seems like the button won’t go any further, which is a problem when the plastic they use is creaky. It’s not a fatal flaw, but you may find yourself using a bluetooth travel mouse more than you would if the buttons were more satisfying.
One of the truly most bizarrely confounding issues is that you can never leave the device in tablet mode between uses! No buttons, not even the power button, are accessible in tablet mode! You therefore need to lift the screen up almost all the way to expose the power switch located at the top of the keyboard just to turn the unit back on. This is a truly unfathomable decision. With this one simple design decision they guaranteed that no one would ever mistakenly compare this device to an iPad.
More important than how fast your computer is — is how fast your computer feels. Responsiveness is critical. You can have the latest and greatest processor but it all amounts to nothing when some background process decides to grab all the cycles it can. Quite a lot of software isn’t written in such a way that it plays as nicely as it should with others; developers often don’t give much thought to how their software might slow you down when you’ve moved on to work on other tasks. This is where Process Lasso comes in! The core functionality of Process Lasso monitors all your computer’s running software and automatically adjusts the priority of any non-critical processes so that they will be less likely to interfere with you. For example, let’s say you are writing a paper in Microsoft Word and you left Firefox in the background with Gmail and Facebook open. You may be typing away in Word only to get irritated as your typing and/or mouse movements momentarily freeze as Firefox executes the JavaScript to update Gmail/Facebook. Process Lasso would detect that that Firefox has begun monopolizing the CPU and would reduce its priority to the operating system. A process with a lower priority still runs as it should, it simply gets less CPU time when other higher priority processes need the CPU. The only difference you’ll notice is that Word will be more responsive. Process Lasso works in the background automatically adjusting priorities to give you the most responsive experience possible. In addition there are all sorts of other bells and whistles included, including the ability to permanently block some apps from running (like that Quick Time process Apple always re-adds to my registry!), the ability to suspend and restore processes, the ability to automatically restart processes which you always want (if they crash/die), and a great performance graph that shows you just what Process Lasso is doing and why.
And best yet, the developers over at Bitsum let home/personal users make the decision about whether they use the free version or upgrade to the slightly more advanced Pro version (you’ll get all the Pro features during a trial period).
Process Lasso isn’t snake oil, it’s not overclocking your CPU or doing technical wizardry, it’s adding a much needed intelligence and configurabilty to the process prioritization mechanisms already built into the Windows operating system; and it’s adding some other useful features along the way.
I’ve been using Process Lasso off and on for about 3 years now and strongly recommend it, particularly if your PC is older and more likely to be momentarily overwhelmed by newer and more resource intensive background tasks.
We don’t recommend software often, and when we do it’s because we truly believe in it and use it ourselves! We do not receive any sort of compensation for these reviews.
Windows 7 Starter is the OS found on most of the low-end PCs you can buy today, and while it includes all the core technical benefits of Windows 7, they have intentionally removed features in the hopes that you’ll pony up the dough for the $80 for an upgrade to Home 7 Premium; new computer buyers can take advantage of a limited time offer of a $50 upgrade.
Some of the Starter limitations can be worked around through free thirdparty software, and we’ll be bringing you a collection of ways to do this. We start with the most surprising limitation of Windows 7 Starter, they won’t let you change your desktop’s background image! Not only do they not give you the option, if you’re technically saavy and change the bmp they’re using yourself, the OS will revert it back to their background!
Fortunately, there is the free Oceanis Background Changer for Starter! Click that link, grab the download, and read the tutorial and within minutes you’ll get your custom background, and can even have your background be a slideshow.
One of my favorite authors ever, in one of my favorite books ever, wrote:
Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you.
- Joseph Heller in Catch-22
And so to the paranoid among you, and those who should be, I present a quick lesson in how truly un-anonymous you are online, and how much more anonymous you can become.
The first thing everyone needs to know, but most people don’t full appreciate, is how your activity online is like your activity in real life, without unusual precautions you’ll leave your virtual DNA everywhere. For most of you a collective “so what” is a reasonable reaction. You’ve got lives to live, and you don’t anticipate anyone would likely be interested in where on the web you go. But anonymity (and the privacy it brings) can be important in many reasonable situations. And for some there is a general principle involved: the principle that we have a fundamental right to privacy, that should not be abridged (just because it is so easy to do and provides a thin veneer of national or regional security).
On that note! Let me share show you how, how much, and where you shed your virtual DNA…
Let’s examine the simplest thing you’re likely to do on the web. You just watched a Discovery channel show about pandas and find yourself curious about how pandas procreate. What happens when you do a quick Google search on “panda bear sex” and click the first result? Here’s what happens:
Your Action or its Result
Who Sees Your Data?
What Data do They See?
Why do they want it?
How long do they hold it?
You type your keywords “panda bear sex” in your browser’s search box and hit “enter”.
Browser (it’s search form history)
search phrase
computer username
Your browser’s search form remembers this search phrase to make your life easier.
Indefinite. Usually until you have so many phrases that it prunes the list. Even after that the data is still on your hard drive, recoverable until over-written.
Your browser plugins (also known as browser helper objects and add-ons) act on the URL, if applicable.
Anti-virus / Browser Plugins
url
date/time
IP
city/state/country (from IP)
anything else they want
Most software firewall/anti-virus suites include a browser plugin that can check every site you want to visit against a list of potentially harmful sites. This can mean (depending on implementation) that they are passing information to their backend about every single browser request you make. It’s like you are cc:ing them on every URL you want. Plugins make the experience of the web much richer, but each one has access to the URLs you visit, the content of those URLs, and anything else it wants on your hard drive (files, data, webcam, microphone, gps, etc.).
Indefinite. Could be anything.
Your web browser contacts Google search via your internet service provider (ISP) to get the Google search results.
Your ISP (the government, etc.)
url
search terms
IP
date/time
city/state/country (from IP)
name
address
phone number
social security number
credit card number
and more…
Your ISP is the only one knows exactly what IP corresponds with exactly what household. And for that household they have a name, phone number, address, perhaps credit card and social secrity number, etc. In no way am I suggesting you should be afraid of your ISP, per se. They will not divulge your identity behind your IP to just anyone, but in this new age of loosely targetted government warrantless wiretaps, RIAA anti-piracy monitoring and lawsuits, etc. ISPs are giving up your identity with and without legal necessity. And ISPs have installed government packet sniffing NarusInsight nodes at their facilities which can analyze all network traffic passing by, looking for activity they deem “suspicious”. And suspicious likely includes the use of keywords, phrases, website urls, etc. that may have worrying or innocent uses.Also note, other ISPs are involved as your internet traffic travels crosses various networks. The ISPs in between can record the traffic they see.
ISPs are legally required to retain information about you for 6 months to 2 years, specifically to help law enforcement. What they retain is left somewhat open-ended, but is at least the information about who had what IP when. ISPs have also in the past generated revenue by selling traffic information to thirdparty companies, helping search engines and advertisers know what web sites are popular; they would not directly include your IP, but poorly written sites can leak some data through URLs.
Google receives and responds to the request, via the ISP.
Google
url
IP
search terms
date/time
city/state/country (from IP)
identity (possibly)
They record the URLs you visit to improve their search results, and also to provide you with features. If you have a gmail account, a Google account, a YouTube account, etc. and you have cookies enabled, Google knows specifically who you are with every search you do and can do things like show you (optionally) your search history.
They say they keep data at least 9 months. (Presumably they keep the data indefinitely if they have your permission as part of a feature of theirs, or if they dis-associate it from your IP.)
Your browser receives the results from Google, but won’t show it to you quite yet. First your browser stores the file it received on the hard drive, adding it to your browser’s cache of the web page.
Browser Cache
url
contents of web page
date / time
computer user name
What you see when you view a web page is a combination of many text, style, video, and audio assets all combined into one rendered document. Each asset is fetched seperately, and stored separately in the cache. Many of these assets are re-used between different pages on a site (for example the images in the header and footer of a page). It would be wasteful for the browser to request these re-used assets every time you visit another page on the same site. The cache saves the remote server work, saves your local browser work, and lets you click from one page to another more quickly (since it already has most of the assets you need).
Indefinite. Lifetime of the cache, then as long as it takes for the info on the disk to be over-written.
Your browser history records the url of your search results in your browser history. It still won’t show you the page yet, still a few steps away!
Browser History
url
date/time
computer username
Your browser’s history can be your good friend or your worst enemy. Useful when you want to revisit a site whose name you can’t remember, but it can be an awful snitch if you plan to cheat on your wife or husband via an online dating site.
Indefinite. You can modify the retention time in your browser settings, but keep in mind the data on a hard drive is not destroyed until it is over-written (and not even, always, then). A URL you visited 2 weeks ago may disappear from the list because you set a 2 week limit, but the url is still on the hard drive and can be recovered, until the disk happens to re-use that space.If you tell your browser you want NO history, this doesn’t necessarily mean it wasn’t recorded on the disk. Many browsers still record to disk and only delete the entries when you close the browser. But deleting is not destroying.
Your browser plugins act on the document of results from Google, if applicable. Nothing is shown yet, but we’re getting close!
Anti-virus / Plugins
See above on Anti-virus, plugins.
See above on Anti-virus, plugins.
See above on Anti-virus, plugins.
Next your browser sets cookies that Google requested. Almost there!
Cookies
url
date / time
computer username
remote session ids
other data you gave the remote site
Cookies are vital for site personalization and authentication. They are benign except that they can contain data which could be found and used to tie you to sessions on other servers, topics you are interested in (based on searches, ads clicked, etc.).
Indefinite. Lifetime of the cookie, then as long as it takes for the info on the disk to be over-written.
Now you see Google results!
None*
n/a
* In the case of Google where all the advertisements are Google’s this final step of viewing the page doesn’t open you up to any new privacy leakage… but see the next few steps which mention the anonymity risks regular ads, Java, Flash, and other things pose…
n/a
You click on the first search result and your browser sends a request to Google via your ISP to redirect you to the first search result, “PandaLovingInfo.com”.
Google, ISP
See above on Google and ISP.
Google wants to know which results people click on.
See above on Google and ISP.
Your browser is redirected to PandaLovingInfo.com.
Website, ISP
referring url
date/time
IP
city/state/country (from IP)
search keywords
ISP has access to your personal details (as mentioned above)
Websites want to know where their inbound traffic is, want to know how many users they have, what their users do, etc. They can collect this anonymously and then tie it to an account you create later.And see above on ISP.
Indefinite. No universal rule, they can keep the data as long as they like. And see above on ISP.
You now see the webpage on PandaLovingInfo.com, where all your questions will surely be answered!
Cache, plugins, and cookies
See above on cache, anti-virus, plugins, and cookies.
See above on cache, anti-virus, plugins, and cookies.
See above on cache, anti-virus, plugins, and cookies.
You are shown advertisements on PandaLovingInfo.com offering many wonderfully peculiar items.
Advertisers on the website
url
date/time
IP
city/state/country (from IP)
search keywords (maybe)
referrer (maybe)
other information about your interests/identity (maybe)
Advertisers want to know where you live, what you’re interested in, and anything else they can. They can track you between sites, so they know you are the same person who was interested in zebra mating rituals last week.
Indefinite. Whatever they want it to be.
The above is about as simple a web experience as you can get. You do one search and view one result, and see how many people are given access to what you’re searching for, and to varying degrees, who you are, what you like, etc. If you want to be truly anonymous, every single “leak” listed above must be plugged.
In the next installment I’ll talk about the dangers posed from these traces you leave, and in the final installment what you can do about it.
In the last few weeks new details have emerged about upcoming contenders vying for the market the iPad is expected to create.
Videos, screenshots, and details of Microsoft’s Courier have appeared on Engadget, and reveal the device to be a brilliantly innovative book-like digital journal running a form of Windows Mobile 7 and arriving in Q3 or Q4. But the information comes not from Microsoft, but from a “trusted source”, so there’s good reason to doubt the final product will match the cleverness shown in these videos; I can’t remember the last time I saw a product from Microsoft which I would call innovative (the word derivitive is the one I expect to use for their products). One of the most surprising things for me about the Courier as alleged is the focus on the digital journal centric design. It certainly differentiates the device from the other players in the field which stress no particular application or use (aside from the ubiquitous browsing or reading apps). This could be key to its success or demise, despite the fact that it will no doubt also run apps of every other description as well; the device wouldn’t be limited by design, only by the limits people read into it. This journaling direction isn’t completely new to the Tablet PC versions of the Windows OS which have long had a primitive but good journal app, but if this truly does deliver on the features shown, it just may be worthy of being a central feature of the OS and device.
The HP Slate also got some press this week, debuting in some videos released by HP. In form, the Slate is akin to the iPad, but certainly larger than the foldable Courier, but what sets the Slate apart from both is that it runs a full desktop OS, Windows 7; that is a good and a bad thing. Included in the good is that every Windows app will run on it, that it will be more easily integrated into (and therefore greeted by) conservative business environments, and that for all users the full web means the full web (every last glorious and icky part of it). Chief among the negatives of a full OS, it’ll never be as elegant to use (since both OS and apps are not going to be exclusively designed for that form factor), the battery life will never be quite as good, it’ll always run somewhat hotter, and it’ll never squeeze the best performance out of whatever cpu is inside it; my last three points hinging on the fact that a full OS will always be more bloated in ram, disk, and cpu cycles required to support the services, features, and other “stuff” necessary to accommodate an entire back catalog of Windows applications.
If the HP Slate or the Windows Courier (as described) both appeared on the market tomorrow at a sensible price I’d probably buy ‘em both (but not the iPad), perhaps one won’t preclude the other. The Courier might become the digital journal I carry with me everywhere, which can be my RDP connection to full computers when/where I need them. And perhaps the Slate would replace my Tablet PC as my mobile ideating and writing computer, for the apps like MindJet’s Mind Manager, MS Visio, MS Word, web for blogging, etc. (with bluetooth keyboard/mouse).
It’s times like these I wish I had a time machine…
We apologize but one of our database tables “crashed” and needed urgent repair. The issue was causing several of our main site features to fail (search, downloading, and registration). We originally hoped we could do the repairs overnight and just limp along until then, but it soon became clear we had to do this ASAP. This sort of thing can happen periodically with MySQL, it’s not a big deal, just takes a little while to rebuild the index. We use replication and backups, so no data was lost. We just brought the site back up after about 2 hours of down time.
There’s no point in buying a GPS sensor for your desktop or a laptop if you rarely move it or have only rarely need that feature, but for free you can install Geosense, a free driver and app that integrates with the API in Windows 7 to provide GPS data to all the apps which use that API. They compute your location from wifi, cell tower, and IP information. Don’t expect to get updating turn by turn directions from your netbook as you cruise along in your car, but very likely perfect for checking directions or doing local searches from a parked car or a cafe. Download it at Geosense.
When I use the DriverGuide Scan I get results for drivers which are NOT for the model of computer that was scanned. Why is this?
Most drivers are not specific to a model of computer since the same devices (and chipsets) are found in multiple models by multiple manufacturers. A bluetooth driver for a Dell Inspiron may be the same as in a Toshibe Satellite. For this reason, our DriverGuide Scan doesn’t focus on matching up drivers by model of computer since that’s not the most relevant criteria. We focus on matching up the hardware ids coded into the actual devices, and base compatibility on that and the device manufacturer. We also use the compatibility ids (also coded into the devices) since drivers are often compatible with multiple versions and incarnations of the same device. An HP Photosmart 7550 driver works on an HP Photosmart 7100 printer as well. So, we also look at these compatibility ids and use a formula based on what Windows itself uses to determine the likelihood of compatibility. We then present you with those updates most compatible with your device.
There are some very rare cases where driver data supplied by manufacturers is wrong and this could be wrongly reported to you as an update; we collect user feedback and able to filter those out. We always recommend reasonable caution when trying out a driver (set a restore point, perhaps make a backup, know how to use safe mode, etc.). Drivers rarely cause trouble, but when they do, it can be very frustrating.
