By Ken Meadows
FROM MAX PC
For sale: Gorilla, one careful owner...
A report claims that shoppers on the web are threatening the existence of endangered species.
The report, "Caught in the web - wildlife trade on the Internet" [see what they've done there] says that an increasing number of live primates and thousands of rare animal products are being sold online. There was, for example, a two-year-old giraffe for sale on an American site for $15,000, and baby chimps for $6000, each. Closer to home, a seven-year-old gorilla that needed a good home was for sale in London due to the relocation of owner".
Robots get covered in skin
Artificial skin has been invented to enable robots to experience the sensation of touch. Some can run, others can track your movements, and there are even ones that can vacuum the lounge and clean your pool. The rise of the robots is in full swing people, and now they're in line for a serious upgrade - robot skin! This new invention will enable them to feel pressure and temperature. It doesn't stop there though. Although this robo-skin is intended to mimic human skin, future versions will include non-human sensory abilities such as light and strain-measuring.
From PC Format
Apple lines Bill's pockets
Apple may be forced to pay royalties to Microsoft on every iPod sold thanks to a timely piece of patenting. Gates' firm managed to slip a vital patent application through the system quicker than Apple could get off the mark, and now it may cost the iPod manufacturer millions. It's been reported that the US Patent Office rejected an Apple application stating that some terms were too similar to an earlier application by Microsoft employee John Platt. The case is still being decided, although Microsoft have already said they will allow Apple to purchase a licence for the patented technology. How generous.
From PC Answers
AOL jail cell
A former employee of AOL has recently been jailed for fifteen months. He admitted to selling a database of 92 million screen names and email addresses to spammers, and consequently, approximately seven billion spam emails were sent out to unfortunate AOL members. Mr Smathers was fired in 2004, and now faces paying damages as well as serving jail time. Whether this will dissuade other cyber-thieves is impossible to tell, but we hope so.
Laptop upgrade
Could you tell me if it’s possible to add extra USB ports to a laptop? My laptop (an Advent machine from a couple of years ago) only has one USB port. I have experimented with USB hubs without much success. Could you tell me if it’s possible to add extra USB ports to the laptop as you can with a desktop machine? Robert England
With desktop systems additional ports can be easily added with a PCI card and a similar option is available to laptop users in the form of PCMCIA cards. Have a look at Mr USB. In the USB/FireWire PCMCIA Cards section, you’ll find a number of two and four port USB cards which you can buy for around £30.
Is the Registry bloated?
My daughter’s laptop runs Windows XP Professional. It seems to be a bit sluggish so I tried EasyCleaner, as recommended in the February issue. While backing up the Registry, I noticed that hers was 52MB compared to my Windows 98SE version, which was only 11MB. Is this normal for XP, or is her Registry severely bloated? She hasn’t really used the laptop that much -- John Wreford.
While the Windows Registry seems to get bigger with every new release, 52MB does seem on the high side for your daughter’s laptop, John. By way of comparison, we checked the size of the Registry on three Windows XP machines and the sizes varied from 21MB to 54MB, so it appears that there is scope for some optimisation. You should be careful when using Registry cleaners. They’re never 100 per cent foolproof and almost always remove an important entry from the Registry by mistake. This is rarely catastrophic, but usually annoying at the very least. This is exactly why you’re to be commended for backing up the Registry before you begin. You can also attempt to defragment the Registry hive files, too. Download a free tool called NT Registry Optimizer from here. On our laptop that had a Registry size of 54MB, it was able to reduce it to just 30MB, which is a reduction of around 45 per cent –pretty good. It’s simple to use, too: once downloaded just install the program and run it. It’ll optimise each Registry hive, then tell you how much it’s managed to save before prompting you to reboot. While you’re at that Web site, we recommend that you take a look at ERUNT as well, which offers a safe way of backing up the Registry that can be recovered using XP’s own Recovery Console. Read the detailed instructions, and print them out in case you ever need them.
ERUNT was mentioned in Sixteen Bits by Mike Boesen fairly recently. The initials stand for Emergency Recovery Upgrade Utility New Technology. It’s also referred to in Terry Bibo’s web page, and was demonstrated at the monthly meeting last month. See here: