His demonstration showed it running the Kindle book-reading software under Windows 7, taking advantage of its touch-screen technology (or “touch-screen experience” as he put it).

Reaction to this product, and similar devices by Archos and Pegatron, was luke-warm.  Nobody was seeing anything new.  It didn’t appear to be much more than the XP-based Tablet PC that Microsoft attempted to introduce way back in 2002.

Personally, I have a Hewlett Packard hx4700 PDA running Pocket PC 2003.  This device was released as long ago as 2004.  I use it with Adobe Reader to read books that I have created from text files downloaded from Project Gutenberg.  Ok, the screen on my PDA is nowhere near the size of the Slate PC, but it is touch-sensitive and I use it to scroll the page while reading.  How does that differ from what Steve Ballmer was demonstrating?

Of course, the new device, running Windows 7 is much more powerful than my PDA, and can run a whole range of Windows software.   With all the glitz and hype surrounding the Windows 7 launch, why wasn’t the demonstration a bit more exciting?

I suspect that this device, being a prototype, doesn’t reliably run much else.  The other Slate PCs by Archos and Pegatron were shown displaying a video and what looked like a web browser.  perhaps they weren’t capable of running much else, either.

There are rumours about a similar device from Apple – dubbed the iSlate.  With the huge popularity of the iPhone and iPod products, people are likely to wait for the release of an iSlate before getting excited about a Windows 7 based device.  After all, Apple seem to be setting the standards for mobile devices and their user interfaces.

Additionally, when the user wants to remove the software from their computer, an uninstall feature must be provided in the Add or Remove Programs section of the Windows Control panel.

If, as a programmer, you use Microsoft’s Visual Studio you have the option to create an MSI installation program for your software.   If you’ve never created an installer before, this can be a little tricky to get to grips with – there’s nothing to guide you through the process, or even to tell you what is required of an installer and what it does.

Users of Professional versions of Borland/CodeGear products such as Delphi and C++Builder had the relative luxury of a free copy of InstallShield Express.  This is a special, cut-down version of a wizard-driven setup program creator, which takes you through each stage of the process.  Unfortunately, since these development tools were sold off to Embarcadero, you don’t get InstallShield Express supplied.  Furthermore, if you work with the lower-cost versions of Delphi/C++ Builder, you didn’t get it anyway.

One option is to purchase products such as InstallShield, but some of these commercial products can be quite costly – especially if you’re writing software as hobby or as a means of generating additional income.

There is, however, the free alternative.  The phrase “you get what you pay for” often proves itself to be true when it comes to free software, but I am happy to report that I have found an excellent installation program creator that is not only free, but is easy to use and just works!

The software is Jordan Russell’s Inno Setup, which you can find and download for free at jrsoftware.org.

Inno Setup runs as a “wizard”, prompting you for various aspects and options that should be available within the Setup program.  Simply run the program and answer the questions.  In many cases, you can keep the defaults that the program supplies.  Once you have finished, you can compile the program and your Setup is ready for distribution.  I’ve used InstallShield Express before, which I thought was incredibly easy to use, but Inno Setup is even easier.

Inno Setup is completely free and it’s the fully working version.  It doesn’t insert advertisements in your installer or play any tricks – it’s just a decent piece of software that does exactly what you want of it.

Setting the Standard
I recently watched an interview with the head of Tesla Motors. Tesla are an American car manufacturer who make electric cars. They’re not a huge company. They don’t enjoy the economies of scale of companies such as Mitsubishi. They have, however, produced a very attractive, high-performance electric car that has a useful range. They quote the range as 244 miles, but independently verified tests have shown that this can be considerably more. performance is 0-60mph in around 4 seconds and the top speed is limited to 125mph.
The car can be full charged up in 4 to 6 hours (depending on the charger in use) from any domestic electrical supply, and the cost is in the region of 2 cents per mile. For most people, the lack of charging points is not an excuse – you could charge it at home, at the office, at a freined’s house etc.
The car looks like a sports roadster which anyone would be happy to park outside their house.

The problem with the Tesla is that it costs £94,000 in the UK. That’s way outside my motoring budget, but it’s something to aspire to.

Requirement
My journey to work is an 86-mile round trip, so if I bought an electric car, I would need a good range. The Tesla’s 244 mile range would be just fine. I could drive to work and back every day for a week on just 2 charges. In fact, at 2 cents per mile my weekly mileage would cost $8.60 (about £5.38). It currently costs me about twice that per day in petrol (gasoline).

I have a wife and 2 children, so any car that I bought would need at least 4 seats, which also rules out the Tesla.

Enter the Big Guns
With the Tesla car out of my reach in terms of price, I had a look for alternatives from the major car manufacturers. The first one I came across was the Mitsubishi i-MiEV.
This car sounded quite promising as it has space for 4 adults. They also claim that it can be charged from flat to 80% in just 20 minutes. If there public charging points on our motorway service areas, that would work out fine – plug in the car, go and have a cup of coffee, and then ready to go.

Unfortunately, it’s not as good as it sounds. You’d really need to like coffee if you went on a long journey as the range of the i-MiEV is only 100 miles. Charge to 80% in 20 minutes and that’s down to 80 miles. If I went to visit my parents, I’d need to recharge twice along the way.
More impressive though is the claim that it will travel 10,000 miles on £45 at the UK’s current electricity prices. That’s equivalent to about 0.72 cents per mile, compared with the Tesla’s 2 cents per mile – about 1/3rd of the cost.

No Oil Painting
And then you see the pictures. The i-MiEV is hideous. Park an i-MiEV alongside a Tesla and you can see that they are worlds apart. I would be embarassed to park an i-MiEV outside my house. I’d have to rent a garage in another street to avoid the embarassment.
In addition, Mitsubishi are considering lease-only on these cars, at a staggering £750 per month. I wouldn’t pay £750 for a car that runs out of juice after 100 miles.

Next up was the Renault ZE (Zero Emission). Sadly, still a concept car; not due for release for another 2 years.
Again, it’s not a good-looking car. The acid-green windows on their demonstrator don’t do it any favours. Cunningly though, it has a solar panel in the roof, but I suspect that you don’t get much of an extra charge from that.

Having now seen the pictures of just two examples of electric cars from major manufacturers I decided to see if anyone made a good-looking electric car. So Google Images came to the rescue, and it was just as I feared. All of the major manufacturers seem to think that an electric car should look like a golf cart, an egg on wheels, or a milk float.

Not many of the cars seem to be available to buy, and those that are available, are outrageously expensive. £25,000 for a plastic egg sitting on a huge battery? I could buy a beautiful, new, petrol-driven Alfa Romeo for less than that. Good looks, room for the family, high performance and outstanding handling.

I can’t be the only one who wants a good-looking, practical electric car that I would be proud to own, can I?
Mitsubishi’s mileage costs are very impressive, but at 3 times as much, so are Tesla’s when you compare them with the cost of running a petrol or Diesel engined car. So why don’t the big companies look at what people want and need. Compromise. Produce a good-looking family car with a decent range. If it costs 7.2 cents per mile to run instead of 0.72 cents, that’s not a problem – it’s still a lot cheaper than the combustion engined cars, and a lot cleaner.

Tesla got the range and the performance in a small roadster. Surely the big companies could scale that up into a useful family car.

A few months ago, I was in a Brantano shoe shop in the UK. I was approached by a member of staff asking whether I would like to join their email mailing list, in which I would be sent news of upcoming discount promotions before they were made public, special offers etc. I filled in the form and returned it to them. I was assured that there would be only about 3 or 4 emails per year.

A couple of weeks later, I received an email from Brantano. From the tone of the message I got the feeling that there would be more than 3 or 4 per year. Add to that the fact that they had mis-spelled my name (I wrote it clearly enough on the form), I decided to unsubscribe from the the newsletter.

So I clicked the Unsubscribe link, which failed to do anything. I tried the same link in 3 different browsers in case there was some sort of incompatibility, but it still failed to work.
So after a lot of searching on their website, I found an email address for their webmaster and sent an email requesting that my details be removed from their database.
I received a reply stating that my details had been removed as requested.

A few days ago, what should appear in my email Inbox, but a newsletter from Brantano. Clearly they had NOT removed my details from my database as requested.
I clicked the Unsubscribe link in this new email (assuming that they had fixed it), and it took me to a Subscribe page. There was no option to unsubscribe at all.

On the basis that

1. I had requested to be removed from the database
2. I had been assured that I had been removed from the database
3. I continued to receive emails from them
4. Their unsubscribe link doesn’t work

their messages are technically classed as spam, and therefore, illegal.

So beware Brantano’s mailing list. Once you’re on there, you can’t get off!

If you visit http://news.google.com/ you can see a selection of news items aggregated from a selection of news sources. When news items from any of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation sites appear in these pages, he believes that Google should be paying him.

It seems that Mr Murdoch isn’t seeing the big picture. All you see on the Google News pages are headlines a a single sentence from the editorial. To read the entire story, you have to click on the link which takes you to the originating site. So anyone wanting to read a story related to headlines taken from a News Corporation site will actually be taken to that site.

Google are, in fact, driving traffic to those news sites. Personally, I never choose to visit any of Rupert Murdoch’s sites, but I do look at Google News. If I’m interested in a story, I’ll click the link and may end up at one of his sites. Therefore he gained a visitor who wouldn’t choose to visit. Heck! Shouldn’t Rupert Murdoch be paying Google for that service?

Any website owner can prevent Google from indexing their site by adding the two lines of code:
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /
to their “robots.txt” file. It’s unlikely that the News Corporation webmasters are unaware of this, which suggests to me that they are simply trying it on by suggesting that Google should pay.

If I owned Google, I would simply drop the News Corporation sites from the search database. After all, I’m sure there are plenty of other news services out there who are only too happy to have links to their stories featured in Google.
I would be delighted if Google featured stories from one of my blogs!

Nuclear batteries have been in use for some time in military, space & aerospace and underwater systems. They have also been used in pacemakers, which demonstrates that they are relatively safe. These batteries have, however, always been much larger than the new ones being developed by the University of Missouri.

The capacity of nuclear batteries has made them very useful for space exploration because they can last for decades.

The biggest problem with nuclear batteries is that they use semiconductors to use the charged particles as they are emitted from the radioisotope. Because the particles have a very high level of energy, they tend to cause damage to the semiconductor, thus shortening its life. To overcome this, the semiconductors are made much larger so that they will last as long as the radioisotope.

The batteries made by the University of Missouri, on the other hand, use a liquid semiconductor that is more able to withstand the energy level of the particles without sustaining damage.

These batteries have been developed to power microelectromechanical and nanoelectromechanical systems in which a small, but long-lasting power supply is required.

The University is continuing development to reduce the size of the batteries even further.

Not surprisingly, the team has applied for a provisional patent on the battery.

Editor’s Comment:
So if they can get 1 million times the energy from a cell of the same size as a conventional battery, why aren’t they making nuclear batteries that will power a car?

Other restrictions require 2 different payment methods (Visa, Mastercard, PayPal) for purchases, and there have to be at least 5 different credit-card numbers.

To read the original article, go here.

Beginners just finding their feet with affiliate marketing can find it frustratingly difficult to make enough sales to comply with these rules, give up, possibly with the intention of coming back to it later when they have more experience. What they don’t realise is that when they leave their account dormant (i.e. there is no activity on it), and it contains a positive balance, they get stung for account charges. The longer it remains dormant, the higher the charges get. If it remains dormant long enough, all the commissions accrued so far will just disappear.

It’s the initial 5-credit card rule that causes so many people to give up and let their accounts go dormant, so this is what needs to be overcome. So, here are some solutions.

Affiliate Exchange
One reader who read the original article had experienced these problems first hand. He decided to do something about it and set up a kind of exchange for ClickBank affiliates in which you buy ClickBank products from other members, and they buy from you in return. The idea being that you quickly build up your 5 different credit cards, and 2 different payment methods.

This is not a bad idea as long as it is managed fairly. Somebody who signs up and makes his purchases from other members doesn’t want to be left waiting for months until enough people have bought from him because there hasn’t been a proper queuing system.

The initial outlay could be costly – 5 items bought – but of course, commissions would be earned on the reciprocal sales made.

ClickBank for Newbies
There is an easier way to achieve the same result using a system set up by ClickBank king, Harvey Segal. He set up a simple, low-cost, viral way of overcoming the problem with his product ClickBank for Newbies.

This is a free-to-download report that explains every detail of the problem, and presents in itself a means of overcoming it. Not only is it free to download, but you don’t even have to sign up to get it. It’s just there for the taking.

If you want to read more details, read my review of ClickBank for Newbies at my CBIntuition blog site, or go straight to the Download Page.

If you follow the incredibly easy instructions in this guide, you should get past that first 5-credit-card hurdle with no problems.

Viral Marketing Method
Viral marketing Method is a new system for promoting any product virally using a selection of powerful tools, including Twitter, the QKR link shortener, the PDF Power Brand branding tool and an ingenious cloaked RSS feed system. The system is so easy to use. It takes about 1 hour or less to set up a campaign, and once you have pressed the button to start the viral system, it just keeps on going.

Unlike those systems being sold to you by the marketing “gurus”, Viral Marketing Method won’t cost you a penny. It’s totally free and you can use it to promote as many products as you want. In fact, it works so well that the owners of Viral Marketing Method use it to promote itself! You can get more details of the system and how to obtain it from Viral marketing method.

There’s really no charge to use this system. It’s not a 30-day trial where you get stung a monthly fee after the initial free period. However, that might change in future, so sign up now while it’s still free.

You do this by building cottages to attract people to the town and then generating more resources to expand further.  For example, you might:

• establish a farm to supply food
• open a quarry for stone
• build a saw-mill to turn trees into lumber for building

There are numerous other buildings you can construct, including Town Hall, Academy, Inn, Barracks, Rally Point etc. Each building has its own specific use, and the construction of some building depend upon the existence of others.

For example, each type of building may be upgraded through different levels.  It is not possible to upgrade the Town Hall beyond a certain level until you have built a wall around the city.  There are numerous dependencies such as this, which kind of makes the game follow a pre-defined path in some respects.

After playing Civony for some time, it was closed and replaced by Evony. Evony is the final version of the game.  I joined Evony to continue where I left off, but found that I had to start right back at the beginning.  Ok, no problem.  I knew what I had to do and got stuck in.

After about a week, the lustre of this game rapidly dwindled until it finally disappeared.  I had been happily constructing cottages for people to live in, set up a farm, quarry and saw-mill and was generating enough resources to continue playing without having to wait until I had enough wood to build a cottage etc.  But as the game progressed, it took longer and longer to build or upgrade something.  Anything that took under 5 minutes to complete could be speeded up, but anything that took longer, I had to wait. And the more advanced my buildings became, the more time it took to upgrade them.

Now that might not seem so bad, but when I discovered that it would take 4 hours to upgrade my Town Hall to the next level, my heart sank.  So I would log on, start the upgrade process and log off again.  Not a particularly thrilling game in that respect, and it was probably taking more time to log on than I actually spent doing anything.  
You can pay money (real money, that is) for speedups, but 1) I don’t want to spend money on a game that hasn’t been especially exciting yet, and 2) It kind of goes against the title in the browser window – “Evony – Free Forever”.

What makes it worse is that you can build or upgrade only 1 building at a time.  So once I’d started off my 4-hour upgrade of my Town Hall, I could do nothing else but wait for it to complete.  At the time, my town had a population of over 13,000 people.  13,000 idle people and I can construct only one building at a time?  Give me a break!

Maybe I’m missing something, but a game that doesn’t let you do anything until 4 hours have elapsed isn’t a game unless you’re one of those people who enjoys chess by mail.

The final nail in the coffin as far as I am concerned is that the Chat system is limited. You can send messages to other people playing the game, but once you have run out of “Speaker” credits, that’s it. You have to pay real money to get more.

So a game labelled as “Free Forever” is free to play, but if you want to do anything except plod along at an excruciatingly boring rate, you need to pay.

My rating? For me it doesn’t even merit one star.

Now, in the UK, you might just be in with a chance of getting broadband as BT announce BET, or Broadband Enabling Technology. This new system extends the range of ADSL broadband lines from 5 kilometres to up to 12 kilometres (7.5 miles).

The broadband speeds at this range are limited to 1 or 2 megabits per second, but that is quite sufficent for many people, and if it meant the difference between dial-up and a permanent connection, I wouldn’t complain about it.

The BET system has been successfully trialled in Scotland, and BT are now planning to extend the trial to 8 other regions of the UK, including Twyford in Berkshire, Badsey in Worcestershire, Llanfyllin in Powys, Leyland in Lancashire, Ponteland in Northumberland, Wigton in Cumbria, Horsham in West Sussex, Wymondham in Norfolk, Inverness Culloden in Scotland and Dingwall in Scotland.

This is just the beginning of attempts to connect the 3 million homes in the UK that are currently unable to use ADSL broadband.

Campaigners for better broadband services have criticised the system, saying it’s not broadband. Considering that the first broadband services available in the UK were a mere 0.5 megabits per second, I’d say they were lucky to be getting 2 megabits. Technology moves on and you can bet that BET is an interim solution. Just be thankful that the engineers at BT are working hard to bring you a broadband service at all. If you’re going to be ungrateful, they might not bother in future!

This printer brings professional print quality to the industrial, high-volume user. Utilizing the very latest in Hewlett-Packard inkjet technology, the EnduraJet delivers an impressive 4800dpi print resolution and superior print speeds. Four individual, large-capacity ink cartridges afford users the ability to print high volumes of professional quality discs at the lowest possible cost per print.

Professional Print Quality

The EnduraJet delivers incredible photo-realistic graphics and a superb quality finish that makes it stand out from other printers. Featuring HP’s PhotoREt III enhanced color-layering technology, up to 4800 x 1200 optimized dpi color resolution can be achieved and by using HP inks, the EnduraJet delivers vivid, life-like color and crisp black text time after time. Easy to use label design software is also included.

Faster and Efficient

The EnduraJet prints up to 25% faster than other inkjet disc printers. Extra large printheads mean that more ink can be placed on the disc’s surface at any one time, which results in faster printing times.

Low Cost Per Print

Due to the EnduraJet’s individual ink tank calibration, printing discs has become more economical. Users can change the individual CMYK inks based on usage, which means zero wastage. The increase-capacity cartridges also offer users a low cost per print (approx. $0.09) making the EnduraJet more affordable and cost effective to run than other disc printers.

SpeedJet Pro Inkjet Printer

This printer brings professional print quality to the in-house production of CDs and DVDs, delivering outstanding photo-quality images directly onto the surface of discs enabling customers to choose colorful backgrounds and images that reflect their company.

HP Technology

The SpeedJet Pro features HPs’ UNIQUE PhotoREt IV color-layering technology, which is able to deliver vivid, true-to-life photos. HP PhotoREt IV controls the placement of the 6-inks more precisely than ever before. Each dot is capable of receiving 32 minuscule drops of color, each one precisely positioned to achieve smoother graduations in tone and to virtually eliminate any grain in the printed image. PhotoREt IV can deliver 289 levels of shade for each color (compared with 17 levels in previous generations) and offers a complete palette in excess of 1.2 million colors. The outstanding print quality is also achieved through the clever design of the drawer mechanism, which holds the discs in place to such a high degree of accuracy, that the finest inkjet printing can take place. The drawer mechanism’s superior in/out tray also allows for fast printing speeds.

In addition to 120mm CDs and DVDs, 80mm mini discs and CD business cards can also be printed with the use of optional adapters and unlike most disc printers, the SpeedJet Pro uses standard HP color, photo and black ink cartridges for the most cost effective printing possible.

User Friendly

The SpeedJet Pro boasts a unique interface making it the easiest to use and most accurate CD/DVD printer by far. The Disc Mask ensures precision printing of designs time after time and the quick and simple calibration process ensures perfect layout.

THE VERDICT

The EnduraJet seems like the way to go as a complete package.  However, I must cover one topic that gets a bit confusing: cost per print.  The EnduraJet has four proprietary ink cartridges that can put out roughly 1,500 prints per set of four (a 69ml black cartridge and 28ml each CMY cartridges), while the SpeedJet Pro’s combination of black and tri-color cartridges (19ml each) can only put out 200 prints per set.  You must use HP genuine cartridges for the EnduraJet but you can find non-genuine cartridges for the SpeedJet Pro, since they are non-proprietary.  This drastically reduces your cost per print, however, because they are not HP genuine, one might discover the colors to be “off” and not match.  It comes down to a cost-benefit analysis based around the desired quality of the prints.

About the Author

Christian Czentye is a recent graduate from UCLA with a major in Business Economics and a minor in Accounting. He is now putting his knowledge and experience to work as a sales and marketing associate for All Pro Solutions, a leading manufacturer and innovator of CD/DVD/BD Duplicators and Publishing Systems.  In the near future, he plans on pursuing his MBA with a concentration in finance.
From low-end, entry-level duplicators to highly advanced and network-based, mission critical Blu-Ray systems, Christian Czentye invites you to familiarize yourself and learn more about All Pro Solutions’ wonderful duplication systems offered at <a href=”http://www.all-pro-sol.com”>www.all-pro-sol.com</A>.  To inquire about additional information, please fill out the following <a href=”http://www.all-pro-sol.com/cd-dvd-duplicators-publishers-contact-us/index.html”>form</A>

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