Anyone who’s even remotely into first person shooters on the PC has probably heard of, or come across, the Battlefield series from Electronic Arts. The first one was release way back in September of 2002, and its captivating online multiplayer scheme enthralled thousands. So, it wasn’t much of a surprise when EA followed up on the success of 1942 with its next installment, Battlefield Vietnam. Although it didn’t fair quite as well with the critics as its predecessor did, it wasn’t a failure by any stretch of the imagination.

The Battlefield series had already established itself as a franchise capable of delivering, but the true show of EA’s potential came in June of 2005, with Battlefield 2; the first true sequel. Instead of transporting the player back into yet another war of the past, the game was modernized into a fictional, present-day conflict between the Chinese, an undisclosed middle eastern nation, and of course the good ol’ US of A. Once more, the game was a stunning success.

But then, perhaps due to their success induced high, Electronic Arts let down a sizable portion of its fan base with their next effort, Battlefield 2142. Jumping from the varied theaters of the Second World War, into the claustrophobic jungles of Vietnam, and then to the present was a progression that seemed logic and apt to many. The series started out with the most significant military conflict of the last century, and then it series took players in a logical progression through all the major engagements that the United States’ military has seen.

The main reason that 2142 never really caught on was probably due to the fact that players suddenly found themselves more than 100 years in the future in a conflict with weapons and vehicles that seemed incredibly out of place in a series that seemed to be focused on realistic military engagements.Luckily, though, the upcoming entry in the series, Battlefield: Bad Company, is a true return to form — and what a form it is! Reinvigorating a series is one hell of a challenge, and as such, Electronic Arts has decided that what better way to field test a game, than to actually put it out in the field. The beta, available to those who have access to the beta codes, has been available for several days now, and I must say that the multiplayer component looks really promising.

The last few weeks, I haven’t played much else besides Call of Duty 4, which is another series that started out by pitting players against the Nazis. As such, I’ll probably make quite a few comparisons to that game.

The beta only includes two maps so it’s pretty obvious that the purpose of the beta is to vet the fundamentals, like gameplay, instead of play-testing a series of maps. When it comes to gameplay, though, Bad Company does quite a few things spot on, leaving only a short list of gripes.

The fundamentals of the series as still present, and perhaps stronger than ever. Players are divided up into two opposing teams, each tasked with accomplishing their goal of destroying enemy depots, while preventing the enemy from performing their task. Once killed, players will continue to respawn into the game until the reinforcement reserves deplete.

One of the changes that veterans of the series will notice immediately upon joining a game is that players are no longer presented with a map from which to choose a spawn point; you either spawn from a set insertion point, or next to your our teammates, your choice. This change might have been made to simplify the game for the console, or it might represent a premeditated departure from the status quo. Either way, the change didn’t have an averse effect on my experience.

The major new addition to the gameplay this time around is the fact that environments can be completely destroyed; everything from trees and terrain, to entire buildings can be completely demolished. This seemingly tiny change has devastating affects on gameplay. No longer can a single, well positioned sniper pick off hordes of enemy soldiers, while simply hiding behind a door post. Traditionally, a sniper positioned in such a manner would have free reign until some fool-hearty soul makes a mad dash for the door and engages the sniper in close-quarter combat. No more, though. Now, you’re free to be as creative as possible with your shots and kills. Let’s see here: you can still go for the direct, zig-zag as you go, approach towards the front door; or you can, for example, sneak around to the back of the building, blow out the rear wall with a well-paced grenade, and make a dramatic entry that way.

Unfortunately, the one thing you can’t do the scenario I just described is take out the poorly supported ceiling above the sniper once the walls are gone so that the rebar studded chunks of concrete will crush or impale the sniper. The most damage you can do to any one of the buildings is reduce it to a smoldering cocoon of support walls and ceiling. In other words, if you were hoping to unite every tank, chopper, boat and Humvee on your team to launch a joint attack aimed at decimating anything and everything in your path, think again.

A destructible environment not only makes the game a lot more fun when you’re the one going the shooting, but it will also produce some truly awesome scenarios. At one point, having already taken out several enemy combatants with a M24 sniper rifle, I was about to fire off another round when I heard an approaching tank. Within seconds this metal beast had rounded the corner of the building ahead of me. As the turret cranked its way slowly my way I knew, then and there, that I was fucked. And I was right…but, the effect was awesome. That tank may have ended my short spree, but seeing the building that I was in blow to smithereens was definitely worth it.

Even though the beta provided me with some truly awesome moments, the experience wasn’t completely without fault. What follows is a short list of some of the gripes and observations, both positive and negative, that I encountered during my play testing. Granted, some of the things listed may not necessarily be issues of real concern, but bare with me:

• One of the first thing I noticed was that whenever I died, the game would kick me back to a menu that conveyed to me that I had to wait a certain number of seconds before I could respawn. It wasn’t so much that I had to wait that bothered me, but rather that this menu took me out of the experience. The menu also allowed me to change my weapon class along with a few other things, but I would have preferred it if, when I died, my view switched to that of a teammate, with a small countdown somewhere off to the side of the screen, and maybe a message telling me that I’d have to press Y, for example, to change my class. Not only did this menu take me out of the experience visually, it also killed the audio; I heard nothing of the ongoing battle until I was able to rejoin.

• I loved the way the sniper scopes his rifle. Instead of immediately switching to the scoped view, as is done in so many games nowadays, there’s an actual transition animation where the rifle is brought up to the character’s face. This simple touch really lent itself to the authenticity of the role. Unfortunately, though, my high hopes for the sniper were immediately brought back down again when I noticed that the sniper seemed to have arms (and nerves) of steel, allowing him to eliminate all vibrations from his aim. I realize that this has been the norm with the entire series, but I feel that perhaps packing a little more punch with each round would go nicely with an unsteady hand. On the positive side though, reload animations for the bolt action look pretty neat, if perhaps a little mechanical.

• Another neat touch is that fact that whenever a player experiences trauma severe enough to lower his or her health down to 30% or less, that player’s vision becomes impaired. The concept is really neat, but the execution is slightly lacking. To me it seems a little hackneyed, but the players vision is simply flooded with a red haze, nothing all too special. It would be cooler if the players vision got worse and worse as his or her health deteriorated. One might start out with perfectly clear vision, go to a red hue at around 30, and then add a slight blur and maybe some camera wobbly as the Grim Reaper approaches.

• Of course, since it is the Battlefield series, there are plenty of vehicles as expected; everything from jeeps and tanks to boats and choppers. I don’t have all too much to mention about the vehicles, since the series has always done this pretty well, but I will mention that I am starting to grow slightly weary of the whole arcade style approach to vehicles. I understand that a console game needs to be accessible to a large audience, but it couldn’t hurt to make the vehicles handle a little more realistically. Maybe I’ve been playing a little too much Crysis as of late, but I want to be able to shoot out tires to bring a car to a potentially spectacular halt — ya know, stuff like that.

• Maybe it’s just me, but I’m not too fond of the grenade control scheme. I want to be able to pull out a grenade and throw it immediately; I don’t want to have to worry about how long I have to hold down the trigger to be assured that the grenade will go far enough. I want to be able to pull the trigger once, and just have it go. I’m perfectly content to have to aim up higher if I want the grenade to go farther. Oh, and another thing: please, please increase the effective radius of a fragmentation grenade. There have been plenty of occasions were I have thrown a grenade to within a yard or two of my target, only to find that after it went off, my target was making me his target.

• Graphically speaking, the beta isn’t all that spectacular. If you’ve been following the development of this game then you have, like me, probably also seen a good portion of the screenshots that can be found floating around the Web. I’m sad to say, though, that the screenshots don’t quite live up to the hype — but, hey, when isn’t that the case?

A couple of months ago, I got so fed up with iTunes and its unstable nature that I completely abandoned it as my primary music player. iTunes was giving me all sorts of problems: it would crash unpredictably, it would halt podcast downloads without reason, it would require my processor’s full attention for extended periods of time, and the list goes on. All of these problems slowly but surely built upon my existing contempt for Apple’s often hailed piece of junk. Apple tries to have iTunes perform all sorts of functions, but unfortunately it fails to please on almost every single level – I’m sure I’ll piss off at least one Apple fan, so don’t hesitate to leave me a comment or two.

After ridding my hard drive of any and all things Apple, I hit Google in search of a replacement for iTunes. After a few quick searches it quickly becomes clear how tight Apple’s stranglehold on music playback is – practically everyone with an iPod uses iTunes, and most are completely unaware of exactly how lackluster this combination really is. Looking through the queries, it was nothing but Apple this and iTunes that. There has gotta be something out there that doesn’t suck…

After a few more searches, I finally found something that I had almost forgotten about: Winamp. Developed by Nullsoft, Winamp has been faithfully reproducing audio since 1997. In fact, the guys over at Nullsoft have just released version 5.5 to commemorate the player’s 10^th anniversary – ironically, this latest version was released on the tenth day of the tenth month of the player’s tenth year of its existence.

Winamp vs. iTunes: A Battle of Philosophies

Apple’s most identifiable mantra is simplicity. Designing software with this philosophy in mind has its fair share of advantages, as well as drawbacks. For example, one of the things that Apple is fond of doing is binding multiple functions to a single button. The play/pause/stop button is a good example of this practice; it keeps the interface clean, possible aiding new users in finding desired functions, but it also pisses off more experienced users. One of the things I hate most about this practice is that it means that I can’t always pause or stop a song or podcast from my current location in the interface — I might, for example, have to switch from the podcast directory to my music library in order to pause the song instead of completely stopping it.

Another drawback of “simplicity” is that it inherently cripples functionality and, by implication, also the ability to customize. Every instance of iTunes conforms perfectly to Apple’s cookie-cutter ideal; in all probability you’ll never find anyone whose iTunes is black instead of white, or whose ID3 tags display any differently than yours. Again, this might be fine for the average user, but every once in a while it’s nice to able to change things around, especially when the mold that you’re being forced into simply doesn’t fit.

Apple, with its simplicity, is at one end of the spectrum, while Winamp is far more towards the center, offering a wider range of functions and settings, without being too complicated. Winamp isn’t in the least bit shy about is capabilities, and as such, it places every commonly used function right on the dash. The interface might look a little more intimidating than that of Apple, but at least everything is right there in front of you.

Winamp’s Look ‘n Feel

I wrote quite an extensive article on why I got extremely fed up with iTunes a months ago, right after it happened; as such, I won’t burden anyone with repeated arguments and explanations. Instead, I’ll try to focus more on that Winamp does and why I ultimately like it better.

Winamp does a nice job of balancing simplicity and functionality without losing customizability. By default, Winamp 5.5 will display three major information panes: Right under the menu bar is a horizontal pane featuring all the major controls, as well as all of information about the file being played. Now if this were iTunes, that would be the only thing displayed here, but it’s not; depending on your needs, you might want to use this pane to display visualizations, playlists, or perhaps, equalizer settings – all of which can also be displayed elsewhere if you so please.

Positioned directly underneath the playback/information pane, you’ll find the directory and media navigation pane. This pane has been vertically split into two parts; the leftmost part lists all the available music, podcast and video directories on your machine, while the right hand portion of the pane displays a more detailed list of the contents of each directory. This part of Winamp, I suppose, is actually quite similar to its iTunes counterpart, save for a few (embarrassing) differences. As much as I had wanted Winamp 5.5 to be perfect, there are still a few minor things that I think iTunes does-dare I say it-better. For one, it would have been nice to see a little more information in the directory listings pane. Don’t get me wrong, detailed library information, like the album name, track number, genre, rating and play count is available, but you’ll have to venture over to a different part of the interface. Perhaps I’ve conformed to Apple’s mold a little too much, but I’m of the opinion that this should available from within the playlist.

Onwards, though. On to the last pane: All the way on the right of the display is what ha s been dubbed the “Playlist Editor.” Occupying all vertical space on right side of the screen, the editor displays all songs currently in the playlist, along with their item number and play time. At the bottom of this pane is a series of buttons which allow you to add to, remove from, and otherwise manipulate the playlist. This feature comes in quite handy when you want to dump a new album directly into a playlist.

A Few More Things Winamp Does

If you haven’t read the preceding paragraphs, you might have missed it: I’m not a big fan of iTunes. One of the things that I hate most about iTunes, and by association also Quicktime, is the general lack of formats that it supports. I happen to like high-fidelity audio reproduction; lossy MP3’s don’t always do it for me. As such, I’m a big fan of high quality, open source formats, such as FLAC, which-you guessed it-Apple doesn’t support. Winamp on the other hand, does support FLAC, along with a whole list of other formats. It’s small things like this that matter to me.

In similar fashion, I also enjoy the fact that I can have Winamp look and behave how I want it to. As I’ve already stated, I consider Winamp to be somewhere towards the middle of spectrum when it comes to functionality. It might not be as customizable as Foobar2000, for example, but simply having a variety of skins to choose from is very nice. Skins don’t just change the look, but they also affect the feel of the player; some skins are really elaborate, some are only about the essentials, while still others might be completely modular.

Additionally, Winamp’s Preferences menu reads like Tolstoy’s War and Peace in comparison to its anemic counterpart in iTunes. After using iTunes for an extended amount of time, the number of options and variables open to change in Winamp is astounding: Would you like to see the splash screen on startup? Do you want to allow multiple instances of the program? How about a scrolling the ID3 tag information in the taskbar icon? Or perhaps you’d like to automatically convert underscores into spaces when reading song names? Winamp even solves of the biggest nuisances in iTunes: you can set it to keep an eye on specific music folders so that any chances in the folder (like the deletion of a song, for example) will automatically reflect in playlist – so no more stupid exclamation marks!

And if there’s something you think Winamp ought to do but doesn’t, there’s always a vast plugins library available. There are plugins that’ll do everything from managing your playlists and post-processing your music, to enabling support for your favorite MP3 player-yes, that includes iPods.

It’s not all too often that you’ll be playing a game that does something new; something that hasn’t been done over and over again in almost every other game. One such game is Portal, a clever three dimensional puzzler based on the incredibly popular Half-Life universe.

Portal got its beginnings when a group of students from DigiPen were invited over to Valve to show off their little project, called Narbacular Drop. Walking out of the demo room, little did the students suspect that they’d soon be hired and encouraged by Valve to further flesh out their project.

Since the inspiration behind Portal started out as a Senior game project, it’s no surprise that the game feels a bit like a technological showcase. That being said, however, Portal is incredibly fun – even if it can be quite frustrating at times. If you’re a fan of the Half-Life 2 universe and enjoy the occasional puzzle, this game is guaranteed to please.

Set in the world of Gordon Freeman, players control a female test participant, named Chell, as she makes her way through the test labs of the Aperture Science Enrichment Center. The games starts out with Chell waking from a cryostasis bed enclosed in an otherwise empty cell, in an empty room. The only other form of intelligence in the room, and throughout the game, is the mechanical voice of GLaDOS (Genetic Lifeform and Disk Operating System) – think of her as a female version of HAL 9000.

After being told what you are expected to do, GLaDOS releases you from your cell, and instructs you to head towards the only exit in the room. I’d better not say much more about the story line, because there really isn’t all that much to it. But, what little there is, is cleverly crafted and quite entertaining while it lasts. An added bonus to the puzzle element of the game is the humorous quality of GLaDOS’s commentary as you make your way through the game: “And remember, Aperture Science’s take-your-daughter-to-work day is the perfect time to have your daughter tested.”

Once your in the first of the 19 levels, you really get a feel for what the game is all about. All of the levels present the player with what essentially amounts to an obstacle course. The levels get bigger and far more complex as the game progresses, but the main challenge in all of them is that you need to get from point A to point B. Sounds easy, right?

Well, not really. The earlier test chambers might be quite simply, with only a small chasm to cross, or a button to press. However, as you get further along you’ll run into all sorts of trouble; for instance, you’re in a room with no immediately discernible exit. You scan the room from left to right, then again from right to left. Nothing. Then you look up and see that the ceiling is a good 200 feet high, and that in the far corner there appears to be a small ledge with what looks like a door. Great. “How do I get there,” you might wonder. The only other structures in the room include a deep pit (without an exit at the bottom) and various pedestal-like platforms of different heights in the middle of the room. The pedestals are way too far apart for you to jump them – and if you fall, you die. So, the only reasonable solution seems to be to first jump to the lowest of the five pedestals, and then, perhaps, to the next one…But you can’t jump those distances and there aren’t any ladders, stairs, elevators, or man cannons available. What do you do?

Bring on the Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device! The portal gun is the essence of what makes Portal completely unique. Using the portal gun (which you get in the third level), players will be able to create an intra-dimensional portal between flat planes, allowing physical objects to instantly travel between entry and exit nodes. Portal ends can only be created on certain planar surfaces, which greatly enhances the puzzle factor. As the game progresses, the placements of portals necessary to complete a challenge become crazier and crazier, which will often lead to bizarre and confusing twists in geometry and gravity. A critical component of intra-dimensional travel is the fact momentum is preserved, or as GLaDOS puts it, “speedy thing goes in, speedy thing comes out.” This effect is very useful when you want to launch yourself across a room.

Despite the fact that Portal is a very unique game on many levels, this only makes it all the more painful when it all comes to an end. In fact, Portal is actually quite short; an experienced played will have no trouble playing through the game in about three hours. On top of that, Portal is a puzzle game, which means that once you know how to solve a particular problem it’s hard to forget, resulting in little replay value. On a bright note, though, Portal (on the PC anyways) comes with an SDK (Software Development Kit), so expect there to be plenty of user created levels in the near future.

Portal is part of a Valve bundle package known as The Orange Box, which is available for the PC as well as the Xbox 360. The Orange Box also contains: Half-Life 2, Half-Life 2: Episode One, Half-Life 2: Episode Two, and Team Fortress 2. The PC bundle retails for $49.95, while the Xbox 360 version goes for $59.95 – which I think is a rip-off, since the PC bundle provides far more value through the inclusion of the SDK. If you don’t care for the rest of the games in The Orange Box, then you can always get Portal as a standalone game through Steam. If you go this route, it’ll cost you $19.95.

BUY: The Orange Box

Ever wondered what all the “Web 2.0″ fuss is all about? Sure, it’s often described as the second generation of online services and applications designed to keep people social; but what does that actually mean for the average user? For an answer that leaves little doubt about the usefulness and inevitable need for powerful, interlinked web applications, check out Picnik.

Picnik – possibly the epitome of Web 2.0 – is the ultimate showcase when it comes to demonstrating that online applications can be just as fast and smooth as any local application. Picnik is a sophisticated, yet simple, photo-editing application, which has all the necessary features to easily outperform and outclass Vista’s Photo Gallery and Apple’s iPhoto.

Although there is no way that Picnik is going to convert anyone away from professional powerhouses such as Photoshop, it has enough elegance and grace to become a social networker’s best friend. Picnik is lightning fast thanks to the clever implementation of AJAX and Flash. Once you hit the “Fullscreen” button, there is no way to tell that Picnik is all the way up in the clouds, as they say.

After a quick and painless registration process, users are presented with a very simple tabbed interface that easily guides users through the process of uploading, manipulating, and sharing their creations. One of the things that makes Picnik such a powerful “Web 2.0″ applications is that fact it is set up to seamlessly integrate with a most popular image sharing sites out there, including: Flickr, Picasa Web Albums, Facebook and Photobucket.

Uploading images is a piece of cake. Once a user hits the “Connect” button and enters their login credentials, it’s a synch to import images from any of the above mentioned networking sites. And if you’re not into the whole “Web 2.0″ phenomena, then there’s plenty of other options at your disposal: either upload your images directly from a local directory, enter a URL, or snap a quick picture with your webcam. You can even search for images from within Picnik, using the Yahoo Search tools.

Once you’ve got they image you want into Picnik, you’ll be able to do all sorts of things to it; some good, some not so much. Obviously, all of the standard manipulation tools are present: Auto-fix, rotate, crop, resize, exposure and color correction, sharpen, and, of course, red-eye correction. But, if you really want to create something unique, then there’s a whole other tab waiting for you.

Under the “Create” tab, you’ll be able to apply a wide variety of “Effects.” If you’ve ever used Photoshop or any other photo editing package, then you should be pretty familiar with the range of filters that exist. Some are useful, while others are a complete joke. Besides just apply one (or more) of the 24 filters available, you’ll also be able to ruin, erh, enhance your images with text and shapes. To be fair, though, the power of each of these tools is pretty amazing; you’ll not only be able to choose the font and size you want, but also how align the text, what color to make it, and whether you’d like it to appear faded. Once you’ve added all the necessary shapes and text, you might want to add one of five different borders.

Another incredibly useful feature is the Undo & Redo system. Any change you make to the image can be easily undone, and if need by, redone. The part that surprised me about the feature was that it’s not just limited to undoing one or two changes, like that sorry excuse for a photo editor called iPhoto. At one point, I was able to undo 12 changes I made to the image.

Once you’re all done editing, hit the last tab to save and share you photo with the world. At this point, Picnik doesn’t actually store images on the own service, but you can easily export your image back into Flickr, Picasa Web Albums, Facebook, or Photobucket gallaries. And if that isn’t the way that you wann go, then you can always save it locally, e-mail it, or send it off to an insane number of other sites, like: ImageShack, Freewebs, Walmart Photos, TypePad, Costo Photo, Snapfish, Tumblr, and SmugMug, to name only a few.

Overall, Picnik deserves to do well; it’s a good concept, that’s been executed really well. This is Picnik’s first week out of beta, and to celebrate the accomplishment, the developers have decided to grant everyone full access to all the features. So, go check it out while you can. At the end of the week, Picnik will cut off some of the more advanced features and make them part of their “Premium Feature Stream,” which will go for an easy $24.95 a year.

I’ve been in the market for a new laptop for about half a year now and I’ve finally made up my mind and purchased an HP DV6500t. I was looking for a widescreen laptop of about 15″ in diameter with a decently fast “Santa Rosa” Intel chip and a decent nVidia graphics card. I also didn’t want to spend more than $1,500 in total (including taxes). Having looked at everything from Asus to Toshiba, I finally homed in my search on an HP, and eventually the DV6500t.

BUYING EXPERIENCE

I knew for quite some time that I wanted a new laptop, and so I was able to do quite some searching for the best places to buy my new DV6500t. Trolling between various sites, along with the occasional visit to a brick and mortar store, made it quite clear that if you want a specific laptop with certain chips, cards, and features, you’ll want to make your purchase from the manufacturer directly.

Buying from HP.com was easy and quite straight forward. I had no trouble selecting what I wanted, and it was always clear what I would end up getting and paying for it. Unfortunately, buying directly from the manufacturer has one major drawback: you’ll have to wait longer to get your new machine, since the item in question won’t be built until you order it. So, after three weeks of waiting, somewhat impatiently, I finally got my DV6500t – kudos to HP and FedEx for accurately predicting the correct arrival time, though.

PACKAGING

When the doorbell rang, I hurried to the door. Upon seeing the box, it was immediately clear what HP was doing to save itself some money. There on the porch, sat a plain cardboard box with nothing on it, save for a few rather large shipping placards.

Within this rather simple box, I found my new laptop wrapped in plastic and snuggled securely between two molded Styrofoam braces. Also in the box, I found the extra 12-cell battery that I ordered and all of the paperwork – plus a few ads. Oddly enough, the regular battery was packaged safely in a bubble wrap sleeve, while the bigger, potentially more dangerous, 12-cell was wrapped in a simple, pink, plastic bag.

The important thing is, though, that the laptop arrived safely all the way from China, even though the packaging was extremely basic.

FIRST IMPRESSIONS

From a visual standpoint, if you can’t get a Mac Book, this is probably the next best thing. Unfortunately, as soon as all the plastic covers are removed, you’ll see every fingerprint, dust particle, wipe and scratch. The problem is especially prevalent on the shiny, piano-lacquer lid.

Apart from the visuals, the laptop feels solid and the ergonomics are decent. All ports and media bays are conveniently located on either side of the laptop, negating the need to reach around the back of the machine to connect peripherals.

Another feature that becomes immediately apparent is the fact that the DV series doesn’t have a latch. The lid is held down in the close position by sole means of hinges, which actually works really well, and aids in giving the machine a sleeker appearance.

SCREEN

The DV6500 series features a 15.4″ glossy screen with a native resolution of only 1280 by 800 pixels. The color reproduction is decent, but the screen suffers from a rather narrow viewing angle; color will look off unless you are perfectly in front of it. The problem is especially prevalent with darker colors. Black levels aren’t great either, but the screen performs adequately if you’re not doing anything more than basic text editing. To be fair, however, for under $1,500, you can’t reasonably expect to get anything drastically better than this.

Colors and black levels aside, however, one issue I do have with this relatively cheap display is that it has a glossy finish, as opposed to a matte finish. Why the hell would anyone prefer to have a display that reflects more light than is absolutely necessary? Glossy screens are usually advertised as being capable of producing a better viewing experience, but for a laptop this simply cannot be true. Glossy screens are only nice in a darkened environment, which is not exactly the average setting for a mobile user. If you happen to be using your DV6500t in a averagely lit room, than there is a fair chance that you’ll see a sharp, almost mirror-like reflection of your environment. I can’t stand it, but I’m sure that it does appeal to some.

KEYBOARD

The keyboard is pretty nice, with good key travel and decent flex. The key layout is pretty average for a Windows laptop. The F1 through F12 keys also serve as special function keys for: help, print, Internet, output switching, sleep mode toggling, locking, increasing brightness, decreasing brightness, play/pause, stop, previous and next, respectively. The home, page up, page down, and end keys are featured along the right side of the keyboard. Typing isn’t overly noisy, producing no more noise than what I’ve come to expect from laptop keyboards. The noise shouldn’t be enough to upset anyone around you in a quiet environment.

Unfortunately, keyboard ergonomics isn’t a strong point for the DV6500t. Hand positioning could have been better, but for a value laptop it isn’t too bad I suppose. The main problem I have with it stems from the fact that the touchpad has been perfectly centered in the middle of the laptop (for additional visual appeal), but this causes problems when typing. The alphabet keys are positioned on the left hand side, causing the user to place his (or her) right hand over the touchpad. This awkward hand placement results in erratic cursor movement while typing.

TOUCHPAD

The largest benefit of the touchpad is that it can be turned off to avoid accidental tracking—but that’s really the only high-point. The touchpad also features the standard left and right click buttons under the touchpad, but, in my opinion, these two buttons have too much travel, causing them to feel a little cheap.

Tracking isn’t perfect either. While the cursor’s reaction to the finger isn’t really a problem, the touchpad feels awkward once the laptop heats up. Depending on what you are doing the laptop will generate more heat, causing the touchpad to become quite warm. Using the touchpad once it’s warm produces a really awkward sensation, which might very well be considered annoying depending on personal preference.

QUICKPLAY

Just under the Altec Lansing speakers and to the right of the power button, there is a touch sensitive control strip, lined with media control buttons. The strip is rather elegant, but for everyday use, you’ll only find yourself using three of the functions: mute, volume up and volume down. In addition to audio control buttons, the strip also features media control buttons (i.e., play, pause, stop, forwards, backwards). To the very left of the strip, there is also a DVD button, which launches HP’s playback software, which as you might have guessed isn’t that great.

ACCESSORIES

One of the advantages of ordering a machine directly from the manufacturer is that you can choose exactly what you want your new computer to come equipped with. I opted to include a variety of extras such as built-in webcam, fingerprint reader and Bluetooth.

• FINGERPRINT READER

The fingerprint reader is a neat feature and works pretty well once you get used to performing the correct wiping technique. In order to set up the fingerprint reader, you’ll have to associate your prints with the machine. The software wants a minimum of three prints, but you can choose to include as many as you want.

I know that some people might be a little hesitant about using a fingerprint scanner to log in because of a variety of concerns, most of which are actually misconceptions. First off, setting up your computer to use the fingerprint reader does not mean that you can’t still log in using your regular password. Others might be worried about the fingerprint scanner from a security standpoint; someone might steal your machine, manage to get in, steal your fingerprint, and thus steal your identity. Well, this is not a problem either, as your actual fingerprint in not actually stored on the hard drive – in fact your print isn’t stored at all. When you first swipe your finger to register it, the scanner analyses your print for identifying features, and then takes those results and hashes them to create an irreversible number. So, on all subsequent scans the same happens and then if the numbers match, you’re in.

Using a fingerprint to log in might be convenient and easy, but there are a few problems with the reader and the accompanying software. First of all, when Vista starts up you have to select the fingerprint icon before you can swipe. This is only a minor gripe, but it’s one that has surprised almost everyone who’s used my laptop. The second complaint I have is the positioning of the fingerprint reader, which on the right side, directly under the direction keys. When using the direction keys or the other buttons in that region (page up, page down, end, and home), it’s pretty easy to accidentally trigger the reader, causing the software to sound a beep and display a pop-up.

• WEBCAM

Along with the fingerprint reader and the imprint finish, HP also included a simple webcam with the laptop with the configuration I chose. The webcam, however, leaves a lot to be desired; it simply isn’t that great. In fact, the webcam included in the DV6500t is, by all quantitative measures, worse than the one in preceding models. Instead of outputting an XGA resolution (1024 by 768) like previous models, the webcam in the DV6500t is only capable of producing VGA imagery (640 by 480). The reasoning behind this decision seems to have been that most applications, especially conferencing apps, have trouble handling high-res video in real-time (due to insufficient bandwidth and latency issues). On the bright side though, some reviews have claimed that the new webcam is far better suited for low-light situations than the previous edition. Regardless of this claim though, it would have been nice to be able to choose the resolution you want to use. Oh, well…

GRAPHICS CARD

Graphical performance is another area where HP decided to go down the cheap road. My initial intention was to purchase the DV6500z, which is the AMD variant. Unfortunately, at the time the best graphics card that HP offered for this laptop was the GeForce Go 7200, which just happens to be one of the most antiquated graphics chips available. Not only is it dog slow, it’s also two generations old. Now, considering that HP is marketing the DV brand as an “Entertainment” laptop, the decision to offer nothing else but the 7200 is downright appalling. And then, to make matters even worse, the next move they made was to get rid of the 7200 and replace it with the 7150, which is even worse.

Now, in all fairness to HP, it seems that this only happened because they were trying to get rid of the 7200 in order to replace it with a better card. Unfortunately, by the time they had upgraded the AMD-based model, I had already purchased the DV6500t.

The DV6500t offers a better, far more up-to-date, graphics card, but it’s still pretty far from ideal for anyone interested in any movie editing or gaming – even casual gaming. The GeForce Go 8400M GS that HP now offers in the DV6500t (both in the Intel, as well as the AMD based versions) comes with an impressive sounding 383MB of memory. Gee, that sounds like a lot… Well, it’s not that great. Only 64MB of that 383MB is actually on the graphics card itself; the other 319MB are shared with other hardware elements. If you’d like a far more serious graphics card, like a 7600GT for instance, I’d recommend checking out some of the newer Dells.

ADDITIONAL IMAGES

BUY: HP DV6500 | MORE INFORMATION: HP.COM

As soon as my friends and I heard that Infinity Ward would be hosting a public beta for their upcoming game Call of Duty 4, we rushed over to the site and registered – just like thousands of other eager fans. Fortunately, one of our registrations was selected for entry and so, after a quick download, we eagerly launched ourselves into the experience. And here’s what we found:

GRAPHICS

From a visual standpoint the game looks about average. That being said, however, this does not mean that the game is at all bland, as there are some interesting visual elements throughout the game. One of the more drastic of these elements is the depth of field blur, which helps make the overall experience feel quite authentic. The blur activates as soon as the player sights their weapon by pulling the left trigger. It eases in pretty fast, blurring everything up close so that only the far reticule and the target remain in focus. Upon releasing the trigger to zoom out, the blur quickly fades out to reveal your surroundings – and, of course, your enemies, right as they are about to ambush you. All three maps also include high dynamic range lighting along with all the other lighting and shading techniques that we have come to expect from modern games. But, besides the depth of field blurring, there is nothing all too special – yet.

MAPS

The beta includes three maps so far: Overgrown, Vacant, and Crash; all set in the eastern hemisphere. Overgrown is set in a small, rundown, rural Russian town, and, as the name suggests, features plenty of overgrown vegetation, ideal for snipers. The map is fairly large, with plenty of open and exposed areas, but it also has plenty of cover. If you’re patient and willing to crawl around in the tall grass, you can rack up plenty of kills as a sniper. The map is pretty well balanced, however, making it pretty easy to defeat snipers if you manage to lure them into the more urban parts of the map, where their long range weapons are rendered useless.

Vacant is probably my favorite map so far. This map is centered around a dilapidated, single story, Russian office. The small rooms and narrow hallways are the perfect catalyst for some very intense close quarter combat, where the player has to be on constant guard. Thanks to a plethora of large windows and numerous doorways, it’s impossible to hold yourself up in a single location for very long, without getting ambushed or running out of ammo.

The last map in this beta is Crash, set somewhere in a small desert town, presumably in the Middle East. The setting of the map would suggest a Black Hawk Down type of scenario, where the good guys had to crash land their helicopter in midtown and then fight off the enemy in an attempt to survive. Like all of the other maps, this one is pretty balanced as well, and there aren’t any glaring advantages to being on either side. Like any good urban map, this one is honeycombed with plenty of alleys and roads, making it once again very tough to hold out for very long without some serious backup.

GAMEPLAY

Okay, so here’s the most important part: it’s a blast. Out of all the games in the Call of Duty series, this one is far and away the best: it’s intense, rewarding, and pretty clever – yes, clever. And here’s why: the developers have done an excellent job at rewarding players for certain achievements, while not making it impossible for mediocre players to get their fair share of kills as well. One of the major new gameplay elements that CoD 4 brings to the table is the addition of perks and rewards.

Let’s start off with the perks. Upon choosing your class, you get a choice of how you would like to modify your character’s abilities. Each player can choose three perks that he (or she) would like to have during online play. There are 15 perks in total, divided up into three subsets. The first perk category allows you to choose if you would like: the ability to seek out enemy explosives, remotely detonate explosives, place trip mines, carry an RPG-7 with 2 rockets, or if you would like to carry three special grenades. The second perk category allows a player to choose whether to: increase their health, reload faster, boost the explosive power of their weapons, increase the damage of their rounds, or make themselves undetectable to the UAVs flying overhead. The third, and final, category let’s players: improve the penetrating power of bullets (so that players can shoot through thin walls), improve their physical speed, drop a live grenade upon death, increase their hip-fire accuracy, or – and this one is quite popular – upon being shot, pull out a side arm in an attempt to kill any aggressors before finally bleeding to death.

Not all of these perks are available right away. As a player gains more and more experience, he’ll unlock more perks as well as weapon upgrades. Much as is the case with the perk system, players will need to gain experience before they can unlock the best weapons and the best mods. Gun modifications include the addition of a silencer (which renders you invisible on enemy radar), various scopes (you start with iron sights, then go on to reflex sights, and eventually you can equip low-power scopes), and camo patterns for your guns (urban, rural, and digital).

Another neat gameplay element is the notion of actually rewarding players who manage to achieve a killing streak – instead of just announcing it to everyone a la Halo. If you kill three in a row you’re allowed to perform a radar sweep using a UAV, so that your team temporarily knows where the enemy is and how to best attack them. After five consecutive kills, you’re allowed to call in an air-strike, which has to be designated on a map. And finally, possibly the best one, when you kill seven in a row you’re allowed to call for backup. When you do so, you’ll hear the low roar of propeller blades cutting through the air, and pretty soon your enemies will be mowed down my automatic gunfire from a CPU-controlled attack helicopter.

GAME MODES

The four overall game modes that the beta includes are: Free-for-All, Team Deathmatch, Team Objective, and Team Tactical. The first two are pretty self-explanatory, so I’ll just explain the other two. Team Objective consists of a variety of different modes, including: Domination and Search and Destroy, Capture the flags in Domination (with respawning), and objective-based Search and Destroy (without respawns). And then there’s Team Tactical, where players form small two, or three, man teams and simply go at it.

GRIPES

Since this is a beta, the game is obviously not entirely bug-free. So, here’s a (very short) list of issues that I’ve seen so far:

• The helicopter might be too good. At one point, I was prone, half-way under a bush, and when the helicopter flew by he had no problem seeing me at all, and I got owned. This would be acceptable if I was a machine-gunner or so, but I was a sniper, wearing a Ghillie suit, which should have made me a lot harder to see.

• Since the game strives to be pretty realistic, I would like to have the ability to switch between firing modes (i.e: semi-automatic, burst, and full-auto).

• …and that’s about it for now. More to come later.

I have steadily grown more and more frustrated with iTunes, the oh-so-loved application of millions; its feature set is basic, it’s dreadfully slow, not to mention bloated, and worst of all, it has polarized the media player market to such an extend that I often wish it had never been introduced.

The first time I used iTunes, I was actually pretty impressed. Until then, I hadn’t encountered a music player that was as easy to use, or looked as sleek. This was back in the days when the integration of the iTunes Music Store (iTMS) into iTunes was fairly benign, and also well before podcasting was popularized – and in my opinion, monopolized – by iTunes. Back in those days, iTunes was a genuine pleasure to use.

Unfortunately, as the years ticked by, I started to dislike what iTunes had become. With each subsequent version, Apple tried to cram more and more features into their dominating player, and by doing so, they made it ever more unstable and far too slow.

My complaints are numerous, so I’ll list the major ones and try to keep it fairly short. I’ll apologize upfront if this turns into too much of a rant. So, without further ado and in no particular order, here goes:

Features:

Apple loves to keep things simple, which is generally nice. Unfortunately, simple is not always best. The most prevalent showcase of this simplicity is the general lack of features.

The entire appeal that iTunes had to begin with was its incredibly simplicity, and the fact that all the basic and essential components were present: easy importation, a simple playlist, and straightforward controls. However, as the popularity of digital media increased and more mediums became available, Apple simply dumped very mediocre and limited support into iTunes, without any regards for proper optimization.

A good example of this, in my opinion, is video playback – something which was not present in the first few versions. I cannot stand the fact that whenever I try to play back a video clip, mostly in the form of video podcasts, the video is restricted to that tiny, lower-left hand side of the screen. Sure, you can enlarge and undock it, but it’s pretty clear the iTunes was not designed to properly accommodate video playback.

Fine, I’ll concede the fact it’s i-“Tunes” and not i-“Media,” so I’ll try to concentrate more on what it was meant to do, namely audio playback. iTunes has been around since ‘01, when it was introduced at the Macworld Expo, and you’d think that six years ought to be enough time for Apple to add a plethora of neat features, right? So, where are they?

Let’s take a look at iTunes in comparison to Winamp, which, in the interest of full disclosure, has been around since 1996, so has had more time to develop. Looking through the “Preferences” windows in both programs, you really get a sense for how many options there really could be in iTunes. For example, Winamp let’s you set all sorts of things, like the font size, the font type, 24-bit audio support, surround sound, mono channel playback, 50+ hotkeys, and Shuffle Morph Rate – a setting which determines how drastic the change in music style is when music is shuffled. Additionally, Winamp also supports advanced title display formatting, meaning that you can completely customize what the song titles appear as in the player. Of course, this last feature is dependent on proper use of ID3 tags, something that iTunes still hasn’t quite mastered.

Obviously, many of the afore mentioned features are not that high on the wishlists of most iTunes users, but it would be nice to see some more features, and support for traditional conventions – I’m talking about those freaking tags, Apple!

Performance:

Considering what is does, iTunes is simply dog slow. The speed of iTunes, or rather the sheer lack of any decent speed, is probably the single most wide-spread complaint about iTunes. Practically everything about iTunes is dreadfully slow; everything from resizing the GUI, to simply browsing a small playlist, (100 songs, or so). Performance while downloading podcasts is just as ghastly. Why the hell does it often require 100% of my computing power to process a few packets coming in from the net?

And then there’s that crappy “novelty” called Cover Flow – I don’t think it could be any slower if they tried. I must admit that I love the way it looks and feels on a high end machine, but for my Windows box its nothing more than a misguided tease. iTunes (along with Quicktime) really make we want to get to the nearest Apple store so that I can buy more wonderful Apple software – note the wonderful sarcasm!

I’m not trying to advertise Winamp here, but at least Nullsoft knows how to make their software compatible with the widest range of possible hardware. Under the “Preference” menu in Winamp, there is a useful feature called “Priority Class,” which allows you to set the processing priority of the application, much like you can do with the trusty three fingered salute (Crtl + Alt + Del). This way, you won’t have to worry (as much) about the music skipping when the processor pegs.

Popularity:

What I hate the most about iTunes is probably its popularity, and the consequences that such esteem tends to create. Considering that Apple only has about 5% (or something close to that) of the personal computer market, the success of the iPod and iTunes is truly a respectable accomplishment worthy of due praise and applause. Nevertheless, saturating the market with a single product, a piece of software in the case, is detrimental to the market as a cohesive whole.

The popularity of iTunes has effectively backed the music media player market into a corner; iTunes is so successful, (in the eyes of the masses, at any rate), that practically no one has the desire or ability to introduce something else. And if no one can effectively introduce anything else, no one is going to develop and market anything else. This creates a real problem for that small percentage of users who hate iTunes for whatever reason, because there simply isn’t anything else that has had enough backing and development to beat the offending software. iTunes might very well work and fit the needs of the majority perfectly, but, contrary to that ridiculous statement, one size does not fit all…

Audio Controls and Quality:

Since iTunes runs on personal computers (Macs included, of course), I would assume that most people listen to the music in their libraries via their cheap, probably Chinese-made computer speakers, or through their similarly inferior headphones. If that is truly the case, than this next complaint might only apply to a very small niche who use their computer as a dedicated audio source.

If you happen to have a high-end sound card and a pair of proper headphones, and you really know what the music that you listen to is supposed to sound like, then you may have already noticed this, but iTunes doesn’t perform the best decoding and signal processing. Now, don’t get me wrong, iTunes is pretty decent when it comes to this stuff, but for a program meant to do little else, it does have its shortcomings. Part of the problem might be that iTunes performs Windows kernel mixing before it sends the audio out to the sound card; in other words, there is no way to get the most out of your sound card with iTunes. Once again, thank you, Apple!

Playing back audio is one part where Apple’s simplicity really hurts. Some buttons are tripled-up on features (play, pause and stop are all the same button) and dependent on the users location within the program. For example, you have to be in the playlist that the song is in to be able to pause, otherwise you can only stop. Then there’s the equalizer. It’s far too limited and basic to properly tune the music to a particular speaker or headphone setup – but, to be honest, I have this complaint of almost all equalizers.

When I purchased a few songs off of the iTunes Music Store and listened to them, I noticed that they didn’t quite sound right. I could hear compression artifacts in some of the more unpredictable parts of the song. This wasn’t just one song, it was pretty much the entire album. I don’t know if iTunes was used to get the music from the original CD onto the store, but if it was then it’s pretty darn bad at ripping music as well.

My experience with the Store certainly does not speak well of the service, considering that it’s DRM “protected” and cost me close to a whole dollar per poorly-encoded song. If you’re looking for a real audio-only player and ripper, check out Foobar2000 and dbPowerAmp. They may not be as user-friendly, but the sound they produce is definitely a lot better.

Stability:

I wouldn’t have a problem with iTunes if only it would work right. With every subsequent version, iTunes has gotten more and more unstable and it has gotten to the point where I have completely abandoned it out of frustration.

No matter what I tried to do, iTunes (version 7.xx) kept informing me that the iTunes library file couldn’t be saved. When this problem first started popping up, I didn’t really think too much of it, because I could usually just hit “OK” and nothing would be affected; it would continue working properly. A few weeks ago, that changed. Whenever I got that error message, iTunes would either corrupt the library file to such an extent that it was no longer readable, or it would delete that songs from the playlist. And then, as if I wasn’t frustrated enough already, I discovered that whenever I closed iTunes and tried to restart it, I’ll would be informed that critical files were missing and that I’d have to re-install the software – which did absolutely nothing!

Another problem I frequently run into is having my downloads spontaneously stop, and it doesn’t matter whether I’m downloading a podcast or a song off of the iTunes Music Store. The problem seems to be most prevalent whenever I’m downloading more than one song or podcast at a time. I’ve had a few cases where I’ve had to restart a download five or six times before it finally did it right.

FLAC Support:

MP3 is definitely the dominate audio codec out there, and Apple whole-heartedly embraces it, so no complaints there. However, there is more to the world of audio than just lossy MP3’s. Again, if all you use to listen to music with are cheap desktop speakers and headphones, you probably won’t have a problem. For those of us who happen to be more selective about the quality and accurate representation of the music that we listen to, MP3’s, especially those encoded at lower bit rates, simply won’t cut it. Or even if you’re satisfied with the high-bitrate MP3’s, there might very well be another reason for wanting support for better, lossless codecs.

“What are you talking about? iTunes has a lossless format; it’s called Apple Lossless!”

Correct, and I’m not going to argue that I can hear the difference between a lossless encoding and the original source, because I can’t. I would, however, like for there to be support for FLAC – the Free Lossless Audio Codec. If I’m going to make the permanent switch from CD’s to the realm of intangible media, I would want to make sure that everything on the source medium is transferred perfectly to a format that is open, non-proprietary, and not dependent on the continued survival of a single company.

Adding support for FLAC shouldn’t cost Apple a lot, except maybe a little development time and possibly their stubbornness. The codec is free and open, so come on, Apple!

DRM:

What list wouldn’t be complete without this complaint. Granted, this grievance one that can be thrown at almost any online music store in existence, but that doesn’t change the fact that DRM is really annoying. What makes it all the more frustrating is probably the fact that it doesn’t even work! If you’re going to implement a system to prevent piracy then, please, make sure it actually works and doesn’t just hinder the honest user.

iTunes Music Store:

And then there’s that wonderful feature called the iTunes Muss Store – note the sarcasm…

First of all, the Music Store is incredibly slow; it takes ages for it to load pages, which makes browsing the store really tedious in my opinion.

iTunes seems to have become a propaganda tool for getting people to waste their money on poorly ripped, poorly encoded, DRM-ed music – yes, I know that there is DRM-free music available for a premium. A new installation of iTunes, for example, will by default have the MiniStore feature activated and ready to sell you albums. This is just obtrusive and annoying.

I had never given the iTunes Music Store a go until recently. A few weeks ago, I received an iTunes gift card, and figured, “What the hell, might as well try it.” Not exactly the greatest of experiences. I downloaded the album “Best of Van Halen, Vol. 1,” which contained Eddie’s signature riff, entitled “Eruption.” This was one of the few tracks that I already owned on another CD and that I had ripped to FLAC, a lossless codec. Playing the purchased track in iTunes, I noticed that something was, well, off. I didn’t sound all that pleasant, and I was noticing compression artifacts that seemed foreign to me. Using Foobar2000, I compared the FLAC version and the iTunes version, and sure enough, the artifacts were only present in the AAC iTunes rip. For the same price ($9.99), I’d rather wait for the CD to arrive from Amazon.com, and rip it myself. I guess that old saying does have some merit; if you want it done right, you’ve gotta do it yourself.

Obviously, the complaint above only reflects my experiences with a single album (of 17 songs), and perhaps other albums are better encoded…

Podcasting:

Let’s be perfectly clear on this: Apple did not create “podcasting.” It has absolutely nothing to do with Apple, their iPods, or iTunes! So why the hell is the word “pod” in there at all?

According to the etymology of the word as presented by Webster’s New Millenium Dictionary of English, the word is a derivation of “iPod + broadcast.” Okay, fine, I can live with that; but it does create a few problems. First of all, for all the novices out there, the word will immediately be associated with Apple and iTunes. Whether this naming was accidental or deliberate is irrelevant; what does matter, however, is the implication. I’m sure that we’ve all come across few people who, when asked if they listen to podcasts, say “No, I don’t have an iPod.”

The problem is only exacerbated with the podcast haven that is the “Podcast Directory,” part of the iTunes Music Store. In truth, this grievance really only exists because of Apple’s (well deserved, I must admit) success. Too many people rely on iTunes as the source of their podcasts, and, unfortunately, not all podcasts have found their way onto iTunes.

As noted by Leo Laporte, a well-known podcaster himself, iTunes is both the greatest thing to have ever happened to podcasting and the worst. Without iTunes, podcasting might never have gotten as big as it currently is, but precisely because of it, too many feel that their podcasts can only be judged by their presence and rank within The Directory.

Quicktime:

At first glance you might say that this complaint is merely a filler, created so that I can reach the nice, round number of ten. Well, you might be right, but consider the following. The iTunes installation package includes Quicktime, the video/audio codec engine that iTunes relies on to play any and all content. Because of this integration, and the subsequent necessity of having to bundle these two programs together, I think this complaint is merited.

I dislike Quicktime almost as much as I dislike iTunes, and pretty much for the same reasons: it lacks features, codec support, and it’s unbelievably slow. I may not be running the fastest machine available, but my 2.0Ghz Athlon should be more than adequate to play back an H.264 encoded video at a smooth framerate. Before anyone points out that H.264 is resource intensive and that this performance issue is normal on a machine like mine, let me point out that VLC has no trouble performing the same feat. Trying to watch a 720p trailer from Apple.com/trailers using Quicktime is an absolute nightmare. What I end up having to do every time is saving the H.264 file, so that I can play it back in VLC. I’d be lucky to attain even 10 frames per second with Quicktime without that stupid player skipping in a desperate attempt to keep it all in sync. VLC can play the same trailers without ever dipping below the desired framerates. Quicktime, much like iTunes, is dreadfully inefficient. It’s absolutely horrible – a complete joke.

And since Quicktime is so deeply integrated into iTunes, trying to watch even a low definition podcast is almost always unpleasant, and at times downright torturous.

Trying to substitute iTunes:

It’s actually surprisingly hard. I may not be the biggest fan of iTunes, but it certainly serves a purpose. It’s hard to find another program that can do decent audio playback and podcasting in a simple and comprehensive fashion.

I currently use dbPoweramp to accurately rip CD’s, Winamp to listen to my (FLAC encoded) music, and iTunes for podcasts. Winamp is far more stable than version 7.xx of iTunes, and sounds slightly better as well, but for podcasts there really is no alternative. So, in short, if you really want to replace all of iTunes, I can only wish you the best of luck!

BitTorrent recently joined the ranks of companies trying to rent and sell legal movies and shows online. On Monday, the 26^th of January, the service became available to the public, but, unfortunately, it doesn’t look too promising.

The plan is to offer movie rentals, which after purchase suffer from a 30 day download window before the user has to pay again. Upon completion of the download, the customer has 24 hours to watch the movie after he or she first clicks play. Besides full length features, the service will also be offering TV shows from a variety of mediocre broadcasters such as Fox, FX, G4, Nickelodeon, Speed, Spike, as well as from a few others. These shows will not expire, but, lo and behold, can only be viewed on a maximum of two computers. The movie rentals currently cost anywhere from $2.99 to $3.99, and the asking price for a TV show is set at $1.99.

Now, this all sounds really great, but why should the casual pirate be persuaded to hop over to the legal side of the fence, when all the material that he or she could possibly desire is at least just as readily available for free on the very same P2P network as the legal stuff? At this point there are actually more users sharing the illegal rips than the legal alternative. Not only are people being asked to pay for DRMed material that requires the use of Windows Media Player to be played, the content is currently only available to those within the US. International customers get nothing – except for the free alternative that is…

There are several problems with this service as it stands right now. First off, it’s DRMed! This whole notion of wanting to protect digital content might work for the average consumer, but this makes absolutely no sense whatsoever for the experienced BitTorrent user. Chances are that if you are familiar with BitTorrent and use it on a regular basis, then you probably know plenty of places that offer the content that you want without the restrictions, for free, and possibly even at a better quality.

Secondly, where is the incentive to actually share this content? You pay for the material, you download it, watch it, and then what? If you’re an average consumer who has never used BitTorrent before, then you’ll probably just shut down your torrenting application and that’ll be that. Computer novices will simply not appreciate the beauty of the sharing system as originally set up by Cohen. The average consumer will regard this BitTorrent service as just another distribution medium, without any regard for how it works, and the importance of keeping the files so that they can be seeded.

Apropos seeding, what happens when the DRM kicks in? The movie files will essentially kill themselves, and then there will be absolutely no reason whatsoever for the end user to keep that file. The user will delete the movie, and the sharing of that file will undoubtedly go with it.

So, what if you do understand how BitTorrent works, and want to share with the rest of the paying community? Is it worth it? After all, you’ve already paid for the movie, and now the expectation is that you’ll share a DRM-ridden file over your overpriced bandwidth. By the end of it all, you’ll have paid more than the original asking price of the movie. Surely, it’s only equitable and fair towards the community as a whole, so why not share? The problem is that the sharing concept was crippled as soon as movie industry decided to prevent us from sharing with their digital rights management systems. As iron as it is, if everyone does what the industry supposedly wants us to do, which is not share, then this system will fail.

Assuming that people will support this system, it works out great for the movie and distribution companies; they pay a little at the beginning of each new release to get the seeding process going and after that the community will be paying for all of the rest, and in the meantime the companies rake in all the money.

In order for this to actually succeed, there needs to be an incentive to share. For example, a price cut based on your overall download to upload ratio. Let’s say that you have uploaded twice as much as you have downloaded, wouldn’t it be more than fair if you were rewarded for this by paying less than those who merely leech? Too bad it’ll never happen. This entire concept probably looked golden on paper, but I doubt that it will have a lot of appeal to new or existing BitTorrent users.

Out with the Old, in with the New

It’s been quite a while since we’ve seen a major update for either Microsoft’s Internet Explorer or Mozilla’s Firefox. In fact, the previous version of Internet Explorer came out just before Windows XP, back in August of 2001. Likewise, Mozilla’s last major update to their browser wasn’t very recent either; version 1.5 can out slightly more than a year ago. So, now that the next version of these popular browsers are out, you might be wondering if the wait was worth it, or not? So, without further ado, here’s how they compare:

Installation:

As far as installation goes, installing Internet Explorer is quite a task. The installer recommends that all of the currently running applications be closed—a warning taking lightly by many, including myself, that really ought to be following for once. As part of the Windows Genuine (Dis)Advantage program, the installer will then check your system to ensure that you are really running a “genuine,” or legal, copy of the operating system. After all of that pans out, there is a lengthy install procedure, concluded by an annoying request to restart your machine. One of the reasons that Internet Explorer isn’t that easy to install is its deep involvement with the kernel of the operating system. Ever since version 4, back in 1997, Internet Explorer has been an important part of the file management system.

Firefox, however, is far less involved in the more trivial functions of the operating system, resulting in a much easier installation experience. After a quick download, the browser installs with minimal requirements: it will only ask for the previous version of Firefox to be closed down. It will then scan for compatible version of any plug-ins that you might be using, and will notify you of the search results, allowing you to immediately install any compatible plug-ins. Additionally, there is no restart request at the end of the procedure; simply hit finish, open the browser and surf away.

Initial Impression

Both browsers look pretty good from a visual standpoint, although the Internet Explorer interface may take more getting used to than that of Firefox. Probably because it’s such a departure from what you may have come to expect from Internet Explorer over the years. After using it for a few hours, I couldn’t help feel like Internet Explorer 7 was desperate to catch-up with other more modern browsers like Firefox and Opera in terms of presentation.

Apart from the drastically different visuals, what stands out immediately in Internet Explorer 7 is the addition of tabbed browsing, which has almost come to represent a right of passage for this generation of browsers. Microsoft’s approach is very similar to that of Firefox and Opera, with the exception of a new feature called “Quicktabs,” which provides the user with a thumbnail view of all of the open tabs for easier selection. It’s similar to Opera’s thumbnails, which appear when the user hovers over the tabs with the cursor, but Quicktabs feels more refined.

Firefox already had tabbed browsing in its previous version, so its developers had plenty of opportunity to listen to the feedback it got from the existing tabbed interface, and they clearly listened. Each tab now has its own close button and for those power-users out there who like have more tabs open than ideally fit in the window, Firefox will now let you scroll left and right through the tabs, without making the tabs unidentifiably small. Not only is Firefox slightly easier to navigate, it also offers a ton of extensions for its users, which Internet Explorer currently doesn’t, but might very well in the future. There are also a ton of themes to choice from, which gives it another leg up on its main rival for those users seeking to customize their web experience.

Features & Usability

Internet Explorer 7 is a major leap forward compared to its predecessors. It includes tabbed browsing, better security, a slicker feel, and improved usability. The mark of a good, modern browser these days seems to have become its support and handling of RSS feeds, and in Internet Explorer that feature is pretty fleshed out. That’s to say that the RSS feed system is actually pretty decent. Microsoft has made it easy to see, sort, manage, and, of course, read feeds. The overall organization of the feed system in Internet Explorer is slightly better, but the feed detection isn’t always consistent, and for those of us used to Firefox, the iconic RSS symbol is not located in the address bar, but in the tool bar, among the rest of those trivial browsing functions.

Another nice feature that Internet Explorer 7 has over Firefox 2 is the afore mentioned “Quicktabs” feature. This allows a user who has a bunch of tabs open to display all the open tabs as thumbnails in a scrollable page. This feature may seem quite pointless, until you’ve opened up about twenty tabs and can’t remember what websites display. Quicktabs can be opened with via a keyboard shortcut (CTR + Q), or using an icon to the left of the tabs. Once open, the thumbnails are big and clear, and clicking on them will bring up the respective tab.

Firefox 2 feels pretty much the same as its first iteration, so the impact of the new features isn’t as pronounced as with Internet Explorer 7. Firefox doesn’t have anything like Quicktabs, but instead features some neat improvements to the tabbing system. The tab closing icon is now no longer only present on the right hand side of the browser, but in every single tab, making it easier to close down a specific tab. However, this feature is pretty pointless to any advanced Firefox user who might prefer to use the middle mouse button to open up tabs and close them.

One of the most noticeable new features is probably the in-line term suggestion when using the built-in search box. You can now type in a search term and the browser will automatically drop down a list of searches that you might want to perform. Unfortunately, this feature is not supported by all the search engines. It works fine when searching for something with Google, but with Wikipedia, for example, nothing is suggested—having the feature work with Wikipedia might have been more useful than Google, but that’s just my two cents.

Performance

This is one area that is often times hard to gauge without doing a series of benchmarks, so be prepared to take this with a grain of salt. It would seem that Firefox is still the faster browser, with Internet Explorer being only slightly more lethargic. One plus for Internet Explorer, however, is that the main code used to display the pages seems to be the same, meaning that since most pages are designed with IE in mind, the chance that you’ll encounter a page that will not display right in Internet Explorer is extremely small. Due to the afore mentioned reason though, Firefox users will still encounter an occasional page that simply will not render right; it might overlap text with images, or frame a page incorrectly, and then there is that extremely small percentage of pages that simply will not display at all with Firefox, due to ActiveX requirements.

Flexibility

Now, the winner in this category should not come as a surprise to anyone. Firefox is well-known for its plug-in expandability. The selection of plug-ins for Firefox is almost endless; if you can think of it, it exists. There are plug-ins that will allow you to save your browsing sessions (much like in Opera), to takes notes on screen, to open instances of Internet Explorer in a new tab (for those rare pages that won’t load in Firefox), and there is even an extension similar to Quicktabs.

This expandability simply doesn’t exist in Internet Explorer as of yet, and the question to be asked is: should it? With its rough history of security oversights and exploits, it might not be such a great idea to be installing third party plug-ins left and right, as you never know what backdoors they might open into your system—this caveat extends to Firefox as well.

Security

No browser is perfect, and these two are no exceptions. Even though both Firefox and Internet Explorer have incorporated a plethora of security innovations, the safety of the end user is still heavily dependent of surfing habits, which no browser can protect you from.

That being said, Microsoft has taken tremendous steps towards improving the security of its browser. Using a color coded address bar, Internet Explorer will warn users when it thinks they are on a potentially harmful site. Each URL that is visited is checked against a blacklist of known malicious sites, and the address bar will then turn red if such sites are found. The opposite is also true for trusted sites. The browser’s address bar will turn green when it encounters a secure, trusted page.

One of the biggest drawbacks to using Internet Explorer is that it is the world’s most dominate browser, meaning that the vast majority of exploits, viruses, spyware and attacks are aimed at Internet Explorer as opposed to something more minor, like Firefox or Opera. This fact in and of itself is one of the things that helps protect the users of Firefox, Opera, Safari and so on: they make up a smaller segment of the user group, making it harder (but, definitely not impossible) for a hack to yield results.

And the winner is…

…still Firefox. Although Microsoft has made a very commendable effort with Internet Explorer 7, Firefox 2 still remains the leader of the pack. Comparing the sheer number of changes and improvements to prior versions, Internet Explorer would win hands down. However, in overall usability and functionality Firefox takes the crown.

Complete, Annotated List of New Features

Internet Explorer:

Better Security:

• IE is no longer integrated into the Windows Explorer shell, used to browse local content.
• For Windows Vista, there is a so-called “protected mode,” allowing the user to run the browser in a sandbox environment, so that its interactions with the main system are severely limited.
• “Anti-spoofing” protection of International Domain Names (IDN), intended to prevent phishing scams.
• ActiveX Opt-In, intended to block ActiveX controls unless allowed to run/install.
• “Phishing Filter,” if enabled, checks the visited URLs against a phishing blacklist so that the user can be informed of known hazards.
• One-click “Delete Browser History” designed to allow for easy history deletion. Will afford public computer users more privacy and security.
• “Fix My Settings” makes sure that the selected settings for the browser conform to the desires security levels, if not the user is informed. The user can also press a single button to make the settings safe(r).
• The address bar along with the status bar now appear in all windows, including pop-ups, disallow the disguising of malicious sites as trusted sites (as if often done in phishing scams).
• The address bar is now color coded, so that it will highlight the URLs of suspicious sites in red. Sites with security verification, certificates, etc will be highlighted in green.
• “No Add-ons” allows IE to be launched without any extensions.
• For Vista users, IE7 will support cipher strengths of up to 256-bit (as opposed to the 128-bit for XP).

Improved Usability:

• IE7 now supports tabbed-browsing as well. There is also a “Quick Tabs” feature, which will display thumbnails of the tabs to allow for quick selection.
• A search box has been added to the top-right of the browser. Windows Live Search is the default selection, but there is an option to add other search engines/services, like Google, Yahoo, Wikipedia, etc.).
• A feed reader has been included for users to aggregate their web feeds such as RSS or Atom.
• When printing, the right-hand portion of the page is no longer cut off on certain pages.
• Print preview will allow users to adjust the margins and print size in real-time.
• The “Zoom” feature will enlarge the complete page, allowing for easier reading on high resolution displays.
• The “Refresh” and “Go” buttons are now one. When entering a URL the button will feature the “Go” function, and when enter is pressed to load the site, it will change to “Refresh.”
• The menu bar can be hidden from view to increase the amount of screen real-estate for to the site.

Firefox 2:

Improved Security:

• Unlike Internet Explorer, Firefox had done security right from the beginning, and as such this section will be very short.

• “Phishing Protection,” which is designed to warn users about potentially threatening websites. This feature is based on the same concept as that of IE 7, it will check the sites against a list of known phishing sites. The list will be updated regularly to offer the best protection possible.

• The extension system has now been improved to provide better security awareness and allows for easier location of additional add-ons.

Improved Usability

• Firefox 2 now features better search capabilities when using the inline search box. Term suggestion will now appear whenever Google, Yahoo, or Answers.com is used. Additionally, it will now alert the user whenever it comes across a new search engine that the user might want to include in the list of search engines.
• Tabbed browsing has been improved. Each link will now open in a new tab, as opposed to a new window as was previously the case.
• The history feature will now keep track of recently closed tabs so that a user can re-open a closed tab with minimal hassle.
• The browser now also supports a session saver, that will reload windows, tabs, text, and in-progress downloads after the browser has been closed and re-opened, a feature introduced by Opera.
• Improved feed handling will now allow users to decide how to handle their feeds. My Yahoo, Bloglines, and Google Reader are now pre-installed as Web service options.
• Inline spell checking will enable users to check their spelling when entering in data in any text form, without having to export their data to a word processor.
• Web sites that feature micro-summaries can now be bookmarked so that their bookmark information will remain as up to date as possible.
• An improved add-ons manager makes it easier for users to manage their existing extensions as well as adding new ones.
• Firefox now supports JavaScript 1.7, which includes features such as generators, iterators, let expressions, to name a few.
• The Windows installer has also been updated to make the installation process even easier.