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My iPod has one redeeming factor: its storage capacity. At 80 GBytes, I can actually have all of my music on it. But I won't buy another iPod if this one breaks. The reasons are:

1. I don't like iTunes. It doesn't run on Linux, and even if it did, I'd probably want to use something else because of its poor user interface and slowness. (I use Amarok instead, but it won't install firmware updates.)
   
2. My iPod crashes regularly. I can't just reset it according to Apple's instructions; I actually have to let it sit for a while and try several times until finally I'm lucky enough to reset it.
3. When I turn it on and start playing a song, the controls are rendered useless for about half a minute while the song plays. The song will occasionally pause, too.
4. Apparently even minor MP3 stream corruptions will cause the iPod to skip the song rather than fast-forward to the next usable MP3 frame.
5. Apple's proprietary formats might offer a reasonable quality, but I'm strongly opposed to proprietary formats.

I don't know which music player I will be purchasing next, but I'm convinced it won't be made by Apple.

Like Windows XP and 2000, and the Windows versions of a decade ago, Windows Vista came on the market and seemed strangely beta-like, and keeping tradition, Vista has placed so tall demands on the computer's hardware that your computer would be slowed to a crawl unless it sported an unreasonable amount of RAM and graphics acceleration.

Many users have been either too annoyed by Vista's so-called user-friendliness or its poor hardware utilization that they have been tempted to downgrade to Windows XP, even if their newly purchased PC was still state of the art and well above the minimum requirements cited by Microsoft.

And were they in for a surprise, especially if they had bought a notebook computer. They would soon realize that no XP compatible drivers were available for the brand new network chip, graphics card, or sound chip. Some had luck finding back-ported drivers on the web, but many were forced to reinstall Vista on their computer.

The reason is obvious: notebook vendors have an incentive to use hardware that works only together with Windows Vista, because today it's hard to find a computer that doesn't include a pre-installed version of Vista. It would only imply increased costs if the hardware vendors had to develop drivers for XP as well.

If one were to divide the time spent creating a document or otherwise operating the computer into different activites, operating the mouse would probably not score high, as much as we feel we use the mouse.

The mouse is nonetheless a nuisance to those of us who prefer to rest our hands on the keyboard as we type. Having to maneuvering the damn rodent around in order to, say, emphasize a word is perhaps easy on the memory, but it means you have to move your hand off the keyboard, onto the mouse, moving the mouse pointer to wherever it must be, marking the word, and then either finding the formatting option in a menu or in a toolbar.

I miss the days of WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS, which certainly had its shortcomings, but many of the often-used sequences were quickly built into our "hand memory," and any special mark-ups or changes was a question of pressing the 'F' and number keys in an appropriate order. It was somewhat user hostily for its non-intuitive approach, but mouse pains were unheard of, and using the keyboard was many times faster than today's mouse operations.

Dontclik.it also thinks that clicking around is a nuisance, and proposes a use of the mouse that eliminates the need for clicking. The flash interface on dontclick.it illustrates the concept neatly. The method is a combination of focus-following and mouse gestures.

Focus-following is well-known by seasoned Unix users since the early 1990es, and is a feature provided by the window manager where you simply hover the mouse above a window or entry field where you want your mouse or keyboard focus to be.

Mouse gestures, like focus-following, are also known on the most popular Linux desktops albeit perhaps less used. Mouse gestures is a technique where a certain motion of the mouse corresponds to a certain action. For example, a swift down motion of the mouse followed by an up motion might correspond to minimizing the window. Dontclick.it suggests that instead of clicking a button, you circle around it with the mouse, indicating that you want this button activated.

Unfortunately, the approach doesn't eliminate the mouse. I do mind clicking, but that's a lesser mouse evil. What I really hate about the mouse is having to take my hands off the keyboard, books, og whatever I'm using and use my hand for maneuvering the damn rodent around. Dontclick.it may solve the clicking part of using the mouse, but it still advocates using the mouse, offering no end of carpal tunnel syndromes caused by repetitive mouse usage.

What's worse, replacing a click with a circular movement of the mouse obviously means you can rest your index finger, but at the cost of making a circular movement that requires even more motion of your arm and hand. I'm afraid if this concept were to replace the conventional use of the mouse, pains related to mouse use would increase, and I don't see how the circular movement can somehow be faster or easier on the hand than a simple click.

You may have seen biometric recognition products such as Microsoft's fingerprint reader, which remembers your passwords for you and inserts the appropriate passwords in the appropriate password fields when you visit a web page.

I returned Microsoft's fingerprint reader to the store the next day after learning the hard way that it worked only with Microsoft's Internet Explorer which I had long since replaced with Firefox, and after learning that it remembered the Windows login password for domain logons only.

Many other products feature biometric recognition. For example, Lenovo's T-series ThinkPad notebooks include a built-in fingerprint reader that helps remember passwords.

Certainly it's easier to tap the fingerprint reader instead of maneuvering the cursor to the password box and remembering and subsequently entering the password. Well, that's unless you consider trust your browser's browser password storage security with remembering the passwords for your various web pages, in which case your browser automatically inserts your user name and password for you, eliminating the need to either type the password nor tap the biometric reader. At least Firefox can do that; I'm not sure whether Internet Explorer can do it.

Still, you may not want your browser to do that, say, if occasionally you leave your computer while logged in and don't want to risk having others sneak up and visit one of your password-protected pages.

Perhaps the fingerprint recognition is a secure and convenient solution in some situations.

I'd agree on the convenience, but as security guru Bruce Schneier once said, if you think technology will solve your security problems, then you don't know about technology and you don't understand security. If you think biometric recognition is safe, perhaps it's time to think again.

I'm not talking about flaws in the accompanying software, which (true to Microsoft tradition, one might add) does appear to contain serious security holes according to Wikipedia, but about trusting that your fingerprint will remain your own personal property.

This YouTube video demonstrates how you can easily copy someone else's fingerprint and use it on the fingerprint recognition device that he or she is using to load passwords. The audio track is in German, and I haven't been able to locate a similar video with English audio or captions. However, with a little explanation I think it's reasonably straight-forward to follow what's going on:

The video shows a member of the German computer club "Kaos," which has experimented with security issues for years. To successfully copy someone's fingerprint for use in a biometric sensor, you need:

• The lid from a plastic bottle
• Superglue (the kind that glues within seconds)
• A digital camera
• Hobby glue (for gluing wood and such)
• Skin friendly cosmetic glue
• A computer with an image processing program
• A regular office printer that can print on transparents.
• A sheet of plastic transparent.

They narrator assumes that the user whose fingerprint is to be copied has already configured his computer to use a mouse with a built-in fingerprint biometric sensor. The user uses this mouse to enter passwords by simply touching the sensor on the mouse, just as intended.

The user's fingerprint is found on a bottle that the user has touched. This could be any smooth surface that the user has touched, of course.

The narrator applies a few drops of superglue in the lid from the plastic bottle and presses it against the fingerprint left on the bottle. The superglue leaves a visible white pattern on the fingerprint when the plastic lid is removed, and the narrator takes a picture of it with his digital camera.

Next, the narrator transfers the image from the camera to the computer and cleans it of irregularities. The size is also adjusted to match that of the original fingerprint. The narrator then prints the image onto a sheet of transparent.

The printer ink leaves a three-dimensional structure, which is covered by the hobby glue. When the glue has dried, it can be removed from the plastic transparent, since the glue won't stick well to the smooth plastic. The glue is now a copy of the user's fingerprint.

The glue fingerprint is cut into an appropriate size and glued to the imposter's finger with cosmetic glue.

The fingerprint copy can now be used on the computer mouse, and voila: the fingerprint copy is recognized as the user's own printerprint.

"Kaos" demonstrates that copying a fingerprint is so easy that in practice you'll be leaving the biometric equivalent of yellow notes with your password written down on them everywhere. With biometric recognition finding its way into our daily lives and being hyped as much more secure than simple experiments disprove, perhaps it will soon be glove season all year as people realize that they leave their passwords on anything they touch.