Zen Monthly Newsletter

From today, Zen Internet will be providing more help when you might need it most. Recently expanded technical support coverage means helpline response services will be available for 12 hours per day - between 8am and 8pm, Monday to Friday. A full team of qualified advisers will also be on duty from 9am to 5pm every Saturday.

Microsoft has created a new guide to allay fears for those who are deploying XP Service Pack 2. According to the Web site, the Application Compatibility Testing and Mitigation Guide for Windows XP Service Pack 2 "will assist IT professionals to test and mitigate application compatibility issues" for the more stringent security technology. The document covers the new security settings, application testing processes, incompatibility symptoms and various "mitigation techniques".

Broadband is down in price. Services costing less than £20 per month are not hard to find. But it pays to read the small print before you sign anything. Some of the most attractive-looking low price deals may not be all they seem. You could end up paying more than you bargained for if you use your new connection outside limits set by the provider. Zen Internet's lowest price service is only £17 per month (plus VAT) and there are no hard-to-spot disadvantages hidden in the fine print. There are no limits on use, you get everything you pay for, and Zen guarantees no contention on its network. Uncompromised service with bandwidth investment that stays ahead of customer demand is the continuing Zen philosophy - it's the only way to deliver performance that provides full-strength Internet enjoyment.

BBC Worldwide recently launched its Motion Gallery Web site that has 10,000 movie clips to start with and many more on the way with BBC and CBS News archives containing half a billion feet of film and 350,000 hours of video waiting to be added in coming months. If professionals find something in the online archives they would like to use, they have to pay, but you can watch the clips, and even download them, free of charge for personal use.

Computer scientist Michael Cohen has turned his daughter into a cartoon character using animation software designed to transform home videos into Disney-style cartoon footage. "It's not a consumer level product yet, more of a professional one to speed up the filmmaker's production process" says Cohen, but his development team at Microsoft Research in Washington is working on making it faster and easier so that it can be used on the average home PC. You can see it working here:

In an ultra competitive age when winning is everything, one Canadian blogger decided to give all the Athens Olympians who finished last in their events some time in the spotlight. Greece won the last-place games, with 13 athletes beaten by the rest.

Big brands are snubbing rising TV advertising costs and turning to the Web. The Internet audience is getting bigger and broader just as the TV audience is becoming more fragmented and extra expensive. Broadband is making viewing TV-like ads online a struggle-free experience and suddenly brand builders have a new mass audience to target. Unicast Communications in New York are driving the switch from TV with new systems that allow video ads to load quickly and run smoothly, regardless of the end user's connection. The technology is being used in some 90 campaigns on sites including ESPN.com and Reuters.

After almost 40 years, America's best known alternative newspaper, the New York based Village Voice, has been forced to lay off long-serving editorial staff as it moves from its traditional focus on weekly production to the "daily electronic journalism" of the Web. Publisher Judy Miszner said that advertising taken for the printed journal "could be better" and that the layoffs are an "ongoing thing, relative to changes in how our audience looks for information".

Seatle's Post-Intelligencer newspaper, often first to report what's new at the nearby Microsoft campus, is wondering if its online and print ad sales are under threat from its neighbours after MSN tied up with NBC to get into the classifieds business. The new MSNBC online classifieds site lets users search employment, real estate, personals, merchandise, and other types of listings from eBay, cars.com and Match.com - a dating site where "someone special is waiting for you".

Will the big cat spook the herd and start a stampede? Apple's new operating system, Tiger, is set for release more than a year before Longhorn, the next version of Windows, according to Mac marketeers. "I'm not sure anyone knows when Longhorn is coming, but Tiger will be ready before it", said Phil Schiller, senior vice president of worldwide product marketing, claiming that the latest features would be available more than a year before Microsoft will match them. The new OS is due for release early in 2005 and will include 'Spotlight' built-in search facilities and extra support for rich media content with the introduction of the latest MPEG standard, H.264, allowing users to view and manipulate high-definition content at up to four times the resolution of current systems.

PC Pro magazine's annual review of PC retailers, box shifters and Internet-related service providers is nearing completion. The voting booths close in five days. If you have experiences to share and brickbats or accolades to add - or you just want to win one of the prizes for taking part (a new PC, laptop or MP3 player) - now's the time.

"I've been pretty happy with the old 27-inch TV in the living room", Dan Tynan, the Gadget Freak, tells us, "and I'm resisting the move to digital. The thing works; the picture's fine; and I really don't want to hassle with a new technology or fiddle with another hundred cables to make things work. I know you'll think I'm just getting old; I think I'm just getting smarter". But now, says Dan, the entertainment giants are fretting over older HDTVs because they allow you to copy programmes to VCR, digitise the results, and share them online. The thought of widespread, Napster-like, sharing of movies has Hollywood worried. Studios are insisting that all new digital-cable-ready TVs and set-top devices must have copy-protected FireWire or Digital Video Interface ports. The Home Recording Rights Coalition - www.hrrc.org - has other ideas.

Thanks to Raza Hussain for spotting a remark made by President Bush at the signing of the Defense Appropriations Act for Fiscal Year 2005, as reported on the official White House Web site: "Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we". Not even 'CJ' Cregg could put a positive spin on that.

Do you put an initial capital letter on "Internet", or the related words "Net" and "Web"? This may seem a fussy, not to say pedantic, question. But it's one that copy editors and those charged with creating the house styles for publishers and others must answer in order to create text that looks consistent, avoids annoying or confusing readers, and demonstrates that it forms part of a unified publication, whoever wrote the words. The question made headlines recently because Wired magazine, the house magazine of Net geeks, announced it would begin writing all three words without capitalisation. "Why?", wrote Tony Long, the copy chief: "The simple answer is because there is no earthly reason to capitalize any of these words. Actually, there never was." The simple reply, Tony, is: That's not true. The all lower-case word was first seen in the late 1960s, when a US Department of Defense project called ARPAnet linked its computer networks and created an "inter-network", or "internet". The latter word became commonplace in the 1970s, by which time there were many internets, as there are today. In the 1980s, a unique entity - the Internet - was developed for public access. It's still here and it's still one of a kind. "Internet" is to "internet" as "Earth" is to "earth" and "Web" is to "web". Generally speaking, if there's just one of something, its title is a proper noun and we capitalise it; if there isn't, we don't.

If you have a digital camera and are missing the quality of the 'old fashioned' prints that you used to get from film, or the prospect of fireside evenings re-living summer holidays with your trusty slide projector, Fotoserve.com may have the solution you're looking for. Fotoserve combine "fanatical attention to detail" with the latest Agfa lab equipment and materials to produce unusually high quality slides and prints with high resolution images and accurate colours beyond the capabilities of desktop printers. It's an easy to use Web-based service and we have secured a 15% discount for newsletter readers who want to give it a try.

A few issues back, we reported on Sony's sophisticated new robot, Qrio, that has some entertaining moves and can even dance better than some humans. At nearby Kokoro Co, working with Osaka University, designers have created a friendlier full-size female android that is altogether more human. According to her creators, the talking android is designed to be used as a tour guide, or to do 24 hour shifts without complaining in an information kiosk.

Yorkshire Businesses are getting government grants to finance their switch to broadband. The Broadband Support Scheme funded by the Yorkshire and Humber Regional Development Agency is designed to provide up to 50% of the cost of initial connection and the first year's subscription to a broadband service. The scheme offers support for any type of connection - ADSL, Satellite, Cable or Wireless.

The government is spending £10,000 per month on Google and Overture PPC campaigns to help people find its new information Web site, DirectGov, which took over from the portal "UK Online" in March. "Initially we are homing in on key target audiences, like families and motorists", said a spokesman for the Cabinet Office, "These groups are more likely to go to the site for practical things such as finding out about child benefit or renewing a licence". Ian Cuddy, editor of eGov Monitor Weekly, which revealed the campaign, said "This will probably be the most cost-effective marketing the government has ever done". But Google searches on "child benefit" and "driving licence" turn up nothing at all from www.direct.gov.uk and even terms like "UK Government", "government online" and "government Web site" fail to reveal any of the paid announcements.

What is the next stage in the evolution of Internet search engines? Microsoft thinks it may be what Ask Jeeves made its name on but did not genuinely deliver: giving a straight answer to a straight question. Eric Brill, a researcher at Microsoft Research, intends that his solution will be the first to do that. Dr Brill's sophisticated search engine is called Ask MSR. It uses information on Web pages to respond to questions to which the answer is a single word or phrase - such as "When was Marilyn Monroe born?". Google does the same job already - its first-listed result summary contains the answer (1927) - but it's not clever enough to deliver a confident stand-alone reply.

Criminals are learning to use the world's best-known search engine to find credit card details online. Google provides access to a number of sites that have posted personal information lists, which include card holders' names, addresses and phone numbers as well as their credit-card data.

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