This has apparently been tracked back a company called AdTran, based in Russia, so keep an eye out and if you aren’t expecting to download anything then don’t. Also keep this in mind even if you are on well known sites. There was a recent case of Alicia Keys MySpace being hacked so that when the user clicked to watch a video (or almost anything else) they were told they needed to install a video codec to watch it. If they clicked ‘OK’ on this, then they got really clobbered. It also installed less nasty stuff in the background which could be picked up by a virus scan, but only if you remember to do this regularly and keep your operating system up to date.

So, the two things to take away from this

1. Regular updates to your system and your virus software
2. If in doubt do not let software install – especially if you hit cancel and it tries again!!

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So, using Carphone Warehouse as the provider of choice and then comparing the Apple iPhone with the Nokia N95 on O2 (it’s actually cheaper on Orange in case you were wondering) on an 18 month contract we get -

Apple iPhone = Cost of Handset (£269) + Cost of Contract (£35 per month over 18 months = £630) = £899

Nokia N95 = Cost of Handset (£0) + Cost of Contract (£30 per month over 18 months = £540) = £540

On top of that, the tariff for the Nokia N95 gives you 400 minutes and 500 text messages, whereas the Apple iPhone’s tariff is a mere 200 minutes and 200 texts. The next tariff up for the Apple iPhone gives you 600 minutes and 500 texts, but that costs £45 per month which means that your cost of ownership for the 18 months goes to £1079, almost double the Nokia N95.

I look at this and think to myself, the Nokia N95 also has 3G, GPS and the camera is a 5 Mega Pixel thing with a decent lens in it (I’m not sure what the Apple iPhone’s one is like, but I have seen photos from the Nokia and they are as good as most sub £100 digital cameras I have seen) surely it’s a no brainer? Then again, the Apple iPhone does look cool, it’s battery life is far better than the paltry 4 hours talk time of the Nokia N95 and have you seen the demos of that interface….but then there is that sneaky feeling they are going to drop the prices like they did in the US…

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Anyway, getting back to the point of this thing, the US has adopted hybrids as their solution of choice. Now, as I mentioned I am not the biggest fan as it is a hugely compromised solution, you need to cart around so much extra weight so unless you drive it in the correct manner you end up getting worse consumption anyway, however if it had meant people were driving around in cars the size of a Prius, then fine, that is actually a real solution – I mean why do people need to drive around in those huge SUV tanks anyway? However ‘hybrid’ has no become code for ‘magically has no effect on the environment whatsoever’ so the same solution is being used on those very same SUVs. So even if you are saving fuel by driving a hybrid ‘properly’ you are still using up more of it because you are still driving a 2 ton tank. Add to this the US government’s decision to promote the use of corn based ethanol, which is nowhere near as energy rich as sugar, so you end up with a fuel source that actually makes matters worse as so much of it would need to be used for the same effect that you would be as well to use traditional fuels.

Electric vehicles also suffer as electricity production is inefficient. You burn an awful lot more energy in a power station than energy you produce, so an electric car per se makes no sense - you simply use more electricity so more raw materials need to be used to create the electricity, then add in the energy losses in converting the power in your battery to forward motion and again you may as well burn the fossil fuels in your engine than a power station.

So I don’t like hybrids, well yes, but if you could actually harness the power to act like a power station rather than a power for the wheels, then there is a solution. The problem is that the best technology we currently have requires a charging time of hours to give you a 50 mile range, which really isn’t that useful. However Zenn claim to have invented a technology that is a step change in this performance. What’s a step change I hear you ask (speak up at the back there)? Well how about 5 minutes charge for a 500 mile range! This is the claim they have made. If it turns out to be right, then you could have a tiny engine in your car that kicks in to charge up the battery when required or even have the whole thing solar powered. They claim the way it works is to use capacitors rather than batteries. Capacitors charge fast but also release power fast, which is what cars tend to need as they tend to either accelerate or do nothing in normal city driving. The guys at Zenn stack them up to increase the capacity via their clever new material that lets them achieve the figures they claim.

There has been a lot of scepticism about this, I mean it is a huge claim, but they have managed to get VC funding from people that put bets into Google and Amazon in their early days. All in all if this proves to be workable it could really revolutionise town cars and city transportation and who knows what next.

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Apparently they have stitched together over 1 million images taken from the likes of the Hubble Space Telescope and it is pretty damn impressive, it’s cost me yet another day of my life (if nobody had invented football, blogging, Facebook and Google Earth, You Tube etc I would be soooo productive) so to share my lack of productivity (and because you’ve probably had your access to Facebook at work blocked) here is the ‘How to’ video they have so handily dropped onto You Tube….

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