Digital Life, revisited.

Digital Life is the technology branch of the Straits Times newspaper which is published every Tuesday. It is basically a paper which tells you the latest in computer technology, and the latest buzz on the internet scene.

It is one of the papers which I do read quite religiously every week.

But at times, it does has its downside.

For example, one of its reporters wrongly claimed Defense of the Ancients All Stars (DOTA to everyone else) was created by blizzard.

Seriously. Just using wikipedia would have provided sufficient information on DOTA.

And now, this.

Firstly, there was this report on gamers these days. While the report itself was interesting, I was rather amused to see that Digital Life compared the popularity of games in a rather strange way.

The not-so-famous game (which I've not even heard of) used the number of people meeting together as an indicator, while a popular game (MapleStory, in this case), just picks up a figure which they pasted on their website (200,000).

So, tell me, how is this a fair comparison? People who play MapleStory are mainly young teens (30 year olds play it. Yada yada.... but I believe the core is mostly teens.), while the other game is engineered more towards the older crowd, as it is a game which allows one to control his destiny instead of merely slashing mushrooms mindlessly.

Statistics used to back up a claim will make a claim sound all cool and stuff, but if such a unfair comparison is used, then it just makes the report look silly as it discredits the entire article.

However, besides this, there is a rather glaring error.

Every week, there is a section where readers write in on their computer problems and an IT expert would reply. Usually, I would pick up a tip or two from their replies, and sometimes even find solutions to a problem I merely close an eye to.

Usually, the IT expert would be a very good one.

Usually.

This week, I'm questioning the abilities of this... IT expert.

Reason?

Someone wrote in to say that his keyboard is showing pound signs when he pressed #, and getting a @ when he pressed ".

The pound sign by itself is a huge hint to the base of the problem.

A UK type keyboard. Windows, being as stupid as usual, is detecting the keyboard (We use US based ones here) to be one from the UK.

The solution itself is very simple. Start --> Control Panel --> Regional and Language options --> Languages --> Details. Get rid of the UK keyboard style, and put in something else (English (Singapore) is fine).

And whoa. Problem solved.

However, this is probably one "expert" who thinks that reformatting and system restoring would solve anything. The solution given is to change the keyboard or perform a system restore. Being a nice guy, he even included his webpage (http://sg.geocities.com/pangcanice) on the newspaper. Note that he also tossed it in for the next problem, which his recommendation was (surprise surprise), reformat.

The second one's solution could lie in being reformatted, but I believe winblows is acting up (as usual).

However, his answer to the first one leaves anyone who knows computers a bit (like me) into wondering if these guys are really the pros Digital Life says they are. Most of the time, they are, and probably, it isn't Digital Life's fault this time.

The "expert" is just one guy who didn't do enough research before writing his article.

Even though it is a side publications, some sort of a standard should be enforced.

After all, this is, a state newspaper.