The Test Bed

Acer gives new use for fingerprint readers

Thu, 17 Jul 2008 12:16:17 +0000

Acer has added new functionality to the fingerprint reader on its new Centrino 2 laptops.

Traditionally, fingerprint readers let you use your thumb rather than a password to logon, with the fingerprint data stored securely in a TPM chip. Acer's new application, called FingerLaunch, lets you assign each one of your fingers (or, perhaps, toes) to open a program or document instead.

If the laptop is only being used by one person, then FingerLaunch makes function keys (that are so often splattered across a laptop chassis) redundant.

I've never used a fingerprint reader for security reasons and the point was raised that features like FingerLaunch aren't used by anybody at all - and Acer had no response or research to prove otherwise.

On the note of Acer's Centrino 2 laptops, the pick of the bunch appears to be Aspire 5930G. It's a 15.4in laptop based on the Gemstone Blue design and sounds the death knell for the original Gemstone chassis, which I'd say formed the ugliest laptops of this decade.

The 5930G comes with a 15.4in 1,280x800 resolution screen, 2GB Ram, one of five new Core 2 Duo processors (dependant on configuration) and an Nvidia Geforce 9300M GS or 9600M GT graphics card. We suspect it'll be a big hit in the sub-£550 market.

Centrino 2 surprises with switchable graphics but disappoints with Wimax

Tue, 15 Jul 2008 16:45:44 +0000

Until yesterday I had missed, arguably, the most important feature of Intel's new Centrino 2 platform: switchable graphics.

Alistair Kemp, PR manager for Intel, explained that the new chipset could flick between the integrated, low-power GMA X4500 graphics and a discrete graphics card on the fly to save battery life when you don't need the brute 3D rendering force of the discrete graphics card.

Unlike Nvidia's hybrid power, this technology supports every mobile graphics card available, presumably because a laptops graphics card isn't directly attached to the video output like it is in a desktop system.

The result is laptops designed for gamers, CAD professionals and HD video buffs can now attain battery life as long as laptops that just rely on integrated graphics.

Centrino 2 also brings a new integrated graphics part, called the GMA X4500. Intel says it will be 1.9x faster in 3Dmark compared with the GMA X3100 graphics chip that is part and parcel of most Santa Rosa laptops. We hope to test this claim in the next month when the GMA X4500 drivers are finished.

A noticeable absentee from the Centrino 2 launch was Wimax, which will arrive later this year. Intel's laptop Wimax offering will be an upgrade for current laptops and an optional extra for Centrino 2 laptops. It'll appear in the form of a PCI Express mini card with Intel's new dual-channel Draft-N card onboard, rated at 450Mbits/sec.

Kemp said the difference in power consumption between Wimax and Wifi was a matter of a few milliwatts, despite suggestions that the power requirement for mobile Wimax devices is currently quite high due to inefficient power amps.

Fix for ZoneAlarm users blocked from Internet

Mon, 14 Jul 2008 11:38:03 +0000

We are still getting messages from readers cut off from the internet following a massive Microsoft update last week designed to thwart a newly-discovered hole in Domain Name System protocolsthat govern internet addressing. The hole, which was not restricted to Microsoft software, could allow attackers to redirect traffic from legitimate sites to criminal imitations.

The KB951748 update cut off thousands users of ZoneAlarm firewall software, including the free basic version. This was because it changed the range of ports used for DNS calls to include ones blocked by ZoneAlarm, and publisher Checkpoint was apparently not informed of the change.

Checkpoint has posted fixes here.

Panasonic gets tough with its new CF-U1 ultra-mobile

Fri, 11 Jul 2008 19:42:39 +0000

Panasonic last night finally showed us its CF-U1 ultra-mobile ToughBook, which was first announced in March, and it looks good. It is designed for field use by the likes of site engineers and municipal officials, and so should not be judged by the same standards as a consumer model.

For instance, I normally hate ultra-mobiles that use small keyboards with mobile-phone style keys. I'd rather have a good attached keyboard or none at all, because you can always plug one in or use a Bluetooth model if necessary, and the Windows handwriting recognition is well good enough for lighter input such as emails.

The CF-U1's 5.6in 1024 x 600 touch screen is too small for comfortable handwriting input but it is not designed for people who want to write War and Peace. Users are likely to hold it in one hand and control it in the other, probably for specialist form-filling applications.

Unlike many early tablets designed for this purpose, it is small enough to do this easily though it is much chunkier than most UMPCs: a full 5.7cm thick. But its 15.1cm x 18.4cm footprint is par for the format and it weighs just 1.06Kg.

That is heavier than some UMPCs but still light enough to carry with ease - and it includes the weight of two batteries, which Panasonic says give a working life between charges of nine hours, more than enough for a whole working day. Moreover the batteries are hot-swappable. You can carry a spare pair and replace the ones in the machine without switching it off.

Solid-state drives (max 32GByte) come as standard, and the machine is designed to be dropped from 1.2m without damage. It has a magnesium alloy case like earlier Tough Books, but coated to increased scratch resistance.

The CF-U1 uses an Intel Z520 Atom processor and comes with Vista or what Panasonic describes curiously as an "XP downgrade". Watch out for a full review soon.

Dreamworks 3D looks great - but wait till you see 3D videophones

Wed, 09 Jul 2008 12:04:04 +0000

We report today that animator Dreamworks will phase out its dual-core AMD Opterons and replace them with yet-to-be-launched Nehalem server chips and Larrabee graphics processing units. The company needs to boost computing power because it wants to make all its productions in 3D from next year.

Journalists who attended HP's recent techfest in Berlin saw experimental 3D footage of scenes from latest Dreamworks 2D epic Kung-fu Panda, and very impressive they were. They do require polaroid glasses to get the effect, and we watched only for a few minutes so it was hard to judge if the eyes would feel strained after watching a full-length film.

Processing 3D takes roughly twice the computing power of 2D, according to Dreamworks, but it would be interesting to know what the figures are for storage and transmission. There must be a lot of scope for compression because of the similarities between the twin images. This could be significant, not only because of the implications for 3D film downloads and streaming. The most-used 3D application in future could turn out to be video phones.

I saw a relatively crude 3D phone system demonstrated at Cebit in 2004 running over a 384Kbit/sec link. You did not need special glasses for it but even at the relatively low resolution used I judged the difference between 2D and 3D videophoning to be rather more than the difference between mono and stereo audio. And, in theory at least, 3D video calls should not need not very much more bandwidth than 2D.

Kodak's 50 megapixel sensor and the peril of predictions

Tue, 08 Jul 2008 18:05:41 +0000

Kodak has announced a 50 megapixel camera sensor giving photographers the ability to capture unprecedented levels of detail. The KAF-50100 sensor is also said to draw less power then predecessors. It has an 8176 x 6132 pixel array, equivalent to the 48 mm x 36mm optical format.

It is, of course, designed for professionals, so perhaps we are being unfair recalling the Nikon consumer division executive who said at Comdex a few years back that no-one would need more than two million pixels. Actually she had a point: the pixel counts of today's consumer cameras are higher than is required for what most people do with their digital images. She did not take into account the fact that high-resolutions allow you to crop pictures, or do deep zooms, and still get good detail..

Bill Gates always claimed that his famous statement that no-one would need more than 640Kbytes of memory was taken out of context. Still, he never lived that down either.

Remote voice recording kit

Fri, 04 Jul 2008 15:14:46 +0000

A new wireless device allows you to record meetings and make audio notes onto your PC frpm up to 30 metres away, says vendor Lindy.

The £69.99 (inc Vat) Wireless Voice Recorder package consists of a wireless handset, a USB dongle and software.

Recordings can be played back either on your PC or on the handset's built-in speaker. The integrated lithium battery lasts for up to twelve hours, Lindy says.

Office subs could woo people to Microsoft Live

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 12:51:34 +0000

Interesting news from the US today that Microsoft is offering to lease the Student version of Office with its One Care security suite and Live web services for around $70 (£35) a year.

The offer has been announced only for the US and I'm waiting to hear from Microsoft to see if it will be introduced into Britain. But, considering that it includes three licences and is not much more than you would pay for virus protection anyway, it is the kind of deal that could make the subscription model work because you are getting a continuing service for your money as well as use of the software.

It would be cheaper in the near term to buy the Office Home and Student edition, which packs Word, Excel, Powerpoint and One Note (but not Outlook or Access) and costs just £80 with three licences from PC World, and you can get it cheaper still bundled with a notebook but you don't get the services.

Both deals show that Microsoft is having to level down its prices in the face of fiercer competition (the free and good OpenOffice offers broad support for Microsoft Office formats) and falling hardware prices that can mean a machine costs less than the software running on it.

The subscription deal has the advantage of potentially wooing customers into using Microsoft's online services at a time when the company is trailing in the battle for web revenues.

Software subscriptions will only work if you get some value out of the continuing payments. Last month we got blurb from a company called PC Powerdown about a switch that will shut you PC and peripherals off on schedule. It costs £30 plus £10 a year 'licence renewal' fee apparently entitled you to upgrades. It would take a lot of persuading to get me to sign up to that one.

Apple Garage hits right note

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 11:18:34 +0000

Just to put in a good word about Apple, after hammering it in two recent blogs. I've just been setting up an old Evolution MK-149 midi keyboard for a nephew to use, via an Edirol UA-20 interface, with the Garage music production software that comes with Macs. There was no reason to expect that the keyboard and interface would cause problems, but using legacy peripherals can be tricky sometimes and I can report that they set up home with my MacBook Air quite happily.

Garage looks like an excellent piece of software to introduce kids to computer music production, with a lot of grown-up features that hide their complexities well.

I'm still awaiting comment from Apple about my earlier blogs, and will keep you posted.

Beating ARM will take years, says Intel's Gelsinger

Wed, 02 Jul 2008 15:12:19 +0000

Intel has a battle on its hands competing with ARM in the handheld arena, the company's star technologist Pat Gelsinger told yesterday's press teleconference at which he admitted that multicore performance was being hampered by the difficulties of parallel programming.

"ARM is a good architecture. It has proven success in the handset space," Gelsinger said. Intel had made a start with the Atom processor, which had reduced the 5w to 6w thermal design power (TDP) of 'bottom end' Centrinos by an order of magnitude to around half a watt.

Far be it from me to contradict Mr Gelsinger (and my recording of the teleconference is crackly at this point) but he seemed not to be comparing like with like here. The TDP of the Atom 230 is listed as 4w and that of the N270 as 2.5w. The average power drain is closer to 0.5w, but that is not the same thing.

And as an ARM man told me darkly: "Look at the standby power." The maximum power in sleep mode of the N270 is listed as 0.5w, which means you are not going to leave it in instant-on standby if you can avoid it.

To be fair to Gelsinger, his briefing was short on triumphalism. He came close to admitting that Arm was ahead on handset power consumption and that it would take time for Intel to catch up.

"We are aiming for platform-level [ie whole system] power consumption in the tens of milliwatt range, which puts you firmly into the handset kind of power envelope, with further reductions in chip size....We have said that over the next couple of years [my italics] we are going to get those milliwatt idle performance numbers."

Gelsinger also revealed that Intel planned to use Atoms in systems-on-a-chip (SoCs). This is typically how ARM cores are used: chipmakers license the core design and wrap their own logic round it.

Gelsinger's main message seemed to be that his company believed the familiarity and scope of the Intel architecture (IA) would see off competition both from ARM and upstart GPU makers (see today's news story).

He asked: "Will IA displace ARM? It would be decades before that is a consideration because of the momentum [ARM] has. But we do see this ...continued wall of IA, going from petaflop machines with Xeons down to milliwatt machines with Atoms- this architectural continuity - is a value proposition that is at the core of Intel's strategic thrust."

Leo and the lion of Lyons

Tue, 01 Jul 2008 15:23:53 +0000

Obituaries of David Caminer, who has died at the age of 92, have focussed on the fact that he was the world's first systems analyst. But his death also revives memories of Leo, the world's first proper business computer.

Leo emerged from the heady days immediately after World War Two when a bankrupt Britain could spare few resources for the development of new-fangled computers. It was an early example of the kind of co-operation between universities and business that later produced Silicon Valley in the US and the cluster of technical companies around Cambridge University that has been dubbed Silicon Fen.

Lyons Corner Houses were in those days as much a feature of British life as Tescos or Boots are today. They provided good affordable food and to keep prices down the company had been a pioneer in what was then called scientific management.

Lyons early on spotted the possibilities of computing and partly financed Maurice Wilkes's Edsac computer at Cambridge, in return for help in building a computer to help run its business. The circuitry on Leo 1 was almost identical to that on Edsac.

Mike Hally recalls in his book Electronic Brains (Granta, £15.99, ISBN 1-86207-663-4) how the first program in 1951 valued all the goods produced at Lyons bakeries. It was a relatively simply task that some thought to trivial to computerise. But Caminer felt the team need experience doing live work on time.

It was the first ever business application. Soon Leo was doing everything "from clock-in to payroll"; Caminer's team had virtually invented business computing from scratch.

So how was that the UK got in first? Wilkes generously acknowledged in a 2003 interview with me how much he owed to a free exchange of knowledge with US pioneers, and that American projects took longer because their aim from was to produce general-purpose models that could be sold on the open market.

Edsac was built specifically for use by researchers at Cambridge, not as a commercial project, and so it was easier to cut corners. Leo was produced initially for specific purposes by one company, though later models were sold to other companies.

Lyons was so well known as a caterer and tea merchant that it had a hard time being taken seriously as a computer company, even though it spun its computer operations off as Leo Computers in 1959.

But it would anyway have had a hard time fighting off the clout and marketing expertise of IBM, which had actually come late to computing. After a series of mergers Leo Computers eventually became part of ICL.

Hally says Caminer was bitter about government short-sightedness, particularly in not granting a contract to calculate the effects of tax changes. Caminer told him: "We had minimal government support. They simply didn't realise that business computing would become vastly more important in volume than scientific computing. If they could find some scientific computer with time to spare to do the tax tables, then they went there if they were saving a few bob. It was very sad."

MSI Wind available in UK

Tue, 01 Jul 2008 09:42:03 +0000

It looks as though at least two UK outlets are now taking orders for the MSI Wind 10in Atom-powered mini-notebook (or netbook or nettop or whatever term takes your fancy).

Morgan Computers and play.com have the product listed, Morgan noting it as 'In Stock' and selling for £387.74 inc. VAT. Play.com says 'temporarily out of stock' but quotes the price at a '20% discount' of £329.99 including free delivery.

Expansys, meanwhile, is showing a whole heap of flavours of the Wind at prices ranging from a pink Linux version at £317.94 (delivery 1st August) to a black XP Home powered model at £363.09 (delivery 22nd July).

We looked at the Wind a few weeks back on the Test Bed when we got an early sample into our labs.

More on the Quicktime hijack and the Atlantic divide

Mon, 30 Jun 2008 17:14:04 +0000

Some respondents to my blog about Apple's Quicktime seem to have missed the point: Windows without QT opens .tifs and allows you to save them; it will not save them with QT loaded, unless you pay extra as prompted or (if you know how) you have unchecked the file association.

Retrying this exercise today I discovered that if you change the file association within the QT control panel, the software simply switches it back again. Only by changing the association from within Windows (My Computer> Tools> Options> File Types) could I persuade the machine not to open .tifs using QT.

I do not suggest deliberate fraud in this attempt to get you to pay for functionality QT has itself disabled, and it may even be a bug - the software appears to be under the impression that a .tif is a movie.

I would however point out that more than one TV company in Britain has recently got into trouble for phone-in competitions for which people were allowed to enter after the result had been decided, at some small cost to themselves and considerable profit to the companies involved.

Again there was no suggestion of deliberate fraud; but the courts took the view that mistakes providing profit to the perpetrators should not have happened, and stemmed from institutional laxity resulting in a breach of public trust.

The overaggressive marketing of QT Pro is similar in principle if not in scale, constituting a breach of trust that happens to be potentially profitable to Apple. At the very least the QT installation and screen prompts should have made clear that changing file associations might disable some functionality and that, as an alternative to buying QT Pro, users could try giving .tifs back to Windows which will happily save them for free.

To answer another of my flamers: my comments were not anti-American; they were my perception of cultural differences. Pretending there are none is not going to bring nations together. You would, for instance, have to recognise that most French people speak French before you could even speak to them.

Western Europeans tend to be more suspicious of big business than Americans, partly because there is a stronger left-wing tradition here, and perhaps also because so many big companies are American and we fear being swamped. To take another glaring difference: there would probably be riots in the US if strict gun controls were imposed; in London there would probably be riots (well, noisy demonstrations) if they were lifted.

Looking at the figures for gun deaths in the US, I think the attitudes of many of its good citizens towards gun control are crazy; but it's their funeral (literally, in many cases) and I don't hold it against them so long as they don't point the wretched things at me.

Apple's Quicktime holds Windows users to ransom

Fri, 27 Jun 2008 14:52:47 +0000

It can come as a shock to we Brits sometimes when we meet Americans and realise that, despite having a broadly overlapping culture and speaking more or less the same language, they are easily as different from us as the French or Germans.

One instance of this is differing reactions to the way Apple exploits its products to flog more products. Americans in general seem to have no objection to this - most of the protests about iPod lock-ins have come from Europe.

My instinct when I find iTunes dragging me to the Apple music store is to resist any temptation to buy; the average American's reaction seems to be to congratulate the company on its marketing skills.

After writing a piece on the MacOS for our print magazine, mentioning this irritation, I resolved to steer clear of the subject for fear of allowing it to cloud my technological judgement.

Shortly afterwards I was forced to confront it again, when downloading a picture from (of all places) the Microsoft site. At some point recently I must have clicked a prompt for an Apple Quicktime upgrade on my main Windows PC, and it had plugged itself into Explorer and signed itself up to open a variety of picture formats.

When I clicked a .tif of the departing Bill Gates, Qucktime opened it within Explorer, no problem. But when I right clicked on it to save the image to disk, instead of giving me the standard IE menu allowing this, I got a Quicktime prompt offering me two choices: Save as source, or Save as a Quicktime Movie.

A .tif is not a movie so I clicked Save as Source as the option that came closest to having any meaning. I was then presented with a prompt saying that the only way I could save this 'movie' was to buy Quicktime Pro (£20 from Apple UK).

In other words, Apple was asking me to pay for functionality that its software had switched off in Windows. Disabling Quicktime from within Explorer is not enough to reverse this - it means you can't even display the picture. You have to go into Control Panel and change the file associations, after which Explorer will happily save the file for free.

I was knowledgeable enough to realise what had happened and do this. But many Windows users would be caught out.

You could argue that Apple's relentless commercialisation of the MacOS desktop is no different from the kind of in-house promotions seen in most major publications, online and off, though Bill Gates got hauled up before the DoJ for doing much the same.

Similarly you might see the sealed-in batteries in many Apple products not as built-in obsolescence but as the price you have pay for the aesthetics.

But this trick with QuickTime is beyond excuse so far as I am concerned. Apple makes some great products, but how it keeps its image squeaky clean I do not know.

Bluetooth headsets: to be seen or not be seen?

Fri, 27 Jun 2008 10:48:16 +0000

Bluetooth headsets are odd things. Too big and you look an utter fool, too small and it looks like you're talking to yourself.

Still, with countless models filling the aisles in mobile phone stores, they appear to be big business, and Jabra has just launched its latest headset - the BT4010.

Its big selling point is an LCD that provides information such as battery level and connection status. Hardly a milestone achievement, but being able to quickly check the battery level is an advantage.

However, the BT4010 sits very much in the 'miniature headset' category, so be prepared to fight off the men in white coats when using it in public places.

The Jabra BT4010 is priced at £29.99 and is available now.