Geek With Laptop

Linux has 32 percent of Netbook market says study

Sasha — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 15:29:33 +0000

We were all wondering whether Linux could make a comeback in Netbooks after Microsoft jumped in and dominated the Netbook operating system market soon after Netbooks came on the scene.

Now according to an analysis of the latest research on Ultra Mobile Devices from ABI, things could be looking up for Linux.

ABI project that almost 35 million netbooks will be shipped in 2009. Although the ABI research doesn’t go into operating system specifics, a Computerworld story by Eric Lai quotes ABI analyst Jeff Orr as saying that Linux will represent 32 percent of netbook sales this year.

We all know that Apple doesn’t have a Netbook so if Linux has 32 percent of the share the remaining 68 obviously belongs to Microsoft.

These figures are significantly higher than what Microsoft has projected. They claimed that Linux only has a 7 percent share.

If the ABI figures are accurate and there’s no reason to believe they’re not, then not only has Linux increased their share, Linux will overtake windows completely by 2013 says Orr. The reason given is that sales of Netbooks are increasing in developing countries.

At the moment the largest chunk of Netbooks sales is in Japan, Australia and New Zealand revealed the ABI study. So it’s also a mistake to think that just because most people in the USA are using Windows on Netbooks that the same applies elsewhere.

“Just because you live in the United States, don’t assume that everything is on Windows” Said Orr.

Consumers outside of the US don’t have as much experience with Windows so do not have the same fear about changing over to a new operating system, Orr apparently told Lai.

So if Linux are on the way up again, what should Microsoft do if they want to remain the dominant player?

Orr suggests that they would have to do what they did before and slash prices on their Windows XP, Windows CE or Windows Mobile.

“They need to get a play started now,” he said.

Ok so even though Linux have managed to up their share of the Netbook market to 32 percent it may be a bit premature to think that Linux will be able to sustain or increase that share.

We mustn’t forget that Windows 7 is on the loose now and so far is doing great so we’ll have to wait and see whether Microsoft topples Linux once again.

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Geeky specs that act as a translation aid

Sasha — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 15:24:10 +0000

The world is getting smaller, not literally of course, but with the rise of the Internet and the impact that this has had on business, we are required to be in touch with speakers of other languages and to travel, more than we ever have been before.

This of course brings its own problems like how to communicate effectively with people who don’t speak the same language. However, the world is also getting clever.

Now a high tech firm have come up with an innovative gadget that will help aid translation in a way that hasn’t been done before.

NEC has developed glasses or spectacles to be more precise as they don’t have lenses, which can be used to display subtitles directly onto a user’s retina.

Users will still be able to view the face of the person they’re talking to as the text will only be beamed to part of the retina. The first time such technology has been used in a commercial product says NEC.

The Tele Scouter, as it has been called, was originally developed for use by people in sales dealing with enquiries from customers as the sales staff could have information about a customer’s buying history beamed directly to them during a conversation.

“It’s best if you know the customer personally for individual sales pitches, but that can be difficult at big stores” NEC spokesman Takayuki Omino said at a Tokyo trade show where the device was revealed.

“This device can be a weapon for salespeople on the floor.”

However, NEC says it can also be used for translating a conversation. Basically the mike on the headset would pick up the conversation, run it through translation and voice recognition software and beam it back to the headset so that the user gets the subtitles in real time as well as the audio.

“You can keep the conversation flowing” said Omino.

According to Omino this would be useful in talks involving confidential information as there would be no need for an interpreter.

The Tele Scouter is due to be launched next year in Japan but the first versions won’t have the translation feature, that won’t come until the year after in 2011.

Unfortunately it won’t be affordable for most folk, at least until the price comes down, as you’re looking at a cost of 7.5 million Yen and that’s without the software.

Sounds great in theory but if both people in the conversation need the specs that makes it far less practical.

The Mavizen Motorbike: “A laptop on wheels”

Sasha — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 19:11:56 +0000

Some are calling the Mavizen TTX02 a “laptop on wheels” — a really, really fast laptop on wheels. Not only can the bike reach speeds of up 130 miles an hour, it also has an onboard computer system.

Each TTX02 comes with a dash-mounted computer complete with Linux, on board server, a dedicated IP address, USB and Wi-Fi connectivity.

A bike and laptop combined, now how cool is that? OK, let’s be serious for a moment, we’ve got to ask the questions haven’t we? Why put a computer on a speed bike, it’s not as if we can check our emails whilst racing ’round the track?

Azhar Hussain, the founder of TTXGP — which, incidentally, stands for The Time Trials Xtreme Grand Prix, a race of zero emissions motorbikes — explains why.

“We are living in a click culture and connectivity is the key, across the board. Our approach was to find how we could make a laptop go racing. We think electric vehicles have more in common with consumer electronics than traditional automotive,” he says.

Mr. Hussain has been showing the bike off at the Sema show in Las Vegas but the roots of the bike lie across the Atlantic.

The first event staged by TTXGP was during the Isle of Man TT between Britain and Ireland in the summer of 2008. Agni Motors won the 37 mile race and teamed up with Hussain to build the TTX02, which comes with two Agni motors.

“The Mavizen TTX02 gives potential participants a chance to acquire a bike that they can develop themselves to make it competitive and unique to them,” Hussain said.

“Racing is brutal but at least with the Mavizen TTX02, the racers can start with a proven platform.”

“As soon as you pull into the paddock, you can connect to the bike via your laptop and make changes,” Mr. Hussain said. “Or we can be your technical team if you just want to go racing.”

The bike will function as a standalone sports bike and as a platform for those who want to race and customize a bike to suit their needs, and the first of the initial run of 50 electronic motorcycles with computer on board will be available during the early part of next year.

Obviously that means not everyone will be able to have one of these super cool machines right away but if you have a spare $40,000 or so then you’re in with a chance and it’s available to pre-order now.

Are mobile phones getting too complex?

Sasha — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 12:10:49 +0000

Yes, says 80 year old Martin Cooper, who was a lead engineer in the team that developed the first mobile phone and who made the first wireless call back in 1973.

Cooper was talking at a conference in Madrid and said that mobile phones are trying to do too many things for too many people.

“Whenever you create a universal device that does all things for all people, it does not do any things well,” he said, according to the BBC.

“Our future I think is a number of specialist devices that focus on one thing that will improve our lives,” said Mr Cooper.

That’s all very well but we don’t want to carry around a mobile, a netbook, a laptop, a camera, an eReader and whatever else, that’s not cool.

“The first cell phone model weighed over one kilo and you could only talk for 20 minutes before the battery ran out, which is just as well because you would not be able to hold it up for much longer” he added.

Yes how could anyone forget the brick, even if you’re too young to have owned one, they are a real indication as to how far we’ve come in mobile technology.

These days we rely on a connection all day every day for business and pleasure. We want to be able to do as much as possible on our mobiles.

Nowadays some mobiles are functioning like mini computers and we like that as can be evidenced by the 140 percent increase in sales of SmartPhones in the past year alone according to research by GfK.

Dr Jon Agar, a technology lecturer at University College in London and author of a book on the history of the mobile phone doesn’t agree with Martin Cooper.

“Martin Cooper’s assertion flies in the face of current trends, and I see no particular evidence to suggest that the trend towards more ‘universal’ mobile phones is going to change direction,” said Agar.

“The future of technologies is ultimately in the hands of users – and the vast majority of users have historically been loath to add to the very small number of technologies that we carry around with us” he adds.

I couldn’t agree more. That’s why the boundaries are blurring so much between SmartPhones, Netbooks and Computers; we actually want our devices to do as much as possible.

Geek With Laptop Weekly Roundup 11.6.09

Mike — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 04:00:26 +0000

The weekly roundup of the web’s best tech news includes a double your pleasure dual-GPU graphics card, “I pity the fool” Legos, free Apple applications, gross bags (eeek, gotta check out the link), and Wayne Smallman weighing in on Twitter lists. Geek with Laptop has found the best, check ‘em out!

Dual GPU graphics card – Radeon HD 5970 with photos leaked

AMD Radeon HD 5970 is a dual-GPU graphics card, which could be the first of its kind that carries two GPUs with super fast processing power. The yet-to-be announced graphics card has a got a few photos leaked.

Study by T Mobile reveals new generation of Metrotextuals. What’s that about?

Sasha — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 16:59:07 +0000

We often hear of studies that come up with conclusions that are somewhat amusing to say the least but wait till you hear the latest.

Apparently men have become so affectionate with each other in their text messages that a new generation of “Metrotextuals” is being born. Bet you’re wondering what that means?

Well according to a research study by T Mobile, nearly a quarter of men (22 percent) regularly include a kiss on texts to their friends, T-Mobile said in an emailed statement.

All ages of men do it but in the 18 to 24 year old age group a whopping 75 percent regularly seal their text messages with an x. In the over 55 age group one in ten have become partial to the habit.

It’s not only close friends that get the virtual kiss either, nearly a quarter of the younger age group will also send a kiss in text messages to other male friends they aren’t particularly close to.

The research also revealed that there’s an etiquette regarding the type or number of x’s displayed in the text.

A simple lower case x is the most common as 52 percent of those polled opted for that compared to 17 percent who went all out for the upper case X and only one in three regularly used several lower case x’s.

So what’s going on here?

According to Clinical Psychologist Ron Bracey, men have been reluctant to share their emotions so don’t express their feelings openly in speech and text messages have given them a way to say how they feel.

“The advent of mobile phones and social media means more communication is done non-verbally and through this it seems men can more easily share their feelings with others – especially their male friends,” Mr Bracey said in the statement.

One self confessed Metrotextual, Nick Kirkham, a 25 year old that works in insurance said that he and his mates have been sending kisses to each other for years.

“In fact, apart from my boss or a work client, there’s no one I wouldn’t send a kiss on text to,” he said.

Personally I think it’s just a way of showing that there is no hostility, I mean we all know that text messages can be massively misunderstood so putting a simple x at the end kind of says “hey, it’s cool”.

Perhaps you’ll disagree but I can’t help but think that much ado is being made about nothing.

Latest Snow Leopard updates will kill the “Hackintosh” netbooks

Sasha — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 19:17:56 +0000

Apple doesn’t have a Netbook and have been slating them ever since they arrived on the scene. Netbooks are popular, extremely popular. So what do you do if you want the benefit of a Mac and a Netbook?

Simple, you get yourself a standard netbook and illegitimately install Mac OS X and you’ve got yourself a Hackintosh. Cheap at the price too!

It must irritate Apple that a growing number of folk are making use of a software hack to easily install the Snow Leopard operating system onto windows and Linux based computers but what can Apple do about it?

Well now Apple are about to release the new OS X Snow Leopard 10.6.2 and 10.5.9 updates and if the rumours are anything to go by anyone who has a Hackintosh had better beware.

Although the OS X 10.6.2 is only available as a developer release at the moment, apparently according to testers, it isn’t at all compatible with atom processors, which of course most netbooks are based on.

Now when you consider that Apple is not exactly a lover of Netbooks and doesn’t use Atom processors in their products why should they care? No really, why should they?

There are more than a few folk out there who believe that by releasing the new non Atom compatible updates, Apple is attempting to kill off the Hackintosh Netbook community.

This could well be something they might be keen to do, especially if the rumoured soon to make an appearance Apple Tablet is on its way.

Of course this is all speculation but the advice from StellaRolla, according to a report in Wired, is that if you have a Hackintosh don’t try and download the updates or your Hackintosh will break, at the moment anyway.

“Apple appears to have changed around a lot of CPU-related information” in the build, says StellaRolla.

“One of the effects of this is Apple killing off Intel’s Atom chip.”

The advice from StellaRolla is to stick with 10.6 and only try upgrading to the 10.6.2 if you are running an older or modified kernel.

It’s possible that by the time there’s a full release the incompatibility issue with Atom processors will be sorted but we’ll have to wait and see about that.

In the meantime the Hackintosh community will no doubt find a workaround pretty soon anyway.

World’s first dedicated Twitter Phone makes its debut but why would anyone want one?

Sasha — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 11:44:43 +0000

No one will deny that social networking is extremely popular, it’s seems that everyone is at it. The number of people using sites like Facebook, MySpace and the Microblogging site Twitter is increasing hour by hour and if you’ve haven’t got a profile then you’re pretty much out of touch.

It’s also true that most of us possess a mobile phone or even two and these days, in fact it seems unthinkable not to have one.

So let’s see, we need our mobiles and we need quick and speedy access to our social networking sites, seems pretty logical then that the two are combined.

That’s why most of the so called SmartPhones now come with social networking applications included. This of course makes it easier to keep in touch with friends, send status updates and generally keep up with what’s going on.

So let me ask you why would anyone want a separate device dedicated just to Twitter?

I have absolutely no idea but a company called Peek obviously thinks that some people would. They have created a phone that is being described as the world’s first dedicated Twitter device called the “TwitterPeek”

The TwitterPeek, which is available exclusively from Amazon, has a 2.7 inch by 4 inch colour screen and a QWERTY keyboard and doesn’t come cheap when you consider that its sole purpose is to Tweet.

There are two prices. You can pay $199 and you’ll also get a wireless service for as long as you have the phone. Or, you can buy a cheaper version for $99 but you’ll only get six months wireless service for that and when the six months is up you’ll have to fork out $7.95 a month thereafter.

All that you can do with the Twitter phone is basically Twitter. It supports one Twitter account at a time and you can do mostly what you would usually do on the Twitter site such as download followers, send and receive tweets and direct messages, retweet and view TwitPics.

However, there isn’t a search option to track tweets and no browser so you won’t be able to view any links posted in tweets.

So who exactly is going to buy one? Perhaps if you don’t want to tie yourself into an expensive phone contract you might want to pay out for a TwitterPeek but I still don’t get it.

To be honest I’m completely baffled as to who might want to buy it. I suppose there’s always the novelty factor.

Partly developed feature in Windows 7 can be used to turn your laptop into a Wi-Fi hotspot

Sasha — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 15:24:34 +0000

The techie firm Nomadio has discovered that there is an unfinished feature incorporated into Windows 7 that can basically turn your laptop into a Wi-Fi hot spot. Cool!

What Nomadio did was use this feature to develop a beta application called ‘Connectify’ that you can download free of charge to do just that, create your very own Wi-Fi connection that you can share with your friends and family and anyone else you want.

Apparently the feature was implemented by Microsoft’s research group during the development of Windows 7 as a way to “virtualise” one wireless card as several separate adaptors.

This project was abandoned back in 2006 but the work that had already been carried out became part of Windows 7 as “Native 802.11 (Virtual Wi-Fi) object identifiers (OIDs).

“A year ago, Microsoft talked a lot about this as a big feature in Windows 7,” said Alex Gizis, the CEO of Nomadio.

“But driver support didn’t get finished. The low-level code is in there, but the driver-level stuff isn’t. And there’s no app or setting in Windows to turn it on.”

So basically the feature was half done and all it needed to complete it was software from Nomadio and hey presto, you’re very own personal Wi-Fi hotspot.

How Connectify works is that it allows a laptop running windows 7 to “tether” other devices to a single internet connection by turning the laptop into a Wireless router. I like the sound of this.

“There are a lot of neat scenarios where this comes in handy,” said Gizis. “For example, people can use a wireless printer without any setup, which usually requires that you first plug the [wireless] printer into the computer with a USB cable so it can select the network.”

You could also connect your phone and other computers or devices to the network even if the other computers aren’t running Windows 7, provided of course that the laptop acting as the Wireless hotspot is running Windows 7.

Now although it’s free for the beta version of the software at the moment, Nomadio are likely to charge for a full version when it’s ready for release apparently in about 6 weeks time.

“I think we’ll end up with two-tier model, one that’s free, potentially ad-supported, and then sell a full version,” said Gizis.

Nice one!

We have the technology! Scientists find a way to replicate what’s on your mind on a computer screen

Sasha — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 20:06:18 +0000

It sounds pretty shocking but it’s absolutely true, scientists claim that they have made a breakthrough in brain research and have now discovered a way to read your mind, no joke.

Although their work has still to be reviewed, the researchers from the University of California used functional magnetic resonance imaging or fMRI as it is commonly known, to scan the brains of two individuals whilst they watched videos, reported the daily Telegraph.

What the researchers found was that they were able to link the movement and the colours in the video footage with the patterns of activity taking place in the visual cortex part of the brains of those watching the video.

All the researchers had to do then, was feed the information they received from the visual cortex into a bit of software and from that they could replicate what was being shown on the video onto a computer screen.

Ok so the footage wasn’t sharp and clear and more like a blurry “mind’s eye” version of the real footage but that’s not the point, the fact is they were able to produce something on a screen akin to what was going on in the brains of the two individuals that could be checked against the original video footage being watched. Wow!

Scientists have already managed to link patterns in the brain with still images that a person is looking at but this is the first time they have been able to “decode” the signals in the brain regarding moving images.

This is a mind blowing discovery and the implications of this kind of technology are enormous.

What it means for the future is that the technology could be used to record people’s dreams and thereby shed new light on dream research.

However, it could also be used to identify criminal suspects by scanning the minds of witnesses whilst they recall what they think they saw, or it could eventually even be used to question suspects.

Since the arrival of brain scanning technology, brain science has been taking massive leaps forward but this latest one is the mother of all biggies.

I’m not sure that the idea of a machine being able to read peoples minds and then displaying what it has “read” on a screen will go down well with everyone but whatever you think about it, it’s fascinating stuff.