« March 2007 | Main | May 2007 »
April 27, 2007
Moving on with Vista and Office 2007
I've got one notebook on Microsoft Windows Vista and I've started working with Office 2007 on several machines. There's a rash of "getting-to-know-you" articles on the Web and in traditional magazines describing the glories or failures of Vista and Office 2007. These products vacillate from being either the bees knees or the essence of why one should flee to Linux.
Meanwhile, back at the big end of town, some corporate IT environments have just moved onto Office 2003 (pant, pant). Yes, all that in 2006. Service Desk staff are not in the least anxious to move further forward to Office 2007 without aggressive user pressure. If that counts.
Despite Vista having been well exposed to ISVs (Independent Software Vendors), you can count on drivers for current and legacy equipment just coming out of beta or just now, being tuned for improved performance. Assuming that you have sorted out the hardware and drivers issue, some older software doesn't work. If you, the owner and fund source aren't keen to put more money out even though you want to soak in the excitement of Aero, drag out all your install CDs and run VirtualPC 2007 - putting the XP or Windows 98 genie in a bottle.
The infamous Office 2007 Ribbon has now started biting. Some home users are exactly the target market - they are either new or very casual users, and the Ribbon is said to expose the features of the programs more visibly. The older hands are quietly cursing under their breath. All their subconscious brain-ingrained File, Edit, Insert command menu habits are now awash in a sea of pain.
This legacy Microsoft Office (let's call it Office Classic) command structure is so ingrained into our consciousness, that tests like those used by UNSW for kids in primary school even ask where or what they should click on to achieve a result.
The pain is sudden and explicit - for example, you may be typing in Word, then notice that the speller is red wriggling the wrong words (or not at all).
You see English (US) in the status bar
- oh, that's easy to change, well, it's Tools > Language something or other....
wait....
there isn't a Tools > Language in Office 2007.
Some MVPs have started creating their own "work like it used to" Add-Ins to suppress the cold turkey feeling.
Here's one from Orlando
Keep tuned to this channel folks. As more positives and negatives (with expletives deleted) surface, we'll write about it.
Posted by Anandasim at 04:31 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
Narrow views
Extulit suggests in a comment on our post on the new Fairfax format [below] that they should have gone tabloid, because that would bring higher circulation.
It might appear from today's story, that shrinking the paper bring circulation gains, with the graphic in the paper version [which didn't make it online] revealing that since The Guardian adopted, oops, adopted the Berliner format in September 2005, circulation has risen 3.4 per cent. The circulation of The (tabloid) Times, however, hasn't changed.
As this marketing puff indicates, other factors could be involved. Wikipedia makes some interesting points here . As does this article from The Guardian. Business Week, by the way, hated it.
What seems clear is that the format change will be accompanied by a massive re-design. Over here, some interesting points.
The move will certainly cut paper costs, while costing quite a bit, initially, to change the presses.
Meanwhile, over at The Australian, D.D. McNicoll announces the real reason for the change:
DO you want to know the real reason that the page size of those two struggling Fairfax dailies, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, is going to be reduced from next year? Several Fairfax journalists contacted Strewth yesterday to cheerfully claim that the width of the newspapers' broadsheet pages is being cut because diminutive Fairfax chief executive David Kirk – who once played halfback for the mighty New Zealand All Blacks rugby team – doesn't have arms long enough to fully open the existing 80cm-wide newspapers and he wants something easier to handle.
Posted by cw at 12:21 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack
April 26, 2007
How to handle a broadsheet
No doubt some of you will be relieved at the news that The Age and Sydney Morning Herald will shortly become less broad broadsheets.
Acknowledging that "size does matter", Fairfax CEO David Kirk informed staff this morning
...it is time to give our readers what they keep telling us they want: a slightly narrower broadsheet so that they can spend more time with our newspapers. We intend to move to a narrower broadsheet format for the SMH and The Age in 2008. We are not moving to tabloid size, or to become a compact; but our new broadsheets will be narrower and more reader-friendly. While our metro papers will have a new size and format, the content will be retained...we are taking a careful look at the successful narrower broadsheets around the world, with particular attention to the current size of The New York Times.
Until then, if you are finding it difficult to manage all that paper, you might be interested in some hints on folding a broadsheet, to avoid losing control.
Posted by cw at 04:49 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
Scooting and shooting
Just before your faithful computer column mounted the Bleeding Edge motor scooter for a trip to the Mornington Peninsula a couple of weeks ago, it occurred to us that this was one of the occasions – the wedding of two of our young friends - when a video camera might be handy.
These are not the sort of impulses you tend to indulge when you’re getting around on two wheels. We’d even decided to wear a vest, rather than a coat, because of the space limitations.
As it happened, however, we’d just been sent a Canon HV10 videocam to review, and it fit our specifications – essentially, Something Very Small - perfectly. And we were pleasantly surprised, as we used it, to find that despite its compact dimensions – a 400g package measuring 56 x 104 x 106mm - it punches well above its weight.
The HV10 is Canon’s first consumer-level HD (High Definition) model. It records compressed widescreen HDV video – roughly four times the resolution of standard definition on Mini DV tapes. If you choose to shoot in HDV mode, the manual recommends using HD Mini DV tapes. JVC HD tapes cost roughly twice as much as the regular variety. Sony charges considerably more.
Our little journey together was probably the worst possible test for a videocam. Because we were literally out the door before we remembered the HV10, we had no time to read the manual, to check that the batteries were fully charged, and practise using the controls.
And because Canon doesn’t include a tape in the package – they also don’t give you a Firewire cable for digital downloads – we had to bung in a partly-used standard tape. Despite those considerable handicaps, we managed to capture all the right moments – in impressive resolution, in focus, and correctly exposed. With more familiarity and better preparations, the onboard equipment means you could expect to turn out some outstanding videos.
With an RRP of $2200, the HV10 is not a cheap camera, but we’ve seen it for as little as$1480 on the Internet and $1750 in camera stores.
It has a superb 10x 6.1 to 61 mm Canon HD lens and Digic DV II HD processor, an image stabiliser, and Instant AF, for faster auto focus. In most lighting conditions, the images are sharp, colour balance and contrast are impressive, and there is minimal “noise”.
There are a couple of trade-offs for the HV10’s convenience and image quality. The first is that because this is a Very Small camera, it also has Very Small controls. Until you master where everything is, you’ll probably feel you’ve got far too many fingers, and fat ones at that.
It’s a vertical or matchbox format, with a 2.7-inch LCD screen, and the designers must have had to do quite a bit of juggling to fit everything in. Your fingers seem to fall naturally on the angled zoom control, but while we didn’t have any problems, if you’re not particularly dexterous, you could mistake it for the camera/card mode switch just behind it, clustered with the still image shutter button.
Most of the controls are at the rear of the camera, under the viewfinder. Just below it is the rotating shoot/play/power off control, and the shooting button, which took us a while to remember wasn’t press and release, but had to be toggled on and off. There’s another layer of controls around that, which switches between manual and auto control, or scene mode – automatic pre-sets for a variety of conditions including Portrait, Sports, Night, Snow, Beach, Sunset, Spotlight, and Fireworks.
Below that, to the right, is the Function button which controls options like white balance and shutter speed. Immediately below that are two buttons to adjust focus and exposure.
Set into a cowling to the right of the power control, is the Menu button and a handy jog dial, that controls set-up features.
If you venture outside the automatic mode, and you use the viewfinder rather than the LCD screen to frame your shots – we’re prepared to bet you won’t - we’d recommend several sessions of weapons drill to familiarise your fingers.
If you’re an average point-and-shoot customer, you probably won’t notice the second limitation of the HV10: there’s no external mic. For that matter, there’s no accessory shoe. You’re going to have to live with the in-built microphone – you’ll have to take a vow of silence whenever you start shooting - or synch your frames to a digital tape recorder.
Another thing you’re going to have to live with is the fact that the HV10 is not a top performer in low-light conditions. You can get around this by shifting into shutter priority mode, and dropping the speed to 1/30th of a second. Although moving subjects will blur, it can produce quite a filmic effect.
We suspect there are a lot of space-conscious, snatch-and-go, point-and-shoot enthusiasts who would find the HV10 the perfect camera, Particularly if they get around on two wheels.
Posted by cw at 04:40 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
April 24, 2007
Here comes some 'Joost' up Internet TV
Joost (Pronounced 'juiced') is a new offering utilising P2P (Peer-to-Peer) technologies to deliver on-demand near-TV resolution broadcasting over the Internet. It comes from the creators who brought us Kazza and Skype and after E-Bay purchased Skype funding for Joost definitely seems like it is a non-issue. In a similar viral campaign when Google's Gmail product came out it is invite only and my inbox keeps filling up with the question "Do you have a Joost invite for me?" and sadly I don't have any yet, though with some link love to the Joost Blog I may just be able to get some invites for fellow readers of the Bleeding Edge.
There are already some impressive names signed up offering content such as National Geographic, ViaCom (MTV, Paramount Pictures), Warner Music and a recently struck deal with CBS. The platform already has plenty of advertising that are short adverts before the clip of your choice is played and thus far are far from being intrusive. You can head over to Joost and sign-up for the beta and hope that an invite will come your way quickly or keep an eye on the web for others who have invites handing them out.
The biggest issue for Australian's who want to use Joost is the bandwidth requirements both up and downstream.
Joost is a streaming video application, and so uses a relatively high amount of bandwidth per hour. In one hour of viewing, approximately 320Mb data will be downloaded and 105Mb uploaded, which means that it will exhaust a 1Gb cap in 10 hours. Windows users should note that the application continues to run in the background after you close the main window. For this reason, if you pay for your bandwidth usage per megabyte or have your usage capped by your ISP, you should be careful to always exit Joost client completely when you are finished watching it.
There is an introduction video from the Joost team here and the video below is a quick (and rough) video I whipped up showing Xavier Rudd from FabChannel.com and the Aston Martin DB9 from the Fifth Gear TV Series all streamed through the Joost application.
Posted by Stephen at 10:36 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
April 23, 2007
Optus: where the buck never stops
Optus got half-way to being gracious about the network fault that denied up to 200,000 Melbourne mobile customers service on the weekend. It did actually apologise for a fault that also sent SMS messages from other networks into the electronic version of the garbage tip. What it didn't do was accept responsibility.
According to an Optus spokesman, the problem was "a vendor-related hardware fault". In other words, a piece of hardware failed. We seem to recall the same ducking and weaving and finger-pointing in a previous Optus debacle. Oh yes. Here it is: another "vendor-related fault".
But hang on, Mr Optus. Equipment fails all the time. This time it took you nine hours to identify and fix the fault. Hasn't anybody there heard of the concept of redundancy, or fault-tolerant design? It's alarming enough for a public telephone network to be beset by a series of escalating debacles. It's much worse when its response is to point the finger at a supplier. Aren't you supposed to have engineers on staff who design, test and monitor the network, to prevent these nasty little faults, or at least ensure the network can recover quickly? Nine hours off the air because a piece of hardware went down is simply unacceptable. And blaming someone else for your own serious shortcomings is unseemly, to say the least. In our view, consumers should steer clear of companies that act like this. They're duds.
We criticise Telstra constantly - usually for charging WAAY too much for its services - but they at least know how to run a phone network.
Posted by cw at 05:19 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
April 22, 2007
Optus falls over ... again
The Optus mobile network seems to have gone absent without leave over a wide area of Melbourne on the weekend. Reports on the Whirlpool forum suggest the network "disappeared" shortly before midnight on Saturday in the CBD and several suburbs, including Brunswick, Armadale, and St Kilda. The problems continued until shortly before 9am Sunday, and in at least one case, two hours later.
Other Optus customers reported their landline, Internet and pay TV services also dropped out.
Optus is gaining a reputation for instability. In February, the company's servers came down, disrupting landline services in Sydney, Brisbane, Hobart, Melbourne and Adelaide. Then, earlier this month, Optus pre-paid customers got to listen to other users' conversations, when the network suddenly decided it was a party line.
Posted by cw at 11:44 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
April 19, 2007
Do we Dopod?
It took us a long time to accept the inevitable, but last week we finally decided we were going to have to abandon the Palm operating system that has powered our Treo 600, and its replacement, the Treo 650.
Two of our friends have already made the move – one to a Windows Mobile device, the iMate JasJar (a touch too bulky for us), and the other - a Mac user for whom a Windows phone would be a betrayal - to a Sony Ericsson.
Bleeding Edge, however, has been prevaricating. We’ve been using Treos for four years now, and the idea of switching fills us with the same degree of enthusiasm that Basil the Bleeding Edge bulldog displays towards the prospect of a bath.
It’s not as simple, say, as moving from a Nokia handset to a Motorola. You’re not just going to have to learn some different key combinations and convert your contact list to a new format. A smart phone like the Treo, or the growing fleet of Windows Mobile devices, embeds itself into your life.
It takes care of your calendar and task list, your email and instant messaging. It becomes your mobile library, with whatever selection of e-books you’ve downloaded. It plays your music and these days, possibly, some of your videos. With a Bluetooth keyboard and surprisingly powerful office applications, it allows you to take your work on the road. The latest generation includes models that also get you where you want to go, with a GPS navigation system.
Because you synchronise your portable files and programs with your desktop operating system, the choices you make are critical. Change the smart phone platform, and you’re going to be buying a lot of new software – fortunately relatively inexpensive software – and spending weeks, if not months, reading manuals and learning a vast array of new features.
We knew that shifting from the Palm-powered Treo to a Windows Mobile device was going to be agony, but the arrival of genuine 3G networks with broadband HSDPA (High Speed Downlink Packet Access) capabilities had forced the decision on us. Palm’s operating system simply couldn’t handle simultaneous voice and data traffic on these high-speed networks - reflected in the fact that the latest Palm smart phone, the Treo 750, is a Windows Mobile device.
Then, just after we’d made our decision to move, Palm Inc. announced that before the end of the year, it would unveil a new Treo that runs the Palm OS on top of a Linux kernel, overcoming its key limitations, while retaining its advantages of virtually instant application operation and switching.
The question for Bleeding Edge suddenly became this: could we wait that long?
This sort of decision does require a lot of consideration. You’ve got to weigh things like network plans and coverage, and availability of handsets. One of the best resources is Whirlpool’s Phones forum, at whirlpool.net.au, where knowledgeable users discuss their experiences and the latest developments.
We’ve already prepared for the switch from the ageing Palm desktop to the Windows alternative, Microsoft Outlook. That gave us a taste of the likely obstacles in our path. The Palm HotSync utility couldn’t seem to handle the transfer of our contacts, calendar, tasks and notes to Outlook 2007, which we’d installed on our Windows XP system.
We messed around for quite a while, then finally decided to buy PocketCopy, from Chapura, for $US24.95.
It’s a one-time solution that transfers the data in your Palm Desktop to your desktop version of Outlook. After that, it’s a simple matter of synching Outlook with your portable device. It’s a simple, clever solution that we regarded as definitely worth the investment. All you have to do is choose the databases you want to transfer, and PocketCopy does the job without any fuss.
We’ve been looking at the Treo 750, the O2 xDA Atom Life and the Dopod D810 as potential replacements for the Treo 650. Each of them is impressive, but we’re leaning towards the Dopod, not just because of its full range of features, including WiFi, but also because of one small, but in our view highly useful feature: a small jog dial that greatly improves one-handed operation.
At around $1045, it even includes GPS capabilities – although the company has not yet released a ROM upgrade to activate that facility in Australia. According to Dopod, it’s going through the approval process with Optus and 3, and is expected to be released in May or June.
We’re happy to wait until then, because at the same time, Dopod is expected to release a new version of the D810 which would upgrade the processor from 400MHz to 500MHz, and possibly increase the RAM.
In the meantime, we’ve got to make some more decisions. We’ve been Telstra Mobile customers since it first introduced the digital network. If we were interested only in voice services, we almost certainly would have simply transferred across to its Next G network.
Telstra doesn’t offer the D810 on a plan – although you can buy one outright and use it on the Next G network - but we could have had the Treo 750 on a two-year, $70-per-month voice plan. As we mentioned recently, however, Telstra’s data charges for non-corporate customers are too high for us to contemplate.
That means we’ll have to switch to 3. It offers the Dopod D810 on its $29 cap plan with a $20 minimum monthly spend over 24 months. The 3 network has recently been updated to HSDPA , shifting data at typical speeds of 600kbps to 1.5Mbps. Telstra claims the NextG network has 100 times more coverage than its competitors, but 3’s coverage map, indicates that we’d rarely notice the difference.
More critically, 3 has also introduced its X-Series data plans, ranging from $20 per month for 500MB of data, to $40 per month for 2GB of traffic. You also get from 100 to 400 minutes of Skype to Skype VoIP phone calls.
It looks like we’ll be spending the next month or two familiarising ourselves with Windows Mobile, and making a final choice between phones – and networks. But we won’t be waiting for the release of those Linux- powered Palms. Even for laggards like us, it’s just too late.
Posted by cw at 01:27 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
April 18, 2007
ZTD - Putting more Do in Getting Things Done
I just spotted a blog entry at Zenhabits about Getting The Human To Perform. It's about Forming the 10 Good Habits.
1 collect. Habit: ubiquitous capture. Carry a small notebook (or whatever capture tool works for you) and write down any tasks, ideas, projects, or other information that pop into your head. Get it out of your head and onto paper, so you don’t forget it. This is the same as GTD. But ZTD asks you to pick a very simple, portable, easy-to-use tool for capture — a small notebook or small stack of index cards are preferred (but not mandated), simply because they are much easier to use and carry around than a PDA or notebook computer. The simpler the tools, the better. When you get back to your home or office, empty your notes into your to-do list (a simple to-do list will work for now — context lists can come in a later habit).
Worth a read....
Posted by Anandasim at 11:55 AM | TrackBack
April 17, 2007
Outlook 2007 performance update
Stephen's posted a link in the forum for an Outlook 2007 update which improves performance.
The 8.3 MB update should accelerate the download of messages from the Exchange e-mail server and reduce temporary freezes resulting from deleting messages or copying them from one folder to another as well as allow faster switching between messages and enable faster program startup. "I can’t say that this will 100 percent solve the latency issues, but users should see a big improvement," said Jessica Arnold, Outlook’s program manager.We've been trialling Outlook 2007 recently, and it does seem it could do with a touch more speed.
We'd be interested in your impressions of Outlook 2007. It seems quite an improvement on previous versions, although we haven't yet completely fallen in love with it. What about you?
Posted by cw at 04:25 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
GPS price war ... and piracy
There's nothing we like better than when manufacturers start fighting over market share. We've got one battle going on in the hard disk industry, for instance, that has just seen Seagate announce a drop in profits. Now it seems the GPS industry is at each other's throats.
Today we got a press release from Navman announcing its entry-level F20 has been reduced from $629 to $499. The better-featured N series range has also been slashed. The N40i is $699 (from $849) and the N60i $899 ($1099). And Sensis WhereIs has joined the party with a $50 cash-back offer on all GPS devices sold in April and May.
On April 1, TomTom announced a price cut on its range. The TomTom ONE is now $499, the TomTom GO 710 $699, and the Go 910 $899.
Can there be any link, we wonder, with the fact that mobile phones and PDAs are increasingly including GPS capability, and despite authentication safeguards, a lot of people are ripping off TomTom software, which seems to be regarded as fair game these days, because - according to one retailer we spoke to - it's no longer being sold in Australia. In fact, according to a TomTom spokesman, iIt has only been available in Australia as part of a package for the HP iPAQ, as part of a global deal.
Update: And today TomTom announced a new model:
Sydney, 17 April 2007 – TomTom, the world’s largest navigation solutions provider, today reveals the new TomTom ONE XL with a super-sized 4.3 inch high-quality touch screen and a sleek new design. The 4.3 inch screen guarantees drivers a clear view of the screen, whilst ensuring a stress free and safer journey on the road. Thanks to the enlarged screen drivers will have a better overview of the road ahead with more streets and information on display.
Posted by cw at 03:08 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
Inbox problems? Pop a Prozac
Robert Wright [no relation] of the New York Times, has this interesting, if bizarre theory that there is a correlation between e-mail and Prozac, in that the more of each there is, the more there will be of the other. Robert [actually, we're glad he isn't a relative] theorises that the issues created by e-mail - did someone not reply because your social status doesn't warrant a response? - are best handled with serotonin, the Prozac ingredient that compensates for problems of social heirarcy.
Hence the Prozac temptation: Just open that serotonin throttle and cruise through your in-box, unhampered by fancied slights, groundless anxieties and other impediments to bliss. (Your mileage may vary.) And, bliss aside: Imagine the efficiency! With the time you don’t spend worrying about Joe, you can crank out e-mail to Jim, Sally and Sue. And efficiency is what e-mail is about, right? By ending the need to coordinate schedules, it lets us interact with lots of people — and interact along such narrow channels that we skip the bother of getting to know an entire human being.We hardly dare inquire, but ... do you by any chance find yourself depressed because of the contents, or lack thereof, of your Inbox?
Posted by cw at 02:42 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
April 16, 2007
Doug Zongker's Powerpoint Piece
I've given some Powerpoint shows but this certainly beats them for content. Watch out for the response to the last question.
Spotted at Presentation Zen.
Posted by Anandasim at 09:26 PM | TrackBack
Paparazzi under threat from Mumarazzi?
Professional photographers say their industry is under attack by the dreaded MWAC - a Mum With a Camera.
Cheap digital SLRs are allowing mothers to turn their passion for photographing their own kids into businesses which pay them for photographing other people's kids, according to the New York Times. Charging as little as $US!0 $US10 [have to remember to release that danged shift key] for an 8x10 portrait tends to endear them to their customers in a way expensive studio portraits do not.
Posted by cw at 04:32 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
Building your own PC ... painfully
Thinking of building your own PC? You might like to learn from the experience of Jim Louderback, editorial director of PC Magazine, who had the bright idea, since he needed a new Windows Vista PC, of assembling it himself. Seeemed like a good idea at the time, because Jim felt he needed to catch up, first hand, with some of the new technologies - SATA, DDR2, PCI Express, Dual Core CPUs etc - that have popped up since he last built a box, two years ago. (Well, there was that Shuttle PC, but that was "a bundle of compromises" which doesn't count.)
Louderback wasn't sparing his bank account. His list of components included Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 processor, an Asus Commando motherboard, Kingston 2 GB DDR2 memory, two unnamed SATA hard drives, ATI Radeon X1900XT video card, and a Creative X-Fi Fatality audio card, packed into an Antec P180B case with a Seasonic S12 650-watt power supply.
Unfortunately, despite having all those nerds reporting to him, Louderback quickly found that while the new technology had fewer pins to bend out of shape, it had a completely new set of frustrations. First Jim couldn't decode the fool-proof colour-coded memory slots on the motherboard, and had to seek help from the nerds who report to him. Then, when he finally got it all assembled, nothing happened. The motherboard's OLED display flashed the message "DET DRAM" at him, but he couldn't find out how to decode that, either.
After burning heaps of time, Jim turfed the Asus Commando, and settled for an MSI 975X Platinum motherboard that, while lacking some of the Asus features, did at least, finally, work. Mind you, the RAM colour-coding was completely different ... just one of the little traps you can fall into in these days of foolproof technology, and Jim got his arithmetic wrong (Bleeding Edge knows all about that), thinking that he was installing two sticks of 2GB RAM, rather than two sticks of 1GB RAM
Here's some of the things Jim discovered:
- DDR2 Memory works in pairs
- Don't be worried when SATA drives don't show up in your BIOS
- Graphics cards have new, specialised six-pin power plugs
- Beware the fragile Core 2 Duo stock CPU cooler
- Flash your BIOS with a USB thumb drive
- Beware high-end, expensive, hyper-tweakable motherboards
- Install the motherboard before the power supply
Posted by cw at 12:27 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
April 13, 2007
Off-book communications
Aah! The "off-book communication" - a way our political masters might be able to avoid being held to account. It seems sensitive emails that might relate to the Bush administration's sacking of US attorneys who weren't dyed-in-the-wool Republican apparatchiks might have been lost, despite action to prevent that Karl Rove chap from deleting his messages.
Faced with government record-keeping requirements, Rove and his merry men led "dual electronic lives", using Republican National Committee email accounts to avoid leaving a paper - make that electronic - trail. The question now is, has it been erased, or does it still exist somewhere?
They're a slippery lot, these Neo-Cons. It would never happen in Australia, of course. Our Government never commits any of its less savoury dealings to email. We're led to believe, in fact, that Liberal (and for that matter Labor) Ministers are selected purely for their inability to use and understand email. If any of them do learn, and are foolish enough to say anything sensitive, any embarrassment is prevented by our Disappearance of Information policy, where in order to safeguard democracy, journalists and others can look at whatever they want, provided it's absolutely useless. It's SOO much harder to lie achieve plausible deniability, when you've got written evidence.
Posted by cw at 06:36 PM | TrackBack
Hold the iPhone ... Leopard will be late
A couple of months away from the release of the yet-unborn-but-celebrated iPhone, Apple has suddenly discovered that the "most sophisticated software ever shipped on a mobile device" apparently won't be ready in June, after all, unless it throws more developers at the project.
That's easy for a genius like Steve Jobs. Just take some developers off the equally sophisticated and much-awaited Leopard OS development. But. Hang on. What about the early June shipment date for Leopard? Won't that, you know, change the Leopard's spots?
No problems. The world's most innovative company has just informed the world that it's put the Leopard launch back until October, on account of moving the labour force to iPhone. But might this robbing of Peter to remunerate Paul not irritate Mac customers, who've REALLY been looking forward to Leopard, given it's been two years since Tiger hit the shelves? Apple has thought about that too, with some what you might call directed philosophy: "Life often presents tradeoffs," it declares, with the subtlest whiff of cigar smoke, "and in this case we're sure we've made the right ones." In other words, "Be cool, and leave everything to us."
So what issues might have beset the iPhone, requiring the re-assignment of resources? Apple zealots have been pooh-poohing John Dvorak for suggesting that one of the sophisticated iPhone breakthroughs achieved with this "revolutionary and magical product" is a battery that (a) is not removable and (b) lasts a breathtaking 40 minutes. But maybe he's right after all.
And it looks like Leopard has some revolutionary and magical features too. According to the Apple 2.0 blog ["Mac news from outside the reality distortion field via Business 2.0"]:
Word that the long-awaited upgrade might be pushed back until October first circulated in late March. At the time, there was speculation that Apple might be holding up the release to make their OS more compatible with Microsoft's Vista (MSFT), a theory that was widely dismissed. But even then, outside programmers working with Apple had complained that the interim versions of Leopard -- the so-called builds -- coming out of Cupertino were unusually buggy for a major OS upgrade this late in the game and were not following the usually release pattern: a flurry of increasingly refined builds followed by silence before the final release.
Could it be that those long delays in Microsoft operating systems could be somehow programmed into Intel chips?
Posted by cw at 11:59 AM | TrackBack
Now for the telescopic finger
Put it down to our tiny mind, but when we heard about the QuickPod - a telescoping arm to which you can attach your camera and take a self-portrait, or perhaps a shot of a hard-to-reach spot such as, in this promotional shot, under your car (perhaps for that great shot of the car bomb???), we thought, "Hmmnn. Now all you need is a telescopic finger to push the shutter."
Silly us. What you do is use the camera's automatic timer. Although, if you're anything like us, you may find those automatic timers exceptionally irritating. They seem to go on until they reach the point where your smile has collapsed through complete boredom, or perhaps reached the point where you start frowning - wondering if you're going to have to re-set the damned thing - and then, SNAP!!! They take the bloody shot. Which you then delete, and start again. So maybe, after all, there is room for a telescopic finger. Please consider, QuickPod.
Posted by cw at 11:18 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
April 12, 2007
Words to go
We have quite enough to do around here without solving the technical problems of fictional characters in the novels we read, but when we got to Chapter 6 of Salley Vickers’ Mr Golightly’s Holiday, we felt a powerful compulsion to come to the aid of the eponymous hero.
Mr Golightly has taken a holiday in a Devon village to re-package his best-seller as a TV soap opera. Like most writers, Mr Golightly is addicted to dictionaries, but rather than load on to his laptop “a CD-ROM copy of the OED, which would apparently furnish every word in the English language anyone could wish to check”, he packs the two volumes of the Shorter English Dictionary into his ageing Morris Oxford (or possibly Morris Minor) Traveller.
“In Mr Golightly’s view,” the author explains, “a computer screen was no substitute for a solid book you could get your hands around”.
Bleeding Edge is besotted with dictionaries too, and we happened to have those two volumes of the Shorter English Dictionary sitting in our bookshelves. We got our hands around them both, and popped them on the scales. They weighed just under 4.2kg. Given Mr Golightly had also packed a notebook computer, it must have been a significant strain for him to be carrying them off to Devon, when he could have had one of his staff install the CD-ROM version of the Oxford English Dictionary on the PC.
That would have given him access to the entire contents of the 20-volume OED. And having them on the computer screen has many advantages.
We suspect Ms Vickers is confused, and the real reason for Mr Golightly’s preferring the books was the sad history of the CD-ROM version .
Way back in the early-90s we’d bought a copy of version 1 of the Second Edition of the OED on CD. Despite the fact that it cost $950, and the original software was slightly buggy, it was a delight. It went far beyond checking on the meaning and spelling of words, allowing you to explore the origin of words and phrases.
Although Oxford University Press at the time was telling customers it didn’t recommend putting the database on to a hard drive, and claiming there was no significant advantage in doing so, in fact it happily resided on a hard drive, where it made for much speedier searches. You could network that version with other computers. It even worked on a Macintosh.
Then Windows XP came on the scene, and our software stopped working. We couldn’t get OUP to address the problems, so, in a moment of frustration, we disposed of our copy.
Later OUP sent us a new version of the Second Edition of the OED. Our early hopes for a return to Word Paradise quickly evaporated. Although this version did work under Windows XP, it had gained a bulky interface, and lost the features which made it such an attractive alternative to all those heavy books.
It was obvious that OUP had become paranoid about the possibility of having its valuable data stolen. The new release could only access the data from the CD. Networking was no longer permitted. A later version allowed you to copy information to the hard drive, but every 70 to 90 days it required you to re-validate from the CD. Unfortunately, glitches in the copy protection system meant the validation sometimes failed. The “improvements” killed our enthusiasm.
It wasn’t until much later that we discovered fixes for all the problems we’d had running version 1 under Windows XP, at a site established by an apparent dictionary fanatic, Robert Holmgren.
Holmgren’s discoveries meant we had to track down a second-hand replacement for version 1. Fortunately, at the time, there seemed to be no shortage of disenchanted users, so it wasn’t too costly.
Holmgren was convinced that version 1 remains the most useful release, but he had some good news for users of versions 2 and 3 of the OED software too. He found ways all the versions could be run from a hard drive under Windows XP and earlier Microsoft operating systems. More recently, he reports that version 1.10 will still run under Windows Vista, under administrator privileges in Windows XP compatibility mode; that version 1 works on the (Intel) Macintosh platform using Crossover Mac and that version 3 happily runs on Macs under Parallels, or VirtualPC.
What’s even better news is that OUP has only recently had a change of heart. They’ve released a software patch called “Release 2”, or version 3.1.1 which means that the only form of OED that you can still buy as a new product, is no longer crippled.
If you have a version 3.1 product that is dated 2004, you can obtain the update from OUP Tech Support (ep.help@oup.com), and gain access to the first version of the OED since v1.11 that can be freely installed on a hard disk without irritations.
In Australia, the electronic version of OED is particularly expensive, at $725, compared to $608 ( 250 pounds) in the UK. The cheapest source, however, is via the US specialist retailer. Elernaid. The latest version is currently on sale for $US198, which is $US100 below the normal price. With $13.60 shipping, that makes a total of $211.60, which is quite a bargain for those of us who, like Mr Golightly, want to take our dictionaries on holidays.
For saner individuals, the electronic versions of the Macquarie Dictionary are probably better value. You can buy the Macquarie dictionary, thesaurus and spell package on CD for $69.95. It doesn’t approach the number of words in the OED, but the interface is vastly superior, allowing you to drag and drop a word onto a small desktop icon. And for crossword fans, you can fill in missing characters with an asterisk, which is a great aid for finding the answer to 1 Across and 7 Down.
You can subscribe to an online version for an annual subscription of $18.65, but we had a good deal of difficulty getting through to it last week. Like us, Mr Golightly would no doubt find that would spoil his holiday.
Posted by cw at 05:58 PM | TrackBack
Palm hitches a ride on Linux
Just when we'd decided to make the switch from the Palm Treo to a Windows Mobile smartphone - probably the Dopod 810 - CEO Ed Colligan announces a new range of Palm Treos will be introduced by the end of the year, with the Palm OS piggy-backing on Linux.
The switch - rumoured way back in 2005, and heralded by unofficial Palm/Linux marriages - will allow the Palm/PDA to handle voice and data simultaneously, overcoming the deficiencies that seemed to have forced it to embrace the Windows Mobile OS for its most recent Treos, including the 750 which has just been released for Telstra's Next G network, and shortly on the 3 network.
Is it too late? Or can Palm lovers wait?
Posted by cw at 01:04 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
April 10, 2007
"Just fix it" age a killer for user groups?
Garry Barker's story about the decline of the computer user group presents one view of the modern user. The story quotes Lyn Goodall, the new president of Melbourne PC User Group - which [pace Garry] must still be the world's largest user group if it's second to APCUG, given that APCUG is actually the association of user groups, rather than an individual club - on a discussion she had recently with a young woman who presumably didn't join.
"As one young woman with whom I tossed this question around recently said to me: if the machine goes wrong, she pays someone to fix it or she buys a new one. She is not interested in knowing how it works. She told me she wanted information instantly, wherever she was. She wants to read her emails, save her pictures and do all that kind of stuff. It is this need for instant information and communication that is driving the young."Well, yes, but we're not sure that necessarily means that they won't join a user group.
It probably does mean they won't join for the same reasons - learning how things work and making contact with more experienced users who can help them solve problems. They probably don't want to read the club magazine.
They're likely to be much more interested in entertainment. And while it is true that these days, people have far less spare time to attend meetings, the urge to communicate is as strong as ever. It's just that these days, people meet online.
What it suggests to Bleeding Edge is that if user groups are to survive, they've got to have much better online facilities, and they must find new ways of creating and fostering online communities. If we were inventing user groups today, what would they look like? Or are we completely wrong, and the entire concept is doomed?
Posted by cw at 03:15 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
Mind your manners
What with the standard of blogging debate deteriorating to the level of death threats and sexual abuse of late, the blogging community is now debating a code of conduct for comment.
Publisher Tim O'Reilly and Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales are co-operating to produce a set of guidelines.
Chief among the recommendations is that bloggers consider banning anonymous comments left by visitors to their pages and be able to delete threatening or libelous comments without facing cries of censorship.Some members of the blogging community - even those who do keep a civil tongue in their heads - are umm, incensed, yup, definitely incensed, by thoughts of censorship:
Many Internet veterans believe that blogs are part of a larger public sphere, and that deleting a visitor’s comment amounts to an assault on their right to free speech. It is too early to gauge support for the proposal, but some online commentators are resisting.May we say, in the nicest possible way, Robert, that we don't have a clue what you're talking about? Freedom of speech can only flourish when the bullies and bores - why does Andrew Bolt spring to mind? - aren't allowed to intimidate and abuse those who, while they might disagree, respect the opinions of others as much as their own.
Robert Scoble, a popular technology blogger who stopped blogging for a week in solidarity with Kathy Sierra [who was the unfortunate recipient of those death threats etc.] after her ordeal became public, says the proposed rules “make me feel uncomfortable.” He adds, “As a writer, it makes me feel like I live in Iran.”
We've been very lucky around here. Our commenters are, with few exceptions, extraordinarily thoughtful and polite. Yours Truly does come in for a bucket-load of ordure every now and again, but we take that as an indication that we're doing our job ... "comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable".
Hmmn. Forgive the personal tangent. So where were we?
Oh yes. You're a particularly polite lot, and pretty wise to boot. So what do you think about establishing some rules of blogging engagement? One tiny problem we can see is this: given this is the Internet, how are you supposed to detect anonymity? We can't ask them to produce their driver's licences, can we?
Posted by cw at 09:25 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack
April 09, 2007
Mindless printing
Hewlett Packard's printer division has noticed that young people in particular - including the boss's daughter - feel they don't need printers any more. This is a touch threatening to a company that still gets most of its revenue from the ink and toner that its printers gobble like crazy, at prices that make the stuff more expensive than the finest champagne.
As the story reveals, HP - like all the printer manufacturers - treats its customers like junkies.
If H.P. wants to see higher profit in several months to compensate for slower growth in another area, [printer division senior vice president] Viyomesh I. Joshi’s unit will cut printer prices. More printers are sold, and new customers are soon buying high-margin replacement ink or toner cartridges.
Having all that information on the Web was supposed to reduce the need for print-outs, but in fact it now accounts for roughly half of all home printing. Now the company has embarked on a strategy designed to get people to print even more Internet material.
It's bought a small company, Tabblo, which sells software that - according to the New York Times - "creates templates to reorganise the photos and text blocks on a Web page to fit standard sizes of paper". In fact, Tabblo actually developed its templates to "put together photos and words with styled templates that can be customized by the author for the purpose of telling a story". It's mostly focused on Web viewing, and presents the printing option purely as an afterthought. H.P., however, quickly saw the potential to help achieve its goal of generating income, and now wants to make the software a standard by making it ubiquitous, like Adobe’s Flash and Reader or Sun Microsystems’ Java. By doing so, it thinks many more people will mindlessly push the button and contribute just a bit more to the world of wastefulness.
Fascinating, isn't it, how corporations so blatantly ignore the environment, and the best interests of their customers, in the mindless pursuit of profits. We're with Mr Joshi's daughter. She doesn't need a printer. And you probably don't need to use yours anywhere near as much as you do.
Posted by cw at 11:28 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack
Back to the blog
It's been quite a while since you've seen our ugly face around here. The reason for the absence? Well, we're not going to go into the details, but it's fair to say we had a lot on our mind.
We're amazed that the blog has survived. It wouldn't have, of course, without the generosity of Stephen and Anandasim, and once or twice Jeremy and Apal. We thank them for their devotion. They've given the blog a much broader personality than when it was just yours truly, and we hope they'll continue to contribute.
It's been more than a year since we stopped posting the columns to the blog, and instead emailed it to those who took up a subscription. We've decided to go back to posting them here, hoping that those who find them useful, and would like them to continue to be available, will send us a donation. Subscriptions are a more certain source of (much-needed) funds, but we think that public comment on the columns enhances their value.
Aside from that, we can't promise to post every day - we just don't have the time and energy - but you will be hearing from us much more regularly.
Posted by cw at 10:56 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack
Workhorse PC (updated)
There are times when Bleeding Edge hesitates to fulfill our duties as a consumer, holding up the particular bit of the economy allocated to us by the common wealth. What with the Bleeding Edge spouse being unable to distinguish this civic responsibility from the actions of “a gadget-obsessed spendthrift”, it’s a heavy burden.
At times like this, we seek the shelter of Moore’s Law. Its essence - that computing power per unit cost doubles every 18 months – means that any expenditure on IT is a demonstrable bargain, provided one assesses it via the rear view mirror. This approach has been indispensable in avoiding terminal atrophy of the spending reflex.
Take, for instance, the workhorse PC. Six years ago, when we first began the exercise of specifying the components for that now legendary machine, our challenge was to provide a friend with an alternative to a $4499 branded PC that, had it suddenly popped up on the credit card statement, would almost certainly have given his spouse a minor stroke or heart attack.
We assembled a superior system which included what at the time were a high-end processor, respectable RAM, sound card and graphics card, 17-inch CRT monitor, DVD player, CD-RW burner, and hard drive, for a total of $2625.
It made it so much easier for our friend to enjoy the bliss of a powerful, trouble-free PC, without nuptial stress and injury, and we decided to share the experience with readers. Since then, thousands of readers have used the quarterly specifications to ease their guilt, and calm their spouses. While we have not yet received an Order of Australia for services to health, marital peace and the economy, we’re sure one must be in the pipeline.
What with the state of the share market affecting the nerve of fellow supporters of the economy, we thought it was time to take a stroll through recent history with Moore’s Law, going back six years, when we began the exercise.
We based that first workhorse PC on the AMD Athlon Thunderbird CPU. It was a mere 900Mhz model, with a system bus of 266Mhz. It cost $400. The mainstream CPU at the time was Intel’s Pentium III, which, depending on the speed, cost from $325 to $625. The cheapest Pentium 4 at the time was $1090, well beyond our price range.
The Intel Core 2 Duo CPU that powers today’s workhorse PC is considerably cheaper than the 1Ghz Athlon, and roughly one quarter the price of the Pentium 4. With two processors working at 1.86GHz on a system bus of 1066MHz, equipped with eight times the onboard L2 cache, it is vastly more powerful. It also uses much less power.
Our first workhorse PC had just 128MB of RAM, which cost $120 – a good deal more than the $85 you’d pay for the 1GB of much faster RAM which powers today’s workhorse machine. Back in 2001, the hard drive stored 30GB, which at $310, represented around $10 per GB – more than 10 times the cost per GB of today’s 320GB drive.
For $1290 - roughly half the price of the 2001 model - what you’re getting in today’s workhorse PC, is, by comparison, a supercomputer.
We’re sticking with the Gigabyte GA-965P-S3 motherboard from last December, but it’s $17 cheaper at $148. For a little more, however, the Gigabyte GA-965P-DS3 is an outstanding purchase. If you’re particularly flush with funds, the Asus P5B DeLuxe is worth the additional investment.
The price of the Intel Core 2 Duo 6300, which is our base-level recommendation, has gone up slightly to $258. Fortunately 1GB generic DDR2 RAM has dropped to $69, from $136. If you’re going to run Windows Vista, or you regularly use programs like Adobe PhotoShop or do any serious multi-tasking, you’ll need 2GB of memory, and now is a great time to buy it.
Graphics card prices may be due for a shakeup with the possible entry into the local market of Foxconn, which aside from producing some very good motherboards, manufactures the popular Leadtek range. Foxconn will have to buy market share from the established brands, and with the situation expected to be resolved in the next few weeks, it might be worth holding off for a month or so.
In that area, we’ve moved to the Nvidia 7300GT graphics chip as the base, because of its widescreen capability. It will cost you $106. If you’re a games player, you won’t be satisfied with anything less than the 7900GS chip, which will cost you around $165. Depending on its price and availability, Foxconn’s FV-N79SMD2-OC might be a bargain at that level.
We’ve chosen the same hard drive in the 16MB cache, SATA II version of the 320GB Seagate.
The big move in DVD writers comes with the arrival of the Asus SATA model, which has a faster transmission rate than the IDE version. In addition to being able to write at 18x, the Asus version includes LightScribe technology which allows you to flip the CD or DVD over and burn a label.
The ThermalTake Soprano VX case is still a sound choice at $127, and the 19-inch BenQ 91G+ LCD monitor is a good entry point, at $293. With $70 for assembly, it’s an absolute steal, compared to 2001. Your spouse should be thoroughly grateful for your restraint.
Components:
CPU: Intel Core2Duo E6300 $258
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-965P-S3 $148
RAM: 1GB Generic $69
Video card: Gigabyte 7300GT (256MB) $106
Hard drive: Seagate 320GB SATA II 16MB $121
Monitor: BenQ FP91G $293
DVD burner: Asus SATA $65
Keybd/mouse : Microsoft 500 $33
Case: ThermalTake Soprano VX $127
Assembly: $70
Total: $1290
Posted by cw at 09:53 PM | TrackBack
Battery boosters
Bleeding Edge was fascinated last week to learn from an article in this publication that “Australians are adopting mobile gadgets such as smart phones and MP3 players far more enthusiastically than Americans”.
The article quoted a study by the independent technology and market research group, Forrester, which calculated that 92 per cent of Australian households owned some form of mobile electronic device, compared with 76 per cent in the US.
The numbers made us very nervous indeed. Just think of it: 92 per cent of Australians – virtually the entire country - have adopted mobile gadgets that will stop working when their batteries go flat. At that point, those people will stop being enthusiastic, and become very bad-tempered indeed. We are pretty sure that if Forrester compared its figures on technology adoption with the statistics on road rage and other forms of violence, they would see a distinct correlation.
If these people are anything like Bleeding Edge, they will frequently forget to charge these gadgets, so that – generally in the middle of a vital conversation – the smart phone will stop being smart, and the MP3 player will close its little electronic mouth, and cease playing that soothing music.
We tend to run into these people in Internet cafes and airport lounges. They are the ones whose eyes are restlessly scouring the décor, looking for a vacant power point.
We encounter them in hotels and motels and conference rooms, when they are dealing with Forgotten Charger Phenomenon – a condition which tends to result from hasty, or neglectful packing, or perhaps from sub-conscious resistance to having to lug around an entire family of chargers to feed all those mobile gadgets.
You can get a small taste of this phenomenon in your home town, as it happens, when you’re in your office, and discover that the charger is at home, or vice versa.
Bleeding Edge has experienced the unfortunate consequences so often that we now take precautions against this sudden loss of enthusiasm for our electronic gadgets, in the form of the Targus range of universal adapters. While the original charger for each of our exciting mobile electronic devices stays at home, where we can keep an eye on it, the Targus adapters accompany us to work, or on trips.
The most obvious advantage of these clever little devices is that they use detachable tips to adjust the voltage and provide the right connection for individual devices. The fact that you don’t have to haul a collection of these transformers around with you reduces the physical stresses on today’s electronic nomad.
Targus claims the Universal AC./DC Anyplug 70W power adapter ($144.95) which we use to power the Toshiba R200 laptop for instance, is compatible with 98 per cent of today’s notebook PCs. It ships with 10 tips that fit the most common notebooks. There’s a compatibility chart here which you can consult to see if the standard tip package will accommodate your system. You can order other tips from Targus.
Targus also sells a 90-watt version of the adapter ($179.95) for higher-voltage laptops.
We’ve fitted it with the Targus Mobile 15 accessory power adapter, which plugs into the adapter’s output cable, to charge PDAs and mobile phones. The ability to double the utility of each power point can be a lifesaver in a world in which power points have become an increasingly rare resource.
We had to order a separate “digital iTip” for the Treo 650, which allows us to charge it simultaneously with the notebook. The adapter also charges devices like digital cameras, mobile cameras, GPS systems, Sony, and Nintendo game platform, and some Archos hard drives. The “tip configurator” on the Web site might need a little adjusting, because we found the Tom Tom GPS system listed under “Games”, rather than GPS devices.
The adapter ships with a car charger plug, and an air adaptor for aircraft power systems. It includes a cloth wallet to store tips and charger cables, and the accessor power adapter is nicely designed to accommodate the cable.
Targus has a similar system for Apple users. We use the Mobile 70 universal adapter ($299.95), which comes with an adapter and tips to charge the PowerBook and our iPod at the same time.
The first generation of these adapters suffered from the fact that the power unit was quite bulky, and the plug was attached directly to it, which meant that if the power point was close to the floor or some other obstruction, you couldn’t plug it in. That’s been overcome by the addition of a power cord with a normal-sized plug.
We suspect 92 per cent of Australian households could get very enthusiastic about these products.
Posted by cw at 09:34 PM | TrackBack
eSATA drives: faster data
The Bleeding Edge data has always been somewhat peripatetic. For years we took our files on little excursions, snugly accommodated in 360kb floppy drives. Eventually they outgrew those containers, and we had to acquire a larger vehicle, the 720kb floppy.
It didn’t take long before we needed a 1.2MB floppy – which wasn’t really floppy – to get our data out of the house. That was rapidly replaced by the 1.44 MB floppy, and even more rapidly by the 2.88MB variety.
It was a bit of a blur after that. We had a 44MB SyQuest external drive, then a 100MB ZIP drive, a 2GB Jaz drive which at three cartridges for $739, worked out at $123 per gigabyte.
We were awfully relieved by the arrival of the CD-R, and the DVD burner, and the ubiquitous USB key. The second generation of that bus, USB 2.0, has become the standard for today’s most common means of data getting around, the external hard drive.
You can buy them pre-assembled, from manufacturers like Maxtor and Seagate. Macintosh users typically buy them from LaCie. The better choice, in our view, is to buy an external case with the particular range of interfaces you need. Because we’ve got Macs as well as PCs, some of the little boxes which have been rapidly proliferating around here have Firewire 400 and Firewire 800 interfaces, as well as the standard USB 2.0.
But when it came time to expand the collection of data transport units yet again, a week or so ago, we decided it was time to move on, to something called the eSATA (external Serial Advanced Technology Attachment) drive.
Modern motherboards which support the SATA hard drive standard either have an eSATA socket, or can have one fitted.
We’ve been eyeing the eSATA plug that shipped with the latest Bleeding Edge extravagance – built around the Asus P5B DeLuxe WiFi motherboard – with increasing interest. Last week, we finally succumbed. We knew that it would dramatically increase the speed of backups and file transfers, but we weren’t sure by how much.
Seagate recently proclaimed that its external eSATA drive was “up to five times faster” than USB 2.0 or Firewire 400 devices, with data jetting around at 3Gb per second. That’s nonsense. Although eSATA drives can technically transfer data at either 1.5Gigabits per second or 3Gbps, in practice they top out at 300MB per second, which is still quite an advance on the 133MBps limit for the old ATA bus
.External case manufacturers offer a range of speeds and connections with their eSATA units. We wanted the fastest possible transfer rates, so we chose two units, the Sarotech FHD-354US2 and the Welland Sun Bright ME-740J. Both have 3Gbps eSATA and USB 2.0 interfaces.
We tested the cases with the same 500GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 hard drive, which is the first generation of the company’s desktop hard drives to use its new Perpendicular Recording Technology to increase speed and storage capacity. The price had tumbled in the past couple of weeks, to the point where you can find them for as little as $240. They also have a new five-year warranty, although if something does go wrong in the final three years, the drives have to be shipped back to Singapore.
The first external hard drive we purchased, six years ago, was made by the Korean manufacturer, Sarotech, and it’s still performing quite happily. In terms of robustness, performance and packaging, we rate these cases at least as highly as LaCie drives. The FHD-354US2 met the usual Sarotech standards. Its aluminium housing was much more robust than the Welland’s, and unlike that drive, its power supply is embedded in the box. It also includes a well-made carry bag, and ships with an intelligent backup application, Intellistore LT. It is, however, substantially more expensive.
We found that it was slightly easier to assemble the Sarotech drive. With the Welland, we were at a loss to understand which end of the LED cable went where. Although there is a small manual in the Welland box, it seems to be aimed more at formatting of the drive. You’ll have to use the USB 2.0 interface to format your hard drive, rather than eSATA. Seagate’s free Disc Wizard offers some help with installation and preparation.
The Welland box includes a bracket that you can install in an empty expansion card slot and attach to an internal SATA port, to provide that alluring external connector. It’s a $16 optional extra with the Sarotech drive, although in our case, we didn’t need it. Both drives were exceptionally quiet, and seemed to manage the heat effectively.
We used an application called HDTach (available from tinyurl.com/rf85v ) to compare and measure the performance of the eSATA drives against both USB 2.0 and Firewire alternatives.
The results were impressive. The best average read time we could wring out of the drive in USB 2.0- mode was 31 MB/s, compared to 55.3MB/s from the internal Maxtor SATA drive.
Both the Sarotech and the Welland eSATA performance was substantially better than the internal hard drive, at 61MB/s.
In practical terms, that meant that we were able to transfer 19.7GB of data to the Sarotech and the Welland external drives in eSATA mode in just over six minutes. Using USB 2.0 on one of our other external hard drives, it took 13 minutes 35 seconds.
The Sarotech has an RRP of $199, available through the distributors at HipGizmos.com, although the street price is likely to be less than that. We’ve seen the Welland for as little as $60 on the Internet. It’s distributed by Anyware.com.au.
Posted by cw at 11:20 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
April 06, 2007
Sloppy work?
Let's be frank. Sometimes we fall short of perfection. We try hard to spell the names correctly, avoid splitting infinitives, check the facts and and the bona fides etc., but we're not immune to the occasional slip-up. A couple of weeks ago, for instance, when we did the latest workhorse PC specs, we managed to understate the price by roughly $200. What happened was that we used Word's column autosum feature to do the arithmetic. Unfortunately, we failed to notice that we hadn't highlighted the first item in the column - the cost of the CPU. Next time we'll get out the calculator, and double check.
Fortunately, while the occasional error gets through, our batting average is pretty good.
We were therefore momentarily mortified on Thursday night, to receive an email from a reader called Bill Purcell accusing us of numerous deficiencies in our latest column (See Below). Bill obviously enjoys a nice game of what transactional analyst Eric Berne called "Now I've Got You, You Bastard", and he piled on the sarcasm::
Sloppy work, I'm afraid, Chas. Telstra's Next G HSDPA is 14.4 mbit/s not 1.8 mbit/s. I would have hoped you, as a revered guru, would know the difference. Perhaps we can blame that on the work experience girl.
I know that numbers are not a strong point of yours, so I won't ask you to explain the current mass migration of ADSL users onto NEXT G wireless broadband services. I don't suppose your sums could be wrong?
I wonder why a fully commercially built new network, paid for by Telstra shareholders, REFUSES to accept ANY HIBIS/Broadband Connect/Broadband Guarantee Federal Government funding?
Why don't you drive the Edgemobile for a couple of hours past the end of the tram tracks and experience what those who don't have Optus or Foxtel Cable, ADSL, or are befuddled by a bevy of dodgy wireless and satellite providers have to contend with?.
I fully understand, however, that one might prefer to sit, in resplendent comfort, in Edgetropolis Central, and try and plug a fancy new mobile phone into a laptop, just to see what happens.
Ouch! The thing is, even sitting in resplendent comfort in Edgetropolis Central - actually, the Bleeding Edge cave isn't what we'd call resplendently comfortable - it's easy to check whether Next G is a 14.4Mbps network. According to Telstra, it isn't. It says so, right here:
With Next G, now you can download files and entertainment even faster on our Super G Fast plans with average speeds of 550Kbps to 1.5Mbps and a peak network downlink speed of 3.6 Mbps.There's no doubt that it will shortly become a 14.4Mbps network, and eventually, even faster. But we mentioned that in the story.
Bill's emails seems to be aimed at having a bit of mud-slinging fun at our expense, rather than discussing the point of the article, which of course, has nothing to do with the speed of the network. It’s a good network, and the story acknowledged that. The point we made in the column was that Telstra is grievously over-charging its customers. If there is a mass migration of ADSL users onto NEXT G (we'd love to know where Bill gets those figures) they must be particularly wealthy.
It seems to Bleeding Edge that what they most have to contend with is not so much "a bevy of dodgy wireless and satellite providers" as a company that has always regarded the public as a resource they can milk. Frankly, in our opinion, Telstra is a world leader in commercial avarice, and for too long it has held this country's progress hostage to its greed.
We can't help but wonder whether Bill might, just possibly, have some intimate connection with Telstra. That line of sarcasm seems awfully familiar.
Posted by cw at 09:30 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack
Telstra's bankruptcy network
The first thing Bleeding Edge did when we took delivery of the Palm Treo 750 review phone was to open it up and check that it already had a SIM card inside. We certainly weren’t going to put any card we were paying for in there.
The second thing we did was to reassure ourselves that the bills for the SIM card which was in fact, shipped with the phone, would not be sent to Bleeding Edge.
The reason for our anxiety was that this phone is connected to Telstra’s NextG network, which, here in the Bleeding Edge cave, we have taken to calling “the bankruptcy network”.
Not that it isn’t a very good network, so far as mobile phone calls are concerned. Technically, it’s a Universal Mobile Teleommunications System (UMTS)network, which replaces the old GSM standard. It provides wide coverage (Telstra claims it reaches 98 per cent of the population), and because it operates at 850MHz, rather than the 2100MHz band, it provides more reliable reception, particularly in buildings, with fewer drop-outs.
It also shifts data at speeds that make the 14.4kbps of the original GSM network, and even the faster EDGE network look pathetic.
NextG uses High Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA) technology, which in theory today is capable of shifting data at 1.8Mbps, and later a good deal more than that.
Although you’re not likely to get quite those theoretical maximum speeds, the performance is perfectly capable of turning mobile phones like the Treo 750 and the iMate JasJam into mobile broadband terminals, and high-speed modems for notebook computers.
Alas, Telstra has always regarded the carriage of mobile data on its networks as a complete luxury that should be restricted only to corporations, the very wealthy, or the financially foolhardy, and the rates they are charging for NextG data are, in our opinion, terrifying.
When it comes to the speed of emptying out bank accounts, no data network in the world comes even close to the plans Telstra offers at tinyurl.com/ywnpcj
For a two-year contract at $5 per month, for instance, that Web page suggests you can download 1Mb (megabit) of data, which would take your phone roughly one second to transfer. According to the Telstra salesman we consulted, someone in Telstra has missed the significance of capital letters in the world of data volumes, and they actually mean you can download 1MB (megabyte) of data, which would take a few seconds more.
After your free few seconds of data, you’d be subject to Telstra’s excess data fee, which on that plan is – gulp - $5 per megabyte.
On those rates, receiving and replying to a few HTML email messages, with those nice colour logos, could quickly chew up your allowance, given the fact that Telstra is also charging for uploaded traffic. We don’t want to think about the consequences of someone sending you a Word attachment, or some JPG images. According to our maths, on that plan, 1GB of data traffic would cost you $5000.
The Telstra salesman assured us that Web pages don’t use much data, but with statistics indicating the average Web page is about 60kB (kilobytes), once you browse more than 16 pages, you’ve exhausted your allowance. Even on higher-volume plans, which reduce the excess data fee to 25c per kB – those ones start at $59 per month with a free allowance of (chuckle) 200 megabytes (we’re taking the salesman at his word) - a gigabyte would cost $250.
For the first two months of a data contract – which is in addition, of course, to your telephone contract - Telstra is providing a free 50MB allowance to help users avoid an unpleasant shock, but after that, the meter will be ticking.
A Telstra spokesman says the average user wouldn’t consume 50MB a month, but we suspect that three months after they sign up, a lot of customers will discover that the world of fast data speeds is somewhat more expensive than they imagined.
If you’re not a corporate customer with a substantial discount, we therefore suggest you approach data transfers on NextG rates with the same caution you’d apply to playing with a loaded gun.
It’s a pity, because the Treo 750 would be a much more powerful tool for the average user if Telstra offered the sort of data plans that are commonplace overseas.
Unlike the previous generations of Treos we’ve so far seen in this country, the 750 uses the Windows Mobile 5.0 Pocket PC Phone Edition operating system. Download a copy of Good Technology’s Mobile Messaging application – you should be able to get a bank loan to cover that – and you’d have access to on-the-road updating of email, calendar, contact and task information through Microsoft’s Direct Push email technology.
We suspect not many of our readers would contemplate doing that on Telstra’s rates, but even as a phone/PDA, there’s a lot to like about the Treo 750. There’s that well-designed keyboard that makes managing emails and SMS messages so much easier, and the designers have managed to integrate some of the clever bits of the old interface – including grouping messages into threads - into the Windows Mobile operating system.
Unlike the Palm-based Treos, which are beginning to show their age, the 750 meets current standards, with features like a 1.2megapixel camera with self-portrait mirror.
Unfortunately, users of previous generations of the Treo are likely to find the Windows operating system another stumbling block.
Bleeding Edge still uses the Treo 650, with its Palm interface, and we were quite ambivalent about the effort involved in converting our contacts etc via software conduits to Outlook.
Macintosh users would have to buy a copy of Missing Sync for Windows Mobile, for $US39.95.
The 750 is slightly smaller and lighter than the Treo 650, and it doesn’t have the protruding antenna. We’ll give you a fuller report on its performance as a phone, but if you’re planning to use it as a data terminal, we do hope somebody else is paying the bill.
Posted by cw at 09:24 PM
April 03, 2007
EMI + iTunes and no DRM in sight!
I posted a while ago regarding Steve Jobs thoughts on Music where he 'Imagined a world where every online store sells DRM free Music'. Today EMI Music CEO Eric Nicoli and Apple CEO Steve Jobs held a joint press conference.
Apple's iTunes Store is the first online music store to receive EMI's new premium downloads. Apple has announced that iTunes will make individual AAC format tracks available from EMI artists at twice the sound quality of existing downloads, with their DRM removed, at a price of $1.29/€1.29/£0.99. iTunes will continue to offer consumers the ability to pay $0.99/€0.99/£0.79 for standard sound quality tracks with DRM still applied.
EMI Music Press Release and Apple Press Release
I might actually install iTunes and purchase some music from Apple and EMI Music, I have had my eye on Norah Jones latest album Not Too Late for a while now...
Posted by Stephen at 04:55 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack