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Gaps in 'top technologists' list
Tim Berners-Lee, founder of the world-wide-web, is the most influential technologist of the past 150 years according to a poll of journalists (including PCW's Kelvyn Taylor) and academics. In second and third place were Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page.
A second look at the 940UX
PCW was contacted from multiple representatives at Samsung when we published our 940UX review claiming the driver we had used, which it had supplied, was out of date.
The new driver, we were promised, offered much higher video performance and support for 3D in Vista.
The software has definitely improved with the inclusion of an excellent taskbar utility that can rotate or mirror the display over USB.
Using the display in portrait mode is a disappoint though, since its viewing angle from the left (or bottom when rotated normally) is very poor – barely 60 degrees or so before contrast peters out rapidly.
Otherwise we've seen no video quality improvement and the displaylinkmanager.exe service still hogs 30-40 per cent of CPU time during 640x480 video playback on a 3GHz Pentium 4 system with 1GB Ram.
Samsung says the latest drivers (4.3 available from www.displaylink.com and not www.samsung.com) now let you use the Aero interface, but at the time of writing we couldn't get the latest drivers to work on our Vista machine at all. DirectX applications should be supported in the second half of 2008 according to Samsung.
So overall, with the £70 price premium over regular 19in monitors, the 940UX remains a three star product.
Small change could see off web pirates
There was backing today for Qtrax and its offer or free, legal music downloads, even after major record labels denied supporting it. The company's site still says its peer-to-peer client will be available for download at 5am UK tomorrow.
Paul Hogan, managing director of content distribution specialist BiBC issued a statement saying that whatever the attitude of the record companies Qtrax's "bravado" is to be applauded.
He went on: "The commercial model of using advertising revenues to allow consumers to download music for free is one that music industry insiders are increasingly viewing as potentially the future of the industry, especially in trying to stem the tide of illegal downloads."
Hogan says his company has content deals in place with EMI, Turner, Universal, Sony BMG and Ministry of Sound.
We humble hacks have a personal interest in the debate because we also sell digital content online, though with a rather different business model. My own long-held view is that the problems would be alleviated, if not removed, if there was a widely accepted and easy method of micropayments on the web.
People think nothing of putting 50p into a jukebox. They cannot do the equivalent on the web without signing up to an account, which is not going to encourage impulse buying.
I've never figured out why the cost of online transactions is so high – too high to make small one-off payments viable. If the greed of the big finance houses is to blame, they are being very short sighted because they are cutting off a layer of trading that could be even more lucrative and would certainly be healthier for the web economy as a whole.
3870 X2 does things in pairs
AMD's Radeon HD 3870 X2's landed on the scene today, a graphics card that includes two Radeon 3870 chips on one PCI Express 2 board.
The concept has been done before on Nvidia's Geforce 7950GX2 and some experimental Radeon 1950 Pro Dual's, but this time the card feels like a more manageable size.
It's currently running through its paces with the latest ATI drivers on our Intel rig. We've snapped it with a regular XFX 8800 Ultra (the black card), where you can see the 3870 X2 is just a fraction shorter.
Corneal displays see the light
Display in the future could consist of light-emitting diodes on a contact lens that beams an image directly on to the retina, according to the latest MIT Technology Review.
It reports that researchers at the University of Washington have already tried the idea by embedding sixteen LEDS and metal connectors into a lens made of bio-compatible plastic.
The aim is to create a display that deliver information without blocking your normal view. Applications might include cellphone displays, telling you would is calling; or information for soldiers in the field, or so called augmented reality that, for instance, might enable you to see a building not just as it is now but as it has been throughout its lifetime.
The very idea of sticking a display on my eye make me wince, and I wore hard contact lenses for years. But what puzzles me about the report is the use of metal connectors and (apparently) conventional diodes.
The lenses are made of polymers, so you wonder why they don’t use polymer diodes (OLEDS) and polymer interconnects. But there's a long way to go yet: even if the idea proves feasible, it is unlikely to deliver usable devices for many years.
£100 Linux PC
After the excitement created by the £199 Linux-based EeePC ultramobile comes news that Linux house Linspire is reportedly selling a laptop through the US etailer Sears.com for $199 - just over £100. The device, made by a company called Mirus Innovations, comes with a 1.6GHz Celeron processor, 1Gbyte of RAM, an 80Gbyte disk, mouse keyboard and speakers but no monitor. The selling price is actually $299 but it comes with a $100 cashback. Oh and the last time we looked it has sold out.
Compact cameras learn from SLRs
Olympus's latest model with a 20x zoom shows another manufacturer trying to combine the best features of a single-lens reflex with those of a point-and-shoot compants. Professionals will always like SLRs because they want the ability to swap lenses, and to pick and choose the best quality available.
But for the average user, who is happy with the quality of a workaday lens, the main advantages of SLRs are what-you-see-is-what-you-get previews and manual focusing, which is one function that has yet to be beaten by digital means.
The new Olympus SP-570 UZ offers manual focusing SLR-style using a lens ring. There seems no reason in principle why setting a shot up on an LCD screen should be harder than through an SLR view, and indeed some digital techniques might make it easier.
The SP-570 costs about the same price as a low-cost digital SLR and it will be intriguing to see how they match up in the market place.
TI joins scramble to make mini-projectors
If you are discerning enough to be a PCW subscriber, and thus already have the latest edition, you can read in the News section our report on a number of companies experimenting with putting mini-projectors into handheld devices such as phones and PDAs.
Soft way to boost depth of field
Photographers using digital or traditional cameras sooner or later come up against the trade-off between exposure and depth of field (the range of distance over which a picture is in focus). Narrow depth of field can produce those striking pictures that show their subject in sharp focus against a fuzzy background; but sometimes you want everything to appear in focus, and in low light this often proves impossible.
Long live the wired net – and bring on whispering wireless
I was not alone yesterday in questioning Apple's decision to sell the new MacBook Air without a proper Ethernet port and rely instead on 11n Wifi links. But Jeff Caruso, of Network World, took the opposite view, wondering if Apple's decision shows prescience because some analysts are saying the wired local network may be on the way out.
Apple's hot Air an anti-climax
Winter Lurgi prevented me making it to BBC TV's White City centre in London, where journalists watched an Apple skycast of Steve Jobs's celebrity sales pitch for the new MacBook Air (see also below).
My first impressions, purely from the pictures and spec, are that it looks a beautiful machine, but not stunningly more so than slimline notebooks already on the market. Most interesting is the fact that it responds to the same “pinch, rotate and swipe” gestures used in the iPod Touch, a genuine (as opposed to steve-jobsian) innovation.
But the launch was still anti-climactic. I was hoping Apple would release its first true portable – a machine light and small enough to carry around by choice rather than need. This is a format crying out for new ideas, especially about the interface – the kind of thing Apple is good at. Let’s hope that like other companies in this field it is waiting for the next generation of energy-efficient processors.
Sorry to harp on about the Eee PC. It's flawed and clumsy and antique looking. It is chunkier than the MacBook Air, though probably smaller in volume and certainly easier to carry. It is an open system not primed to feed Apple's online cash cows. The battery can simply be unclipped, whereas a replacement on the Air needs serious surgery. And it has a proper network port, and so does not need to rely on flaky Wifi shouting its data through the overcrowed airwaves. On price, novelty and potential it is by far the most interesting of recent machines, MacBook Air and all.
The Macbook Air: Super-thin, but no wired Lan or removeable battery
Apple has announced a raft of new products at Macworld in San Francisco, and the one that got the audience whooping and cheering the most was the Macbook Air, which Apple claims is the world's thinnest notebook at just 1.94cm tall (0.4cm at its thinnest point). It also comes with a 13.3in screen and a choice of 1.6GHz or 1.8GHz Core 2 Duo processors.
We can't deny it's a splendid-looking piece of kit, but the ultra-thin design means it lacks what we consider to be essentials, such as an Ethernet port. Relying on wireless (even if it is 802.11n) isn't the most sensible decision - only last night my wireless network went down, leaving me to hook up to the router via an Ethernet cable to sort things out.
As with Apple's iPods, the Macbook Air features a non-removable battery, which isn't much good for those who like to carry a second battery on long journeys. And if you do suffer battery problems outside of the one-year warranty period, which isn't unrealistic when it comes to notebooks, you'll have to send the Macbook Air back to Apple, who will replace the battery for a pretty steep fee of £139.
The 1.6GHz edition comes in at £1,199 while the 1.8GHz version, complete with a 64GB solid state drive, costs a whopping £2,028 - an indication of just how expensive these solid state drives are.
We'll have a full review of the Macbook Air soon...
Eee PC could rock Microsoft if it got out of Geeksville
The EU’s new investigation of allegations of monopoly abuse against Microsoft is not the only trouble the company has in Europe, nor necessarily even the worst.
Late last year Becta, the UK agency for schools IT, reported the company to the Office of Fair Trading and recommended schools and other educational institutions to look at alternatives, including open source, before signing expensive contracts with Microsoft to upgrade to Vista or Office 2007.
Why I bought a Eee PC
I finally put my money where my mouth is and bought a 4GByte, £219 Eee PC ultra-mobile. It interests me for three reasons. Firstly, because I believe the emergence of powerful true portables is the most important development since the advent of cheap desktop machines in the late seventies.
Apple maxes out during CES
Apple marketers have been playing a curious game this week, with a string of announcements coinciding with the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. They have unveiled a new 1U rackserver, the Xserve, using two 3GHz quad-core Xeon processors, which they boast is "up to twice as fast" as its predecssor. Also a "fastest yet" Mac Pro using two 3.23GHz quad-core Xeon processors. And today it is announced that iTunes pricing will be standardised across Europe, promising to end within six months the much resented mark-up for the UK.
An Apple statement implied that this mark-up is the fault of record labels, which it says charge more for this country than elsewhere in Europe. The statement said: "Apple will reconsider its continuing relationship in the UK with any record label that does not lower its wholesale prices in the UK to the pan-European level."
The turnaround will of course have nothing to do with placating Europe, which has a more questioning attitude towards Apple product lock-ins than the company's US fan base.
The announcements may have been timed to keep Apple in the news during CES. But they will also raise speculation about what there is left for Steve Jobs to announce in his keynote at next week's Apple love-in, Mac World 2008. Let's hope it's that much-rumoured Mac ultra-portable.
Needless irritations with Nokia's E51
Despite a T-Mobile store telling me it was an old model and about to be discontinued, I've finally got hold of my Nokia E51 - a phone I previewed last year.
I was impressed with the preproduction model and am equally pleased with the finished article.
There are, however, some annoyances - not least that it comes with preinstalled email accounts for AOL, NTL World and Yahoo installed as default. I wouldn't mind so much if I could actually delete these, but there appears no way to get rid of them.
It's the same story for the internet bookmarks section. Does T-Mobile really think permanent bookmarks such as Download Graphics and Download Themes are going to persuade me to one day pay for this stuff? Infuriatingly, once again, there is no way to delete them, leaving my own bookmarks (the ones I actually want) sitting down at position 11.
Another irritation is that despite a variety of ridiculous ringtones preinstalled, there wasn't a single standard 'ring-ring' tone (i.e. one that doesn't make you look like a complete fool when it goes off on the train). This left me to scour the web looking for a free one - a task that proved harder than you might think. Perhaps T-Mobile hoped I'd buy one using its helpful internet bookmarks...
Despite these grumbles, I am still very impressed with the E51. Despite coming from Nokia's business range it sports a good mix of business and entertainment features and, most importantly for me, will happily keep going for over four days on a single charge if I go easy on it.
Samsung gets publicity shy
Samsung's rise to the position of being one of the world's biggest and most innovative technology companies has been admirable; but we wonder if it has now got so big that it believes it no longer needs to inform anyone about its new products.
Asking for more details on the reported 31in OLED screen it will be showing at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, we were told the company will not be releasing any press releases about products at the show until January 14. This is four days after CES ends, and four days after PCW's print deadline. Ah well, there's plenty of other companies to write about…
E-tail and retail learn how to coexist
PC magazines could be forgiven for a touch of shadenfreude as Christmas spending figures show the internet hitting traditional sales channels. Our readers were naturally among the first to latch on to the power of the web, so we were the first to be affected - hoist with our own petard as we promoted the very technology that drew off much of the advertising that sustained us.
The Dixons group which owns Currys and PC World (no relation) reported sales down, with takings £50m less than expected, and there is talk of store closures.
Music downloads soared over the holiday as people tried out their new MP3 players, but there was a corresponding drop in CD sales. There may be little sympathy for the big music companies who have been creaming off huge profits for years; but hoary problems of copyright protection will have to be addressed if a digital economy is to flourish.
News that Dell, the classic online retailer, is selling through Tescos would appear to buck the trend. Dell's build-to-order system has been hit by the commoditisation of computers: people can expect almost any model to be capable of any workaday task required of it, which means PCs can be sold off the shelf like a can of beans.
But computers will always require local sources of supplies and expertise, which means e-tailers and retailers will have to learn how to coexist. Dell's move shows it adjusting to this reality. PC World is offering a hybrid system, allowing customers to order on the web and collect from their nearest store.
Eee PCs in short supply
Asus has been struggling to keep up with demand for the Eee PC ultramobile, which costs just £199 (2GB model) or £219 (4GB). Your reporter ordered one in early December from Go Education, which it turns out is run by industry old hand Kirit Shah, formerly head of North London system builder Dotlink.
He ordered 3000 of the machines in November and had to turn away business because they did not arrive soon enough for Christmas. He reckons the Eee PC is going to be very big in the education market.
PC World is taking orders but, according to its site, there are none left at any of its London stores.
Meanwhile Datawind claims its £179.99 Pocketsurfer handheld sold out in its e-tail channels over Christmas. The device comes with 20 free hours a month of accelerated 2g mobile access. It is pocketable, but my money's with the Eee PC, which is more of a working platform. Kirit reckons a 3g dongle will be available for it this year.
Is the HD DVD Xbox 360 imminent?
With the Consumer Electronics Show just around the corner, the latest rumour is that Bill Gates, who will be makin
g his last CES keynote speech, will announce an HD DVD version of the Xbox 360 console.
The Xbox 360 Elite wasn't released that long ago, but aside from more storage, HDMI and a new black chassis, little had changed from the original version.
An HD DVD update would certainly make sense, but with Sony's PS3-lite shipping with a Blu-ray drive for just £299, Microsoft will have to make sure the addition of HD DVD doesn't push the price up too far.
