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Google god of a thousand names
Google owns more names than an Eastern god, website monitoring service Pingdom has discovered. It found thousands of Google-owned names in the .com domain alone. Many of them are clearly designed to foil typosquatters who garner hits from misspelled addreseses. Some hint at future services: google4kids.com, googlebackups.com,googleauction.com, googlebroadband.com, googlecasinogames.com, googlefamily.com, googlejokes.com, googlelovers.com, googlepersonals.com, googlereligion.com, googlefaith.com, googlegym.com, googledaycare.com, bankgoogle.com, googlepaperproducts.com
Other names make you wonder what is going on: googlesex.com, googleporn.com, google-yahoo-porn.com,. google-yahoo-sex.com, googlewarez.com.
And some are simply baffling: 1p0g0og1e.com, az-on-url-je.com, goooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooogle.com
A Pingdom blog observes that many of the names have probably been registered to protect the brand. 'Lawyers have surely been keeping busy reclaiming lots of Google-related domain names over the years.'
Our cards already receive free satellite TV, Hauppauge tells Freesat
Freesat’s cryptic denunciation of TV-card vendor Hauppauge yesterday appeared to suggest that only approved kit will be able to receive BBC, ITV and other channels being broadcast in its name. But it seems that many of these channels are already being broadcast and are being received happily by existing satellite cards.
Are all the owners of these going to have to buy new equipment when the service starts officially? I am given to understand that the only content that will be broadcast by Freesat itself will be the electronic programming guide. Hauppauge says it does not wish to get involved in a slanging match with the organisation. But Yehia Oweiss, vice-president of sales for Hauppauge Europe, issued the following statement today:
"Hauppauge has been a European pioneer in the market for free-to-air receivers for PCs and laptops for over a decade, and has successfully serviced its customers with its award-winning products. Our customers have been enjoying a wide range of unencrypted free-to-air satellite and terrestrial channels in Europe for years, including BBC HD, for example.
"For encrypted services, our WinTV CI module enables the use of a CAM and viewing card to decode broadcasts. Our products are not endorsed by Freesat, nor would we wish to imply they are."
Meanwhile, Freesat has still not announced precisely when it will launch its services officially. If it were more open with its plans, and about what restrictions there are on receiving these 'free' services, some paid for out of our licence fees, people could make their own minds up about what equipment to buy - and would be far less likely to buy kit they may have to replace.
Western Digital unleash beast
Western Digital have just annouced the 4th generation Raptor drive, the 300GB VelociRaptor (WD3000GLFS), the world's fastest SATA drive.
The VelociRaptor has a 2.5in form factor, a 10,000rpm spin speed, 16MB of cache and a claimed seek time of 4.2ms.
The 2.5in drives are enclosed in a 3.5in frame that Western Digital has named IcePack which has a built in heatsink to help keep the beast cool. A version for the enterprise space will be launched later without the IcePack.
The MSR price for the new drive is £250.
Ofcom ignores inside job in setting new homes up for hyper broadband
Just been wading through Ofcom's proposals for promoting high-speed broadband links in new homes, Next Generation, New Build. All the discussion is about how to get high-speed (ie fibre links) to homes, which is unsurprising as it is the most difficult and expensive task. The regulator's remit does not extend to the how data should be distributed inside new homes, but it would have been useful if the discussion document had at least highlighted this as an issue.
The government has a target of building three million new homes over the next 12 years; new builds are currently running at 246,000 a year. Yet so far as I have been able to establish, there is no official best practice on how to future proof these building for data links.
I was shocked at an Ideal Homes exhibition a while back to see both Intel and BT telling builders that Wifi would provide all the future proofing they will need.
Leave aside the questions of whether Wifi and it successors will be able to keep up with bandwidth demands over the lifetime of a building, is it a sensible technology to promote as a distribution medium?
You may be able to justify it in old buildings that are hard to retrofit with cable but contention problems are only going to get worse as time goes on. Powerline communication, which is becoming very popular, also causes radio pollution.
As a matter of principle, to keep pollution down, wireless should surely be used only when necessary – and especially not when a better method is readily available.
Installing Cat 5 Ethernet links, capable of at least 1Gbit/sec, in new homes is a doddle when done at the stage when the power wiring is put in. If there are not enough people with the necessary skills now, there could be with minimal training.
Better still would be fibre links. These are relatively expensive (though not when set against the price of a house) but prices will come down. Simple kits, including combined fibre and power cables, are already available.
Anyway, Ofcom is asking for you comments on its proposals, which you can download from the link above.
Updated: Lenovo USB port replicator
Lenovo has followed Toshiba in using Cambridge-based DisplayLink rtechnology to enable a port replicator docks a notebook via a single USB2.0.
DisplayLink’s silicon and software allows the link to carry video as well as standard replicator traffic such as that from a keyboard or mouse. Hot plug support allows notebooks to be docked and undocked in seconds.
The major advantage of the system is that it avoids expensive machine-specific docking stations, promising considerable savings for companies with large mobile workforces.
One feature not available on the first Toshiba version (see review) is a button that switches the second monitor from extended to mirror view – something you normally have to do through the Windows Control Panel.
Update: the replicator is available now at an estimated price of £97.53 (incl VAT). Dabs charges £75.4 inc Vat for the Toshiba Dynadock, but of course the Lenovo may also be subject to online discounts.
Bulk scanning, lost metaphors, and how computing killed the fraction
Kodak's latest Scanmate i1120 scanner bundle (see my review, which will posted on this site soon) is a worthy rival to Fujitsu's nifty little Scansnap, though I did hit a slight hiccup with the Vista driver. Both devices, despite their small size, are designed to cope with the document processing of a small office.
They are also good for a task many people face, or would face if they got round to it: reducing stacks of old paper to a couple of CDs. Newspaper and magazine articles are probably better photographed than scanned; you can even translate the results into text using the latest versions of leading OCR packages.
I set the Scanmate a real-life task of digitising a load of typewritten A4 manuscripts and photocopies, dating from the days before word-processors. Some of the pages had heavy handwritten annotations and alterations and Omnipage, one of the packages bundled with the Scanmate, OCR-red them very well – though, inevitably, not perfectly.
Some of the manuscripts were literally cut-and-paste jobs. In pre-computer days, of course, this was the way of editing: you typed or wrote out an alteration, cut it to shape, and pasted it over the original. It struck me that this connotation is probably completely lost on younger computer users when they use the term.
In the same way nautical terms like fathoming and plumbing have taken on their metaphorical meaning, and are rarely used in their original sense. The first person who said 'I can't fathom it' must have been a sailor who threw a plumb line over the side of the ship and couldn't touch bottom. A wonderful image has been lost.
Another thing I noticed going through the typescripts was that they used fractions, such as 1½ miles. Fractions have virtually disappeared in the computer age and you can see why: it has just taken me a couple of minutes in Word to find the '½' symbol. Far easier to write 1.5 miles. Old typewriters of course had keys for common fractions.
Scanners like the Scanmate and Scansnap are expensive compared with a cheapo flatbed. But considering the time they can save, and the fact that with a bit of they can clear a room of paper, they are worth it.
Laptop alarms are alarming
Hate to pour water over the idea from an enterprising graduate, Chao Liu, which we report today, for a laptop alarm that screams when disturbed. But I have to say from personal experience that theft alarms can be dangerous.
A few years back I was in New York with an expensive digital camera, and trying out a theft alarm that had been sent in for review. It had two parts: you stuck one on your camera, or whatever you were trying to protect, and kept the other in your pocket.
All was quiet until the two pieces came to be further than a certain distance apart, when a loud alarm sounded. Naturally you had to remember to switch the thing on and off as needed. Naturally I forgot, which may have saved me from injury or worse.
Wandering round the streets of Manhattan I was approached by a street hustler, who gave an entertaining but manifestly dishonest pitch for money. As is the way of these things, it took me a few seconds after he had disappeared to realise that the real purpose of his playacting was to distract my attention. An accomplice had pinched my camera but at least my companion and I had come to no harm.
If the alarm had been primed and sounded there is no knowing how the two thieves would have reacted. In their panic, someone might well have got hurt.
Dodgy birthday recalls glory days of the Epson control freaks
Time was when your reporter and half the techies in London could have recited the Epson control codes off by heart. The company's dot-matrix printers, starting with MX-80, appeared in the early eighties when everyone started using word processors and Epsons quickly became best-sellers, to the extent that their control codes became a de facto standard.
In those pre-Windows days each application using a printer needed its own drivers, so a standard was desperately needed. In practice every printer sold seemed to require its little tweaks. And many of the arty writers who began using them affected to despise technology.
The result was that I, and anyone else capable of reading a hex dump, could have had a thriving business simply troubleshooting printers. I lost count of the number of friends of friends of friends who rang me begging for help. Or of the ones who snootily told me, a professional writer for some years: "I'm a writer. I don't understand these things."
What baffled me (still does, come to that) is how the Japanese, who seem so design conscious, could produce such bad manuals. I wondered if it stemmed from the way they wrote: that their graphical conventions were different from ours.
The Epson manuals were evidently written by engineers for engineers, and then badly translated. I actually wrote to the company and offered to rewrite them, but I never got a reply.
Those old dot-matrixes were great workhorses, though. I never had one give up on me even after printing thousands of pages.
These reminiscences were prompted by the fact that Epson has announced a rather artificial birthday. It is 40 years since the Shinshu Seiki miniprinter, the EP-101, was launched by its parent company Seiko.
Epson was not launched as a separate company until 1975 and was named after the printer (son of EP). Epson is offering a €5000 holiday as first prize in a competition to come up with an image for its 40th birthday card. Perhaps a sign saying: "The world's only 40-year-old 33-year-old"?
£2 for 100 photoprints
You can get 100 digital photos printers for just £2 under a launch offer from a service at
The Sun Online, under a deal with CeWe Colour.
Winners and losers as mobiles disrupt hardware and software industries
One British company looks like winning whichever technology comes to dominate the emerging market in MIDs – Intel's term for pocket web-enabled devices. Our story yesterday highlighted the fact that this format, and even the slight-larger ultra-mobile PC format, could see Intel going head to head with processors using cores from ARM.
One of the most promising of these is TI's ARM-cored OMAP 3430 system on a chip, which supports 720p playback. It also uses PowerVR graphics technology from Hertfordshire-base Imagination Technologies.
It turns out that the sister chip to Intel's new Atom processors, which are designed for MIDs, also uses PowerVR.
So do ARM-based Samsung chips. Freescale's iMX31 , NXP's PNX4008, and NEC NaviEngine 1, Imagination's Dave Harald tells. Also using it are some Freescale chips based on the PowerPC architecture, and several Renesas chips using MIPs cores.
Talking of which: AMD may have missed a trick in selling off its Alchemy business unit in 2006. It specialised in MIPs chips that might have allowed AMD to compete better in this market.
Personally I don't like the term MID, which is simply a new label for an old idea: a connected pocketable handheld. I'd say MIDs are distinct from ultra-mobiles less in their size than in the fact that they do not have a heavy-duty input system and are therefore primarily for content delivery rather than work on the move. This distinction may disappear as the technology and especially the user interface matures.
The format is already being disruptive. Cheap mobile devices are at last allowing open-source to squeeze Microsoft in the consumer market. Note that the company has reprieved XP for this format, which is traditionally the domain of Windows CE.
Wince runs pocket apps that cannot compete with open-source applications. Microsoft is bundling its poor man's office suite Works with the new Asus ultra-mobile. And it has dropped consumer prices even of its flagship Office suite: you can get the Home version, bundled with a notebook, for £80 complete with three licences, making it less than £30 a copy.
And open-source runs on a wider variety of platforms than Windows, opening markets up to non-Intel manufacturers. There are already mature toolsets and a large pool of developers for architectures like ARM and MIPs.
HP's arty notebook
HP has announced its Pavilion dv2800 Artist Edition notebook.
There's nothing particularly special inside (Core 2 Duo, Nvidia Geforce 8400M graphics), but HP is clearly hoping the striking appearance will be enough to boost sales.
The winning image, created by Portuguese artist Joao Oliveria, was chosen from over 8,500 entries in HP and MTV's "Take Action. Make Art" contest.
We're not entirely sure what the image is actually depicting, but HP says it's a "stunning play on today's pop culture - combining slightly retro elements with modern technology" - that clear's it up then.
The notebook is available now for £999 including VAT.
