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More on the Quicktime hijack and the Atlantic divide
Some respondents to my blog about Apple's Quicktime seem to have missed the point: Windows without QT opens .tifs and allows you to save them; it will not save them with QT loaded, unless you pay extra as prompted or (if you know how) you have unchecked the file association.
Retrying this exercise today I discovered that if you change the file association within the QT control panel, the software simply switches it back again. Only by changing the association from within Windows (My Computer> Tools> Options> File Types) could I persuade the machine not to open .tifs using QT.
I do not suggest deliberate fraud in this attempt to get you to pay for functionality QT has itself disabled, and it may even be a bug - the software appears to be under the impression that a .tif is a movie.
I would however point out that more than one TV company in Britain has recently got into trouble for phone-in competitions for which people were allowed to enter after the result had been decided, at some small cost to themselves and considerable profit to the companies involved.
Again there was no suggestion of deliberate fraud; but the courts took the view that mistakes providing profit to the perpetrators should not have happened, and stemmed from institutional laxity resulting in a breach of public trust.
The overaggressive marketing of QT Pro is similar in principle if not in scale, constituting a breach of trust that happens to be potentially profitable to Apple. At the very least the QT installation and screen prompts should have made clear that changing file associations might disable some functionality and that, as an alternative to buying QT Pro, users could try giving .tifs back to Windows which will happily save them for free.
To answer another of my flamers: my comments were not anti-American; they were my perception of cultural differences. Pretending there are none is not going to bring nations together. You would, for instance, have to recognise that most French people speak French before you could even speak to them.
Western Europeans tend to be more suspicious of big business than Americans, partly because there is a stronger left-wing tradition here, and perhaps also because so many big companies are American and we fear being swamped. To take another glaring difference: there would probably be riots in the US if strict gun controls were imposed; in London there would probably be riots (well, noisy demonstrations) if they were lifted.
Looking at the figures for gun deaths in the US, I think the attitudes of many of its good citizens towards gun control are crazy; but it's their funeral (literally, in many cases) and I don't hold it against them so long as they don't point the wretched things at me.
Apple's Quicktime holds Windows users to ransom
It can come as a shock to we Brits sometimes when we meet Americans and realise that, despite having a broadly overlapping culture and speaking more or less the same language, they are easily as different from us as the French or Germans.
One instance of this is differing reactions to the way Apple exploits its products to flog more products. Americans in general seem to have no objection to this - most of the protests about iPod lock-ins have come from Europe.
My instinct when I find iTunes dragging me to the Apple music store is to resist any temptation to buy; the average American's reaction seems to be to congratulate the company on its marketing skills.
After writing a piece on the MacOS for our print magazine, mentioning this irritation, I resolved to steer clear of the subject for fear of allowing it to cloud my technological judgement.
Shortly afterwards I was forced to confront it again, when downloading a picture from (of all places) the Microsoft site. At some point recently I must have clicked a prompt for an Apple Quicktime upgrade on my main Windows PC, and it had plugged itself into Explorer and signed itself up to open a variety of picture formats.
When I clicked a .tif of the departing Bill Gates, Qucktime opened it within Explorer, no problem. But when I right clicked on it to save the image to disk, instead of giving me the standard IE menu allowing this, I got a Quicktime prompt offering me two choices: Save as source, or Save as a Quicktime Movie.
A .tif is not a movie so I clicked Save as Source as the option that came closest to having any meaning. I was then presented with a prompt saying that the only way I could save this 'movie' was to buy Quicktime Pro (£20 from Apple UK).
In other words, Apple was asking me to pay for functionality that its software had switched off in Windows. Disabling Quicktime from within Explorer is not enough to reverse this - it means you can't even display the picture. You have to go into Control Panel and change the file associations, after which Explorer will happily save the file for free.
I was knowledgeable enough to realise what had happened and do this. But many Windows users would be caught out.
You could argue that Apple's relentless commercialisation of the MacOS desktop is no different from the kind of in-house promotions seen in most major publications, online and off, though Bill Gates got hauled up before the DoJ for doing much the same.
Similarly you might see the sealed-in batteries in many Apple products not as built-in obsolescence but as the price you have pay for the aesthetics.
But this trick with QuickTime is beyond excuse so far as I am concerned. Apple makes some great products, but how it keeps its image squeaky clean I do not know.
Bluetooth headsets: to be seen or not be seen?
Bluetooth headsets are odd things. Too big and you look an utter fool, too small and it looks like you're talking to yourself.
Still, with countless models filling the aisles in mobile phone stores, they appear to be big business, and Jabra has just launched its latest headset - the BT4010.
Its big selling point is an LCD that provides information such as battery level and connection status. Hardly a milestone achievement, but being able to quickly check the battery level is an advantage.
However, the BT4010 sits very much in the 'miniature headset' category, so be prepared to fight off the men in white coats when using it in public places.
The Jabra BT4010 is priced at £29.99 and is available now.
Express Hotmail access saved
Microsoft has backtracked on a decision to prevent people from accessing their Hotmail accounts though Outlook Express.
It said in a letter to users that they should instead download the Windows Live email client, which "has the familiarity of Outlook Express and much more."
The letter said that Outlook Express uses a legacy protocol called DAV that was unsuited to addressing the 5GB of email storage now provided with Hotmail. It gave a deadline of June 30.
But, following protests from users it has postponed the move, without specifying a new deadline. See here for full details.
One in the Phi for the fascinating memristor
Apologies for a typo in our article on memristors in our latest print edition, but it does illustrate the peril of using exotic characters.
The Greek letter Φ (Phi), representing magnetic flux, came up fine in our proofs but we had to use a Symbol font and forgot to tell Acrobat when we sent pdfs to the print shop, with the result that it came up with the wrong letter.
If you have missed all the fuss about memresistance, a newly-established circuit parameter as fundamental as resistance, it's well worth checking out and the article is online now.
In a nutshell: memristors (devices that display memristance) are characterised by the fact that their resistance varies with the charge that has passed through them, and they 'remember' that resistance until they pass current again.
The effect is apparent only at the nanoscale but the possibilities are mind-boggling, even scary. Ultra-fast, ultra-dense memory is one mooted application but they can also be used in analogue mode to mimic the synapses of the brain. Damn machines are going to be smarter than we are before too long.
Safer with sat nav?
I had to chuckle when I saw a report on how sat nav has a positive effect on driving safety popped into my inbox.
Unsurprisingly, the report was commissioned by a sat nav manufacturer - TomTom.
I've used plenty of sat navs and, admittedly, they've saved my bacon many a time. Their ability to guide you through a series of inner city one-way streets can simplify even the most complex of road systems. However, I find it hard to believe that, in general, I'm a safer driver when I use one.
Having a bright colour screen sat right in your field of vision can only be a distraction to what's on the road. And no matter how many times you're told not to, if you can't hear the volume or need to bash in a new route, the temptation to do so while driving often overrides safety concerns.
Worse still, you're often left to fumble with a touchscreen display as opposed to physical buttons.
Sat nav may be convenient, but despite what this report says I think they can be just as distracting while driving as mobile phones, if not more so.
Are you a safer driver when using a sat nav? Share your thoughts by posting a comment below. We'll publish a link to the full report when it's available.
RM puts Eee PCs to schools
RM has announced its version of the 8.9in Eee PC for schools.
RM expects to sell 50,000 Eee PCs in 2008 and reckons schools which kit their pupils out with the little laptop see SAT scores go up by an average of 3.5 per cent.
Tim Pearson, CEO of RM, said Microsoft had been aggressive on pricing of the Windows version and that the price gap between using Linux and XP (including Works 9) on the Eee PC is £25 in the UK.
"Learning how to type is more important than learning how to write," said Pearson, who was describing the mantra in a Singaporean school. In my opinion, however, increased PC usage may benefit language, humanity and electronic education, but laptops are not yet suitable for most mathematical education - a qwerty keyboard is too rigid to derive something, do basic differential equations or even long division exercises.
Microsoft's director of education, Steve Beswick, took the stage afterwards and extolled the benefits of Windows XP on small laptops. "Security is one of the reasons for using XP in school," said Beswick. Citing security as a virtue of Windows may sound laughable, but schools like to set universal security policies and parental controls.
The 8.9" RM Asus miniBook, as it will be called, costs a fiver more than the non-RM branded Eee PC costs (at £285 ex. Vat). It will be available for a few months before being superseded by the superior Atom based Eee PC 901.
Historic ICT 1301 on show
Computer history enthusiasts will be heading on July 13 to a car rally at a Kent farm where the only working ICT 1301 mainframe computer from 1962 will be on display. The machine, nicknamed Flossie, has the serial number 6 and was the first machine out of the factory of the company which later merged with English Electric to become ICL. Its designed, Dr Raymond Bird, is pictured above visiting the restored machine in 2004 when he was aged 81. It is a second-generation UK computer design, clocking 1MHz, with 4000 printed circuit boards using discrete germanium transistors, a decade before integrated circuits began to make their mark. It boasts 2000 words of 48 bit magnetic core store, several drum stores, and an optical card reader and punch. It was originally used to process London University GCE results and is set up to do pounds, shillings and pence as well as new-fangled decimal currency. Later it was sold as scrap to students who used it to process large club membership lists in the 1970s. Now a group of enthusiasts is trying to recover software contained in half inch 10 track magnetic tapes. It is now at Buss Farm, in Kent, venue for The Darling Buds Classic Car Show on July 13.
Win a Shuttle 'Alone in the Dark' PC
View imageWho says Friday the 13th is unlucky? Visitors to Shuttle's European website can tempt fate and enter a competition to win a special edition Shuttle PC. Clebrating the launch of the fifth instalment of Atari's 'Alone in the Dark' game, the PC - based on a XPC Barebone SG31G5 chassis - comes with a copy of the game. The competition ends on 7th July 2008.
3D Pandas, true-colour screens, and why local storage is here to stay
The most impressive act at HP's big Berlin event today came not from the company itself but from film company Dreamworks, which showed off three-dimensional versions of scenes from its new feature Kung-Fu Panda. HP has been heavily involved in developing technology for the animation which requires phenomenal computing power.
Dreamworks is not doing a 3D version of the full film but it did some scenes in 3D to show off a techology that it plans to use in future. We had to don Polaroid specs to get the effect and it was quite startling to find oneself flinching a virtual missiles that seemed to be coming straight at you. Incidentally the 2D version looked good too, but off course that requires only half the computing resources needed for 3D.
One result of the colloboration between HP and Dreamworks has been the HP Dream Colour display that can render a billion colours. It seems that the old CRT monitors reproduced colour a lot better than LCDs, which lack consistency across the screen because the lighting is not uniform. The two companies got together to do something about it.
The colour fidelity is obtained partly by using clusters of red, green and blue LEDs across the entire black plane to provide consistent lighting.
The display will cost $3499 in the US and Andy Bowden, manager of displays at HP, says it its is as good as specialist models costing between $15,000 and $20,000 (these details have been updated since this blog was first posted)..
One interesting factoid from the event came from Phil McKinney, chief technology officer of the personal systems group. He reckoned that if all the data held by every home PC were transmitted across the internet the task would take 11 months to complete. And ghe amount of data stored is rising exponentially. McKinney's conclusion is that we can't leave everything to the Internet. "We are always going to need some local storage," he said.
Voodoo Omen turned PC innards upside down
View imageVoodoo has completely rethought the classic PC layout for its new desktop machine, the Omen, unveiled at HP's launchfest in Berlin today. The motherboard has been turned upside down and hangs from the top of the machine, with the ports arrayed underneath a detachable lid. This leave back clear, except for a gap at the top where the cables emerge,
The six drive bays are aligned at right angles to their normal positions, accessible through neat little panels at the side. They can take standard or solid=state drives. On the front is a secondary monitor with no specific use, though it can be used to display system papareters.
The one on display was running a pair of next-generation SLI-ed Nvidia graphics cards, details of which were under embargo. The machine can take up to 8GBytes of overclockable 1600 MHz CORSAIR PC-14400 DDR3 SDRAM.
There's a choice of 3.20GHz or 3GHz Intel QX9770 quad-core processors, overclocked to the maximum judging from the impressive array of liquid-cooling pipes and a base that looks like a radiator. Voodoo would not say how fast it clocked.
HP describes it as a luxury PC. So luxurious, in fact, that you won't be able to buy one for a while because they will be offered initially only to people who already own a Voodoo.
Voodoo also showed a notebook called the Envy, presumably because that is the emotion it is designed to inpire in your friends. It is actually a rather plain-looking black box, made of carbon fibre, with a 13.3in WXGA screen but it has impressive specs - see here, where you will also find more details about the Omen.
Having forked out £19 for a USB-ethernet converter for my ludicrously under-ported MacBook Air, I was particularly interested to hear Rahul Sood, chief technology officer, describe how Voodoo got round the fact that the Envy was not thick enough at 0.7in to take a standard Ethernet jack. He stuck one in the power adapter to avoid people having to buy special leads.
The iRex iLiad, which I am in the process of reviewing and is if anything is thinner than the Air, uses the same idea.
Extreme hype works for Apple
Regulars readers may have noticed that attitudes towards Apple at PCW Towers tend to be a mix of admiration and intense irritation. The cause of the latter reaction is usually Apple luminary Steve Jobs and his big mouth.
Typical was the way he launched Apple wireless networking in 1999 as if the company had invented it, although it had been in widespread use on PCs for two years.
Still, you have to hand it to the man: his hype works. Analysts ARCchart report that Apple's Airport Extreme has become the top-selling wireless router in the US, outselling brands like Linksys, Dlink and Netgear.
The Extreme sells at the Apple site for $179; a Linksys router with similar specs can be bought for $40 less and should work as well with a Mac as with a PC.
Looking at the entire base-station market, including models not packing a router, Apple comes fourth with an 11 percent share. That is still higher than its 6 percent share of the US computer market (globally it has only about 3 percent).
ARCchart concludes that PC owners must have been buying the Apple model, indicating the power of a brand. Of course it could also mean that Mac users have taken this long to save pennies enough to meet Apple's inflated prices, and are only now in a position to catch up with the rest of us.
RSI rates soar 30 per cent, but is it just ambulance chasing?
The number of reported RSI incidents shot up 30 per cent last year, according to a 1003-person study commissioned by Microsoft.
Eight per cent of office workers now struggle with the painful digits and sharp pains shooting through their bodies associated with RSI (repetitive strain injury), while 68 per cent of office workers suffer from some sort of pain (like back ache and sore eyes)
John Allen, managing consultant at the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents (RoSPA), said "there have been some high profile court cases that have attracted very large damages awards recently and as such more people are becoming more aware of it and reporting RSI." He also expects RSI injuries to increase in the future as technology use increases.
Bronwyn Clifford, a chartered physiotherapist, advises that "keystrokes, rather than using the mouse, help against RSI". Voice activated commands, taking breaks (like a proper lunch break) and, in some cases, using a more sensitive and even a bigger mouse can also help, she said.
At PCW, we use vertical mice and tablet pens to easy the pains of using a computer. Little, however, can help our eyes from the strain of staring at a screen for 10+ hours a day.
New chip could make satnav standard on Bluetooth devices
This is a block diagram of the new BlueCore 7 chip from CSR, which
packs satnav, Bluetooth and FM send/seceive onto a piece of silicon
just 3.6mm by 3.2mm. John Halksworth, head of product management, says
the extra functionality comes at the same cost as a Bluetooth-only
chip, which means it could become more or less standard issue on mobile
phones and other portable devices.
He claims the sensitivity of the eGPS system is particularly impressive because of the limited scope for aerials in mobile devices. It has also boosted what he calls the "across body" performance to providing good communication even when link back-pocket device to headphones. Apparently in some earlier models, body attenuation has caused some problems.
BlueCore 7 also uses CSR's proprietary Auristream voice codec but reverts to Bluetooth's CVSD if talking to a non-CSR device.
Arm's new GPU
This is a block diagram of Arm's Mali-400 MP multicore graphics processing unit, unveiled today, showing the shared level 2 cache, the "console class" vertex processor, and the maximum four fragment processors able to fill a billion pixels a second.
Arm sells designs and does not make chips to actual implementations, and thus performance and power drain, are down the manufacturer. Chris Porthouse, senior product manager, said some Arm customers would implement it at 45nm scale and some were looking at 32nm.
There is much interest in how Arm is going to play against Intel's new Atom processors on price and performance. Apple's iPhone and iThouch have shown what can be done with Arm technology, but Mali-400 designs won't hit the market until 2010. Products using its single-core Mali-200 are expected to appear this year.
