A new report in Nature about the mysterious Antikythera Mechanism - a clockwork computer dating from around 150BC - suggests that it may have been used to calculate the relationships between the various astronomical calendars in use in ancient Greece, and the 4-year Olympiad calendar used throughout Greece.

The Antikythera Mechanism was discovered in a shipwreck in the Mediterranean in 1901, and despite a poor state of preservation continues to reveal surprisingly complex features. You can download a PDF of the full paper from the Nature website.

Posted by Kelvyn Taylor on July 31, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0)

  Asus today announced UK pricing for its Eee Box PC, the desktop version of the Eee PC 'netbook'. Available from September, the two models of the Eee Box (white or black) will retail at £199. In a departure from the strategy used for the successful Eee PC, the first versions will ship with Windows XP Home installed. A Linux version will follow at an unspecified date. Full specs are listed below. No monitor is included in the price.

Posted by Kelvyn Taylor on July 30, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Samsung has just announced its INNOV8 handset (yes, that's pronounced 'innovate'), with its main 'innovation' being a built-in 8-megapixel camera.

Based on Symbian OS v9.3, the handset is clearly hoping to replace the humble digicam and comes complete with a 2.8in screen and Wifi. It also houses Samsung's nifty technology that detects when subjects are blinking (retakes the shot) or smiling (takes an impromptu shot) - something we've just been testing out on Samsung's NV24HD (review coming soon).

Should you want to indulge in a bit of geo-tagging when taking photos, the built-in GPS will pinpoint your location.

I'll be interested to see just what sort of images the 8-megapixel camera is capable of - unless Samsung has done something very special, I doubt they'll be able to match the quality of a dedicated digicam. But marketing seems to be all about big (and often meaningless) numbers these days, and the 8-megapixel camera will probably be enough guarantee decent sales regardless of image quality.

That said, the phone does look pretty stunning and might even give the iPhone 3G a run for its money on the catwalk.

The INNOV8 comes in 8GB and 16GB versions, and will be available next month.

Posted by Will Stapley on July 24, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0)

We've had the odd complaint about poor battery life from Celeron M based Eee PCs, especially since our Eee PC 701 and Eee PC 900 review units lasted a very reasonable 2 hours 15 mins and 2 hours 49 min when reading a PDF with screen brightness set to maximum and Wifi turned off.

A recent Bios update disabled a Bios option that let you choose between performance and battery life so that the CPU would flick between 900MHz and 630MHz respectively when on battery power. But the update seems like a bit of a red herring since it didn't improve battery life substantially on my Eee PC (a different one to the one we reviewed).

A bigger issue is the quality of the battery being used, since each Eee battery appears to behave different and every one I've seen isn't calibrated properly.

With the battery fully charged, my Eee PC 900 reports 80 per cent battery life remaining as soon as it is unplugged. It then drains down to 7 per cent over the course of one hour, where it stays for a second hour before dying. Unfortunately, the default Windows power scheme puts the Eee PC into standby at 10 per cent, so many Eee PC owners aren't getting the full potential out of their batteries.

A friend's Eee PC 701 I had a play with exhibited similar behaviour, getting stuck on 30 per cent.

The cause is probably cheap logic inside the batteries being supplied with the Celeron M generation of Eee PCs and my advice is to either turn off the Windows power scheme altogether or to lower the warning levels so that your battery goes the distance it's capable of.

Posted by Emil Larsen on July 23, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Domain name and hosting provider 1&1 was quick to fire out threats from debt collectors to both myself and a friend recently.

Like any tech-heads, we've both got hosting packages and domain names bought from several companies including 34SP, CWSHosting, UK2, Low cost names and more. Most companies send out emails notifying you that a domain name is up for renewal and that if you don't act immediately then you'll lose the domain name.

In my experience (and my friend who suffered the same fate), 1&1 is different because I didn't get a notice email (or phone call) saying my domain was up for renewal. Instead the company just renewed it and, once they realised my debit card had expired, billed me via post afterwards.

Before I'd rung them and said I'd only wanted the domain name for the first year and I wouldn't pay for the second, 1&1 hired debt collectors who sent me an additional bill.

After some pleading with 1&1 customer support, who claimed I'd signed a rolling contract, it pulled its debt collectors off me but only after I'd paid for the renewal of my domain name.

It seems, in my opinion, a rather rash way to do business. But the market is extremely competitive and I'll show my discontent with my wallet and buy domains elsewhere from now on.

Posted by Emil Larsen on July 23, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (4)

NFC (near-field communications) could be a buzzword you'll soon be hearing a lot more of over the coming months, particularly in relation to Bluetooth 2.1 devices. Bluetooth 2.1 supports NFC, which is a short-range radio technology similar to that used in RFID tags and London's Oyster cards. It lets devices communicate up to about 10cm away, and in Bluetooth it can be used to remove the need for going through the tedious pairing process.

There are one or two NFC-capable phones on the market, such as Nokia's 6131 NFC, but to date NFC has been seen mainly as a way to let a phone become an 'electronic wallet', where you can simply touch your phone onto a till to pay for goods (or, if they're anything like Oyster cards, perhaps let any passing hacker clone them.)

But today we saw an even handier use for NFC at the British Motor Show, where Parrot was displaying a new version of its Party Bluetooth mini-speakers.   

Due to launch later this year, the new Parrot Party is NFC-ready, which means if you have a suitable phone or MP3 player you'll be able to connect to the speakers simply by waving it near them.

Yes, we know you can set up Bluetooth to automatically connect to paired devices, but this removes the need for the initial pairing entirely, making it ideal for Bluetoothophobes.

Parrot says it will also have the same technology in some of its digital photo frames, so you'll be able to transfer photos at the swipe of a mobile.

Posted by Kelvyn Taylor on July 22, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Never mind benchmarks, how many PCs do you know that can do 211mph and accelerate from 0-62mph in just 4 seconds? Well, we found one at the British Motor Show that can.

This ultimate office on wheels is a Brabus SV12 Biturbo , based on a long-wheelbase Mercedes S600 limo with one of Brabus' legendary 6.3litre V12 'Rocket' engines, developing 730bhp, squeezed into it.

Naturally, it's the IT side of this £270,000 motor that interests us, although the eye-watering £24,726.70 (ex. VAT) price for the 'Business equipment' means that interest is purely academic.

For your money you get a retractable 15.2in widescreen TFT built into the headlining, an infrared keyboard with touchpad, a couple of multimedia screens built into the headrests and a laptop running what appears to be Windows Vista mounted in an electrically operated drawer in the boot.

There's also built-in mobile internet, sat nav and a console for a colour printer, apparently.

We certainly managed most of that in our car PC feature in the current issue of PCW, and certainly for a lot less cash, but we must admit we couldn't quite match the leather trimmings. Or the exhaust note...

Posted by Kelvyn Taylor on July 22, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0)

At the British Motor Show today, Garmin showed off its latest sat nav, the Nuvi 500 series (pictured left). This is Garmin's first attempt at a crossover model that can be configured for use by drivers, walkers, bikers (or scooterers) and boaters. Perhaps desinged with British summers in mind, it's waterproof and fuel-resistant (important for bikers, apparently) and comes with both car and bike mounts (see picture below) in the box.

The Nuvi 500 contains UK & ROI street maps, whereas the Nuvi 550 adds a full European map set. It will cost £299 when it goes on sale in September. Detailed topographic and marine charts aren't supplied as standard, although the street mapping does feature digital elevation mapping with shaded terrain contours.

Other features include Bluetooth, a removable battery and support for Wherigo adventure games and a Geocaching player.

Posted by Kelvyn Taylor on July 22, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Acer has added new functionality to the fingerprint reader on its new Centrino 2 laptops.

Traditionally, fingerprint readers let you use your thumb rather than a password to logon, with the fingerprint data stored securely in a TPM chip. Acer's new application, called FingerLaunch, lets you assign each one of your fingers (or, perhaps, toes) to open a program or document instead.

If the laptop is only being used by one person, then FingerLaunch makes function keys (that are so often splattered across a laptop chassis) redundant.

I've never used a fingerprint reader for security reasons and the point was raised that features like FingerLaunch aren't used by anybody at all - and Acer had no response or research to prove otherwise.

On the note of Acer's Centrino 2 laptops, the pick of the bunch appears to be Aspire 5930G. It's a 15.4in laptop based on the Gemstone Blue design and sounds the death knell for the original Gemstone chassis, which I'd say formed the ugliest laptops of this decade.

The 5930G comes with a 15.4in 1,280x800 resolution screen, 2GB Ram, one of five new Core 2 Duo processors (dependant on configuration) and an Nvidia Geforce 9300M GS or 9600M GT graphics card. We suspect it'll be a big hit in the sub-£550 market.

Posted by Emil Larsen on July 17, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Until yesterday I had missed, arguably, the most important feature of Intel's new Centrino 2 platform: switchable graphics.

Alistair Kemp, PR manager for Intel, explained that the new chipset could flick between the integrated, low-power GMA X4500 graphics and a discrete graphics card on the fly to save battery life when you don't need the brute 3D rendering force of the discrete graphics card.

Unlike Nvidia's hybrid power, this technology supports every mobile graphics card available, presumably because a laptops graphics card isn't directly attached to the video output like it is in a desktop system.

The result is laptops designed for gamers, CAD professionals and HD video buffs can now attain battery life as long as laptops that just rely on integrated graphics.

Centrino 2 also brings a new integrated graphics part, called the GMA X4500. Intel says it will be 1.9x faster in 3Dmark compared with the GMA X3100 graphics chip that is part and parcel of most Santa Rosa laptops. We hope to test this claim in the next month when the GMA X4500 drivers are finished.

A noticeable absentee from the Centrino 2 launch was Wimax, which will arrive later this year. Intel's laptop Wimax offering will be an upgrade for current laptops and an optional extra for Centrino 2 laptops. It'll appear in the form of a PCI Express mini card with Intel's new dual-channel Draft-N card onboard, rated at 450Mbits/sec.

Kemp said the difference in power consumption between Wimax and Wifi was a matter of a few milliwatts, despite suggestions that the power requirement for mobile Wimax devices is currently quite high due to inefficient power amps.

Posted by Emil Larsen on July 15, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0)

We are still getting messages from readers cut off from the internet following a massive Microsoft update last week designed to thwart a newly-discovered hole in Domain Name System protocolsthat govern internet addressing. The hole, which was not restricted to Microsoft software, could allow attackers to redirect traffic from legitimate sites to criminal imitations.

The KB951748 update cut off thousands users of ZoneAlarm firewall software, including the free basic version.  This was because it changed the range of ports used for DNS calls to include ones blocked by ZoneAlarm, and publisher Checkpoint was apparently not informed of the change.

Checkpoint has posted fixes here.

Posted by Clive Akass on July 14, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Panasonic last night finally showed us its  CF-U1 ultra-mobile ToughBook, which was first announced in March, and it looks good. It is designed for field use by the likes of site engineers and municipal officials, and so should not be judged by the same standards as a consumer model.

For instance, I normally hate ultra-mobiles that use small keyboards with mobile-phone style keys. I'd rather have a good attached keyboard or none at all, because you can always plug one in or use a Bluetooth model if necessary, and the Windows handwriting recognition is well good enough for lighter input such as emails.

The CF-U1's 5.6in 1024 x 600 touch screen is too small for comfortable handwriting input but it is not designed for people who want to write War and Peace. Users are likely to hold it in   one hand and control it in the other, probably for specialist form-filling applications.

Unlike many early tablets designed for this purpose, it is small enough to do this easily though it is much chunkier than most UMPCs: a full 5.7cm thick. But its 15.1cm x 18.4cm footprint is par for the format and it weighs just 1.06Kg.

That is heavier than some UMPCs but still light enough to carry with ease - and it includes the weight of two batteries, which Panasonic says give a working life between charges of nine hours, more than  enough for a whole working day. Moreover the batteries are hot-swappable. You can carry a spare pair and replace the ones in the machine without switching it off.

Solid-state drives (max 32GByte) come as standard, and the machine is designed to be dropped from 1.2m without damage. It has a magnesium alloy case like earlier Tough Books, but coated to increased scratch resistance.

The CF-U1 uses an Intel Z520 Atom processor and comes with Vista or what Panasonic describes curiously as an "XP downgrade". Watch out for a full review soon.

Posted by Clive Akass on July 11, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0)

We report today that animator Dreamworks will phase out its dual-core AMD Opterons and replace them with yet-to-be-launched  Nehalem server chips and Larrabee graphics processing units. The company needs to boost computing power because it wants to make all its productions in 3D from next year.

Journalists who attended HP's recent techfest in Berlin saw experimental 3D footage of scenes from latest Dreamworks 2D epic Kung-fu Panda, and very impressive they were. They do require polaroid glasses to get the effect, and we watched only for a few minutes so it was hard to judge if the eyes would feel strained after watching a full-length film.

Processing 3D takes roughly twice the computing power of 2D, according to Dreamworks, but it would be interesting to know what the figures are for storage and transmission. There must be a lot of scope for compression because of the similarities between the twin images. This could be significant, not only because of the implications for 3D film downloads and streaming. The most-used 3D application in future could turn out to be video phones.

I saw a relatively crude 3D phone system demonstrated at Cebit in 2004 running over a 384Kbit/sec link. You did not need special glasses for it but even at the relatively low resolution used I judged the difference between 2D and 3D videophoning to be rather more than the difference between mono and stereo audio. And, in theory at least, 3D video calls should not need not very much more bandwidth than 2D.

Posted by Clive Akass on July 9, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Kodak has announced a 50 megapixel camera sensor giving photographers the ability to capture unprecedented levels of detail.  The KAF-50100 sensor is also said to draw less power then predecessors. It has an 8176 x 6132 pixel array, equivalent to the 48 mm x 36mm  optical format.

It is, of course, designed for professionals, so perhaps we are being unfair recalling the Nikon consumer division executive who said at Comdex a few years back that no-one would need more than two million pixels. Actually she had a point: the pixel counts of  today's consumer cameras are higher than is required for what most people do with their digital images. She did not take into account the fact that high-resolutions allow you to crop pictures, or do deep zooms, and still get good detail..

Bill Gates always claimed that his famous statement that no-one would need more than 640Kbytes of memory was taken out of context. Still, he never lived that down either. 

Posted by Clive Akass on July 8, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0)

A new wireless device allows you to record meetings and make audio notes onto your PC frpm up to 30 metres away, says vendor Lindy.

The £69.99 (inc Vat) Wireless Voice Recorder package consists of a wireless handset, a USB dongle and software.

Recordings can be played back either on your PC or on the handset's built-in speaker. The integrated lithium battery lasts for up to twelve hours, Lindy says.

Posted by Clive Akass on July 4, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Interesting news from the US today that Microsoft is offering to lease the Student version of Office with its One Care security suite and Live web services for around $70 (£35)  a year.

The offer has been announced only for the US and I'm waiting to hear from Microsoft to see if it will be introduced into Britain. But, considering that it includes three licences and is not much more than you would pay for virus protection anyway, it is the kind of deal that could make the subscription model work because you are getting a continuing service for your money as well as use of the software.

It would be cheaper in the near term to buy the Office Home and Student edition, which packs Word, Excel, Powerpoint and One Note (but not Outlook or Access) and costs just £80 with three licences from PC World, and you can get it cheaper still bundled with a notebook but you don't get the services.

Both deals show that Microsoft is having to level down its prices in the face of fiercer competition (the free and good OpenOffice offers broad support for Microsoft Office formats) and falling hardware prices that can mean a machine costs less than the software running on it.

The subscription deal has the advantage of potentially wooing customers into using Microsoft's online services at a time when the company is trailing in the battle for web revenues.

Software subscriptions will only work if you get some value out of the continuing payments. Last month we got blurb from a company called PC Powerdown about a switch that will shut you PC and peripherals off on schedule. It costs £30 plus £10 a year 'licence renewal' fee apparently entitled you to upgrades. It would take a lot of persuading to get me to sign up to that one.

Posted by Clive Akass on July 3, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Just to put in a good word about Apple, after hammering it in two recent blogs. I've just been setting up an old Evolution MK-149 midi keyboard for a nephew to use, via an Edirol UA-20 interface, with the Garage music production software that comes with Macs. There was no reason to  expect that  the keyboard and interface would cause problems, but using legacy peripherals can be tricky sometimes and I can report that they set up home with my MacBook Air quite happily.

Garage looks like an excellent piece of software to introduce kids to computer music production, with a lot of grown-up features that hide their complexities well.

I'm still awaiting comment from Apple about my earlier blogs, and will keep you posted.

Posted by Clive Akass on July 3, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Intel has a battle on its hands competing with ARM  in the handheld arena, the company's star technologist Pat Gelsinger told yesterday's press teleconference at which he admitted that multicore performance was being hampered by the difficulties of parallel programming.

"ARM is a good architecture. It has proven success in the handset space," Gelsinger said. Intel had made a start with the Atom processor, which had reduced the 5w to 6w thermal design power (TDP) of 'bottom end' Centrinos by an order of magnitude to around half a watt.

Far be it from me to contradict Mr Gelsinger (and my recording of the teleconference is crackly at this point) but he seemed not to be comparing like with like here. The TDP of the Atom 230 is listed as 4w and that of the N270 as 2.5w. The average power drain is closer to 0.5w, but that is not the same thing.

And as an ARM man told me darkly: "Look at the standby power." The maximum power in sleep mode of the N270 is listed as 0.5w, which means you are not going to leave it in instant-on standby if you can avoid it.

To be fair to Gelsinger, his briefing was short on triumphalism. He came close to admitting that Arm was ahead on handset power consumption and that it would take time for Intel to catch up.

"We are aiming for platform-level [ie whole system] power consumption in the tens of milliwatt range, which puts you firmly into the handset kind of power envelope, with further reductions in chip size....We have said that over the next couple of years [my italics] we are going to get those milliwatt idle performance numbers."

Gelsinger also revealed that Intel planned to use Atoms in systems-on-a-chip (SoCs). This is typically how ARM cores are used: chipmakers license the core design and wrap their own logic round it.

Gelsinger's main message seemed to be that his company believed the  familiarity and scope of the Intel architecture (IA) would see off competition both from ARM and upstart GPU makers (see today's news story).

He asked: "Will IA displace ARM? It would be decades before that is a consideration because of the momentum [ARM] has. But we do see this ...continued wall of IA, going from petaflop machines with Xeons down to milliwatt machines with Atoms- this architectural continuity - is a value proposition that is at the core of Intel's strategic thrust."

Posted by Clive Akass on July 2, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Obituaries of David Caminer, who has died at the age of 92, have focussed on the fact that he was the world's first systems analyst. But his death also revives memories of Leo, the world's first proper business computer.

Leo emerged from the heady days immediately after World War Two when a bankrupt Britain could spare few resources for the development of new-fangled computers. It was an early example of the kind of co-operation between universities and business that later produced Silicon Valley in the US and the cluster of technical companies around Cambridge University that has been dubbed Silicon Fen.

Lyons Corner Houses were in those days as much a feature of British life as Tescos or Boots are today. They provided good affordable food and to keep prices down the company had been a pioneer in what was then called scientific management.

Lyons early on spotted the possibilities of computing and partly financed Maurice Wilkes's Edsac computer at Cambridge, in return for help in building a computer to help run its business. The circuitry on Leo 1 was almost identical to that on Edsac.

Mike Hally recalls in his book Electronic Brains (Granta, £15.99, ISBN 1-86207-663-4) how the first program in 1951 valued all the goods produced at Lyons bakeries. It was a relatively simply task that some thought to trivial to computerise. But Caminer felt the team need experience doing live work on time.

It was the first ever business application. Soon Leo was doing everything "from clock-in to payroll"; Caminer's team had virtually invented business computing from scratch.

So how was that the UK got in first? Wilkes generously acknowledged in a 2003 interview with me how much he owed to a free exchange of knowledge with US pioneers, and that American projects took longer because their aim from was to produce general-purpose models that could be sold on the open market.

Edsac was built specifically for use by researchers at Cambridge, not as a commercial project, and so it was easier to cut corners. Leo was produced initially for specific purposes by one company, though later models were sold to other companies.

Lyons was so well known as a caterer and tea merchant that it had a hard time being taken seriously as a computer company, even though it spun its computer operations off as Leo Computers in 1959.

But it would anyway have had a hard time fighting off the clout and marketing expertise of IBM, which had actually come late to computing. After a series of mergers Leo Computers eventually became part of ICL.

Hally says Caminer was bitter about government short-sightedness, particularly in not granting a contract to calculate the effects of tax changes. Caminer told him: "We had minimal government support. They simply didn't realise that business computing would become vastly more important in volume than scientific computing. If they could find some scientific computer with time to spare to do the tax tables, then they went there if they were saving a few bob. It was very sad."

Posted by Clive Akass on July 1, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (1)

It looks as though at least two UK outlets are now taking orders for the MSI Wind 10in Atom-powered mini-notebook (or netbook or nettop or whatever term takes your fancy).

Morgan Computers and play.com have the product listed, Morgan noting it as 'In Stock' and selling for £387.74 inc. VAT. Play.com says 'temporarily out of stock' but quotes the price at a '20% discount' of £329.99 including free delivery.

Expansys, meanwhile, is showing a whole heap of flavours of the Wind at prices ranging from a pink Linux version at £317.94 (delivery 1st August) to a black XP Home powered model at £363.09 (delivery 22nd July).

We looked at the Wind a few weeks back on the Test Bed when we got an early sample into our labs.

Posted by Kelvyn Taylor on July 1, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0)