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Sony Ericsson keeps us in the dark
Sony Ericsson tells us it has set up a gig on June 15 featuring a group called Friendly Fires who will play in absolute darkness. The idea is to "heighten the senses of the audience and increase their listening experience." The location is secret and we have not been invited; tickets are available via competitions and a MySpace channel. But their press relations people have asked whether we want "post event" pictures of the gig. We can go one better by heightening your senses with this exclusive pre-event picture (click to enlarge).
£200 Atom-powered XP netbook
Supermarket chain Netto is offering an 8.9in netbook with 1GB of RAM, a 1.6GHz Atom N270 processor and 60Gbyte hard disk for £199.99 from June 4 "while stocks last". The Hercules eCAFÉ, which originally cost £279.99, comes with Windows XP Home Edition, and the OpenOffice.org office suite.
First Looks - Cooler Master HAF 922
Cooler Master's HAF 932 is a popular case amongst enthusiasts but only if you have the room for it, so Cooler Master have launched a case based on the design of the 932 but in a smaller form factor, the HAF922.
Solidly built from steel, with a well executed black finish, the HAF 922 has some nice design features including a separate tool free PCI slot situated to the side of the seven main tool free expansion plates. This spare slot is handy if you are using multi graphic card setups and run out of access to the main plates. The motherboard backplate includes a cut out for the base unit of a third party CPU cooler and cut out's at the top and bottom of the plate and help with tidy cable runs.
There's plenty of cooling built into the HAF922 with two 200mm fans, one sitting behind the front bezel, the other housed in the roof while a third fan, a 120mm unit sits on the rear panel. A third 200mm fan can be fitted to the side panel if needed and all the 200mm fans can be replaced by twin 120mm fans if needed
All of the drive bays are tool free with the five 5.25in bays using
a locking button, while the five 3.5in bays have locking latches which when opened allow the whole drive bay to be slid out, making the fitting of hard drives a doddle. Each of the four pins that hold the drives are rubber mounted which helps keep drive vibration and therefore noise down.Disappointingly there are only two USB ports, housed in the top of the front bezel along with two audio ports and an e-SATA port. Coolermaster have even included a button to turn off the fan LEDs which is a great idea as sometimes they can get very annoying and distracting.
Priced at £89.99 Coolermaster's HAF922 represents very good value for money and is well worth looking at if you're in the market for well featured midi tower
Netbook confusion remains as Microsoft backtracks on Win7 Lite
Confusion still reigns in the netbook arena, with Microsoft reported to be backtracking on its decision to limit the devices to three running application under the Windows 7 starter edition. The same site also says Microsft had made it impossible to change the Windows 7 wallpaper but has thought better of it.
Techarp, apparently drawing on information from computer manufacturers, says there will be starter editions designed for two categories, a netbook and a small notebook PC, as well as a special edition for China. Microsft defines a netbook as having a screen diagonal of 10.2in or less.
Techarp says limitations on graphics and touch capabilities on netbooks have been removed.
Microsoft is keeping mum on the subject but with at least three open-source projects - Android, Intel's Moblin and Ubuntu - targeting the new formats it must be wary of allowing its rivals to gain critical mass in a potentially huge new market.
The fixation on categories - netbook and small notebook - has more to do with software pricing than technology. The cheaper the hardware gets, the higher the software costs as a proportion of the selling price, and the more likely it will be that people will choose open-source if Microsoft does not cut its prices. Hence the idea of a Windows 7 Lite, which allows the company to undercut its own products on price.
Microsoft has no option but it's a risky strategy, especially as people may have different expectations of emerging true portables and don't necessarily want a "pocket Windows". This is especially so as first generation non-x86 formats are likely have the edge over Wintel products on portability and battery life (see below).
Apple, which broke one mould with the iPhone but has so far ignored the new formats, could also spring a surprise; but it is not chief executive Steve Jobs's style to go downmarket and any Macnetbook is unlikely to be challenging on price.
Meanwhile, Lenovo has launched a 12.1in machine using nVidia's Ion platform, which couples a GeForce 9400M graphics processor and Intel Atom processor on a Pico-ITXe motherboard. Ion gives the IdeaPad S12 (pictured above left) the performance of a gaming machine capable of playing HD movies to an external display using an HDMI link. It is described as a netbook, contrary to Microsoft's definition, which just goes to show that where the marketing men lead, the public is not always sure to follow.
Why the Cool-er e-book caused excitement at PCW Towers
For some years now mobile handset manufacturers have been packing more and more features into devices patently too small to cope well with them (particularly in the matter of text input), while PC manufacturers have been selling what they called portable machines that would be more accurately described as luggable. More recently the two industries have been converging towards a format that is both small and light enough to carry in a jacket pocket or handbag and yet has the computing power and connectivity of a desktop.
This evolution of what will surely be the iconic platform of the early 21st century still has years to run but we are at last beginning to get the technology that will allow it to happen, notably powerful frugal processors and systems-on-a-chip (SoCs). These have already given us ultra-portable netbooks and over the next few months we should see the release of a number of devices in a still smaller category Intel has called the Mobile Internet Devices, or MIDs.
Vendors including Intel have tended to talk down the capabilities of these true portables, fearful both of undercutting the value of their own larger machines and of raising people's expectations too far. But remember that even a low-powered device with a relatively slow Wifi link can use harness full PC power by acting as a front-end for a machine on the network. And very-low-drain SoCs, whether ARM or Intel based, are perfectly capable of running office apps.
The constraints are thus more ergonomic than technological. But while people may end up using these pocketable devices as workhorses, particularly if the input problem is cracked (which is a subject in itself), the exact way they will be used is almost impossible to predict.
One certainty is that they will act as a content delivery platform, more usable than today's iPhone and iPod Touch. This will be a major cultural change, creating incidentally a new communications medium with elements of the website, newspapers, magazines and TV. Computing, arguably, is at the start of the most important transition since low-cost mainframe power hit the desktop.
These musings explain why the arrival at PCW Towers of a new low-cost e-book reader called the Cool-er caused a lot of excitement. It is the first machine we have seen in what might be called a sub-netbook format. It is similar in functions, interface and technology to the current generation of e-book readers (see my review) but as you can see from the picture at the start of this blog it is truly pocketable. And, at £189, it's also much more affordable than the competition.
I compared it with a small, rather battered paperback that was the closest I could find to the size of the Cool-er. The paperback was slightly thicker but lighter (110g compared to 180g). The Cool-er was only marginally heavier than my HP 914 smartphone (158g) and appreciably lighter than my Panasonic DMC T-23 compact camera (258g). So it fits well within my personal definition of a true portable, which is something light enough to carry by choice rather than necessity.
E-book readers are the easiest category to fit this format because their bistable displays use power only when changing state. This means batteries can be smaller and last longer, and no heavy cooling is required. And the Cool-er has no wireless, which would save a little weight.
But it shows what is possible: an electronic notebook the size of a paper one. Time will tell whether this will become the dominant size for ultra-mobiles, even the dominant computing platform. For sure it raises the question of what the smallest practical size for a working platform is.
All access points are one to Extricom mobile clients
It is rare for someone in the Wifi industry to talk honestly about the snags as well as the advantages of the technology. They will boast of the range of the latest 11n links but omit to point out that doubling the range quadruples the area of contention (and that is not counting interference between networks in the vertical plane - ie on different floors).
They will tell you that the speed is 300Mbits/sec without pointing out that much of that goes on network overheads, and that the top speed anyway depends on bonding two channels which you are not supposed to do if there are other networks in range. In cities, of course, there are always networks in range so the only way you can get top speed is by playing road hog.
"People don't notice the problems because Wifi, particularly 11n, is so resilient. All they see is a drop in performance," said Phil Belanger, who worked on the 11n spec.
Belanger can talk about these things because his company, Extricom, offers a technology that addresses problems associated with Wifi networks that use multiple access points. There is apparently no standard way of setting these up - the Wifi specs do not cover it. But the usual way is to site access points to give minimal overlap in their coverage and ensure that neighbouring ones use a different channel.
There are some problems with this. The signal strength is erratic and tails off with distance, and 11n performance can be hit badly if the system has to cope with legacy 11a/b/c devices, which will inevitably be present on large public or campus sites. Also there can be an appreciable hiatus when a user crosses from one access-point area to another.
Extricom's approach is to connect all access points to a smart switch and present them to the roaming clients as a single device. The switch can decide, packet by packet, which access point to draw the data from; this can also help it decide which access point to use to send data. There is no channel contention because all access points use the same channel. To use the jargon: Extricom separates the MAC and PHY layers, putting the former into the switch.
There are no boundary problems within the network area because there are no boundaries. Moreover, using a system called Channel Blanketing, the overheads of coping with multiple protocols can be avoided by assigning a different channel to each of the different WiFi flavours: one for 11b/g at 2.4GHz, one for 11n at 2.4GHz, one for 11a at 5GHz and another at 11n at 5GHz (click in image to see larger version).
The latest development, announced at the Wireless and Mobile 09 show in London yesterday, is a cascading switch that allows you to double up two Extricom networks, each with 16 access points. This can be either to double the coverage area, or to provide resilience in places like hospitals where the network cannot be allowed to go down.
If Extricom has to go through all this trouble to avoid problems campus sites where access points can be carefully sited and managed, there must surely be questions about how 11n will scale up in crowded cities and blocks of flats where the siting and use of Wifi equipment is chaotic and people are being encouraged to throw HD video around.
But at least we are finally going to get a firm spec. Belanger tells me the one for 11n will be finalised this September, and that all current Draft 11n products should be compatible with it.
BNP junks its manners
Could the BNP be trying a new defensive tack following the leak of its membership list last November? It has taken to sending its press releases to PCW, and therefore presumably to every other magazine in the realm, and repeated requests to be taken off the list have no effect. Hardly behaviour calculated to improve its image with hacks who already have screeds of junk mail to negotiate. But there could be a cunning plan here: if it includes everyone on its mailing lists, no harm could be done by further leaks because there would be no way of distinguishing people really involved in the party.
On the other hand, perhaps the BNP simply has no manners.
Wolfram and Spotify shift paradigms
The new WolframAlpha engine may be limited in its knowledge base but it does extend the general ability to mine the world's knowledge base beyond Google-style listings. This is because it can extract, process and present information from different sources that Google would simply list and leave you to derive the data that you want.
Its limitations are obvious from when you start to use it. For instance when I entered the string "GDP UK 1930 to 2009" it did not understand the full request. But when I entered "GDP UK" it charted the figures since 1970 with the option of extending the dates. So it could do what I asked but I had to ask in a non-intuitive way.
These stumblings do not make it a failure. These are early days and WolframAlpha is going to raise expectations about what can be done with web searches. It happens that I've been talking the co-creator of another Web 3.0 search engine called Facility, which also goes beyond straight keyword searches, and will write more about it shortly.
Over the weekend I was rather belatedly trying out another proclaimed paradigm shifter, Spotify, and was an immediate enthusiast. It comes closest yet to what the musical web could and should be: a jukebox of all world music. It doesn't offer every single track ever made but it came up with a version of just about everything I requested.
I didn't try the £9.99-a-month premium service and relied on the advertising-financed version. The ads were infrequent and mostly promoted Spotify itself, so how it is going to pay royalties I can't imagine. For people who listen to music only at home or work, it bypasses the need to own copies of tracks.
Clearly there will be ways to copy the streamed music, though you cannot officially do so, but there is really little point circumventing the system when you can hear the tracks for free anyway.
Spotify could, as some have claimed, provide a model for how the music industry goes forward but I'd guess that it will need to change its business model. The advertising should pick up once people latch on to how good the service is, but it may then become so intrusive as to drive people to buying a subscription.
Actually £120 a year is very good value for all the music that you want to hear, considering that people will pay that for a weekend festival. But it's a lot for people like myself who listen to music mostly over the radio and would use Spotify less often; I suspect that some kind of pay-per-listen system will have to be introduced.
This is a subject close to journalists' hearts, as our industry has been hit as hard by the web as the music business and we too are having to find new ways to pay our way. You can buy annual subscriptions to newspaper and magazines but you cannot usually buy a single issue or article on the web because the mechanisms are not yet in place.
This is one reason why so much on the web is available for free, and newspaper magnate Rupert Murdoch is not alone in wondering how long this can continue to be so. As the Americans say: you pay peanuts, you end up with monkeys.
RDS for GPS
There's a group test of sat-nav devices coming up in PCW's August issue, and I've spent some time driving round the nether regions of North East London testing them. One of the features increasingly found on higher end units is an FM transmitter, so that the instructions can be broadcast to your car stereo, and you'll hear them through the main speakers, rather than relying on the built in speaker for the satnav unit - and all too often, those can be a bit on the quiet side, especially if you like to drive with the windows open.
Confusion as GPUs hit 1GHz
There's some confusion about an AMD announcement today of the world's first 1GHz graphics processor, evidently timed to coincide with the ninth anniversary of the launch of its first 1GHz CPU. AMD said that a 'factory-overclocked' version of the HD 4890 is the first to hit 1GHz using standard air-cooling systems - ie a heat sink and fan. The difference between an AMD GPU 'factory overclocked' to 1GHz and a 1GHz AMD GPU is not at all clear, as both are presumably guaranteed to run at that speed whereas you might break warranty by clocking up the HD 4890 yourself.
There is no word yet on how the "factory overclocked" HD 4890 will be branded, or how much it will cost. The confusion is compounded by the habit, not confined to AMD, of calling GPUs and cards using them by the same name. This happens because AMD provides manufacturers with a GPU and a reference design for cards that can be used as a basis for products. Vendors differentiate themselves in what they do with the GPU and (if they use it) the reference card.
As it happens Sapphire announced an HD 4890-based card clocking 1GHz two days before AMD and demonstrated it last week at the Digital Summer product showcase in London. But the Sapphire HD 4890 Atomic Edition uses its Vapor-X vapour-chamber cooling which is much quieter than using a fan. You will be able to read PCW's verdict on the HD 4890 in our August Edition, out next month.
More trouble ahead for Intel
Intel's protestations of innocence (see below) about the EU anti-trust ruling seem unlikely to stave off trouble nearer home. Martin Reynolds, managing vice president and fellow of analysts Gartner, said the EU ruling would have minimal effect on market conditions but could pave the way for an AMD civil action in the US state of Delaware, scheduled to be heard next year.
And the Obama administration is taking a harder line on anti-trust issues than that of President Bush. US Assistant Attorney General Christine Varney said on Monday that there would be a return to "vigorous antitrust enforcement action".
The US Federal Trade Commission last year formally launched an investigation into Intel's trading practices and, according to the Wall Street Journal, its officials have been coordinating with their European counterparts.
Meanwhile computer buyers may be wondering whether the EC action will bring down the price of chips by stimulating competition, or make them more expensive as the cost of the fine is passed on to customers.
We played fair, claims Intel's top wig
Intel's senior lawyer issued a statement rebutting the findings of the EU competition commissioner that resulted in today's £968m fine.
Bruce Sewell, senior vice president and general counsel, said the case resulted from a complaint by AMD, Intel's biggest competitor, predicated on the claim that alleged restrictive business practices threatened AMD's survival.
He went on: "Eight years later, our competitor and the sole complainant in this case, is alive, healthy, and claims to be expanding its business. Moreover, in real terms, the cost of the products over which Intel is claimed to exercise monopoly power has fallen faster than that of any other of the 1,200 products tracked by the US government."
Yet the EU had determined that Intel had violated its antitrust laws, and ordered Intel to modify certain alleged sales and pricing practices.
"We take great exception to the conclusions reflected in this final decision and we are dismayed that in a time of such acute economic turmoil the competition authorities have seen fit to intervene in what is by all objective measures an innovative, dynamic and competitive market," the statement said.
"The basic allegation against Intel is that it used lower prices, in the form of rebates, to prevent customers from buying or supporting AMD, or to punish customers when they did so. Such claims are false. Intel has never required a customer to agree not to buy from AMD in order to obtain a discount, nor raised a customer's prices when it decided to buy from AMD.
"Like every company Intel competes to win as much business as it can, and every time Intel wins a sale, or secures preferential marketing terms, one of our competitors loses out on that sale or marketing relationship. This is the essence of true competition. Intel provides incentives for customers to purchase our products and for customers to promote our products -- incentives which can and have been matched by AMD at various times in the past.
"Intel believes that consumers benefit from lower prices. Regulations should not prevent one company, no matter how large that company is, from offering discounts or providing incentives. Today, the part that Intel might sell to computer maker for €10, provides the same computing power that in 2000, when this case began, would have cost more than €1000."
Searching at the blink of an eye
Test Bed sadly could not make it down to Yahoo's Open Hack Day at the weekend, which the company says was attended by 300 developers from 15 countries.
The winners, a team from Dundee University, Yahoo!s BOSS (Build your Own Search Service) platform to create an application to allow people with disabilities to search the web using the blink of an eye via an on-screen keyboard.
Second was an application providing online real-time translations of proceedings in the European parliament. Sadly it doesn't appear to translate double Dutch, which many EU handouts we get are written in. But perhaps we shouldn't be flippant about these things, coming from a country with the impertinence to expect foreigners to speak its language.
Another winning app speeds up searches for musicians, music broadcast and tracks. The Hacker's Choice award went to an application called Open Freecycle, which searches for items across all Freecycle groups that make unwanted items freely available.
Corsair announce large SSD drive
Corsair's latest addition to their SSD family of hard drives is the P256, a high capacity, high performance drive with an equally high price tag.
The P256 has a 256GB capacity and uses specially selected Samsung MLC flash memory and the high performance Samsung Controller IC together with 128MB of cache memory and NCQ to produce quoted read speeds of up to 220MB/sec and write speeds of up to 200MB/sec.
Play.com have it listed at £569.99 including free delivery.
25 chips that shook the world - and just one is an Intel
Spectrum, the (very good) magazine of the US IEEE professional engineers' organisation, has published a list of the 25 Microchips that shook the World - with just one, the 8088, from Intel. Not even the 8086, first of the x86 dynasty that has become synonymous with the Intel/PC architecture.
The 8086 was Intel's first full 16bit chip; the 8088, in the words of Intel engineer Stephen Morse, was a "castrated" version because it used an 8bit external data bus. This, Spectrum argues, smoothed the transition to 16bit architecture because it made the chip compatible with low-cost 8bit support chips available at the time.
The only British chip on the list is the 32bit ARM1 RISC chip of 1985, predecessor of the chip that powered the Acorn Archimedes precursor of the ARM chips that dominate handhelds globally.
Spectrum writer Brian R Santo admits that the list is contentious but says what the chips have in common is that they're "part of the reason engineers don't get out enough."
They also show that, despite its dominance in the PC world, Intel is far from being the only important maker or designer of chips.
Other chips on the list, which are in no particular order, include the still-used 1971 Signetics NE555 (1971) timer/oscillator; the 1975 MOS Technology 6502 used on Steve Wozniak's Apple I; Texas Instruments's TMS32010 (1983), the first programmable Digital Signal Processor (DSP), Intersil's 1983 ICL8038 waveform generator, used in Moog music synthesizers; Western Digital's WD1402A (1971), the first universal asynchronous receiver/transmitter (UART) used to connect serial and parallel data streams; Kodak KAF-1300 (1986) 1.3megapixel image sensor; and the Deep Blue 2 Chess Chip (1997) used in IBM's Deep Blue computer, which beat world champion Garry Kasparov.
Also included are Transmeta's Crusoe (2000), which was commercially unsuccessful but forced Intel and ARM to address energy efficiency; Texas Instruments Digital Micromirror projector chip (1987); Micronas's 1997 MAS3507 MP3 decoder used on the Diamond Rio PMP300 music player; and the 1976 Zilog Z80 (1976) which powered many early computers including the TRS 80 and the Spectrum.
Video-check your home via your always-on network storage box
More from last week's Digital Summer product showcase (see here and here) in London. Iomega showed a range of its network-attached storage (NAS) products streaming media over a local network, including the StorCentre IX2 with a choice of 1TB or 2TB capacities.
It supports DN:A and UPnP and so should work with compliant products from other manufacturers. Iomega has been boosting the software bundled with its products thanks to its takeover by EMC. The IX2 has been upgraded to include a BitTorrent server, allowing fileswapping without the needing for a PC, and with support for remote access.
A useful trick of the latter feature is that it allows you to access an IP camera over the web. In theory any IP camera (ie one sitting directly on the network, as opposed to a webcam plugged into a PC) can be accessed but Iomega has only tested the feature with the Axis range.
Many companies selling surveillance kits try to hook you into accessing cameras via their servers for an annual fee, and it is not always clear what added value this provides other than providing continuing revenues to the vendor. The IX2 will allow you to check your home or office for intruders, or whatever, but for features like intruder alerts triggered by software-based movement sensors you may find that you still need to hook in a PC.
Incidentally I am trying out Iomega's ScreenPlay HD multimedia drive at the moment and it cosied into my home network without a hint of trouble. IT has 500GB of storage and an HDMI cable capable of pumping out HD (as well as pictures and audio) to your TV. The only problem stems from the TV-style IR remote control, which happens to use some of the same signals as my TV, so I have to take care to keep them apart.
It has also confirmed my belief that emerging new ultra-portable computers will act as remote controls in the future. Navigating folders via a TV screen six feet away, as you have to with all these media streaming devices, is slow and cumbersome and would be far easier via a handheld screen.
Buffalo was showing its new Terastation III NAS, which has four hot-swappable drives and capacities up to 8TB depending partly on how you configure it - Raid levels 0, 1, 5, 10 are supported.
It's more for business use than for the home, though it has an in-built DNLA media server with people storing HD movies are going to need storage at this level. It also includes a BitTorrent server and supports remote access.
An Apple tablet? Well, it is a Mac and it has a pen screen
It's well known that all Macs are made by Apple and its contractors, apart from the odd maverick system builder hounded by the company's lawyers. So what was this Mac tablet doing at yesterday's Digital Summer product showcase? A tablet from Apple... could it have seen the light of the future at last?
Fat chance. This is a £1649 (ex Vat) Modbook, sold by Computer Warehouse. It is actually a modified Macbook, with a Wacom digitiser screen and protective layer from Axiotron. The MacBook screen is taken off by Computer Warehouse's own Apple-certified engineers. and replaced by the 13.3in digitiser.
So what happens to the old screens? "I'd never thought of that," said Compurter Warehouse's man. "I don't know."
All very ecological.
Verbatim hedges bets on DVDs as SD capacities head for 2TB
Could CDs and DVDs be following the floppy disk into the great dustbin of history? It may be a little soon to be writing them off but storage media giant Verbatim is hedging its bets, judging from the variety of products it is flogging these days.
The company began manufacturing floppy disks in the seventies and progressed to optical media, which it still makes. Now it is selling peripherals such as mice and mouse mats, as well as a wide range of solid-state storage including ExpressCard SSDs with capacities up to 64GB and read/write speeds of 120/30MB per sec.
Verbatim's own products show how solid-state storage is threatening optical disks. The 4GB USB sticks pictured above, one from Verbatim and the other from Kingston, are so small they could be more accurately described as USB slivers and they store almost as much as a DVD.
The Verbatim model packs software for automatically backing up your data, with optional password protection and encryption. Kingston has launched a range of DataTraveler Locker USB drives up to 16GB in capacity with 256bit AES encryption.
All were on show at the Digital Summer product showcase in London yesterday, together with SDHC (high capacity) cards with capacities going up to 32GB. A Kingston spokeswoman said she expected SDXC (extended capacity) cards with capacities above 32GB to be available by the end of this year. The roadmap points to 2TB, enough to mirror more than 400 DVDs on a card little bigger than a thumbnail.
HANNspree to enter netbook market
HANNspree better known for their TV and monitor ranges are set to enter the highly competitive netbook market next month.
The HANNSnote range will come with a 10in screen, full sized keyboard, -n WiFi, Bluetooth, weigh 1.2kg and perhaps most importantly of all, a 6-cell battery.
Expected to arrive in June with a proposed retail price of £289 inc VAT.
Microsoft makes your PC talk in its sleep
Windows 7 gets scary
No this isn't a pic from the trailer of of some cheap budget horror flick, but one of the desktop wallpaper images bundled with Windows 7 RC1. What on earth were the developers eating?Inglese, per favore, YouTube
Sometimes, big web sites do things that seem so odd, you're convinced it must be your fault. I've spent some time looking at all the options on a friend's YouTube account, trying to work out what they've done - and I can't see a setting that would account for the odd behaviour.
If you've ever uploaded video to YouTube, you've probably also received email notifications, telling you when people have subscribed to your videos, or left a comment. And given the predominantly English speaking nature of the net, you probably received those messages in English. In fact, you'd expect to, wouldn't you? After all, if YouTube knows you used that language when you uploaded your videos, and didn't switch to another one, it would seem reasonable to send you notifications that way too.
So, when you suddenly receive messages, that say something like "ItalianUser ha aggiunto un commento su VideoName" or "L'utente di YouTube ItalianUser si è appena iscritto ai tuoi video" you look through the options, and think "have I switched language somehow?"
And, the answer appears to be no.
My friend's also received similar messages in Dutch too; while it's doubtless educational, surely this is a massive oversight in the design of the system? Does everyone on YouTube really receive notifications in the language of the user who caused the triggering event, rather than in their own language? And if so, how on earth did that one slip through the net?
And if it's just my friend, can anyone shed light on how to make the messages arrive in English once more?
Windows 7 RC1 installed over Vista with no problems (bar an old bug)
I installed Windows 7 RC1 code over a Vista installation today with no problem, except that I had to clear some hard-disk space after the installer said it "preferred" 16GB to be free. The whole thing took about two hours. My old Vista Windows directory occupied 12.8GB, no less than 7.35GB of which is taken by the mysterious winsx directory which appears to be a dll archive. Windows 7 RC1 occupied 9.22GB, with 3.89GB in winsx, which thus appears to account for almost all the reduction in size.
It happened that Internet Explorer was crashing in a Vista before the install. I did not bother to investigate further as the browser would be replaced with Internet Explorer 8 in RC1. Oddly, IE still crashed in precisely the same way in Windows 7 RC1, though Firefox runs without trouble. So does Office 2007, isasmuch as I have had time to test it.
The Explorer problem appears to be unconnected with Windows 7 but I decided to uninstall and reinstall the browser to see if that cured the problem. But I had forgotten Explorer is part of the Windows 7 operating system and it cannot be uninstalled.
XBMC and HD HomeRun
In the June 2009 issue of PCW, I look at home entertainment networks, and one of the devices that's touched on is the HD HomeRun from Silicon Dust, distributed in the UK by Nectar. The full article will be online later in the month, but for now you can download a diagram here, which shows the real-world network I have set up at home.
Pay once for internet on your Blackberry
T-mobile is offering a Blackberry Pearl handset with a year's worth of email and internet access for a one off charge. The idea is you get the benefit of owning a Blackberry minus the commitment of a contract.
For £180 buyers get a year's worth of 'unlimited' (1GB per month) internet access and a Pearl 8110 handset, which although is good - is also getting on a bit. Pre-installed apps include Facebook, MySpace and a variety of IM clients but text messages and phone calls will have to be topped up as usual.
Orange offer a similar PAYG service with the same handset but charge £5 per month for online access.
