The leaves are falling off Photosynth
Well that's what Microsoft's new Photosynth website - just released from its long beta phase - keeps telling us. Photosynth is now live for users to create their own 'synths', although every time we try to view one we get the bizarre message pictured here. Usually followed by IE7 crashing.
To create a 'synth' (a funky stitched-up 3D view of a photo collection), you need to upload between 5-300 photos (yes, upload - don't dig out your high-res pics just yet) of your subject using the Photosynth desktop application and let Microsoft's servers do all the grunt work. Oh, and you need a Windows Live account to sign in as well.
It's a fascinating technology, but one that seems to be in desperate search of a useful practical application for the masses.
Leo and the lion of Lyons
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."
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.
GTA IV smashes sales records
GTA IV broke the UK one-day selling records for a game when it launched on Tuesday this week, Chart Track has revealed.
Early estimates say a total of 609,000 copies were sold in the first day, whizzing past the previous record of 501,000, held by GTA: San Andreas in 2004.
Xbox 360 version sold 335,000 while the PS3 version racked up 274,000, both one-day records themselves for their respective consoles.
GTA IV could go on to break many other records, since an analyst at Wedbush Morgan has reportedly predicted 13 million sales worldwide are achievable by the year's end.
I was one of the many punters who queued for the game; but first I had to buy an Xbox 360. My only option was to buy the console bundled with three games because standalone copies of the game were sold out. And once I had added an extra controller, I was £290 out of pocket.
Now, realising my 15 year-old TV can't handle 60Hz Pal (needed by some Xbox360 games), I'm also going to have to buy a new TV. And since buying anything with less than a native 1080p mode and 1:1 pixel mapping (so I can use it as a big PC monitor) seems a waste of cashola, GTA IV is, in essence, going to cost me around £1,000. Great game though.
Irony of the skeletons still rattling in Microsoft cupboards
Microsoft simply can't shake off its past. The US Supreme Court has denied a request by the company to drop an anti-trust suit filed by Novell in 1994 alleging anti-competitive behaviour by Microsoft 10 years previously. Curiously, Novell is now under fire for cosying up to Microsoft over reconciling the competing ODF and OpenXML formats.
PCW on Facebook
Fans of social networking phenomenon Facebook will be happy to learn that Personal Computer World now has its own dedicated Facebook page. You'll find RSS mini-feeds for all our latest news and reviews, plus new announcements and updates, so head on over there and join our fan club!
Build a virtual BMW
At the recently opened BMW Welt showroom in Munich, prospective buyers have been shown a system that uses the latest 3D visualisation systems to help them configure their dream autobahn muncher.
Using a system developed by Realtime Technology, visitors chan choose trim, colour and wheel options on a touch-screen console and see the results in real time on a 3D image of the car projected on a high-resolution 8 megapixel screen by a Sony SXRD 4K projector.
Processing the massive amount of 3D data requires some serious horsepower. RTT's Powerwall system is a clustering solution using 5 Fujitsu Siemens R40 computers each with 16GB of Ram and an Nvidia Quadro FX5600 graphics card.
Steganos launches new free encryption product
German software company Steganos has today launched a totally free data encryption utility designed to let you securely store sensitive data. Safe One lets you store files in encrypted 'safe' partitions on a hard disk or USB storage device, such as an iPod. The free version is limited to 2 x 1GB partitions, and you can download it right now from the PCW Downloads site.
Windows Home Server 120-day trial now available
Microsoft has in the past couple of days made a 120-day trial version of Windows Home Server (WHS) available via the WHS website. UK users can't download it but can order up to 5 copies of the DVD for a nominal shipping sum of £4.58.
OEM versions of Windows Home Server have been available online in the UK for some time now, and cost around £90.
When a reinstall could mean you pay twice for the same copy of Windows
It is a fact of life for anyone interested in computers that they become IT troubleshooter for friends, not to mention friends of friends. Nothing wrong with that, except when what seems like a simple job turns into a major hassle – and expecially so when the hassles come from the PC or software vendors or both.
A friend's Dell Dimension, perhaps three years old, had gone on a go-slow and, as it was used mostly for emails and had little software loaded, I offered to do a quick clean reinstall as the easiest way to fix it.
If he had got a Windows XP Home Edition disk with the PC, he had lost it. But I had a copy, and could use the licence number printed on the side of the Dell system box, so there was no question of stealing software if I used it for the reinstall.
Accordingly I reformatted the C-drive and began. There was no problem until I was asked for the licence number, which was promptly rejected. Microsoft told me it was Dell's problem.
Dell told me that the machine might have recovery code in a hidden partition, accessible by clicking Control-F11. This did not work; there was indeed a hidden partition but it appeared to contain only a hardware diagnostics utility.
Dell's support man told me the only alternative was to buy another copy of XP… in effect to pay a second time for the same code.
Dell's support staff in India (of whom, incidentally, I have had good reports) are supposed to be ringing me this evening to take me through the recovery procedure again but I don't hold out much hope. I've already had hours of unnecessary hassle, which appears to be a case of anti-piracy measures acting against the interests of legitimate users.
