The Future’s Full Of Holes

If you’re like most of the population, you only upgrade your computer every couple of years, if that. I was recently surprised (and, I’ve got to admit, more than a little pleased) to discover that the computer shop closest to home still sold old-style PS/2 style keyboards. Sure, they were only two bucks a pop, which suggests they’re not exactly a high-demand item. Still, USB supplanted PS/2 as a connection methodology more than a decade ago, and their retail presence does suggest that most of us are getting a lot of wear and tear out of our expensive IT purchases. That’s a good thing, both from a value for money and environmental standpoint.

One of the benefits that you get when upgrading if you’ve held onto your current computer for any decent length of time is the jump in system and processor speeds that will have happened while you were getting a useful service life out of your old PC. It’s not a new idea, but it’s still true today; when buying new IT equipment it pays to buy at the top of the speed curve relative to your budget. You might not need that new speed today, but it’ll ensure that your purchase remains current for quite a bit longer as the applications of tomorrow are still well suited to the speeds your system can maintain. Conversely, buying as cheap as possible will get you yesterday’s technology, and while you may be able to run things today, you may find some of tomorrow’s applications beyond the grunt of a simple system. It’s a fine balancing act — it’s certainly possible to spend too much on a system with components you won’t use as well.

So what’s current and upcoming in the PC world, anyway? On Intel’s schedule for the very near future are its next generation “Ivy Bridge” processors; these feature improved onboard graphics, USB 3.0 support, better power management — and naturally they’re claimed to be faster. AMD’s continuing on its path of “Fusion” processors — systems where the processor has a full DirectX11-compatible graphics processor built in, making them highly competitive with Intel’s processor parts, although in pure market terms Intel’s still the big shark to AMD’s minnow. Looking even further forward into the types of optical chips that high end servers use, IBM’s just revealed a technology it’s calling “Holey Octochips” — and that’s not just a prototype name that somebody drew out of a hat. IBM’s Holey design quite literally takes a chip wafer and blasts forty-eight holes into it so that laser light can pass through it; IBM’s claim is that this gives the eventual chip data processing capabilities of up to one trillion bits per second. Fast, in layman’s terms. You won’t be using a holey octochip on this or even next year’s PCs — it’s still a product pitched for high-end supercomputing, and IBM’s hoping to licence the design out to other companies — but within the next five to ten years, it’s entirely possible we could all be flinging bits around at speeds that are all but unimaginable right now.

Want Windows 8 For Free?

I’ve written about the impending release of Windows 8 extensively over the last few months, but that’s been largely on the basis of Microsoft’s own announcements regarding the latest iteration of its operating system software. This month, Microsoft’s taken the same steps it took with Windows 7 and released a “consumer preview” edition of Windows 8 that you can download right this minute if you’re so inclined.

Microsoft’s offering up the ISO of Consumer Edition in both 32 and 64 bit versions as a direct download from its servers for anyone who cares to grab them. If you’re keen, head over to

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows-8/iso

and choose the language (English, Chinese (Simplified), French, German or Japanese and then whether you want the 64-bit or 32-bit version. Generally speaking that should be the 64-bit version, especially if you’re going to install it on a system with more than 4GB of RAM, as 32-bit Windows can’t “see” any RAM above that limit — actually technically just above 3GB, in fact.

There’s a few caveats there, however; for a start, the 64-bit English download itself weighs in at a hefty 3.3GB, which will take both some time and some serious chunks of your data allowance to actually download. It’s supplied as an ISO image — that’s essentially an archived CD image, although it’s also possible to convert a USB flash drive to perform the same function. From there, it’ll install in much the same way that existing Windows operating systems do, with the only remaining catch being that this is still early software — the full retail version of Windows 8 is expected to ship later in the year — and it’s also time-limited software. When the full version of Windows 8 ships, you should be able to migrate a consumer preview version into the full version of Windows 8, but it’ll cost you whatever Microsoft decides to charge for it. Still, if you’re keen to see what Microsoft’s got just around the corner and have a spare PC — which needs to have the relatively moderate specifications of a 1GHz processor, 1GB RAM, 16-20GB free hard drive space and a DirectX 9 capable graphics card — it’s well worth checking it out. Bear in mind that if you do install the consumer preview onto an existing Windows PC and choose to install the operating system as an “upgrade”, you’ll overwrite the existing operating system — which almost certainly isn’t your best move!

Motorola Xoom 2: Second Time Lucky?

Motorola had a brief moment in the spotlight at CES 2011, when it unveiled the first Android tablet running on Google’s brand-new (at the time) Android 3.2 operating system, dubbed Honeycomb. The Xoom was the first of many, although it only narrowly squeaked onto the Australian market prior to the launch of competing Honeycomb tablets, some of which had been announced well after the Xoom itself.

The Xoom was a fair but not great tablet, hampered by slightly heavy carrying weight, annoying buttons — especially the volume controls — and a problem that’s weighed heavily on many Android tablets, in that they’ve been priced to the equivalent of Apple’s very popular iPad 2. Motorola’s just released the Xoom 2 in Australia, and like the original Xoom, it’s initially being launched as a Telstra product, either on contract or outright for $720.

First of all, the good news; Motorola’s designers clearly took a long hard look at what didn’t quite work with the original Xoom, and made some revisions. At 599g, the Xoom 2 is lighter than the original Xoom, and it’s enough of a carrying weight difference to make it very pleasant to hold. It’s also got a better IPS display panel than the original. The shape’s been refined into a an unusual square with rounded corners; it’s presumed this is to avoid the kind of patent territory that Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 10.1 ran into with Apple, as it’s not really something that adds to the Xoom 2 experience. The tricky power and volume buttons on the original Xoom have been shifted to the right hand back of the tablet, and increased significantly in size. There’s also an integrated infrared transmitter on the top of the tablet, to be used with the supplied Dijit remote control application.

The bad news is rather more of a problem, however. While the internal CPU has had a small speed boost, up to a 1.2GHz Dual Core model, the rest of the Xoom 2’s hardware is all a bit familiar. It’s still running on Android 2.3 Honeycomb, rather than the newer Android 4.0 ‘Ice Cream Sandwich’ variant. Motorola’s promising that the Xoom 2 will get Ice Cream Sandwich at some point in the future, but right now the operating system is stuck in the past. Performance starts out acceptably nippy, but I found that within around 30 minutes of tablet usage, the inbuilt browser became noticeably laggy, as did the tablet itself. Running third party applications, and especially games showed the Xoom 2 chugging badly; this is a tablet that sells itself as a premium product, but doesn’t quite act like it. At $720, still within the same kind of price band as both other Android tablets that already run Ice Cream Sandwich, or for that matter an iPad 2, I wouldn’t be putting my money down on Xoom 2.

Understanding Windows 8 Tablets

When Microsoft announced Windows 8, it was with a renewed focus on taking on the most popular computing commodity of recent years, namely tablets. Windows 8 will feature a standard desktop interface along with a new touch-based interface, known as Metro.

Microsoft refers to Metro as a “design language”, which is a fancy way of saying that products that are Metro compliant will have a consistent font and design look. Microsoft’s current look for the Xbox 360 console is Metro-based, but the most prominent product that Microsoft’s brought to market to date has been the Windows Phone 7 operating system; if you want a taste of what Metro on Windows 8 will be like, Windows Phone 7 should be your first port of call.

Metro isn’t just Microsoft slapping a skin on Windows 8 and continuing on its merry way with desktops and laptops, however; it’s also the core way that a new version of Windows 8 will run. Historically, Windows has primarily been written for Intel’s x86-based architecture, and that doesn’t change for Windows 8. What comes on board is a version of Windows 8 for devices running on ARM (Advanced RISC Machine) processors. ARM processors aren’t the devices used for most desktop or laptop systems, but they are widely implemented in the tablet and smartphone space, due to their lower power requirements, which means that Windows On Arm (officially WOA) will most likely first appear on tablet-style products.

This isn’t Microsoft’s first stab at Tablets; many years ago Microsoft launched Windows XP Tablet Edition with great fanfare but, aside from some very niche markets, virtually no traction in the market. Windows XP Tablet Edition was in essence a touch-capable (but not terribly functional) version of XP; subsequent operating systems from Microsoft have included touch compatibility but little of great significance was done with it at an application level.

There’s a significant change present for Windows on ARM, however, and that’s due to the fact that ARM isn’t x86; no legacy — that is,  existing or old Windows applications — will run at all. Instead, new WOA applications will have to be written from the ground up.  Microsoft’s likely to supply most of its applications in WOA forms. It’s already known that versions of most (if not all) Microsoft Office applications will have WOA equivalents, although they may only run in the desktop mode, even on tablets. Internet Explorer will also be bundled for browsing purposes, and while it’ll be Internet Explorer 10 in name, it won’t support plugins that will work on the x86 version of IE 10. That means, at least for the time being, that things like Flash won’t work on WOA devices, although it’s always possible that third party browsers or plugin workarounds may emerge.

Windows On ARM also means Microsoft will have even more devices to technically support; while there are many millions of potential x86 combinations of things like graphics cards, network interfaces and peripherals, for the most part external vendors handle those kinds of drivers. But you don’t — and can’t — change the graphics card on a tablet, and that means each iteration of a Windows 8 tablet will need its own updates. So far, it seems most likely that you’ll only be able to get Windows 8 on ARM pre-installed on a pre-approved tablet, so updates shouldn’t be too much of a problem.

In many ways, it’s identical to what Apple did with the iPad and iPhone. It’s theoretically possible that it could have ported the full OS X operating system across, but that would have had an effect on battery life — and not a good one. Starting afresh does mean dropping a lot of application compatibility, but if Microsoft can grow an application ecosystem to rival iOS, it should be able to overcome that particular hurdle. Microsoft has been very active in its developer community in recent years, and it’ll be fascinating to see what comes to WOA.

The Problem with Ethical Gadgets

There’s been a lot of discussion recently over whether Apple — currently sitting as the world’s most valuable company by stock valuation — should be doing more to ensure the basic human rights of the workers in the Chinese factories — largely controlled by a company called Foxconn, which is an external contractor to Apple — are upheld and, where possible, improved. So the logic goes, Apple makes a huge profit each year, and some of that money, so the argument goes, could go into better wages for the Foxconn employees who make Apple’s iPhone, iPads and iPods.

It’s certainly a noble argument — and a useful stick for those who don’t like Apple to beat them with — but it’s not the entire picture, which is, as such,  a more complex and nuanced situation than at first glance. First, there’s the commonly overlooked fact that while Apple is a major customer of Foxconn, it’s far from being its only customer; in the IT space, everyone from IBM to Dell to Sony to Microsoft use Foxconn’s factories for production purposes. However, it’s Apple that gets shoved into the “leadership” role in this case, even though it’s not set in stone at all that if Apple pulled out of Foxconn’s factories, the others would follow suit. It could well just lead to Apple’s products going up in price, while competitors continued to use Foxconn’s cheap labour.

For its part, Apple is adamant that it conducts regular inspections of factories, and while it’s open to saying that it has in some cases uncovered irregular working practices — and even ceased using some suppliers as a result — there’s also the allegation that Chinese factories have faked factory setups when inspections are taking place. That’s a hard one to judge either way, as is the issue of whether a Chinese factory worker is better off than a Chinese farm worker; the lines who queue up to get a job at Foxconn certainly suggest it could be an improvement. As with anything in China, given the strong level of government control, it’s hard to come to a definitive conclusion in any case.

None of this means that conditions for workers shouldn’t be improved, but there’s ultimately one way that this could be achieved, and that’s by consumers themselves making it a key purchasing criteria; if it becomes too expensive in terms of lost sales for a company to use labour with allegedly unethical roots, they won’t do so. That’s not just Apple, however; in order to change the way that technology is produced, especially given that the production of some key components involves incredibly harsh chemical processes, it would need to be something that was insisted upon by consumers (and businesses) at every level.

Why aren’t there more Aussie tech celebrities?

Australia has punched above its weight in terms of contributions to the world IT industry — the CSIRO’s role in the invention of Wi-Fi being one of the more recent examples — and yet in terms of the world’s most prominent IT “faces”, we’re barely a blip on the radar.

I was reminded of this recently due to the sad passing of the head of local ISP Exetel, John Linton. Linton passed away rapidly following a stroke, and his passing was announced on Exetel’s customer-only web site.

Linton was a fascinating character who had been involved in the local technology industry for decades. His role at Exetel grabbed the local headlines, but he’d worked at IBM and then later (and more significantly, in terms of overall local impact) Linton was at the helm of Osborne computers, which was at one time the largest PC seller in the country. Osborne was, at one time, a massive force in the local industry with plenty of local presence even in smaller regional centres, a model that nobody’s been able to duplicate since. indeed, when Osborne folded I knew more than a few folks who lost regional work as a result, and in one of life’s little quirks, I worked for some time at the company that bought out Osborne, Gateway 2000 (later just Gateway).

Linton was an outspoken and often vitriolic CEO of both Osborne and Exetel, and certainly a man that could be described as a “character”, however one choses to take that term. In more recent years, he was a notable critic of the Federal government’s Internet Filtering and National Broadband Network initiatives. I didn’t personally agree with his anti-NBN stance, but taking on Linton as a journalist was always an interesting proposition; he was vehement in his views and not afraid to speak his mind, which always made for (at the very least) some interesting headlines. If Linton didn’t like you, you were an idiot — if you were lucky.

Linton’s passing is sad, but it also gave me pause for thought. Linton was a notable figure on the local technology scene, but there are relatively few Australians who have taken that kind of Australian determination to an international scale. IT is notably not particularly bound by national borders, especially in the Internet age, and yet, so far, we’ve virtually no IT “celebrities” to speak of. I’m not sure if that’s simply a matter of scale or opportunity.

Google knows a lot about you, but is that a bad thing?

Google’s a company with an interesting history. It rode into prominence in the early part of the previous decade, largely on the back of a search engine — something that in itself was already a highly commoditised entity — that worked more quickly and effectively than the competing search engines of the day. Google isn’t without competition in the modern market — Microsoft’s Bing and Yahoo!’s search engines being the most prominent examples — but for many folks, Google is search.

In case you’re wondering, Google doesn’t just offer up search results for the fun of it; the vast bulk of Google’s income comes from advertising that hangs off the search results. Google got to where it is partly because its search results were good, but also because it could offer tailored and unobtrusive advertising that paid out; if you got ads in your search feed that were relevant to your interests, you were more likely to follow them up, and therefore everybody benefits — at least in theory.

Google also isn’t, according to one of its famous early promises, evil. To be precise, one of Google’s early company mottos exclaimed “Don’t be evil”, so that while you were handing over lots of information to Google in return for free search services — and later other offerings ranging from office software to calendars to social networking — you could rest easy that the company wasn’t trying to be evil, and your private data was safe and secure.

At least, that was the theory. Recent online uproar against Google has focused on a couple of Google’s most recent alterations to search and to its privacy polices. Firstly, in the area of search, Google’s started to give more prominence to results given a +1 mark through Google’s own Google+ social network. That’s a policy somewhat rife for abuse, but what’s got a lot more folks concerned are changes to Google’s privacy policies due to hit on the first of March. The full details of the new policy were announced on Google’s official blog here.

Google’s main product might be search, but a single Google account can link to RSS reading, email, calendar, documents, photos, YouTube and a plethora of other sites and services. Previously all the information within the bounds of one Google site stayed where it was, giving your data and preferences a certain quantity of relative anonymity. From March 1st, Google will start collating the data from one service against each other, building up a much more comprehensive profile of who you are and what you do than it did before. Technically speaking, Google already had all this information (or as much as you chose to give it); its new policy makes it explicit that it’ll leverage this information across all services. Google’s spin on this is that it’ll lead to a simpler overall Google experience, but there’s reason to be wary. Google’s sitting on an information goldmine — one perhaps not just relevant to simple advertising — and it’s one that users have largely handed to it for free. Cross-collated data in one single place also represents a tasty vector for attack by cyber criminals, although here at least we can hope that Google’s defences are good. Actually, given that an individual user can’t do much to improve Google’s security, that’s all we can do — hope that it’s up to the task.

Does Streaming Music Sound Right?

The past couple of months has seen an explosion in services that offer streaming and stored music access for a set monthly fee. Sony’s got its Qriocity service, Samsung offers up its Music Hub, JB Hi-Fi offers its NOW service, and the latest service to launch is Rdio, another streaming service that’s been available internationally for some time now.

Despite the (slightly) differing pricing, the core of all these services is basically the same. You pay a set monthly fee, with cheaper subscriptions offering a smaller subset of either features or methods of access, build up playlists of artists and then have your subscription period to listen to “your” music as much as you’d like. Some services are more closely tied to specific technology platforms — so it’s no shock that there’s a Qriocity client for the Playstation 3, or for that matter a Music Hub application for the Galaxy SII and Galaxy Tab — but it’s still music. The hook for all of them is the breadth of the offering; for around ten dollars a month you’re getting much more than the equivalent amount would buy you in cold hard compact discs.

Well, sort of. The big and most obvious difference between buying a CD and these kinds of services is that you never actually own the music you’re paying for. Buy a CD and you own it; you can listen to it endlessly, quite legally transfer it to other devices for your own personal listening pleasure or use it as a shiny coaster if you have a sudden epiphany and decide that, say, Romanian trumpet sonatas aren’t actually all that thrilling after all. Whereas with a subscription, all you’ve got is the time you’ve paid for, and that’s all.

In case you’re concerned about the absolute value of a service, it’s worth noting that most of them offer some kind of limited time trial period for you to peruse their archives and make sure that their musical selection matches yours. Everyone’s tastes are different, and there’s bound to be some obscure tracks that are missed over; most of these services do cater to the mainstream.

In one sense, streaming music isn’t all that different from the way that many people enjoy video entertainment; while many folks own impressive DVD or Blu-Ray collections, there’s plenty more who plunk down a set number of dollars each month for a Foxtel or Austar subscription, and that’s entertainment that’s solidly there while it’s being watched and then gone.

Will Kinect For Windows change the way you use your PC?

One of the more interesting things to come out of this year’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas was Microsoft’s official announcement of a Windows-compatible version of its Kinect camera. Kinect, if you’re not familiar with it, is a camera array with 3D sensing capabilities that Microsoft first launched for its Xbox 360 games console. The cameras within the Kinect sensor track your body movements in real time, and this allows the Xbox 360 to offer both physical screen selections — swiping your arms around to select things or change pages — as well as more “physical” gaming experiences, including a number of fitness titles.

Kinect might have its roots in gaming, but it didn’t take long for keen hackers to see the potential in hooking up the sensor to a regular PC and use its 3D modelling capabilities for other purposes. To Microsoft’s credit, it didn’t shy away from or try to block the hackers; there was (in effect) unofficial “support” for Kinect hacking; Microsoft didn’t specifically sell the sensor to do anything but gaming, but was happy enough with some of the side efforts that came out of it. If the hackers broke a Kinect sensor or two along the way, Microsoft was more than happy to sell them another.

Kinect for Windows changes that arrangement somewhat. For a start, the “official” Windows Kinect (which will launch in Australia on February 1st) is more expensive than the Xbox version; a sensor and software will cost $299, something Microsoft puts down to the Windows Kinect sensor being a standalone product; it figures that money can be made with Kinect games on the Xbox 360, whereas the PC version may not generate any more income directly.

It’s also somewhat annoying to note that the official CES announcement pegged the price at $US249, but the Australian price is a chunky $50 more; while there are some tax considerations to take in mind, not to mention shipping, that kind of price difference does sting a bit.
The really interesting question for Kinect For Windows is what it’ll be good for. Clearly there’ll be some cross-porting of existing games titles, but that leaves the Kinect as only a rather expensive games controller.

There’s all sorts of potential for a touch-free navigation environment on the PC, albeit one that’d work a lot better for a PC connected like a home media centre than one connected to a notebook that’s sitting right in front of you. Microsoft’s claim for the Windows sensor (and not the cheaper Xbox one) is that it’s optimised for close up work of this kind, but I’m a little lost to work out what’ll make the most sense for that kind of interaction (outside of certain mobility limited scenarios) that couldn’t be done just as well with the tap of a mouse button or click of a keyboard. The new Windows 8 “Metro” user interface is built on Microsoft’s experiences with touch on the Windows Phone platform, and I can see how that could work with Kinect, but at the same time interface designers will have to work around implementing both Kinect and standard interfaces; at a $299 per user price point I’m not totally convinced that many will.

The Next Generation of WiFi is (nearly) here

This time of year is when we typically see a lot of new product announcements emerge from the US-based CES (Consumer Electronics Show). CES is where a lot of deals are made, products are demonstrated and wild claims are made. Not every product sees the light of day, and those that do don’t always live up to the hype.

Just prior to the 2012 CES (as I’m writing this), Broadcom has announced availability of chipsets that support the next generation of wireless networks. Not wireless networks in the sense of wireless (paid) broadband as I’ve discussed previously through companies like Telstra, but wireless as in WiFi; using an existing network connection (or none at all) to share files across computers, tablets, smartphones and anything that can talk basic IP.

The current state of the art (in terms of what you can buy right now) is 802.11n, and that was a product that took a long time to stabilise and get ratified; for a long while many vendors offered “pre” N products with varying speeds and cross-compatibility. We can look forward to that same merry dance with the next generation, variously called 5G or more technically, 802.11ac. Broadcom’s new chips can burst at up to 1.3Gbps — at least that’s what they claim — but the as yet to be ratified standard suggest peaks of up to 3.6Gbps. It’s highly unlikely that you’ll see actual 3.6Gbps throughput in anything at all, but that’s not likely to stop wireless manufacturers touting that the new chips are many multiples faster than the existing 802.11n gear. Bear in mind, though, that 802.11n tops out at a (theorectical) 600Mbps, but nobody gets that either; there’s always network overhead, frequently interference, shared spectrum and the issues of moving away from the wifi source to deal with in any wireless configuration setup.

802.11ac isn’t just about speed. The working theory is that it should be more applicable to devices that are power sensitive, such as smartphones and tablets, partly due to the design of the mooted specification, and partly due to the higher potential speed. At least in theory, if you can send a file (of any type) across a wireless network quickly, the chips responsible can then drop down to a low power state more rapidly as well; the end result should be longer battery life when using WiFi, something that’s typically quite challenging.  Broadcom doesn’t make wireless equipment itself; its chips are likely to show up under the hood of other more well known brands such as Netgear. At some point in 2012 it’s likely that the first 802.11ac products will hit store shelves. 802.11ac is backwards compatible, so it should work well with existing 802.11n gear (not to mention the older 802.11a and 802.11b equipment). At first, though, you can expect to pay high prices for highly hyped equipment, but whether it’ll last through to the ratification of the standard and work seamlessly with later 802.11ac equipment remains to be seen.

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