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The Rife Report February 2010 |
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Tales from Microsoft, Intel and Adobe As usual the thousands who gathered at the annual Consumers Electronic Show in Las Vegas last month were treated to a gazillion gadgets, most of which will not see store shelves for months, if ever.  From my perspective (an armchair at home before my PC) the best and most enjoyable summary was that of David Pogue. The New York Times tech writer says: "The biggest news . . . was the explosion of interest in 3-D television . . .by the companies making them. Whether normal people have any interest is a big question. At CES, if you stood in line long enough, you could watch prototype 3-D TV screens at the Sony, Samsung, Toshiba, LG and Panasonic booths." Read on at this link where you can also view Pogue's humorous Truth Serum interview with a 3D TV pitchman. 
I'm with Pogue - 3D movies were a fast-passing fad years ago. 3DTV may seem a couch-potatoes' dream, but one wonders. The 3D focus put graphics card maker Nvidia in an enviable position since it can enable users to have a 3D experience right now with the help of one of their GeForce cards. That position could change - competitor AMD is said to be planning 3D support for its Radeon Catalyst drivers. Intel's major thrust at CES was the introduction of more than 25 processors, wireless adapters and chipsets. Included were 17 next-generation Core i3, Core i5 and Core i7 processors all coinciding with the arrival of the company's 32-nanometre manufacturing process. The latter is now being used to integrate HD graphics inside the processor and make smaller, more power-efficient CPUs. Sean Maloney, Intel executive vice president said that compared to previous models, the new processors speed up high-end tasks like intense graphics as well as mundane tasks such as syncing a music player. He added that related tasks would run close to twice as fast. Maloney also said laptop responsiveness will also improve with Turbo Boost mode, which can crank up the speed of cores to boost performance. The technology can also shut down cores when not needed to save power.  Many gamers consider separated high-end graphics cards (often dual or, even quad-mounted via ATI's CrossFire or Nvidia's SLI technology) on motherboards using a CPU chipset without onboard graphics a better match for them. Intel has promised to unveil some things which should greatly speed up video transcoding in the combined chips. Time will tell. Although including graphics (a GPU chip) with the CPU (or processing chip) may be smart marketing for Intel (other than to extreme gamers), it may prove risky from a legal standpoint. A recent US Federal Trade Commission complaint against Intel specifically cited integrated graphics bundling on Intel's chipsets, as an anti-competitive practice.  Ballmer did discuss Microsoft's high-profile win this past year - Windows 7. But new highlights were of a limited variety. The best was perhaps Microsoft and HP introducing a Win7-powered touchscreen slate computer or tablet - a bridge between laptops and smartphones. "It's a beautiful little product," said Ballmer of the slate which is expected to go on sale later this year. As expected, a couple of weeks after CES, on January 27, the word broke on Apple's iPad. The much-anticipated tablet computer (months of rumours), a multimedia, Internet-enabled slate could, according to the Wall Street Journal: "fuel the next leg of growth for the company."  He said it is "way better than a laptop, way better than a phone." Then he brought out the iPad. Watch it on YouTube video. The iPad has a 9.7-inch LCD display with full multi-touch input, 802.11n WiFi, Bluetooth 2.1 EDR, between 16 and 64 gigs of storage and a 10-hour battery. All in a case just half-an-inch thick that weighs 1.5 pounds. Jobs said it will "go on sale in March."  The NY Times also says: "The question now is whether regular consumers will buy the iPhone-like device, which starts at $ 500 US and can cost as much as $ 829 US. . . It may introduce a new category -- something between phone and laptop -- or it may not. And anyone who claims to know what will happen will wind up looking like a fool." Techspot reports: "Apple's iPad doesn't support Flash, and Adobe isn't thrilled. The company says Apple is continuing to impose restrictions on its devices that limit both content publishers and consumers. "Without Flash support, iPad users will not be able to access the full range of web content, including over 70% of games and 75% of video on the web." And don't look now, but Fujitsu, which has been selling its own iPad since 2002 looks as if it will dispute Apple's right to the trademark in the courts. That's a trail Apple has gone down before - remember the iPhone dispute with Cisco? It came to a compromise settlement back in February, 2007. My prediction about USB3.0 actually finally arriving was on target - some products are now on store shelves! At CES, 17 devices designed for USB 3.0 were introduced, that had speeds up to 5 Gbps (compared to USB 2.0's 480 Mbps), 1 GB of data is transferred in 3.3 seconds, compared to 33 seconds with USB 2.0. Hewlett-Packard is actually shipping USB 3.0 on Envy 15 laptops configured with ATI 5380 graphics and Core i7 processors. In the hard drive market, both LaCie and PQI have USB 3.0 on their new models.  Then there's the lower-rated Gigabyte GA-P55A-UD3 and UD4P mobos. The former boasts it was first on the market with USB3 certification. They each have the Intel P55 Express chipset supporting either Core i7 or i5. Each has two USB 3.0 ports and twelve USB 2.0 ports along with two SATA 6Gb/s and six of the older, slower SATA 3Gb/s. They sell for $ 150 and $ 190.  Unhappy with your new P55 board? No USB 3.0 - well Asus has a new PCI card, the U3S6 that has two USB 3.0 ports and two SATA 6.0 ports for $ 30 US. I've yet to see it this side of the border, but perhaps soon. If you like external hard drives for backup security and perhaps just plain storage, you'll really like USB 3.0 speed. Western Digital released two My Book 3.0 external hard drives. At 1 TB capacity, the My Book 3.0 is available both as a standalone unit ($ 179.99 US), and bundled with a PCIe USB 3.0 adapter card ($ 199.99 US). A 2 TB is to be introduced soon. Seagate unveiled its SuperSpeed-enabled external drive the BlackArmor PS 110 that includes a 500 GB hard drive, an ExpressCard adapter (for those computers without a USB 3.0 port), as well as backup software and AES 256-bit encryption for backed up files. Seagate is currently selling BlackArmor PS 110 for $ 179.99 US on its site.  The backup software is a custom-build from Acronis, much like its TrueImage 2010 product and is XP, Vista and Win7 compatible. Seagate and Acronis have done a partnership OEM (original equipment manufacturer) deal on this venture involving BlackArmor NAS (network-attached storage) and DAS (direct-attached storage) drives. I hope, if you have XP installed as your prime operating system, that you read the security advisory included with Patch Tuesday's updates January 12. Microsoft confirmed that the version of Adobe Flash bundled with XP (v6) has a lot of bugs. They urge you to upgrade to the latest version. Adobe discontinued support for Flash Player 6 in 2006.  "Adobe has addressed these vulnerabilities in newer versions of Adobe Flash Player. Microsoft recommends that users of Windows XP with Adobe Flash Player 6 installed update to the most current version of Flash Player available from Adobe." Only Windows XP is affected by this problem. Vista and Win7 include newer versions of Flash. Just uninstalling Flash Player 6 on XP is not a good idea - it could cripple browsing, since much of the content on the web is Flash-based. The best plan is updating to the current new version. - Flash Player is 10.0.42.34, downloadable from this Adobe site. Beginning April 13, Adobe plans to release automatic, silent updates for its Adobe Reader PDF-viewing software currently in version 9.3. Brad Arkin, Adobe's director of product security and privacy, said Acrobat Refresh Manager was installed on millions of machines as part of the October 2009 quarterly patch released by the company.  For some reason, the company has no plans (yet) for an automatic-update feature for its Flash Player (which we described above with a fix for its many bugs in version 6) or for any other Adobe product. |