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The Rife Report February 2012 |
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Win8 Beta now Consumer Preview: this Month? Much has been written about this year's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas - the last keynote appearance there for Microsoft apparently. Although it had a huge attendance 153,000, and long lineups everywhere, many writers slagged it as same old, same old, with even dire forecasts of its future. Paul Thurrott on his WinInfo Daily blog called it a "Complete Waste of Time." He said he spent much of the week: "wading through an unprecedented sea of non-news" with what he called: "the hyperactive, kiddie-driven gadgets blogs . . . posting about anything, no matter how uninteresting or nonsensical.  "When I started WinInfo in 1995, I had one goal: separate the wheat from the chaff and tell the reader about only what really matters. My successors, alas, are both less insightful and less useful, from what I can tell. And it makes me sad. Not only is CES a waste of time, but thanks to these kids' inability to discern and then communicate what's really important, they've actively worked to make it harder for others to figure that out." More kind was Deb Shinder, writing in WinNews: " I tend to think CES, like many other things in life, is what you make it. You can complain that the size of the show makes it difficult to find the jewels among all the rubbish. But isn't that what makes diamond-hunting fun in the first place?" Taking another stance with a warning, was Matt Warman of the United Kingdom's The Telegraph: "As you'd expect from the world's biggest technology fair, CES was full of new kit, from Sony's Bloggie camcorder that can broadcast instantly to the web to Samsung's fridge that recommends recipes based on its contents. . . ."  He suggests that big manufacturers all know that "selling gadgets is no longer enough. All they want is for you to buy into a web of products, connected by their own unique networks. So a Samsung camera will talk best to a Samsung TV, and both of them, theoretically, will use the same sort of interface and store all their data online so it can be accessed from anywhere. "It might not pay off however: Apple's made it work by using a closed network and the results are a real wonder of the modern world, both in terms of the technology and the economics. But other manufacturers are all pushing open standards. So if you can continue to use, say, a Sony TV with a Panasonic camera and get the same results, then what's to stop the continuing, cheapening commoditisation of technology? Consumers are onto a winner, but what that means for technology companies - and CES itself - could be painful." There are interesting innovations about the Asus P8Z68 Deluxe motherboard, which fires up the newest member of the Rife PC stable. Of particular note is, of all things, a refurbished BIOS. Yes, the old Basic Input-Output System has been overhauled. That integral front end software now is called the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface or UEFI.  It sports a completely new look or GUI - Graphic User Interface - and is to be the new standard on new mobos arriving in your neighbourhood computer stores. Technically, it's a software interface between an operating system (say Windows7 or even Win8) and platform firmware (say American Megatrends' software embedded on some motherboards). When you turn on your machine, the BIOS checks that all hardware is in order (the POST or "power-on self-test" sequence); then starts the operating system (using OS loader code); and then hands control to the OS (Win7). In case you wondered, UEFI is not a sudden break-through. The original EFI specification was an outgrowth of the Intel Boot Initiative program begun back in 1998. Seven years later in 2005, EFI evolved into UEFI, a specification now coming to fruition industry-wide. The most common use of the BIOS is a way to set up a system's boot order. You can and perhaps should enable your machine's CD \ DVD player to boot first. In that manner, with a bootable trouble-shooting software disk in the player, you will be able to use any special utilities on that disk to check on and perhaps fix a PC's issues outside of Windows. If there's nothing in the CD-DVD player in this type of boot order, the boot manager merely moves on to its secondary choice, that should be set as the hard drive containing the OS for a regular system startup.  UEFI's opening look, called EZ mode (or something similar depending on the manufacturer), hides an advanced mode that will be more familiar to anyone who has used the older BIOS interface. Advanced mode gives more detailed information, and in more old BIOS familiar locations, along with some new tools, among which is the ability to print copies of the boot screens to an USB flash drive (screen shots here were done this way). In case you missed it, back on September 20, Steven Sinofsky posted on Microsoft's Windows 8 blog site an article about UEFI in Re-engineering the Windows boot experience. He explained how current boot-time options, such as system repair, store and image recovery, become more usable with UEFI's graphic interface. For example - how system startup can with Win 8 and UEFI, in seconds, go from power-on to the Windows Desktop with no flickering screen or flash-by text messages. In Sinofsky's words: "In Windows 7 today, all of this happens over a span of about a minute on average. Now, imagine all of that (in Win8) flying by on your screen in approximately 7 seconds!" He also showed how dual-boot will work with a graphic face-lift. Might I suggest you will probably like this rejuvenation of a DOS-era tool - even in its Windows 7 iteration. Microsoft's Windows Hardware Newsletter in its January 24 edition contains a note from the editor stating: "As we move closer to the Consumer Preview release of Windows 8 at the end of February, big news this month is the release of the Windows 8 Hardware Certification Requirements. . . ." Pending any sudden firing of said editor, that means the (formerly called) Win8 Beta will definitely be available for public download the week of February 26-29. It also seems to indicate that the Win8 code is very close to final lock down.  Is that what's behind the name change? PC writers and Microsoft watchers Mary Jo Foley and Paul Thurrott discussed this on a recent episode of the Windows Weekly podcast. They were not privy to the Hardware Newsletter at that time, but they do make good points. (You can see it here - it is a lengthy 1 hour 40 minute video discussion including the Win8 Preview and other topics such as the ReFS file system for Win8 Server.) Thurrott suggested a developer preview (the September Build version) could be followed by a consumer preview (the beta) and finally the enterprise preview (the release candidate). Of course, we now know the February beta will be the consumer preview - which, with the note about certification requirements release suggests that Win8 code is very near completion. Mary Jo felt that: "If Microsoft changes the nomenclature, the company is doing so to signify a change that's been coming for a while now. What used to constitute a "beta" doesn't really exist in the new Windows world. . . the current Windows organization doesn't show code publicly at all until it's pretty much set in stone. . . ." She suggests Microsoft wants to create an atmosphere of "that Windows 8 is right around the corner. Hey, it's basically done - it's in consumer preview now!" She notes Microsoft officially remains silent, except for the February date.  On the perimeter of all this I have learned via an email invitation from the company that an "event" called WinConnections is planned March 26 - 29 in Las Vegas to bring together "Microsoft and industry experts" to learn "the latest trends and hands-on training on new technologies and products." What news if any, will come then? There's also the announcement that Microsoft has cancelled its annual Mix conference for designers and developers. A blog post says there will be no Mix '12 - and no future Mix events. Mary Jo suggests When Microsoft replaced its Professional Developers Conference with BUILD in September 2011, "there were some rumblings that BUILD also might end up replacing Microsoft's annual Mix conference. . . . And if we potential attendees get to vote on location/timing, I vote Seattle in September." Now let me see - Seattle, September, Win8 final release - yeah, possible! There have been requests regarding my preference in free image viewers. So here goes.  IrfanView, now in version 4.26, is fast, simple to use and it's freeware for use with graphic viewer for Windows 9x, ME, NT, 2000, XP, 2003 , 2008, Vista, Windows 7. Freeware (for non-commercial use). Mind you, the author accepts and encourages donations towards further development. Irfan Skiljan is the name of its Bosnia-born developer - he brags, and rightly so, that since 2003, IrfanView has had more than 1 million downloads EVERY month! If I had to rate it, I'd say it's my first choice. I've been using it for years - each new version adds to its ability to do the jobs I need it to do. The list of file formats it can open and work with is long - formidable! And it opens them fast - you can also display thumbnails, show your files as slideshows, and even play multimedia files. Of course, besides merely opening files, it can convert them from one format to another. It does a surprisingly good job of graphics editing - no, it's not Photoshop, but it gets most jobs done. Get rid of red eye, crop or add effects . You can even batch-convert large groups of files. You can download it from his homesite and from a host of mirror sites - including CNET, Tucows, Fileforum, TechSpot and the like. Since the invention of liquid crystal displays in the mid-1960s, display electronics have undergone rapid transformation. Recently developed organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) have shown several advantages over LCDs, including their light weight, flexibility, wide viewing angles, improved brightness, high power efficiency and quick response.  Jennifer Marcus reports in the UCLA Newsroom (here), that OLED is now used in cell phones, digital cameras and other portable devices. But developing a lower-cost method for mass-producing such displays has been complicated by the difficulties of incorporating thin-film transistors made of amorphous silicon and polysilicon into the production process. Researchers from Aneeve Nanotechnologies, at UCLA, have used low-cost ink-jet printing to fabricate the first circuits composed of fully printed back-gated and top-gated carbon nanotube-based electronics for use with OLED displays. In this innovative study, the team made carbon nanotube thin-film transistors with high mobility and a high on-off ratio, completely based on ink-jet printing. They demonstrated the first fully printed single-pixel OLED control circuits, and their fully printed thin-film circuits showed significant performance advantages over traditional organic-based printed electronics.  Got a comment, rant or rumor? - Click here to send Bob Rife an E-mail. Content Copyright © 2012 All Rights Reserved |