Blog Currents – 2011 - 29, Sep.

I suppose I am a little sensitised to these reports but there is a bit on the ongoing Apple versus Samsung saga this week. As for my own Samsung phone I love it. I found and use a magnify app that works like an electronic magnifying glass. There is a reverse function to change the colour scheme, useful for some kinds of tasks.

So far all the apps, games and utilities I have been using are free. No need to get anything that requires payment as yet. I wonder how much I would have had to shell out by now if I happen to have bought an iPhone, I suspect a lot more than zero.

The Windows 8 PC will work against a secure boot facility. In the UEFI firmware. Some have suggested that this could lock out Linux users on a Windows 8 PC. Microsoft says rubbish and that a user will be able to run whatever they want to on their PCs. The Unified Extensible Firmware Interface is the thing that allows the faster boot times. It also can implement a digital security check to verify a digital signature before loading. The target is those nasty root kits and other related boot loader problems.

According to Professor Ross Anderson of Cambridge University this may not be technically correct. He claims that a signed build of Linux would work, as long as you have the right OEM keys. The OS kernels themselves will also need to be signed since the kernel is part of the boot process.  The impact on a developer will also be significant for an open style product. This he claims will occur if the current draft of UEFI is adopted as specified.  If the BIOS firmware is intelligent enough then unsigned software could run. The problem to date has been that firmware vendors tend to go for minimal functionality for their target market. If this happens to be Windows 8 then Linux and other open OS users could find themselves locked out.

Now I suppose you could trust what Microsoft tells you but with a direct tie in to your hardware MS will be hard pressed not to try and lock things up in a way that favours them. Remember their DRM attempts if you don’t believe me. Microsoft claims that users will have complete control over their PC. They put it back on the OEMs to control functionality. At this point in the discussion I am reminded of how tightly MS use to control their OEMs and what could be put on a machine being loaded with Windows. What both Microsoft and critics of UEFI tend to agree on is that unless secure boot can be disabled then Linux can't be run on Windows 8 PCs.

E Ink inc. expects to sell over 25 million e-book readers this year and they are not concerned that Amazon has an Android tablet ready to deploy. I suspect some of those numbers will be Christmas shoppers looking for an inexpensive eBook reader to give to a loved one, or themselves. I still love and regularly use my Amazon Kindle 3. I have a one month trip coming up and the Kindle will be a central part of that when I am between locations.

Samsung has shipped over 10 million Galaxy S2’s so far and this before they have fully launched in the US. Some of the contracts will take their customers well past the Apple iPhone 5 launch date and most pundits agree that the popular phone is a serious threat to future iPhone sales.  The iPhone series has sold around 75 million units to date but with the latest batch of contracts extending for a year or two every one sold is one that will not be buying a new iPhone.

So who is winning the TV stations or the Internet? I guess it depends on where you are, who is in government and what side of the political fence the papers fall on. In general, as far as I can tell at least, papers tend to be Left in nature. Actually journalism in general has vanished to be replaced by talking heads talking about themselves and opining rather than reporting. The perfect examples are CNN and CNBC that have changed from news organisations to something else entirely.

Blogs, social networks and online news is starting to restore some of the balance to this and as a result in places like the US, Australia, the UK and many other countries the only way to get any kind of balance is to go online. In a recent Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism survey they found that while nearly three quarters of the people still check the news on TV once a week more than half still read a newspaper and listen to a radio. Just under half use the Internet. While this sounds OK for the traditional media outlets when you drill down a little it becomes apparent how they are failing to provide.

Those watching the TV are looking for breaking news and the latest weather and driving reports. For any news on local services the Internet wins. Website of TV stations get little traffic. People are also starting to look at multiple sources for their new rather than relying on the TV or newspaper articles. People are becoming a lot smarter about who they believe and how they cross check.

You can always rely on the Australian legal system to get it wrong. Samsung faces yet more delays as the judge considers Apple’s case. This means those waiting for the Galaxy 10.1 must wait or order from offshore. Apple is complaining that Samsung is trying to ‘steal’ its market. D’uh that’s what all companies try to do to their competitors. I guess Apple missed that part of the course at community college. If the Galaxy 1-0.1 goes on sale it may threaten sales of the iPad and iPhones, yep d’uh again.

The next version of the Galaxy II is the II HDE LTE that goes on sale in Korea with a 1280 x 720 screen and an OLED display. It also has a ‘larger’ battery.

If you are keeping score there are about 20 lawsuits pending between Samsung and Apple. If Apple wins the world becomes a closed and locked down place where Apple controls all software. OK, there is some exaggeration there but this is certainly what Apple wants to see. Samsung has a large number of patents in the areas of WiMAX and LTE. If Apple are forced to get into these markets they will run into some stiff litigation.

So if you can read ancient Sumerian then Google has an app for you. Five of the Dead Sea Scrolls are available for your perusal. For the Isaiah scroll you can get an English translation. The images are in a 1200 pixel resolution. I suspect that will be of no help to those of us that are not competent in dead languages.

Bored with your normal games? How about ping pong with a single electron? Cambridge again where scientists have managed to bat an electron back and forth along a wire. Electrons rarely follow straight lines but the scientists managed to coral this particular one in experiments that may advance quantum computing. They managed to bat the electron back and forward about 60 times with bursts of sound.

Blog Currents – 2011, 21-Sep

So I finally got myself a new smart phone, the Samsung Galaxy S2. There are a lot of firsts for me in this purchase including using the Internet and checking e-mails from my phone and Android compared to Windows Mobile and the HTC front end.

First impression was a very slim and light device that was very responsive and fairly easy to use once I figured out the main menu operation and how to receive a phone call by swiping instead of pressing.

I spent the first couple of days, as everyone does, downloading the free Android software from the Android Market. This was very easy and if you stick to the defaults and pick the item at the top of the list for the most part you will end up with the best or top rated product.

The variety of free software is excellent and for many of them there is a paid version that will cost somewhere between 0.01 and $10 with very little much more expensive that that range and the majority at the lower end. Even a product like Quick Office Pro is only $15 for office document compatibility. It covers Word, Excel and PowerPoint. If you want it for free then just download OpenOffice for Android.

The screen is big enough so that when it is turned sideways Internet content is at least readable. The touch sensitive screen makes it easy to scroll, enlarge and shrink such screens so keep them small for navigation and enlarge as necessary to view.

The camera does a good job and the video is quite sharp. Music playback is loud enough to keep more than one person entertained and when the unit is flat on its back the sound comes out of both ends. Did I mention that response time is very fast? Probably due to the dual core CPU. Games like solitaire are quite playable and even those like Zuma’s Revenge is easy to play. There are some changes for the smaller formats but for the most part a game you would use on a PC works about the same way it does on the Android device.

One of the first apps to get is a battery saver of some kind. With such an intelligent data connectivity framework you need something that is dropping unused connectivity and checking less often than continually for new e-mails and so on. You can nearly double your average battery life and even with lots of downloading the unit lasted a good 24 hour cycle of use without recharging.

Another thing to get fairly quickly is a case of some kind. The unit on its own feels somewhat fragile because it is so thin. A screen protector is another favourite addition, I tried but I couldn’t get the damn thing on without bubbles which is what those friendly people at places like Fortune Town are good at.

I have had the unit about 4 days now and I am getting used to most of the functions that I will be using regularly. Adding a contact for example was as simple as noticing the + button on the Contact screen, if you don’t then it can get frustrating. The verdict for the short time I have had it is that the device is about the best I have seen for a smartphone and the first one that I would have, and did, purchase for myself.

Industry News

Up til now Apple seems to have had the lawsuits against Samsung all their own way. That will soon change. The first round in the salvo will be in Korea where they plan to get the iPhone 5 banned there before it is released. The basis is that the iPhone 5 will more than likely break patents Samsung holds in Korea. Key in the list are those relating to wireless technology. Basically as long as the iPhone contains any telecommunications functionality then they will be breaking some kind of patent in Korea. So as soon as it hits the streets, if it does there, Apple will be immediately facing a series of law suits.

This would be the first of a series of high profile attacks on Apple by Samsung. Apple started this patent war and Samsung is ready to not only fight back but to initiate attacks of its own. Another developing battleground is Australia.  Like Germany Apple is trying to have the Galaxy Tab banned there. The new suit from Samsung claims that Apple has violated seven Australian patents owned by Samsung across most of their range including the iPad 2, IPhone 4 and earlier versions. This is a counter suit in response to Apple’s opening salvo.

By the time you read this Samsung is still banned from selling their Galaxy Tab in Australia after it was pulled a week after it appeared on the shelves. Samsung has also filed an appeal in Germany after the ban on sales that was re-approved on the 9^th of this month. Let the games begin and my personal vote , will not surprise regular readers, is for Samsung.

Intel brings out some great gear but they also have their flops. Take the latest 710 SSD series. It was supposed to arrive in July and so it was two months late. On the surface it sounds normal 100, 200, 300GB capacity drives running on 25nm chips. The performance is only slightly better than the series it is replacing. The read and writer performance averages are spotty as is the bandwidth throughput figures.  Worse its read IOPS score is about 38,500 compared to Anobit’s latest Genesis product that is running at a much faster 70,000 IOPS. Genesis’ write speed is a nice 40000 IOPS by comparison the Intel device is a glacial 2700 up only 300 over the previous model’s 2400. I could go on but the bottom line is that Intel has dropped the ball on this one. Yes it can happen to the best.

A better story, and one from the pages of science fiction, is a new 3D printer that can ‘print’ replacement blood vessels.  Using a multiphoton polymerization printing technology doctors from the Fraunhofer group, yes the one’s who brought us MP3, are printing blood vessels. OK they are not really doing that, what they are doing is building the foundation upon which the blood vessel is created.  This is not like printing a plastic tube, something that even a regular person can do these days. Instead the 3D printers inks are synthetic polymers that can bond to living tissue. These include the anti-rejection molecules and other living compatible elements. So, no Fifth Element body creation technology just yet but this is a first step. The hope is that the technology will be able to develop replacement parts for bypass surgery in the not so distant future.

Sick of the Blue Screen of Death (BSOD)? Actually I can’t remember the last time I saw one but they still happen from time to time even on Windows 7 machines. Windows 8 will come with a new version of the BSOD called bug check. No, I’m not making this up. Same white on blue screen but the Sirius Cybernetic Corporation has been consulted and the message now reads “Your PC ran into a problem that it couldn't handle, and now it needs to restart." Oh, there is also a sad face smiley icon. Kind of the social networks version of a BSOD I guess. Actually I do remember the last time I saw the BSOD, the Bejing Olympics J

Blog Currents – 2011, 14 Sept

It has been a very busy week for me. An application had to be delivered with a shifting base and of course the last day before the presentation was a mad dash to get as much working as possible and it had three people working on it at the same time. Of course the last day also included some testing, debugging, presentation preparation, a database changes and installation along with a bunch of other bits and pieces that had to be covered. 

For the programmer this is where they find out if what they had written actually produces the results required. At the same time the BA sits down and checks the results and where incorrect works out what formulas have to change or what new rules are required to get the outputs necessary.

The database individual tries to work out how to speed things up, what tables are required and based on what the BA tells them may need to massage the data in some way. Then it all has to be moved onto a presentation notebook where other issues can arise.

The person looking at the presentation itself, often a PowerPoint like solution is concerned with how pretty it looks; something the programmer probably has had little time to focus on busy making changes on the fly and on demand.

In the end the result may be something cobbled together to last the presentation after which all the things that are held together by patches and fill in code need to be fixed. The outputs as presented will need to be matched by the programmer in code and the database returned to a normal and often fuller state. It is common for example to strip out data that will not be used to speed things up in the demo.

The rules for a presentation are simple get the outputs working the way the boss wants them and pray that nothing goes wrong. Even the best of the best have had demo issues. Jobs, Gates and others have had the screen suddenly vanish, display an error message or do the wrong thing. This is where the terms “beta,”  “demo version,” and “the final product will work a lot more smoothly” are often heard. Others include: “I have an old notebook,” “Looks like I have a lot of old data in the database slowing things down,” and “Squirrel!” the latter being a movie reference.

In Australia the big department stores and others are finally pushing for parallel imports. This will of course simply add to the existing parallel imports, a.k.a. Internet ordering. Places like Singapore, Australia and others pay a premium for printed books because of a long term tie back to the UK. Strangely even though this is so you can often order books online from the UK and have them shipped to Australia for less than the price of a similar product there.

I predict that once this gets through and the parallel importing of books is allowed that it will open the floodgates for all manner of products. As people become more Internet aware and the payments systems get tighter in terms of security then more people will buy online.

I mostly use eBay and PayPal as my ordering and payment systems. I use PayPal because it allows me to pay directly from my bank account and I only have to provide my credit card details to one place, once. Every time you order and provide your credit card is one more chance that someone can get your details. As far as eBay goes I almost never bid for anything but instead use the Buy It now approach. This saves the hassle of bidding and in all cases I am happy with the price before I buy.

As an example I recently purchased some of those five toed ‘barefoot’ running shoes. Local price over $220, price online less than $90 including shipping so I did very well from the deal. I probably purchase about 90% of things online these days.

The traditional retailer is going to have to change with the times, to a certain extent at least. There are still a lot of products that require the customer to touch, see, smell and otherwise interface with them. The second time they need the same thing however it is online for a quick order that does not require driving to the store, paying for parking and fighting with other shoppers.

I was reading an ad for a portable 2TB drive at under $100 i.e. close to 3000 Baht and remembering just how far we have come in the It world over the past couple of decades. I remembered buying a 500MB drive for just under U$1000

Industry News 

So the iPhone 5 is in production, in a factory in Taiwan called Foxconn. They are apparently making about 150K units per day at the moment ready for the release at the end of September when a few million will be ready. For their part Apple hasn’t even announced the release as yet. Not many are falling for the ‘accidental’ loss of the unit in a bar, it appears to be a pre-release publicity stunt, just like the last time. Exactly when the iPhone 5 will be released is still a secret but the smart money is on early October. Apple is expecting to move over 20 million units this year.

Windows 8 is getting closer to reality and the big ticket item appears to be the fast boot times. What it does is write the kernel state to disk at shutdown. Instead of a hibernation like scenario Windows 8 will just write the state of driver, services and items like that back into memory to facilitate the fast start. The rest is compressed and uses the parallelism of the latest CPUs to uncompress quickly. The result is a 30-7- percent faster boot time. Faster is you have an SSD instead of a regular hard drive of course. If your machine has UEFI firmware rather than Bios it is faster still because the former uses later more optimised code sets. A regular cold boot option is still available and all of the post log in start-up will be at the same, sometimes glacial, speeds. Perhaps they will address that with Windows 9?

Want a Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1? Don’t bother looking for one in Germany. A court there determined that the "smooth, simple surfaces on the 10.1-inch Honeycomb tablet copied the minimalist design of Apple's iPad.” It also said that other designs could have been used by Samsung. This is getting so bad that long time Apple supporters are starting to come out of their daze and are starting to attack Apple as being as bad as Microsoft ever was. The rest of Europe has lifted the sanctions however so if your are in Europe, minus Germany, you may already be enjoying your new Samsung tablet.

As Samsung rightly pointed out by imposing the injunction based on some very generic characteristics the ruling has restricted “design innovation and progress in the industry.” Apple is now gong after the Galaxy S2 the phone most likely to take down the iPhone for sales. Yes Apple has degenerated into a very nasty type of company that is using frivolous lawsuits to stifle competition and hold their market share. Perhaps this is the real reason Job is moving out, again.

Finally for this week Seagate is working on a composite 2.5 inch hard drive SSD hybrid for notebook computer and similar. The plan appears to be to add SSD memory to their thinner single platter Momentus range to target the emerging ultrabook category. So we should expect to see something like 250-400GB of disk merged with 4-16GB of flash sometime in the next few months. This will provide a lower price point than the pure SSD units while speeding up boot and some applications.

I love this industry, something new every day.

Blog Currents – 2011, 7 Sep

The world is currently tablet crazy. Most times I get a seat on the bus it is next to someone who has a tablet of some kind, mostly the Apple variety. The cautionary tale is the recent HP fiasco so what do we know about tablets and what can we expect?

On the one had you have a tablet built buy a respected PC and engineering company based on technology they paid over $1b for. No one seemed to want it, possibly because it used an operating system no one had heard of, Web OS. The “over the air” updates seemed to have no appeal and in the end they sold for a fraction of the original asking price. On the other had there is a completely closed tablet system that locks you into buying only from essentially one store and these are selling like hot cakes.

So the short answer to the question “is there a tablet effect?” is “yes.” It’s not a laptop or a desk top but as one writer put it a “forearm top” device. These devices are stealing sales from the lower end of the laptop and PC markets. Another point to note is that despite what the Apple Lovers might think Apple did not invent the form factor but no one can argue they did make is useable. That being said it is not the iPad effect but still the generic tablet effect that is at work here.

In one or two years time the iPad, court cases withstanding, will probably not be the dominate player in the market and definitely not the only player. It is also highly unlikely that the tablet will be the dominate player in the market, the notebook and PC will still be very strong. Also, given the way the computer market goes there may be a whole new form factor in 2-3 years.

One reason is that the price point is still too high at $800-$1000 for a decently configured machine that is a lot of PC or notebook these days. The problem the other makers have made is trying to conform to the Apple price points, this is one reason why they have not done very well as yet. Apple is highly unlikely to move out of the stratospheric market segment which leaves the rest of it for the other players. Rule number one, don’t try to out Apple, Apple. Apple buyers will pay the extra because it is an Apple, a pattern of behaviour that Steve Jobs and his other senior staff understand very well.

If someone like Samsung or Google can get a reasonable device under $500 and even down as low as $200 then most people can justify that kind of expense. Chinese copies are down there or lower so once someone with a name can figure it out the sales will skyrocket.

Then there is the operating system in conjunction with the developer platform, including adoption. Web OS was useable but fell flat when it came to the development market.  Android may not currently be the most useable platform but it certainly has plenty of developers these days. People buy new devices because of the apps and developers build more depending on how many people are now or will soon be part of the buyers. If you were wondering this is the main reason that Microsoft keeps going with Windows 7, they are hoping that some tipping point will be reached where the developers build enough stuff to attract more buyers.

So we come back to HP. Over 2 million devices just hit the market and people will be wanting software. If enough developers get going then perhaps there will be a more profitable second round for HP and WebOS. Was this a good bet for the bottom line? No, not by any reasonable measuring stick; so yes the biggest PC maker can get it wrong as well.

The herd instinct is an interesting one. When the HP started to sell the blogs and hot deal sites started to go crazy. Since people now spend quite a bit of time on the Internet a kind of buyer’s mania set in and people who would not normally have bought one raced out and did. People want to part of something. For the Apple fans it is all things Apple for other things if the price is right people will join in just to be part of something. I admit that when I heard about the sale I wanted to buy one but by the time I heard about it and wanted to act it was already too late.

So in conclusion Apple has great looking products but their continued monopoly by law suite and tightly controlled App Store will not guarantee they stay on top for ever. As for HP and WebOS the story is still in progress. They certainly triggered a lot of interest in their tablet product. The example set by HP may see a new flood of lower priced units leaving the iPad up in the clouds. Also as a final observation, no matter how big you are or how well you think you know that the future will be when it comes to computers it is anyone’s game.   

Industry News

In related news the latest range of ultra notebooks will mot be shipping in any great quantities for the rest of the year. Everyone remembers the Intel CULV or Consumer Ultra Low Voltage from Intel. You don’t, see there is proof right there. They didn’t do so well so the new term is Ultrabook and Intel is hoping to take some market share beck from the tablets. Brushing off the crystal ball Intel is predicting the wet finger in the air number of 40 percent sales of notebooks in 2012 to be of this new format. They will either take off or not, we will just have to wait and see.

I love scientific invention. The latest one that caught my eye is a single molecule motor that runs on electricity. No it’s not the first tiny engine but the previous ones ran on light or chemicals. Sure you need a tunnelling electron microscope to build it and spin it sitting on a copper surface but it’s cool. Also a practical application is a long way off if at all.

Toshiba has a new thin tablet just 7.7 mm thick and with no rounded corners J It will come with micro USB, micro HDMI and Micro SD slots. I expect more of these devices with all the features the iPads don’t have to continue to appear. In other tablet news Samsung is not going to use the WebOS operating system. Sony has a new Android 3.2 based tablet with a folding screen. Due out in November it is small when folded and of course will play PS2 games.

Acer has laid claim to the first Core-i7 based Ultrabook. The Aspire S3 weighs in at 1.3kg and is 13 mm thick and will also come in i3 and i5 versions. With a 13.3 inch screen it is aimed at the Macbook Air range to give them some competition in that market space. Acer claims 50 days of battery life in deep sleep mode and 6-7 hours in full working mode. It has an instant on functionality that brings the unit up in under 2 seconds. This is the kind of functionality Intel want to put on show for the Ultrabook range.

Yes, you can tell that I have been looking at all kinds of things as I ponder exactly what is going to be in my new PC.