Blog Currents – 2011 Dec 7

It's fast. The new computer is all set up and it is fast to boot, fast to shutdown and applications run a lot faster than on my old machine. I also ripped my first few HD-DVD disks to back them up. I picked up an old Xbox 360 HD-DVD USB drive that I had ordered from the UK, plugged it in and a few seconds later I could read and play HD-DVDs on my computer.

I first tried a rather complex process of ripping the disk, demuxing it, recombining it and until the last step everything was going well. I was trying to convert the HD-DVD into MKV format. The first process took about 8 hours and did not work. Then I found MakeMKV. This application rips selected or all content from a HD-DVD or Blu-Ray directly into and MKV file that contains multiple audio streams and subtitles. It rips and converts a disk in about one hour. On the down side there is no way to reduce the size of the output or change any other options, it is a raw rip to an MKV file in full resolution. Movies sizes are around 25 GB or a little less so it is a lot of space for each disk. Guess I will need to buy a new empty hard drive. The problem is that with Thailand off the manufacturing circuit for a while prices have all gone up.

The best speed improvement has been on the game Starcraft 2. On my old machine it took many minutes to move between game loads, now it takes seconds. The graphics are really good and I can run the game's graphics settings at full resolution with all the extras turned on. SQLServer is working properly and I finally managed to work my way through some Microsoft Reporting Services examples.

I am still very happy with my Samsung Galaxy S2 a.k.a. my Android phone. The application range is just so good and having a couple of young nieces I soon find out what the favourite games are. I have been playing Stupid Zombies which is an exercise in angles as you try and shoot zombies by bouncing your bullets off different surfaces. I also downloaded a decibel meter and a spectrum analyzer to check noise levels and frequencies around my new computer. It has a high pitched noise when the SSD is accessed for some reason, perhaps they all do that. A little bit older and I probably won't hear it any more anyway :)

I also downloaded Classic Shell for my new Windows 7 machine. This adds the option of Alt-Start to bring up the familiar XP Start menu in addition to the Win 7 Start menu, it also gives you back some useful items that are missing from Windows 7 Start. It is Open Source so just do a search for it if you want that old familiar feeling back again.

Industry News

Europe has it in for the big guys, with the exception of Apple of course. The latest target is Google. The company is facing 400 pages of objections from the European Commission. The complaints have been collected from a range of other companies because Google is apparently abused its dominant position in the search engine market. One other complaint is that Google dropped the results position of rival services and unfairly lowered the "Quality Score" for sponsored links of competing services. Not sure if it is in the brief but Google also lowered the result position of sites against the global warming craze. For example Watts Up With That is the most popular site for 'skeptics' but you won't find it on the front page of many related searches. Goo9gle has also been playing the Apple game by imposing exclusivity agreements with advertisers which prevent them from displaying adverts from rival search services on their own sites.

Not surprisingly one of those bringing complaints is Ciao! owned by Microsoft. There are others. Earlier this year the US Federal Trade Commission also started its own antitrust investigation into Google's search and advertising practices. The US has a very poor track record when it comes to this kind of thing, Google is after all an American company. Expect this one to fall flat but the European one to be a lot more successful.

Ironically, or not, at the same time Google has applied for permission to takeover $12.5bn Motorola Mobility with a response from the EU due in January. This is about the same time the anti-trust situation should hit Google.

In other Google related news, this time Android, Table makers are suggesting that Google needs to work closely with them to drop prices so that they can hit harder at the Apple iPad market. In the UK for example the iPad still gets about 75 percent of the tablet sales. It doesn't seem to matter that Apple buyers are locked into the Apple dimension, for everything. One issue is that Google does not give automatic upgrades to their operating systems on the tablet platforms like they do on their Smartphones. Applications have no quality guarantee, then again you can get just about everything you could want for free so I consider this one just being picky.

Apple has failed in its bid to have Samsung tablets banned in the US. The problem with success is that Apple needed to show that it would be harmed more by Samsung continuing to sell products if its patents were being infringed than Samsung would be if its products were banned and it proved it wasn’t infringing on the patent. In other words Samsung would be hurt more by the ban so they get to sell their products pending the outcome of a court case. Not a very easy thing to do in Apple la la US land. Apple also lost recently in Australia where a ban on the Samsung 10.1 inch tablet was overturned.

Samsung has a new range of tiny Serial ATA solid state drives for the ultrabook range. Working with Intel the idea is to release a competitor to the Apple MacBook Air. There are four sizes 32, 64, 128, and 256GB and they add to the existing PM830 range. The smallest size is really aimed at providing caching support. The drives weight in at a tiny 8 grams and include 256-bit AES encryption. You get up to 500MB/sec for sequential reads and 260MB/sec for sequential writes. Not the fastest in the world but at this size who is really counting.

In related news the price of flash chips is starting to come down. The reason is an over-supply and slow markets in Europe and the USA. You may think the Thai floods have something to do with this but the prices were dropping anyway. The supplies of the current technologies will probably continue to be more than the market needs as fab plants ramp up for the production of higher yield 2Xnm and 1Xnm processes.

Just because it is cool. Scientists have been working on quantum entanglement between a pair of small synthetic diamonds, at room temperature. Yes not at some ridiculously low temperature. This could mean another step closer to a quantum computer. In this case they  generated motional entanglement between vibrational states of two spatially separated, millimeter-sized diamonds at room temperature. Just how they did this involved a lot of lights and mirrors. Why do we care? Well entangled objects can function as quantum on-off devices, or "qubits". On the negative side the entanglement lasts for only a few picoseconds so they still have a long way to go. Still it is cool.

The Swiss have ruled that that downloading pirated copies of films, music and video games for personal use will remain legal because it is of not detrimental to copyright owners. Using a Dutch survey they also concluded that the entertainment world does NOT lose money because of piracy a conclusion that will annoy the BSA to no end. According to the Swiss survey a third of Swiss citizens over the age of 15 download pirated content, but they don't spend any less money on entertainment than usual. There are changing patterns of sales e.g. a bit less on music and a bit more on games. If you didn't know it the UN labels Internet access a basic human right, like many one curtailed in more than a few countries. The Swiss have used this to limit any  filtering or blocking of websites because as it would damage freedom of speech and violate privacy protection laws. Would a number of other major Western and Asian nations be so open. The Swiss Federal Court has already ruled that tracking companies are not allowed to log IP addresses of file-sharers making it all but impossible to get to the average P2P user.

Looking for a new tablet, one using Android 4? Look no further than China where a sub $100 called the Ainol table, yes an unfortunate choice of name, has been released. Android 4.0 or  Ice Cream Sandwich is not yet available in current Western tablets. The new device has a 7 inch screen, 1GHz processor, WiFi, USB 2, HDMI, Micro SD and both front and rear cameras. It will do 1080p playback and has a capacitive touch screen. It will be available in Europe and the US under the Leader and OMG brand name which should make it a little easier to sell.