Currents 2013-01-30
I got my hands on Office 2013 a.k.a. Office 15 or even Office 365. The last one is the online subscription model being the ideal version for Microsoft because you are essentially hooked forever. This comes in two versions with access to different features you can look up and starts at $100 per month and the advantage is you get access to the latest version at all times and you can access it from anywhere.
Office 2013 or Office 15? These are the two different names for the same product, just like Office 2010 is also called Office 14. Thank you Microsoft, because sorting through all the options isn’t confusing enough. In this article, I'll focus mainly on the desktop Office 2013 applications. The new versions only runs under Windows 7 and 8, not even Vista is supported let alone XP. There are differences between Win 7 and 8 but mostly how they start off. As far as I can see most of the changes are cosmetic and layout changes with a few bits of additional functionality. There is for example a new formatting panel on the right of PowerPoint.
The ribbon is still there but now there is an option to shrink it to a mini ribbon as well as removing it from the screen. You'll find additional tabs on the Ribbon, including the new Design tab, and the Developer tab is now enabled by default. Word has some new layout options to make it easier to work with images. Most will want to stick with the Office 2007/2010 docx format but Strict Open XML and Open Document Format (ODF) 1.2 are also available.
One nice feature is that the Start screen for many apps now shows recent documents on the left that some may want to pin there. I prefer a cleaner look and feel. You can now also reference online images in your documents. Overall there has been some good work on image handling. Microsoft has added to the recommendations it makes, I’m not a fan but many seem to like it. The live, recommended chart variations for the selected data set in Excel is cool. Saves by default are to your Microsoft Sky Drive, many will want to turn this off, particularly the business users. Touch screen users are supported with a number of new touch based functions.
One excellent change is the ability to open and edit PDF files. The result can be saved as a PDF or a docx with tables and other items maintaining their structure in either document type. Overall this Office release is more of an incremental update than an upgrade and is focused on supporting the Windows 8 paradigm. The changes are subtle rather than overt and I suspect that many older users on Windows 7 will not want to pay for the upgrade.
Using a computer as much as I do I occasionally get caught by some adware, typically in the form of toolbars that slip by and are added to Firefox. I can usually get rid of them via the Add/Install Programs facility under the Control Panel or removing them as an add-in. Occasionally more drastic options are required like with the Claro start screen I recently had trouble removing.
If you find yourself in a similar situation or just want to see if there is something there then try AdwCleaner. Search for it, grab the latest version and run it. Use Search to see what may be there and Delete to get rid of it. You will need to do a reboot but it cleaned up my Claro problem without any fuss. You can even donate via PayPal if you feel so inclined.
According to the industry analyst IDC PC shipments are down, Ultrabooks and Windows 8 have not made much difference and tablet sales have taken up the slack. My prediction is that tablet sales will flatten this year as the allure fades.
iPhone sales managed to hang on in Japan and the US but everywhere else the favourite was Android based devices including a sales figure of over 70 percent in China. My prediction here is that Apple sales will continue to fall against Android and the iPhone 5S will have no positive impact to the current slide in 2013.
A good idea, just a lot late. Nokia has posted the templates for 3D printer users to be able to make their own shell or case for the Lumia 820 smartphone. This includes some of its plastic parts, with the rear plate available as inert plastic or one of Nokia's inductive charging devices. While cool China figured this one out a number of years back and started mass producing different colours, styles and replacements for most phones. You can find these by the thousands in places like MBK in Bangkok or any department store around the world.
Currents – 2013-02-06
So which companies do you trust? Every year for the past seven the independent research group Ponemon Institute has published a report on the Most Trusted Companies for Privacy. This US based survey asks 100,000 adults to rate the larger organisations. This year AmEx, HP, Amazon and IBM made the top four. Microsoft and eBay also made the top 20 but Apple and Google didn’t even thought they were in the top 20 the last couple of years. The problem is that people these days no longer trust IT organisations to have their personal privacy in mind. Instead the belief is that private info is collected to either use internally for profit or sell to others.
Case in point Facebook. Facebook is another that has dropped out of the top 20 as has Yahoo!, Dell and AOL over the past few years. Not so long ago a search with Google would return results on public Facebook events. Try it, go onto Facebook and find an upcoming event. Now log out of Facebook and try searching for that event in Google. Facebook recently unveiled a beta search facility called Graph Search that has been forwarded to the approximately one billion Facebook users. If you actually do get a hit on the search the link takes you straight to a Facebook login page. Or put another way Facebook has made its once public pages private. Like Google Bing has also missed out.
These are very recent changes and highlights the concept of “it’s ours and we’ll be the ones making any money on it thank you very much” approach now starting to pervade all forms of social media. The problem of the new Facebook search is it allows linking of information that was not previously available by reducing privacy. If you go here http://actualfacebookgraphsearches.tumblr.com/ you will find some example of the kinds of searches Graph Search allows like Family Members of people who live in China and like Falun Gong or Married People who like Prostitutes. This was previously information not as easy to work out but now you can get it from Facebook with a couple of clicks.
Representatives of Facebook have tried to justify the new system by using terms like “you can control who can see your friend lists” but the defaults are always fully open and not the more privacy friendly options. The result here is essentially a Web within a Web that allows Facebook to control their users and so make more money. It allows for more targeted advertising to be fair just like Google does. This is just one of the reasons sites like Facebook have fallen down the we trust you lists.
Bow down before the might of the tablet. If you were unsure who the master is now, look no further than numbers from the UK wing of GfK, a market watcher that tracks over-the-counter sales. There were more tablets sold in the UK in December than notebooks sold in the last quarter of 2012. Tablets were also about 23 percent less expensive in 2012 than in 2012 mostly due to all the seven inch models that appeared. There are more brand names and a lot more models coming. I expect this trend to continue through at least a few more months as even more models and brands appear but after that I’m not so sure.
Someone forgot to tell Hitachi that the hard drive is dying. They just announced a 1.2TB drive running at 10,000rpm. They did this by adding a new platter to their Ultrastar range. This makes it the largest disk with that speed rating. The platters are glass not aluminium and this means thinner so four platters can fit into the old space of three. There are competitors in this space but not at that storage size.
I admit to being excited about the upcoming Samsung Galaxy S4 probably out in mid-April. A 5-inch screen, with 440ppi resolution or 1920 x 1080p and it may even be a flexible one. A four core CPU or even an eight-core Exynos 5 processor looks possible running at 1.8 GHz and Android 4.2.1 or a newer version with wireless charging. There will also be a 13mp camera.
So what do you do if you have a new operating system and are having problems getting it out to more people or you have a product you want to have greater exposure? You start doing deals and that is what Microsoft has been doing for some time now. Bing not being adopted? Simple have Yahoo! use it for ten years instead of their search engine. Convince Nokia to drop their OS and use Windows Phone then buy Skype. When more Windows 8 is needed invest in Dell. Sorry but I’m not buying that last one and neither it seems are PC users as Windows 8 sales are still very lethargic. Microsoft is blaming OEMs and computer makers for not making enough touch based screens. Manufacturers point out that if they had built all those Ultrabooks they’d be broke.
Currents – 2013-02-13
It wasn’t that long ago that you would ask a young teenager about computer stuff, these days it’s even younger. According to NSPCC a charity organisation in the UK children as young as five should be taught about safety online. As I can attest my six year old niece is happy using a tablet, smartphone and computer to play games and browse sites. To put it another way the very young are now getting connected and while their focus is typically on childlike sites this opens them up to the wider and darker parts in the Internet.
There is a nasty element out there that will for example coerce this age group to make their own explicit photos or films. In the older age groups sexting is becoming more common and it is easy for all age groups to suddenly find themselves looking at porn. Years ago sneaking into an R-rated movie was a badge of honour for seventeen year olds, these days watching porn is so passé that the self-made images are perceived as the only way to earn “respect.” The predators are happy to pray on such misplaced ideas and in a busy world parents either don’t have the time or are simply unaware of the issues.
Kind of related to the above Google and the Mozilla foundation have joined to demonstrate the WebRTC standard in their browsers to show live video chatting from within the browser. The new standard uses an RTCPeerConnection to allow video chat without the need for any plug-ins. It does include a permission exchange to activate cameras and microphones and is targeted at the click to chat features in web pages.
The demo appears to be in response to CURTC or the Customizable, Ubiquitous Real Time Communication system that Microsoft is pushing as a new standard. This one will also work on VoIP phones and mobiles. It is probably targeted for Skype now owned by Microsoft. Both protocols are in standards review and as usual it will be interesting to see who comes out on top here.
It took a bit longer this time but every device that uses iOS 6 has been jailbroken. This means that the iPhone 5, the iPad mini and the latest iPad Touch are now free. Credit goes to Evad3rs and you can find the tools here http://evasi0n.com/. The tool is available for use from multiple operating systems. The break is known as an “untethered method” that doesn’t require the need to be connected to a computer when rebooting. The biggest reason for jailbreaking is to free the user from the draconian control imposed by the iTunes store i.e. freedom to load whatever you want onto your device. The good news is that according to the DCIM Act it is legal to do so, at least in the US.
In the “people have way too much time on their hands” department for this week the guy who write Wine, the Windows emulator for Linux demonstrated Wine running on a Mac that was running an Android emulator. This could mean that you may be able to run a Windows App on your Smartphone sometime in the future. According to sources the demo was very slow but worked. I for one am having a hard time working out why you would want to run Windows apps on Android at all.
Isaac Asimov predicted it. The European Commission has decided to find the Human Brain Project (HBP) and will provide over 1 billion Euros over the next ten years to see if HBP can build a supercomputer in Switzerland capable of simulating the human brain. One of the aims of the project is to build a robot that will be controlled by the so called neuromorphic brain. I only have one response to that, Skynet.
By the time you read this the Microsoft Surface Pro will be out. Instead of the tablet Surface RT this is a fully functional ultrabook equivalent with a touch screen. The targets are those company CEOs that have dallied with an Apple iPad that Microsoft wants to bring back to the fold under Windows 8.
There are two basic version one with 64 and 128GB solid state memory with 42GB taken up by the operating system. Using an i5 1.7GHz CPU with 3MB of cache and 4GB of dual channel RAM. The unit can get hot and includes twin fans and a cooling vent. The screen is a 10.6 inch 1900 by 1080 ten point touch display with 9.2 inch viewing area. It weighs 2 pounds so it may be too heavy for some. It does have a USB 3 port and a microSD card slot which is nice and provides the extra memory. According to SanDisk this will be available up to 2TB in the not so distant future. Battery life is a bit over three hours. You also need to buy the keyboard separately of which there are currently two versions, if you get one get a keyboard. The stylus placement is poorly designed.
I don’t see myself getting one and at $1000 plus the keyboard it is probably out of the range of the average tablet buyer.
Currents – 2013-02-20
Microsoft, or at least someone there, is stupid. Let me explain why I think that. Windows 8 is their latest and greatest operating system. It is provided on just about every new PC sold, including on the ultrabook my parents recently purchased. They were going away on an archaeological training dig in Cambodia and about an hour before they left tried out a new 2TB Western Digital Passport external drive to be used as one of two for backing up data they were going to collect.
When the ultrabook was fired up it went through the normal process, asking a few location questions and the name of the main account to be used etc. This account was of course a member of the Administrator’s Group, all standard stuff. When the drive was plugged in the panel came up “Access Denied.” Of course in the limited time available I tried the usual searches and blogs, tried some suggestions including a registry change but still the same message.
Finally I activated the Administrator account, something that requires the use of the command line Net User command and found that when plugged the drive in under this account there were no problems at all accessing the drive. So some brilliant mind working on Windows 8 decided that in this case external USB 3 hard drives would be by default not accessible to the thousands of home PC buyers lumbered with Windows 8 even from the standard account everyone would create being part of the Administration Group. I’m sure in a couple of months when they get back and I have more time I’ll eventually find out how to do it but come on Microsoft, really?
According to Tim Cook the COO of Apple after Steve Jobs passed on to that great tablet in the sky, it was Job’s idea to wage "thermonuclear war" on Google’s Android and by extension Samsung. Apparently Cook didn’t want to go after the supplier of their CPUs and last year they spent over $8b on parts from the Korean manufacturer. Perhaps sometime soon this suing from the grave can stop and everyone can just go back to resting in peace?
According to the recent Cisco Visual Networking Index (VNI) report two thirds of all mobile phone traffic will be video by 2017. That is over 11 Exabytes per month or in more understandable terms a lot. Given that the figure is close to fifty percent today that may be an underestimation.
I’ve been saying and writing about it for years. US software and application manufacturers have been charging countries outside of the US outrageous prices and mark-ups for the same products when compared to local US prices. Apparently the Australian Parliament has finally noticed and has called for Apple, Microsoft and Adobe to front up and explain why. That part is easy, additional money for their bottom line, the hard part may be getting to stop doing it. They have been doing it in Thailand for as long as I can remember as well. The day after I wrote the above Adobe dropped the prices for their Creative Cloud but not their other products.
Another app I just found was for US only is the Amazon Cloud MP3 player that gives you access to music albums you buy from Amazon, but only in the US. That is over 350 songs I can’t play because I’m not there. If any readers are still wondering what there is music piracy, this kind of restriction is a flashing neon sign of a clue.
How do you feel about a SIM less phone? Apple loves the idea being worked on by Gemalto and Ericsson. The latter are thinking about machinery but Apple is thinking about people. In Europe the GSM standard is required and this means a removable SIM. Theoretically an embedded SIM could allow the switching of networks but would you really trust Apple to allow this to be free an open? Then there is security. Every new SIM has an embedded key that is quite hard to access and is the basis of the ‘secret’ GSM sessions used when making a phone call. For the embedded SIM to work well network operators will need to share some restricted data with each other or via some third party. Again I don’t see that happening easily as well unless Gemalto is the party used.
You know you’re a success when your product name is indistinguishable from the underlying technology. In a recent survey carried out by Gartner many people did not distinguish between the Samsung Galaxy smartphone range and the Android operating system. So the Samsung brand is now synonymous with Android and to many they are the same thing. I don’t expect that Google or Samsung are bothered by this in the slightest given that Android made up for about 70 percent of mobile phone OS sales in the last quarter.
When did tolerance for a bit of political spin change to not challenging outright lies from our politicians? Some claim that there has been warming over the past sixteen years but there is no data available to back that up. Some claim that storms, hurricanes, floods and other extreme weather events are increasing and will continue to do so. If anything all the available evidence shows the opposite over the past few years. Other claims like no more rain to fill the dams and that children will never see snow again have been shown to be just plain wrong. The most recent example of extreme weather being wrong is the storm in a teacup over allegations that our sportspeople across different codes are all drug takers. The truth ended up being something like maybe one guy at one club did something a few years back. This alarmist trend in everything from the media and politics is disturbing.
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