Category: Computers and Internet

Tim Adams has an interesting article in today’s Observer about Second Life – the online virtual world where a million people have gone to escape from their real lives – and ended up doing exactly the same things as people do in the real world. Wetware or software – it’s all the same, it seems to me. The attraction of Second Life continues to baffle me. 

By coincidence, two major players have announced telepresence products this week. Microsoft announced their RoundTable products (due next year) and Cisco has announced their TelePresence range.

 

The Cisco products are interesting in a number of ways. They’ve taken the approach of making the experience of holding a virtual meeting as realistic as possible, using big HD screens and compression technology to make latency as low as possible (a minimum of 150 msec end-to-end). Their top end product (the TelePresence 3000) gives a strong illusion that twelve people are sitting around a single table – but in fact half of the table and six participants are in one location and six are in another location, with the other half of the table. The approach doesn’t come cheap – each end costs $300,000.

 

Microsoft, on the other hand are tackling the low end of the telepresence market, with products predicted to come in at around the $3,000 mark for setting up one end of a teleconference.

 

I think there’s room for both, particularly if they can interoperate, so that, for example, the CEO, seated in her Telepresence meeting room, can address employees gathered in meeting rooms, or seated at their own PCs.

 

In my time in Shell, I had experience of both ends of teleconferencing, with various degrees of success. Even with the high-end systems, though, the experience was far from realistic and too often not trouble-free. Cisco do seem to have pushed the envelope, and it will be interesting to see how well they do in the market against the established players. Cisco themselves are rolling out 110 TelePresence rooms inside their own company.

 

To get an impression of what the Cisco product is like, download or watch Robert Scoble’s video Podcast. It has Guido Jouret, Cisco’s CTO explaining to a group of people what the technology is behind the illusion. For techno-nerds, like me, this was a very interesting video, with Jouret giving a lucid explanation of how the products came about and what the plans are. Fast forward a few years, and this technology will have come down in price to probably a tenth of the cost, and be much more widely available to small companies, and not just the Fortune 100.

Miguel Carrasco has put together his list of the 10 biggest computer flops of all time. Being the pendant that I am, I take issue with his list in a couple of respects. First, that "of all time" tag always irritates me. What he means, of course, is "time up until now". But, as I say, I’m in pedant mode.

 

More seriously however, I would question his attribution of the "greatest flop" label against some of his list. Yes, the Xerox Alto and the NeXT did not become ubiquitous. But I would argue that they were seminal. They represented ideas and ideals that subsequent designers sought to emulate, and have led directly to today’s Macintosh and Windows operating systems. And CP/M was hardly "one of the greatest flops". It was remarkably successful for its time. It fell, not through a fault of its own, but because a meeting between IBM and its owner did not take place.

 

Still, I would agree with his inclusion of the embarrassing IBM PC/Jr and the Apple Newton in his list. Both should have been strangled at birth. And on the software side, Microsoft’s BOB, Windows ME and IBM’s OS/2 probably deserve to be there. Although, to be fair, OS/2 soldiered on in ATMs for years before falling by the wayside. 

I see that I’m not the only person who would like to line up certain software developers against a wall and execute them. Diamond Geezer is having some trouble with software that won’t take no for an answer. Been there, done that, nearly took an axe to the system…

I blogged my disappointment with Creative Technology’s inability to write decent software last month. They released a new beta version of the Vista driver software for the Audigy soundcard yesterday. I downloaded it. I installed it on a mint-fresh installation of Vista RC2 build 5744.

 

The result? Another Blue Screen Of Death, and a non-working soundcard. Yep, Creative Technology are crap. I’m never going to buy any of their products again.   

…or the joys of being a software tester.

 

I’ve been using Beta 2 (and the Beta 2 Technical Refresh) of Office 2007 for sometime. When I installed it, it installed alongside Office 2003, and that was not a problem. A month or two later, Microsoft issued some security patches via their Microsoft Update system, and suddenly my Outlook 2007 stopped working. I got it working again by running "repair" on Office 2007. This happened a couple of times – each time Microsoft released patches for Office 2003, it would break Outlook 2007, and I’d have to repair it.

 

However, last night, some patches were installed, and this time Outlook 2007 remained resolutely broken. "Repair" had no effect. Neither did a complete uninstall and reinstall of Office 2007.

 

After four hours of trying one thing and another, I found the only way to get Outlook 2007 running again was to do a complete uninstall of both Office 2003 and 2007, and then reinstall Office 2007 only. It seems that the latest patches to Office 2003 are completely incompatible with Outlook 2007. I see from the message boards that I’m not the only one to have bitten by this bug, but I’m surprised that no-one inside Microsoft found it before the patches were released. This probably means that no-one in the testing teams of either Office 2003 or Office 2007 have dual installations anymore… Only us poor saps outside…

Ogle Earth reports that Google Maps now has The Netherlands properly covered.

At some point today, the page hit counter for my blog went over the 100,000 total as measured from when the blog began. Notwithstanding that a large proportion is probably down to me checking my deathless prose, or the totally disinterested checking by spambots, I feel that a milestone has been reached. Here’s to the next 100,000… 

Interesting little video about the use of computers to provide evolutionary design alternatives in, for example, drug design or civil engineering.

I see that Microsoft is gearing up to introduce its answer to YouTube – and it’s called Soapbox. The introductory video is suitably bizarre. God bless all who sail in her.

If you’ve been trying out the Beta 2 release of Microsoft Office 2007, you might be interested to know that a technical refresh of the software will be released tomorrow. If you are also playing around with Vista RC1, then you definitely need this technical refresh.

What’s real and what isn’t? So far as the internet is concerned, it’s a good question. The latest example of fantasy masquerading as reality is lonelygirl15. Ostensibly a teenager keeping a video diary unbeknownst to her parents, she turns out to be the creation of a group of filmmakers. Zephoria, over at Apophenia, has the story. And while she is excited about this and "loves the way people are using all of these new social technologies to create cultural experiments", I am less sanguine and confess to feelings of unease.

…about Windows Vista. OK, so we are still working with pre-release software, but there are five pieces of hardware in my system that the hardware manufacturers have so far failed to even produce beta device drivers for. And I’m not confident that in some cases they ever will.

 

Then there’s Creative Technology, which is in a class of its own. The hardware may be fine, but the software is dreadful. We are now just four months away from Microsoft releasing Vista, and yet the beta drivers for Creative’s products (when they exist, which is not usually) are a huge steaming pile of ordure. This is nothing new as far as Creative is concerned, it’s always had a shocking reputation for its inability to write decent software and release it on time. Just a quick visit to its discussion forum for Windows Vista shows that. My experience with Creative’s beta drivers for my Audigy 2 soundcard is mixed. After a BSOD and some other error messages, the soundcard limped into action. But the 5.1 surround sound is still just stereo, and many features of the hardware just don’t work. Ah, the joys of beta software.

So Microsoft has released a version of its Windows Vista operating system that is getting close to what the final version will be. Vista RC1 (Release Candidate 1) became available this week. Well, you know me, of course I downloaded it and installed it on a couple of the computers at home. So, what do I think?

 

Well, it’s pretty, I have to say that, but it behaves in different ways to Windows XP, and sometimes that bites me. Take, for example, the act of upgrading the device drivers and application software for my webcam. The first part of the installation proceeded swimmingly, then I was told the system needed to restart in order to complete the installation. Fine, but when it restarted, I saw this:

 

 

OK, I thought, I’ll click, and sure enough, I saw the setup program had been blocked. But even though there was an "enable" button (which I assume would "unblock" the program and let it run to completion), it was greyed out, and I couldn’t unblock the program. I tried several things to unblock the program, but nothing worked, and the device drivers remained uninstalled…

 

 

The balloon does not make it clear that the user needs to right-click on the icon to see a menu where it is possible to unblock the startup programs. Just clicking on the icon (as the balloon suggests) leads to the dialogue box where it is not possible to unblock the programs.

 

Sigh. If I have to google in order to learn how to use software, then I would contend that it ain’t intuitive…

 

 

Google Earth has at last got around to using high resolution images in its coverage of The Netherlands – and what a difference it makes! No longer is our house just a fuzzy brown blob, but it can be clearly seen, as can the pond in the garden. Google Earth is a terrific application, and being used in mashups in a huge variety of ways.

I continue to be amazed at Google Earth and the uses to which it is being put. Here, for example is Frank Taylor waxing ecstatic over a series of stunning aerial shots of Africa. He’s right, they are worth exploring.

Microsoft have released a pre-RC1 build of Windows Vista (build 5536) to a wider audience than just their registered beta testers. The build is available here. Once 100,000 copies have been downloaded from that page, Microsoft will pull the plug. So if you’re interested, you’d better move fast before they are all gone. Apparently, you’ll need a license key from one of the earlier builds (e.g. Beta2). Now, where did I put that key?

…to spite your face. An English saying that means "this will hurt you more than it hurts me". The "you" in this case would appear to be Microsoft. And why? Well, the pricing details on their upcoming Vista operating system are showing on Amazon.Com as:

 

 

Robert McClaws, over at the Longhorn Blog is not impressed ("pure and total crap" are his words). His rationale is that the price reduction on additional licenses is not sufficient to act as an incentive for people to buy them rather than pirate the software. He goes into more detail in a follow-up post here. I have to say that I have some sympathy for his argument. We have three computers here, all running legitinate copies of Windows XP Professional. If I were to upgrade them all to Vista Ulimate edition, then I’m looking at paying out $725 for the privilege (one upgrade of $259 plus two additional licenses at $233 each). Frankly, that doesn’t seem worth it. I suppose I could just upgrade one computer to Ultimate edition and leave the other two at Home Premium. Even so, I’m still looking at an outlay of $561. Hmm, I might just as well stick with Windows XP for two of the three computers for a few years more.

Microsoft has announced that you won’t be able to play forthcoming HD-DVD media in your 32bit computer. You’ll need to upgrade to a 64bit computer for that.

 

While Microsoft may claim that they are doing this at the behest of the media companies (which very well may be true), the reaction from the computer-buying public is likely to be one of anger. It certainly doesn’t make me a happy camper.