No, not that wimp. This WIMP.

Here's Jeff Han showing off WIMP-less computing:

That's incredibly impressive - I'm a sucker for these things ever since I started using a Commodore Amiga and apps like the Trip-A-Tron light synthesizer.

I can see one major problem with this interface though... greasy fingers.

Not sure what Han is running, but he's got some damn fast graphics there. Anyone know?

Posted by Juha Saarinen at 10:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Which browser will you go with?

That's a silly question really, because you can't avoid Internet Explorer 7 if you use Windows. So let me rephrase: which browser will you use? Internet Explorer 7 or the newly released Firefox 2.0?

I've been using both for a while now (in beta and RC form) and... feel a little undecided, but lean towards Firefox 2.0. It's annoying that the memory hogging issue in Firefox persists but it doesn't seem as bad as in 1.x. IE7 seems to eat RAM too, btw.

There's always Opera 9 I suppose, but its user interface is hard to get used to for me.

Update The Microsoft Internet Explorer team sent the Firefox crowd a cake!

Posted by Juha Saarinen at 3:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Digital Subscriber Lines or DSL is unfairly maligned as a technology because telcos insist on placing artificial constraints on it. It's mainly to avoid those constraints that I and others talk about fibre, not in the hands of telcos, as the future. However, that age-old copper network can be coaxed into performing rather snappily still...

Optical fibre is fast and has unlimited scalability (almost), so why bother with copper? Well, the copper's already there so if you can make tweaks to DSL, it makes sense to use it while the fibre networks creep closer to houses.

While New Zealand is still stuck with somewhat improved first generation DSL which will now provide the maximum speed lines allow - 8Mbps down and 1Mbps up - other countries are moving to ADSL2+ with and without Annex M. This provides a theoretical maximum speed of 24Mbps down, and 1 or 3.5Mbps up.

As fibre-optic feeds to roadside cabinets become more commonplace, telcos can shorten the copper loops over which the DSL signal runs. Doing it this way is necessary to reach the high speeds of ADSL2+, but it also means other variants such as VDSL2 become possible.

VDSL2 has a whopping 250Mbps aggregate bandwidth close to the DSLAM (the bandwidth can be split symmetrically or asymmetrically), dropping to 100Mbps at 500 metres, and 50Mbps at 1km. After that, VDSL2 performs much like ADSL2+ at around 1.5km distance.

However, Portugal Telecom is talking up its mediaDSLAM VDSL technology, which promises 100Mbps at distances up to 4-5km. This is roughly the same distance that first-generation ADSL goes now. That's one serious speed improvement, and a commercial launch is set for next year.

It doesn't stop there though: Israeli scientists are looking at gigabit per second DSL over distances up to 300 metres. The way they do it is by exploiting the dreaded "cross talk" or interference that the high frequency DSL signals generate.

Whether or not any of the above could be done in New Zealand - or if Telecom would even consider them - remains to be seen. Telecom's network manager Alcatel reported that the copper network here is in poor shape, and it may be cheaper to just ditch it and go with fibre to the premises. Still though, for the countries with well-maintained copper loops, it looks like there's plenty of life left in DSL yet.

Posted by Juha Saarinen at 2:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

It looks like Microsoft knew that it had about a snowball's chance in hell against European Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes.

On Friday, news arrived that Microsoft will do what Kroes wants, which is change Vista.

Vista e as it the Euro version is tipped to be named, won't come with Microsoft's antivirus and security software, and security vendors will have access to the kernel - PatchGuard notwithstanding. There will be no default MSN Search in Internet Explorer either and Microsoft will give away its new "PDF killer" format, XPF.

If Microsoft had refused to comply with the Commission, Kroes could've fined it €3 million a day - from July 31! Clearly, Microsoft added that to the cost of not being able to release Vista in time quite some while ago, because all of a sudden there are no problems doing what the Commission wants.

Vista will be released on time in Europe now, indicating that MS had already prepared for EU not to yield. South Koreans will get a similar version of Vista as well.

However, is it such a good idea by the EU to force Microsoft take out features from Vista? Opinion is divided here, with the EU and security vendors saying one thing, and Microsofties vehemently disagreeing. On my Geekzone blog, I translated a letter to Kroes from the former head of Microsoft Belgium and Luxembourg, Bruno Segers.

Segers reckons that Europeans won't buy Vista e, and bases this on Microsoft's experience with the Euro version of XP, which had Windows Media Player stripped out of it. Instead, people bought full overseas versions. This, Seger says, will lead to European software businesses losing money - and, offer customers a less secure operating system than people overseas will get.

Posted by Juha Saarinen at 5:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Telecom Head of Consumer Marketing Kevin Bowler said the 025 network is due to shut down on 31 March 2007.

That's that then for Telecom's AMPS network, which seems to have been well-liked by customers:

At Telecom’s full year result in early August there were approximately 83,000 customers on the 025 network compared with 478,000 12 months earlier.

I thought nobody used 025 anymore, but look at those figures. People clearly loved their 025 phones. I'm surprised that Telecom managed to retain all the 025 customers and move them to 027. Wonder if that's correct? Surely there must've been some churn to Vodafone?

Telecom has invested more than $250 million in mobile technology over the past three years.

Hmm... that's $83.3 million a year. Less than I thought. The CDMA/EV-DO network is cheap to run, clearly. With the high calling rates, it must be a real cashcow for Telecom.

Posted by Juha Saarinen at 3:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Just think about that amount for a while. OK, it's in shares and not cold, hard cash, but... it's a good chunk of change.

I'm talking about the Google-YouTube deal of course. When the rumour first surfaced and the US$1.65 billion figure was mentioned, I thought "no way".

YouTube's been going since February 2005 only, and while it has heaps of users, it also has big bandwidth bills. The estimated amount of daily data churned out by YouTube is 200 terabytes, and that costs a lot even in the US. (As a sidenote, I can't imagine there ever being a YouTube in NZ with our expensive bandwidth charges.)

There's some AdSense ads on YouTube now, but where's all the money going go come from? Some people reckon it'll be TV producers hopping aboard the YouTube train, but I'm not so sure. YouTube is only suited for short clips in low resolution at the moment. Anything more ambitious requires even more bandwidth, which neither YouTube nor its users yet have.

Either way though, congrats to Steve, Chad and Jawed. That's some record there, guys.

Posted by Juha Saarinen at 2:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Just a few quick initial impressions of the Vodafone HSDPA Vodem...

1) The software seems quite buggy. It crashes frequently for me, and the only way to get it going again is by unplugging and inserting the USB connectors on the Vodem. I hear there's a firmware update for the Vodem in the works, which will take care of issues like the lack of support for Intel-based Macs and maybe Windows Vista too.

2) Performance varies a lot. It'll go from excellent to slow modem-like speeds, at random.

3) When it goes, it goes rather nicely, with low latency (80-120ms) and good throughput.

Pinging idg.co.nz [210.48.100.10] with 32 bytes of data:

Reply from 210.48.100.10: bytes=32 time=128ms TTL=48
Reply from 210.48.100.10: bytes=32 time=133ms TTL=48
Reply from 210.48.100.10: bytes=32 time=119ms TTL=48
Reply from 210.48.100.10: bytes=32 time=133ms TTL=48

Ping statistics for 210.48.100.10:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 119ms, Maximum = 133ms, Average = 128ms

Pinging 210.48.100.1 with 32 bytes of data:

Reply from 210.48.100.1: bytes=32 time=314ms TTL=240
Reply from 210.48.100.1: bytes=32 time=260ms TTL=240
Reply from 210.48.100.1: bytes=32 time=306ms TTL=240
Reply from 210.48.100.1: bytes=32 time=280ms TTL=240

Ping statistics for 210.48.100.1:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 260ms, Maximum = 314ms, Average = 290ms

Posted by Juha Saarinen at 6:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Surprise! The tiny little Vodem arrived today, without my having to hand over my first-born as a hostage for the review period.

And this is what it looks like:

It really is small as you can see, with the USB cable (two connectors, one for additional power if needed) being almost incongruously big for the Vodem.

Installation on XP is plug and play as promised, but I'm having SIM issues at the moment so will have to try out the Vodem performance after that's sorted out.

The Vodem shows up as a CD Drive in Explorer:

and this is what the software client for connecting to the network looks like:

Not sure why it's wonky like that - could be the 1680*1050 screen on this Lenovo N100 that I'm using.

Now to fix the SIM issue.

Posted by Juha Saarinen at 5:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

You are no doubt waiting with baited breath for Microsoft's Windows Vista to come out, but... it looks like you may have to wait just a bit longer.

Microsoft is releasing a second Release Candidate tomorrow of Vista, which may just put the October 25 release to manufacturing date out of joint.

To satisfy Microsoft's internal quality control metrics, the number of outstanding bugs must drop below 500 before Vista hits the shop shelves. RC1 which in normal parlance should've been almost ready to roll, had 1,400 or so bugs left in it. The question now is if Microsoft has managed to drop that number by a good 1,000 in RC2 and also, if the reported device driver support issues have been solved.

If RC2 isn't sufficiently bug-free, the release date is likely to be pushed further into 2007, much to Microsoft's hardware partners' chagrin.

I'll try to get the ISOs for Vista over the weekend and install it... wish me luck. :)

Posted by Juha Saarinen at 12:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Coverage as in reviews, and not service reach, that is. Unlike past service rollouts, Vodafone's HSDPA hasn't seen any real tests in media. Why's that?

We're not sure what Vodafone's PR people are thinking but they certainly make it difficult for us to write anything at all about HSDPA. To provide a fair and balanced review of the service, we have to try out HSDPA and associated devices - naturally.

I attended an early HSDPA demo at Vodafone, where I saw the trial network perform pretty well. That was in April this year and at the time, Vodafone bosses Phil Patel and Jeremy Foster said we'd be able to test drive the HSDPA network under real life conditions soon.

However, months went by and nothing materialised. The HSDPA network went live sometime in July/August, and Telecom got devices from overseas to try it out with. We didn't see any devices despite requests however.

HSDPA got nearer its launch date and Vodafone decided to give away ten devices - the external "Vodems", or USB HSDPA modems - in a promotion. Still nothing for us to review however and we were wondering if there's something badly wrong with the service that Vodafone doesn't want the media to know about.

That was it as far as I was concerned. If Vodafone wants to doesn't want its services and products reviewed, well, that's too bad.

Today however Vodafone's external PR agency rang and said a Vodem would be available. Great, I thought, as I could cover it for the annual PC World broadband feature in the bumper Dec-Jan issue. There have been quite a few readers asking what HSDPA is like and I have no idea at the moment.

The PR person in question says I needed to look over some agreements, sign and return them before she could send out the Vodem though... and I started to read them. A couple of times in fact, because I couldn't quite believe what I saw.

I can honestly say I've never seen any review agreement as painstakingly detailed as the one Vodafone wants us to sign. For obvious reasons, signing such things is a BAD IDEA in general - when we test stuff, it's for real and sometimes stuff breaks. Sometimes however vendors think that we can write reviews by looking at the box and not actually use the products in question, but most see reason once we talk to them.

Vodafone's agreement though takes the biscuit: not only does it strictly limit what we can do with the Vodems, and make us responsible for them, but the mobile operator also wants confidentiality:

2.4 You will keep your participation in the Trial confidential and will not disclose any information in relation to the Trial to anyone (including review articles and magazines) unless required to do so by law.

Errm, right. So, Vodafone: what exactly is the point then?

Anyway, if you were wondering why you haven't seen an HSDPA review yet, now you know. It's not because we haven't tried...

Posted by Juha Saarinen at 4:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Reading this piece on OSNews about Apple's bad business decisions, made me think about all the other examples of snatching failure out of the jaws of success that I have seen over the years.

The OSNews article is a bit contradictory on places, but still worth a read - check out the comments though, as people have posted corrections to parts of the story there, like Jobs' role in the company.

Anyway, here are some examples of astonishingly incompetent tech ventures that I can think of, in no particular order. Feel free to agree/disagree and add your own.

NeXT: Starting with The iJobs, he left Apple to found NeXT, which made beautiful UNIX workstations, the legacy of which is apparent in today's Mac OS X. They were expensive, didn't have enough developer support, and bombed in the end.

Be and BeOS: Going on to Jean-Louis Gassée, also ex-Apple, he thought he could do better than his former employers. Catchy name, a multi-threaded OS that performed well and great design notwithstanding, Be went down the toilet. A real pity that, because the Intel version of BeOS was one of the nicest operating systems I've used.

UNIX: Multi-tasking, networking, the whole Internet in fact: these are the legacies of UNIX. It's a robust operating system that ended up totally hamstrung by vicious legal battles over licensing rights, and of course, the lack of a modern GUI. It is survived by clones like Linux and the *BSDs.

Atari and Commodore: Who owned the home computing market in the past? Not Apple, nor the IBM PC clone makers. Instead, it was Atari and Commodore. Their computers had sound, great graphics, video, 3D games and more well before anyone else but neither company was able to develop its product beyond the original concepts.

Novell: Once upon a time, one network OS ruled the market - NetWare. But, Novell didn't see the Microsoft and Internet juggernauts coming, and is now flogging a rebranded Linux distribution instead. Whoopsie!

Microsoft: DOS5.x, MSAV, Bob, Windows ME, Cairo, WinFS, Vector Markup Language are just some of Microsoft's slipups. We can probably add Internet Explorer to this list, at least version 6. Microsoft has survived them all though, which is no mean feat.

Motorola: First with a raft of features that Intel didn't have until late in the game, like 32-bit processing and clock-doubling and also blessed with a flat memory addressing model rather than a convoluted segmented one, Motorola had some great CPUs. Then, it developed the PowerPC range which never kept up with Intel in terms of performance and now Motorola based computers are rarer than hen's teeth.

Intel: You're the greatest processor maker in the world, having trounced Motorola and later, AMD. What do you do? You bring out the hot and inefficient Netburst architecture in the Pentium 4 range, and watch as AMD eats your lunch, profits drop and redundancies grow. Intel was lucky to have the Israeli mobile processor developers save its hide.

AMD: Before Athlon, AMD was way behind Intel thanks to the slow performing K5 and K6 processors and poor motherboards. Had the Athlon not happened, it's a safe bet there wouldn't have been an AMD today.

Telecom: The First Media/First TV hybrid fibre/coax network could've offered performance far better than ADSL, but Telecom lost the plot and ditched it. That failure is nothing in comparison to Telecom buying AAPT in Australia, and wasting over $2 billion trying to figure out how to survive in a competitive market. Luckily for Telecom, it's been able to milk the protected monopoly in NZ to offset the massive losses in Australia.

Vodafone: Remember how General Packet Radio System or GPRS was supposed to provide 144kbit/s, dizzying speeds at a time when analogue modem connections were the norm? Or even 172kbit/s with all eight time slots firing? Didn't quite work out that way for Vodafone, unfortunately. GPRS in practice is not only slower than analogue modems, but also eye-wateringly expensive to use. It was certainly not the wireless broadband that the Fletcher Telecommunications inquiry thought it would be, having bought into the GSM marketing shpiel without actually trying out GPRS.

Posted by Juha Saarinen at 11:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)