Mobo maker builds 'powerless' processor cooling fan

I have always been a fan of Stirling engines and have made several over the years, including one that stirred a beer pot utilizing the waste heat from the brewing process. This is an overwhelmingly cool application of a venerable technology.

Jack

How open source has influenced Windows Server 2008

Sam Ramji writes on an MS "Open Source" site.

Yes, it's company propaganda. Yes, it is spun to the moon and back. It's hard to find fault with that because as far as I or anyone I know can tell, it's all true!

Not that MS has not listened to users before. They really have. And not that this is the first time MS has delivered a product straight down the alley of user desire. It is not. But surely they have never done so much in a way so responsive to user requests. I have a hunch getting to know Windows Server 2008 is going to be a LOT more enjoyable than first I thought.

Jack

Desperate Microsoft cuts Vista pricing

For those of you who have not been paying strict attention (tisk, tisk) the price cuts are for RETAIL copies, like the one of Ultimate I got stiffed on just after release. It seems too many of the "build it yourself" crowd are installing Linux.

Jack

Microsoft Lists Programs Borked by Vista SP1

The problem is that the list is obviously woefully incomplete. While I suppose some of that is Microsoft's responsibility, it seems more than a little farfetched to lay it all on them. Or much of any of it, for that matter.

It's a cinch SP 1 will break some stuff. I am unaware of that sort of major upgrade to anything not breaking some stuff. And that includes the upgrade I just did to my Linux box. (Where IS that penguin, anyway? I'm getting tired of holding this gun.) I would like a much more comprehensive listing, but it is what it is.

Jack

Geek Meet 2008

Just a reminder that Geek Meet 2008 is April 11-13 in Las Vegas, NV. If you are going to be joining us and haven't already done so, please fill out the registration form at http://geekmeet.oncomputers.info. Registration is due March 1st, if you wish to receive a T-shirt. Hotel rooms at the Microtel Inn must be booked by March 10th if you wish to receive the group rate.

The *missing* update finally released Thunderbird 2.0.0.12 arives Feb 26, 2008

Mozilla lately has been put down regarding patches that stated a fix that included 2.0.0.12 of Thunderbird, well, that missing revision has now been released. The link above takes you to the release notes for the new version.

Report: broadband policy leaves billions of dollars on table

It's like we have been saying; broadband in America kinda, well, sucks. I guess that's the only word for it. And the national policy behind broadband adoption sucks worse. Change is going to come hard, though. You can bet on that.

Jack

Critical VMware Bug Breaks 'Barrier'

This is a big one. However; because it is located in the Virtual Machine itself, we can mitigate any possible damages until it is fixed by simply running a good AV on the Windows host machine and not using the Shared Folders feature unless we run it on a removable drive that we can scan after the files are put there or accessed. At least that's what I'm told so far.

The part of VM Ware's site dealing with this has been temporarily slashdotted by folks wanting to know. I'm sure we'll be able to get clear information by the morning, but for now it's out of reach. And VM Ware has said a patch is coming within two weeks, so a temporary workaround is tolerable. That's as good a time frame as companies like Microsoft can give us when they are caught in a Zero Day situation, though everyone would like to see it sooner rather than later.

Jack

OnComputers Radio show Podcast 02-24-08

This is the On Computers Radio show podcast for 02-24-08. You can listen live every Sunday from 10AM to 1PM Pacific thats 1PM to 4PM Eastern. Join us for the live show and chat. If you prefer, you can download the same MP3 file here via ftp.

Links from the Gregg Zone!

1) First up for the week is another of those advancements in technology where I think we get the biggest bang for our buck, helping people who have problems to solve. Kind of like the exoskeleton, a few weeks back, but a little more conventional, although not much. This has to be the coolest wheel chair ever to hit the market place. It will be a wonderful future if this becomes the main stream, I do believe technology is our evolution as a species. If you are unfamiliar with this item, you should check it out. http://www.ibotnow.com

2) This item might appeal to the geek in some of you. It strikes me as an example of someone with way to much time on their hands, but I will leave it up to you. It is a musical composition using only the sounds found in windows XP, and 98, I thought it was interesting but to long. Amazing what you can accomplish during a three month bout with cabin fever, http://www.youtube.com

3) Now to answer the question, are there people out there in their garages inventing our future? Or, at least trying, using the internet in an attempt to breakthrough to the masses, well yes there are. Here is an example of a man and his son with a dream, while I do not think they are going to make it, I have to give them credit for trying. If they can get the numbers they talk about it would be most impressive, but they really need a design man, at least when it comes to curb appeal. http://www.dreamcar123.com/

4) In the do it yourself department I found this one, would be a great project for kids. It is an easy and not to complicated way to build your own world clock, for a few pennies. Looks like it works pretty well to me, although I have little need for one, as a teaching aid it might have some value. http://www.metacafe.com/

5) In the green planet department for the week how about a lamp that runs on gravity, and will last 200 years, now that is hard to beat. Very cool, check it out here. http://dvice.com

Vista SP1 Hoses Some Applications

Microsoft Knowledge Base Article #935796 tells us that some applications will either experience degraded performance or not run at all after Service Pack 1 (SP1) is installed. You can find it at the link above.

This kind of thing seems to happen to one degree or another with every Windows Service Pack. To be honest, I am not sure whether to be concerned that this time so many security applications are affected or not. Right now, I think the best position to take is to simply stay informed and make plans according to how things look as we get closer to the actual release of the Service Pack.

More than anything, we need clarification of existing information and the results of more testing. I'm sure that will be done, both by Microsoft and their testers.

Jack

Disk encryption may not be secure enough, new research finds

It's a huge flaw in the way encryption is executed and there are ways to work around it. Good practice can mitigate some of the risk. The rest may have to be tolerated until the devices we use change in the normal course of things or are changed to eliminate this risk.

The problems is that the encryption keys can be recovered from the computers RAM, even after the computer is shut off! Contrary, though there is some reduction in retention, RAM does not lose all the data stored in it immediately upon shutting down the device. And in hibernation/sleep or suspend states may not lose it at all. The encryption keys can be recovered by astute researchers in many cases.

It's an interesting subject and the methods used to slow degradation of bits stored in RAM were so simple and inexpensive that their elegance will astound.

Jack

Intel pushes Raytracing again

I've been interested in ray tracing for over a year now. Apparently the developers concerned with our next generation of video hardware (or the one after that) have settled upon this as the way to do things. This short article will tell you what things.

Ray tracing is orders of magnitude more efficient at yielding "full reality" high definition content. In some ways it takes an awful lot more doing than rasterized images we are drawing now. The processor horsepower needs for ray tracing are staggering, even today. But, as everyone knows; Moore's Law just keeps chugging along and we will easily have that horsepower available to us before all that much more time has passed. And as this article tells us, the economy is to the programmer. She or he gets to write a lot less code to get a lot more effect out of it all. That is the difference. (Ray tracing will also lend itself to more automated ways of tweaking programmed images than we have now. Fill out a form about surface textures, degrees of reflectivity, etc; and the development environment does the rest. The programmers will have a field day.)

It's coming.

Jack

Microsoft launches new open standards, interoperability push

This is huge!

Apparently Microsoft has seen which way the wind blows and had a genuine "come to Jesus" moment. In addition to the European Union's efforts to push MS into true interoperability, something fundamental has changed within the company.

I suppose this could be more smoke and mirrors than reality, but I don't think so. They seem really, really serious about it all. The company's press release/announcement is here. and there doesn't seem to be any funny business going on at all. I believe them.

Their covenant not to sue seems all on the up and up and offers rather generous terms to open source companies. Individuals and small organizations fly free.

Lastly; There is a certain smugness at Red Hat, Canonical/Ubuntu and some other Linux organizations. Their refusal to sign patent pledges with Microsoft is now completely vindicated. A short commentary on that can be found here.

Jack

Trend Micro 2008 forecast for cybercrime.

Needless to say, the forecast is grim.

Even so, I wanted to post this because it seems to agree with what the members of our OnComputers community are reporting and expecting. In a way, this is a sort of kudo to all of you who have contacted us on security matters because it confirms that the things you are seeing are indeed part of the big picture and that you see them correctly.

Jack

Lamp lit by gravity wins Greener Gadget award

Sometimes I just fall in love with something I find on the web. This is definitely one of those things. It's a lamp powered by gravity. You lift some weight up and as it comes down, it powers the lamp for a half-hour or something like that.

Obviously efficient, it is also just a cool looking device and an obviously cool hack.

Jack

The internet as a platform? Not as ISP bloodbath looms

It all boils down to who is going to pay for the bandwidth?

We think we are paying for bandwidth, but the truth is that our "broadband" has been severely oversold by the ISP. They simply cannot deliver the volume of data nor the speeds they have promised to all their customers. The infrastructure is not there. This applies to the US, Canada and a host of other nations besides Britain, which is the actual subject of this article.

As more and more content is available in bandwidth-intensive formats, this is going to be more and more of a problem and we all know that sooner or later, we (the users) are going to end up paying for it in one form or another.

Jack

Don't Give Me That Vista Thing!

(Written for another site in January, I thought you might wish to see it here, as they did not use it.)

Bad reputations can be incredibly difficult to overcome and Microsoft's Vista operating system has enough of a bad rep that no one is going to let it date their sister, if you know what I mean.

That's too bad. Not that I'm a Vista booster. I'm not. But Vista is not all bad, by any means, my objections notwithstanding. It will serve a lot of users very well. Probably the vast majority of users, when you get right down to it.

A few days ago, I got a call from a friend. His aunt needed to buy a new computer. The old one died. We chatted for a while about just how to recover her address book and data (something my friend is quite capable of doing but he wanted confirmation of his plan's utility and efficacy). Then we talked about just what she needs from a computer.

She is a heavy email user, participates almost continuously in several IRC chat rooms centered on her various interests, surfs a lot, prints a lot of color photos along with black and white documents in volume. For this she has two printers. A color ink jet and a monochrome laser, along with a standalone scanner. She uses Vonage for most of her phone calls and she plays Sudoku on the machine.

A quick check showed Vista drivers for both printers and the scanner were available. Her display was also supported. As she was already using a simple memory card reader for transferring her photos from her camera to the computer, that was no problem at all. A quick proposal was put together centering on an HP computer equipped with Vista.

Her reaction was swift and definitive; "Don't give me that Vista thing!".

A bit of discussion revealed that she has both read and been told about just how bad Vista is. She had a lot of objections at hand, ready to go. She had been told that Vista was going to prevent her copying images, regardless of their origin. And that Vista would not support her games, scanner or printers. Plus, she had been informed that she would have to learn everything about using her computer all over again.

With such ingrained opposition, the easy course would be to simply purchase a computer equipped with Windows XP, or transfer her to a Mac. (There is no way she would go with Linux.) Instead, her nephew, my friend, simply lent her a laptop with Vista installed. We set her up a user account, installed her games and the appropriate drivers. Only the scanner required a download. The rest were already part of Vista. And we put all her data on it, as well.

A few days use turned her into a Vista enthusiast. The clincher was probably something others won't experience in comparison to their XP machines; greater stability. Her XP computer was never all that stable and would crash on occasion. (My friend and I worked on this and in the end attributed the problems to hardware, rather than the operating system or software. The machine would crash occasionally running a Linux live CD, too.) The Vista laptop, and indeed her new computer, both with Home Premium installed, are more stable than her XP machine was.

So she was converted. The new machine was duly installed and she is very, very happy with it. And features we never thought to point out to her because we take them for granted, like the USB and audio ports on the front of the machine, delight her, as well. It really is a nice computer with it's Core Duo processor and plenty of system memory (2 GB).

But Vista labors under it's bad reputation, partly undeserved though it is, and will for all it's life. For some users, Vista really is not a good thing. For others, meaning almost all users, it is completely adequate and, indeed, just what is needed. I think this applies to it's heightened security functions, more than anything else. One can argue just how secure Vista is, but there is no doubt at all it is more secure than it's predecessor.

Writers and other commentators still pile it on, though. Not just in the tech press, either. The criticism makes it into mainstream news, too. Vista is bad in this way. Vista is bad in some other way. It seems to never end. Frankly, I don't think Vista can recover. Given that, I wonder if the best thing Microsoft can do is to simply move on and bring out a demonstrably new operating system as soon as humanly possible. One with a new and clean reputation.

Jack

Faxing in OpenOffice.org

After having questions in chat about Faxing from OpenOffice, I found this article, thought I should pass it along.

Intel's Silverthorne Unveiled: Detailing Baby Centrino

We have mentioned Intel's "Silverthorne" platform (chipset and processor together) in connection with a couple products in the last two shows. Here, in all it's radiant glory is AnandTech's take on how it works and what it means. A somewhat geeky article, but it's important to wade through this one. That's because Silverthorne is as likely to be the next Centrino as not and, frankly, it raises the bar for low-power consumption platforms intended for devices larger than phones and smaller than notebook computers.

Frankly, I think this one is very cool and would fit right into my life as the heart of a UMPC or similar device.

Jack