WinHEC: What’s the opposite of liveblogging?

I was really looking forward to liveblogging Bill Gates’ keynote address at WinHEC today. I’m sure a few other folks were as well. But a funny thing happened when I made it into the exhibit hall. Someone had decided to (1) Disable Wi-Fi in the exhibit hall (but not announce it – it’s amusing to watch people try every possible setting in the Windows XP wireless dialog box); (2) Squeeze the media (print and online) into a specially reserved section without any tables (why do you think they call them laptops?); (3) Provide no power outlets (thus giving my old Toshiba a real-world stress test).

So, you don’t get the benefit of my real-time analysis of BillG’s keynote, and instead you have to put up with my after-the-fact pontificating based on notes I wrote in the dark until my battery died with a half-hour to go. The last 30 minutes was just a blur.

It was a low-energy keynote, without a clever, self-effacing video clip like the ones that have become a hallmark of Gates appearances in recent years. The geeky audience got an appropriately geeky talk from the Alpha Geek, who had (in classic Microsoft style) three key messages to pass along:

Windows for 64–bit platforms is here now. But it will be a while before it lands on your desktop. Windows XP 64–Bit Edition is a start, but it will be another year before 64–bit desktop PCs reach the mainstream and several more years before the 64–bit drivers and apps reach critical mass.
Longhorn! Longhorn! Longhorn! Honest, this is not going to be Windows XP Service Pack 3. In fact, Gates got a big laugh when he said, after a particularly impressive Longhorn demo (and I’m paraphrasing), “Wow, every time I see one of these demos I ask why we can’t ship this right away.” Heh. I’ll have a lot more to say about Longhorn in a later post.
All sorts of surprising new PC form factors are on the way. Tiny tablets. Well-connected media devices. Killer color printers (no kidding). All in the Longhorn timeframe, of course. I want one of everything.

Bonus geek content: The Longhorn demos were using build 5060. If you downloaded anything older via BitTorrent, you are so last week

(Good news: This afternoon’s sessions, including a fascinating presentation on new hardware designs, were held in rooms with tables! Bad news: Still no power strips. So I had to drag a chair to the back of the room, next to a power outlet, and blog from long distance. Good news: My battery is back up to 70% charge.)

Bloggers’ lunch tomorrow at Tulio. Don’t expect me to liveblog it.

Stay tuned.

Reporting from WinHEC 2005

I’m here in Seattle at the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference, where Microsoft is laying out its vision of what sort of technology will be running your office and living room in the coming years.

There’s lots of good stuff, including some nicely detailed looks at Longhorn. I’d be sharing all sorts of details with you, except that the rocket scientists who set up the conference facilities didn’t set up these facilities to be blogger-friendly.

Stay tuned. I’ll be passing along details soon enough.

The $10,000 PC: Is this thing gold-plated?

Ars Technica has just unleashed their April 2005 Ars System Guide. Boring? I don’t think so.

We are not concerned with what you should be buying your 500-person company for your next mass upgrade. These are the systems that we, your fellow enthusiasts, either have, plan to have, or would love desperately to have. 🙂 We know how you think, ’cause we think that way, too.

Now, when recommending products, you’ve got to take two main factors into account: available funds and performance. Some lucky bastards have unlimited funds; some have to pinch every penny. Most of us are somewhere in between. So, when you say something is the “best thing out there,” it’s important to ask, “Best for whom?” In recognition of this fact, our recommendations come in the form of three hypothetical computers.

At the top, there’s the God Box. This is for the guy who has just won the lottery, or whose company is funding the purchase (same thing). Of course, this doesn’t imply adding stuff for the hell of it. Even on this spec, we don’t want to be wasting money. It will be, however, generally beyond the range of mere mortals.

Uh, yeah. Before you get too attached to this machine, be aware that it runs $10,661.15, not including shipping and handling. Yowzah! The Budget Box, on the other hand, checks in at a very reasonable $804.95, sans operating system. You can probably find something between those two extremes.

(Via jkOnTheRun)

Overclocking is bad for your PC’s health

Microsoft’s Raymond Chen (whose epitaph will no doubt include the words, “developer of the original Tweak UI utility for Windows”) put up a fascinating post earlier this week. It’s worth reading for two reasons. First, it details how Microsoft engineers really do use the data you submit when your Windows computer crashes. Second, it highlights a problem that might be affecting you right now:

Since the failure rate for this particular error was comparatively high (certainly higher than the one or two I was getting for the failures I was looking at), he requested that the next ten people to encounter this error be given the opportunity to leave their email address and telephone number so that he could call them and ask follow-up questions. Some time later, he got word that ten people took him up on this offer, and he sent each of them e-mail asking them various questions about their hardware configurations, including whether they were overclocking.

Five people responded saying, “Oh, yes, I’m overclocking. Is that a problem?”

The other half said, “What’s overclocking?” He called them and walked them through some configuration information and was able to conclude that they were indeed all overclocked. But these people were not overclocking on purpose. The computer was already overclocked when they bought it. These “stealth overclocked” computers came from small, independent “Bob’s Computer Store”-type shops, not from one of the major computer manufacturers or retailers.

For both groups, he suggested that they stop overclocking or at least not overclock as aggressively. And in all cases, the people reported that their computer that used to crash regularly now runs smoothly.

I’ve done my fair share of overclocking through the years, but currently I’m running every single computer I own (five, at the moment) at its rated speed. It helps that I’m not a gamer – that’s the group that, in my experience, is most fanatical about squeezing performance out of a PC, even at the expense of stability. And most online communities dedicated to hardware tweaks for hardcore gamers spend a lot of time explaining how to overclock to the point where your computer doesn’t crash. You can push it up a notch at a time until it fails, and then back off. Or you can start high, crash, and back down a notch at a time until the crashes stop.

Either way, you’ve created an environment in which some degree of instability is practically guaranteed. If you have mysterious performance problems or compatibility issues, anything short of a blue screen, can you safely say that the hardware isn’t the problem?

Oh, and if I bought a computer from someone who had overclocked it without my knowledge, I would be as mad as hell. That’s fraud, plain and simple. As Raymond says, “There’s a lot of overclocking out there, and it makes Windows look bad.” Unnecessarily, I might add.

Creative’s powerful portable speakers

Last summer, I ran across a deal on the Creative TravelSound MP3 portable speaker system and, on an impulse, I bought one. It arrived via UPS a few days later, and I promptly set the box aside. Over the next few months, I took a few short trips, but never felt the motivation to throw this little unit into my traveling bag.

For this week’s trip to Redmond, I decided to give these little speakers a shot. I had read a lot of reviews before clicking the Buy button, and the consensus was overwhelmingly positive, but I was still skeptical. I used the short cable (included) to connect the headphone output of my MP3 player to the speaker’s inputs and cranked it up. What a treat! The sound is excellent for such a small package. It’s not going to replace my 5.1 surround system, but it’s more than good enough for traveling, and I’m finally able to listen to a little music while I catch up on e-mail in a hotel room instead of settling for whatever happens to be on TV. It has 32MB of flash memory as well, so it can hold a few songs and work without an external sound source. It also records voice, so I could use it for interviews if necessary.

Creative_mp3_spkrs

These speakers are designed to run on 4 AA batteries, and Creative claims that they’ll play for 35 hours when they’re plugged into an external sound source. I decided not to buy the external power supply, because I don’t want to have to carry yet another AC adapter in my travel bag. Surprise! The adapter for my iRiver H120 music player works perfectly with these speakers, and it’s already in my bag. Connect power to the speakers for playback, and then switch the cable to the H120 to recharge. Perfect.

At nearly $90 through Amazon.com, this isn’t a bargain, but if you spend a lot of time on the road, you might be willing to pay the price. I paid roughly half that price, which was great for this unit. If all you want is playback, look at the Creative TravelSound 200, which appears to be the same speaker unit minus the MP3 player and voice recorder. At $42 with free shipping, I’d recommend it for any frequent traveler with a music player.

More stuff I saw at DEMO

Here are a few interesting products I saw yesterday at DEMO.

Cloudmark (formerly SpamNet) showed off a browser add-on called SafetyBar for Internet Explorer. It’s a logical extension of their SafetyBar for Outlook and Outlook Express, which uses a community-based filtering system to very effectively block spam and viruses. The idea behind the SafetyBar for IE is simple: You install the add-in, which puts a new toolbar in the IE window (sorry, this product doesn’t work with Firefox). Every time you visit a Web site you can rate it as safe or unsafe. Meanwhile, an entire community of other Cloudmark users are doing the same. If you receive an e-mail with a link to a Web site that’s “phishing” for personal information, chances are the site has already been rated unsafe, which means you’ll see a warning message when you click the link. My take? It’s still a reactive process. This sort of checking should be done at the ISP level, and it shouldn’t be up to the user to install yet another piece of security software. I’m also concerned that the overhead of checking URLs against the Cloudmark database will slow down browsing.

Photoleap showed off a very interesting free application that solves some of the inherent problems with sharing digital photos. E-mail is a terrible way to share photos, especially hi-res copies of multiple images. Online services add an unnecessary layer of complexity. Photoleap (available in Windows and Mac versions) lets you open what looks like an ordinary e-mail window and drag in a bunch of photos. You add the recipients’ addresses and your message and click Send. The program converts the photos into thumbnails and sends a link to the recipient, who can then install Photoleap to pick up the full assortment of pictures you sent. I definitely want to try this one out. The free version limits photos to 2 megapixels and 25 photos per message and also displays ads in a sidebar. If you want to send or receive larger photos or send more than 25 at a time (and get rid of those pesky ads), pay $29 for the Plus version. You can try the Plus version free for 30 days.

Photoleap

Teleo has a new voice-over-IP service that gives you a personal phone number for $4.95 a month and the opportunity to make free PC-to-PC calls and receive unlimited calls from anyone (with or without a PC) or send calls to any number (including land lines) for a pretty low cost. Generally, the cost was very low – in the 2–cents-a-minute range for outbound calls from the U.S. to land lines in Europe. I haven’t been tempted by the Skype hype, but this one sounds like a tremendous deal. (Update: Stuart Henshall has a longer evaluation of Teleo and calls it “a real winner.” I found the link via his Skype Journal.)

I’ll have more later today.

More thoughts on DEMO

Dwight Silverman of the Houston Chronicle has resurrected his blog at the Houston Chronicle. That’s good news! (Dwight, where’s the RSS feed?) In one of his first posts, he points out that I was at Demo yesterday but not updating as frequently as he wishes I would have.

I plead not guilty by reason of strategy. Yes, I could have sat in the front row with Jason and Marc and Scoble and Buzz and the rest of the live-blogging crew, but frankly they were doing a better job than I could dream of doing. If you wanted the play by play, Blogging Demo was the place to go, which was why I pointed to it. (And now, I presume, the domain gathers dust until the next DEMO conference, in the fall?)

Anyway, the point of this site is to try to wrap some context around what I saw the past few days. I’ll pass along my impressions of a few products that caught my eye, but I’ll also try to pull together the larger lessons of the conference.

A new Media Center contender?

Wired News has a solid story on the DEMO conference: Six Minutes to Stand Out.

Reporter Daniel Terdiman singled out one company that also impressed me with its six-minute presentation:

…cable TV companies may find themselves threatened by Mediabolic, whose network media player is designed to give TV viewers a previously unavailable level of personal control.

The media player allows users to run custom-designed web-based applications on their TV. For example, users can get instant eBay auction alerts, view their Netflix queues, play their Live365 music collections or any of hundreds of other applications — all on their TV.

Amazingly, all of their applications looked exactly like Windows XP Media Center Edition. In fact, several portions of their demo used add-ins that are running on my Media Center PC. It’s not a program you can buy and use to build your own Media Center. Instead, they’re selling a development platform that hardware companies can adopt. We’ll see how much interest they can muster.

Demo details

Jason, Marc, and the rest of the Weblogs,Inc. team are Blogging DEMO. I spent half of Monday at the show and will spend all of Tuesday. It’s an eclectic mix of products, most of them still under development and some of which might never see the light of day. But there’s no doubt that a few of the products I saw today will be huge hits in the next year or two.

I loved Vlog It.from Serious Magic. This is a video production tool that lets you create your own teleprompter, add special effects, and even use blue screen SFX to create the illusion that you’re broadcasting live from somewhere other than your cramped and cluttered home office. I usually scoff at the idea of homemade videos on the Internet, but this one convinced me that even I could do it and that you might actually want to watch it!

Motorola could have done without the model Hummer for their demo of iRadio, but the idea of having access to hundreds of channels of digital radio accessible in my car or on the phone sounds cool. I have no idea how this works, and I wonder how this differs from the iRadio announcements the same company made in 2000 and 2001.

In the Demo Pavilion, I saw an Outlook add-in called Outboxer that looked pretty sharp. If I ran a big corporation (or a little investment company), I’d look seriously at this utility, which helps prevent employees from sending out e-mail messages that contain inappropriate content or break Federal regulations like Sarbanes-Oxley.

And I would dearly love to replace my external USB drives with a Mirra storage device, which would simplify the task of getting all my data backed up effortlessly.

I’ll be gone all day Tuesday, so look for more on Wednesday.

Indestructible notebooks

Scoble experiences what we all dread:

I pulled my backpack out of the car, flipped it over my shoulder (I hadn’t yet had my coffee) and I heard a sound that I had never heard before. Sounded like metal or glass sliding along concrete.

I knew without looking what it was. My Tablet PC was laying on the concrete. My heart sank. It had fallen from at least four feet onto concrete and I knew from the sound it made that it was not gonna be a good day.

Surprise! It still worked. Actually, maybe I’m not so surprised. Back in the dark ages, when I was a senior editor at the late, lamented PC Computing (later Smart Business), we used to do an annual “torture test” of notebook computers. The last one appeared in 2002, just before Ziff-Davis pulled the plug on the magazine. Marty Jerome and the PCC Labs crew devised a thorough set of tests that every unit had to go through: freezing cold (as if you had left it in the trunk overnight in Buffalo in mid-winter), extreme heat (same deal, only think Phoenix in the summer), a coffee spill on the keyboard, and of course the infamous drop test.

I remember Marty once telling me that the testers were always reluctant to push that first notebook off the drop table and watch it crash. The whole act flew against the spirit of everything they had ever learned about safeguarding a computer. But by the end of the test they were smiling and laughing, almost diabolically, as they went about their business of destroying really expensive brand-new computers.

Then, as now, the Toshibas were extremely well-engineered. I’ve got a two-year old Toshiba Tablet PC that’s still running strong. Never dropped it, though, and I hope I never do.

If you want to take a stroll down memory lane and see some of those old notebook torture test results, try this Google search. And if you want to protect your notebook, think about knitting your own laptop case.