Keeping files synchronised across different PCs is, frankly, a pain in the rump. You work on a document at home over the weekend, only to forget to drop it on a USB stick before Monday morning, and end up missing a deadline. Or you’ve got photo libraries stored on two different home PCs, with different albums in each.
Microsoft’sLive Mesh and online start-upDropbox have come up with similar answers to this problem, offering online services that keep your files in synch across multiple PCs. Both are at the invite-only test phase at present, but we’ve wormed out way into the private betas. Here’s how they compare. Read the rest of this entry »
As I said in my recent review, the launch of Acrobat 9 is the most important release in years. Naturally most of the attention has been on the incorporation of the Flash player into the Adobe Reader with all that this means in terms of media handling and interactivity.
However it’s possible that the associated launch of Acrobat.com will eventually prove even more significant.
Google’s motto may be “do no evil”, but the company can do no wrong in the eyes of tech investors and the mainsteam media. However, I suspect the day it decided to lavish some of its pocket money on YouTube may prove to be one of the biggest mistakes the company ever makes.
The $1.65 billion it paid for YouTube may be small beans to the search monolith, but Google has publicly admitted that it can’t find a way to turn a profit from the millions of eyeballs that are watching video on its site every day. Hosting terabyte upon terabyte of video doesn’t come cheaply. Charging users to watch videos is a non-starter, so either Google finds a way to make YouTube more attractive to advertisers, or it’s going to continue to bleed money.
I’ve been surrounded for the past few weeks by a veritable herd of tiny computers for a forthcoming Labs test - nine of them, to be precise - but I wasn’t prepared for what I was going to see when I searched for the World’s Smallest PC. I didn’t really expect anything - idle curiousity rather than genuine expectation drove me to Google - but I was delighted to stumble onto the Space Cube.
Remarkably, it’s an entire PC inside a chassis that’s 2 x 2 x 2in square. The Space Cube runs Linux and packs in a remarkable amount of hardware for such a small PC: a 300MHz processor, 64MB of SDRAM and a 16MB flash hard disk.
The ingenious design stretches to the numerous ports that are included around the case: a VGA output, USB socket - plug in a hub and you’ll be granted plenty of instant connectivity - and 100MB/s RJ45 Ethernet. There’s even a card reader and audio jacks.
The price of $325, though, is pretty elementary. A quick web surf reveals that it’s never been sold outside of Japan, and my email to the Shimafuji Corporation has, so far, fallen on deaf ears - so they’ll be no benchmark results any time soon, unfortunately.
There’s no denying that it’s a great little bit of kit, though - who needs a laptop and a bag when you can have a PC in your pocket?
I’ve written columns in the past bemoaning the slow death of the British PC industry. Now the ravens really are fleeing the Tower, with the news that Alan Sugar (or Suralan to The Apprentice generation) has resigned as chairman of Amstrad, after selling out to Sky last year.
To be fair, Sugar hasn’t really been a prominent figure in the PC industry for well over a decade. Issue 1 of PC Pro from November 1994 gave his Amstrad PC9486 a measly two stars, which I’m sure historians will mark as the beginning of the end for the company as a force in British computing.
Yet, I’ve still got a soft spot for the grouchy old sod, mainly because of the brilliant Amstrad NC200 laptop that saw me through university. This was the Eee PC of its day - ultraportable, easy-to-use, and far cheaper than any Windows laptop of its era. It even came with a soft faux-leather wallet, which was the clincher for me.
This is less of an innovation and more of a “why the hell has it taken so long” moment, but I just had a wonderful online banking experience. Yes, I know, I should get out more.
I switched banks after reading our Online Banks Exposed feature a few months back, and since then I’ve had the hassle of transferring money back and forth between old and new accounts as various direct debits and bill payments came out of both before they were all switched across.
Now, I read a story back in May about online banks reducing the ludicrous three working day transaction period to a mere two hours, but I hadn’t actually noticed this happening as of yet. Those three days were an unfortunate necessity that apparently existed purely to gift the banks three days worth of interest while the currency was “in limbo”. Read the rest of this entry »
The carriages on my daily commute to Sussex and back are so well sound-proofed that you can hear a fly scratching its ear in the driver’s cabin. So when a repetitive tapping noise interrupted my gentle snooze on the way home last night, I set about immediately locating the culprit.
I was expecting it to be an inconsiderate iPod owner tapping away to the beat. In fact, it was another Apple product to blame - the MacBook Air.
The chap in the row opposite was rattling out a document, with his laptop hanging precariously over the edge of the train table, so as not to steal any more than half of the available table space (the unwritten rule of laptop etiquette on the Brighton line).
I tried out a TomTom for the first time at the weekend. I realise I’m a bit behind the curve on this one, but like many Londoners I don’t own a car (that’s my girlfriend’s Clio in the picture), and there doesn’t yet seem to be a bike-friendly GPS system that has all the bells and whistles I’d want.
The device actually did a lot more than I’d expected. Naturally, it directed me to my destination, but it also provided a handy reminder of local speed limits, and beeped alarmingly whenever I approached a speed camera. It also unnerved me a few times by mistaking bends in the road for turnings, but mostly it was a very positive experience.
Following Barry’s post yesterday, which revealed how children as young as eleven were buying booze using debit cards, comes news that kids in Japan are using photographs of Bruce Willis to trick facial-recognition age-verification systems on cigarette vending machines.
That’s incredibly smart, apart from the whole smoking bit. More details here.
I had a parental visit at the weekend, and we decided to take in some of the tourist sites around the capital. On Sunday the itinerary involved a quick spin on the London Eye – it does actually move much faster than it appears to from my office window - followed by a gig in Hyde Park.
To the embarrassment of my family I had items from my bag confiscated at both.
This often happens to me, as an inveterate tinkerer and technology hoarder; bike parts taken by Science Museum staff, USB drives and mobile phones at a laptop manufacturer’s design centre. It’s no big deal to me, as long as it’s justified.
On the Eye it was a small toolkit I carry in case my bike falls to pieces. Fair enough; the spanner could be used as a weapon, perhaps, or to undo the capsule and send it plunging into the Thames. At the concert, though, it was my DSLR which was flagged up, as I was told that on the second day of the two-day event, staff had been told to stop “big cameras” from entering. This has been happening more and more in the last year or two.
