Stop picking on Steve Ballmer

Wednesday, May 28th, 2008

I like Steve Ballmer. In fact, I struggle to understand how you can’t.

There’s something unscripted about him that’s uniquely entertaining. Watching him answer a question from the public is like watching a HGV driver trying to reverse out of a cul-de-sac. It’s a twenty minute event, filled with aborted attempts, sudden U-turns and near misses. Nineteen minutes of utter, exasperating futility followed by one minute of triumph when he eventually stumbles upon the way out. And here’s the thing – the more of it I watch, the more I find myself rooting for him. It’s endearing, and all the more so after being subjected to a number of smooth talking PR gurus who’ve perfected the art of speaking without saying anything at all.

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Windows 7: 582 days and counting

Wednesday, May 28th, 2008

Microsoft has broken its vow of silence over Windows 7, with Steve Ballmer claiming that the new operating system will arrive by “late 2009.” Read our news story to find out what’s coming in Windows 7 here.

That gives Mr B and the Microsoft engineers precisely 582 days (thank you Online Conversion.com) to get the operating system out of the door, or once again face ridicule for slipping deadlines.

On such a tight deadline (Vista took six years, remember) it’s patently obvious Microsoft isn’t ripping up Vista and starting again. Although the Vista Team Blog claims Windows 7 is a “major release”, it also reveals that the “the long-term architectural investments we introduced in Windows Vista and then refined for Windows Vista SP1 and Windows Server 2008 will carry forward in Windows 7.” There will be no new kernel either, with Microsoft even claiming that any hardware capable of running Vista will work fine with Windows 7.

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More keys = higher productivity?

Wednesday, May 28th, 2008

My keyboard died this morning, drowned in coffee. It wasn’t entirely my fault; my coordination has never been at its best when covering the early morning shift on the news desk.

I won’t miss it, though, as in its place now sits a Logitech wireless behemoth covered with, to quote Hunter S. Thompson upon sitting behind the wheel of a Cadillac Coupe de Ville, “esoteric lights and dials and meters that I will never understand.”
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Why cars and PCs are a potent mix

Monday, May 26th, 2008

There are times in my life when I feel that I’m not quite dedicated enough to the computing cause, and this weekend was one of those times. I found myself in a field around five miles away from Sleaford in Lincolnshire, and it’s fair to say my fellow field dwellers outgeeked me – because they’d all taken the time and effort to fit PCs into their cars.

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A little learning is a dang’rous thing

Saturday, May 24th, 2008

You’re probably getting sick of hearing about the GCSE paper in ICT that my colleagues and I tried last week. But no one’s yet mentioned a particular question which I think is the very worst I’ve ever seen in an exam. (more…)

Small but beautiful?

Friday, May 23rd, 2008

Just arrived at the PC Pro offices is the small but perfectly formed Transtec Senyo mini desktop PC. Unlike the MSI Titan David Bayon reviewed earlier in the week, which looked nice, but seriously underwhelmed when it came to the details, this one looks as if it has more of a chance.

It has a proper slot-loading DVD writer, a DVI output on the rear plus a host of other useful ports (including mini FireWire and three USB ports plus an SD, MMC and Memory Stick card reader).

More to the point, it’s notable for it’s lack of irritatingly pointless flaps. Check the reviews section next week for full a appraisal.

Back to school with a bump

Friday, May 23rd, 2008

We’ve all read the stories over the years about exams getting easier, but I always just assumed they were Daily Mail rabble-rousing rubbish. But having sat a GCSE ICT exam for myself – that’s an exam intended to tax 16 year-olds by the way – I can safely say they’re getting, if anything, more difficult. And not in a good way.

As my rather embarrassing performance demonstrates, actual IT understanding didn’t seem to play a huge part in the marking of the paper. On questions requiring written answers, you could have written an entire page of sound argument, but if you didn’t include the precise terms or points in the mark scheme, you lost the mark.

In fact, the whole experience went a long way to convincing me of a common argument: that today’s exams are largely based around training pupils to memorise the particular key facts they’re expected to know.

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What rights do I have to my photos? #!

Friday, May 23rd, 2008

Recently there’s been a lot of excitement about Adobe’s launch of a free online version of Photoshop, Photoshop Express. However the biggest squeals weren’t of delight and you only have to take a look at the original Terms and Conditions to see why…

8. Use of Your Content. Adobe does not claim ownership of Your Content. However, with respect to Your Content that you submit or make available for inclusion on publicly accessible areas of the Services, you grant Adobe a worldwide, royalty-free, nonexclusive, perpetual, irrevocable, and fully sublicensable license to use, distribute, derive revenue or other remuneration from, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, publicly perform and publicly display such Content (in whole or in part) and to incorporate such Content into other Materials or works in any format or medium now known or later developed.

You don’t have to be a lawyer to see that basically you were handing over your all rights as originator and giving Adobe free rein to make money from your photos however it saw fit!

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Nvidia’s confused GPUs

Friday, May 23rd, 2008

Nvidia aren’t known for their demure and shy antics, so I wasn’t surprised at a press briefing a few weeks ago when they launched an attack on what some quarters – namely Intel with their new Larrabee GPU – who have identified ray-tracing as the future of graphics.

They spent a great deal of time assuring the assembled members of the IT press that it was a waste of time – every game since before the turn of the Millennium (indeed, since the demise of voxels) because every game is made using polygons and that developers wouldn’t want to alter their techniques and systems around a new, somewhat experimental technology.

So, why have Nvidia gone and bought a ray-tracing company?

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Who’s top of the PC Pro class?

Friday, May 23rd, 2008

As you may have read from our news story on the appalling state of GCSE IT examinations, five of the PC Pro team has sat the same ICT GCSE Higher paper that thousands of teenagers would have sweated over last summer.

So how did our team of so-called experts do?

Top of the class was deputy editor, David Fearon, who scored a lofty 70 out of 80 – which in this day and age is probably enough to land him a scholarship at Oxford, let alone an A*. David only let himself down on his definitions of testing, extreme data and erroneous data – although given the ridiculously prescriptive marking scheme, we believe it was the answers that were erroneous, rather than David.

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