Over the past week I’ve been dipping into the flood of “tweets” pouring out of Tehran. And I’ve been impressed: primarily, of course, by the spirit of the Iranian people, but also by the way Twitter has kept me informed with an immediacy and rawness that mainstream media coverage can’t match. What we’re seeing in the east is a landmark event, not only in geopolitical history, but also in the history of the internet

But while Twitter has undoubtedly played a major role in events, there’s a technology which I think has been even more pivotal. I’m talking about camera-phones — such as the one that captured the last living moments of a young Iranian woman named Neda, shot dead during a protest on Saturday in the streets of Tehran. (more…)

So, after months of anticipation, Wolfram Alpha is finally here. And I don’t know about you, but I’ve found it a big disappointment.

I mean, obviously it was never going to slay Google on its first day. But after watching Stephen Wolfram’s pre-launch screencast I did believe it was at least going to be a credible alternative information source, offering authoritative and structured answers in a way no traditional search engine could aspire to.

Sadly, now Wolfram Alpha’s here it turns out that it doesn’t bloody know anything.

(more…)

Last week, Microsoft announced some details of anti-piracy measures in Windows 7. It sounds like they’re going to be slightly less intrusive than those in Vista, and probably roughly as effective.

I don’t exactly resent all this product validation stuff. I’d prefer it if Microsoft didn’t feel the need to do it; but I accept that the company has a legitimate interest in dissuading casual copying, and to me a one-time online authorisation doesn’t seem an unreasonable way of going about that.

But I do resent all the weasel words and spin that surround the process. (more…)

Yesterday I noted that our Office benchmark runs surprisingly slowly in the Windows 7 RC. Today I’ve been digging around for an explanation.

The first step was to see whether the slowdown affected all Office applications equally, or whether it manifested mainly in one application. This was easily tested with a stopwatch, and the results were pretty clear: the Access, Excel and Word tests completed in effectively identical times in Vista and Windows 7 RC… but the PowerPoint test took more than three times as long in Windows 7.

Look, here’s that same information in graph form:

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Six months ago I benchmarked an alpha version of Windows 7. And I was surprised to find that, despite the new OS feeling much more snappy than Vista, application performance was actually identical.

Now Windows 7 has progressed all the way to Release Candidate status I thought it might be interesting to repeat the experiment with the almost-final code. So again I’ve been running our real-world benchmarks, this time on a Core i7-based system with 3GB of RAM, to compare performance in Vista to both clean and upgrade installations of Windows 7 RC.

This time the results surprised me even more:

As you can see, in most of our tests a clean installation of Windows 7 RC remains on a par with Vista, or at worst a few seconds behind. It’s faintly odd that, in the Photoshop and 3D tests, the upgrade installation was slower than a clean installation of either Vista or Windows 7, but the gap isn’t big enough to fret over.

But what sticks out like a sore thumb is Windows 7 RC’s dreadful performance in our Office test. This test involves extensive number-crunching and graphing in Excel, page formatting and printing in Word, database sorting in Access and slide creation in PowerPoint. Our Windows 7 alpha completed it in an identical time to Vista, but the RC took 70% longer in a clean installation. In an upgraded environment execution time was almost doubled.

(In case you’re wondering, the Multi-app test entails running the Office, audio and Photoshop benchmarks all at the same time, so 7’s relatively poor scores here are probably just another symptom of poor Office performance.)

I don’t yet know what’s causing the slowdown. It’s not unique to this particular setup: I repeated the test on an Athlon X2 system, which is architecturally pretty damn different to a Core i7, and saw a comparable slow-down on this benchmark.

But I’m continuing to investigate, and I’ll let you know what I find.

Like many of you, I spent the weekend tinkering with the new Windows 7 release candidate. And, probably like many of you, I’ve been faintly disappointed at the complete absence of major new features, especially after we were promised “surprises”.

But I have to admit, the outlandish new “Characters” and “Scenes” themes have had me grinning like a Cheshire Cat. I never thought I’d say this, but this new edition of Windows really is beautiful.

And though it looks great out of the box, there’s one quick tweak I can recommend to make it look even better. (more…)

Pop mogul Pete Waterman is feeling hard done by. At a press conference last Thursday he announced that, in 2008, he’d made £11 in royalties for Rick Astley videos being viewed on YouTube – a sum with which he was not happy.“I get more from Radio Stoke playing Never Gonna Give You Up than I do from YouTube,” he pouted.

Well, this is an increasingly pressing issue. How should royalties work in the internet age?

Unfortunately, it rapidly became clear that Mr Waterman didn’t actually want to confront that question. What he wanted was our sympathy. (more…)

Here’s something that winds me up. This is a graph that was published to accompany a high-profile hardware launch last year. I won’t name names, but you can probably guess who produced it and what they were trying to show:

As you can see, across various tests the red bar is three, four, even six times as tall as the green one. But hold on — because that’s not an accurate reflection of relative performance. (more…)

So, as you’ve doubtless already seen, the £250 Challenge is now in its final phase. If you haven’t seen it, drop everything and rush out and buy the latest issue of PC Pro right now.

Because on pages 102-9 of issue 175 you’ll find complete specs for each of the five PCs in the challenge, along with the sorry tales of how we obtained them. You’ll also find an assessment of how well we all fared, in the judgment of our estimable editor, Mr Tim Danton.

But screw him; because the real judge, dear readers, is your good selves. Yes, ultimately it’s down to you to decide who wins the challenge. Will it be David Fearon, proud purchaser of the world’s most mediocre laptop? Seriously, they should call it the Acer Uninspired. Ha ha. (more…)

I’m just road-testing Safari 4, and I’ve come across this interesting claim on the What’s New in Safari page:

“Safari now uses Windows standard fonts, but you can choose to use Apple’s crisp anti-aliased fonts if you prefer.”

Now, if you didn’t know any better, wouldn’t you take that to mean that Windows’ fonts aren’t anti-aliased? And that this was a special way in which only Safari could improve your life? Of course, you and I do know better, but… well, the libel laws of this country restrain me from further comment. (more…)