Brian's Brain

Microsoft's probably feeling pretty annoyed right about now. Back in July, and just a few days before Microsoft provided business details on the cloud-based Windows Azure operating system along with rolling out the cloud-augmented Office 2010 application suite at the Worldwide Partner Conference, Google pre-empted its competitor by unveiling the cloud-centric and Linux- and Chrome browser-based Chrome O/S. And last week, shortly after Microsoft formally launched Windows Azure at the ...Read More

I'm still chewing on and otherwise digesting the information Google provided on Chrome O/S during last week's briefing, so stay tuned for the analysis I promised on Thursday. For now, I thought I'd share some initial impressions on the operating system's Vmware virtual machine image (which reportedly also runs on open-source VirtualBox) that I downloaded from Gdgt last weekend. Long-time readers already know that I've long been using Vmware Fusion to run Microsoft's Windows XP P...Read More

In past writeups, I've discussed the range-versus-frequency tradeoffs of 802.11's two ISM bands (2.4 GHz and 5 GHz), along with the more fundamental limitations of wireless versus other networking technologies. Here's some more quantification of the disquieting situation, in a testing environment different than the one I normally use (i.e. different from my Truckee, CA home office).

As I type these words, my friend's simultaneous-dual-band Apple Time Capsule is 22 feet (and one stucco wall) away from me. WiFind reports that the 5 GHz beacon (specifically channel 149, i.e. 5.745 GHz) coming from the HDD-augmented router has a 19%-of-max signal strength at my ...Read More

A sea level follow-up to my long-running high altitude 'Thin-Air ATSC' blog series, which culminated in a recent cover story...

I've reviewed a lot of products and usage scenarios over the years, with a diversity of results logged to date. But I don't know if I've ever been more disappointed than I am this evening as I write these words. Although, to be abundantly clear, I'm not near as annoyed as this guy apparently was.

My friend whose been acting as my tech guinea pig of late doesn't have any sort of subscription television service, and she owns a 25" CRT with a 4:3 aspect ratio and integrat...Read More

A few weeks back, I alerted you to a rumoured release of the Google Chrome O/S source code...a heads-up that unfortunately ended up being premature. This time, it's official. Head here for the bits. And stay tuned for my analysis after this morning's press event at Google's headquarters. For now, content yourself with a few minutes' worth of promotional video:

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Some of you might recall, as contributing blogger Steve Leibson pointed out last New Year's Eve, that Microsoft had a 'bit' of trouble with its first-generation 30GByte Zune portable multimedia players a few months back. The realtime clock driver code (reportedly obtained from Freescale) didn't correctly handle leap year transitions, thereupon hard-locking up the Zune during the New Year's Eve boot sequence...a problem that magically repaired itself one day later, and that Microsoft fixed for good via a subsequent firmware update.

The Motorola/Verizon Droid handset, which I recent...Read More

Continued from 'Analyzing Nokia's Business: Past Performance Is No Guarantee Of Future Success'...

The O/S (and broader consumer support infrastructure) lack of user-friendliness doesn't help, either. Take my friend's E71 (running the S60 v3 flavor of Symbian), for example. Her prior handset was a BlackBerry, so some of her complaints (unclear-function shift and function keys, for example) are at least somewhat understandable impacts of platform migrations. But the unit's display backlight control was ridiculously over-aggressive by default, and figuring out how to adjust it was non-intuitive. Neither she nor I could discern how to activate the unit's speakerphone, even with the assistance of Nokia's documentation, until a random key press produced the desired end result. The handset employs a ...Read More

A friend of mine (as I mentioned the other day) is currently using (and in the process, evaluating for me) the Nokia E71 handset that I previously mentioned back in March:

Nokia's also recently released a successor to the N95 handset I talked about in that same writeup:

along with a descendent of the Internet Tablets I wrote about in February 2008 (and else...Read More

Friend and colleague Peter Glaskowsky, who's held a diversity of Silicon Valley positions over the years and who I've mentioned several times before, is a senior systems architect at Intel as of the beginning of this week. One of the 'side' jobs he tackled while seeking full-time employment was author of CNET's Speeds And Feeds blog, and Peter wrapped up his work there with a five-part writeup series which I commend to your attention even if you're not doing 'pure' computer designs:

• Efficiency
• Reliabil

Back in September 2007, Apple warned iPhone owners not to jailbreak and carrier-unlock their handsets, citing the potential for permanent inoperability that might result and noting that such damage would not be covered by warranty protection. Since then, the company has regularly repeated such statements, expanding them to include the potential for security breaches to networks on which the jailbroken iPhone (or iPod touch, for that matter) was operating. And as regular readers already know, I chose to ignore those warnings a few months ago.

In retrospect, my nonchalance wasn't wise (particularly since it's reminisce...Read More

The Hackintosh (aka OSx86, i.e. running Mac OS X on generic PC hardware) phenomenon is something I've been closely following since Apple announced its move from PowerPC to x86 CPUs in mid-2005. Long-time readers might remember that a year ago I planned on converting a MSI Wind U100 netbook into a tiny, totable Mac; other more pressing obligations have delayed my actualization of that particular aspiration, and recent hardware glitches haven't helped matters. And followers of my professional Twitter feed already know that ...Read More

Two weekends ago, I noticed that my Apple TV was outputting wonky graphics from its UI, along with heavily distorted images when I attempted to play back video clips. For those of you unfamiliar with the product's hardware and software underpinnings, it's basically a headless Mac running a custom version of OS X, and with TV-friendly composite, S-Video and component video outputs (along with HDMI, which is what I use) instead of the traditional VGA. It's intended to be constantly powered on; even when you manually put it in standby mode, significant portions of the system remain fully operational. If I unplugged the Apple TV for several days, its display would be fine for an hour or few, depending on what I subsequently did with it, but sooner o...Read More

Much discourse is regularly made in the tech press regarding the single-chip integration effects of Moore's Law, and the associated extinction of companies and their products whose functions are now absorbed into competitors' hardware and software. Less commonly discussed, however, for reasons I frankly don't understand, is the effect this silicon consolidation has on the systems comprised of the ICs. Perhaps the most common all-in-one tech devices are smartphones and PCs (including low-cost netbook variants), and last week's news clearly demonstrated their 'black hole' effects on technologies in their orbit that sooner or later get sucked in. Check out this graph...Read More

One of my meal meetings at the Intel Developer Forum back in late September was with Steve Roux, Senior Strategic Business Development Manager for USB technologies at NEC Electronics. As any of you who've followed Ron Wilson's extensive technology, circuit design, IP and product coverage of recent months already knows, 'SuperSpeed' version 3 of the USB specification is looming on the horizon. And judging from both company announcements and ...Read More

Plenty of companies pitch me on new products, armed with nothing but a pile of PowerPoint foils. Inevitably, many of the promised chips never appear, which is why I make it a rule to not bother telling all of you about any IC that doesn't have accompanying pricing and sample-and-production availability statistics. And that's why I didn't write up Zenverge's ZN100 and ZN200 audio-plus-video-plus-DRM transcoders last November, when the company first gave me an over-dinner presentation on them.

Many of the other promised chips arrive late, accompanied by performance, power consumption and other specifications that drastically undershoot the supplier's preliminary promises. And that's why I was so pleasantly surprised when Zenverge invited me to meet with them again a month ago, this time at their Cupertino facilities. Here's a ...Read More