Brian's Brain

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.

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 integrated NTSC tuner. She is, in a few words, a prime candidate for a DTV converter box. So earlier today, I finally fired up the four...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:

...Read More

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

A week ago, I shared with you my experiences two nights earlier watching the live stream of a U2 concert on YouTube. Although the band's performance at the Rose Bowl broke records with a sellout crowd of 97,014, the Akamai-aided attendance was even more mpressive...an estimated 10 million streams served.

Friday night, as a follow-up, I tuned in to a Livestream-served and Facebook-sponsored Foo Fighters live jam session. At 7PM, there were around 13,000 folks online; by 7:30PM when...Read More

Following up on yesterday's disappointing re-test of Gigle Semiconductor's HomePlug AV-plus powerline networking adapters, today's evaluation focuses on NETGEAR's XAV1004 HomePlug AV unit. Whereas the XAV101s I'm currently using are based on Intellon's (now Atheros') second-generation INT6300 chipset, the XAV1004 employs the third-generation INT6400. According to Chris Geiser, NETGEAR's powerline product line manager:

Remember Google's Linux-based Chrome O/S, which I wrote about back in early July? Well surprise surprise...the company just released a beta build, in both standalone and virtual appliance (for VMware Player or VirtualBox virtualization purposes). Hit this link and download away; share your impressions in the comments section of this blog post. Enjoy!

Followup: It was a clever ruse. Move along, folks, nothing to see here...