HD-DVD Launches Tomorrow
HD-DVD is set to launch with fanfare tomorrow (Tuesday). Some Best Buy outlets have violated the mandated release date by selling Toshiba players to customers as many as four days earlier than allowed. A few threads are available on AVS Forum discussing first impressions of the technology. I won’t be contributing to the sales or hype because of draconian DRM measures built into the format. Hopefully enthusiasts have done their homework and will continue to boycott the format.
Popularity: 2% [?]
Google Calendar Launches
In the coming days, every tech pundit to amateur fanboy will be heralding tonight’s Google Calendar launch as the second coming of Chr-st. I’m skeptical. Google’s latest foray into web applications can do calendar sharing amongst a group of people, event invitations and RSVP management (think evite), mobile device event reminders, and integration with its webmail but then again so does Yahoo! Calendar. However, Yahoo! Calendar goes a step further by allowing users to locally sync with Outlook, Outlook Express, Palm OS handhelds, Pocket PC handhelds, and more. Google doesn’t.
For people in my field, it is a necessity to have access to our schedules throughout the day on our PDA/smartphones. To facilitate this, our appointments and meetings are all sent to Microsoft Outlook via Exchange which then syncs with our handheld devices. Then again, if a field requires this sort of calendaring, then solutions have already been in place long before Google Calendar ever came to be. Therefore it remains to be seen how important this feature is with the target audience of online calendars. In the mean time, users can manually export calendars from Outlook in CSV format and then import into Google Calendar. I tested this feature and it worked fine although it was a rather cumbersome process that I would abhor repeating regularly. This product is not for a serious PIM user so I’m going to reserve judgement for now until I get honest feedback from the casual webmail using masses. Regardless, we should all be prepared for lots of uninformed cheerleading over the next few days.
Popularity: 2% [?]
Firewire is slow on Windows XP SP2
Recently I dusted off my Firewire external hard drives previously hidden away in a secure closet to organize and backup about half a terabyte of data across my various computers. Spring cleaning for the binary world can be a tedious process but the end result of having clean systems is well worth it. Data transfers of this size usually take a long time to complete so I was dismayed by the realization of everything progressing slower than usual. I fired up Rainmeter and clearly saw data lumbering around 6 to 7 megabytes per second. Normally Firewire 400 and Firewire 800 drives operate in the range of 26 to 39 megabytes per second on file copy operations. I needed a solution quickly because the tedium of file transfers running many times slower than normal was unacceptable.
The problem is caused by a driver design choice introduced by Microsoft in Windows XP Service Pack 2 when dealing with Firewire 800 devices. Instead of operating at S800 speed, Firewire 800 devices incorrectly run at S100 or about 100 megabits per second. This explains the slow down so what is the solution? RME, a German firm specializing in high-end Firewire audio devices, posted a lengthy workaround involving a reversion to the SP1 Firewire driver on SP2 machines. Although this solution works, it still limited Firewire 800 devices to S400 speeds instead of S800. As of December 2004, Microsoft has released a hotfix described in Knowledge Base article KB885222 that corrects this issue. This is a very old issue and unless a consumer is actively using Firewire devices, this problem may escape new users. The hotfix worked perfectly and I successfully completed my spring cleaning.
Popularity: 2% [?]
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