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Under the hood of HP Z series workstations
At a launch event in Los Angeles last week, HP gave journalists an opportunity to go under the hood of its new Z Workstation series, which were officially unveiled on Monday.
The Z400, Z600 and Z800 models were designed by BMW Designworks to have a sleek look and clean lines, and all three feature Intel Nehalem processors.
Terry Pilsner, vice president of HP Workstation R&D, said the new line has been designed to be energy efficient and easy to pull apart to service. He opened up the machine to demonstrate how parts such as the graphics cards, fan unit and power supply can be removed without having to disconnect lots of cables.
"There's a green light at the back of the supply. When you plug it into an AC outlet, the light comes on to tell you if the power supply is good or bad," Pilsner said. "If the green light doesn't come on, we can get a replacement out within 24 hours."
The power supply unit has also been redesigned for better cool air distribution.
"With Nehalem, you have two processors and the memory is right next to them, it's a very close design requirement," said Pilsner. "With one processor in front of the other, if you let normal airflow happen hot air would blow on the second one from the front one and cause an imbalance." In response, the power supply has been designed to ensure fresh air flows over the first processor and onto the second one through the column design.
HP was also keen to play up the environmental features of the new workstations line. The Z400 and Z800 will both offer a liquid cooling option from this summer (this won't be available in the Z600 due to space constraints) while Pilsner said the design is 90 per cent recyclable and offers 85 per cent efficiency. "The instructions have been etched onto the metal to eliminate plastic labels" he added. "They're also halogen and lead-free processors with the Intel components."
HP also has plans to expand the upgraded workstation line with advanced AMD chips, with the launch of its first 12-core model based on an AMD processor slated for this summer. Future models will also include a 64GB Intel Solid State Drive.
First Look: Internet Explorer 8
The latest version of Microsoft's Internet Explorer is now available to download, and I've been taking a look at the newly released browser.
Overall, IE8 is a welcome improvement over previous Microsoft browsers, and I believe it is on a par with rivals such as FireFox and Safari in terms of features, performance and ease of use. This may not be enough to tempt back users who have defected to FireFox over the last few years, but it is definitely worth the upgrade for those still using older versions of IE.
The major feature of IE8 is its greater adherence to standards such as HTML, CSS and JavaScript. The upside of this is that it drives greater Web interoperability, but it may cause problems with web content designed around the quirks found in earlier versions of IE.
Unlike an earlier review of an IE8 beta release, I had few problems with content not displaying in IE8. In fact, I found it difficult to locate any sites that showed any problems at all. Of those that showed issues, almost all were web-based applications rather than public-facing web sites, suggesting that businesses are the most likely to require IE8's Compatibility View that displays pages as they would appear in IE7. Pages that did have problems with IE8 seemed to work fine when Compatibility View was activated.
IE8 is also not lacking in terms of performance, with no perceptible difference in page load times between it and FireFox. Microsoft itself disclosed figures last week that showed any differences between the three top browsers are measured in fractions of a second.
New in IE8 are Accelerators and Web Slices, both of which are useful but not must-have features.
Accelerators provide links to functions when you highlight text on a page. By default, IE includes Accelerators to show a pop-up map from an address, or a translation (see screenshot), or to create an email or blog entry. Others are available online from the "Get More Add-ons" button on the toolbar.
Web Slices provide a direct link to web content from the Favourites bar, akin to the way RSS feeds work. Examples include an eBay web slice that shows auctions you are interested in and alerts you to changes in bids. However, many of the currently available slices are very US-centric, such as those providing weather or traffic alerts, but only for US cities.
Like Safari and Firefox, IE8 now provides a "private" browsing mode, InPrivate Browsing. Selecting this from the Safety button launches a new browser window with InPrivate mode enabled, to avoid confusion with any pages you might already have open. IE does not retain any browsing history for sites visited in this mode, which ends when the user closes the new window.
This will be useful for hiding login information if you need to access your email via a publicly access computer, for example, but users should be aware that it does not ensure complete privacy. In a corporate environment, the internet gateway will likely have a record of all web sites visited, for example.
IE8 also helps privacy through InPrivate Filtering (called InPrivate Blocking in the beta releases), which gives users some control over third-party content such as adverts that might be used to track them. IE examines such content as the user browses sites, and if ten or more sites load the same resource, it appears on a list from which users can block it, should they choose.
Perhaps the most useful security features are the SmartScreen Filter and Cross-Site Scripting Filter. The first is an enhanced anti-phishing filter that analyses pages for suspected malicious content, as well as checking the web address against a blacklist.
The Cross-Site Scripting Filter is designed to detect code that has been inserted into a genuine web site in order to steal information such as credentials, and disable it. Microsoft has a demo that shows how this works, but whether it will work as well in a real situation remains to be seen.
The size of the install file you need to download for IE8 depends upon the platform, with the Windows XP version weighing in at 16MB. The installer checks for any new patches or updates, and a reboot is required after installation is complete.
Hello, can you hear me?
I've often fancied one of those natty little Bluetooth headsets that let you take a call while your phone is tucked out of harm's way in your bag or pocket, but there are such a confusing array of these that I've never got around to actually settling on one and buying it.
This week, one of my colleagues solved the problem by offering me one he had been given free by a vendor. I won't name the model in question, but I can't say I'm impressed with the device at all, and I'm now glad I didn't waste any of my own money.
It isn't that the device doesn't work. I had no trouble pairing it up with my mobile phone, after which the handset always diverted audio to the headset whenever the latter was switched on.
No, the problem is that nobody can hear a blasted word I'm saying if I use it to make a call.
The headset is one of those fashionably tiny devices that clips comfortably over your ear, but is so small that the microphone part is actually resting against your cheek. An awful lot of these devices share a similar design, but placing the pickup so far away from your mouth is an obvious flaw, surely?
Whenever I tested the headset to make or receive calls, the person at the far end either couldn't hear me at all, or said it sounded like I was speaking to them from the middle of a boiler room.
Has anyone out there had better luck with these devices, or can recommend one that actually works?
Using Microsoft's My Phone service
Microsoft's recently unveiled My Phone service for synchronising smartphone content with a web-based storage site is still officially in beta, but the company has allowed me access to test it out.
Generally, I'm quite pleased with the service, but there is definitely room for lots of improvement. As Microsoft is garnering feedback during the beta phase, it is quite possible that many issues will be ironed out before it is opened up for broader use.
As reported in the news here, My Phone lets you synchronise various types of content from your phone up to the web site. This includes contacts, calendar and task entries, but also text messages, documents, photos, videos and music.
Each of these categories can be selected individually by checking a box. You can also synchronise content from Flash storage cards.
Once your content has been backed up online, you can access it from a PC by logging into the My Phone web site, potentially making it much easier to get photos off your phone than mucking about with direct sync cables.
Synchronisation is also bi-directional, so you can upload a file to the web site from your PC, and it will be sent to your phone the next time you synchronise - handy for sending across Word documents and such for viewing while on the move later.
This should also allow you to re-load all the content you want if you get a new handset - providing it is also Windows Mobile - but I haven't tested this out.
On the downside, synchronisation seems to take a long time, not just on the first run when all your selected content gets uploaded, but also on subsequent runs when very little has changed. One synchronisation session took close to ten minutes, even when I switched to using the Wi-Fi interface of my handset instead of the cellular HSDPA connection.
You can continue to make calls and use your handset for other purposes while synchronisation takes place in the background, but if you lose the wireless signal for any reason, My Phone simply stops and does not appear to retry without manual intervention.
You can set synchronisation to happen on a daily or weekly schedule, or keep it on manual. Unless you have a generous bandwidth allowance from your mobile operator, manual synchronisation is generally recommended.
I would also like to see more fine-grained selection of content to synchronise. For example, all my photos are stored on a Micro SD Flash card, but I can't set My Phone to synchronise photos only from there. This means that the entire set of sample images that came pre-loaded on the handset also got synchronised up to the web site, even though I don't want these.
Another drawback is that when you choose to synchronise contacts, My Phone only includes names from the Outlook contact list and not any of those stored on the phone SIM itself. This means you are likely to lose some contacts if your phone should go missing, unless you use another method of backing these up.
Access to the online content from a PC browser is also fairly basic at present. For example, while you can view a slide show of all uploaded photos, there is no facility to rotate images you might have captured by rotating the handset sideways to get a landscape shot. There does not seem to be a way to select more than one image at a time to download to your PC, either, which makes this a laborious process.
However, I should point out the My Phone is still in beta, and is not expected to be broadly available until early Q4 2009, according to Microsoft, so much could change between now and then.
My Phone will eventually come pre-installed in Windows Mobile 6.5, but users with Windows Mobile 6 or 6.1 handsets can download and install it. I am currently trying it out on an HTC S730 handset, which is based on Windows Mobile 6.
The client itself is a 560kB download and unpacks several files, one of which is a runtime of just over 700kB in size. Microsoft recently pushed out an updated version, which was a download of exactly the same size.
You need a Windows Live ID in order to login to use My Phone. If you have a Hotmail account, then this is your email address.
