Winnipeg Experts

Acording to Tom’s Hardware:

Carlsbad (CA) – Microsoft today unveiled what the company calls surface computer, a new product that allows users to interact with content and information without a traditional mouse and keyboard.

The new device is scheduled to be unveiled at today’s D: All Things Digital conference and appears to not only show the future of touchscreen terminals, but also goes one step closer to what the company co-founder Bill Gates had outlined as a global content access system at the Consumer Electronics Show in 2006 (see image gallery.)

The “Surface” computer is a 30” table-top LCD that can be used by multiple people at the same time. Microsoft says, that the interactive display can recognize physical objects identification tags similar to bar codes, such as cellphones or chip-enhanced paintbrushes, but also enable users to engage in “hands-on” activities such as “digital finger painting” and interact with content through touch and “natural gestures”.

The company said that Surface will be available later this year, initially at locations such as restaurants, hotels, retail locations and casino resorts, where surface will be set up with a set of customizable applications, including photos, music and virtual concierge software. Harrah’s Entertainment (which owns Caesar’s Palace and the Rio casino), Starwood Hotels & Resorts and T-Mobile USA will be the first companies to install Surface systems.

Harrah’s said that it will implement Surface to allow guests to reserve tickets to an Elton John concert, review the menu at Bradley Odgen restaurant, take a tour of its Pure nightclub and book spa treatments. The “virtual concierge” will also serve as a guide to Harrah’s seven Las Vegas casinos, allowing guests to “visit” multiple venues and plan their itineraries without getting up from their table. T-Mobile retail stores planning an interaction feature with products, where cellphones can be placed on Surface where product features, prices and phone plans would appear.

“With Surface, we are creating more intuitive ways for people to interact with technology,” Microsoft chief executive officer Steve Ballmer said. “We see this as a multibillion dollar category, and we envision a time when surface computing technologies will be pervasive, from tabletops and counters to the hallway mirror. Surface is the first step in realizing that vision.”

Well I was fortunate enough to finally drop the money on a new monitor frmo Samsung called the Samsun SyncMaster 226BW. It is a 22″ LCD monitor with HDCP support I will be writing a formal review on it ASAP. All I can say is that this is one of the best monitors I’ve ever had the pleasure of working with. Here is the screenshot of my Vista desktop using the full 1680×1050!

The world’s second-ranked computer manufacturer, Dell Inc., announced on Thursday that it will begin selling its PCs at more than 3,000 Wal-Mart and Sam’s Club retail locations across the U.S. and Canada starting on June 10.

Dell also plans on adding additional retailers to the mix in the UK, Germany, France, Japan, China, and Brazil later in the year, a spokesman told Reuters.

According to a Dell representative, the computer maker will offer two exclusive Dimension desktop systems at the U.S. Wal-Mart and Sam’s Club stores, although he would not go into specifics about either. However, Roger Kay, principal at Endpoint Technologies, said the deal was a limited-time one, lasting only a week.

Wal-Mart confirmed that both systems will be sold in a “package bundle” with a sub-$700 price tag. The Canadian stores will carry different, exclusive models, the company said.

The move is an interesting one for a company that has traditionally relied on a flexible direct sales model through the Internet and phone. It was that model, in addition to selling machines at various mall kiosks, which helped the company’s market share to skyrocket in the late ’90s and left other OEMs struggling to compete on price points. Dell has made only one fray into the true retail space, opening a mall store in Dallas.

Recently, however, Dell has suffered from stagnant sales, as well as more competition from the likes of Hewlett-Packard, who recently overtook the company as the world’s number-one computer seller. HP has embraced retail, although it also offers direct sales through its Web site.

In that vein, some see Thursday’s announcement as way for the company to cautiously test some new waters without a full-fledged commitment.

“It’s absolutely a limited trial,” said Steve Baker, NPD Techworld’s director of industry analysis, with regard to the deal. “Dell is a smart company moving into selling to third parties. It’s a cultural change for them, a sea change.”

Baker added that Dell will likely be testing those retail waters for a while in order to get a feel for what the retail channel is really like, what the benefits are, and whether it will eventually hurt or help them.

“They’ve indicated to me that it’s a trial,” Kay said.

But will selling PCs through a retail chain that’s not exactly known for its high-quality electronics hurt Dell by diluting its brand? Maybe and maybe not.

“It’s not really the direction I expected them to go,” Kay said.

But, Kay said, all indications had been that Dell had been courted by virtually all of the big-name electronics retailers. “I don’t know why they went this route,” Kay said. “it could have been the deal, maybe they got really favorable terms. And Wal-Mart also has the widest distribution model.”

As of last week, Wal-Mart began expanding its in-store consumer electronics sections, increasing its stocks in brand name HDTVs, home-theater systems, Skype phones, and high-end digital cameras.

In many ways, adding Dell PCs to the mix may be a worthwhile extension to that new strategy, benefiting both companies in the end. Just as Wal-Mart and Sam’s Club can offer new retail opportunities, Dell—as a well-recognized brand—could also give Wal-Mart’s consumer electronics department a complimentary boost in reputation.

Wal-Mart was a good choice for [Dell] because typical electronics retailers, like a Best Buy or a CompUSA, might be a ‘little reticent’ in dealing with a company that’s built its image on direct sales, Baker said.

“I think everyone’s waiting to see what happens,” Baker concluded. “Dell hasn’t sold to the typical customer that goes to a Wal-Mart.”

If the Wal-Mart experiment is successful, retailers should look for Dell to expand into more traditional electronics retailers, he said. But those retailers may attempt to use Dell as leverage to secure better deals. “Everybody is going to wait and hear what the rumors are on sell-through at Wal-Mart,” Baker said.

Dell also has made strides in a variety of channels: the kiosks, the mall stores, as well as a new value-added reseller (VAR) program, Kay said. “I expect movement on all of these fronts,” Kay said. “Call it the gatling-gun approach.”

Barely three months ago, Sony paid $97 million in damages and interest to Immersion in a dispute over the rumble functions in Sony’s Dual Shock controllers. And while the two companies have since patched things up, Sony opted to leave rumble by the wayside when it was designing the PlayStation 3’s motion-sensing Sixaxis controller.

The electronics giant hasn’t been able to entirely avoid patent headaches since then, however, as Irvine, Calif.-based Target Technology filed suit earlier this month, seeking damages for alleged patent violations related to Sony’s Blu-ray technology, which is used in the PS3 system.

The suit, which names Sony Computer Entertainment America, Sony Pictures and Sony DADC, claims that products marketed under the Blu-ray name infringe on a patent Target owns for reflective-layer materials in optical discs. The patent addresses what Target called a need for specific types of silver-based alloys with the advantages (but not the price) of gold. According to the patent, the alloys are also more resistant to corrosion than pure silver.

Target does not specify in its suit whether it believes all of Sony’s Blu-ray discs infringe on the Target patent or whether the suit applies to just a portion of the discs manufactured. The patent was filed in April of 2004 and granted in March of 2006.

Target is seeking a permanent injunction that would prevent Sony from violating Target patent rights in the future, as well as damages, with interest, multiplied due to what Target characterizes as deliberate and willful infringement.

Sony representatives declined to comment. Target’s attorneys had not returned GameSpot’s requests for comment before press time.

“Apple has released fixes for 17 OSX vulnerabilities, ranging from system takeover to denial-of-service attacks. It was the fifth security update released this year. It also marked the first time this year that an operating system security update from Apple did not patch a vulnerability disclosed by the January Month of Apple Bugs project. Today’s update pushed Apple’s year-to-date patch total to over 100. More than one of the affected flaws were called ‘critical’ or ‘dangerous’.”

If you’ve owned a computer running Windows, you’ve probably complained about things crashing on your computer. Windows Vista includes a Reliability Monitor utility that lets you track all of the times that something crashed.

To get to this screen, you’ll just need to open Performance and Reliability Monitor in the administrative tools section (or just type perf into the start menu search box, and it’ll show up)

Once you are there, click on Reliability Monitor in the left hand tree menu, and you’ll be greeted with this screen:

You can track how stable your computer is, based on the number of crashes, and you can select a large number of dates to get a nice graph like you see above, which includes information on various system failures, as well as installs and uninstalls of software.

In order to illustrate how this could be used for troubleshooting, let’s give an example:

Your computer has been crashing for at least a few weeks now, but you aren’t sure what you did to make it start crashing. You go to the Reliability Monitor and discover that there were no crashes before 2 weeks ago, and the day before the crashes started, you installed some shareware software. Now we know that the shareware software is what probably caused the application crashes, and we can just uninstall that.

Note: The System Restore feature is very useful, and is well worth using as you tinker with Windows Vista. Most installations of software automatically set a restore point, but if you are tinkering with the registry or other system settings, you might want to set a restore point first.

Got a USB stick that Windows Vista doesn’t want to use for memory? Read how to use it anyway.

Sooner or later, everyone’s computer tends to slow down. Call it old age or simply doing too much, but even the most cutting edge PC’s seem to lag after a year or so of use.

For those who aren’t keen on opening up their PC to put in more memory, Windows Vista has a handy little feature called ReadyBoost that can use USB sticks for additional memory. Unfortunately, Windows Vista doesn’t take kindly to the slower sticks on the market and refuses to use them. Proving once again that we control the computer and not the other way around, here’s four simple steps to get around this limitation and use any USB stick you have to increase your computers memory.

1. Setup

First things first. Plug the device in. Ignore AutoPlay if you have the enabled, and go to Computer in the start menu. When it pops up, right-click the USB stick and select properties.

2. Disable the stick

Click on the Readyboost tab on the properties menu and check Do not restest this device. Click okay and unplug the stick from your computer.

3. Edit the registry!

Woah! Don’t panic, it’s not as frightening as it sounds. Firstly, you need to open regedit, by opening the start menu and typing regedit, then enter. The registry window should load up.

Using the left-hand pane, work your way through the following folders: HKLM (Local Machine) -> SOFTWARE -> Microsoft -> Windows NT -> CurrentVersion -> EMDgmt. You’ll have a list of USB devices the computer has encountered, one of which should be your USB stick. Click on it.

Here there’s a few details you need to edit. Double click on Device Status and change the value to 2, then ok. Do the same for ReadSpeedKBs and WriteSpeedKBs, changing their values to both 1000. Exit the regedit and breathe a sigh of relief.

4. And back in again

Now all that’s left to do is put the stick back in and once again go to the device properties (Computer > Right-click on drive). If you look under the Readyboost Tab, you’ll be able to now select Use this device. Success! Now enjoy your faster PC.

I’ve normally been a big Red Hat linux guy. I found most of the other distros like SuSe put items in places you’d never think of looking and their patch and software management were never really all that good. I have been playing around with ubuntu and I’ve been finding their distro to be really Enterprise ready. Always looking for new ways of making my life easier I started using SSH a while back. SSH stands for Secure Shell. Basically when you use a program like putty you can actually bring up the command line from a remote workstation. What I didn’t like about Putty is the commands you had to do in order to copy files to and from your machine. I recently found out a program I’ve used for years “FileZilla” will actually allow me to connect using SSH. Ubuntu has made setting up a SSH server so easy it’s almost sickening.

Here are the steps:

1. Go to your ubuntu server and type “sudo apt-get install ssh”. Because Ubuntu does not use the user root to avoid certain security issues you must use “sudo”. sudo lets you become root for a very short time. The apt-get part is Ubuntu’s software and patch management program. “install” should make sense to anyone who knows english. “ssh” basically tells apt-get which program you want to install. Because ubuntu is setup to use repositories on the Internet it will automatically download all the items you need. It installs them and then starts any daemons(ie services) if needed.
2. Go to your Windows machine and download and install “Putty”. Make sure that Putty points to the proper IP address of the ubuntu SSH server. This will give you remote access to the server through a remote terminal.
3. Download FileZilla. Setup a new site making sure that you select the SSH option instead of FTP.

Voila! You now have a SSH server up and running. You can copy files back and forth in an encrypted manor!