Apple extends iCloud storage for MobileMe customers
After the less than stellar launch of MobileMe, Apple wants to do as much as possible to look after those who supported the fledgling online service as they transition everyone to iCloud.
So it's no surprise that Cupertino has decided to extend its offering of a free upgrade to previous MobileMe customers who made the switch to the new service.
Previous MobileMe customers who opted to move across to the new iCloud platform were initially offered a free copy of Snow Leopard to entice them to the new service.
Later, those who switched to iCloud between October 12th, 2011 and August 1st, 2012 were offered an equivalent level of complimentary storage based on their MobileMe subscription.
This week, Apple has sent out notifications to MobileMe switchers enjoying that free 20GB of storage that it had decided to extend the free offer for an additional 12 months.
Not a permanent upgrade
Apple has made it clear that the extension is far from a permanent one with the offer only valid until September 30 2013, or until a user opts to upgrade their iCloud account themselves, thereby cancelling the free upgrade.
While it was initially offered to ease the difficulty of transitioning content from one service to another, with MobileMe now dead in the ground for months, it seems Cupertino is simply looking for a way to reward its loyal customers.
Via: AppleInsider
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Zynga to write off up to $US95 million over OMGPOP acquisition
It seems that social gaming company Zynga's decision to spend $US180 million (£110 million) on acquiring one-hit wonder developer OMGPOP hasn't quite worked out as planned. The company has announced its intention to write off up to $US95 million (£60 million) from the deal.
Zynga's third quarter preliminary financial report broke the news, while showing that the quarter hadn't been quite as successful as the company would have hoped.
While Zynga earned between $US300 to $US305 million (£185-£189 million) in earnings, that wasn't enough to stop the company from reporting a net loss of between $US95 to $US105 million (£60-65 million). It forced the company to lower its full year expectations.
This follows on from the first half loss of $US108 million (£68 million), which the company blamed on Facebook's poor public offering
Share price plummets
Zynga's share price took s a significant tumble following the news, dropping around 22 per cent in after-hours trading. The closing share price of $US2.21 is but a fraction of its $US10 debut.
Zynga CEO Mark Pincus used a company blog post to try and rally the company. He plans to turn the current disappointing results around by "investing in other genres like casino where we already lead with Zynga Poker and blue PVP, a category we pioneered with Mafia Wars, and now have the opportunity to reinvent with the industry's best talent here at Zynga."
It's far from the end of days for the company though. With the launch of Farmville 2 and Chefville, as well as classics like Words with Friends, the company is still attracting 311 million monthly active users.
Via: BGR
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Apple offers solution to iPhone 5 lens flare issue. Sort of...
Apple has acknowledged the purple lens flare some users have experienced when taking pictures using the iPhone 5.
The issue occurs when a photo is taken with an out-of-frame light source, such as the sun, impinges upon the photo or video recording, causing a halo effect to appear.
Apple says users can get around the issue by - you guessed it - positioning the camera differently.
In a post on the company's official support forums Apple suggests adjusting the camera, so the light source enters the lens at a slightly different angle.
Purple pain, purple pain
"A purplish or other colored flare, haze, or spot is imaged from out-of-scene bright light sources during still image or video capture," says the Symptoms section of the post.
The suggested resolution to the issue reads as follows: "Most small cameras, including those in every generation of iPhone, may exhibit some form of flare at the edge of the frame when capturing an image with out-of-scene light sources. This can happen when a light source is positioned at an angle (usually just outside the field of view) so that it causes a reflection off the surfaces inside the camera module and onto the camera sensor. Moving the camera slightly to change the position at which the bright light is entering the lens, or shielding the lens with your hand, should minimize or eliminate the effect."
There's no admission of a fault on Apple's part or what may be causing the issue, but the support post follows an emailed reply to one iPhone 5 owner claiming the issue was 'normal'.
The forum posting inspires memories of Steve Jobs' famous 'just hold it differently' reply to an unhappy user during the iPhone 4 antennagate saga.
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Angry Birds Star Wars reportedly on the way
Just when you thought Rovio couldn't possibly squeeze any more life out of Angry Birds, a partnership with Star Wars looks to be incoming.
The Finnish mobile gaming giant posted a teaser image on Tumblr on Friday, featuring one of its irate winged beasts donning Jedi robes and and wielding a lightsaber.
Now, the Fast Company website has 'confirmed' the impending franchise link-up through a representative at Lucasfilm, who added that a line of Angry Birds Star Wars toys are also on the way.
There's no news yet on the format the game will take, but Fast Company says that Luke Skywalker will be cast as the iconic, yet weak, Red Bird in the mash-up.
Angry Birds Star Wars Jenga?
A host of merchandise is set to be revealed at a special event at Toys 'R' Us in New York's Times Square on Monday morning, including action figures and a re-imagined version of the board game Jenga.
Paul Southern, vice president of licensing and consumer products marketing at Lucasfilm, said: "As casual games grow as a category and mobile devices grow as an interface, it's going to become more important for us in the future.
"Our partnership with Rovio helped us to understand a little bit more about how they achieved that success."
The initial Fast Company post mentioned that the Angry Birds Star Wars game would arrive on October 28, but has since been updated with no mention of a new release date.
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Steve Jobs tribute MacBook Pro laptops auctioned for charity
A limited number of MacBook Pro laptops paying homage to late Apple visionary Steve Jobs, who died one year ago, have gone up for auction.
The custom Retina Display MacBook Pros, modified by laser engraving company Undercover, feature Jobs' silhouette within the bite of the Apple logo, and one of his most iconic quotes engraved onto the bottom.
The 'Jobsified' Apple logo design was created by Hong Kong artist Jonathan Mak following the death of the company's iconic leader last October.
The quote, Jobs made in 1995, reads: "When you grow up you, tend to get told that the world is the way it is and your life is just to live your life inside the world, try not to bash into the walls too much, try to have a nice family, have fun, save a little money. That's a very limited life. Life can be much broader, once you discover one simple fact, and that is that everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use. Once you learn that, you'll never be the same again."
Proceeds
All proceeds from the sales go to the Get It Done charity and the Sellanapp organisation, which Undercover says is "dedicated to creating iOS apps that don't have a direct business model, but have a clear societal value."
To get your hands on one of these ultra limited edition models, you can head over to eBid.com.
However, as these are no ordinary MacBook Pro laptops, the price is also a little out-of-the-ordinary. They're available for the 'no reserve' price of 9,500 Euros (£7,673 / £12,384).
On Friday, Apple released an emotional tribute video to the co-founder and former CEO who lost a long battle with pancreatic cancer in 2011.
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In Depth: Is Amazon's boss the new Steve Jobs?
In a world of dull tech CEOs – ten points for anyone who can say three interesting things about Samsung's CEO; hell, ten points for anyone who knows his name without Googling it*– Jeff Bezos stands out.
His Amazon empire has crushed retail rivals, provided a platform for the internet's biggest names and become a key player in the tablet business, and he's just getting started.
Is Jeff Bezos the new Steve Jobs? The question isn't as crazy as it sounds. While Bezos is a businessman first and a technologist second, he shares the late Jobs' ability to see into the future - and like Jobs, he thinks big and plays for keeps.
Although Bezos studied science and computer science, he didn't start off in the tech industry: in 1994 he was pulling in a six-figure salary from Wall Street investment firm DE Shaw & Co, where he was the youngest senior vice-president the firm had ever had.
Bezos was quick to recognise the potential of e-commerce and jumped ship to start a new business, Amazon.com, which would sell books online. He didn't choose books because he loved books, or for sentimental reasons; of the 20-odd potential products he considered selling, he decided that books were the best bet because traditional bookshops could only ever stock a tiny proportion of the available titles. Internet bookshops had, and have, no such limits.
Pushing Amazon forward
In Amazon's early days, Bezos demonstrated a Jobsian level of salesmanship, innovation and marketing. He sweet-talked family and friends into fronting $1 million for his new venture, was quick to realise the power of user reviews and automatic product recommendations, and sent trucks past Barnes & Noble bookshops advertising Amazon's URL.
Trucks aside, Amazon didn't advertise at first: users loved the site, its speed and its prices (helped in part by Amazon's willingness to lose money - it didn't make a profit until late 2001) and told their family and friends about it.
Like Jobs, Bezos isn't the easiest boss to work for – there are tales of Bezos berating employees over relatively small issues - but where Jobs hated imperfection Bezos seems quite happy with it. As the WSJ reports, "Bezos's philosophy was to get to market quickly, in order to get a jump on the competition, and to fix problems and improve the site as people started using it."
He took the same approach to the Kindle, and you can see it in the Kindle Fire too: Bezos's method is to launch fast, launch big, and file down the rough edges later.
Steve Jobs liked to quote the hockey player Wayne Gretzky, who said "I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been." Bezos, we're sure, likes the sentiment too, because that's exactly what he does: he predicts what's going to disrupt his business and does the disruption himself.
The iPhone exists because Steve Jobs knew that phones would largely replace stand-alone MP3 players, and many of Amazon's products exist for similar reasons: if anyone's going to disrupt an Amazon business, Bezos wants it to be Amazon.
When Bezos realised that ebooks would ultimately outsell printed ones he built an ereading device and kept on refining it; when he realised that traditional publishers could be disrupted he provided an indie publishing platform and set up a book publishing division too.
When it was clear that discs would die out, Amazon sold MP3s, offered a cloud-based music player and started streaming TV and movies through Amazon Prime. When cloud computing started to become a big deal, Amazon offered storage and servers.
And when it became apparent that smartphones and tablets would replace many PCs and e-readers, Amazon made apps, an App Store, and the Kindle Fire tablets. If the rumour mill is correct, Amazon's even working on a phone.
Is Amazon displacing Microsoft?
There's a strong argument that Amazon is taking Microsoft's place at the top table of tech: its $115 billion market capitalisation may be roughly half of Microsoft's, but if the future of the PC is the Personal Cloud rather than the Personal Computer, a battle not of hardware but of ecosystems and media services, then Amazon is already doing rather well.
Five years ago the idea of Amazon kicking it with Apple, Google and Microsoft might have seemed rather far-fetched, but that's exactly where Amazon is today. Not bad for a bookshop.
Amazon's phenomenal rise is an impressive achievement, but Bezos is just getting started: where other tech CEOs might tell you that the sky's the limit, Bezos has loftier plans.
In 2000, he founded Blue Origin, an aerospace company that's "working to lower the cost of spaceflight so that many people can afford to go." Its motto, "gradatim ferociter", is Latin for "step by step, ferociously". It's a good motto for an aerospace company, but it's a pretty good fit for Jeff Bezos too.
* It's Kwon Oh-hyun.
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Buying Guide: Laptop tracking software: 8 apps to track your lost or stolen PC
Track your laptop: 1-4
Losing a laptop through either misplacing it or by theft can be devastating. Not only is the financial loss tough to get over - laptops aren't cheap after all - but the loss of personal files, documents, photos and other data can be even more upsetting.
It can also be potentially very dangerous, as any criminal who snatches your laptop could then have access to your email or online banking accounts, which combined with other personal data on your laptop, could make identity theft easy.
The laptop security and tracking software we're looking at in this group test claims to add an extra layer of security to your laptop should disaster strike. In worst-case scenarios they should allow you to remotely lock down your laptop and wipe sensitive data. However, in the best-case scenario, the software will allow you to track and retrieve your laptop and, if it's been stolen, provide evidence to the police for a conviction.
Can the software we've rounded up deliver on its promises? Lets investigate.
1. EXO5
A business package that's more focused on locking down your data
Price: £309 for 3 years on 25 devices
Info: www.exo5.com
Specs: RemoteKill file encryption, drive lock, curfew, geolocation, logs, data export, RiskSense alerts
EXO5 has a small-to-medium business-orientated approach to laptop tracking, but that shouldn't put off home users - especially if you have a number of devices you want to keep track of.
First of all you need to go to the Settings tab and download the Agent Installer, which is a standalone .EXE file that needs to be run on any device you want EXO5 to track. Once done you can view the devices by clicking 'Assets'.
When selecting an asset to track you'll be shown its location on Google Maps, using similar Wi-Fi triangulation technology as the other services we've tested here. It was good, and got the right road, but was a few buildings out when some of its competitors were more accurate. The public IP address is also displayed, along with whether or not the device is connected to the internet.
The Hardware/OS section, lists your devices' hardware configuration, and isn't much use unless you need to see if someone has changed any of the hardware in your laptop. The software tab offers more illuminating details of what programs have been installed on the laptop while Event Log keeps you up to speed on what your laptop's being used for.
Most of these features are geared more towards an individual or company that wants to make sure that a laptop is being used for the right purposes.
Of most use is the incredibly handy RemoteKill option. This enables you to encrypt files and folders remotely if the laptop is stolen. Presets such as 'All Microsoft Outlook.pst files' make it quick and easy to secure important info. You can also add a boot sector lock to shut down the device - and both can easily be reversed if the laptop is recovered.
Verdict: 3.5/5
2. FrontDoorSoftware
A more blatant approach to security
Price: Free (or $30 for a 3-year licence with unlimited location tracking)
Info: www.frontdoorsoftware.com
Specs: Stolen alert display, remote lockdown, start-up audible prevention alert, send custom text message, geolocation tracking
FrontDoorSoftware is a laptop protection and tracking tool that although free to download, comes with some of the features that we've also seen in paid-for software. While this is a test on how well it protects a laptop, not on aesthetics, there is a noticeable lack of userfriendliness to the program, which could put people off or make relatively simple actions more complicated than they need to be.
A case in point: the installation process includes a slightly bewildering SetLicence window with a number of buttons and text boxes with little to no description of what each one does. Spelling mistakes in the online instructions don't inspire confidence either.
Once installed our laptop had to be rebooted and afterwards sported a FrontDoorSoftware window with a warning that the device was protected, alongside the usual Windows login screen. You can also send a custom message to the screen. However, it also means that thieves know they need to act fast to remove the software.
Your contact information is also displayed in case the laptop is simply lost, so a good Samaritan can contact you to return it.
FrontDoorSoftware uses Wi-Fi positioning technology courtesy of Skyhook (www.skyhookwireless.com) and the results are very similar to GadgetTrak's (p54), with the approximate location just 60 yards out. However, the software runs as a second-user account, so it has an impact on the system's performance.
You can remotely lock the device and mark it as stolen through a web interface, which can only be unlocked with a code.
Verdict: 2.5/5
3. GadgetTrak
Tracks your laptop with half-hour reports and takes sly web shots
Price: $20 (£13) a year
Info: www.gadgettrak.com
Specs: Wi-Fi positioning, webcam support, integrated police reports, online dashboard
For a Windows-based laptop the protection involves downloading and installing the software onto the machine and registering it with your GadgetTrak user account. You can then log on to www.trak.me and use the control panel to enable tracking. You'll get email reports every half an hour, with various bits of information helping you locate your laptop.
Arguably the most useful part of the report is the Wi-Fi based location section, which provides you with the latitude and longitude of your device's location based on its Wi-Fi connection, and the networks surrounding it. There's also a handy link to Google Maps with an icon indicating the rough location of your device.
In our tests it offered the approximate location as a couple of buildings down from its actual location. While it's not pin-point accurate enough to go and retrieve your laptop there and then - not that you should attempt to if it's been stolen - it at least gives you an idea of where it is. Occasionally the location would jump around a bit, pointing in roughly the same area but giving the impression the device was being moved about when it wasn't.
The report also includes a snapshot taken with the laptop's webcam, and will hopefully catch the thief using the laptop at that moment. However, you can't choose when to take snapshots and there's no option to change the frequency of the reports.
When turned off, the laptop can't send tracking info, but as soon as it's turned on you'll get a report. While GadgetTrak does not appear in the Windows Start menu or in the system tray, it can be seen in the Uninstall Programs window - though you need an admin password to remove it.
Verdict: 3/5
4. LoJack
Good all-rounder, but unlike Jack - it's almost the master of tracking
Price: £40 for a year
Info: www.absolute.com/lojackforlaptops
Specs: Geolocation, remote lock, customised lock-out message, remote delete, Theft Recovery Team
LoJack is definitely focused on home users. This is evident not only in the easy and simple installation, but also by the pop-ups that appear on screen, similar to those found in antivirus suites. Designed to be reassuring - as it tells you your laptop is protected - it's no less annoying as any pop-ups.
Once installed, you need to create an account on the LoJack website, enable geolocation tracking and create a PIN. A map view shows your device's location and there are four tabs that split the planned recovery of your device into: locate, lock, delete and recover.
While many services rely on Google Maps, LoJack opts for a map powered by Esri. It looks good but there's no easy way to zoom in to get a more specific idea of where your device is, just a large red dot that for us covered quite a large part of Bath. Those in larger cities may find this service more useful.
Above the map, there's a Device Status that should update itself every 24 hours, so you know that LoJack is still installed. The Lock part of the process requires you to input your PIN, enter a message, then click 'Lock Device'. The locking process isn't instant - it took about 20 minutes for us. When it did we were notified by email. A lock screen appeared - with our message - and the laptop became unusable.
While good, the locking software isn't entirely secure, but there's also support for Intel hardware locking (if your device supports it). Remote deletion of your important data can also be run in the Delete step, while in the Recover section, the laptop can be marked as stolen and a Recovery Team is notified and will begin collecting evidence to hand over to the police.
Verdict: 4.5/5
Track your laptop: 5-8
5. Prey
An open-source protector of your PC that puts paid-for software to shame
Price: Free
Info: http://preyproject.com
Specs: Wi-Fi auto connect, GPS and Wi-Fi geolocation, small memory footprint, webcam and screenshot capture, remote data removal, lockdown PC
As FrontDoorSoftware has shown already; just because a product is free doesn't mean features necessarily have to be cut. Prey is a feature-rich and stable open-source program.
As we've seen in some fantastic Linux distros, there are a lot of very talented coders out there. First impressions of Prey are that it has a professional and good-looking interface that manages to easily eclipse FrontDoorSoftware.
When launching the software for the first time, you're required to set up how Prey sends you reports - either via email and web, or email only. The web control panel is excellent, with a clear and attractive interface. Settings can be easily configured via sliding toggles, similar to those found on iOS devices.
Designating your laptop as 'Lost' will instruct Prey to begin creating reports on its location and send you email notifications. The frequency of these reports and emails can be easily altered and makes the absence of this feature in GadgetTrak all the more baffling.
What GadgetTrak does have over Prey, however, is that the reports are included in the email while Prey only offers a website link. The reports themselves are very good though, with Wi-Fi-based location (again pretty accurate), and webcam support.
A very handy feature that isn't in many other laptop security suites is that Prey also takes a screenshot of the laptop. It's a great addition, and if you're lucky the thief could be on a site that will help you recognise them, such as Facebook. There's even more information included in the reports, which makes Prey easily one of the best laptop security applications we've tested and it's free.
Verdict: 4.5/5
6. MyLaptopGPS
An oddly named product that tracks your laptop through IP and not GPS
Price: £1,200
Info: http://mylaptopgps.com
Specs: Location tracking, recover laptop data, remote destroy data
Once you've set up a MyLaptopGPS account and installed the software, it will run silently, so thieves will have no idea that your laptop is being tracked. As with the other products we've reviewed here, you can track your laptop via an internet browser.
The interface is rather bland and lacks the friendly style of Prey, but it's easy to navigate. You can quickly designate the laptop as stolen, which turns on tracking and a few unique features. You'll receive email updates about your laptop, with a reassurance that 'SafeRecovery Team is pursuing the recovery of this machine'. Also a window will pop up on the laptop claiming 'This machine is globally tracked via permanently embedded GPS'.
While this message lapses into hyperbole, it could encourage thieves to abandon or even hand the laptop in. There's even a phone number to contact, but it's a US number. The window sits on top of other windows, which could also prove annoying for thieves - except it can be easily closed through the task manager. Once closed, any thief would know it was being tracked and wipe the laptop and reinstall the OS.
MyLaptopGPS offers a workaround of sorts. You can identify important files you don't want to lose and when you flag your laptop as stolen, MyLaptopGPS uploads those files to a location on the web, emails you a link, and then deletes them from the laptop.
Though MyLaptopGPS has GPS in the name, it relies on the much less accurate IP address registration to locate laptops. Where other services use Wi-Fi positioning to get a more accurate location, the IP address registrant just gave us the city of the IP address - which wasn't even the city the laptop was in.
Verdict: 2.5/5
7. The LaptopLock
A free package offering a solid basis for your own security solution
Price: Free
Info: www.thelaptoplock.com
Specs: Delete files, encrypt files, show a message to the user, execute a program, play a sound, visible or hidden from the user
LaptopLock is a free offering that eschews a fancy interface for a simple, no-frills look. Signing up for the service is quick, you simply need to enter your email address and a password, and you're taken straight to the online control panel. From here you can add a computer, giving it a name for easy reference.
From this page you can download the software. During installation you can choose whether or not to show a splash screen when the laptop starts up - it's nice that you're given the choice.
There are no tracking features with this program, so ideally it should be installed alongside a free service that does, such as Prey. What LaptopLock concentrates on is protecting your data if your laptop is lost or stolen; and is broken into three parts.
The first is file security - here you can select the data you want LaptopLock to delete if you flag up your laptop as stolen via the web interface. Choosing the files and folders is very easy, and you can select to securely delete the data, so that data recovery tools can't access it. If you're not too keen on the scorched earth policy, you can choose to encrypt the files instead.
The second part is notifications. You can select to show a message or play a sound when the missing laptop is in use. The final part is that you can select a program to launch when the laptop is reported stolen - a good chance to run a tracking program, or activate your webcam and upload the photos it takes.
The laptop can also be marked as stolen, notifying a recovery team that will begin collecting evidence to hand over to the police. LaptopLock might appear simple, but with it you can make your own laptop security solution.
Verdict: 4/5
8. MyLaptopTracker
A stealthy way to track your laptop
Price: $30 (£19)
Info: www.mydevicetracker.com
Specs: Stealth mode, one click tracking, Wi-Fi positioning, webcam image capture and Flickr integration, remote data retrieval
MyLaptopTracker seems to take the opposite approach to protecting your laptop compared to packages such as FrontDoorSoftware. Not only is MyLaptopTracker's easy, it also takes a more stealthy approach to protection, but then it isn't a free package.
Installation is very easy, with just a simple download and install of the software. You're then taken to a web page with a big bright Start Tracking button. Once done you can leave it to track your laptop quietly. There's no sign that MyLaptopTracker has been installed on your laptop. Even the Uninstall Programs window shows no trace of the program.
In fact, the only way to get to MyLaptopTracker on the laptop you want to protect is by opening up the Run command window, typing 'mydevicetracker'. Once in the program you can select a number of neat features, such as a folder with important personal files that you can hide or, in extreme cases, delete if the laptop gets stolen. You can also trigger this action if the laptop can't connect to the internet after a set amount of days - though there are obvious drawbacks with this.
Two good features that were absent from GadgetTrak are the ability to alter the time between email notifications and upload images taken with the laptop's camera to a Flickr or ImageShack account. The interface for the desktop program is clear and easy to understand and took us very little time to setup, but the web interface is rather sparse.
There's no denying that the simplicity of turning tracking on and off via a single button is nice, but the sparse web interface can end up being rather annoying as you wait anxiously for a report.
Verdict: 3/5
And the winner is...
Hopefully by reading through this group test, and learning about all the many tracking features that are available, has piqued your interest in setting up some proper security measures for your prized devices. Besides, you don't want to miss out on posting screen shots of a thief online.
Sometimes in our group tests when we look at both free and paid-for software there can be a huge gulf in quality between the two. However sometimes we see free products that offer just as many features - and perform just as well - as their competitors that charge.
This is one of those tests where the free, open-source Prey easily competes - and in some cases surpasses - its paid-for rivals. When a free program does such a good job, it can often feel like a bit of an open and shut case - after all why pay for something when a free version will do the trick?
The results were not so clear cut, as LoJack still offers a compelling reason to lay down your money. In the end, there were two clear tracking software winners: LoJack representing the paid-for software and Prey winning the free software choice.
LoJack
LoJack's easy to navigate interface, along with the way that it splits the laptop security and recovery process into four steps, make it a quick and reassuring tool to use. While there are free services out there, the subscription you pay for LoJack brings some peace of mind that the service will still be there when you need it. Dedicated support and recovery are on hand to help you as well.
Prey
If you were to take a quick look at Prey, you wouldn't think it was a free tool at all. It just looks so professional. It boasts loads of feature, looks great and works extremely well. Once again the open source community has sown that talent and passion can turn an altruistic project into something truly special. With so many features, Prey is the best value laptop security package around. Get it and use it.
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Review: Parallels Desktop 8 for Mac
Going head to head with VMWare Fusion 5 is Parallels Desktop 8. This latest version boasts speed improvements and other enhancements such as support for 32GB of RAM.
As with VMWare Fusion 5 there aren't many big perks over the previous version. Getting started with virtualisation can be a confusing minefield of operating system jargon and instructions. Here Parallels scores highly on our ease-of-use scale.
Getting started with your virtual operating system is easy. Even if you've not downloaded the software, Parallels will go and fetch the right thing, making the whole process simple. Within seconds you can be on your way to installing Ubuntu or even Android, you can get OS X Lion from your rescue partition and naturally, a host of Windows options.
Once you've chosen what operating system you'd like Parallels to run, the installation times are impressive too. We had the developer preview of Windows 8 installed and running in about 25 minutes.
For Mac users who want to play Windows games on their Macs, virtualisation software offers the perfect workaround and Parallels is good in this area too. There's no denying that game graphics suffer in comparison to a dedicated games rig, but gameplay was smooth.
Naturally, most processor- and graphics-intensive games will push your Mac a bit hard, but there are plenty of other titles that work fine. Parallels is speedy enough, though we have to admit that it seemed to be a bit more processor-hungry than Fusion 5 in everyday use. The software seemed to slow down OS X operations more often, but an extra 5 seconds for an app to open is hardly the end of the world.
In many ways being just as good as VMWare Fusion is a bit of a problem for Parallels, given that it's more expensive. At £65, Parallels doesn't give a host of extra features or a huge increase in performance over the £40 that VMWare Fusion costs you.
All that being said, Parallels is a great product - it works well and given the complexity of what it's performing, operates at impressive speeds. For upgraders, the list of improved features is similar to Fusion 5 in that there aren't many. If you must have it then you'll not be disappointed, but you're not getting much either.
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Tutorial: How to make your own computer from electronic components
Making your own computer
Have you ever stopped to wonder, 'how do computers work?' Think about it for a moment. Computers are just another electrical device, like a light bulb, made of inert bits of metal and silicon.
Yet, when put together in the right way, these tiny components can store and manipulate information, and they can even have an impact on the real world.
We stopped to wonder, and we decided to find out. In this article, we'll share everything we discovered. And with the aid of a piece of free software called KTechlab, we'll show you how you can put all this knowledge into practice and create your very own, crude, computing (well, adding) device.
If you want to go on and build your own computer from these designs, all you'll need is a bread board and a few components. Maplin, for example, has a comprehensive electronics catalogue.
Switching
Let's start by thinking about the light bulb. It's a simple device - you flick a switch, and it turns on. Flick the switch the other way, and it turns off. Each time you flick the switch, what you're doing is making and breaking an electrical circuit - you're controlling the flow of electricity.
This is all that really happens inside a computer, too. Lots and lots (billions) of tiny switches are controlling the flow of electricity. What makes these switches different to your light is that they're not mechanical switches controlled by people, but electrical switches that are controlled by electricity! It's a strange idea, but you can see the principle illustrated in a device called a relay, shown above.
In this electrical circuit, there's a light bulb attached to a battery. In between the bulb and the battery is a switch. While it's open, the circuit is broken and the light bulb turned off.
Underneath the switch, however, is an electromagnet. This is a device that becomes magnetic when an electrical current flows through it. When the electromagnet is switched on, the light bulb's switch is pulled downwards by the magnetic field and the light comes on. When the electromagnet is switched off, the switch swings open again and the bulb goes off.
OK, so at this point you're thinking 'somebody has still got to switch the electromagnet on'. True. We'll cross that bridge later, but for now just see how it's possible for a switch to operate based on whether there's a current flowing into it or not.
Electrical switches can be made in many different ways. Relays are one possible technique, vacuum tubes another, and then there's the transistor. Transistors are much smaller than the other two switches, and they're the switch used in modern computers.
We won't explain how they work, since this would see us sidetracked into the weird world of physics; but we will explain how to use them, since they'll form the heart of the circuits we make in the rest of this article.
Transistor as switch
To demonstrate how to use a transistor, we'll show you how to use it as a simple switch.
Take a look at Figure 2. Here, you can see that the circuit is almost identical to the relay example. The relay, however, has been replaced by the transistor.
Two of the transistor's legs are connected to the same wires as the relay's internal switch was, while the third is connected to the controlling wire. When a small current is applied to the third leg (called the base), a large current is able to flow almost uninhibited across the other two legs (the one with the arrow is known as the emitter, the other the collector). If there's no current flowing into the base, then no current can flow from the collector to the emitter.
Boolean logic
Great! Now you know how to use a transistor, but how does that help us?
To explain this, we need to step back and think a bit about boolean logic. Boolean logic is a system for determining the value of various statements, a bit like ordinary mathematics. The difference is that in the boolean system, there are only two possible values for every statement: 1 or 0 - true or false.
For instance, you can use boolean logic to evaluate the sentence 'My hands are cold'. If my hands are cold, then the boolean result of this statement is true. If they're not, it's false.
Boolean logic isn't restricted to evaluating a single statement at a time, however, since it also has operators, just like in normal maths. 'My hands are cold AND my feet are warm' is only true if both halves of the statement are true; 'My hands are cold OR my feet are warm' is true if either one, or both, of these statements are true. These kinds of statements are often summarised in truth tables, and below are the truth tables for the two operations we've seen so far:
There's one other key operation that we'll come across, called NOT. It interprets only a single statement, and inverts its value. The truth table is as follows:
Logic and transistors
Being able to evaluate whether or not a statement is true or false, with the help of operations such as AND, OR and NOT, turns out to be the basis for all computer operations. How this is so will become clear later, but for now let's look at how the humble transistor enables us to evaluate boolean statements.
The first point to note is that, whereas above we were dealing with English language statements, when it comes to electrical circuits the only tool we have at our disposal is whether a circuit is on or off, just like the lightbulb. Fortunately, boolean logic deals with precisely two values.
From now on then, 1 (on) will represent true, and 0 (off) will represent false. Let's start by creating what's known as an AND Gate, the electrical equivalent of the boolean AND operation.
Take a look at Figure 3. Here, you can see a circuit. This time there's no battery, but a fixed power source instead. To complete the circuit, we need a ground connection, which acts like the opposite side of the battery. If there's any break between the power source and the ground connection, then no electricity will flow in the circuit.
LED and transistors
You'll also need to note that the LED (light) is being used to represent the result of our boolean operation, and that the two resistors (small components used to reduce the flow of electricity - you could also turn down the voltage of the power source) are being used to protect the transistors. Without them, the transistors would operate strangely!
Now, look at the transistors. They're being used as switches, just like we did earlier. What's interesting is that they're both sat between the LED and the ground source. For the circuit to be complete (and for the LED to be on, and our result 'true') both transistors have to be conducting electricity from the collector to the emitter. If either one of them is open, no electricity flows and we get a false result.
If you want to experiment with this circuit yourself, and confirm that it really does recreate the truth table for AND, you can install KTechlab. You can drag and drop components from the left-hand side, drag wires around, and then toggle switches to see the results. Every circuit we create from now on can be recreated with KTechlab, and you can find the .circuit files on this month's DVD.
Two more gates
Before moving on, let's look quickly at how to make OR and NOT gates from transistors, too, since from these three components everything else can be built. Both circuits can be seen in the diagram above.
We'll start with the OR gate, since that's easiest. It's almost identical to the AND gate, but rather than placing the transistors inline, they're both connected to the power source and ground separately. This way, if both are off no electricity will flow, but if either one is on electricity will flow and the light come on.
The NOT gate is a bit more complicated. The light is on by default, since it's connected directly to both the power source and ground. That accomplishes the first part of our truth table. But why does the light switch off when we connect the transistor? Surely the light is still connected directly to the power source and the ground?
The reason is that in a parallel circuit such as this one, the electrical current gets divided between each branch (in this case, the transistor and the LED) in proportion to their resistance. Since the transistor has such low resistance, almost all the current goes through it and not the LED.
Of course, it's not perfect, and to ensure that the current going to the LED is low enough for it to not turn on, we introduced a resistor to reduce the current further.
Simpler symbols
That's all the basic components we need to build from their transistor building blocks. Out of these, an entire computer can be built! Pretty incredible.
Building more complex circuit diagrams on top of these will start to look messy, but fortunately KTechlab provides premade AND, OR and NOT gates, with reasonably sized and distinct symbols that will make them easier to work with. We'll be using these from now on.
Each gate's symbol is alongside the circuits we made in each figure. To show you how these can be plumbed together, take a look at Figure 5. In this figure, we've made an XOR (Exclusive-OR - true only when either input is true, not both) gate out of the other gates we constructed. We'll be making use of this in what follows, too, so note that it also has a built-in symbol, included in Figure 5.
Making your own computer
Binary maths
OK, we're almost ready to make our adding machine, but before we do that you need to know about the binary number system. Numbers can be represented in many different ways.
In our day-to-day lives, we most often interact with the decimal system. In this system, we have ten symbols, the value of which depends on its place, with each place having a value of ten times that of the place to its right.
In the number 133, for example, the 3 on the far right is simply worth 3. The second 3, however, indicates 30, and the 1 on the left-hand side indicates 100. The value of the number as a whole is the sum of all three places.
Binary is a bit different. Instead of having ten symbols, it has only two: 0 and 1. Because there are only two symbols, each place in a binary number is worth twice that of the number to its right, not ten times.
Take the binary 011, for example. The 1 on the far right is worth 1. The 1 next to that, however, is worth 2. Just as before, the value of the number as a whole is the sum of both places, so 011 in binary is 3 in decimal.
Note that binary might represent numbers differently, but it works in the same way. This means that all the usual tricks for adding, subtracting etc, still work.
Binary is important in computers because it's easy to manipulate and store via electronic mediums. A 1 in binary can be represented by the presence of electric flow (a closed switch) and a 0 by the absence of flow (an open switch).
Half adder
If you're thinking that sounds like the kind of system we could work with using boolean logic, you're right. In what follows, we're going to combine everything we've learned so far to create a simple machine capable of adding two binary numbers together.
Let's start by thinking about what it would take to add two one-digit binary numbers together. Try writing out the binary sums for all the possible combinations of 0 and 1. You can use columns and carry numbers, just as you would with binary arithmetic. You should see that, because 1 + 1 requires us to carry a digit in binary to account for all possible one-digit additions, we'll need to provide for a two-digit outcome.
We can represent this in a truth table:
Look at each Output column in the truth table. The Carry column looks just like an AND gate's truth table, while the Sum column looks just like an XOR gate (not an OR gate, because the output shouldn't be 1 when both inputs are 1). Given that that's the case, we can make a circuit to represent this by connecting an AND gate and an XOR gate to the same inputs.
The output of the AND gate represents the carry, the second digit in the addition's result, and the XOR gate the sum, the first digit in the addition's result. You can see this circuit in the files on the disc.
Full adder
This is what's known as a half adder. It's pretty cool, right? You've now seen how controlling the flow of electricity enables us to do real work - we've managed to perform a mathematical operation just by pointing electrons in different directions!
As cool as the half adder is, however, it doesn't get us very far. Because it supports only operations on one-digit numbers, we can't count to numbers greater than 11 (3 in decimal notation).
There is such a thing as a full adder, however, and as the name suggests, it's composed of two half adders (with a slight modification). Start in the same way as before, this time doing the addition for two two-digit binary numbers.
If you do the sums with columns, it's like doing two single-digit additions. You do the addition on one column, carry the result if necessary, and then do the sum on the second column, carrying the result if necessary. Adding an arbitrarily large number, then, is 'just' a case of stringing together lots of single-digit additions, lots of half adders.
We say 'just', because if you look at the second column, there are three inputs: A, B and the carry from the previous stage. To figure out how we can do this, let's draw another truth table:
Study this table carefully, looking first at what inputs are needed to arrive at the S column, and then which inputs are necessary to arrive at the Cout column. You should see that S = (A XOR B) XOR C and Cout = (A AND B) OR (Cin AND (A XOR B)).
If we map this onto a circuit diagram, as in Figure 6, you'll see that the result is two half adders, with an additional input, and their carry bits combined in an OR gate.
This is a full adder. Alone, it's capable of adding three single-digit numbers, but they can be 'cascaded' together, by plugging the Cout of one full adder into the Cin of another, to add any sized number. Each full adder is responsible for doing 'one column' of the final sum.
A long way off
That brings us to the end of this article. We've come a long way, progressing from basic electrical circuits all the way through to making an adding machine capable of summing arbitrarily large numbers. But we're still a long way off having a real computer.
What we've created in this article would be part of a computer's Arithmetic Logic Unit. In a real computer, the ALU would be capable of many other operations, too, including subtraction, multiplication, and plain logical operations such as AND, OR and shift left and right.
The ALU would be provided with numbers to operate on, and told which operation to carry out, by a device known as the Control Unit, which in turn would fetch the instructions and operands from memory. All of these other components, however, are also made from the same basic logic gates that we've used in this article, they're just put together in different ways.
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PM David Cameron joins Twitter
David Cameron has become the first British prime minister to sign up to Twitter.
The PM registered the @david_cameron account on Saturday and by the early hours of Sunday morning had amassed 65,000 followers.
In his first tweet to the nation he wrote: "I'm starting Conference with this new Twitter feed about my role as Conservative Leader. I promise there won't be "too many tweets...""
The last few words of the post are a lighthearted reference to an interview in 2009, in which Cameron said: "The trouble with Twitter, the instant-ness of it - too many tweets might make a tw*t."
Later on Saturday, the PM posted a picture of himself meeting with staff at the John Radcliffe Hospital after announcing "£140m to help their work across the country."
Keeping it in the family
So far the PM has chosen to follow just four people and he's keeping it very close to home; the Mayor of London Boris Johnson, foreign secretary William Hague, health secretary Jeremy Hunt and, of course, the official Conservative Party account.
Unsurprisingly, Cameron's timeline makes for some interesting reading.
Some users have resorted to profanity-laden person abuse, while others are using the platform to challenge his policies. The rest seem to be just having a giggle.
A particular favourite was this from @JohnJonJoe, which read: "@david_cameron 25p a freddo haven't been this outraged since they stopped making Taz bars you gotta stop this madness."
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Foxconn denies strike at iPhone 5 manufacturing plant
Foxconn has moved to deny reports that an employee strike at one of its plants has halted production of the Apple iPhone 5.
On Friday is was alleged that 3,000 to 4,000 workers left their posts at the Zhengzhou factory in central China, due to the imposition of stricter quality controls, reportedly requested by Apple.
However, Foxconn has played down the reports and said only two minor disputes had taken place earlier in the week, which had resulted in no delays to the production schedule.
In a statement emailed to Reuters, the company said: "Any reports that there has been an employee strike are inaccurate. There has been no workplace stoppage in that facility or any other Foxconn facility and production has continued on schedule."
Foxconn added that the small scale disruptions on October 1-2 were "immediately addressed and measures taken, including providing additional staff for the lines in question."
Too much pressure
Apple's reported desire for stricter quality controls is said to be the result of widespread user complaints of out-of-the-box aesthetic flaws on the new iPhone 5 handset.
China Labor Watch, an advocacy group based in New York, claimed on Friday: "This strike is a result of the fact that these workers just have too much pressure."
Reuters also reports: "China's official Xinhua news agency quoted a government spokesman in Zhengzhou as saying some 100 quality inspectors at Foxconn refused to work for an hour on Friday after one was allegedly beaten by workers irate over the inspection demands."
While the full picture of the reported industrial action is yet to emerge, it is clear that all is not well at the plant, which employs 130,000 people and assembles an estimated 70 per cent of iPhone 5 devices.
Last month, there were also widespread reports of rioting at the Foxconn facility in Taiyuan in north China, which required 5,000 police offers to calm the situation.
Both Apple and Foxconn have come under fire in recent years over the alleged poor working conditions for assembly workers.
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MySpace CEO: No point competing with Facebook and Twitter
The CEO of MySpace says the soon-to-be-reborn social network will not be seeking to compete with Facebook and Twitter.
The revamped service, which is currently in private Beta, will allow users to join with their Facebook and Twitter accounts rather than register with another social network.
Tim Vanderhook told NBC news that the new service will continue to appeal to music fans in the way LinkedIn is aimed as business users, and will not attempt to go head-to-head with the existing behemoths.
He said: "No one wants to manage another social network. We think it is unique and distinct, it integrates with Facebook and Twitter to be able to pull over your social graph and pull over your identity of who you are.
"We think Facebook is the uber social network that is supposed to be there. We think we built a great social network for artists. Similar to how LinkedIn built one for business, we think there is a huge gap that we wanted to fulfill. There is no point to compete with Facebook and Twitter."
Segregation
Vanderhook also clarified the status of users who're continuing to make use of the old MySpace site.
Initially they will be segregated from newcomers to the service until the company decides what to do with the old website.
Vanderhook added: "There will be a separate section for our consumer base using the classic MySpace. We are going to leave it up for quite awhile. We will make a decision at a later date if we will ever take down the old property."
Bargain basement
The impending relaunch comes after Specific Media picked up the company from News Corp for a bargain basement $35m (£21.5m) back in June 2011.
Last month, the company released a preview video offering a taste of what we can expect from the new MySpace, which impressed most observers.
Those eager to jump back on the MySpace bandwagon can now sign up for an invite, but there'll be no "Steve Jobs style" hard launch according to the company.
"We know we are the underdog," said COO Chris Vanderhook, brother of Tim.
"For us it is a little too presumptuous to do a big huge, bang, Steve Jobs launch. That's not our brand and its not right for MySpace. We want to be able to prove everything that we want to do."
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Apple Maps update returns missing Statue of Liberty to New York City
Apple has started to roll out the first updates to its Maps application, starting with the restoration of some major New York City landmarks.
The missing Statue of Liberty, which presumably was visiting friends and family back in France, is now safely back on American soil according to Apple Maps' updated 3D satellite imagery.
Also, the once hopelessly-distorted Brooklyn Bridge now appears in all its majestic glory, in the ongoing, but unannounced updates.
The 3D Flyover feature for Apple Maps was touted as one of the headline features of the new offering but has been subject to ridicule since the app's launch within iOS 6 in mid-September.
Glaring omissions
It is, of course, wise for Apple to tackle the most glaring omissions to the Maps app first as they have been subject to the greatest level of mickey-taking.
However, there remains huge amount of work to be done before the product meets the expectations of Apple fans and the company itself.
Last week Apple CEO Tim Cook made an unprecedented apology in which he admitted the company "fell short" on its commitment to deliver the best experiences for its users.
Now New York is on the way to being fixed, perhaps Apple could work on removing the omnipresent cloud cover, currently enshrouding the whole of England?
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Motorola abandons Lap Dock and Webtop experiment, amid poor sales
Motorola has announced that it will no longer develop the Lab Dock accessory and accompanying Webtop software, which allows an empty-shell laptop to be powered by Moto smartphones.
The Google-owned company said adoption of the Lap Dock and Webtop software, which arrived alongside the Motorola Atrix smartphone in early 2011, had not been strong enough to justify further development.
The accessory, which was the subject of much excitement upon its debut at CES 2011, used the Atrix's processing power, memory and connectivity to bring the dock or a desktop monitor to life.
As a result, Moto told CNET, the Webtop app, which appeared on its smartphones and gave Lap Dock users a separate operating system more akin to what they'd experience on a laptop, would be discontinued.
Redundant
The company said that, as the Android OS itself integrates more desktop-like features, Webtop would ultimately become redundant.
In a statement to CNET, Moto said: "Motorola's Webtop app helps users extend their smartphone experience to larger screens.
"While consumers around the world have adopted Webtop and the concept spurred a lot of innovation in the industry, the adoption has not been strong enough to justify continued resources being allocated to developing Webtop on future devices.
"We have also seen development of the Android operating system focus on the inclusion of more desktoplike features. Beginning with Photon Q and Droid Razr M/Droid Razr HD/Droid Razr Maxx HD, we will no longer be including Webtop on our products moving forward."
More Google cuts?
The cuts may be a result of Google trimming the fat at Motorola, following its multi-billion dollar acquisition of the hardware giant.
Reports on Friday claimed that Google has already shelled-out $340m (£210m) on "severance packages" to those Moto employees deemed surplus to requirements.
Overall, Google plans to cut approximately one fifth of all Motorola staff, so these hefty redundancy payoffs are likely to continue well into next year.
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Opinion: Why new SSDs aren't just super fast, but super cheap
The problem to date with SSDs has been a combination of measly capacity and patchy performance.
With conventional magnetic drives now measured in terabytes and available for apparent pennies, putting up with limited capacity on SSDs is hard to take.
The same goes for the performance and reliability problems that occasionally hit SSDs. Given the solid-state sales pitch, the tendency is to assume they're just going to work. And work really fast. Like plain old PC memory, otherwise known as RAM.
On the capacity issue, earlier this year we saw a major price drop in most SSDs, with the 120 to 128GB species falling to around £70 or so. That was welcome, but it's still not good enough. Not when 500GB is probably the minimum you want if you have a big games library and a load of other apps.
A little TLC
The big news here is the new Samsung 840 drive and its TLC memory. TLC, of course, stands for Triple-level cell. That's the next step on from today's multi-level cell or MLC memory. It boils dwon to the difference between storing three or just two bits of data per memory cell.
In very simple terms, that means 50 per cent more capacity in the same amount of silicon. What's more, this new TLC memory has also been shrunk down to 21nm in terms of process technology. That's a serious double whammy in terms of data density.
If there's some bad news, it's that I'm not expecting the new 840 to be crazy cheap at launch. It's probably mirror the £70-ish where mainstream SSDs have settled. But that's a launch price for a hot new drive. And it's only going to go in one direction.
Pro drive
As for the performance half of the equation, it very much looks like Samsung has just raised the bar there, too, with the new Samsung 840 Pro. Out goes the TLC memory, though we're still talking fancy new 21nm flash memory but of the MLC variety.
In comes huge IOPS performance of up to 100,000 operations per second. Now, it's often the peak read and write numbers that grab the headlines. The problem with that is twofold.
For starters, the SATA interface, even in 6Gbps trim, is increasingly putting the kybosh on peak performance. Which is why you see a lot of drives topping out at a little over 500MB/s in benchmarks.
Random access
Even more important is the fact that it's the IOPS performance that determines how quick drives are in messier, random access workloads rather than nice, sequential reads and writes. In other words, IOPS makes at least as much if not more difference to the feel of you PC or laptop – or tablet for that matter.
We're currently having a play with our Samsung 840 and 840 Pro samples and will have first impressions soon. But I've an inkling each will end up being a game changer in its own right. Of course, what I really want is the best bits of both drives. But that's still a little ways off.
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Tutorial: How to network your smart TV
Networking your TV: why it's a great idea
Smart TV features are becoming standard on many new televisions.
Take the Panasonic 2012 line-up of 22 models, for example. Of these, only five lack any connected 'smart' features.
But what's so smart about these new televisions? It's happened very quickly, but TVs are now hooking into home networks. Using the DLNA standard, they're more than prepared to talk media-turkey with anything else that's hanging out on the same network.
This has the potential for some pretty cool uses, like wirelessly streaming a video you've taken on your mobile phone to your smart TV. Well, perhaps that's the coolest one, but it also means you can easily share media stored on any PC with not just your TV, but any DLNA device. Your phone, tablet and other media streaming devices will all happily work together as they're capturing DLNA-ready content and pushing it to other DLNA-ready devices.
It's when you throw our old friend the PC into the equation that all hell breaks lose. The PC's endless versatility and longevity mean you're likely to have videos and music lying around stored in codecs that haven't seen the light of day since the last millennium. What we need is an intermediary software service that turns your computer into an all-singing, all-video serving, DLNA-compliant device that your smart TV (and anything else for that matter) can see and play from over your network.
Serving up
For this project we're going to use the Serviio media server. It's a little more complex than other options, but as far as we're concerned it's the most accomplished free DLNA server out there.
It's certainly not the only option though. You can use the Windows Media Player-based UPnP/DLNA streaming, but it tends to be very picky about what it wants to share, and presents those files to connected devices as a huge, unsorted list. We've also recommended Plex in previous articles, but although it does a good job of serving as a DLNA server, we've run into issues with the transcoding and Serviio offers internet feeds that Plex does not.
That last point is an interesting one, if not an entirely solid feature. Serviio has a flexible plug-in system that lets you add online streams, sources and other online on-demand video and audio services into the DLNA environment. It's a clever system, because it means any DLNA device can now access the likes of BBC iPlayer, 4oD, YouTube and more, even if they might not be able to access the web pages originally or lack a suitable app.
We say it's not entirely solid because it depends on there being a set 'feed' web page - either an RSS/Atom feed, or a web page that catalogues the feeds for a series or channel. Serviio then uses the 'groovy' plug-in to parse the feed or page and generate the standard DLNA-compatible list of media.
The problem is, the system breaks if the original feed or web page changes, which happens more often than you'd think. For example, one issue we encountered recently was due to 4oD switching to capitalised programme names - a subtle change, but one that was big enough to break the plug-in completely, so you have to remember that it's not entirely stable in that respect.
There may be an additional option available from your TV manufacturer, which may provide DLNA server software. Not all do, but Samsung does with its AllShare system (www.samsung.com/global/ allshare/pcsw), while LG MediaLink ties into Plex. It also seems that Sony has recently launched a tool called Homestream (http://bit.ly/ MBM32Q), though oddly enough this is just Serviio with new icons.
Target profiles
DLNA gained traction over UPnP because it's a targeted subset of UPnP specifying a small range of supported media formats, rather than the open-ended specification of UPnP. This leaves it as more of a transport and communication protocol for DLNA to ride on.
The formats it supports breaks down into the following:
Image: JPEG, PNG
Audio: AC3, AMR, ATRAC3, LPCM, MP3, MPEG4, WMA Video: MPEG 1, MPEG 2, MPEG 4 p2 (DivX), MPEG 4 p10 (h.264), WMV9.
Containers: MPEG PS/TS, MP4, ASF (for video)
You'll notice there's no as-old-as-the-world AVI, MKV or even VC-1/WMV10 support. Any file not supported has to be in the best case remixed into a supported container, and in the worst-case re-encoded and remuxed, aka transcoded to a supported format and container.
So if you've tried UPnP servers in the past and failed to get them to play nicely with your smart TV then this is the likely reason, but that's where Serviio or a similar service comes in to fi ll the gap and provide a beautiful media world to live in.
Networking your TV: how to do it
Part 1: A smart start
Taking your not-so smart TV from zero to hero
1. Not another firmware
Now that TVs are as smart as your computer, there's yet another device in the home with firmware for you to update, alongside its built-in software and upgradeable online content. Great.
It's well worth doing though, because newer firmware can add up-to-date codec support. Your TV manufacturer's support site will help you out and you'll just need a USB stick.
2. Home Server or not
We'll be looking at the standard Windows install of Serviio, but just so you know, those clever chaps have produced a Windows Home Server add-in for all versions up to 2011. This provides a Serviio tab as part of your main Windows Home Server Dashboard. To grab this version, just browse to http://serviiowhs.codeplex.com and take it from there.
3. NAS and tablets
Serviio, as it turns out, is super clever. Alongside Windows, Mac and Linux support, it can also be installed onto a number of NAS devices such as the WD My Book Live and Dlink DNS-320/5.
To find out how, check the http://wiki.serviio.org page. There's also a free Android app called ServiiDroid, which provides direct console control to your local Serviio server for remote management.
Part 2: Serving up hot DLNA
Delicious media streamed straight into your greedy ears and eyes
1. Up and running
You know the script by now: download and install the latest build from www.serviio.org via the Download tab. As Serviio is a Linux-based open source development, it's a service foremost and an interface second.
Thankfully there is a GUI console available from the Start Menu and the Notification area. This will provide all the main controls, along with feedback on connected clients.
2. Adding media
Click the Library tab - this is the main area to add media you want shared around your home. This can be video, music or photos.
Two columns indicate whether Serviio should attempt to scrape metadata for videos, or if it should automatically update the library with newly detected files. Just click 'Add local' and add folders of your stored media and state if, and how often, it should rescan these.
3. Metadata scrapings
Serviio will pass thumbnails to your DLNA devices to give you a prettier interface and boy do they need it. It'll also use various online sources to try and scrape fi lm and TV metadata and serve this up as well.
There's an option to use your own XBMC-formatted NFO fi les from XBMC itself, or standalone scraper like www.mikinho.com/yammm or www.mediacentermaster.com.
4. Transcoding
Finally, take a look at the Transcoding tab. Most importantly, you'll want to make sure the maximum number of cores are allocated to the job. On a quad-core, for example, you may only want to allocate two.
We suggest keeping the original audio, because most devices can handle the majority of default streams. We found that even a lowly 1.5GHz AMD Turion II could manage 720p HD media.
5. Stream away
At this point you can happily give your new DLNA server a spin. The majority of files should play just fine with transcoding including MKV.
Subtitles don't work unless they're embedded in the original file and are supported by the target device. Fast forward and rewind should work, but transcoding can limit the range. You might need to get used to the DLNA tree organisation too.
6. Troubleshooting
If you run into problems, check the Status tab and make sure your device is marked green and is using the correct profile. If not, try a generic one. If this doesn't help, check the forum for user-created profiles to add to the XML.
If some files play and you're trying an AVI, it's likely it's using variable-bitrate audio, try using VirtualDub and re-save the file with DirectStream for both streams to remove this.
Part 3: A dash of service
Online streaming services are just a plug-in away
1. Installing plug-ins
The online resource plug-ins are an ongoing development. If you head to http://forum.serviio.org and check out the Available Plugins forum, you'll find links to the latest builds for various sources like BBC iPlayer and YouTube.
These are GROOVY files, and need to be copied into the 'Program files > Serviio > Plugins' folder. You won't see any specific changes at first.
2. Adding feeds
Those GROOVY files actually tell Serviio how to decode the various webpages or RSS feeds to DLNA-friendly output. You'll find suggestions for feeds and pages in the same thread as the plug-in.
To add one, select 'Library > Online sources', then click 'Add > RSS feed'. Enter feeds.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/highlights/tv, give it a display name and click 'Add'.
3. Web resources
If someone is suggesting a web page that lists a series of episodes then this is likely a Web Resource option. For example, a number of 4oD pages seem to be set up as such.
If these work correctly on your smart TV they'll be found under the Online entry in the Serviio menu. You should be able to pause and rewind, and while we admit they're not perfect, they're still useful.
4. Error checking
The log file is hidden in the 'Program files > Serviio > Logs' folder. This provides details debug information, so if a file fails to play, this should be your first port of call. Check for 404 or 500 errors, as these will indicate an issue connecting to the web server.
Try temporarily disabling any IP filters or firewalls and check any URLs before retrying on the TV.
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Review: VMWare Fusion 5
Running Windows on your Mac may sound like sacrilege, but for many its just one more convenient aspect of being a Mac owner.
The latest virtualisation tool from VMWare is Fusion 5, it comes less than a year since version 4, and as such, has only received a light brush of new headline features.
Support for Retina displays and USB 3.0 in Windows 8 as well as optimisation for the latest Macs have been included. Battery life improvements for those using a laptop Mac and some other minor enhancements have also been made.
The Pro version of Fusion has been updated to keep the IT admins happy as well. If you already have Fusion 4 and are looking to upgrade, speed enhancements and reliability improvements aside, there are no new standout features that would make upgrading an obvious choice.
Installing a copy of Windows is simple enough, although it's not as elegant or user friendly as with Parallels. Windows 7 took about 30 minutes to get from DVD, through the installation process and to the desktop.
As with every piece of software, the user interface is personal. We liked the slickness of Fusion, it feels Mac-like and looks good. Some of the icons are a touch generic however, and first-time users might find it hard to remember what each one is for at first.
During our tests we used Windows 7 in the main, though we did use both Windows Vista and a pre-release version of Windows 8 as well. Here's where Fusion really impresses - at times you can forget that you're using a Mac. Software runs as quickly as you'd expect it to on a PC. It can be quite an unnerving experience as you open Paint on your desktop and have it run like a native app. Resuming a paused virtual machine is speedier than previous versions too.
Even given that impressive speed, that's not to say running these virtualisation products didn't bring our Mac to a juddering halt from time to time. Occasionally our Mac Pro stalled and all that we could do was wait for the quad-core 2.8GHz processors and 8GB of RAM to catch up.
However, for the majority of the time Windows did feel like a native OS and quickly switching between Mac and Windows was a breeze. Fusion 5 is great, we liked it and can highly recommend it. It's cheaper than Parallels and ran just as fluently during our testing.
Fusion 5 has more favourable licensing terms and overall tips the scales as a better first-time purchase. There's nothing here to sway an existing Parallels user away, but we'd say that Fusion has the edge.
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