Sony Ericsson Satio versus Sony DSLR
Sony Ericsson's official Satio Blog has published pictures taken with the new 12MP snapper handset, comparing it to a mid range DSLR and compact camera.
The phone, which looks likely to have a UK release date pencilled in for the second week of October, was pitched against the Sony A700 and the Ricoh GX100.
The Swedish developer took it out and about on a family picnic on a cloudy day - with the results not as impressive as you might have hoped for a cameraphone that many believe will jump to 'best in class'.
Detail
As you can see, while the Satio picks out detail well (compare the clouds for instance), it seems to struggle to bring out the richness of colours on offer.
Sony Ericsson Satio
Sony A700 DSLR
Still, this is only one scene type, and we'd hope the Satio performs better in other scenarios such as direct sunlight (otherwise it will struggle to beat the i8910HD).
Head on over to the Sony Ericsson official Satio Launch Blog to see the full comparison between the cameras (and the full resolution images), and keep your eyes peeled for our full review of the Satio in the next few weeks.
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In Depth: The roboticist who refuses military funding
This is an extract from Wired for War by PW Singer, exploring the ever-growing role of robotics in warfare.
Illah Nourbakhsh is an Associate Professor of Robotics in the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. He is also the military robotics world's worst nightmare, the scientist who learned to say "No, thank you."
"As a kid, I was interested in taking things apart and putting them back together in weird ways," tells Nourbakhsh. He worked on solar car racers in college and then went to Stanford for graduate school. His research topics varied from genomics to AI.
He recalls when he first plugged his AI software into robots. "I was blown away by how little they could do. It was painfully obvious that robotics was delinquent." So, he came back to his interest in taking things apart and putting back them together, weirder and better, and decided to make a career in the robotics field.
As with most other students, much of the support for his early research came from Pentagon money. Soon, Nourbakhsh began to get requests for specific applications of his robotic research to battlefield scenarios. This was around the same time that he was taking a class which examined at the social side of technology. "I had my epiphany moment. I put my foot down and said 'I won't do it.'"
When Nourbakhsh talks about the writers that influenced him the most, his decision begins to make even more sense. Rather than referencing science fiction as many other scientists do, he talks about the novels of Walter Percy, the southern writer who wrestled with the ability of science to explain the basic mysteries of human existence.
He recalls how a character in one of Percy's novels contemplated committing suicide. They ultimately decided not to, as that would be the last decision they ever made, as compared to all the other things they could choose to do with life.
It became a sort of guidepost for Nourbakhsh as he wrestled with whether or not to take the military's money. "The general feeling I had was that every time you choose to do something, you are explicitly choosing not to do everything else. The point isn't what not to do, but what can you do best. That is, whatever you choose, choose what is most important to you."
As a young graduate student, then, Nourbakhsh resolved to refuse all military money and choose to work only on the most positive research work he could find. "I wanted to feel I was working on something with immediate social-positive impact, rather than something neutral that could be used for good or ill later…I want to be able to say I've done some good in the world."
His decision, however, had financial consequences. "It is very easy to take the DARPA money and look at it as only for long-term research…It is hard to get millions from any other source, plus you have a far better chance of winning DARPA grants than others."
Yet, a full decade in, Nourbakhsh's plan has worked out. His current research projects include educational and social robotics, electric wheelchair sensing devices, believable robot personality, visual navigation, and robot locomotion.
Nourbakhsh supports such programs with commercial sales of the products he's developed and with corporate research support from firms like Intel, Google, and Microsoft (He just laughed when I joked, "How is Microsoft less spooky than DARPA?").
He is particularly excited about a program that used robotics as educational tool for expanding the number of people working on technology. He's found that if you can get youngsters excited about technology, you can also use it as an avenue for teaching them other valuable life skills.
With his credo in mind then, Nourbakhsh helped found Robotic Autonomy, a summer robotics camp for under-privileged kids from San Jose. Using an "Ikea-like robotics set" that he designed, the kids are taught engineering and computer programming skills.
They then compete in such challenges as "robotic musical chairs." The side effect of building robots, the instructors have found, is that the kids also build teamwork and leadership skills, as well as get excited about science and education. Many of the children coming from poor neighbourhoods have later ended up going to Ivy-League schools.
In the last few years, Nourbakhsh has noticed a change. While no one really cared about his refusal of Pentagon money when he was a graduate student, he is starting to make waves as a professor.
He tells how several colleagues have quietly come up to him to say, "We are watching you. If you pull this off for several years, we may well do the same." He ends our talk by saying, "I'm a guinea pig and that makes me more firmly resolved to prove that it's possible."
Buy Wired for War from Amazon UK.
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Interview: 'When are the metal ones coming for me?'
Could robots really take over the world? Peter W Singer is an American political scientist who has written a book called Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution in the 21st Century.
Now out in the UK, the book explores the massively increasing role of robots on battlefields.
The book explores the questions that unmanned systems present for everything from when wars begin and end to warriors' very experiences – and the potential threat from AI to humans.
"You can't write a book about robots and war without have to deal with the 'when are the metal ones coming for me?' question," says Singer, who was also coordinator of defence policy for Barrack Obama's Presidential campaign.
But isn't it tempting to think of military robotics as being something of the future rather than the present? "Exactly! That is the point of the book, to capture this immense revolution around us that we aren't much noticing. Look at the raw numbers. When US forces went into Iraq in 2003, they had zero robotic units on the ground. By the end of 2004, the number was up to 150. Today it is over 12,000."
With the increase in drone strikes into Pakistan, as well as the expanded purchasing and use of unmanned systems in the UK's new defence plan, Singer believes that the subject matter of the book is becoming even more timely than ever.
"Already in the prototype stage are varieties of unmanned weapons and exotic technologies, from automated machine guns and robotic doctors to tiny but lethal robots the size of insects, which often look like they are straight out of the wildest science fiction," explains Singer.
For his book, Singer interviewed hundreds of robot scientists, science fiction writers, soldiers, insurgents, politicians, lawyers, journalists, and human rights activists from around the world.
Singer did meet some people he refers to as "refuseniks," such as scientist Illah Nourbakhsh. "Illah is one of the most fascinating people I met in the journey. They are robotic scientists who look at what happened to the nuclear physicists behind the Manhattan Project that built the atomic bomb and then regretted it for the rest of their lives.
- Book extract: The refuseniks – roboticists who just say no
"The Refuseniks like Illah don't want the same thing to happen to them and instead want to push a debate about ethics and robotics, including the ethics of the scientists who build them. So, despite the huge amount of money being offered, he refuses to take Pentagon funding and instead builds robots that he believes will make the best possible contribution to society."
Moore's Law in robotics
So how will robotic technology develop? Singer believes the two trends to keep an eye on are Moore's Law and miniaturisation.
"The multiplying effect of Moore's Law, year after year, is the reason that refrigerator magnets which play Christmas jingles now have more computing power than the entire Royal Air Force did back in 1959.
"If Moore's Law holds true, then within 25 years, this doubling effect will have robots running on computers that are a billion times more powerful than those today.
"To be clear, I don't mean "billion" is the sort of amorphous way that people throw about the term, but literally multiplying the power of an iPhone or Predator drone by 1,000,000,000.
"Now some argue that Moore's law won't hold and it will slow down. That may be true. But let's say the pace of advancement only goes one percent as fast as it has for the last few decades. Then our robots will be guided by computers a mere 1,000,000 times more powerful than today," muses Singer.
And what about miniaturisation, how will that evolve? "I recall seeing at one Air Force lab a tiny rocket engine that fit on the tip of a pen. Imagine the capabilities that can provide in war! A commando will literally fly a 'fly on the wall' in from over 1000 meters away.
"But what the book is about is also how we have to weigh the dilemmas that very same technology will bring. For instance, that the very same technology will be available to terrorists, corporations, criminals, and even my neighbours."
So Singer believes we have to better understand what is happening now if we want to handle it intelligently. "Robotics and AI is no longer just science fiction, but becoming technologic, as well as political reality. Or as one US military-funded robotics researcher put it to me, many may want to "think that the technology is so far in the future that we'll all be dead [and so don't have to talk about it]. But to think that way is to be brain dead now."
When should we salute our metal masters?
Let's not beat around the bush. The future vision described in the book is pretty frightening, isn't it? "Yes, it's pretty darn scary. But then again, the very first line of Wired for War is 'Because robots are cool.' That is my answer as to why someone writes a book about robots… [It's] also written in a way that isn't mean to scare but approach this important topic with a sense of both excitement as well as foreboding."
So how real does Singer think the threat from AI is in terms of having evil intent given the reaction of those he spoke to on this topic in the book? "Perhaps you should rephrase the question as, 'So when should we salute our metal masters?,' he jokes.
"Look, you can't write a book about robots and war without have to deal with the 'When are the metal ones coming for me?' question. Essentially, four conditions would have to be met. First, the machines would have to have some sort of survival instinct or will to power.
"In the Terminator movies, for instance, Skynet decides to launch a nuclear holocaust against humans in a bizarre form of self-defence after their scared attempts to take it offline when it reaches sentience.
"Second, the machines would have to be more intelligent than humans, but have no positive human qualities (such as empathy or ethics)," he continues.
"The third is that the machines would have to be independent, able to fuel, repair, and reproduce themselves without human help. And, fourth, humans would have to have no useful fail-safes or control interface into the machines' decision-making. We would have to have lost any ability to override, intervene, or even shape the machines' actions."
Could it happen?
Singer believes these conditions would present too high a barrier in the short term. "For example, most of the focus in military robotics today is to use technology as a substitute for human risk and loss," Singer explains. "It is the very opposite goal of giving them any survival instinct.
"Second, the ability of machines to reach human level intelligence may be likely someday, even sooner than most expect given the rapid doubling effect of Moore's Law on our technology just under every two years. But it is not certain.
"Third, while our real-world robotics are becoming incredibly capable, they all still require humans to run, support, and power them." Singer reaches for an example – the Global Hawk drone, the replacement for the manned U-2 spyplane.
"It can take off on its own from New York, fly 3,000 miles on its own to London, stay in the air 24 hours, using its surveillance and intelligence gathering systems to hunt for a terrorist over the entire city, then fly back 3,000 miles on its own to New York, and land on its own. But, the drone still needs humans on the ground to gas and repair it.
"Fourth, there are enough people spun up about the fears of a robot takeover that the idea that no one would try to build in any fail-safes is a bit of a stretch. Most importantly, perhaps, the whole idea of a machine takeover rests on a massive assumption.
"As many roboticists joke, just when the robots are poised to take over humanity, their Microsoft software programs will likely freeze up and crash.
"The counter to all of this, of course, is that eventually a super-intelligent machine would figure out a way around each of these barriers. In the Terminator storyline, for example, the Skynet computer is able to trick, manipulate, or blackmail humans into doing the sorts of things it needed (for example, emailing false commands to military units or putting humans in concentration camps), as well as rewrite its own software (something happening today with evolutionary software)."
Singer says the idea that we would not learn our lessons from science fiction is somewhat voided by the fact that real world military expediency has us carrying out research into all sorts of systems that science fiction directly warns us about.
"This is nothing new. HG Wells' warning of what he called an 'atomic bomb' in the anti-war story World Set Free instead served as the inspiration for the Manhattan Project. As I talk about in my book, one robotics firm was actually asked a few years ago by the military if they could design a robot that looked like the 'Hunter-Killer robot of Terminator.'
"It wasn't such a silly request. The design would actually be quite useful for the sort of fights we face now in Iraq and Afghanistan," Singer concludes.
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Skype opening up 'next gen platform' to third party devs
Following recent news that eBay has sold the leading internet telephony service Skype to a group of private investors for a cool آ£1.9bn, it looks like plans are already in place to develop a platform to better open up Skype to third party developers.
The news follows the announcement earlier this month that Skype was closing its Skype Extras program.
"It was a tough decision, but we want to assure the community that we focus our time and resources on initiatives that delight our users and help our partners create innovative products for new markets," writes Skype exec Antoin Bertout on the Skype Developer blog.
"While the Extras program didn't work as well as we'd hoped, we still believe there are opportunities for third-party developers to enhance the Skype experience. We'll keep you posted."
Skype calls without Skype
TechCrunch have been speaking with Skype exec Jonathan Christensen who reiterated the company's position with regards to third party devs.
That report notes that the "Extras announcement is not about Skype backing away from a robust developer platform" but instead that, "Skype is focusing on a next generation platform that will hopefully address the deficiencies of the old program and open many more opportunities for developers to build on Skype services."
The suggestion is that Skype will release a software development kit (SDK) that would allow "developers to integrate deep into Skype and make calls over the Skype service without opening the Skype client."
Which would mean that third party desktop apps would be able to make Skype calls directly, without the user having to open a Skype client on their computer.
Interesting stuff, for sure. Although right now this is all speculation as to where Skype might take internet telephony in the future.
TechRadar has contacted Skype's UK office for further information on how this 'next generation' version of its developer program might work. Stay tuned for updates.
The sale follows reports that Skype founders Zennstrom and Janus Friis were locked in a licensing dispute with eBay over key aspects of Skype's VoIP tech.
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Bowers & Wilkins unleashes iPod Zeppelin Mini
Bowers & Wilkins has announced it is to bring its award-winning Zeppelin iPod dock to the masses, with the launch of the Zeppelin Mini.
As the name would suggest, the Zeppelin Mini is a more compact version of the Zeppelin.
But B&W suggests, despite its size, the device "attains the same high standards in sound quality and design".
New features to the dock include an updated docking arm and USB connectivity, while the device uses the same advanced Digital Signal Processing (DSP) that the Zeppelin uses.
The ability to stream music to the dock is also present, but this can only be done via plain, old USB.
The new compact size of the Zeppelin Mini is 200mm (height) by 100mm (depth), and it weighs in at just 2.5Kg. Interestingly, the new look for the system does mean that it doesn't look much like a zeppelin now, but there you go.
The release date for the Bowers & Wilkins Zeppelin Mini is October, and it will retail for آ£299.
Find out more by pointing your browser to www.bowers-wilkins.co.uk.
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New HTC Hero firmware promises faster OS
HTC has released an update to the Hero firmware which reportedly solves the bugs present in the release handsets.
Back in July, when we reviewed the HTC Hero, we noted that the phone was good but still suffered from slight lag at times, which was enough to mark it below the iPhone despite having the Sense UI with multiple homescreens.
But users over in HTC's Nordic regions (such as Sweden, Denmark and Norway) are reporting version 2.73.405.5 is bringing some decent speed upgrades, as well as camera software upgrades too.
UK release date
The good news is that HTC has confirmed to TechRadar the UK version will be coming in the very near future, but can't give us any specific date, nor what new goodies this firmware will bring.
We'll keep checking back to the HTC UK website to find out when it goes live, but until then you could always install the Nordic version (although this means you'll have to do it manually, so we wouldn't advise it).
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Review: Avanquest WebEasy 8 Professional
WebEasy 8 is a bit of a compromise for any potential website designer. More advanced users are likely to find it restrictive, as the templates are rigid and editing HTML is a tricky process.
Novice users will find the interface pretty unpleasant to use, as many of the built-in tools are difficult to find.
The Professional version of the software includes hosting for three months and a free subdomain – you'll need to look to the Platinum edition to get a proper domain included along with a full year of hosting.
There's the usual raft of site templates on offer, including a selection for iPhones and other mobiles, and they are generally of a high standard.
WebEasy 8 is a good example of a program that attempts to walk the fine line between advanced and beginner web-design tools and ends up falling into neither camp.
While there's not a great deal intrinsically wrong with the software, there's also little to make it stand out. Extended use proves to be a frustrating experience.
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Humax Freeview HD receiver outed
Humax is one of the first manufacturers to release details about a new range of Freeview HD receivers, choosing this year's IBC to unveil its latest player.
While the machine on show was just a prototype, Wotsat managed to take a few pictures of it and glean some information about just what features the yet unnamed player will house.
Pricing similar to Freesat box
According to Wotsat's blog, the machine on show was a single tuner box, supporting both DVB-T2 and DVB-T, with MPEG2 and MPEG4 H.264 decoding – all ready for Freeview HD.
What's rather special about this Freeview HD box is its ability to also stream content via DLNA. Couple this with the fact it will be able to record TV shows via USB on an external drive, according to Home Cinema Choice, and what you have is a nicely connected machine.
Wotsat also spoke to Graham North from Humax who confirmed the box's release date will be in the early part of 2010, with pricing similar to Humax's current Freesat range.
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LG officially announces GW620 Android phone
LG has officially announced its first Android phone - the GW620, designed for messaging and all manner of social networking.
The new phone brings a 3-inch touchscreen, a full slide out QWERTY keyboard, a 3.5mm headphone jack, a 5MP autofocus camera and both Wi-Fi and GPS.
We brought you news of the phone last week when it was spotted at IFA as the Etna, meaning it will probably be launched under different monikers in other regions.
It's been slotted in for a fourth quarter release date to us European lot, with no word on other regions at the moment, nor any pricing or carriers helpfully.
Two tier approach
"The LG-GW620 will appeal to first-time smartphone customers by offering a new and different kind of user experience," said Dr. Skott Ahn of LG Mobile.
"Our objective is to provide a wide selection of smartphones to satisfy the diverse preferences of today's consumers. This Android phone is just one of many smartphone models we plan to introduce worldwide in the years ahead."
LG also announced plans to release mobiles based on Windows Mobile earlier this month, as the company looks to sprint up the sales rankings and start challenging Samsung and Nokia.
Although given Windows Mobile hasn't won any awards for usability in recent years, the Koreans will hope the new iterations of the OS are a lot more popular.
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Apple's iPod touch camera mystery deepens
Apple launched a new 64GB model iPod touch earlier this month, although one thing that was conspicuous by its absence from Apple's new PMP was the addition of a video camera.
What made the lack of video-camera add-on even more bizarre for many was the fact that Apple's new iPod nano range did get a basic video-camera added in.
MacRumors reports that earlier leaked, pre-release pictures of the new iPod touch that did show a camera on the device were actually the real thing, and not a 'Photoshop job' as many suspected.
Camera mystery
"While there has been an ongoing belief that Apple was indeed planning a camera module in the latest iPod touch, one reader has found the most convincing proof when comparing the iFixit teardown of the new iPod touch with the previously leaked images of an iPod touch with camera," notes MacRumours.
The evidence seems to point to the fact that the camera was originally there and then was removed prior to the official iPod touch announcement on 9/9/09.
TechRadar imagines that Apple will add a video camera to the iPod touch pretty soon, although as ever, Apple is remained tight-lipped on the matter. For now it wants to concentrate on promoting the gaming capabilities of its new third-gen iPod touch.
When quizzed on the non-appearance of a camera-equipped iPod touch last week, an Apple rep merely swerved the question and told us that the focus for this Christmas holiday season was squarely on selling as many video-capable iPod nanos and (non video-capable) reduced-price iPod touches as possible.
Head over to iFixit for the fully-detailed iFixit breakdown of the innards of the new Apple iPod touch.
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Review: Isol-8 IsoLink 1
Isol-8 is the company started by one-time IsoTek designer Nic Poulson, also known as the man behind the Trilogy line of amplifiers. It is a pure mains conditioning specialist, with a range extending from the IsoLink 1 mains cable we are reviewing here up to sophisticated mains regenerators and high-current filters costing in the low thousands.
This simple cable is the company's introduction to its range – and ours. It uses Oxygen-Free Copper conductors of generous diameter, screened overall with a tinned copper braid.
Connectors at both ends are good-quality industrial parts: the more upmarket Isol-8 cables have the same wire but fancier connectors.
Standard length is 1.5 metres, but other lengths are available to order. It's always interesting to try mains cables on different components and we're certainly glad we did in this case, as results seemed to vary quite widely.
Annoyingly, we couldn't find a consistent pattern across the range of equipment we had available, but a solid-state phono stage certainly showed a clear improvement in resolution, almost as if some background noise had been removed.
A moderately upmarket CD player hardly benefitted, but a slightly elderly high-end one was much more inclined to show improvements, with better resolution again and also a slight gain in treble openness.
Meanwhile, two power amplifiers, one valve and one transistor, seemed to gain a semitone or three of bass extension – obviously that's impossible, taken literally, but a little extra clarity in the lowest octaves can easily come across that way.
Although we can't predict exact results, we're happy to recommend you give this cable a try.
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In Depth: Can Sony really make all existing PS3 games 3D?
With endless analysis that suggests that this particular generation of consoles will be the most enduring yet, it stands to reason that there will be a series of miniature battles for supremacy during the Xbox 360 and PS3's extended lifespan.
Sony appeared to have fired the first real mid-generation salvo at the recent IFA consumer technology show, when it demonstrated PS3s running real time 3D on a new range of consumer Bravia televisions, due to launch in 2010.
Existing games such as Motorstorm, Wipeout HD and Gran Turismo 5: Prologue were paraded in three dimensions and everyone was invited to pick up a Dual Shock 3 and give it a try in real time.
The most tantalising bit of info? That Sony thinks it may be able to convert all existing PlayStation 3 games to 3D with a simple firmware update, because much of the image processing is done by the television itself. It sounds almost too good to be true.
Given that Sony is keeping tight-lipped on the technology behind it, we thought we'd pick the brains of a programmer behind one of the most graphically impressive games on the PS3 at the moment, Colin McRae DiRT 2, to find out whether a 2D game could really be given an extra dimension.
FULL ON: Colin McRae DiRT 2 is just the kind of graphically intensive game that would be tough to render in 3D using a traditional method
We chose the game not only because it's an example of the current state of the art, but also because it utilises a technique called occlusion, which works out what the player can 'see' and removes unnecessary visual elements to allow for more detail in the scene.
Depending on how drastically the scene is altered to generate the two separate perspectives required for a 3D image, this could be an additional hurdle.
Andy Sage, Principal Programmer at Codemasters Racing Studio, explained that in DiRT 2's case occlusion was, in fact, a minor problem compared to the difficulty of rendering two versions of the same frame – once for each eye.
"Occlusion information is stored in a grid that is quite a bit larger than the eye separation distance, so you could use the same occlusion data for both the left and right eye renders," he explained to TechRadar. What's more of an issue is that traditional techniques for 3D visuals on PC, which rely on the graphics processor rendering each frame from two different angles, have had a massively detrimental effect on framerates.
"If you render alternate frames from a slightly different viewpoint then this is quite easy to implement, but this would halve the update rate to 15FPS and would make the game virtually unplayable. The problem is that the left/right images have to correspond to the same game frame so you can't just update everything at 30FPS as normal."
Sony has revealed that there is image processing technology within the television itself, and with that in mind, Sage was able to suggest one possibility that would put a far smaller strain on the console's own processor, which in many games is already running at near to full capacity.
"I think that the most achievable way to get general purpose 3D would be a different technique which doesn't render the full scene twice," Sage explained. "To do this, you need to use the rendered depth information for the scene and the final single rendered image. You then modify the final image based on the depth and display once for each eye. This is a lot cheaper [in terms of processing power] because you only do the main render once, and would be more compatible with existing games."
In order to provide a convincing 3D image using the television's onboard image processor, that depth information for each frame would have to be sent down an HDMI cable to the television.
It's worth noting that with the release of the PS3 Slim, Sony upgraded the console to support Bravia Sync, a system that allows console and television to communicate over the HDMI connection. It may well be through this link that the PS3 is able to provide the television with depth information from its rendered image.
SONY ONLY: There's always the possibility that PS3 3D could exclusively work with Sony's own brand of Bravia televisions
If Sony truly can retro-fit 3D visuals to its library of games, it will quickly provide an extremely compelling reason to choose the PS3 over the Xbox 360 at a time when home consoles appear to be approaching a watershed of mainstream appeal.
What's more, those lingering criticisms of the console's graphical shortfall compared to Microsoft's machine would be forgotten in a trice and instead the PS3 would be considered the more sophisticated machine.
Of course, with any 3D solution requiring investment in an expensive new 120Hz television and with many current generation gamers still playing in standard definition rather than HD, there's no guarantee of uptake.
Still, it's a remarkable piece of brinkmanship by Sony, and if its claims are true, this could be the first console war that is turned on its head in the middle of a single generation.
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Review: KDE 4.3
You might wonder why we've chosen to look at the 4.3 release of KDE and not 4.0. The answer is that 4.0 should never have been released – it suffered from instability and a much reduced feature set.
After 18 more months, 4.3 is the release that 4.0 should have been, and it's now stable enough for critical use. KDE is also now stuffed full of eye candy.
There's a new desktop theme called Air, but we weren't too keen on it. It's all light grey and washed out, and we preferred the higher contrast of the Oxygen theme.
It's also a crime that there's no WebKit integration for KDE's web browser. WebKit started life on KDE and it's staggering that the developers can't re-integrate the rendering engine back into the environment.
The launch menu is difficult to use and KDE needs to work on a more effective replacement which brings over a few more features from Gnome Do.
There are dozens of other additions too, but overall none are as important as KDE's new-found stability.
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Review: Triangle Altea Ex
Although we've reviewed several iterations of the Traingle Antal, the largest model in the Esprit Ex series, this is the first Altea to come our way.
It's the smaller of two floorstanders in the company's least costly range, though its آ£1,200 per pair price tag is the result of some significant recent rises – when we reviewed the larger Antal Ex some eighteen months ago, it cost just آ£1,125 per pair.
Although the Altea Ex looks purposeful enough, with its three drive units mounted in a solidly built and braced enclosure, it's not the most attractive speaker around. It has a slightly curved dark charcoal painted front panel and a rather indifferent vinyl woodprint, in cognac or black, covering the other faces.
A two-and-a-half-way design, the bass driver is loaded by a large flared front port and its 120mm fibreglass diaphragm is reinforced by a large dust cover.
In the Triangle tradition, the bass/midrange driver has a flared paper cone diaphragm roughly 112mm in diameter, terminated by a double-S fabric surround, and this in turn is loaded by a small rear port.
The 19mm tweeter is Triangle's TZ2500 horn-loaded design, which the company claims offers superior crossover integration, because the horn mouth is larger than a conventional dome.
It sits on a proper damped-steel plinth, which looks good and provides excellent stability. There are five points of floor contact here – four rather pretentious-looking 20mm spikes at the corners of the plinth lack any lock-nut arrangements and, therefore, tend to wobble rather easily.
A large centre-front cone to earth the front panel is fitted with a captive disc, which will work very well on wooden floors, but is unlikely to pierce a carpet. Connection is via twin terminal pairs.
Sound quality
The in-room measurements made it abundantly clear that this speaker should be kept well clear of walls, but notwithstanding this observation and in spite of its two ports and bass drivers, the overall character is a shade thin and lightweight.
While it's true that the bass lacks a little warmth and authority, its timing is good and it's bouncy, quick and generally informative, if somewhat understated.
As with other Triangle designs, the real strength here lies in its expressive and dynamic midrange and top end. This is certainly lively and engrossing, but also has a tendency to 'shout' when the volume control is turned up high, partly because of a general lack of smoothness, but also because the restrained bottom end leaves the upper half of the audio band sounding a little exposed.
Image focus seems pretty good and there's little evidence of enclosure colorations here. While the Altea Ex is always entertaining and involving, with fine voice articulation, the lasting impression is of a somewhat untidy sounding speaker that doesn't, perhaps, do quite enough to disguise the kind of limitations that are inevitable at this sort of price.
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BBC puts Tomorrow's World archive online
The BBC has announced that classic excerpts from Tomorrow's World have appeared online legitimately for the first time.
The show, which ran from 1965 to 2003, was one of the Beeb's flagship programmes, and focused on future trends in technology.
While the predictions on the show weren't always right, a number of gadgets and gizmos which have shaped are lives today were first introduced on Tomorrow's World. These include: CD players, camcorders and Teletext.
Clips from the show can now be found online at www.bbc.co.uk/archive/collection, a website run by the BBC which shows off some of the broadcaster's 70 years of content.
Fragile technology
Maggie Philbin, a former host of Tomorrow's World, has written a piece for the BBC about the addition of the show to the BBC archives, in which she notes: "The home computer, the mobile telephone and the compact disc all made their debut on the show.
"I would love to say I recognised their significance immediately but often the technology was fragile or incomplete - a mixture of space age and Stone Age - and the real potential was hidden."
Currently there are 23 clips in the archive, ranging from an hour long to five minutes. The BBC says about the clip bundle: "In this collection, we witness a change in how people thought of the future and chart the rise and rise of the computer."
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In Depth: Recover data with Linux
When you're used to the world of Windows or OS X, Linux can seem a little unforgiving.
Not only does command-line access hand over the complete keys to the manor to any unwitting user with access to the administrator's account, there's rarely a safety net should things go wrong.
Despite advances in most Linux desktops (where the ubiquitous Trashcan safely buffers deleted files), you get no such protection from most system specific configuration, installation and maintenance tools.
And while it's rare for anything to go wrong without your direct input, some accidents do happen, especially if you enjoy tinkering with the latest distro release each month.
But this being Linux, there's plenty you can do to dig yourself out of a hole, which is why it's always a good idea to have a repair-worthy distribution close to hand when performing configuration and installation tasks.
One of the best developments in recent years has been the Live CD. These offer a fully functional Linux installation that runs from an optical drive. If you've got enough memory, you can even install new packages to the RAM disk just as you would when completing a standard installation.
This makes a recent release of a Live CD-based installer like Ubuntu Jaunty the perfect system recovery tool. Not only does it include every package you might require, but because it runs from the optical drive rather than the hard drive, your data isn't touched and there's no chance files will be overwritten without direct input. It's the obvious place to start when you get stuck.
1. Booting Linux
Probably the most common problem is when the Linux boot menu disappears or gets corrupted. The most likely reason for this is that a shared Windows installation has re-stamped its authority over your disk's master boot record, overwriting the Grub boot loader with its own system launching code.
In these cases, you need to boot into a different Linux environment, either off a Live CD or from any other Linux booting media you can get hold of. The distribution you choose will also need to have Grub installed.
With Ubuntu, open the Terminal from the Accessories menu and type sudo grub. This will launch the boot loader with administrator privileges. From the 'grub' command prompt, type find/boot/grub/stage1. This Grub function searches every compatible drive attached to your system for the '/boot/grub/stage1' file, which is used to launch the operating system.
GETTING GRUBBY: The command line can seem daunting, but it's really not
When the file is detected, it'll output the drive and partition number of your lost installation using the format (hd1,0). Your output will look different, but it's the drive number followed by the partition number of the Linux partition that you're looking for.
Grub should only be installed on a single partition on a single drive, so you shouldn't find more than one version of the file. To restore the Grub bootloader to your drive, type root (hd1,0), swapping the drive and partition number with the output you found with the previous 'find' command. Then type setup (hd1), swapping 'hd1' for your drive number.
You should now find that your Linux partition and booting ability has been restored. The only potential problem is that this process could overwrite a Windows bootloader, and if Windows was installed after the original Grub installation, it won't launch from the boot menu.
2. Booting Windows
Fortunately, adding Windows to your Grub menu is easy enough, and it's straight forward to add any other OSes you want to boot from your system if you've got an example entry to work from. The key to the boot menu is a file called '/boot/grub/menu.lst', and if you open this in a text editor, you should see that the formatting is relatively easy to understand.
For instance, here's a typical entry for booting a Windows installation off the first partition of the drive:
title Microsoft Windows
root (hd0,1)
makeactive
chainloader +1
You can make this Windows boot entry the default selection by adding a line that has 'savedefault' as the only word.
PLAIN TEXT: The formatting of 'menu.lst' is fairly straight forward and easy to understand
Adding Linux entries isn't quite so easy, as you need to get the path to both the 'initrd.img' (RAM disk) and 'vmlinuz' (kernel) files correct, according to how they sit on the Linux filesystem. The best way is to copy and paste an existing entry and change the paths accordingly.
Older versions of Grub won't support newer filesystem types. ext4, for instance, is a major upgrade to the standard Linux filesystem and it needs a specially modified version of Grub to boot into it. This could cause a problem if you installed a new Linux distro using ext4 alongside an older one with its older version of Grub.
The only option in this case is to upgrade Grub, either manually or through a distribution that ships with the modified Grub, such as Ubuntu Jaunty.
3. Restoring the MBR
If you ever need to reinstate the Microsoft Windows bootloader onto your disk's master boot record (MBR), you can use the Windows rescue disk and the 'fdisk' command. However, there's also a handy open-source utility called 'ms-sys' that performs the process from a Linux installation.
With the tool installed, typing ms-sys-w/dev/hda will create a Microsoft MBR on the first drive. But this may leave you with the opposite problem to the one we started with if Linux is on the same drive. To resolve it, you'll need to reinstall Grub to get back to your Linux desktop.
MS-SYS: This handy app lets you create and edit the MBR from the Linux desktop
Even if you can't get to your Linux desktop, if you can get to the Grub boot menu then there's still lots you can do to troubleshoot an installation, whether that boot menu is off a Live CD or a standard installation. Press [Escape] when you see the boot menu, and 'e' on the line causing you problems, and you can now edit each entry on the fly.
These are the same lines we were editing in the 'menu.lst' file, and you can edit in-place options like the root partition for the operating system or the locations of the RAM disk image and kernel. Finally, rather than pressing 'e' for edit mode, try accessing the same command-line we used to search for the missing Linux installation. Just press 'c' to be dropped to the prompt.
'Find' is just one of around 30 commands that you can use to fix problems on your hard drives, list directories and even examine the contents of text files (the 'cat' command). For more details on what's available and how to use it, type help.
4. Fixing a partition table
Another situation that initially appears to be catastrophic but can be resolved without data loss is if you happen to destroy the partition table of one of your disks. This is the kind of error that could render an entire disk's worth of information useless, and it will also prevent your PC booting.
But partition tables are stored independently of the data on the disk, and there are ways that you can rebuild them. You might think that it's particularly difficult to destroy your partition table, but there are ways that you can easily do this accidentally.
TESTDISK: You can rebuild your broken partition table with this clever program or diagnose the fault
The most common cause is if your PC is forced to restart while resizing a partition. You might find that the entire partition table is corrupt, despite the fact that no other partitions on the drive were touched by the process.
Another likely scenario is that the wrong device name is used while installing Linux onto an external USB device with a command like 'dd', resulting in your principle hard drive becoming the incorrect destination for a write command.
This can happen from Windows installations too, but Linux can fix both. The command you need to use is called testdisk. This is one of the most useful commands we've ever had to use in an emergency, though it's not installed on many Live CDs by default.
With the latest Ubuntu Jaunty, you'll need to install it from the Live CD environment using the package manager. After this is done, you should type sudo testdisk on the command line. If you don't use the sudo command to run with administrator privileges, testdisk will ask for your password when the main page first appears.
Before you get to that step, though, you'll need to let the app know whether you want to create a log file or not. The correct answer is 'Create', but most people skip this stage and move straight on to the repair. Before you select the 'No Log' option, just remember that a log file can really help if testdisk fails or makes the problem worse. It's the only way that you'll know how far the along the process the repair procedure managed to get before it stopped, and where any fatal errors might have occurred.
5. Writing the new table
After choosing whether or not to create a log file, the next screen you'll see will list the storage devices attached to your computer. The size of each disk should be correct, along with the unique identifier for the drive at the end of the line.
Use the cursor keys to select the drive that you want to repair and press [Enter]. The screen that now appears is the most important, because you need to give testdisk some indication of the type of drive partition used on your system.
WHICH PARTITION: You will need to know what type of partition your broken install used before going ahead
In the vast majority of cases, this is going to be the first option – an Intel/PC partition. If you're using a system other than this, then there's a good chance you'll already know what it is. You may be using the ultra-new EFI standard, for example, and this can be selected from the list.
After pressing [Enter] again, you'll see a page that has another list of options. You need to choose the first one to analyse the contents of the drive. This will first display the registered partition details, if possible, before allowing you to perform a quick search for the table configuration within the data on the drive. There's also an exception for Vista-based partitions, as these are handled slightly differently.
If the search is successful, you will see the list of partitions discovered on your drive. If not, you'll be presented with the option to perform a deeper search, but we've never found this necessary on a normal Intel Linux system. From the page that lists the discovered partitions, make sure that the general parameters are correct – such as one of them being labelled as bootable – and press [Enter].
From this file list of partitions, select 'Write' to make the list of partitions you can see on the screen permanent. After a system reboot, you should find your drive fully restored, although there's a chance you might need to install the Grub bootloader.
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