Intel’s Appstore
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Developer, Intel, Mobile on
Intel has just launched its first appstore - in the shape of appdeveloper.intel.com.
Targeted at Netbooks, appdeveloper.intel.com is more than just another Apple-style appstore. It’s also a set of tools to help developers build applications that run on Atom. Integrating into common IDEs, Intel’s Atom SDK contains tools to help manage your applications, as well as integrating with Intel’s ecommerce platform for licensing and for handling delivery of additional content.
There’s a lot in appdeveloper.intel.com, and more to come. IDE support is a ways off, and it’ll be interesting to see how Intel handles integration with Eclipse and Visual Studio (and how it intends to deliver support to Flash Builder and Aptana). Sign ups are already open, and are free for now ($99 in the future), and there’s plenty of content on the site, so developers can get started quickly.
One big difference from other appstores is the developer catalog - where you’ll find components you can use in your own applications. Intel’s planning on building a developer ecosystem with its Atom offering, and getting tools out there is important. Software components and component stores were one of the drivers that contributed to the success of Visual Basic, and it’s good to see that Intel has learnt that part of the developer ecosystem lesson… The first batch of components is up already, and includes power and network management tools as well as video capture libraries.
There’s also a cross-platform bent to the site that’s refreshing. Developers can use the site to work with two operating systems - the Intel-sponsored Moblin Linux and Windows 7 - and two run times - Java and Adobe’s AIR. Moblin is becoming increasingly important to Intel (and we wouldn’t be surprised to see a tie up between it and Google’s ChromeOS in the future), and this year’s IDF will also see it get a new release and a whole new UI.
However the big winner here is Adobe. AIR’s still a relatively new arrival on the application development scene, but one that’s quickly picked up some very significant mindshare. With netbook’s relative low power, and near ubiquitous connectivity, there’s a lot of synergy between the hardware and Adobe’s rich internet application vision.
Yet Another Appstore it may be, but appdeveloper.intel.com looks set to be an important tool for developers who want to work with the growing netbook segment - and who want to turn them into devices that are actually useful rather than glorified Gmail appliances.
–S
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Windows 7 on the HP2710P Tablet PC
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in operating systems, Windows 7, Windows Vista, Laptop, Intel, Microsoft on
My workhorse machine is an HP 2710P tablet. It goes pretty much everywhere I go, and so it was the first machine (aside from my test PC) that I set up as a clean Windows 7 install, using the RTM build from MSDN.
First, the good news: As with nearly every machine we’ve taken to Windows 7 virtually everything works straight out of the box. There are Windows 7 graphics drivers for the Intel card ready and waiting, as well as drivers for most of the machine’s hardware, even drivers for the fingerprint reader and the SD card slot.
But there is some not so good news: Some of HP’s built-in tweaks and speciality hardware aren’t supported yet, and there’s some question over whether they will ever get Windows 7 drivers. That’s always a risk when hardware pre-dates an OS. It’s certainly a little annoying when the screen won’t autorotate, and the slider volume control on the keyboard won’t work - but there are workarounds using OS features such as Windows 7’s Mobility Center (call it up with Windows-X) which gives you rotation and volume controls.
Not to worry though, as as Windows 7 builds on Windows Vista, you can get all those functions back using the latest versions of the Vista drivers from the HP web site.
So far I’ve been able to get back rotation and special keys (including the volume slider and mute button), the accelerometer-based hard drive shock protection
You’ll need the following SoftPaqs:
SP43616 - HP Quick Launch screen rotation and special keys
SP38424 - hard drive shock protection
SP39734 - WiFi and Bluetooth manager
These will give you most of what you need. Some set up guides suggest using earlier You’ll also find a couple of devices without drivers in Device Manager. These are part of the Intel AMT device management suite, and aren’t really necessary for most users.
You can find the drivers for these in these two SoftPaqs: SP38312 and SP38313
The installers for these drivers won’t run under Windows 7. However the files will unpack into folders under C:\swsetup. In Device Manager right-click on one of the two unsupported devices, and choose “Update Drivers”. Choose to install from a local folder (and make sure the “use subfolders” option is selected). Pick C:\swsetup and let Windows install the device driver. Do the same for the other AMT device driver.
And that’s everything you need for a fully configured Windows 7 machine.
Enjoy.
–Simon
I found this forum thread very useful when setting up my machine
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Countdown to the 22nd of October
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Windows 7, Intel, Microsoft on
It’s been an open secret for a while that Windows 7 would launch before the end of October, at least to anyone who watches Microsoft. Fitting Microsoft’s standard Beta, RC and RTM timeline to the dates we’ve already had suggested that RTM would be sometime in July, with a download-powered business launch in late August/early September, followed by the familiar consumer boxed copies in October (as well as on OEM hardware).
When Acer accidently let slip that they’d be shipping hardware with Windows 7 on October 23rd we all nodded, as it was clear that the conveyer belt was rolling along happily. Even their later denials left us nonplussed. The end of October it was, then. It had to be then, if Microsoft was to meet its target of getting many many Windows 7 machines into channel in time for the November shopping rush - the US Holiday season.
This morning Microsoft’s Bill Veghte revealed what we knew all along. The consumer launch will be on October the 22nd, in plenty of time for what the US calls the “Holiday Season”. It’s not surprising that Acer already knew that date…
So the clock is ticking. There may be a second RC for MSDN and Technet users in the middle of June, with the RTM version in July. Shortly after that it will arrive in MSDN, and should be on Select for enterprise subscriptions in late August, early September (based on the Vista timelines). At the same time the RTM code will be shipped to OEMs, ready to be installed on hardware to be shipped in time to arrive in stores in October.
Not long to go - not long for hardware manufacturers to get their drivers through certification. That might be a problem, and could yet be an Achilles heel for Windows 7. Microsoft’s code is solid and works well, but some popular drivers just don’t seem to work very well. A case in point are the drivers for Intel’s 965 chipset - which seem to have got flakier and flakier with each each public build. The latest version causes interesting screen corruptions on our test machines. It’s not just Intel dropping the ball - AMD appears to be dropping support for many of the ATI Radeon cards that are out there.
The clock is ticking, and it’s up to hardware vendors to make Windows 7 a success. If they fail, well, they’re going to be in a lot of trouble - as the much anticipated holiday boom in PC sales just won’t arrive.
–Simon
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Eee PC 1000HE; the netbook with a real battery
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Processors, Power, Hardware, Laptop, Intel, HP on
How do you get a full day’s work out of a netbook? Make it bigger (and turn everything off).
The latest Eee PC, the 1000HE, has a hefty 8700mAh battery but because the Eee is quite chunky itself that doesn’t stick out much at the bottom. If you want a thinner netbook, the HP Mini and Mini-Note models are far slimmer than the Eee (and they weight rather less too, even with HP’s 6-cell extended battery); in fact, the 17″ MacBook Pro is thinner than the Eee 100HE, although the MacBook is obvious far less portable in other ways (I’d have to switch from the natty Cirque du Soleil handbag that my beloved HP EliteBook 2730p tablet fits in perfectly to a messenger bag, albeit a slim one).
But if you can put up with the less than slim casing of the 1000He, you get a very portable machine that you can take more seriously than many netbooks, although there are still compromises. Forget 16GB SSDs; you get 160GB of hard drive, which puts many 12″ notebooks to shame. The keyboard is a significant improvement over most netbooks; with a separate frame to avoid the bouncing and flexing that previous Eees were prone to, it’s more comfortable to type on, and while the keys are small they’re widely spaced apart, as on some Sony VAIOs and MacBooks, so you”re much less likely to hit the wrong key even if your finger is too big to hit just the key you’re aiming at. Even so, the HP Mini-Note keyboard remains the one to beat - the Eee keyboard is good, but not that good.
The trackpad is the ElanTech SmartPad that Dell uses on the Mini 12, which has more multi-touch options than you can shake a fist at; two finger scroll, pinch zoom and rotation, drag and drop that you can’t drop by accident, a double-tap gesture for opening a magnifying glass window, and three-finger swipe (sideways for page up and page down, up and down for launching My Computer and opening Alt-Tab and switching windows by waggling your fingers around on the touchpad). You have to get used to the gestures, but they can speed you up, especially on a small keyboard like this.
Talking of speeding up, the 1.66GHz Atom N280 ought to be faster than the 1.6GHz N270 in most netbooks; frankly we didn’t notice and when a Web site script went beserk and opened over 20 tabs while Word and Windows Media Player were running, things ground to a halt. Once you step down the processor speed to improve the battery life, it doesn’t matter what the top speed is.
No Atom system is going to be a patch on a Centrino 2 and they don’t pretend to be. But then the only way to get a 9 hour battery life on a Centrino 2 machine is to add an extended battery. The Samsung NC10 had the best battery life of last year’s netbooks with a battery that didn’t bulge out of the case and that was up to 7 hours 30 minutes without Wi-Fi and with a dim screen, or 6 hours 30 with Wi-Fi on and the screen comfortably bright. The HP Mini-Note 2140 has an optional 6-cell battery that does stick out (you may find it gives you a better typing angle because it lifts up the keyboard); that manages five hours in heavy use (streaming video and music) and well over seven hours for general use with Wi-Fi and good screen brightness.
The sticker on the Eee actually claims 9.5 hours; that’s if you’re in power-saving mode (and the button for that is now a tiny button above the keyboard, next to options for turning off the screen altogether, switching resolution and - oddly - launching Skype), with Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and the Web cam turned off and the screen set to 40% brightness. The screen is noticeably dimmer than other netbooks and notebooks even at full brightness and 40% isn’t particularly comfortable for viewing. Advertising 9.5 hours most users will never see made me expect that the Eee 100HE would leave me disappointed (and hunting for a power socket), but it delivers very respectable battery life in normal use.
Turn on the Wi-Fi and the power icon promises 7 hours 15 minutes; this fluctuates up and down depending on what you’re using the PC for but after 5 hours of downloading software, browsing Web pages, streaming music and editing documents the battery still promised almost two more hours of use and we did indeed get just over 7 hours. You can play over 6 hours of video (which drives the processor and the screen harder than many apps) before the battery runs down.
In the real world, that really is a full working day. Combined with a keyboard normal adults can actually use, this makes the new Eee a significant advance on the recent stream of me-too netbooks and the kind of machine we hoped for when the first Eee came out. It finally gives the Mini-Note 2140 a competitor and because Asus has much better distribution than HP you can expect to find the 1000HE at increasingly low prices.
- Mary
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Servers
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Hardware, Enterprise, virtualisation, operating systems, linux, Intel, HP, Server, Windows, Microsoft on
Server sales went down 3.8% and up 4.9% this summer. That’s up if you’re counting how many servers companies have been buying in EMEA in Q3, by nearly 5% and down by just under 4% if you’re counting how much they cost. It’s the biggest fall in the amount spent on servers since the end of 2005, and la the news is much worse in Western Europe, at least for server vendors. Revenue went down 7.6% compared to last year, although unit sales are only down by 0.6%; that means you can buy almost as many servers as you did last year and pay rather less for them.
Dig into the IDC figures and there are some other interesting trends. Central and Eastern Europe are using more and more IT and it’s not just commodity x86 servers (up by 15/9%); pricier Itanium, mainframe and other non x86 servers went up by 22% and IBM saw almost 50% increase in revenue for z OS here. Windows didn’t lose any revenue this year either, all though all other server operating systems did, including Linux (although only what IDC calls a ‘very minor drop’); in fact Windows gained another 2% of server OS market share across EMEA.
It’s still the year of blades: up by 37.5% in sales compared to last year, and now 12% of all server sales by revenue. IBM lost as much on falling sales of x86 servers as it made on System z mainframes. Sun’s SPARC Enterprise systems sold well but Sun still lost share in the server market. Like IBM, it’s losing out to Dell and HP: HP was the number one server vendor with 2.4% growth, mainly because of ProLiant sales. Dell had a small increase in revenue and a 4% increase in shipments: more than HP but much less than the double-digit growth it had been seeing in previous quarters.
So, yes, servers sales are down overall and manufacturers will be hurting; but so far it seems to be canny buying that’s affecting the market as much as buying fewer servers. And that makes me think that while some companies may be skipping new servers in favour of SaaS and the cloud, more are just tightening their belts. The credit crunch has led to plenty of mergers and acquisitions (some more voluntary than others); that’s a lot of heterogenous IT systems to integrate, which means less time to go building new systems that need new servers - and more servers in a business that might get better economies of scale.
And then there’s virtualization. The server vendors have been supporting virtualization to the point of putting hypervisors in flash on new servers to get you running 20 servers’-worth of VMs on your new box more quickly. I’ve been asking vendors if this isn’t storing up trouble and lost sales for the future. You might never have bought the other 19 servers, but how about just another two or three? Answers have ranged from blank looks to assurances that it wouldn’t be a problem for long enough to let them find a way around it (often followed by ‘people will always need new servers’) to the very honest ‘yes, but we have to do it these days’. VMware revenue was up 32% for Q3 2008 compared to the year before; growth for 2008 might “only” be 42% rather than 45%. Microsoft has only just got into the serious hypervisor market with Hyper-V but it’s free with Server 2008 so you can expect it grow fast; Citrix and Red Hat have been chalking up the numbers for a few years too. Maybe the credit crunch will be the point at which virtualising servers also comes to mean not buying as many new ones
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The LHC isn
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Hardware, Intel, Networking, HP, Internet on
Simulating the big bang and colliding particles at the speed of light takes a lot of space, makes a lot of data - and it isn’t going to blow up the planet.
The Large Hadron Collider has been running quietly for a week and no tiny black holes have made their way out through the giant concrete end caps yet, so the world is probably safe.
The collider itself is a vast confection of superconducting magnets and we were lucky enough to go down into the caverns last year while it was still being constructed. The scale of the shaft and the cavern are impressive enough; ATLAS is just one of the detectors on the ring and the structure dwarfs the engineers putting to together.
We’ve put together a look at the detector using Microsoft’s Silverlight DeepZoom technology.
An experiment like the Large Hadron Collider also produces a lot of data: 15 million gigabytes a year, streaming out of CERN to a worldwide computing grid at 2GB/second through an HP ProCurve infrastructure. The mainframes and supercomputers that processed the data in decades past have been replaced by rows of PCs. The cavernous computing centre looks like an old school gym; half of it is full of familiar tower cases, the other half is filling up with racks and blades and tape library robots as CERN builds its own mega-data centre.
You need a special invitation - or a research project - to get into the caverns at CERN, now that the LHC is switched on. But you can book a tour to see one of the other particle accelerators, decelerators and colliders where researchers try to recreate the first seconds after the Big Bang - or you can head down to the basement to see the Tim Berners-Lee’s first Web server.
A slightly battered NexT cube with a hand-written label peeling off from the front of the case, the memo of the original World Wide Web proposal lying over the keyboard; if there was a coffee cup in the display case, you’d expect Sir Tim to come back and sit down at any minute. Also behind glass is one of the first Cisco routers to make it to Europe; it’s a hefty beige box that cost $10,000 back in 1984.
Tours start in the dramatic wooden Globe of Science and Innovation, but take a minute to stand in the main reception area across the road. The coloured lights shooting through the concrete floor flash every time cosmic rays are detected; that bright blue could be a solar flare or a supernova.
-Mary
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IDF: Will SSD mean the end of 5GB free?
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Enterprise, Storage, Intel on
Cloud computing will shine on SSD, but your free storage might go away when it does.
The reason you get free storage on Gmail and SkyDrive and Mozy and flickr and all the other Web 2.0 services isn’t just to keep up with all the other Web 2.0 services. It isn’t just to draw in visitors who can see and click ads. It’s because when you use hard drives, especially cheap, consumer grade hard drives, to run your search engine on, the only way to make that storage fast enough is to leave most of it empty.
The hard drives that Google stacks together are never more than 25% full, because any more than that and the latency to get the information back off is just too slow to make the search effective and slap the ads on it. The other 75% is just sitting there spinning around on the platter and making you happy by putting your files on there for free makes sense.
You don’t need access often enough to slow down Google’s own accesses and Google can queue your request up to retrieve when it’s convenient - your Internet connection isn’t fast enough for you to notice.
SSD is still expensive, but it could save a lot of money for enterprises and Web services because it’s lower power. For a notebook PC you care about 15% longer battery life - if Intel’s figures carry over to real PCs; for a data centre, you care about Watts/IOPS and Intel is claiming SSD can offer six times the read performance using 98% less power and needing only 75% of the space - because you can put cooler drives closer together without space for fans and AC. That means SSD should quickly start to become common. But that could also mean the end of ever-increasing free online storage.
On the one hand, SSD is fast enough that latency is much less of a problem, so you don’t have to leave most of it empty. And on the other, it’s expensive enough that you don’t want to leave any of it empty.
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IDF: stress testing SSD
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Silicon, Storage, Hardware, Laptop, Intel on
Battery life? Performance? No, the important test Intel’s new SSD passes is known internally as P*ssmark
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You say Express Gate, I say Palladium
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Futures, Silicon, virtualisation, Hardware, Laptop, Mobile, Security, Intel, Microsoft on
Imagine a second, simpler operating system on your PC with fixed features, so it’s more secure - after all, if you can’t add more programs you can’t add a virus either. It would have to start up quickly, so that Windows wasn’t waiting for it, so it would be ideal for listening to music and watching video. I’m not thinking about virtualization per se, although that’s one way to achieve something similar; this is two operating systems side by side, both with access to the PC hardware, but one of them does much more limited and circumscribed things.
Can you tell what it is yet?
No, actually, I’m not talking about Palladium - sorry, Microsoft Next Generation Secure Computing Base. That grew out of an attempt to reassure Sony that it would be OK to allow DVD movies to play on a PC without piracy becoming endemic and turned into a much more useful and visionary idea about using public key cryptography not to identify people but to secure machines. It would have been a good way to implement the DRM it was associated with in the public eye, though wouldn’t have forced it on anyone who didn’t want to run it. Palladium loaded a secure piece of software called the TOR that acted as a secure area that could only run trusted code (written to public APIs), where the apps would be invisible to the main OS - all secured by the machine-specific key in your TPM and some new technology from Intel.
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3G laptops: cheaper, faster, longer-lasting?
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Laptop, Hardware, Processors, Intel, Networking, Internet, Wireless, Mobile on
I wouldn’t be surprised to open a packet of cornflakes
Rated: 100% (1 votes)
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