COMPUTER CURRENTS

IT shoppers out in force

Crowds at the recent Commart IT event indicate that computing is now mainstream

JAMES HEIN

I dropped by the latest Commart IT event recently and the place was packed. It has been interesting to watch over the past 15 years how with each new show more and more people have attended.

While from one perspective this is a good indication that computing and computers have penetrated further into the market, it also means that it is getting harder and harder to enjoy the show. Getting around involves navigating through large crowds.

One reason for going was to try to find the iRiver (or Corwon) X20 digital media player. After checking the different sites, this looked like the one to get. I knew the brand was in the show because it was on many people's tags.

After starting with a quick walk round I started asking people where it might be. The downstairs people told me it was upstairs. The upstairs people told me to ask the information counter, which directed me to the Creative area in the upstairs front section. There they told me it was back in C section somewhere. I finally spotted Xenn at Big Computer, which actually sold the units, but they called them Corwon, not iRiver and they sent me elsewhere.

I finally found some iRiver units but was told to check Pantip for the X20. What I did notice was the large difference between US and Thai prices for this brand, even with the strong baht. The Apple Nano prices were the same all over Bangkok and I suspect that, like Sony, the prices are fixed by the respective head offices. When I eventually went to Pantip I was told that the model was not yet in Thailand.

With all the people the noise levels were also down (people make good sound absorbers). There also seemed to be an effort to fit more booths into the same space and I suspect that the show will outgrow Sirikit in the not too distant future, which is a shame given the convenient location on the underground train line.

It is starting to get to be a real cycle as I work on my computer on the weekend. Download and update Windows security patches, watch as a FireFox update goes through, update and run SpyBOT and make sure my anti-virus signatures are all up to date. Then I read that, according to Symantec, Windows has the least security holes. What?

According to Symantec, Microsoft Windows has the lowest number of vulnerabilities and the fastest turnaround time for patches of all commercial operating systems, but it also has the most serious flaws. Okay, now we are back in the same dimension.

The three operating systems compared were Windows, Apple Mac OS X and Red Hat's Linux. In this group Microsoft turns their fixes around in 21 days compared to 58 for Red Hat and 66 for Apple. At the same time over a third of Microsoft's problems were serious issues that opened up the computer to external attack. Apple had one and Red Hat two.

The same report determined that FireFox was more secure, with 54 problems in IE and 40 in Mozilla browsers overall. Firefox had none of the high security issues while MS had one. If you want to read the full reports you can search for it at the Symantec web site.

While in Pantip I picked up a 320 GB SATA HDD with a casing to plug into my USB port. When I buy this kind of equipment I like to make sure it has a fan. More difficult is a unit with the power supply also built in instead of an adaptor, but I guess you can't have everything.

This kind of unit is very handy for backing up data, consolidating your music, software and movie collections and is portable too. If you really want flexibly for backing up your PC, then get a hot swap unit for your computer that will allow you to slip in a hard drive while the computer is turned on. Hard drive space is very cheap these days and it won't be too long before a 1 TB drive is down to a reasonable price. If you are curious, that is over a year and a half's worth of MP3s at a high quality rip.

I was planning to get a new broadband router as I am having reset problem with mine but my usual supplier told me to wait. Instead he suggested I get the latest BIOS and make sure my router is plugged into my UPS first. I checked the SMC site and they get a recommendation downgrade because I could not find any BIOS downloads for my Barricade 9 model. So DLink or Zyxel or LinkSys are my current recommendations.

Industry news

Vista has been banned. I bet that got your attention, but this is standard policy for a new operating system. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is a US Government organisation that does research and sets standards for things like cryptography, so they like to spend time making sure the OS is secure enough to use before adopting it.

Despite the usual claims from Microsoft that businesses will be rushing out to upgrade to Vista this is a common practice both in government and private practice. Similar testing is required to ensure that all current applications will run properly under Vista.

In related news, Adobe has released a new version of its Creative Suite, CS3. However, they announced that they will not support CS2 under Windows Vista. While CS 2.3 will probably run without any major problems and is "not recommended," if you want to run Adobe CS under Windows Vista the message is to upgrade. You can find full details on the Adobe web site. Not supported under Vista is Adobe Acrobat Professional 7.0.

I'm showing my age a little here but John W. Backus, the man who lead the FORTRAN development team, passed away recently. For those younger ones scratching their heads, Fortran - which stands for Formula Translator - is a computer programming language favoured by engineers and scientists and was first seen in 1957, even before I was born.

Before Fortran most people were writing in assembly code and Fortran was the first higher level programming language.

Bored scientists at the University of California have come up with the nano equivalent of alphabet soup. They have devised a process to make precise, uniform objects about a micro across. These include three dimensional letters, triangles, crosses and other shapes. You are probably asking yourself why?

These letters glow in the dark and are so small they can use them to tag individual cells in the human body. They expect to be able to shrink the process down even further so one day in the future they could even put words on a human cell. Not sure how useful this is but it is neat.

I can imagine some nanobot loaded up with the letter "C" tagging cancer cells that could then be zapped with a laser. Or the phrase "Kilroy Was Here" written on the back of someone's brain stem. The joke potential for someone with an optical microscope can only be imagined by scientists.

Email: jamesh@inet.co.th

Bangkok Post

Last Updated : Sunday April 08, 2007