Thursday, December 11, 2008

Two New Devices Give Presentations Some Portability


Digital projectors are the best way to get the biggest possible image for a PowerPoint presentation or a movie. But the projectors are often pretty big themselves, with even most "pocket projectors" too big to stuff into the typical pocket or laptop bag.


That is changing. A new miniature-chip technology from Texas Instruments called pico is making digital projectors truly portable, instead of merely luggable. For the past couple of weeks, I've been using two of the first pico-based projectors on the market, Dell's M109S and Optoma's Pico PK-101.

The products are designed for different customers with different needs. Dell positions the 13-ounce M109S as a notebook companion, best suited for work presentations. The four-ounce Optoma projector is designed more as an iPod or digital-camera accessory for watching movies and slide shows on the go.

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The Dell M109S
Dell

The Dell M109S
The Dell M109S
The Dell M109S

Their portability requires compromises, most obviously in brightness and image resolution. The Dell and Optoma projectors, respectively, support 50 and 11 lumens -- a standard measure of projector brightness. That's far dimmer than top-notch projectors that offer several thousand lumens. So neither product excels in well-lighted rooms, where overhead and ambient lighting overpower their images. You can compensate somewhat for this weakness by placing the devices closer to the surfaces onto which they're projecting -- for example, a wall. But the darker the room you use, the better.

At about the size of a candy bar, the $399 Optoma device is the smaller of the two projectors and the one with the most intriguing possibilities for expanding the tiny screen sizes of mobile devices like the iPod.

It's powered by a rechargeable battery that Optoma says lasts for an hour on full brightness or two hours on a power-saving setting (the projector comes with two batteries). The projector has a tiny speaker, but people who want decent sound will need to use headphones or external speakers.

In theory, the Optoma device is small enough to bring along on a camping trip to show a film on the side of a tent, or to a restaurant, where you could inflict a vacation slide show on dinner mates by projecting onto a napkin or tablecloth.

I tested it on a recent airplane flight by projecting an episode of "Mad Men" from an iPod touch onto the back of the seat in front of me. The seat was a dark blue with embossing on it, so it didn't work very well. It's best to project onto an unmarked, light-colored surface. The quality of the image was better when I lay in bed one night, projecting a video onto a white ceiling.

Even under the most favorable circumstances, however, I found the images from the Optoma projector very dark, muddling the outlines of characters and action on screen. Although Optoma says you can get up to a 60-inch image from the projector, 45 inches was about as big as I could make the image before it got too fuzzy.

Optoma says the projector will ship with an iPod-compatible connector cable when it goes on sale in the U.S. on Dec. 15, though the unit I tested didn't come with one. I connected the device to my iPod touch using a $50 cable from Apple.

Compared with the Optoma device, the $449 Dell M109S is a behemoth, yet it's still only about the size of a short stack of drink coasters. Most projectors weigh at least a few pounds, if not more, which is big enough to make them a hassle to carry around. I barely noticed the Dell projector inside my laptop bag.

Unlike the Optoma projector, the Dell M109S has to be plugged into an electrical outlet to work. It comes with an unsightly set of connectors for plugging the projector into a video source, such as the VGA port found on most laptops and a composite video plug that is standard on DVD players. I was, however, able to plug my iPod touch into the Dell projector using the $50 Apple cable.

And unlike the Optoma, the Dell doesn't have speakers. To get sound for a movie, you'll need headphones or speakers, like those on a laptop.

Despite its extra bulk, the Dell M109S literally outshines the Optoma projector. It produces a bright image that I found very watchable, even if it wasn't high-definition. I projected the movie "James and the Giant Peach" onto an interior wall of my house, creating an image that was about 7 feet, measured diagonally.

The Dell M109S includes a capability called keystone correction, a standard feature in most projectors that adjusts a projected image to give it the proper dimensions, rather than the trapezoidal shape that results when a projector is angled upward. The Optoma projector doesn't have this feature. To get a normal rectangular movie image, I had to hold the projector level, toward the projection surface.

For business travelers who do presentations or for people who want to create a theater-like experience in a hotel room, vacation house or against a sheet in the backyard, the Dell projector would be a good fit. For now, the Optoma projector is a good idea that needs refinement.

Tuesday, December 9, 2008

SonicWall beefs up storage offerings

New hardware for its Continuous Data Protection line
Tim Greene (Network World) 08 December, 2008 07:54:00



SonicWall is revamping the hardware for its storage appliances, giving them much more capacity from the top of the line to the bottom.

The four new Continuous Data Protection (CDP) models, available December 15, replace the four original models which the company is no longer selling. SonicWall has not set formal end-of-life details for them.

Two of the new boxes are designed for small and midsize businesses with 400GB of storage. The other two, with up to 4.25TB of RAID 5 storage, are designed for central corporate sites to back up smaller appliances. They can also be used by value-added resellers as part of a backup-in-the-cloud service, SonicWall says.

The old CDP models stored 160GB to 600GB.

CDP devices can restore data from block-level changes to entire hard drives, and the company claims end users can make the fixes themselves without the intervention of IT administrators.

CDP client software runs on each machine to be backed up. It continuously backs up changes to the file system. Since buying the technology with the purchase of Lasso Logic in 2005, SonicWall has rewritten the firmware for the appliances to harden it.

The new models and their base prices are: CDP110 at US$2,000; CDP 210 at $3,500; CDP 5040 at $9,000; and CDP 6080 at $12,000.

Thursday, December 4, 2008

Hitachi GST, Intel team up for solid-state drives

Hitachi Global Storage Technologies and Intel are teaming up to produce solid-state drives for servers and workstations, the companies said Tuesday.

SSDs based on flash memory chips are faster and consume less power than disk drives, and because they don't have moving parts they can also be more reliable. Although SSDs are more expensive than disk drives, the high-speed, low-power characteristics they offer are particularly useful in high-end applications, such as data centers.

Under terms of the deal, drive maker Hitachi GST will only use NAND flash chips obtained from Intel in its high-end SSDs. The two companies will jointly develop drives that use Serial Attached SCSI and Fibre Channel interfaces, with products expected to hit the market in 2010, they said. Financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed.

Intel will continue to sell SSDs for laptops and desktop PCs, which use the SATA interface, under its own brand.

Intel's flash chips are manufactured by a joint venture with Micron, called IM Flash Technologies (IMFT). The joint-venture company doesn't sell to third-party customers, with all of its output going to Micron and Intel.

Tuesday, December 2, 2008

LoJack For Your Laptop


by Erick Schonfeld on December 2, 2008

It was only a matter of time before a location tracking app found its way into laptop security software. Laptop Cop, which lets you remotely control your computer and delete files if it is stolen, now has a geo-location feature based on WiFi-hotspot triangulation technology from Skyhook Wireless. It is the same technology that is used in the iPhone (along with GPS and cell-tower triangulation) to determine your location for geo-aware apps. Now you can tell the cops exactly what door to knock on, more or less.

Laptop Cop costs $50. It does come with those other features as well. But if you want the same Lojack service for your laptop without paying, you can download MyLoki for free. It is a browser add-on from Skyhook that broadcasts the location of your laptop. And anyone can always check your personal MyLoki page to see where your is laptop (which is supposed to be a proxy for you, but not when it’s been stolen).

It won’t be too long before all of your devices will tell you where they are.

Update: There’s another laptop recovery service from GadgetTrak for Macs that also uses Skyhook. In addition to the WiFi positioning, it also uses the Mac’s built-in camera to to take a picture of the perp and sends it to your Flickr account.

Monday, December 1, 2008

Greenpeace Slams Apple Over "World's Greenest Family of Notebooks" Claim

Worker harder, Jobs, if you want our lovin' say ecoactivists

Every season seems to bring new claims by Cupertino's Apple Corp. of its leaps-and-bounds advances in being more environmentally friendly. And every season brings a scathing report from Greenpeace on how far the company has yet to grow.

Perhaps Steve Jobs and company were tempting fate when Apple announced in a recent series of ads that the MacBooks were "the world's greenest family of notebooks", referencing their power saving use of Intel processors and their halogen and plastic free construction. Unsurprisingly, Greenpeace was there to punch a hole in Apple's dreams as it delivered its environmental report card full of less-than-glowing things to say about Apple's big claims.

While Apple deserves credit for eliminating brominated flame-retardants (BFRs) and other toxic plastics and managing relatively low power consumption, Greenpeace says the company's lack of providing a timeline in phasing out other potentially harmful compounds used in the laptops and their production is one of its key problems. Another significant shortcoming is Apple's failure to create environmental impact reports and tackle the problem of tech trash, it states.

Greenpeace gives Apple a failing rating -- 4.3 out of 10 (PDF). Writes Greenpeace, "[Apple]needs to commit to phasing out additional substances with timelines, improve its policy on chemicals and its reporting on chemicals management."

Apple's spokesperson declined to comment on the criticism, saying merely that customers should check out the "Apple and the Environment" section of the company's website if they want information on the company's environmental policy.

Don't mess with Accounting .

Don't mess with Accounting .
Kathy gone wild !

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