Posts Tagged ‘The Guardian’
VW Golf GTI 2-litre TSI 210
Posted by: Gadget Boy in Technology on September 20th, 2009
The original hot hatch has been given a nifty 21st-century makeover
The Golf GTi was the original hot hatch. It was so nippy and streetwise, it put the glottal stop in hot. It was, in fact, an 'ot 'atch. Fittingly, it first arrived in 1976, the 'ottest summer we've known. Thirty-three years and almost two million GTIs later, the latest version is a more mature proposition. Not grown-up exactly, but a tad more approachable, like a tasty geezer who's dropped the permanent sneer.
VW is calling this sixth version of the car "iconic", which may sound like self-bigging-up but is hardly an idle boast. The GTI does possess a significant cultural cachet. It is the suburban dream machine in the shape of a hatchback, a curiously English piece of iconography, hard to ignore without being attention-seeking. 'Ot but not OTT. One of the charms of the GTI is that it has never looked very special. It's a Golf, after all, perhaps VW's most functional car, but to the aficionado, the beady-eyed youth who longs to race it to the car wash, it is a fantasy assembled in a factory. One bloke with whom I conducted a bit of south London business stared at the car with close to religious reverence and said in an awed hush, "Is that the new one?" while a group of local lads practically swooned as I drove by, their faces engraved with consumer yearning. And at more than 22 grand, in the middle of a credit crunch, that's probably about as close as they're going to get to a GTI.
What are they missing? It's comfortable rather than luxurious. The interior is devoid of flashy gimmickry. The dashboard's sensible and clear. There is no ergonomic awkwardness. Everything comes down to the drive. And pretty much everything in the drive comes down to the gearbox. It positively compels you to accelerate. It is the opposite of a traffic-calming device. Everything short of maximising the revs and then shifting up seems like an appalling mishandling of the car and its gearbox; a sort of rudeness verging on abuse.
OK, the fuel economy is improved and the carbon emissions are reduced, but just look at that 100-yard stretch of open road in front. It would require Zen-like restraint and about 18 speed bumps not to want to reach the rear bumper of the car ahead in as short a time as possible. Even for someone deep into his fifth decade, this is a car that mounts a daunting challenge to the concept of patience. It's frightening to think what a 20-year-old who's just split up from his girlfriend might do with his hand on that gear stick.
But then, as I say, the price should prove a disincentive to salivating legions of boy racers. Better to leave it to their salivating fathers.
Google bucks recession to soar in value by 25% in a year
Posted by: Gadget Boy in Technology on September 18th, 2009
Internet search company is big winner in list of 100 most valuable global brands
Even in the midst of a global economic downturn there is one company, it would seem, that is resistant to the recession. Can't think of the household name that has bucked the slump? Try Googling it.
The internet search company was the biggest winner in the definitive list of the 100 most valuable global brands published today. Unsurprisingly, given the events of the last 12 months, banks and financial service companies accounted for four of the top five biggest fallers in the Interbrand top 100.
The brand value of investment bank UBS was halved to $4.37bn (£2.65bn) from $8.74bn a year ago. Financial firms Citi, Morgan Stanley, American Express, and HSBC suffered double-digit declines in the value of their brands, as did JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs.
Google, which dominates the global search market and has expanded into software, video, email, mapping and web browsing, saw its brand value soar by 25% in the last 12 months – more than any other company in the top 100 – to $31.98bn. The search company led a strong performance by the technology sector, with big rises for Amazon, BlackBerry and Apple, which broke into the top 20 global brands for the first time on the back of a 12% rise in its brand value to $15.43bn.
Clothing retailers Zara and H&M also saw double-digit rises despite the recession and were applauded by Interbrand for offering "affordable enjoyment in chaotic and worrying times". Top-tier luxury brands such as Ferrari also did well.
"Brands need to collect loyalty and the trust in financial services has diminished for obvious reasons," said Graham Hales, managing director of Interbrand UK, blaming economic instability and the "perceived lack of security" among banks for their poor performance.
"It is now becomes a question of how they move on from this position," Hales added. "The market feels like it has been hit by a hurricane, and there is clearly still a long-term lack of confidence in these brands. You need to rebuild very quickly to get back to a position of strength."
Barclays, which does not feature in the top 100 because of its lack of global presence, had "actually done very well", said Hales. "They have demonstrated a greater sense of confidence and conviction in their brand. They opted away from taking the government bailout and they are re-emerging faster than the others."
The top five brands in 2009 were identical to the top five of 2008. Coca-Cola topped the poll with a value of $68.73bn – up 3% – followed by IBM, Microsoft, GE and the highest-ranked non-US company, Finnish mobile phone producer Nokia.
The recession appears not to have dulled consumers' appetite for fast food, with sixth-placed McDonald's one of four high street fast food outlets in the top 100, along with KFC, Burger King and Pizza Hut, which all rose up this year's list.
Harley-Davidson fell 23 places and lost 43% of its brand value. Hales attributed the drop to the "changing nature of male bravado". "We don't feel so smart sitting on top of a big noisy polluting engine anymore. Conversely, Ferrari has held its own because it is a top luxury brand and it produces so few cars each year that it is relatively unexposed to the overall dynamics of the market."
Interbrand's survey is based on factors, including the economic earnings that a brand creates and the role that it plays in driving demand for a company's products and services.
Are malware writers getting ambitious?
Posted by: Gadget Boy in Technology on September 16th, 2009
Yes, if you mean that they're now trying to catch people who read the New York Times, rather than random visitors to music download, porn and hacking sites.
Yes, if you mean that they're now trying to catch people who read the New York Times, rather than random visitors to music download, porn and hacking sites. Of course, it's harder to compromise one of the Grey Lady's web servers, but one group of criminals recently found the answer: buy advertising.
What we now call "malvertising" has grown this year, and it represents a serious threat not just to individual users but to a web that's ultimately paid for by ads. As Deloitte noted in its predictions for 2009: "Anything that makes large numbers of internet users decide that clicking on online advertisements could be a bad or dangerous thing threatens the current business model of almost every company that does business online."
The New York Times says it fell victim to a malicious ad swap. "The culprit masqueraded as a national advertiser and provided seemingly legitimate product advertising for a week. Over the weekend, the ad being served up was switched so that an intrusive message, claiming to be a virus warning from the reader's computer, appeared."
The result is one of the most obvious scams around. A message says your Windows PC has 38 pieces of malware and invites you to run a scan. The fake antivirus program then asks for money to remove the malware (which doesn't exist). In the worst cases, it also drops a Trojan that can download some real infections. The Times slipped up because the criminals impersonated Vonage, the internet telephony company, and it seems they may have owned vonage-inc.com at the time. "Because the Times thought the campaign came straight from Vonage, which has advertised on the site before,it allowed the advertiser to use an outside vendor that it had not vetted to actually deliver the ads," according to the NYT's internet section.
The Times says it has now improved its checking system, but malvertising attacks have also been mounted via other publications, and via Facebook and Google ads. Nowadays, it's also very common for the attacks to use topical events, such as the deaths of Ted Kennedy and Patrick Swayze, to try the same scam using Google's search results.
The result, as Kris Lamb, director of IBM's X-Force security group, told ECN, is that: "There is no such thing as safe browsing today and it is no longer the case that only the red-light district sites are responsible for malware. We've reached a tipping point where every website should be viewed as suspicious and every user is at risk. The threat convergence of the web ecosystem is creating a perfect storm of criminal activity."
How Last.fm inspired a breakthrough
Posted by: Gadget Boy in Technology on September 16th, 2009
I first saw Mendeley pitch two weeks ago – now it is on the way to changing the face of science
The music radio site Last.fm is one of the great ideas from the UK during the first dotcom boom. Users can listen to their own songs and other tracks recommended by Last.fm's algorithms based on their tastes, including iTunes, and those of friends. It could easily have been a one-trick pony. But now a few academics have applied its serendipity to scientific research. Why can't researchers, instead of waiting anywhere up to three years for their papers to jump all the hurdles, be part of a real-time market place – a fusion of iTunes and Last.fm for science? They pitched the idea, among others, to two of Last.fm's investors: Spencer Hyman and Stefan Glaenzer, newly enriched by the sale of Last.fm to CBS. They bought into the idea of using the site's principles to aggregate users' data (anonymously) while building up a databank of articles. Now the show is on the road and expanding fast. It is free, but a premium version will be added soon.
How does it work? At the basic level, students can "drag and drop" research papers into the site at mendeley.com, which automatically extracts data, keywords, cited references, etc, thereby creating a searchable database and saving countless hours of work. That in itself is great, but now the Last.fm bit kicks in, enabling users to collaborate with researchers around the world, whose existence they might not know about until Mendeley's algorithms find, say, that they are the most-read person in Japan in their niche specialism. You can recommend other people's papers and see how many people are reading yours, which you can't do in Nature and Science. Mendeley says that instead of waiting for papers to be published after a lengthy procedure of acquiring citations, they could move to a regime of "real-time" citations, thereby greatly reducing the time taken for research to be applied in the real world and actually boost economic growth. There are lots of research archives. For the physical (but not biological) sciences there is ArXiv, with more than half a million e-papers free online – but nothing on the potential scale of Mendeley. Around 60,000 people have already signed up and a staggering 4m scientific papers have been uploaded, doubling every 10 weeks. At this rate it will soon overtake the biggest academic databases, which have around 20m papers.
This startup is fascinating for a few reasons. First, it shows the second phase of the dotcom boom is throwing up great, practical ideas. Second, the technology transfer involved – from music to science – is innovative and raises the question of how many other disciplines could adopt it. Could there be a rival for Google by gearing search not to links to a website, but to the thinking of like-minded people? Third, this is another example of "Wimbledonisation", (a reference to the tennis tournament) in which Britain may not win the competition but gets the economic benefits of hosting the tournament. Mendeley, though based in Clerkenwell in central London, was founded by three German academics – Jan Reichelt and Victor Henning (interviewed here) and Paul Foeckler – confirming London's dominant position for European entrepreneurs as well as footballers. Investors told them it was the centre of the best research hub outside Boston and a magnet for recruitment. When I heard their five-minute pitch in a noisy room recently I hadn't realised how fast they were moving nor that they were about to be named one of the top 10 in Tech Media Invest 100, sponsored by the Guardian.
Small wonder that it has already got some of the world's leading universities on board, including Harvard, Stanford, Cambridge and Imperial, all by word of mouth. Dr Werner Vogels, chief technology officer of Amazon, reportedly said of Mendeley that if they got it right they could change the face of science. They seem to be well on the way.
App stores: now open for business
Posted by: Gadget Boy in Technology on September 16th, 2009
Apple didn't invent the app store, but it has paved the way for firms to prise open the closed world of mobile applications
When Apple's iPod began to rise to prominence in 2003, analysts suggested the digital music player had created a "halo effect" that boosted the company's computer business – which at the time definitely needed it. With the release of the iPhone, Apple created another halo effect, but the beneficiaries this time are not just the company but the entire mobile industry.
Apple didn't invent the idea of an MP3 player, but it created an effective combination of hardware, software and a convenient music store that appealed to consumers. It also didn't invent the idea of mobile applications or even the idea of an app store, but with the iPhone it has the rest of the industry – both networks and handset makers – scrambling to create or relaunch application stores.
Mobile applications are not new. Sun Microsystems' Java platform was designed to work on mobile devices almost from the start, and the industry has long been successful in selling Java-based games and ringtones. However, the iPhone has increased awareness of a much broader range of apps, dramatically increasing their demand.
Ilja Laurs spent five years as the head of a mobile games developer, and had become frustrated. His company was finding it impossible to get its applications onto phones. In 2005, he launched getjar.com, an open app store. Having grown up in Lithuania when it was under the control of the Soviet Union, Laurs's view of GetJar was of "a democracy, rather the controlled economy" of the mobile world.
Apple shows the way
The Jar in GetJar refers to the Java Archive format commonly used to distribute mobile applications. The apps store started out catering strictly to mobile Java applications, but it has expanded to support all major platforms, including indirect support for the iPhone. It doesn't host the files for iPhone applications, but has links to the official app store.
Apple's store has led to a much greater awareness of mobile apps among consumers, Laurs says, and has led to an exponential growth in demand for apps – not just for Apple but also for GetJar. In January this year, his store had 18m downloads, but now is seeing 55m a month. GetJar makes money from that too – 95%, through charging content developers for premium placement or extra visibility on the site. The rates are determined by auction.
But for the future, Laurs sees the mobile apps market becoming as big if not bigger than the internet. It's a safe bet, considering that more than half of the world pays to use a mobile phone, while only 23% of the world has internet access, according to the UN's International Telecommunications Union.
Of course, the full power of mobile applications is limited to higher-end smartphones, which accounted for only about 14% of global mobile phone sales in the second quarter of 2009, says the analysis company Gartner. According to the mobile advertising startup AdMob, Apple's iPhone store sells $200m of applications every month, or $2.4bn a year. Half of all iPhone owners buy applications. The same research showed that 19% of the owners of handsets running Google's Android operating system buy apps.
Despite Apple being a newcomer to the mobile market, the number of iPhone apps has grown quickly to boast around 75,000 applications. The BlackBerry maker Research in Motion has a few thousand. Nokia's Ovi store has about "5,500 content items", which includes applications, ringtones and wallpaper graphics. Palm has a rudimentary store for its Pre.
That said, mobile application sales have a very long tail. The top 100 applications account for only 20% of the downloads on the site, Laurs said. GetJar says that it has about 54,000 game and application files. About 80% of the mobile applications on GetJar have some kind of business model: some charge for the applications, usually in single-digit amounts, while others such as the Opera mini browser operate a search-based business. Some 10% of downloads from GetJar are non-commercial, including religious apps such as electronic versions of the Bible or the Qur'an.
Carriers and device-makers have opened up, but it is still far from being completely democratic – a situation that would have been unacceptable on the internet, Laurs says. "It's like if Microsoft would have blocked Firefox or if Google decided a site didn't exist at all. These are examples that sound completely stupid in the open internet world, but this is what we have in mobile now." Carriers now understand that consumers want applications and will abandon carriers that don't provide them, he suggests: apps stores like Apple's have been a huge step forward for the industry.
Open the store
However, pressure is building on Apple to open up even further. It has come in for increasing criticism for the level of control it exerts over the iPhone apps store, to the point where the US communications regulator queried Apple, the carrier AT&T and Google about the rejection of the search giant's Voice application. (Apple responded that it is "still considering" it.)
Some have credited the pressure with pushing Apple to approve the application from streaming music service Spotify, even though it could be seen as competing against Apple's iTunes music store.
Carriers are wary of becoming "dumb pipes", a mobile phone companies see the landline internet service providers. Mobile phones are unlikely to become as open as computers connected to the internet, but with greater awareness among consumers about applications on mobile phones, there is a new pressure to open up the closed world of mobile even more.
Population of India to get biometric ID cards
Posted by: Gadget Boy in Technology on September 16th, 2009
In India, Big Brother just wants to help. The country's 1.2 billion citizens are to be issued with a biometric identity card in an attempt to improve the delivery of India's inefficient public services – a move civil liberties' activists are condemning as the act of a "surveillance society".
This month, the country began the ambitious scheme of issuing everyone with a unique identity number. Within the first five years of the scheme, giant computer servers will hold the personal details of at least 600 million people. The introduction of what will be one of the world's most ambitious IT projects will cost an estimated £1.5bn.
The scheme is the brainchild of Nandan Nilekani, one of India's best-known software tycoons and now head of the government's Unique Identification Authority. "We are going to have to build something on the scale of Google but it will change the country … every person for first time [will] be able to prove who he or she was."
The country's red tape is legendary: Indians have dozens of types of identity verification, ranging from electoral rolls to ration cards, yet almost none can be used universally. The new system will be a national proof of identity, effective for everything, from welfare benefits to updating land records.
Nilekani said the scheme would help the poor especially. Moving from one state to another – a regular occurrence for poor villagers in search of work – often meant benefits were withdrawn because proof of residence was lacking. "This will mean maids and labourers … a hundred or two hundred million people – will be able to access welfare benefits for the first time without any questioning who they are."
Eventually, cards will hold the person's name, age, and birth date, as well as fingerprint or iris scans, though no caste or religious identification. "We are not profiling a billion people. This will provide an ID database which government can access online. There will be checks and balances to protect identities," said Nilekani, who has also been in talks to create a personalised carbon account so that all Indians might buy "green technologies" using a government subsidy.
Doubts have been raised over privacy and the complex security needed to police such the system, as well as concerns that the project is just too ambitious. "We could have a hacking Olympics," said Guru Malladi, a partner at Ernst & Young.
Civil liberty campaigners fear the card could be a tool of repression.
Nandita Haskar, a human rights lawyer, said: "There's already no accountability in regard to violations of human and civil rights. In this atmosphere what are the oversight mechanisms for this kind of surveillance?"
‘Lab-on-a-chip’ tech for cancer test
Posted by: Gadget Boy in Technology on September 16th, 2009
Endoscopic technology would enable doctors to test for colorectal cancer biomarkers during internal examinations
A quicker diagnosis for early stages of colorectal cancer would save lives. Combining biology with electronics, Sefi Vernick, a PhD student at Tel Aviv University, hopes to provide just that. By adding lab-on-a-chip technology to an endoscope, his work should enable doctors to test for cancer biomarkers during internal examinations.
Vernick is working on biosensors, mainly electrochemical, for cancer detection as part of a group effort to develop biomedical devices. As the third-most common cancer, early diagnosis is important. "It's also widely accepted that, since cancer is the sum of many cellular events manifesting in many ways, the solution lies in multi-target strategies. A simultaneous detection of biomarkers may increase level of confidence [for detection] considerably," says Vernick.
Biomarkers are commonly used in medical diagnostics to indicate a disease state. Cancer biomarkers are molecular changes detectable in the tumour as well as blood, urine or other body fluids with these telltale signs being produced in the tumour or by the body itself. But there's a problem: "CRC [colorectal cancer] is a greater challenge since its biomarkers aren't sufficiently specific."
Endoscopes allow doctors to examine the rectum and colon, take biopsy samples, and remove small polyps that may develop into cancers. By fitting lab-on-a-chip technology to an endoscope, cancer biomarkers are detectable too. "This tool allows us to both visualise and remove polyps and screen for cancer in real time.".
At the moment, he relies on the presence of a single biomarker for healthy cells not found in cancer cells. The lab-on-a-chip acts as an electrochemical biosensor for this biomarker (which catalyses the substrate) with electrodes transducing a signal into a measurable electric current. Filters help reduce biological noise within this "highly sensitive" method. The research, which is partly funded by American-Israeli businessman and philanthropist Lester Crown, also hopes to add further cancer biomarkers to increase the level of confidence in the results.
The new research is welcomed by Dr Alison Ross, senior science information officer at Cancer Research UK. "There are many questions that need answering before we know whether this potential new test is accurate and reliable and provides benefits over existing methods," she says.
"This new technology is just one example of the huge research effort to identify biomarkers that can aid cancer diagnosis. But any new way of speeding up the diagnosis of bowel cancer would be very welcome."
Ross also points out that when cancer is detected early, treatment is often simpler and more likely to be effective. The UK has already introduced a bowel cancer screening programme using the faecal occult blood test to check for early signs.
Find your nearest postbox – legally
Posted by: Gadget Boy in Technology on September 16th, 2009
A Freedom of Information request has led to a very useful website showing where postboxes are located
One of the winners of the Cabinet Office's Show Us a Better Way competition – held last year to find ways of using government-owned data – is getting into its stride, after Royal Mail was forced to release the location details of its 116,000 postboxes by the Freedom of Information (FoI) Act.
The idea of finding out where your nearest postbox is – put forward by Jenny Ingram – was one of six winners. But creating a map of those postboxes had to be put on hold almost immediately when Royal Mail expressed reservations about providing its data to an outside party.
But following a series of FoI requests, the details not only of the postcodes of the postboxes but also their collection times has been gathered. The crowdsourcing effort (which readers are encouraged to help with) aims to pinpoint every postbox in the UK on an openly licensed map so it can be provided on future mobile platforms without licensing concerns.
The scheme, being run by Matthew Somerville, a web developer, at http://www.dracos.co.uk/play/locating-postboxes/ builds on the complete set of postboxes released under an FoI request in August. Other requests have also gathered collection times.
Royal Mail has insisted it retains all rights in the information released through the request – which would include precise locations of the postboxes. But Somerville has got around that by using the open-sourced OpenStreetMap system, and asking viewers to click a spot that they think is closest to a named, postcoded postbox.
Does that infringe the Royal Mail's rights? "I don't think locations of postboxes are being derived from the list, regardless of what the IP [intellectual property] status of the list itself might be." Somerville said. "I would hope that they would consider what I have done/ am doing worthwhile and a public service. They could even use the accurate locations themselves to run things such as travelling salesman algorithms to work out better routes to collect from the postboxes!"
So far 22,747 have been located out of about 116,000 in total. And how long could it take to finish? "No idea," says Somerville. "People can really only do the ones around them unless they're travelling, so it's really up to getting people all over the place."
It's a wonderfully useful idea – though the fact that it required multiple FoI requests and still has faint legal uncertainty shows that the government urgently needs to stop looking at its non-personal data as requiring protection – and start allowing the public to create new products with it.
Join the debate at the Free Our Data blog
Want to improve your memory?
Posted by: Gadget Boy in Technology on September 16th, 2009
People are keen to snap up machines with 64-bit systems, compared with the standard 32-bit. But what's the real difference?
The arrival of Apple's Snow Leopard upgrade to its Mac OS X operating system this month, and the advent of Microsoft's Windows 7 next month, is being seen as a golden opportunity to sell more product by one group of semiconductor manufacturers – whose potential market per computer will be increased by a factor of about 4bn each – 4,294,967,296 to be precise.
That's the multiplier in the amount of RAM that a 64-bit operating system can address compared with a 32-bit one. That upgrade from 32-bit to 64-bit is part of a key shift in Snow Leopard compared with its predecessor, Leopard. And although Windows 7 will come in both 32-bit and 64-bit flavours (with prices varying between them), and upgrading from 32-bit Windows to 64-bit Windows requires a wipe-and-install, a significant number of people – perhaps half of buyers of new PCs, by some estimates – are expected to find it attractive enough that they will.
Raise a DRAM
That's good news for the DRAM (dynamic random access memory) industry, which has had nothing but bad news for the past 18 months. As supplies ballooned in 2008 while PC sales slowed, revenues fell by around 15%. Total DRAM industry revenues in 2008 were $23.6bn (£14.3bn), down 25% on 2007. The analysis company iSuppli forecast that 2009 would bring in only $20.1bn. The problem: manufacturers didn't have any reason to put more than 4GB (maximum) into a PC, but DRAM makers were getting more efficient – and hence pumping out more memory. Their efficiency was coming in the "wrong" part of the business cycle.
That is typical for the DRAM industry, which bounces from champagne to commiseration. But now, 64-bit computing has come along, and may keep it happy.
"A basic 64-bit machine will probably have 8GB of RAM," says Terry Groth, worldwide product marketing manager of Lexar Media, a subsidiary of Micron Technology (which sells the Crucial brand of RAM). "It's probably going to be driven by OEMs [original equipment manufacturers] and manufacturers. We're expecting a rebound in the economy, and more computer buying in the [Christmas] holiday season, and we expect the trend in DRAM sales to follow that."
In theory, a 64-bit operating system can address as much as 16m gigabytes (16 exabytes) of RAM. In reality, physical limits (of available memory slots in the machine) and cost mean that even those keen to stuff their personal computer with the maximum can only put in 8GB – although 64-bit Windows can support up to 128GB.
Even so, both numbers are a significant advance for the RAM manufacturers, where the maximum has been 4GB for some years – of which Windows Vista users were usually only able to use 3GB. The transition inside the operating systems is by no means complete; 32-bit drivers will exist in both for a long time to come. But 64-bit is a reality; and so is the prospect of people wanting significantly more memory. (It's even possible that people will need extra RAM when running 64-bit – because the operating system will have to load 32-bit drivers as well, increasing the memory it needs.)
For a market that has been depressed, along with the rest of the PC supply chain – with sales off by around 10% in 2009 compared with 2008 – the shift towards 64-bit is delightful news. The obvious advantage of having more RAM is that more data can be stored in memory, rather than having to be read off the (comparatively slow) hard drive. Browser page data, video information, and dozens of programs can all sit comfortably together in huge RAM spaces without having to be swapped onto and from the hard drive (such "paging" is a key constraint on systems with limited RAM).
However, it's not a panacea. John Nack, principal product manager of Photoshop at Adobe, noted on his blog that: "What does 64-bit computing mean, practically speaking? In a nutshell, it lets an application address very large amounts of memory – specifically, more than 4 gigabytes. This is great for pro photographers with large collections of high-res images: [Adobe] Lightroom being able to address more RAM means less time swapping images into and out of memory during image processing-intensive operations."
But, he added: "It's also important to say what 64-bit doesn't mean. It doesn't make applications somehow run twice as fast. As Photoshop architect Scott Byer writes, '64-bit applications don't magically get faster access to memory, or any of the other key things that would help most applications perform better.' In our testing, when an app isn't using a large data set (one that would otherwise require memory swapping), the speedup due to running in 64-bit mode is around 8-12%."
Bigger, better, faster
Even so, regardless of RAM, running a 64-bit address system has other benefits. It can handle files more than 4GB in size, such as entire DVDs, disk images and video directly; 32-bit systems struggle because each address over the 4GB point must be represented using more than one "register", requiring multiple CPU cycles to read it. In a 64-bit system, every address can be held in a single register.
Tests suggest data encryption and decryption runs between three and five times faster in a 64-bit environment; complex numerical analysis (of which encryption is a subset) also runs faster, though few people will use their PCs for that. Professional Apple users, often high-end graphics users, are likely to be early adopters, says Groth.
And the DRAM manufacturers will be happy to sell to you. They have recently introduced a new form, DDR3, which runs faster and can store up to 8GB – gigabytes, not gigabits – on a module. By the end of 2010, says Groth, we'll be seeing 16GB modules, though the cost may make them useful only to high-end servers.
But the cost will, inevitably, fall. And DRAM chips keep stuffing more onto them: Moore's law, suggesting prices halve every 18 months, has held fast for decades.
"Every time the technology goes to a point where it seems Moore's law can't be improved on, they somehow do," says Groth. "At some point I imagine that the physical nature of the components will have an impact. But for now it's still going strong and working for the industry."
Films like Gamer aren’t playing the game
Posted by: Gadget Boy in Games, Technology on September 17th, 2009
Avatars are everywhere in the movies these days. But how many film-goers want to imagine themselves as, say, Gerard Butler?
Gamer, from the guys that brought you Crank, is based on a puzzling premise. Gerard Butler is trapped in an ultraviolent live-action computer game in which he runs around shooting people and getting shot at; his every action controlled by a 17-year-old gamer wielding a Wii-type gizmo from the comfort of his own home. But why would anyone want to play a game where their avatar is a real human being who could get killed, thus bringing their participation to an end? (And that's even before we get started on the moral objections, which tend not to be of account in your average dystopia.) Surely much of the appeal of computer games such as Call of Duty or Halo is that even if you get fragged, you can pick yourself up and start all over again. And again. Until you get it right, or find the cheat code.
The word "avatar" derives from the Sanskrit meaning "descent", though one might as well add "into silliness", since avatars in the movies are rarely the sort of incarnation you'd choose to associate yourself with. The avatars of Keanu Reeves and his chums in The Matrix are like a 15-year-old's notion of cool, which involves dressing like an habituee of an S&M leather club. Wouldn't it be more fun to raid a virtual house of Chanel or Armani instead? And James Cameron's Avatar, to judge from the trailer, looks suspiciously like a live-action version of one of Roger Dean's 1970s prog rock album covers, populated by the results of unsavoury couplings between Smurfs and Houyhnhnms. If I wanted blue skin, I'd join the Blue Man Group.
As someone whose acme of gaming pleasure was reached in the search for the ocarina in The Legend of Zelda, and who enjoyed the quest parts of Mortal Kombat more than the kombat itself, I prefer the game worlds of David Cronenberg's eXistenZ, or of Mamoru Oshii's Avalon and Ghost in the Shell animations, which go beyond the standard shoot-'em-up to offer cityscapes more intricate and intriguing than rubble-strewn battlefields – hidden treasures such as the gun you could make out of Chinese food, or basset-hounds so lovable it would be tempting to live in a virtual world, just so that you could own one. I did once get seized by a yearning to have hair like Dr Aki Ross from Final Fantasy; after the fruitless purchase of many overpriced conditioning products, I was forced to admit the only way to get coiffed like that would be to undergo a motion-capture makeover.
William Gibson and Neal Stephenson are usually credited with the popularisation of the avatar concept, though Philip K Dick, typically, explored it before everyone else, with the Perky Pat layouts by which bored planetary colonists in The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch could insert themselves into Barbie doll worlds. They used hallucinogenic drugs rather than computers, but the idea is much the same. As for films, The Sorcerers, made a couple of years before its whizzkid director, Michael Reeves, died of an overdose in 1969, was surely an avatar movie avant le fait, with its plot about two oldsters, played by Boris Karloff and Catherine Lacey, who control the mind of Ian Ogilvy and, through him, vicariously act out their increasingly lurid fantasies of sex and violence on Susan George.
But hasn't cinema itself always been a manifestation of our desire to act out our fantasies through avatars? It's just that in times gone by we called them movie stars. Surely any film worth its salt should tell a story efficiently enough to allow us to insert ourselves into the action and feel through the characters as they live and love, fight and die. Honestly, who wants to be Gerard Butler or an intergalactic Smurf when you could be Ava Gardner or Humphrey Bogart, strip off a glove in a Jean Louis strapless gown, run the Miami underworld in a Hawaiian shirt while snorting humungous quantities of cocaine, or exchange saucy double entendres with Cary Grant on the train to Chicago? Maybe film-makers should leave the avatars to creators of computer games, and get back to the business of telling proper stories instead.
Action and adventure, Comment, Culture, features, Film, Science fiction and fantasy, The Guardian, Virtual worlds
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