The Hard Edge
What Alice didn't tell Bill was that she fled to France not because of a great fare, or even the promise of reliable electricity. She fled because she was becoming seriously interested in tablet computing again.
More than 10 years ago, it took Bill and a team of ZD technicians to pry the failed Momenta tablet from Alice's hands. It wasn't that Alice loved the product per se. She just saw, for one moment, the power of a tablet form factor and the benefit of being able to compute anywhere. Further seduced by AT&T's TV commercials featuring someone lounging on the beach with an eye-catching handheld, Alice took up the challenge and went in search of the ultimate tablet.
Even 10 years isn't enough time for Alice to be able to speak publicly about what she went through. Windows for Pen Computing, hauling a backbreaking brick-like device from Slate Computing, and other episodes make the quest unspeakable even today. But over time, even Bill can admit tablet-style devices have been cropping up and succeeding. (Yeah, I hear they were big with Moses. —Bill)
When Alice saw shoppers in her San Francisco grocery store using their Palm Vs to check their shopping lists, she knew the tablet was coming back. Within weeks, Microsoft announced a new tablet in the works, and Sony unveiled a prototype at CES that wirelessly connects to the Net via broadband and lets you watch DVDs.
Alice even found a small startup called Aqcess Technologies that's already selling tablet computers called QBEs (www.qbenet.com/products.htm). In addition to the usual wireless Internet and e-mail, QBEs (pronounced "cubes") have built-in Webcams for conference calling from your easy chair, and double as desktops when docked and connected to a mouse and keyboard.
Still, problems in this category have yet to be solved. The QBE, for example, is way too expensive (close to $3,000 for the tablet alone) and as thick as a laptop. Tablets should be ultralight and ultrasleek if they're to compete with laptops for ease of use. Three cheers to Aqcess though, for coining the term "Family Area Network," which is what these wireless home networks are. Move over WAN and LAN, here comes the FAN.
With Alice long gone again, Bill suggests a moment of silence. Perhaps this round of tablet computing will succeed and Alice will survive to face another new trend. In the meantime, stay tuned for regular updates on tablet computers. They're baaack!
Why ask why?
This is quickly shaping up to be the year of ceaseless questioning. Who really won the election? Will tech stocks recover? Will there be a recession? Never ones to stand idly by in the face of a trend, Alice and Bill decided to serve up a few of their own technology ponderables.
Why is a little Florida company called Xbox Technologies holding Microsoft's Xbox gaming console hostage in a trademark-naming dispute when Sony was able to call its PlayStation2 the PS2? Doesn't IBM PS/2 ring a bell?
Why is it that as soon as AT&T WorldNet starts advertising itself as the fastest ISP in the universe with the fewest disconnects, Bill can't get a connection speed faster than 28kbps and finds himself tossed offline if he's idle for more than 10 minutes?
Why is it that Intel keeps reducing the speed of its Pentium 4, when a cheaper Athlon can still rub its nose in the dirt? Intel started with a 1.5GHz version, then supplied 1.4GHz and 1.3GHz iterations. Is it that difficult to see this is going in the wrong direction? (And are the Blue Men viable successors to the Bunny People?)
Why did nVidia (www.nvidia. com) buy 3dfx (www.3dfx.com, for now)? The once-proud company fell victim to the toss of the graphics dice (by the hand of nVidia). It really had nothing to offer nVidia, whose GeForce overpowered its Voodoo. Was it just so another competitor wouldn't buy it up? (Bill remembers an old cartoon showing fish being progressively eaten by their larger cousins. Seems to fit.)
Why is Silicon Graphics (www.sgi.com) charging $450 for an adapter that allows its 17.3-inch 1600SW LCD panel to work with graphics cards other than the less-than-standard Number Nine card it was provided with? Sure, the MultiLink adapter enables the 1600SW to accept both VGA analog and DVI or DFP digital signals. And there's a built-in scaling capability that ensures even lower-resolution images scale to maximize the SuperWide display on the Silicon Graphics 1600SW. It's even compatible with Bill's Matrox G400-TV graphics card. But $450? Adding insult to injury, there's a six-week wait to get one.
Why is it that no sooner than Bill gets his phenomenal Klipsch (www.klipsch.com) v2-400 speaker system, Klipsch releases the v2.1s? Better separation and midrange response are supposedly the differences. But Bill figures he'd never notice, thanks to the hearing loss he's suffered listening to the whirring of loud hard drives and computer fans for all these years.
Why did Alan Greenspan suddenly reduce interest rates a few months ago? That's easy. He knew the lease was up on Bill's '98 Corvette Pace Car and that Bill wanted to buy it. Mr. Greenspan, reportedly a longtime "Hard Edge" reader, and the second most powerful man in the United States, was just being a pal. Thanks, Al. You're down for a ride anytime you're in town.
It slices, it dices
Alice and Bill have long admired the American spirit of invention. And although "The Hard Edge" has faithfully chronicled the birth of the Web browser, the move to gigahertz processing, and the ups and downs of 3D graphics, longtime "Hard Edge" readers know Alice and Bill also have a weakness for the wackier products that show up on late-night television. In fact, one of their favorite pastimes is finding technical uses for these products, blending the highest of the high-tech with the lowest of the low-tech. The results have produced some of the most popular moments in "Hard Edge" history.
For example, when the move toward energy-efficient computing became an out-of-control marketing fad, Alice and Bill suggested The Clapper as a more economical way to power down your monitor and desk lamp at the same time. When Intel began moving users from the 486 to the Pentium via a processor upgrade socket rarely used by consumers, Alice and Bill suggested spreading Chia seeds into the socket holes and growing a Chia Pet Upgrade Processor instead.
Today, Alice is happy to see the Internet itself has joined forces with the Ginsu knife, the Flowbee haircutting system and yes, even the Pocket Fisherman, to bring you these low-tech classics on the Web at www.seenontv.com.
Alice and Bill are already busy combing the site for tomorrow's technical treasures. In the meantime, if you spot a product that will cut hair and brown bacon without electricity, and can think of a new high-tech use for it, please drop Alice and Bill a line. They'll feature your idea in an upcoming "Hard Edge."
Mondo cool
Yamaha (yes, the guitar and motorcycle people) have held top honors for the fastest CD-RW drive for quite some time. Recently, it introduced a newer and (you guessed it) faster version called the LightSpeed CRW 2100EZ. Bill had a chance to fondle one a few months ago and wrote it up for some obscure PC magazine. It was an impressive drive at the time, but Yamaha was just getting its software bundle together and making things work, so Bill had to track spare software across the Web.
Time passed. Then Bill got a call from Tony Tate. Longtime readers will remember Tony as a maker of high-speed IDE interface cards who could be somewhat argumentative and outspoken, especially when Bill gave Mondo Cool awards to Promise Technology and not Tony's company. Tony's now part of another company, Pacific Digital (www.1pdc.com). The company has a new CD-RW drive called the Pacific Digital 161040ei. Well, golly, it's the Yamaha drive with all of the appropriate software neatly packaged in the box and selling for $10 less than Yamaha's suggested street price.
This is a 16x/10x/40x drive, and for those of you still scratching your heads over CD-RW numbering parlance, this means it writes at 16x, rewrites at 10x, and reads at 40x. (From the Department of Obscure Factoids: "x" is the original 150K-per-second speed of 1x CD-ROM drives, so "40x" is really 40 times 150, or 6,000K per second.)
Bill loves liner notes, considering them a near-constant source of amusement. In this case, however, there was nothing to laugh at. The liner notes said, "Rip a 74-minute CD in less than 3 minutes!" You may not believe this if you've ever slaved over CD rips, but it's true. Bill ripped a 73:38 CD (he made it himself) in 2:46, and that's less than 3 minutes by a chunk. Up to that point he'd been tooling along with what he thought was a fast 4x/4x/24x Toshiba SD-R1002 combo drive. It needed 8:05 to do the same thing. To be fair, Bill used the same software for each drive.
So how about writing, you ask? The Pacific/Yamaha drive wrote an audio CD in 7:09—about a third of the time it took the Toshiba. When it came to just transferring data (hey, you can use these things for backup, too), 635MB went from hard drive to Pacific drive in just under 5 minutes, while the now seemingly out-of-breath Toshiba needed almost 17.5 minutes. If you could save 12 minutes a day for a week, when you were done you'd finally be able to take a lunch hour and visit the bathroom.
At $289, the Pacific Digital 161040ei isn't cheap. Not much that's good really is. (Sometimes Bill is, but usually that's just called being trashy.) But compared to those graphics cards you've been drooling over, with their artificially inflated, sky-high prices, it's a darn bargain—especially when you factor in the time savings.
Bill expects to hear from Tony Tate again when this column hits the stands and the Web. He'll probably complain about the "isn't cheap" line and suggest a whole slew of drives that cost more. They're not cheap either. But this one's pretty good.
Happy 100th (and then some) Alice and Bill
If you didn't wish Alice and Bill a happy 100th "Hard Edge" by sending them an e-mail or even a card, shame on you! Luckily, it's not too late to start things off fresh by sending them a fine rant or comment of a technical nature. Alice has been pleased by all the mail she's been getting now that she controls the e-mail address, so please keep the kind words and comments coming.
"The Hard Edge"
Computer Shopper
28 E. 28th St., 10th Fl.
New York, NY 10016-7922
hardedge@zdnet.com COMMENTARY--It's May, or it almost is. in "hard edge" time, However, Alice is gallivanting around France to avoid Northern California's rolling blackouts. Bill is sitting in the Basement of Doom and Pepsi-Cola under 18 inches of snow, as a Coleman double-mantle lantern casts a pall over everything beyond its reach. Sunlight pokes through the moss-covered oaken shutters that allow critters and flung CDs to exit the lab. While water drips onto the concrete floor with an audible plunk, Bill ponders whether French toast is worth the airfare.
What Alice didn't tell Bill was that she fled to France not because of a great fare, or even the promise of reliable electricity. She fled because she was becoming seriously interested in tablet computing again.
More than 10 years ago, it took Bill and a team of ZD technicians to pry the failed Momenta tablet from Alice's hands. It wasn't that Alice loved the product per se. She just saw, for one moment, the power of a tablet form factor and the benefit of being able to compute anywhere. Further seduced by AT&T's TV commercials featuring someone lounging on the beach with an eye-catching handheld, Alice took up the challenge and went in search of the ultimate tablet.
Even 10 years isn't enough time for Alice to be able to speak publicly about what she went through. Windows for Pen Computing, hauling a backbreaking brick-like device from Slate Computing, and other episodes make the quest unspeakable even today. But over time, even Bill can admit tablet-style devices have been cropping up and succeeding. (Yeah, I hear they were big with Moses. —Bill)
When Alice saw shoppers in her San Francisco grocery store using their Palm Vs to check their shopping lists, she knew the tablet was coming back. Within weeks, Microsoft announced a new tablet in the works, and Sony unveiled a prototype at CES that wirelessly connects to the Net via broadband and lets you watch DVDs.
Alice even found a small startup called Aqcess Technologies that's already selling tablet computers called QBEs (www.qbenet.com/products.htm). In addition to the usual wireless Internet and e-mail, QBEs (pronounced "cubes") have built-in Webcams for conference calling from your easy chair, and double as desktops when docked and connected to a mouse and keyboard.
Still, problems in this category have yet to be solved. The QBE, for example, is way too expensive (close to $3,000 for the tablet alone) and as thick as a laptop. Tablets should be ultralight and ultrasleek if they're to compete with laptops for ease of use. Three cheers to Aqcess though, for coining the term "Family Area Network," which is what these wireless home networks are. Move over WAN and LAN, here comes the FAN.
With Alice long gone again, Bill suggests a moment of silence. Perhaps this round of tablet computing will succeed and Alice will survive to face another new trend. In the meantime, stay tuned for regular updates on tablet computers. They're baaack!
Why ask why?
This is quickly shaping up to be the year of ceaseless questioning. Who really won the election? Will tech stocks recover? Will there be a recession? Never ones to stand idly by in the face of a trend, Alice and Bill decided to serve up a few of their own technology ponderables.
Why is a little Florida company called Xbox Technologies holding Microsoft's Xbox gaming console hostage in a trademark-naming dispute when Sony was able to call its PlayStation2 the PS2? Doesn't IBM PS/2 ring a bell?
Why is it that as soon as AT&T WorldNet starts advertising itself as the fastest ISP in the universe with the fewest disconnects, Bill can't get a connection speed faster than 28kbps and finds himself tossed offline if he's idle for more than 10 minutes?
Why is it that Intel keeps reducing the speed of its Pentium 4, when a cheaper Athlon can still rub its nose in the dirt? Intel started with a 1.5GHz version, then supplied 1.4GHz and 1.3GHz iterations. Is it that difficult to see this is going in the wrong direction? (And are the Blue Men viable successors to the Bunny People?)
Why did nVidia (www.nvidia. com) buy 3dfx (www.3dfx.com, for now)? The once-proud company fell victim to the toss of the graphics dice (by the hand of nVidia). It really had nothing to offer nVidia, whose GeForce overpowered its Voodoo. Was it just so another competitor wouldn't buy it up? (Bill remembers an old cartoon showing fish being progressively eaten by their larger cousins. Seems to fit.)
Why is Silicon Graphics (www.sgi.com) charging $450 for an adapter that allows its 17.3-inch 1600SW LCD panel to work with graphics cards other than the less-than-standard Number Nine card it was provided with? Sure, the MultiLink adapter enables the 1600SW to accept both VGA analog and DVI or DFP digital signals. And there's a built-in scaling capability that ensures even lower-resolution images scale to maximize the SuperWide display on the Silicon Graphics 1600SW. It's even compatible with Bill's Matrox G400-TV graphics card. But $450? Adding insult to injury, there's a six-week wait to get one.
Why is it that no sooner than Bill gets his phenomenal Klipsch (www.klipsch.com) v2-400 speaker system, Klipsch releases the v2.1s? Better separation and midrange response are supposedly the differences. But Bill figures he'd never notice, thanks to the hearing loss he's suffered listening to the whirring of loud hard drives and computer fans for all these years.
Why did Alan Greenspan suddenly reduce interest rates a few months ago? That's easy. He knew the lease was up on Bill's '98 Corvette Pace Car and that Bill wanted to buy it. Mr. Greenspan, reportedly a longtime "Hard Edge" reader, and the second most powerful man in the United States, was just being a pal. Thanks, Al. You're down for a ride anytime you're in town.
It slices, it dices
Alice and Bill have long admired the American spirit of invention. And although "The Hard Edge" has faithfully chronicled the birth of the Web browser, the move to gigahertz processing, and the ups and downs of 3D graphics, longtime "Hard Edge" readers know Alice and Bill also have a weakness for the wackier products that show up on late-night television. In fact, one of their favorite pastimes is finding technical uses for these products, blending the highest of the high-tech with the lowest of the low-tech. The results have produced some of the most popular moments in "Hard Edge" history.
For example, when the move toward energy-efficient computing became an out-of-control marketing fad, Alice and Bill suggested The Clapper as a more economical way to power down your monitor and desk lamp at the same time. When Intel began moving users from the 486 to the Pentium via a processor upgrade socket rarely used by consumers, Alice and Bill suggested spreading Chia seeds into the socket holes and growing a Chia Pet Upgrade Processor instead.
Today, Alice is happy to see the Internet itself has joined forces with the Ginsu knife, the Flowbee haircutting system and yes, even the Pocket Fisherman, to bring you these low-tech classics on the Web at www.seenontv.com.
Alice and Bill are already busy combing the site for tomorrow's technical treasures. In the meantime, if you spot a product that will cut hair and brown bacon without electricity, and can think of a new high-tech use for it, please drop Alice and Bill a line. They'll feature your idea in an upcoming "Hard Edge."
Mondo cool
Yamaha (yes, the guitar and motorcycle people) have held top honors for the fastest CD-RW drive for quite some time. Recently, it introduced a newer and (you guessed it) faster version called the LightSpeed CRW 2100EZ. Bill had a chance to fondle one a few months ago and wrote it up for some obscure PC magazine. It was an impressive drive at the time, but Yamaha was just getting its software bundle together and making things work, so Bill had to track spare software across the Web.
Time passed. Then Bill got a call from Tony Tate. Longtime readers will remember Tony as a maker of high-speed IDE interface cards who could be somewhat argumentative and outspoken, especially when Bill gave Mondo Cool awards to Promise Technology and not Tony's company. Tony's now part of another company, Pacific Digital (www.1pdc.com). The company has a new CD-RW drive called the Pacific Digital 161040ei. Well, golly, it's the Yamaha drive with all of the appropriate software neatly packaged in the box and selling for $10 less than Yamaha's suggested street price.
This is a 16x/10x/40x drive, and for those of you still scratching your heads over CD-RW numbering parlance, this means it writes at 16x, rewrites at 10x, and reads at 40x. (From the Department of Obscure Factoids: "x" is the original 150K-per-second speed of 1x CD-ROM drives, so "40x" is really 40 times 150, or 6,000K per second.)
Bill loves liner notes, considering them a near-constant source of amusement. In this case, however, there was nothing to laugh at. The liner notes said, "Rip a 74-minute CD in less than 3 minutes!" You may not believe this if you've ever slaved over CD rips, but it's true. Bill ripped a 73:38 CD (he made it himself) in 2:46, and that's less than 3 minutes by a chunk. Up to that point he'd been tooling along with what he thought was a fast 4x/4x/24x Toshiba SD-R1002 combo drive. It needed 8:05 to do the same thing. To be fair, Bill used the same software for each drive.
So how about writing, you ask? The Pacific/Yamaha drive wrote an audio CD in 7:09—about a third of the time it took the Toshiba. When it came to just transferring data (hey, you can use these things for backup, too), 635MB went from hard drive to Pacific drive in just under 5 minutes, while the now seemingly out-of-breath Toshiba needed almost 17.5 minutes. If you could save 12 minutes a day for a week, when you were done you'd finally be able to take a lunch hour and visit the bathroom.
At $289, the Pacific Digital 161040ei isn't cheap. Not much that's good really is. (Sometimes Bill is, but usually that's just called being trashy.) But compared to those graphics cards you've been drooling over, with their artificially inflated, sky-high prices, it's a darn bargain—especially when you factor in the time savings.
Bill expects to hear from Tony Tate again when this column hits the stands and the Web. He'll probably complain about the "isn't cheap" line and suggest a whole slew of drives that cost more. They're not cheap either. But this one's pretty good.
Happy 100th (and then some) Alice and Bill
If you didn't wish Alice and Bill a happy 100th "Hard Edge" by sending them an e-mail or even a card, shame on you! Luckily, it's not too late to start things off fresh by sending them a fine rant or comment of a technical nature. Alice has been pleased by all the mail she's been getting now that she controls the e-mail address, so please keep the kind words and comments coming.
"The Hard Edge"
Computer Shopper
28 E. 28th St., 10th Fl.
New York, NY 10016-7922
hardedge@zdnet.com