NVDIA Tegra

11031-dsc00147There has been a lot of buzz over the demo of new Tegra platforms recently. Most of the news seems to pit the Tegra against Intel for dominance of the Netbook market. Personally, I have to agree in the most part. Except for the purpose of running Windows applications, a Tegra Netbook would be a better choice than an Atom based system for one simple reason: performance per watt.

For those of you who do not understand the difference, suffice to say that the Tegra is built of a different architecture from the Atom systems. As a result, the Tegra provides a richer multi-media experience than the Atom system and consumes less power while doing it. The reason is very simple. The Tegra integrates graphics capabilities from NVIDIA and a low-power multi-media enhanced ARM based system.

For those of you who have never heard of ARM, they are the microprocessors that power your mobile phones, ipods and various other consumer electronic and multimedia devices.

The super exciting thing about this is that NVidia is able to fit an entire computer platform onto a board that is only slightly larger than your typical USB flash drive. Therefore, it is obvious which market segment is NVidia targeting – the ultra-mobile and integrated devices.

You may ask what kind of software it can run. The answer is that it can run almost everything except Windows software. You see, there has been an ARM port of Linux for ages. In fact, Ubuntu has been working on exactly that – an ARM port of Ubuntu for the purpose of placing it on ARM based Netbooks. Google has also moved the Android platform up from merely powering smart-phones to powering ARM based Netbooks. In fact, Adobe has recently announced that they will be releasing flash support for ARM as well.

So, you can see where this is headed.

Oh, I forgot to mention its performance numbers. The various sites claim that it can playback 1080p video and can run for several days on a single battery charge. Personally, knowing how these things work, the numbers sound right.

Wolfram|Alpha

If you’ve never heard of it before, there is a new kind of search engine in town. Its name is Wolfram|Alpha and it is brought to you by the guys who made Mathematica. It uses the Mathematica engine and some magical algorithms to answer your search queries. Now, none of this scares me the least but. But when computers acquire a sense of humour, I am not so amused.

Try some of these queries on the engine (you can just click on it).

Who cares about Microsoft Bing.

Apple TV

I am re-evaluating the possibility of using an Apple-TV for my HTPC. The advantage is that this is a device that was designed to be a HTPC from day one. It has all the right connections and is also low-powered. Furthermore, it turns out that XBMC is supported on the Apple-TV. The Apple-TV can be had for about RM1250 (GBP 216) from certain re-sellers in Malaysia (it is listed at RM1450 at the Apple store).

The only potential disadvantage is the lack of support for full-HD content. All references point to the fact that the Apple-TV is only able to decode HD-ready (720p) content but will upscale it to full-HD (1080p). This is not a serious problem at the moment for all of my available media are mainly SD content. Furthermore, I don’t see this situation changing anytime soon simply because there isn’t that much full-HD content available anyway.

Another difficulty may be with the ability to integrate the Apple-TV onto my home network. If I were to get the Apple-TV, I would be getting the 40GB one, which severely limits the amount of media it can store. So, the Apple-TV would need to stream the data off the network. It has got both wired and wireless network connections. However, it would need the correct software to be running on the network in order to work properly. Firefly doesn’t seem to support streaming videos at the moment.

This may be solved by installing XBMC on the Apple-TV. It is certainly capable of running as a standalone application.

Certainly something to consider. It would be easier to get this than some of the other options.

Over-Glorified Paper

Over-glorified paper. That is exactly how I think most people today treat computers. The power of computing can be used for so much more. However, the masses tend to just see them as over-glorified paper. Personally, it frustrates me that even governments, universities and large organisations fall into this trap of treating computers as over-glorified paper.

In most organisations, computers are merely used to keep track of information – records. They are used as over-glorified filing cabinets to store lots of typed up documents called files. Let us be honest with ourselves. Just look around and you will see that this is how most of us use computers. To type up reports, organise and store them in the computer.

In some organisations, computers are slightly elevated to information sharing. When information needs to be exchanged between parties, the files are retrieved from the computers and emailed over to the other party. This is just one caveman step above actually printing out the records and passing them to the other person to be re-entered in as another computer file. I’m sure that this caveman method is still in use.

However, the power of computers will never be realised until computers are actually used to process information. There is so much that computers can help us with, particularly in the the elimination of human error. Few organisations actually reach this level of computer use because few have the necessary expertise to afford such a system.

The recent fiasco with our APEX university accidentally accepting more students than they did, is reflection of a badly implemented computer system. Obviously, it was caused by human error, where the officer in charge accidentally uploaded more names than he/she was supposed to. You can see how this problem could have been easily avoided by merely removing the need for any sort of manual data entry.

Applicants should be encouraged to apply to the university by filling up an online form, which will capture the necessary information. Then, in an environment that uses computers to process information, the computer will perform all the necessary evaluation and acceptance of students into the university, based on specific criteria listed in the algorithm chosen. Then, the computer would automatically release the results to the students as well. In all this, the only time a human needs to get involved is to manually fix some problems, e.g. when the computer cannot decide on the placement of certain students.

Unfortunately, this obviously wasn’t the case – not just for our APEX university, but also for almost everything else.

Trouble in HTPC Space

I’m starting to think that our selection of computer goods in Malaysia is severely restricted to the gaming variety. I had the chance to visit Digital Mall, PJ last weekend and spent a while perusing the 4 storeys of shops selling mainly gadgets, phones and computer products. Unfortunately, I failed to find any place that sold anything suitable for my HTPC.

You can see that the local computer retail industry seems to be driven by games. You can see the retail stores pushing high end processors, motherboards and graphics cards. Supposedly, these are needed by the gamers to experience the best and greatest in state-of-the-art games. Unfortunately, gamers are a dumb bunch and end up shelling out a fortune to build a gaming rig that doesn’t perform as well for games as they thought it would have.

Unfortunately for my purposes, I’m going after low power, low profile and low cost systems for my HTPC rig. Seems that my tastes run counter to the main stream. So, trying to get stuff off-the-shelf is not as easy as I had hoped. I was planning to just pick up a suitable e-machines computer or similar for my HTPC rig. Unfortunately, there were none to be found in the whole building. There was only one e-machine model being sold in one-store but it was not suitable for my rig.

Seems that I might actually have to travel down to Low-Yat to have a look, this weekend. I hate having to go down there. Parking is a pain and the crowd is just crazy. Maybe I should take an LRT down instead. I’ve got a new book to read with me and this might be a good time to start. I really need to get my HTPC rig built. Otherwise, my new HDTV is being wasted.

My requirements are really simple – a quiet system that is capable of full-HD output and 5.1 sound. If I had to assemble one myself, at least give me the option of buying the component parts. Otherwise, I would be willing to pay for a ready-made machine at the right price.

Movie Marathon

Alright, it is not quite a marathon, but it has been a while since I spent so much time at a cinema. Today, I watched two films in two sittings – Terminator Salvation and Monsters versus Aliens. The two films are from completely different genres but they are both equally enjoyable, albeit in very different ways.

Terminator Salvation was an action fest – lots and lots of CGI generated action. They introduced a number of interesting robots in this film. One that kills humans under water, one that kills humans in the air, and one that kills humans on wheels, on top of the humanoid models that kill humans on foot. As you can probably tell, there is a lot of human killing in this film.

Monsters versus Aliens was a laugh fest – lots and lots of CGI generated comedy. I loved the fact that Hugh Laurie (Dr House) played a major role in this film, and I have always liked Reese Witherspoon’s voice. I expected more from Stephen Colbert though. He got to play the character that he spends so much time bashing on his show. Too bad he didn’t carry if off as well as I had hoped.

Both films are surprisingly rated U – for general viewing. So, there were plenty of kids in both films, less in Terminator. The kids were a problem for Monsters, as the one who sat behind me kept talking to his dad. Actually, the kid next to me in Terminator kept asking his dad what was happening. Maybe it’s not a good idea to bring kids to Terminator as the story line is probably a bit to complex for young minds to follow.

Anyway, the next summer block buster that I’m looking forward to is Transformers – Megan Fox positively sizzles!

Spoiler: I knew that John Connor wasn’t going to die at the end because Christian Bale had already been contracted for 3 Terminator films!