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Newstips Electronic Editorial Bulletin Issue # 2010-03a
Daylight Savings starts this month & other news
In this issue:
Antec & the power of choice... Fixmo unlocks preview for press...
Franklin casts a spell on ESL... Diabetes can make you look
drunk... Tiffen LED heads at NAB... Special Report: more on 2560
... Project Yippie: IIS... Reviews: AcoustiFeet, GE 10" plug-in
LED fixture, Syba RAID card, WinDVD Pro 2010, Asus U3S6 card...
plus our commentary on LED room lighting
Antec offers a greater power of choice
Whether it's an old desktop with mysterious symptoms since
upgrading the graphics card or adding a drive or a new build that
didn't count on the power demands of boot-time memory writes &
drive start-ups, PC powerlessness can hit any user. There are a
lot of power supply brands out there with similar numbers on
their PSU models, but Antec supplies get rated for consistently
deliverable power, not just what they can squeak at peak. Some of
those brands have just a few models or major gaps in pricing from
one power level to the next or unnecessarily high levels of heat
or noise or low levels of efficiency. If you think one dangly
metal block is the same as the next, Veronica has 7 families of
Antec power supplies that you might just have fun learning about.
Contact: Veronica Feldmeier, Antec Inc. (Fremont, CA)
510-770-2150 vfeldmeier@antec.com http://antec.com
For press, Fixmo preview perseveres
Fixmo Tools BlackBerry Edition ($20) isn't officially out until
March 17, but don't let that stop you. Hit the site now, download
the free trial (fully functional for 15 days), drop Rick a note
with your e-mail address & handset PIN & he'll make that 15 day
time limit disappear. Contact: Rick Segal, Fixmo (Toronto, ON)
416-414-9726 rick@Fixmo.com http://Fixmo.com
Franklin casts a spell on ESL
Franklin is a platinum sponsor of the TESOL (Teachers of English
to Speakers of Other Languages) convention in Boston, March 24-27
as well as presenting there to champion their worldwide
SpellEvent program. Aline can answer any questions about that or
perhaps you'd prefer to do a little hands-on coverage of one of
their multilingual handheld reference products, from inexpensive
Spanish-English dictionaries to an impressive 12-language
speaking dictionary & reference collection. Contact: Aline
Boutin, Franklin Electronic Publishers (Burlington, NJ)
609-386-2500x4434 aline_boutin@franklin.com http://franklin.com
Diabetes can make you look drunk
Here's why fuel cells are the sensors in two of the higher-price
BACtrack breathalyzer models, the BACtrack S75 Pro (street $140)
& the BACtrack Select S80 (street $160-$200). Fuel cells respond
only to the presence of alcohol when you blow to test your blood
alcohol content while semiconductor sensors are vulnerable to
false readings from other chemicals, like ketones, which
diabetics often produce. With consumer breathalyzers increasingly
used for employee or student screenings, it's important to
understand when & how false positives can happen as well what
breathalyzers can avoid them. Connect with Keith for more details
or for a hands-on review. Contact: Keith Nothacker, KHN SOLUTIONS
(San Francisco CA) 415-693-9756x113
mailto:keith.nothacker@bactrack.com http://bactrack.com
Tiffen at NAB: LED heads
No matter what the economy's doing, broadcasters still have work
to do & Tiffen has several categories of products to help them do
it better, cheaper & smarter. One of the focus areas at the
Tiffen NAB booth will be the Lowel Blender
adjustable-color-temperature LED array light. You can wait & see
it there or ask Hilary for details now. Contact: Hilary Araujo,
Tiffen Company (Hauppauge, NY) 631-609-3216 haraujo@tiffen.com
http:/.tiffen.com
Special Report: 2560 displays
Is your monitor's screen crowded, maybe overcrowded? We note with
interest that most current graphics cards handle a maximum
resolution of 2560x1600 (4.1 Megapixels in a 16:10 format); we
also note that 2560x1440 (16:9) is a quad (double by double) 720P
HD. Most of today's monitors are obvious offspring of 1080P TV
manufacturing, generally running 1920x1200 or a bit less. 2560
monitors are available with prices starting over $1000 at sizes
starting around 30" (0.133Mp per diagonal inch). We currently run
two 1920x1200 displays (24" Westinghouse, 2.3Mp, or about 0.096
Mp per diagonal inch). If we were to swap in 30-inch 2560
monitors for these, each window would be smaller by 75% in both
directions & we could fit 70% more "landscaping" on each screen.
That's enough numbers. We understand there are some people who
already like that idea enough to shell out a grand or more per
display, but not enough to bring the prices down to the point of
broader market popularity. On the TV side of the street, now that
it's routine to recover some extra margin by going to frame-rate
multiples, will production attention turn to displays scaled to
more pixels? If so, quad-1080P still seems cost-prohibitive, but
quad-720P may be attractive. If that catches on, higher-volume
manufacturing at those pixel densities could bring 2560 monitor
pricing into range for a lot more buyers.
Project Yippie: Internet Information Services
IIS is, in Microsoft's terms, a Web applications platform. It's a
way to host a Web site or an ftp server, for example; it can also
play a role in other kinds of content delivery. If you're running
Windows 7 or Vista or XP, Windows IIS is available to you but may
be limited in terms of the number of concurrent connections it
can support Windows Server 2008 R2 includes Microsoft Internet
Information Services 7.5 with some new features, including an
improved way of including ftp services. IIS surprised us by being
one of the easiest elements to work with, perhaps because we're
not running sophisticated Web apps like shopping carts. We're
especially delighted that IIS lets us run multiple domains on a
single server by creating separate bindings for each (with or
without a "www" or "ftp" header, for example) that let each
domain point to its own folder path while all can point to the
same static IP address. Work we expected to take many frustrating
hours or to prove impossible took only minutes.
Special Report Bonus Review: AcoustiFeet
Most computer case feet are hard, which is great if you want to
turn the floor into a sound board for making its vibrations even
noisier but terrible if you're trying to get the box to shut up.
While we were seeking silence for our Project Yippie server, we
came across an inspirational company, Quiet PC USA, as we were
discovering how big a niche the quest for quiet has become. The
specific product that led us to them is from Acoustiproducts, a
UK product line they exclusively represent in the US:
AcoustiFeet. These are soft silicone rubber rings (with an
adhesive backing circle) that you can squish with your fingers &
come in varieties to handle loads up to 18, 30, 50 or 70 pounds.
The bottom of the ring is rounded to help reduce the contact area
& further reduce transmission of whatever vibrations survive the
gel-soft medium. The test is a simple one of listening to see if
these gel donuts can really help gear get quieter; the answer is
yes. Bottom line: We love the way AcoustiFeet can reduce the din
of so many things with moving parts inside, from computer cases
to small air purifiers to cable boxes, adding small but
significant steps to our quest for quiet.
Special Report Bonus Review 2: GE 10" plug-in LED fixture
While under-counter lighting didn't quite qualify for our
editorial call for LED-based room illumination, we found one item
of interest from Jasco Products: the GE 10" High-Output LED
Fixture. This is a full solution (including screws for its
keyhole mounting slots) that plugs into an outlet (5' cord),
turns on & off with a rocker switch on one end & shines 2 LEDs
downward, each about flashlight-bright. It's rated 120 Volts at
0.2 Amps, which would mean 24 Watts, which we didn't believe;
Kill A Watt EZ shows it consuming 2 Watts. Bottom line: if you
need an under-counter-style light bar & have a way to tuck away
its 5' cord, the GE 10" High-Output LED Fixture offers easy
installation & ample illumination with barely a sip at the power
mains.
Special Report Bonus Review 3: Syba PCIe X1 SATA RAID card
Three things we took forever to learn about tech: you never fail
to outgrow your stuff, there's no such thing as safe &
advancements are just a way of making something else a
bottleneck. Our little Project Yippie server could have run
forever with Windows software RAID, but that just made us
uncomfortable. Syba makes a little (about half the size of a
graham cracker) 2-port SATA II RAID card (PCIe X1) for simple
hardware-based RAID 0 (striping, for speed, which we don't use)
or RAID 1 (mirroring, for safety, which we do use). This is a
low-profile card; its small size barely impacts the in-chassis
airflow, but it did require us to find a full-length bracket with
the same mounting hole spacing (had one on an obsolete SATA I
card). We had to prep by removing the software mirror & resetting
those drives from dynamic to basic. The card's BIOS kicks in
during the reboot let you to initiate the new mirror; a Windows
driver & utility disc comes with. Bottom line: the Syba
SD-LP-PEX2IR SATA II 2-port hardware RAID low-profile PCIe X1
card just took longer to type out than it did to install,
configure & put to work.
Special Report Bonus Review 4: Corel WinDVD Pro 2010
BluRay players may come as just hardware (which was the case with
our Pioneer BDR-205 BluRay burner) or may come with a bundled
software player; whatever the case, Windows Media Player,
QuickTime Player & RealPlayer SP are not going to play BluRay. We
suspect that the issue is less about the technology than about a
license fee, so we sought a commercial product able to play
BluRay content without bringing boys in blue to the door. Corel
WinDVD Pro 2010 plays just about every audio & video format that
a red-laser or blue-laser disc is likely to hold, including
BluRay support for BD-Live. We tested it with BluRay video at
1080P as well as with a very difficult telecine transfer to
standard DVD of a 1954 Sherlock Holmes TV episode at full screen
(1920x1200). WinDVD was even able to play our original Cherry
Picks animation disc, which we haven't been able to do since the
day it was first showcased in Las Vegas. Bottom line: WinDVD Pro
2010 is proving itself a reliable & capable way to get really
good viewing out of discs that were born for that as well as from
those carrying less gifted content.
Special Report Bonus Review 5: Asus U3S6 card
As the terrible old joke says, Asus must have squeezed a lot of
tomatoes to make their new U3S6 card because with it, systems get
to catch up all over the place. This PCIe X4 card adds 2 external
USB3 ports (4.8Mbps) & 2 internal SATA3 ports (6Mbps) to existing
systems. Most users will never feel the bottleneck of this
21.6Mbps of potential traffic talking to the system through a
4-lane PCIe 2.0 slot only good for 16Mbps. (Individual
rotating-media drives can't read or write fast enough to fill
that bandwidth but SATA3 SSD drives soon will & external RAID 5
arrays can now). Bottom line: For anybody who needs an easy &
economical way to support SATA3 & USB3 today, its $30 price tag
makes the Asus U3S6 PCIeX4 card a no-brainer.
Watts up illuminati
You're going to see an increasing number of pitches about
LED-based alternatives for room lighting; since we expect a lot
of them to be deliberately short of relevant attributes, we
thought we ought to touch on a few of those here. About the best
you can expect from a 3Watt LED is what you might get from a
45Watt incandescent; the next "standard" step up is 5Watts with
illumination closer to a 60-75Watt incandescent, probably a
minimal consumer expectation. Target has a few 3W-class LED table
lamps in the under-$100 range; they're not bad for reading. You
can today buy an LED drop-in replacement for fluorescent tubes,
but at $150 a pop, we don't expect that to be a panacea (also,
they could do better than a 10-year life expectancy). We like
that lighting will in a short while become dominated by LEDs, we
just wouldn't want you to be led astray. Contact: Martin Winston,
Newstips (Novelty, OH) 440-338-8400; marty@Newstips.com
http://Newstips.com
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Newstips Bulletin [Novelty, OH] +1.440.338.8400 http://Newstips.com
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