SLR from Sony

NEW SLR CAMERA AND YES ITS A SONY!

SONY’S ALPHA DSLR-A100 IS THE COMPANY’S first attempt at bringing a digital SLR to market. You may find this camera familiar,since it’s almost identical to the Konica Minolta’s 6-megapixel D-SLR, the Maxxum 5D. This shouldn’t come as a big surprise since Sony essentially took over Konica Minolta’s camera business last year.

But is the Alpha a rejuvenated 5D model or simply a rebranded device? It turns out that the A100 is somewhere in between.New features include a 10.2-megapixel CCD,instead of 6, which is suitable for making very large prints or signifi cantly cropped photos. There’s also an anti-dust technology system that uses a staticfree coating on the CCD, combined with vibrations to keep the sensor clean.Overall, the Alpha A100 shoots very good pictures, especially when used outdoors with ample lighting. The image stabilization feature worked well, and the burst mode let me shoot literally hundreds of consecutive shots on the CompactFlash card, which must be purchased separately. Testing revealed some problems, however.Using a high ISO setting produced more noise than I like to see. I also found that the resolution is low for a 10MP camera; in fact, it scored more like an 8MP camera on my resolution tests. In addition,the camera took a sluggish 1.3 seconds to boot up and fire off a flash shot, and it had a relatively poky 1-second recycle time.As a first digital SLR, the Sony DSLR-A100 offers consumers a lot to like. But given the price, competing D-SLRs offer better picture quality and more innovative features.

Airline Reservation Snafus

Conducting business on the road is often hectic and stressful. To avoid a similar experience with air travel to and from your business destination, follow these tips to prevent surprises and delays.

Big crowds, long lines

To avoid crowds and long lines at the airport ticket counter, use your airline’s Web site for online check-in, boarding pass printing, and seat assignments. Some airlines also offer curbside and self-service check-in at the airport. In addition, if you fly with just a carry-on bag, you can avoid checking luggage when you get to the airport. And if possible, schedule your departure for off-peak days and times.

Avoid getting bumped. When an airline overbooks a flight, latecomers are the first to be involuntarily bumped. To avoid getting bumped, check in at the airport early. Even if you have a boarding pass and a seat assignment in advance, you need to check in within a specific time before the flight’s scheduled departure. Airline Web sites offer information about check-in time policies.

Too much baggage

Limit carry-on baggage to one item plus one personal item, such as a notebook PC, purse, or briefcase. Label the bottom of your notebook with your business card or other identification and place keys, cell phones, and other items that may alert a metal detector in a clear plastic bag, so screeners don’t need to handle them individually. Also, check your air carrier’s size and weight limits for carry-on and checked baggage.

Power problems

If you plan to use your notebook during your flight, make sure its battery is fully charged and bring a spare if you have one. If you are counting on plugging into a power port, find out the location of power ports and get a corresponding seat assignment. Some airlines provide ports only in business or first class-seating areas.

Incorrect or missing documentation

For all flights you must have a governmentissued photo ID (such as a driver’s license, passport, or military ID) that matches the name on your ticket. If you are flying internationally, confirm documentation requirements for the countries you will be entering. See the U.S. Department of State Web site (travel.state.gov/travel/tips/brochures/brochures_1229.html) and your airline’s Web site for more on international travel requirements.

Ticket trouble

To avoid ticketing problems, get your ticket at least several days in advance of your flight. Verify that all of the ticket information is correct. In case flight schedules change, reconfirm your reservations a few days before your flight. And don’t buy a standby or open return ticket if you are flying during a high-demand time, unless your schedule is flexible.

WiMAX Wireless Technology

Rising Star Or Long-Term Loser?

Anyone who follows the development of wireless technologies (or for that matter, has been in a Starbucks recently), knows that Wi-Fi (short for Wireless Fidelity) has finally taken off. In hotels, restaurants, and airports around the country, PC users can log onto the Internet wirelessly if they have a Wi-Fi modem. Nevertheless, Wi-Fi hasn’t always been this well received. It took years of perseverance on the part of developers before it came into its own. Currently trying to gain altitude in the same way is WiMAX (Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access). Wi-MAX uses the IEEE 802.16 standard to send voice, audio, video, and data transmissions across distances of up to 30 miles. For WiMAX developers and potential customers, the multimillion dollar question is, “Will it succeed like Wi-Fi?” The path to wireless success has been fraught with missteps and misjudgments (of time and expense involved), and numerous wireless standards have fallen by the wayside. Will WiMAX be different?

A Historical Perspective

For more than a decade, companies and governments have dreamt of a world where a single entity, such as a corporation, a university, or a city,could connect thousands of users wirelessly to a central network. At the same time, cable and telephone companies have envisioned conquering the “last mile” dilemma, industry jargon for the difficulty and expense of bringing broadband services to widely dispersed rural consumers.

Over the years companies have tossed around several technologies as the answer for these conundrums, but none have taken root. In 2001 a group of companies formed a nonprofit trade organization, WiMAX Forum, to foster development and knowledge of another potential solution: the upcoming IEEE 802.16 standard,aka WiMAX. These companies were convinced that 802.16 held the key to serving urban and rural customers in fixed environments with high-speed wireless service.

Since that time the WiMAX Forum has reinvented itself, picking up support from an industry-spanning array of heavy hitters including AT&T, Intel,Dell, and Ericsson. The group now embraces the full 802.16 specification, which can serve fixed and mobile devices. Like other wireless technologies,WiMAX products use radio waves to transmit signals from one access point to the next, and its spectrum range is impressive. Companies can use WiMAX in licensed and unlicensed frequencies between 2GHz and 11GHz, with the possibility of future support for frequencies of as much as 66GHz. The first WiMAX certified products will be available for the 2.5GHz, 3.5GHz, and 5.8GHz bands.

802.16: A Combination For Success?

Already, companies in Australia,Russia, South Africa, Spain, and other global locations are developing WiMAX networks. In the United States, WiMAX champion Intel has conducted several successful trials of the technology, including one at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival and another over a 500-squaremile area during the 2005 Interop Las Vegas. Service provider TowerStream already has hundreds of WiMAX customers online in New York City and other major urban areas.

In June Canterbury, United Kingdom, became one of the first cities to run WiMAX trials with the goal of deploying the technology countywide. Launched in collaboration with wireless network provider Telabria and the University of Kent, the Canterbury project aims to provide businesses (and potentially citizens) with wireless Internet-based telephone service, videoconferencing, and Internet access. On the other side of the globe, the island nation of Singapore plans to have countrywide WiMAX coverage by June 2006.

Flies In The Ointment

To hear its proponents speak, WiMAX is the great panacea that will solve all the world’s broadband ills. However, the technology faces a number of hurdles before it will become a mainstream solution.802.16 is actually a family of standards that includes 802.16d (recently renamed 802.16-2004) for fixed wireless hardware and 802.16e for fixed and mobile devices. Currenlty, companies are developing and achieving certification only for products that comply with 802.16-2004. Products for 802.16e are expected in 2006, but they will not automatically be compatible with 802.16d. Users will need to perofm an upgrade to enjoy fixed and mobile WiMAX. To speed the adoption process, many companies are moving forward with proprietary WiMAX kits that are not yet certified for the initial 802.16-2004 specification.This decision lets them build a WiMAX infrastructure more quickly but will necessitate more migration later. Additionally, despite its technical superiority to Wi-Fi (transmission speeds of 75Mbps vs. 11Mbps; coverage of approximately 30 miles vs. 300 feet to 1,000 feet), WiMAX holds the disadvantage of being the latecomer at a very wellattended wireless party. Historically, companies and individuals resist spending money to deploy new solutions when they already have workable ones in place.

A WiMAX Future?

Even as proponents and critics argue over WiMAX’s future, most agree it holds impressive potential. “If only half of its backers’ bullish claims about performance and equipment pricing hold up in the real world, WiMAX will be a viable option for applications such as 802.11 ‘hotspot’ backhaul and for extending broadband to areas that can’t be served by wireline DSL infrastructure,” noted wireless analyst Tim Kridel in a report he prepared for Heavy Reading. (Backhaul products transmit data at high speeds from a remote site or network to a main site. They are used to aggregate traffic from disparate end points to a central location such as a wired corporate network or the Internet.) “As WiMAX’s footprint grows and its costs drop even further, it could even begin to displace cellular and 802.11.” Kridel also predicts DSL carriers may use WiMAX to bypass licensing fees competitors charge for use of existing landlines.

These solutions may not excite consumers or the media as much as the promise of surfing the Internet at Starbucks or watching movies on mobile phones, but they generate substantial sales. The Telecommunications Industry Association’s 2005 Telecommunications Market Review And Forecast projects that WiMAX infrastructure revenue will explode from $15 million in 2004 to $115 million in 2005 and then swell to $290 million by 2008. Research firm Strategy Analytics predicts there will be 20 million fixed WiMAX installations by 2009. Like Kridel, Strategy Analytics sees WiMAX as a solution for fixed, rather than mobile, broadband. In its report Strategy Analytics’ director of RF & Wireless Component Service Chris Taylor stated, “Major concerns still remain regarding battery life for mobile WiMAX, undefined mobile specifications, and probable competition with 3G and proposed 4G networks.” In the corporate world, the attitude is also cautious. “As we work with large enterprises, we are seeing some talk of WiMAX and how it may help businesses in the future,” says Andrea Fox, CEO of Atlanta-based IT consulting firm EPIC IT. “Corporate America could benefit greatly from WiMAX. There is a need for standards, as interoperability is limited and can be costly. It’s promising and exciting, but we want to make sure the solution is solid and reliable and has a future before we consider deploying it to our corporate clients.”

New Ways to Nab Spam

More than a third of all e-mail now carries digital markers to help prove where it came from, which helps reduce spam. You can typically find the telltale signs of spam in a message’s header—a normally ignored part of an e-mail file that contains information about the message’s path through the Internet,the sender’s e-mail client, and more in-depth information about the sender, recipients, and subject line. Now two technologies for verifying the source of an e-mail message are finding their way into headers as well.

The behind-the-scenes technologies, known as Sender ID and DomainKeys, are designed to help users detect spam and fraudulent e-mail by identifying messages that claim to be from a legitimate company but, in reality, are scams. In typical spam and phishing attacks, fraudsters use a real domain, such as bankofamerica.com or ebay.com, to convince people that the message is authentic. Combating this requires some changes—albeit small ones—to the infrastructure of the Internet. The approaches use different ways to verify that the source of an e-mail message—as stated in its header—matches the information contained in the Internet’s phone book, the domain-name system (DNS).

Sender ID—a hybrid of two previous plans, Microsoft’s Caller ID and the Sender Policy Framework (SPF)—checks the numerical address of a message’s source (contained in the header) against a list of allowed e-mail servers published by the owner of the domain from which the e-mail originated. The result can be “none” if Sender ID was not used, “pass” if the message has a Sender ID and the sources match, or “softfail” if the server is not listed in the domain’s known mail server list.

It’s easy for an organization to deploy Sender ID. All it has to do is identify its e-mail servers and publish the data in its DNS record. DomainKeys uses public-key encryption to create a stronger means of authentication. Public-key encryption creates two codes—one that encrypts the message, and one that decrypts it (only the second code can decrypt the message). Usually, the owner who created the key pair keeps one part secret (the private key) and publishes the other part (the public key). Someone can verify a message signed by a company’s private key by using the public key published in the fi rm’s DNS record.

Already, major Internet service providers—such as AOL, Google, the Microsoft Network, and Yahoo!—are using the technologies to reduce spam. In May, the companies met with ISPs at the second annual E-Mail Authentication Summit to push adoption of the technologies. At the summit,Microsoft stated that more than 2.4 million domains have published the additional information required for Sender ID, up from a mere 20,000 two years ago. Meanwhile, Yahoo!, the creator of DomainKeys, receives about a billion messages a day signed with the DomainKeys technology through its public e-mail service, the company said.

Other steps you can take to protect your inbox are to have separate e-mail accounts for friends and work, as well as a throwaway address (for when you have to register to use a Web site or for shopping online); and making sure your e-mail provider uses Sender ID or DomainKeys. Verifying the source of e-mail messages does not solve the spam problem, but it does provide a tool to prevent fraudsters from dressing up a message to make it look as if it came from a legitimate source.

BEYOND OFFICE 2007

The latest version of Microsoft Office is the biggest change we’ve seen in years. Visually, the new Ribbon user interface in its core applications—Word, Excel, and PowerPoint is the first major design improvement in over a decade, and I’m very pleased with the new graphics engine. As I’ve been working with Office 2007, I’ve been compiling a list of features I’d like to see in a future productivity suite.

So with that in mind, I talked with Antoine Leblond, the new head of Microsoft’s Office Productivity Applications group, about where Office is now and where it’s going.In these core applications, Office 2007 lets you minimize the UI so you see a blank page unless you need a command. That’s convenient, but I’d also like a classic mode for those applications. Leblond said there’s no practical need for that because people adjust to the new UI pretty quickly. He did say it makes sense to have Ribbon in more applications but that the new UI was designed more for the authoring apps (those that create documents) than the transaction-oriented Outlook app, which may require a somewhat different interface.

Another new feature that Leblond touted is Outlook’s built-in search, which, he said, will turn “filers into pilers,” in that people won’t use folders as much. I’m sure that’s true of some people, but I still use both. I’ve been using third-party search engines for years (my favorite is X1), so Outlook’s isn’t revolutionary. Performance is one of my concerns with search, so it’s good that Outlook uses the Windows Vista index service. We wouldn’t want two indexers on one machine. I’m also concerned about Office 2007’s performance on machines with less than 1GB of memory.Leblond noted that the development team usually doesn’t focus on performance until near the end of the release process, so it’s too early to judge.

As for PowerPoint, Leblond and I agreed on the dramatic evolution it has undergone. Most schoolchildren now learn to make presentations, something I never would have predicted when I first saw the program many years ago. But PowerPoint needs many more improvements. It was designed for a world of static text and graphics, and we’re moving into a world of cinematic presentations. Leblond said that creating richer presentations—and ones that run on the Web—was a goal for the future.

Office’s main competitors are the Web 2.0 productivity applications, including Writely, Zoho Writer, and Google Spreadsheets—all Web-based applications for creating and sharing documents. They don’t match Office, but they offer a very simple way of sharing information. Leblond dismissed those options as “mini-applications” but did agree that the ability to save and share information over the Web is interesting.

For big companies, Microsoft’s Exchange and SharePoint servers are solid infrastructures for such collaborations. If your company doesn’t want to maintain these applications, you can find hosted versions. But for individuals and small businesses, setting up a hosted plan takes too much effort and may be too expensive. Offi ce Live is a step forward in making it easier for small businesses, and there are also a number of good competitors out there, such as Near-Time and HyperOffice.

I’d like to see the collaboration process made a lot easier for individuals. That’s the best part of the new Web applications, even if the programs themselves don’t have all the features you’d like, such as better ways of tracking changes. Leblond indicated that Microsoft will invest more in services such as Office Live, but that the company will deliver “what works best as a client and what works best as a service.” He pointed to the existing Office Web site as an example of integration of client and server applications, and he said the team was looking at much richer integration possibilities down the line.

In many ways, Office 2007 is yet another revision of the basic productivity applications we’ve seen for years. Those applications are essential, but we’re now using richer media, much more information and storage, and always-on communications. I’d like to see Offi ce move forward and embrace the Internet even more.

APPLE ITUNES 7

LIGHTS, CAMERA, ITUNES
Rejoice! Apple has unveiled a major iTunes overhaul. The software has new capabilities and much-needed connectivity improvements, and the store has new content: feature films (finally!) and iPod-friendly versions of popular games. Sadly, music tracks remain à la carte.

The films look good, if a bit soft, in full-screen mode on a 19-inch monitor, and they look dazzling on a 5G iPod. But $9.99 and up each seems stiff for titles that you can view only on a PC monitor or a 2.5-inch LCD—and no iPod below a 5.5G can play more than one before going dark. The nine new full-color, full-featured (iPod-only) replicas of Web and arcade games well justify $4.99 a pop, though.

The sporty software makeover contains a tool that automatically fetches missing album art, a better-organized Sources list, and much more.Fans of live albums and other “continuous” audio will like the new option that scans your library, eliminating what it thinks are inappropriate gaps between tracks. It worked for me, but I could find no way to repeat the scan or modify the settings. My favorite addition, the iPod Summary screen, makes management a breeze. The new software offers an abundance of worthwhile tweaks and some long-overdue features. If Apple offered a music-subscription option, iTunes 7 would merit an Editors’ Choice.

MAN MADE BLACK HOLES?

Can a particle collider be taken too far? That question is being raised about the next-generation Large Hadron Collider (LHC), shown in the photo here. The huge particle pulverizer and accelerator is located at the CERN particle physics laboratory,near Geneva, Switzerland. It’s due to open for business late next year and slated to simulate the Big Bang.

The LHC is being constructed in a massive underground tunnel. The tunnel’s core contains two pipes, each containing a proton beam. The two beams will travel in opposite directions around the tunnel and create massive, as-yet-unseen amounts of energy when they collide, which will be measured and analyzed by scores of computers and physics equipment.

The Lifeboat Foundation, which serves as a watchdog for next generation particle accelerators, has posted a set of concerns about LHC experiments. In particular, the foundation notes this citation from CERN’s Web site: “According to some theoretical models, tiny black holes could be produced in collisions at the LHC. They would then very quickly decay into what is known as Hawking radiation (the tinier the black hole, the faster it evaporates) which would be detected by experiments.” The primary concern of Lifeboat is that the black holes may never decay, creating unstable, possibly disastrous physical consequences.

The Tiniest Projector

Miniaturized gizmos could arrive in handhelds, cars, and robots.
In the continuing quest to shrink everything, researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Photonic Microsystems (known as IOF) have produced a projector,seen here, that’s the size of a sugar cube. It could soon arrive in cameras, digital video players, and other handheld devices.
Until recently, attempts at miniaturization in projector technology have come up against physical problems: The core of a traditional projector is a micro-mirror array with a million mirrors. Each can be tilted to reflect a light source evenly, producing light or dark pixels that together form the projected image.
Fraunhofer researchers have produced an alternative to the micro-mirror array. “We use just one single mirror,” says Andreas Brauer, director of the Microoptic Systems division at IOF. “This mirror can be tilted around two axes.”
The researchers are also working on shrinking traditional light sources so that small diode lasers can replace them. RGB projection technology relies on red, green, and blue light sources. Red and blue diode lasers are already small enough for the tiniest projectors, but the remaining challenge is to shrink green diode lasers. Several researchers outside Fraunhofer also are working on that remaining goal.
The tiny projection technology likewise has promise in handheld gizmos. As one example, inexpensive miniature laser arrays in cars could act as distance sensors that measure the gap between vehicles when driving or nearby objects when parking.