Charlie’s Angles: Forecasting the financial weather sounds a good idea. But could we?
I once read a science fiction story whose author had clearly been inspired by watching the weather forecast one day, and on seeing the presenter talk of "highs" and "lows", had thought: what if that was not a forecast of weather, but of moods? Thus people walking along roads would be gripped by sudden happiness, or thrown into despair, as the highs and lows passed over them. Well, now it's time for the next great idea that is being very quietly suggested: the financial forecast. Yes, I know that we already get some of that sort of thing. The IMF, the Bank of England, the G7, and Uncle Tom Cobbley and all put out predictions about how various economies will fare in the months and years ahead. (Rather as with analysts' predictions, hardly anyone ever seems to go back and ask how well they did.) But if we're honest, if you compare that to the quality of weather forecasting today - which uses some of the most powerful supercomputers in the world, constantly refining their systems and using feedback loops to evaluate what they're getting wrong and right - forecasting of the financial weather is still on a par with examining seaweed to figure out if it's going to rain. Now, some people are suggesting that supercomputers can get us out of the situation that we're in: one where the banks are, what's the technical term, "in a bit of a pickle".
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Charlie's Angles: Forecasting the financial weather sounds a good idea. But could we?
How hard are things in the PC industry?
Tough… particularly if you're Dell. The Texan computer manufacturer has been taking a battering recently - and things aren't getting better, according to financial results released yesterday. In the three months ending in January, the company's income was down to $351m from $679m for the same period last year – a 48% drop over just 12 months. Sales, it said, were down 16% in what turned out to be the worst Christmas for the computer industry since 2002. That might seem like dire news for the world's second largest PC maker (and it is) but yesterday's results were actually better than many people expected. That was thanks to a severe round of cost-cutting at the company's operations around the world, which Dell executives say will eventually save it around $3bn a year
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How hard are things in the PC industry?
Video: Rick Rashid, senior vice president at Microsoft Research, on monitor technology and new products
Bobbie Johnson talks to Rick Rashid, senior vice president at Microsoft Research, about the evolution of monitor technology and how the company demonstrates its new products to the public
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Video: Rick Rashid, senior vice president at Microsoft Research, on monitor technology and new products
Michael Cross: Let’s celebrate a decade of joined-up e-government
It was a thrilling time for tech-heads. In 1999, the first dotcom boom was at its height, Keanu Reeves was strutting through the first Matrix movie – and two-digit Cobol clocks were ticking towards the great millennium rollover. And, of course, Tony Blair's still-new Labour administration published its plan for a joined-up, all-seeing, government computer. If you missed the last one, don't feel bad: nearly everyone else did, too. The plan appeared in a little-noticed document called Modernising Government, published 10 years ago next month. Outside the small circle of e-government enthusiasts, the paper attracted interest mainly for its proposals to retrain ministers and senior civil servants in spinning New Labour's policies. But Modernising Government also launched a lasting revolution. A section headed "Information age government" announced: "We must modernise the business of government itself, achieving joined-up working between different parts of government and providing new, efficient and convenient ways for citizens and businesses to communicate with government and to receive services." It was the beginning of citizen-centred, joined-up e-government – also known as the database state. Modernising Government launched e-government's go-go years by proposing that every public service be made available electronically by 2008 (a target later brought forward to 2005, to upstage the rest of the EU). It also set the framework for a series of massive IT investments in public services, from the NHS, to the police, to computers on dustcarts. Although in those innocent pre-9/11 days it could sidestep the ID card question, Modernising Government proposed creating "a common approach to how people identify themselves when dealing with government call centres". Commercial smartcards would have a role to play, it suggested. "We are working with banks and other partners to make them available for dealings with government. We will publish a framework for their use in support of service delivery across government." Whether that "framework" ever appeared slips my mind, but the central philosophy – that citizens should transact electronically with an entity called "government" rather than individual agencies and local authorities – resurfaced in the "Transformational Government" strategy of 2005 and the Treasury's "Service Transformation" plan in 2006. And, for all the excitement about borrowing web 2.0 techniques and tricks, it remains policy today. It was a curiously orphan policy, however. For all its fundamental constitutional importance, the rights and wrong of joining up government have rarely entered the mainstream of political debate: ministers assume that it's an unalloyed good, and leave the details to the techies. Part of the trouble, of course, was that the paper was written by the techies in the first place. To their credit, Modernising Government's authors saw that difficult questions lay ahead. A brief section on privacy recognised "concern" about "inadvertent disclosure and inappropriate transfer of data".
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Michael Cross: Let's celebrate a decade of joined-up e-government
TechFest swoons over light and touch advances
Microsoft's TechFest seems to feature an inordinate number of Brits - based not only in the company's Cambridge research centre, but also in Redmond, Asia and beyond. The fruits of UK researchers have proved very interesting, including one project that caught my eye; Second Light - a system that one person described as "Surface Plus Plus". It's a glass table-style display (like Microsoft Surface) but with a difference. By sliding a piece of paper or other semi-transparent material over the table, you can see hidden information about the objects on parade - in their example, for instance, an astronomical map appears over a picture of the night sky. It's as if you are exposing a whole extra layer of information above the screen, a sort of digital X-Ray. In fact, the whole thing is really a visual trick: there are two projectors throwing different images up in the air, which alternate rapidly. A switchable diffuser lets you By breaking into the second image with your piece of paper you get to see the "invisible" layer, which then exposes (in their example there was text attached to a photo, or an astronomical map on a picture of the night sky). But that's not all. More work is underway to develop the system - such as enabling 3D imaging of, say, CT scans for doctors - and it's certainly clear that there might be educational opportunities for museums and suchlike. It's very cool - although right now I imagine you'd have to sell people on using a Surface before you can take them onto the next generation. Conveniently located next to Second Light was another intriguing - and probably more immediately useful - system called "nanotouch". This takes the idea that you'd get a lot more value out of a small touchscreen if, well, you didn't have your fingers in the way the whole time. So, instead of using your fingers on the screen itself, you use your fingers on the back of the device. The demo on display used gaming as an example - using touch to move your on-screen character around without ever needing to obscure it from view. Nanotouch isn't brand new - I'd read about it before - but this is the first time I've seen it in operation, and it's very intuitive...
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TechFest swoons over light and touch advances
TechFest swoons over light and touch advances
Microsoft's TechFest seems to feature an inordinate number of Brits - based not only in the company's Cambridge research centre, but also in Redmond, Asia and beyond. The fruits of UK researchers have proved very interesting, including one project that caught my eye; Second Light - a system that one person described as "Surface Plus Plus". It's a glass table-style display (like Microsoft Surface) but with a difference. By sliding a piece of paper or other semi-transparent material over the table, you can see hidden information about the objects on parade - in their example, for instance, an astronomical map appears over a picture of the night sky. It's as if you are exposing a whole extra layer of information above the screen, a sort of digital X-Ray. In fact, the whole thing is really a visual trick: there are two projectors throwing different images up in the air, which alternate rapidly. A switchable diffuser lets you By breaking into the second image with your piece of paper you get to see the "invisible" layer, which then exposes (in their example there was text attached to a photo, or an astronomical map on a picture of the night sky). But that's not all. More work is underway to develop the system - such as enabling 3D imaging of, say, CT scans for doctors - and it's certainly clear that there might be educational opportunities for museums and suchlike. It's very cool - although right now I imagine you'd have to sell people on using a Surface before you can take them onto the next generation. Conveniently located next to Second Light was another intriguing - and probably more immediately useful - system called "nanotouch". This takes the idea that you'd get a lot more value out of a small touchscreen if, well, you didn't have your fingers in the way the whole time. So, instead of using your fingers on the screen itself, you use your fingers on the back of the device. The demo on display used gaming as an example - using touch to move your on-screen character around without ever needing to obscure it from view. Nanotouch isn't brand new - I'd read about it before - but this is the first time I've seen it in operation, and it's very intuitive... if you incorporate it in the right way (here's a video from New Scientist to show you). Researcher Patrick Baudich (who is also looking at other touch-based systems to try and take them forward) also allows other objects - ones that are even smaller than an MP3 player or phone - to be operated while you can still see the screen. Microsoft Software Research and development Internet Gadgets guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
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TechFest swoons over light and touch advances
Zero-day hole in versions 9.0 and earlier of Adobe Reader and Acrobat
"A critical vulnerability has been identified in Adobe Reader 9 and Acrobat 9 and earlier versions. This vulnerability would cause the application to crash and could potentially allow an attacker to take control of the affected system. There are reports that this issue is being exploited," says Adobe
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Zero-day hole in versions 9.0 and earlier of Adobe Reader and Acrobat
Apple’s US sales fall as crunch starts to bite
I expect most people suspected sales of Apple's premium-priced computers would come under pressure, given the dreadful state of the US economy, and that seems to be the case. The Wall Street Journal is reporting: "Apple Inc's unit sales of computers through US retail channels fell 6% in January from the same month in 2008, the first monthly decline in three years, according to market-research firm NPD Group." NPD analyst Stephen Baker said consumers are becoming more price-sensitive as the economic climate continues to worsen. "Casual buyers or people who are trying to make a choice are trading down," Mr. Baker said. NPD reckons that Apple's retail market share, measured in units, fell from 16.4% to 13.7% in January 2008. "The firm estimates that the dollar value of Apple's sales through U.S. retail channels fell 11% during the month, faster than the decline in unit sales," says the WSJ. However, PC sales did not suffer as badly, thanks partly to the popularity of cheap netbooks. According to the story: NPD said unit sales of all brands of PCs rose 13% in January from a year earlier, but the dollar value of systems sold fell 3.2% as consumers bought less-expensive models. Hewlett-Packard Inc had the strongest showing in the month, while the company's PC unit shipment rose to a market share of 40.1% in January compared with 39.2% a year earlier. Although Dell is a major player in the US market, its sales are still mostly direct.
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Apple's US sales fall as crunch starts to bite
Problems decoding compressed RAR files
I have several RAR files containing downloaded music which always come up as "archive damaged or incomplete" when I try to open them with SuperNZB. Is there a way of fixing these files or at least extracting the music in them? Phil Goodland WinRAR is a very efficient and deservedly popular compression or archiving program, somewhat like Zip, and it is frequently used to split very large files into smaller ones (part1.rar, part2.rar, etc). WinRAR is commercial and proprietary, so some alternative compression programs try to handle its encryption system. However, you have a much better chance of success using WinRAR itself
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Problems decoding compressed RAR files
Eee Box PC, TV set, and Blu-ray?
I'm planning to add the new Asus Eee Box B204 to a 32-inch, 720-line HDTV set as a space-saving combined PC and entertainment centre. The Eee Box is designed so it can be clipped to the back of a TV. It has an ATI Radeon HD 3400 graphics card and HDMI output. I'm also thinking of getting an external Blu-ray BD-RW/DVD-Rom.
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Eee Box PC, TV set, and Blu-ray?