Linksys’ low-end IP PBX called the SPA9000 is reviewed in today’s Computerworld.com here. It is a capable system whose diminutive size hides a high level of complexity. While it packs plenty of features, getting some of them to work will require a great deal of patience, reading the manual and trial-and-error experimenting in the brave new world of business IP telephony.
One of the hazards of using Internet cafes and other public Wi-Fi hotspots is that there is a good chance of getting infected, scanned, or both while you are online. Alternatives include installing and running a virtual machine that has its own protected workspace, using a U3 thumb drive that comes with its own software and password protection, and now Mojopac, an intriguing software solution that recently began shipping earlier this spring.
The growing antagonism between Google/You Tube and the creators who “involuntarily supply” their video content has shown that the PC is becoming the place to go to watch videos. So wouldn’t it be nice if you could stash all of your huge video and music files someplace other than your own computer’s hard drive? And if such a place could be easily connected to your living room TV and stereo system, so you could view the videos and listen to music without having to integrate a PC into your living room stack of gear? And wouldn’t it be nice if could you use a wireless connection to move these files from your PCs too, since you can’t or won’t wire your living room with Ethernet?
These aren’t empty questions, but the idea behind the $275 MediaGate MG-350HD. It is the size of a hardback book with lots of cables and connectors to hook up to your TV and hifi. It sorta works.
http://www.Mediagateusa.com
The box has your choice of component, composite, S-Video or DVI video connectors and coax, optical or twin RCA audio connectors. Among that selection should be some combination that can hook it up to what you have in your living room. Unlike having a Media Center PC, it is quiet and doesn’t generate much heat.
You can connect it to your PC via either a regular USB connector, or use either the wired Ethernet or wireless networking ports. It doesn’t come with any hard disk – you’ll need to buy an older model 3.5 inch IDE drive. (It would have been nicer if they included a SATA interface, especially since those drives are pretty cheap now.) After taking off four cover screws, you can quickly connect the IDE drive inside the box and then close it back up, power up and format the drive. There are instructions that are written in badly translated English for various versions of Windows on how to do this.
The good news is that the box has just enough intelligence to handle all sorts of video files that I stored on it. I asked my 20-something stepson to give me a sample of video downloads to try out. One came with German subtitles, one was a version of Babel without any subtitles (which is tough because a lot of dialogs isn’t in English), and one came more or less like the theatrical version. None of these files could immediately play on an ordinary Windows PC without installing further audio or video encoders, such as Divx. They all ran as is just fine on the MediaGate.
The bad news is that the wireless and networking support will take some effort to get working. To use the MediaGate as a network storage device, you need to install a special driver on your Windows PC. It was easier to plug in the USB cable and move the files over to its hard drive, which somewhat defeats the idea behind a network storage box. I have WEP configured on my home network, and I couldn’t get the appropriate key to work with the MediaGate, despite its supposed support for this encryption level.
The unit comes with a small remote control that is used mainly for setup tasks, and for scrolling through the various files to play them. And scroll you will do – the interface is similar to Windows Media Center, showing you folders and file names on screen in large fonts that mean just a few listings per screen. If you have hundreds of files, it will take some effort to find them. Another cool feature is that you can store video and audio files on ordinary USB key drives and then plug them into the unit and play them.
Both audio and video quality seemed acceptable. You have your choice of 4:3 or 16:9 aspect ratios of the video. Overall, the device does a decent job. If you aren’t a fan of Windows Media Center, this might be a good alternative. Apple’s iTV is comparably priced when you factor into the fact that it includes the hard drive but not the cables. But iTV doesn’t do 4:3 and you need to use iTunes to manage how the content gets moved over to the box.
Server virtualization has become a great tool for the data center, helped by the leading virtual server software vendors literally giving away their product. And as more IT shops are consolidating their servers using virtual machines (VMs), they are finding an active marketplace and plenty of choices for how to implement the concept.
In this story for Datamation, I compare VMware with Microsoft and Xensource’s offerings.
When I first got my Mio H610, I was intrigued. Here was one of those “kitchen sink” devices that seemed to do a solid job in serving many needs. It is a portable GPS receiver, along with an MP3/video player and a photo viewer, and includes some other utilities. It comes in a package slightly bigger than one of the more modern Palms, and is even designed to look very similar to them.
You can read more of my review for the new GearDigest, one of the Tom’sHardware-related family of Web sites.
The idea of having a managed security service bundled with a soho firewall/router/gateway all-in-box isn’t new, but this year two new products have extended the idea with the addition of built-in DSL modems to the package. Both SofaWare, a division of Checkpoint Software, and TrustEli have come out with these kitchen-sink products.
Corporations looking for new ways to enable roaming users to connect securely to their internal networks have latched onto Virtual Private Network Secure Sockets Layer (VPN SSL) gateway products. Unlike older VPN products that use secure TCP/IP protocols, the SSL products primarily make use of Web browsers to establish their connection. This, the theory goes, makes them easier to install and more parsimonious in their client software, thus useful for unmanaged situations. We found these claims are for the most part unrealized, the products are still just as complex as IPsec VPNs. However, the SSL products still require a great deal of administration, configuration, and support.
I review five SSL VPNs for Information Security magazine, including the first comparison to include Cisco’s ASA 5540 product, in this month’s issue. The other products include Aventail’s ST EX-2500, F5 Networks’ FirePass 4100, Juniper Networks’ Secure Access (SA) 6000 SP and Check Point Software Technologies’ Connectra NGX R61. Juniper comes out on top.
And you can check out my special page summarizing recent SSL VPN reviews on my site here.
Now that USB thumb drives are almost give-away items (coming to a cereal box near you), vendors are trying to differentiate themselves by offering some useful software on the drive itself. The latest innovation is something called u3, which is the name of an industry consortium that has developed a low-level protocol for launching applications directly from the USB drive itself. It is a neat idea, but with some caveats.
One of the first things a new PC user quickly finds out is that any application has to be installed directly on each PC. Gone are the days of DOS where applications could fit easily on a single 360 kB floppy disk and run from a few executable files. The u3 folks are trying to bring us back some of that functionality, and it is a worthy effort.
I tried out the SanDisk Cruzer Titanium 2 GB u3 model. There are at least a dozen more that you can find, naturally, on u3.com.
The first thing you should know is that u3 doesn’t work on anything besides Windows XP/2000.
The best feature about u3 is that it offers a simple password protection for your data. If you try inserting the drive in a Mac, or in a Windows machine where you don’t know the password, you can’t read anything on it.
While I am sure that eventually someone could crack this password if they tried hard enough, it is a great way to at least make sure that if you leave your u3 drive lying around, the data won’t be easily viewed.
There are a lot of other programs that either come with or are available to work with u3 drives. The San Disk model included portable versions of Skype, Trillian/AIM, and a limited subscription to Avast anti-virus scanner. ThinkFree makes a $50 portable version of its Office software, and there are versions of Firefox browser too, so you can take your bookmarks and settings with you when you travel. You can setup some or all of this software to automatically load when you insert the drive in your PC — this can take a while to get everything going.
Given that u3 drives don’t cost much more than non-u3 drives, it makes sense to buy one for your next thumb drive. In my case, where I use a Mac desktop, it is less useful than if I was in an all-Windows environment.
I haven’t run AOL software since about the time in the late 1990s when Marshall Rose and I were writing our book on Internet Messaging together. We wanted to call the book “You’ve Got Mail” but that is a story for another day. So when AOL announced last week that they were migrating to a free service for those of us that didn’t need their dialup connections any more (dialup? Who uses dialup?) I had to try it out.
Boy, did I enter the wayback machine, Mr. Peabody. Before I knew what was going on, my hard disk had filled up with AOL bloatware. I count the following programs now installed care of Time Warner:
AOL Coach, AOL Connection Services, AOL Deskbar, AOL Spyware Protector, AOL IE Toolbar, AOL You’ve Got Pictures screensaver, Real’s Player, QuickTime, and AOL Computer Check Up. Not to mention the AOL Uninstaller, which only uninstalls one of the above programs. As my friend Barry Gerber would say, who designed this crap?
The AOLfree version faithfully replicates the AOL paid experience: you have AOL IM, a browser to AOL’s portal (when was the last time you needed to check that page?), and of course, AOL email (if you can find a series of characters and numbers that no one else has already grabbed). But why would anyone want to do this? The days of a “walled garden” — as AOL once called its portal — are long over, and most people use whatever email and browser they want these days.
However, there are a couple of things that it doesn’t do, things that parents should know. One of the most useful things of a real AOL account was the ability to set children’s access to content and how they would use their IM and email accounts. While most teens these days know more than parents and how to get around these blocks, the pre-teen set can benefit from these controls. The AOLfree universe is completely free of parental controls.
But if you are still using AOL and don’t have youngsters around, you want to get off the AOL bus now. This is why their phone lines are being clogged with users who want out of their monthly AOL tax on their Internet access. BTW, the number to call is 1-888-265-8008 and operators are standing by 24/7. I will save you the trouble of looking it up on AOL.com, which isn’t the easiest thing to find. And don’t get me started on how much of a maze AOLhelp online is. There are so many blind alleys on their Web site that any noob trying to figure this out isn’t going to get very far. Clearly, they are working on their site. (When I went under AOLhelp, account questions, price plans AOL offers; I got “We’re sorry, currently there are no available documents for this section.” Oops.)
Yes, there are some semi-useful tools, such as AOL Computer Check Up, which scans and attempts to fix your hard disk for things that are wrong with it, but there are better programs around for free, including PCPitStop.com from my friend Dave Methvin. And there is its Spyware blocker, but after installing all these other AOL thingies I am not sure that I can find the blocker among all my desktop clutter anymore. And why, pray tell, do I need both Real and QuickTime players on my machine? Certainly, one would be enough to play all that video content that AOL now is streaming at me, including the intro video with the cute blonde showing me what the software does, which is almost worth the entire hassle of installing and uninstalling AOLfree.
No, this is one piece of freeware that you get exactly what you pay for: a mish-mash of second-rate software, all so that you can have a “vanity” AOL email address to indicate to the rest of the world that you continue to be a clueless noob. Glenn Fleishman writes equally harsh language in this week’s Tidbits.com newsletter:
AOL’s software still stinks. AOL’s email filtering is highly erratic. Any of us who run mailing lists are familiar with suddenly having all of our double opt-in, fully approved AOL users bounce our email for some obscure reason that’s impossible to address directly with AOL.
AOLfree is just another in piece of their software that continues to annoy me. I wrote a short review of their latest AIM Pro IM client for Computerworld that you can read here.
When I wrote that piece I got a few emails from people within AOL that wanted to talk to me. They didn’t provide phone numbers, and I assumed they were product managers so I emailed them back, saying I welcome a dialog. Never heard another peep out of them. Perhaps they didn’t receive my message — but this is just another indication of how hard it is to deal with the company. I think we can say that the merger with Time Warner has been successful at reverse cherry-picking the aspects of two dysfunctional corporate cultures and creating a worst-of-breed new media company.
AOL has done a terrific job of getting noobs on the Net, and providing an IM service for teens that is now being used by many businesses. But their software efforts suffer from coming from a large corporation that has lost its will to be an innovator. There isn’t any reason to use AOLfree. If you still have AOL.com as your domain, it is time to consider other alternatives, like Google, Earthlink, and hundreds of other places that will do a better job.
If you want to pay close to two grand for a flat-screen LCD, you might want to consider the HP LC3760N 37-inch HD LCD TV. It has enough connectors to keep you busy for the better part of the day hooking up everything you own, the picture is beautiful, and it doesn’t take up much space; it’s less than 6 inches deep. It comes with a simple stand, or you can mount it on your wall.