CES 2007

Technology

I’ve just returned from the Consumer Electronics Show, which ran from January 8-11 in Las Vegas. This was my first time attending the largest trade show in America (2700 exhibitors, 150,000 attendees) and it was quite an experience. Over the next few days, I’ll post entries about some of the more interesting products and companies I saw.

I was travelling with some colleagues, and we had four days to cover the exhibition – just as well, since it covers ten large convention halls, and conference space in several nearby hotels.

The scale of CES is hard to grasp – by lunchtime on the first day, we had cleared half of one hall and felt we were doing well – until we realised we had only cleared half of one corner of one hall!

It was time for a more aggressive approach. By planning ahead, and stepping up the pace substantially, we managed to cover about 90% of the exhibits during the first three days! This left Thursday morning for some final follow-up visits to stands, and we were all done by lunchtime, leaving the afternoon for some R&R.

The conference was well organised, with courtesy coaches between the different venues, free Internet access available in the halls (supplied by DivX), and even free international phone calls courtesy of Vonage, who had installed VoIP kiosks in the lobbies. Complimentary magazines from just about every consumer and electronics publisher you’ve ever heard of were also available outside the conference entrance, along with the six show guides and product directories.

While most of the halls were in the gargantuan Las Vegas Convention Center, one hall was in the Sands Expo Centre, about a mile away. (The Adult Entertainment Expo was taking place in an adjacent hall during the week, which led to an interesting mix of attendees in the areas outside the hall.)

General Trends

Two products were in evidence just about everywhere this year – large high-definition LCD televisions, and digital photo frames. Even manufacturers who didn’t sell photo frames were using them to display information sheets for their actual products.

There was a wide and varied selection of Windows Media Centre PC cases from assorted vendors – perhaps the most impressive (if not the most practical) were the Diamond Media Centre range from Moneual, which featured a jewel-encrusted fascia panel and control knobs at prices ranging from $30,000 to $1,000,000, they are for elite purchasers only.

Moneual's diamond-encrusted Media Centre PC

While most of the larger vendors had extravagant stands with large floor areas, there were plenty of smaller stands there as well. The entry level cost for a stand is in the region of $6000-$8000 depending on location (about 2 metres x 3 metres) which is within reach for even small startups.

There were surprisingly few freebies on offer. Other than the ubiquitous carrier bags, and a few trinkets like LCD pocket torches, watch batteries, and T-shirts, pickings were slim.

Apple steal some thunder

One of the biggest announcements didn’t even happen at the show. Apple were running MacWorld in San Francisco during the same week, and launched their new and long-awaited iPhone, though it won’t be available until June. While the industry was impressed with the product, there was plenty of scepticism about Apple’s ability to break into the highly competitive cellphone market, especially with a product that costs $600! Time will tell…

Virus Creation in The Lab

Technology

The US magazine Consumer Reports (similar to Which? magazine in the UK) has been in the technology news recently. As part of a comprehensive test of antivirus software packages, they commissioned a consulting company to create 5,500 new viruses to see how well market leading programs would cope.

The antivirus industry, led by McAfee, was immediately up in arms when they heard about it. Imagine the risk to society of these viruses escaping into the wild! What blatant disregard for consumer safety! And other similar scaremongering…

It only takes a little scratching below the surface to show that their concerns are, at best, misguided. The viruses created for Consumer Reports were simple modifications of existing viruses, altered so that their signature was no longer identifiable. The viruses were kept in a secure environment, and all copies were removed after testing – only a single CD remains, which is kept in a locked and secure cabinet on site.

Surprise, surprise – McAffee’s package didn’t do particularly well in the test; it relies heavily on a signature database to identify new threats. When viruses were still something of a novelty, this approach worked well – it often took weeks before a new virus gained notoriety, giving McAffee plenty of time to respond.

By now however, it is so easy for would-be virus writers to develop new viruses, and variants on existing viruses, that a pure signature-based approach is no longer sufficient. A more pro-active approach is needed, that can identify virus-like behaviour and quarantine or block the affected program. Of course, there will be legitimate tools which end up looking like a virus – commercial tools can be recognised and permitted explicitly, while a mechanism can be included to allow users to grant access to other programs on an as-needed basis.

Maybe the industry should use two distinct terms – “Virus removal”, for packages that can remove existing viruses which are already known to the program, and “Antivirus” for packages that can detect new virus strains and prevent infection in the first place. (Somehow, though, I can’t imagine vendors thinking this is a good idea.)

Whenever Which? reviews product categories that I know well, I find myself disagreeing with their conclusions; this doesn’t give me much confidence in their reviews of other products that I’m not familiar with. People I trust have made similar comments about Consumer Reports. In this case, however, they’re on the side of right. More power to them…

(In case you’re wondering, the top rated antivirus packages were from BitDefender and ZoneLabs. The full report is only available to subscribers.)

Flatrate 3G access from Vodafone

Networking

ENN reports that Vodafone Ireland have announced a flatrate 3G access package from 1 July.

For around €50 per month, users can enjoy up to 1 Mbps downstream Internet access while on the move, subject to a monthly cap of 5 GB of data.

This sounds like a pretty good deal, though I’m dubious as to how close to 1 Mbps your average mobile user can expect; I’d expect speeds closer to 128 Kbps. You only need to have a conversation with someone on a car phone to realise how hard the mobile network works just to keep a connection up at all.

However, I’m more interested in its potential for fixed base users, such as those in areas too remote to have traditional broadband available. Until now, the only solution for such users has been satellite, which is both expensive and awkward.

Vodafone have > 99% coverage around the country, so there is an excellent chance that almost every household will be within range of a mobile signal. It’s not clear whether Vodafone need to upgrade the transmitters on each mast to support 3G access, or whether this can be accomplished by a software upgrade. If the latter, then this may finally be a cost-effective way for small businesses in remote regions to get decent Internet access.

(Keep in mind also that a fixed antenna should be capable of much better datarates than a purely mobile solution. And if the introductory price is €50 per month, prices can only get cheaper over time.)

Why Windows Vista is not written in .NET

Windows

I recently came across an article at security website Dark Reading which explains why Vista isn’t written in .NET.

There are a few different reasons given, but the main one is that Microsoft have a lot of hardcore C++ OS programmers who didn’t want to switch to C#. Because C# is type-safe, it’s a lot harder to do some of the standard C tricks of peeking and poking memory locations, tweaking bits in registers, etc.

This is a shame, because while that type checking can be frustrating at times, it does give an awful lot of protection from malicious coding techniques. Given the rate at which Microsoft publishes Windows Security Updates, you’d have thought they’d be very keen to adapt a more secure computing environment.

Another reason given was performance: since .NET code is pseudo-interpreted, it is not as efficient as native C/C++ code. That’s a red herring though – my experience with .NET has been that it runs more than fast enough for almost anything you’re likely to do with it. Like any environment, you can easily write bad code that runs like a dog; you can also write good code that runs very fast indeed.

And as if to prove my point, the current non-.NET betas of Vista run incredibly slowly, at least on my Athlon 2400 system with 1 GB RAM and a very fast Radeon graphics card. Intel must be rubbing their hands with glee…

DDoS against UltraDNS

Networking

The Washington Post has an interesting article about a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack against UltraDNS, a provider of domain name services.

It’s a chilling read. If you’ve wondered why recently, some popular websites appear to be mysteriously offline, this may provide some of the answers.

The most unsettling bit is that there doesn’t seem to be any obvious way to defend against this sort of attack.

Optimising the morning commute

Observation

In my continuing search for ways to improve traffic flow (rather ironic, since I’m working from home these days), I came across this analysis of how small variations in departure time for the morning commute could lead to significant time savings.

Friends who commute from North Wicklow to Dublin city centre had told me that there was a narrow window in the morning when you could get a clean run into the city without too much delay – about 10 minutes after the early morning rush has subsided but before the school runs kick in. This article appears to support that theory (albeit on a different continent!)

(Of course, there are the usual Slashdot comments on the article also…)

Maybe one day, I’ll actually get to put all this theory to use…