Audiovox A-DUO-101-AVW User Manual download pdf (Page 34)

INSIDE TRACK

BY JOHN C. DVORAK

MAY 9, 2006 PC MAGAZINE 53

thing expensive and bound to break—a classic un-

necessary gizmo.

Another hot

topic was RFID. It’s generating world-

wide interest now that the devices have come down to

the size of a grain of rice. Now they want to put these

things everywhere, from trucks to pets to you and me.

Everyone was talking about

getting “chipped.” I

think not.

Strange Bedfellows Dept.: I find it amusing

that Dell just bought Alienware, a maker of high-end

AMD-based computers for gamers. It’s odd, since Dell

actually got rolling in the PC business by developing

some of the fastest computers available. I remember

Michael Dell, at a PC Magazine Editors’ Day in Tex-

as about 20 years ago, personally showing off a 286

machine that at the time was

clocked faster than

any competitive computer.

Back then, the company

was designing its own motherboards and pushing the

envelope. I wonder just what it is that Alienware does

that Dell itself can’t do. My guess is that it’s

just an

excuse to get into bed

with AMD after all the years

Dell chose to be an Intel-only shop. An

expensive

divorce,

if you ask me.

Booting Windows XP on a Mac Dept.: Someone

ﬁ nally came up with a quick-booting version of Micro-

soft Windows XP

that boots just ﬁ ne on an x86 Mac.

I had the opportunity to play with it; it looks just like

any Windows XP until you go into the device manager

and see more

yellow question marks than you’ll ever

see anywhere. It works, but it doesn’t really like being

on a Mac—yet.

How Did They Do That? Dept.: I had no idea that

you could manage to get a video feed out of a USB 2.0

port, but Tritton seems to have done it with the TRI-

UV100 USB 2.0 Interface. As many of you know, you

can run multiple monitors with Windows XP and cre-

ate a

large desktop. An nVidia SLI card can support

two monitors from a single card. Most cards can drive

only one monitor; to run another monitor you need

to add a second card. Enter the Tritton. This

small,

widely available USB device

gives you an addi tional

1024-by-768

output for a second monitor. I didn’t

know that this was even possible. You could probably

add another display card for less than the $80 that this

thing costs, but with closed systems, or for its simplic-

ity, it’s a very interesting idea.

HE CEBIT SHOW IN HANNOVER,

Germany, will become the

world’s dominant computer

technology show unless a new

U.S. show can fill the void left

by the

collapse of the Comdex

event. Such a shift in dominance

from the U.S. to Europe could

be a disaster for American companies, which have

tended not to participate heavily in CeBit. If interest

in CeBit were to grow in the U.S. market, then the

show would be

impossible to unseat as leader. That

said, CeBit could veer off in the wrong direction and

self-destruct or stall.

One of Comdex’s wrong turns was to

downplay

interesting gadgets

and technologies. The show

suddenly changed its focus, choosing to concentrate

instead on enterprise computing and the needs of the

Fortune 1000 companies. I hate to have to point out

continually that although the Fortune 1000 companies

can each purchase tens of thousands of computers

and software systems, there are

only 1,000 of these

companies,

hence the name. This makes for a show

with low attendance, if you just

do the math. Though

1,000 people might go to the show, each representing

one of the 1,000 companies, nobody wants to exhibit

in an empty hall that resembles a

ghost town without

the tumbleweeds.

This was the kind of target market CeBit chose

for its

CeBit America show in New York a few years

ago, which proved short-lived. But at this year’s Han-

nover show, the promoters were again talking about

de-emphasizing devices and technologies and instead

focusing on solutions. Solutions, by their nature,

are

boring.

The booth that was packed to the gills with

showgoers was Microsoft’s pavilion, loaded with giz-

mos and technologies. This was followed by the mo-

bile-phone makers’ booths, which displayed all sorts

jazzy phones. The “solutions” booths were empty,

and the TV crews covered the jazzy new stuff. Can

you imagine otherwise? “Yes, Brent, our back-ofﬁ ce

database subsystems rely on an SQL database which

our proprietary software accesses via VPN and our

special nodal software. Let me give you an example of

a complex query search here on the monitor.” Yawn.

If any

one theme dominated the show, it was the

copycat attempts to make the mobile phone into some

sort of all-purpose device. This will

never end and

will never succeed.

The spotlight this year was on

games and

ﬂ ip-around screens. I think every phone

maker had one of these screens. They slide up and

then ﬂ ip sideways to form kind of a “T.”

This is useful for

watching TV and playing games

with a controller below the screen. I see it as some-

Attempts to make the mobile phone into

some sort of all-purpose device will never

end and will never succeed.

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