The magazine of the Melbourne PC User Group APCUG Conference and CES 2006 Ash Nallawalla, APCUG Representative |
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Our Committee voted to send two representatives to the annual APCUG Conference and the adjoining Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas during 2 - 8 January 2006. They were our President, Dave Botherway and our new Vice President, Lyn Goodall. Much later we received the good news that Microsoft USA was going to pay the travel expenses of two of our Featured Community representatives (Dave and me) to come to CES for Windows Vista related events. This enabled us to send three members to this event for less than the budgeted cost to send two.
APCUG Conference
Our group is a member of the Association of Personal Computer User Groups (APCUG). It holds an annual conference adjacent to CES and offers a rich programme of user group leader roundtables, education sessions and keynote speeches by experts. There were 230 attendees from 88 user groups.
APCUG's Annual Sponsors are Microsoft Mindshare Program, Corel and CompUSA. Other conference sponsors were John Iasiuolo & Computer Outlook, The Digital Photo Guy, LapWorks, The Healthy PC, User Group Relations, Logitech, NTI, Webworking Services Corporation, Smart Computing, AMD, Firetrust Limited, Intel, Alpha Software, InterVideo, Adobe, CNet, TrendMicro, Linspire, Panda Software, Auto FX Software, Red Mercury LLC, Association of Shareware Professionals, Pexagon Technology and National Cristina Foundation.
The winners of the annual Jerry awards, Newsletter contest and Web Site content were announced. PC Update won an equal Second Place for the Newsletter contest. Congratulations to our writers, Gary Taig and his team for the achievement.
Here is a selection of some Education sessions we attended:
- Simple Ways to Secure Wireless Computers
- Getting to Know APCUG
- Podcast Your UG Meetings
- Setting Up a Home Network
- The Future of User Groups Round Table (by Aaron Coldiron of Microsoft, Chris
Pirillo of Lockergnome and Ash Nallawalla)
- Digital Photography: Lee's Rule of Threes
- Simple Ways to Protect Yourself from Identity Theft
- Making Monthly CDs for User Groups (by Dave Botherway)
- Editors Round Table
- What Does the Internet Know About You?
- Low-Cost Video Conferencing
- How to Be a User Group President
- Technology Funding Sources
- Getting Vendors to Present to Your User Group
- New User Group Member Orientation
- Take Back Control of Your Computer
- Treasurers Round Table
Presentations
Chris Pirillo of Lockergnome fame introduced his new search tool Gada Be (pronounced the American way) at http://gada.be. It displays search results from several sources and is worth trying out if your favourite search engine does not deliver what you expect.
Jonathan Seckler of AMD spoke about the evolution of the Digital Home and how the typical home user's most complex need is probably how to share a printer over a network, while vendors are dreaming up The Jetsons-like scenarios.
At the Adobe breakfast we were shown Photoshop Elements 4.0 and here are some of its interesting features:
- Metadata features have been improved. You can tag photographs with names such
as "Family", "Betty" and so on and drag them on the thumbnails.
- Facial recognition now enables you to find all "people" pictures for tagging -
however, a person with only one visible eye might not appear in such a list.
- Edge detection has been improved.
- The Magic Extractor enables you to mark the desired region with red dots and
the rest with blue dots, so the selected portion is easily extracted.
The Cnet event featured a tour of the cnet.com Web site and a list of interesting products to see at the CES show:
- Jensen in-dash PC with a 40 GB drive and DVD-ROM
- Samsung ZX20 mobile phone that moves data at 3.6 Mbit/s
- Intel ViiV technology and its new logo, heralding its move into home
entertainment PCs
- The Wow-Wee P-Bot home robot
- Razer Tarantula keyboard for gamers with its 2000 dpi track precision
- Polk Audio network enabled speakers each with its own configuration "Web page"
- Kyocera KR1 router that uses a cell phone as its WAN line
- It will make your tasks safer and easier.
- Find information instantly.
- The latest in entertainment.
- New code base.
- Focus on fundamentals.
- Improved design.
- The user interface (UI) is cleaner and more informative. For example, the URL
of a phishing site will show up with a red background to warn you. Certified
genuine sites will display a green background.
- Users now work in low-privilege accounts without frustration if they wish to
install a new program or perform some Administrator-privilege task. For such
tasks, they can supply the suitable password and then revert to lower privileges
so that their system is less vulnerable.
- The Taskbar now shows a little preview of the window each button represents
when you hover over it.
- Alt+Tab (Task Switcher) is now improved with Flip 3D, a 45-degree rendition of
all open windows that you can scroll with the mouse wheel.
- The Sidebar is a toolbar on the right of the screen that runs little "Gadgets"
not unlike Yahoo Konfabulator Widgets.
- SideShow provides summary information in a secondary display such as a little
LCD screen and it does not require the main PC to be running.
- The Photo Gallery thumbnails display a larger tooltip image when you hover
over them. Edited images are backed up with the original negative in case you
need to revert to it.
- Media Player 11 now shares the same buttons as the rest of Windows, so there
is less confusion. Its library comes with a great set of album cover art.
Scrolling through large song libraries is very fast.
- Comprehensive parental controls give you more granular control over what
children can see or play.
- Defender is the new anti-spyware tool that is now part of Windows.
- Software Explorers give us more information about running processes.
- Internet Explorer 7 (IE7) shares the same user interface (UI) as does Windows
Vista.
- You can choose to load several sites in multiple tabs when you start IE7.
- The Windows Media Center is digital cable-ready if you have the appropriate
cable card. This will be rolled out to Australia later. No set-top box will be
needed and therefore you won't get Pay Per View or Video on Demand.
Dave and I attended this 3-day event, which overlapped some of the APCUG Conference events. The activities were mostly at meal time, so we had time to go to APCUG and CES in the intervening time. Lyn was also able to attend some of the activities.
Much of the Windows Vista content was under a non-disclosure agreement and was hosted by JB Williams, Josh Levine, Jed Rose and Aaron Coldiron. We were shown new features and we gave our feedback. Microsoft thanked us and said that the latest build contains our "fingerprints" - changes made as a direct result of our prior feedback.
We can write about anything that has been shown publicly to date and most of it was at CES. Dave and I will show the latest Vista beta at SIG meetings over the coming months.
Bill Gates Keynote
Bill Gates was the first keynote speaker at CES. He and senior Microsoft managers and partners demonstrated the main features of Windows Vista (mentioned above). We heard about the MTV Networks deal where the Urge music service will open up thousands of new music content that you can buy individually or as CDs based on your selections. Messenger will feature VoIP calling to normal phone numbers through Philips.
2006 International CES
CES had about 150,000 visitors and it was tiring to navigate through the crowds. Queues were everywhere - taking a shuttle bus took an hour simply standing in line to get you on your way. CES featured not only computers but anything related to consumer electronics such as car accessories, mobile phones and home appliances.
From my perspective, the emphasis was on entertainment. Mobile phones now do a lot more than make phone calls. You can use them to watch TV, play games, track your position, listen to MP3 music, and more. Memory chips are packing in more data and are cheaper. Two years ago I bought a 256 MB flash memory stick for US$89; now companies are giving them away with press releases as if they are floppy disks.
The most interesting product for me was the Slingbox. It looks like a huge block of silver chocolate about the size of a keyboard and you plug it to your cable TV set-top box and to an Internet connection. Then you can go anywhere in the world that has a fast Internet connection and watch TV content as is being shown at your Slingbox location. I imagine that it will appeal to sports fanatics.
Intel changed its logo and announced the dual-core Viiv (rhymes with five) platform for entertainment PCs. Kodak released a two-lens camera called the V570. One is a wide-angle lens and the other is for zooming; you can zoom in and out without realising that you have changed to the other lens.
Telescope enthusiasts had many new models to admire. One little device from Celestron is the SkyScout, which you point at any part of the night sky and find out the name of the constellation, star or planet. You can't buy one until April.
There were all kinds of vehicles and all seemed to have at least four LCD screens and numerous large loudspeakers in the boot. I presume that such vehicles never need to carry luggage, as there wasn't any space for it.
Microsoft showed off Windows Vista, Xbox 360 (arriving in Australia in March), an HD-DVD add-on for the Xbox, Starz-provided movies through a service called Vongo and so on. Lyn, Dave and I spent time manning the Windows Communities booth where we showed off our own user group Web site and that of The Hive http://www.hive.net, a Microsoft-sponsored site for community leaders.
Reprinted from the Jan / Feb 2006 issue of PC Update, the magazine of Melbourne PC User Group, Australia
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