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Newstips Electronic Editorial Bulletin Issue # 2009-06b
News to scrub the grill by
Thermaltake adds trendy new Element T case next week
It started with the snazzy Element S cases with killer cool looks
& one of the best build experiences ever. New in stores next
week, Thermaltake brings that elemental style to the trendy new
Element T mid-tower case ($90), with a handsome mesh front
outside & options galore inside. It comes with 200mm top & 120mm
rear exhaust fans with mounts for optional 120mm or 230mm side &
one or two 120mm or 140mm or one 200mm front intake fans. You're
unlikely to have a combination of drives it can't accommodate.
It's as sleek in a staid office setting as it is striking as a
LAN party animal. Ask Ramsom if you'd like one for review.
Contact: Ramsom Koay, Thermaltake Technology USA (City of
Industry, CA) 626-968-9189x127 ramsom.koay@thermaltakeusa.com
http://ThermaltakeUSA.com
How graphics cards fit your coverage after all
These days, you may not cover tech products for their own sake,
but that doesn't strip them of news value. Here are several
reasons you may want to cover graphics cards (noting, of course,
that PNY offers their brand of ATI- & Nvidia-family graphics
cards at retail). If your topic is video editing, for example,
support for higher resolutions at faster frame rates & the
ability to support a second monitor may be important, as might be
the ability to drive a TV output. If your story is about the
business or behaviors or health effects of gaming, the ability to
handle games on the same PC that earns its keep as the household
or homework computer may save the cost of a separate console. In
a world where 70% of the PCs being bought from stores are
notebooks, there might also be an angle in the ability to later
upgrade the graphics that comes true by swapping what's in the
slot for a desktop, but not true with a notebook. Whatever your
interests are that can include graphics cards, Sue can support
you with info, photos or reviewables. Contact: Susan Bartolucci,
PNY (Parsippany, NJ) 973-560-5592 sbartolucci@pny.com
http://PNY.com
Tiffen as a stable mate
Inevitably, some of your next coverage will involve the people
you write for in the context of taking pictures or shooting
videos & we all understand that this isn't an era when it's
popular to talk about spending a wad of cash on getting a new
camera. Tiffen has tons of stuff (some of it an ounce at a time)
that makes sense, both for consumer & business stories
(especially with the new emphasis on video for business). Talk to
Hilary about shooting from stable platforms (tripods, monopods,
even Steadicam), about lighting, about software (desktop or
iPhone) for adding dramatic effects to photos after the fact,
filters for adding effects (plus lens protection) when shooting &
a lot more. Give him an idea of what, where, how much or why you
want to focus & brainstorm your way to an easy story with lots of
info, pix or reviewables available. Contact: Hilary Araujo,
Tiffen Company (Hauppauge, NY) 631-273-2500x1216
haraujo@tiffen.com http:/.tiffen.com
Special Report: Station gear dismal
One of the local stations needed a few clips on the digital
transition, so Marty took his HD camcorder outside, set it up on
a tripod with a wired lav mike & shot 8 short clips. A few
minutes in Sony Vegas and the clips were ready to roll, but how
should we render them? It took several tries to get that answer.
The station has both SD & HD cameras (mostly HD in the studio &
SD in the field) but does its newscasts in SD, sending 16:9 SD to
digital channels & putting "curtains" (black bars on either side)
around 4:3 video. That's OK because we can do 16:9 SD but needed
to know which formats they can ingest. MPEG2 was a no-go. They
asked about QuickTime, but we don't have QT authoring codecs (may
have to look into that). We found a format in common in AVI
(which, we should mention, makes somewhat larger files). We tried
sending the clips as files attached to e-mail messages; the
station mail server has a size cap that's smaller than even these
short clips. They offered us personal Yahoo & Gmail addresses;
each of those has a 10MB cap & each of these files was bigger
than that. We asked if we could ftp the files; they were going to
ask an IT guy about that, but said that nobody had ever done a
successful ftp to the station. Ultimately, they sent out a camera
guy to pick up a USB drive with the 9 clips on it (total, 750MB).
We know that a lot of the limitations on what they can ingest are
due to the limitations on Avid installations; they said that in
6-8 months, they would "upgrade" to a few Macs running Final Cut
Pro. (FCP is a nice product, but in our experience, we get more
flexibility & better results with a PC running Sony Vegas Pro).
Until just a few weeks ago, we heard, when the police offered
them a DVD with crime scene video, they had to play it on a
monitor & shoot the screen with a camera. They had never heard of
CuteFTP Pro. We understand that station operations are on
starvation budgets; this particular station had just offered
buyouts to every staffer age 50 or older. What we find amazing is
that our little shop has more options for shooting, editing,
rendering & delivering HD or SD video than they do. Some of their
local competitors are worse off; those who are a little better
off are only a very little better off. As a major network news
producer pal told us, once those budgets disappear, they never
come back; everybody who's been forced by exigency to get more
done with less & cut corners that weren't there before will be
expected to make that the baseline for the job from then on.
Broadcast industry optimists view that as a whole bunch of
pent-up demand that's about to explode into a sales boom;
pragmatists view it as a permanent shrinkage in the segment's
staff & infrastructure (budgets ergo) expenditures. Let's not
forget that last year's election spending represented a revenue
windfall for stations, but in general terms, that all got sucked
up into the balance sheets of their ownership groups to offset
losses elsewhere. Stations are unlikely to stop doing newscasts;
it's one of their most profitable forms of local entertainment
programming, especially when ad dollars are less locked-away than
right now. What is likely is that as the experienced veterans
leave, newscast content will become even thinner & production
values even more of a compromise. It's unlikely that the
broadcast consultants will stem that ebb; budgets for them were
among the first to be cut.
I7 project: Fait accompli
Our new Core-i7 systems are now up & running in our production
environment with all the applications we use in place, most of
them & many drivers updated for the 64-bit environment. We've had
some additional stumbles since our last report & learned many
things, like that Vista gets confused when you present it with
too many raw drives & thinks it has no valid installation
candidates (in KB docs you really have to dig to locate). We also
learned that Office 2007 still puts some of its files (like the
Outlook safe & blocked sender lists, accounts & rules) into
folders that get trashed whenever a "fix" installation recreates
the "Users" folder tree, with no easy or obvious way to export &
re-import those important configuration elements all in one
activity. We've done a lot of stress testing & while this
platform (with its huge memory footprint & 4-core/8-thread
powerhouse CPU) isn't entirely immune to choke points, they're
now rare, no longer the daily or even several times hourly
occurrences they had been on our 4GB 32-bit systems. One of the
most consistent early frustrations is in coping with a seemingly
endless series of granting User Account Control & Firewall
permissions; that, of course, does fade over time. The prize of
the package is the MegaRAID 4-drive RAID5 video array in our
"Video" volume, delivering some of the most blazingly fast
renders we've ever experienced. We've left Outlook running on a
2-minute fetch cycle while doing download sessions, drive-cloning
sessions, running DreamScene desktop video & playing a
full-screen game at 1920x1200 with nothing getting into anything
else's way. Our design goals & design wishes pretty much (barring
those installation quirks) came true. So in conclusion, our
conclusion is that the level of horsepower & redundancy we've
implemented in these Core-i7 systems result in a viscerally
enjoyable computing experience, seemingly unfettered by the scope
of challenges we present to it, overall performing very nimbly
indeed.
Special Report Bonus Review: La Fin Du Monde
For those of you speak French, you know that these 4 words mean
"the end of the world". In this case, La Fin Du Monde is the name
of a triple-fermented malt beverage (9% alcohol) from Unibroue
(Chambly, Quebec). Each of the 3 fermentations, we're told,
happens on its own custom yeast base. The result is surprisingly
pleasing (else we wouldn't be reviewing it here), with a Belgian
ale's character as refined by a rounded smoothness with some
additional dimensions (a little bit of tartness, some spice, some
light sweetness) that appear nicely orchestrated to the palate.
Its effervescence comes in high-def, closer to the tiny bubbles
of Champagne than to the unsubtle stubble bubbles of the cans in
most fridges. It's a bit hard to find in the countryside around
Cleveland - a few local restaurants & wine bars carry it - the
best we can do at the grocery store is a very different choice
(Smithwick's from Guinness, with its own interesting
characteristics). Bottom line: La Fin Du Monde is a choice to be
on the watch for, rewarding the search with a uniquely pleasant &
interesting flavor that's almost certain to keep you searching
for more.
Special Report Bonus Review 2: Lexmark soft fax & V64
Years ago, we reviewed & loved the Lexmark X6575 All-In-One
printer/scanner/copier/fax, then were disappointed when we
upgraded to Vista & found that its software-based non-manual fax
features were no longer available. More recently we reviewed the
newer X9575 & delighted that in addition to control panel &
display changes, we could again print to fax & otherwise let our
software send faxes. Now we've upgraded to a 64-bit Vista
installation & those features have again disappeared. We don't
see Lexmark warning buyers that attractive features will become
unavailable under the 64-bit Vista operating system. Perhaps
Lexmark is not aware that the accelerating move to 64-bit systems
is compelled by the larger memory footprints (a 32-bit O/S can't
see more than 4GB) that come with DDR3 memory & that the use of
DDR3 memory is compelled by the growing catalog of computers that
use an Intel Core-i7 CPU. The current, latest version of the
X9575's 64-bit Vista driver for the X9575 seems to have been
released in 2007; is there some betrayal of user support in
orphaning owners who upgrade to newer PCs by involuntarily
downgrading their ability to take advantage of programmatic links
to fax services? Obviously, if Lexmark could make these things
work in a 32-bit Vista environment, there needs be only a
relatively small amount of development work to release a more
complete software package for the 64-bit Vista environment. We're
pragmatic enough to understand that there's more revenue in the
ink than in the printers & that sending faxes doesn't use any
ink, so it may not rank highly among their internal priorities;
eventually, though, seeing the disappointed user base abandon
ship for other brands doesn't do their ink sales any good,
either. Mature operating system users aside; it also makes us
wonder which feature sets will be off the table when Windows 7
arrives. We took those questions to their online (chat-mode) tech
support & got a series of disturbing answers, some of which were
bad advice & some of which involved bad information. We took our
challenge to the product manager, with a much happier outcome.
Those soft ("host-based") fax features are not supposed to be
missing under Vista 64; there was an error in the driver posted
on the Web site that is soon being addressed. To get us up &
running even before that, they figured out what was missing &
sent it to us separately. It was never a war (more a lover's
spat); we can again do paperless faxing, at least in print-to-fax
mode. Windows Vista still doesn't see their gear as either a fax
modem or a fax server, but we hope to see progress there as we
pursue this with them a little more. Bottom line: the chat-mode
Lexmark printer tech support gang isn't living up to the
standards we see in both the printers & the brand, but the HQ
crew is proving quickly responsive whenever any shortcoming comes
to their attention.
Special Report Bonus Review 3: TrendNet tech support
We've had a TrendNet router (TEW672GR) here since August & it
seemed to work perfectly; last week, we discovered that wasn't
quite the case. We upgraded our cable connection from 7.5Mb/sec
(download speed) to 15Mb/sec. We were surprised to see (through
the Speakeasy speed test site) only about 1.5Mb/sec coming
through the router. When we plugged our PC directly into the
cable modem, the test results jumped to about 18Mb/sec. We
contacted TrendNet tech support twice: once through an online
ticket & once through their 24/7 phone techs. In both cases, they
concluded it was a faulty router & set up arrangements to replace
it. (Both, we might add, suggested the very test we had
performed, so perhaps already having done that test several times
helped speed their analysis). We now have the replacement
installed, imported the settings into the new one we had exported
from the original, rebooted the cable modem & now we're enjoying
a consistently faster ride. Bottom line: TrendNet tech support is
a perfect match for anybody who needs always-on Internet
access.
Respond please: how work has changed
This is especially but not exclusively relevant to those of you
writing for newspapers or broadcast news: Please drop Marty a
note or call with how your everyday work life is different now.
Beyond more hours, less help & more things to do, are there
shifts in the rules about what you can or can't (maybe should or
shouldn't) cover? Is there something Newstips can do as a "spy
satellite" on consumer & tech segments to help your work happen
with a little less stress? We want to adapt to stay useful,
relevant & helpful, both in what we present in the Bulletin & in
what we can accomplish when we get a little phone, e-mail or live
one-on-one time. Even if you don't have any specific ideas for
us, please do update us on the ways in which your personal Hell
is now working with less air conditioning, tighter cubicles &
unrealistic explanations; every cure begins with a more complete
understanding of the ailment. Contact: Martin Winston, Newstips
(Novelty, OH) 440-338-8400; marty@Newstips.com
http://Newstips.com
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Newstips Bulletin [Novelty, OH] +1.440.338.8400 http://Newstips.com
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