I got a new job as a Senior Editor at PC World. Just started last week, and I’m still getting my feet wet. Jumping in right before the Christmas holiday break and then CES is a hell of a time to start. Lots of meetings, lots of learning the product database system and publishing system and gearing up new coverage for next year and so on and so forth.

Right now, I’m getting up to speed by taking the reins of the laptop/notebook beat. But I’ll be heading up a “system group” that covers notebooks, desktops, some parts and peripherals, how-tos and stuff, things like that. It’s a goal to re-boot the graphics card coverage over there early in 2010.

So that’s all for now.

I’m not sure how the review ended up with a score of 72 (good). They come up with that number as a composite of various sub-scores and stuff I give them when I submit it, but my scores were pretty low. I think the text of the review makes it pretty clear that I don’t think it’s a “good” ebook reader.

For some reason, Press Pause, the weekly video game web show I co-host with Carlos Rodela, is not listed in the Zune Marketplace. You can get it on iTunes here. You can subscribe to it in the Zune software by adding the RSS feed. But we want to be listed in the excellent Zune Marketplace, and for some reason it’s not there.

So, I need your help to submit it. If they get enough submissions, they’ll add it. Just follow these three steps.

1. Go to the Zune podcast page on the web. Any browser should work fine.

2. Click the bright “Submit a Podcast” button on the left-hand side.

3. In the dialog box that pops up, enter the following URL and click “Submit”: http://mevio.com/feeds/presspause.xml

That’s it! Thanks for all your help! And to show you that this wasn’t just a complete waste of your time…hey, you’re already at this neat Zune podcast directory thing on the web. Did you check it out a bit? You might want to. You can stream any podcast in the Zune marketplace (which is really big) right on the web page. Free. That includes audio and video podcasts. And you don’t need to have a Zune account, or to sign up for anything, or enter in some arcane RSS feed, or any of that stuff. It’s just a big, totally free podcast playback machine on the web. Neat, huh?

Update: Looks like we’re listed now. Thanks to everyone who submitted.

Maybe you’re not doing an upgrade. Maybe you’re shopping around for a new PC. Either way, the biggest pain in the butt with getting a new PC or wiping your drive and starting fresh with a new OS is re-downloading and installing all those indispensable apps you use every day. (Well, the biggest pain is actually backing up all your photos and music and stuff – but you really should be doing that anyway.)

Enter one of the greatest websites in all creation, Ninite.com (no, that’s not hyberbole). It’s an idea so brilliant, so simple, and so useful that I wonder why it hasn’t been done years ago.

Visit ninite.com and you’ll see, right there on the front page, a list of checkboxes for commonly used Windows applications and utilities. It’s all categorized, and most of the big “must haves” are there. Check the ones you want to install, and hit the little “Get Installer” button at the bottom. This will download a tiny (less than 200k) executable which, when run, will download all the apps you picked and install them. There are no prompts, no sites to visit, nothing to sign up for. It installs all the apps to their default locations with default settings.

Take, for example, the notebook I just upgraded to Windows 7. I head to ninite.com, and check the boxes for Chrome, Firefox, Skype, Pidgin, iTunes, VLC, Hulu Desktop, Picasa, Microsoft Security Essentials, Adobe Reader, Flash (both IE and non-IE), Silverlight, uTorrent, Dropbox, Steam, and WinRAR. Hit the button, run the exe (which downloads in two seconds because it’s so small), and walk away. I come back later and all those apps are installed and ready to roll.

Genius.

It’s even smart enough to recognize that I’m running 64-bit Windows and grab the 64-bit versions of apps like iTunes, Security Essentials, and WinRAR. All they need to do now is add the Zune software and Ventrilo to their list and it’ll have literally everything I need on a new PC install (outside of boxed products and games). Try it. You’ll love it.

Dear ninite.com people – work your magic on a site for drivers!

Stuff for you to do:

1. Watch the show, dummy! You can also grab it on iTunes and Zune. Leave constructive feedback at presspause@mevio.com.

2. Watch live and chat. The show tapes every Thursday at 3pm. We stream the taping of the show on justin.tv/presspause, and we interact with the chat room before and after the show. We ask you guys stuff, we answer your questions.

3. We’re in San Francisco, so if you’re a developer in the Bay Area, we’d love to shoot a quick and painless interview where you can talk about your games or company or whatever. Or we can talk about the meaning of life. Or what your favorite morning beverage is. We’re not picky. And we promise not to ask how many levels or how many weapons your game has. If you’re not a developer or publisher, use the power of the many social media thingies on the Inter-tubes to tell them you wanna see them go on Press Pause.

4. Follow us on Twitter. I don’t think there’s an official Facebook page yet.

Update: Just a clarification. This isn’t a new full-time job or anything like that. It’s a one afternoon a week gig. So you’ll still see my freelance work on other sites, and I’ll continue to update here.

As they point out in a pretty neat article about the issue at Icrontic, the problem is that the industry standard for measuring battery life is a program called MobileMark 2007. This program basically runs your computer through some productivity apps, which are pretty easily cached into RAM on modern notebooks so you don’t get much hard disk usage. These run until the battery dies, and that’s your battery life benchmark. Wi-Fi is almost always disabled, the laptop is almost always in its most power-saving and low performance profile, screen brightness is usually at 50% or less, etc.

There are plenty of advocates for changing this, to use different ways of measuring battery life in notebooks. Most call for a new set of procedures revolving around real-world application tests and new logos or stickers to describe battery life. Frankly, I think most of these ideas won’t go very far. Testing labs want a reliable, repeatable, “set it and forget it” test. We don’t need to rewrite the book on battery life testing, we just need a new version of MobileMark.

What should MobileMark 2010 look like? First, it should reflect what people actually use their notebooks for. This means mostly browsing the web (the modern, dynamic web, not static HTML), some document creation and editing, a little video, and a little 3D gaming.

First, the standard should be for notebooks to be set the way normal people set them. Power profile set to “balanced” or whatever the middle-of-the-road general setting is. Screen brightness at 80% or 90% (which is how most users have it set). Wi-Fi enabled. In fact, Wi-Fi should be used for some of the test.

The test itself should be a 10-minute loop that runs through several typical laptop scenarios. Why 10 minutes? Any shorter and you spend all your time loading tests, not running them. Make the test too long and some notebooks won’t go through enough loops of the test to average out the tests over time. A 15 or 20-minute test might work, but anything longer than that is probably too long.

The first 4 minutes should be a web test. Today’s dynamic web sites are the #1 use of notebooks. BAPCo should host several mock websites (accessible only to registered MobileMark users) that the notebook will load. They mimic the javacript and Flash heavy environments of modern popular sites like Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, Digg, etc. The test can use whatever browser is set as the computer’s default, but it should actually interact with the sites, virtually “clicking” on buttons and opening menus and such.

The next 3 minutes is standard document creation. Load up World, Excel, Powerpoint, and some light image-editing app and run through a scripted scenario of searching, typing, copy/pasting, etc. This is straightforward stuff, and is what MobileMark already does.

The next two minutes is all video. Full screen, hi-def video in a popular format like H.264. If the laptop has a graphics chip that can assist with GPU decoding, that’s fine, it can be used. If not, the video might be jerky and drop frames and such – which is fine. We’re measuring battery life, not quality or performance.

The same goes with the last minute of the 10-minute test. This should be an intense 3D game, or rather, a test made to mimic the load of one. Full-screen 3D graphics that actually puts a load on typical notebook graphics processors, together with some physics and AI routines running a canned animation. It doesn’t need to actually be interactive, it just needs to load up the CPU and graphics chip like a game would. It should be reasonably forward-looking, too; it doesn’t matter if Intel’s integrated graphics gets 4 frames per second while a mid-range discrete GPU from ATI or Nvidia gets 40. Again, we’re just measuring battery life here.

As with the current MobileMark 2007, this loop of tests would just repeat until the laptop dies. I’m guessing your typical “four hour” laptop of today would die in about two hours of this new MobileMark, which is in line with the reality where most users’ laptops die in half the promised time.

This hypothetical new MobileMark 2010 would be a vast improvement over what we currently have, without making the testing labs for notebook manufacturers and editorial press have to make major changes. They would just load on a different version of MobileMark, and the checklist of pre-test conditions (Wi-Fi state, energy saving mode state, screen brightness state) would slightly change. It’s not more work for anyone, it doesn’t mean changing stickers or labels or building a new logo program or any of that sort of stuff.

Of course, it won’t happen unless everyone agrees to jump at once. The need for a more realistic battery test has existed for a long time, but manufacturers don’t want to adopt a standard that makes their notebooks look like battery life is shorter. Certainly, they don’t want to do so unless everybody else does. Yet another reason why a new version of MobileMark with newly mandated test conditions is the best way to go – it’s the path of least resistance to broad industry adoption.

Fantastic astronomy website Bad Astronomy (get it? Bad Ass…tronomy?) has word of a couple new pictures that are pretty incredible.  Both are pictures of galaxies in the Virgo Cluster, the nearest large cluster of galaxies to us – “only” about 60 million light years away. First up is NGC 4402:

Then we have NGC 4522:

The Virgo Cluster is made up of more than a thousand galaxies, packed fairly tightly together (for galaxies, anyway). The gravity they exhibit on each other causes them all to swarm around each other in crazy orbits at incredible speeds. Like, 10 million kilometers per hour. To put that in perspective, a high-powered rifle bullet may leave the muzzle at about 1,500 meters per second. That’s 5,400 km per hour.  So, some of these galaxies are whipping around over 1,800 times faster than a high-powered rifle bullet.

Now, there’s a very, very thin cloud of gas all around these galaxies, called the interstellar medium. It’s thinner than the atmosphere on Earth by a long shot. We’re talking about, like one to ten atoms per cubic centimeter. But over the massive size of a galaxy, it adds up. And when the galaxy is whipping through it at 1,800 times faster than a rifle bullet, this so-thin-you-can’t-see-it gas actually rips out the gasses within the galaxy.  What makes these pictures so cool is you can clearly see this happening.

You can grab bigger versions of the photos, including desktop wallpaper images and really big TIF files here: NGC 4022 and NGC 4522

It has been 19 years since Hubble launched in 1990. It’s initial construction, all the launches to put it in space and repair and upgrade it several times, have cost U.S. taxpayers an estimated $8 billion. So, a little more than $400 million a year. Sound crazy high? Again, some numerical perspective: There are 156.3 million taxpayers in the U.S. (as of 2008) Hubble’s cost averages out to about $2.70 per year for each taxpayer. I can’t get a cup of goddamn Starbucks for that. Your tax dollars at work!

I won’t bother to summarize all the individual features that were revealed today. Tech Report has a excellent article on it, so does AnandTech. I’m just going to editorialize a bit with some of my thoughts based on what we know (and don’t know) so far.

First, boards based on Fermi are going to cost a considerable bit more than the Radeon HD 5870 and 5850, which are ATI’s competing DX11 cards that just launched. The RV870 GPU powering ATI’s cards is 334 mm². It has a 256-bit memory interface. Nvidia didn’t talk about GPU size, but it did say that Fermi is 3.0 billion transistors – 40% bigger than RV870’s 2.15 billion. So, figure a chip somewhere around the 460-480 mm² mark. That’s huge.

The chip being 40% bigger doesn’t mean 40% more expensive to produce, though. Imagine chips A and B. Both are 40nm chips made at TSMC. Chip A can fit 100 chips on a wafer, and Chip B can fit 60 chips on a wafer, because it’s 40% bigger. But as chip size grows, it’s harder for the whole chip to come out without flaws, so the yields are worse. Chip A has a yield of 75% – three-fourths of all the chips on the wafer function properly within the intended specs. Chip B has a yield of 60%, because it’s so much larger. That means you’ll get 75 good chips on a wafer for Chip A, but 36 good chips for Chip B. That’s less than half.

In other words, depending on how the yield situation works out, Fermi could be twice as expensive to produce as RV870. Hell, it could be worse. We really have no way of knowing, except to say that a 40% larger chip is usually well more than 40% more expensive to make.

It’s not just the chip, either. A 384-bit memory interface means Fermi-based cards will likely have either 768 MB (not likely) or 1.5 GB of RAM, so that’s higher RAM costs. It also means more PCB layers on the board itself. So aside from higher chip costs, the board costs of Fermi-based products will be higher than Radeon 5800 products.

So if Fermi-based products are going to be considerably more expensive than Radeon 5800 products, what about performance? Well, all Nvidia has talked about so far are the chip design elements that impact GPU compute, rather than traditional graphics. There’s quite a lot there. Nvidia has clearly spent a fair chunk of the transistor budget doing things like dramatically improving double-precision floating point performance, increasing cache sizes, ECC memory support, and so on. These things typically do nothing at all for typical graphics performance (games and stuff). So the chip is 40% more transistors, but that won’t necessarily translate into 40% higher frame rates.

Nvidia seems to be gearing the world up for this. The mantra they keep chanting is that “graphics performance isn’t enough anymore.” Compute really matters a whole heckuva lot, they tell us. This sounds like PR code for “the card is going to be 50% more expensive than the competition and not 50% faster in games, so please place as much importance on GPU compute apps as possible so we look like a better value.”

You know how drill sergeants tell recruits to begin and end everything they say with “sir?” Sir, yes sir! Sir, I didn’t mean to shoot the sergeants toe off, sir! That’s what it’s like listening to Nvidia these days, only with “CUDA” instead of “Sir.” For over a year, Nvidia has told everyone who will listen that GPU compute is super duper important, and has very aggressively flogged PhysX and CUDA. And you know what? Consumers just don’t care all that much. Maybe one day, when there are robust standards and quite a few GPU-accelerated applications that normal people use all the time, the average consumer will want a graphics card to make its non-gaming apps go faster just as much as it wants it to make its games go faster and look better. But we’re not there yet, and we’re not going to be there in the next six months, as much as Nvidia would like us to be.

So Nvidia’s facing a tough sell in Q1 2010 (or maybe late 2009) when the first Fermi-based cards go on sale. They’ll almost certainly cost $399 or more, judging by what we know so far. ATI has a chip and board design that will let them push Radeon HD 5850 cards below $200 and 5870 cards below $250 within the next six months, if they want to. Is a modest increase in frame rate and much higher performance in GPU compute apps going to be worth such a broad difference in price? Will it be a moot point, because the cards will be out of the cost and power budget for most consumers (and OEMs)?

This, of course, means jack-all if the software is crap. Fortunately, it is not crap. In fact, it’s quite good. The fine folks at Ars Technica have a first-look that is favorable, but I’ve been using the beta myself for a couple months on both Windows 7 and Windows Vista PCs so I thought I would offer my two cents.

First, it’s reasonably lean. On my 64-bit system, it generally uses less than 100MB of RAM (usually more like 70MB). That’s not the leanest background app around, but it’s not the worst offender, either. Windows Defender gets disabled (MSE is a superset of the Windows Defender stuff) so those system resources get freed up, which offsets the “cost” of MSE.

Second, it stays out of the way of my other programs. I haven’t noticed any change in system performance. It doesn’t screw up any of my games. I get the same firewall permission prompt with new games I always get in Windows, but that’s it. It doesn’t seem to run scans while I’m doing other system-intensive stuff. After a couple months of running this thing, I really can’t tell the difference between it being there and not being there, unless it catches something. Which is good.

Third, it appears to work. New virus and other malware definitions are updated practically every day. Windows Update will deliver them, and of course you can update by hand. I purposely downloaded a couple keygens and other programs from torrent sites that people said were infected, and MSE did indeed detect the bad stuff and prompt me to clean it. Cleaning the infected file (usually deleting it, sometimes quarantining it) is generally a one-click affair.

For now, I see no reason not to choose Microsoft Security Essentials as a free anti-spyware alternative. Many of the pay antivirus packages offer all kinds of extra features, like rootkit removals and more advanced firewalls and anti-email phishing stuff and all. If you want that stuff, go get AVG or something. But compared to products like AVG Free, MSE seems to stack up just fine. Frankly, if you don’t go around clicking on things you know you have no business clicking on, and if you keep up to date with your Windows Updates, you probably don’t need more protection than the free packages offer.

Of course, the real security firms will test the software against hundreds or thousands of known threats and get a really detailed take on how well it protects you. Maybe against that sort of testing, it’ll turn out to be crap. But hey, it’s free and so far, I like it. So if you’re not running any sort of anti-malware other than the basic Windows Defender that comes in Vista or Windows 7, go ahead and give this a whirl.

Now, if Microsoft really wanted to secure Windows, they’d work a deal with Adobe to offer updates to Flash through Windows Update. Not to distribute it in the first place, but if someone has it installed, they’d get updates that way. Flash is on like 95% of all desktop and notebook computers and it’s just chock full of potential attack vectors for malware. Adobe keeps closing the holes, but nobody ever updates their Flash software. I know Microsoft is all about positioning Silverlight against Flash and Adobe Air, and that’s all well and good. But I don’t see how providing updates to people who already have the software will really change that, and it’ll make Windows a gazillion times more secure.

This isn’t exactly a crazy amount of radiation, and it’s probably not worth getting worked up about. I know this intellectually, and I’m sure my body can and does easily absorb that much radiation without complications. All kinds of radiation hits us all the time, and whether it’s harmful or not depends on the strength and length of exposure. EM radiation bombards us from radio towers (FM, AM, TV, etc.), power lines and outlets and stuff, cell phone towers, Wi-Fi, and a whole bunch from the freakin’ Sun itself. Of course, we do constantly talk about protecting yourself from all that solar radiation with sunscreen and such.

Even knowing that it’s almost certainly not harmful, it’s still a little troubling that my iPhone 3G, which I always keep in front pocket when I’m out of the house, is 0.24 - 1.39 W/kg. I mean, how often is it way down at the .24 range? When is it way up at 1.39? I suspect this range has to do with things like whether or not Wi-Fi is enabled. Annie’s G1 comes in at 1.11 W/kg, which is somewhere in the middle of the list. 3G smartphones, unsurprisingly, fare worse than…uh…dumbphones I guess you’d call them.

(By the way – I was going to name this post “I’m nuking by nuts!” but I chickened out.)