Headworx

We talk a lot about data security nowadays. From time to time we hear people lose their computers and the value of the lost data exceeds the value of the hardware by several orders of magnitude. Yes we all know we can encrypt data. But the encryption solutions available so far have always required a trade. Be more secure used to mean put more work into what you were doing. Set up some encryption software. Remember to encrypt files. Be careful where you store your encryption keys. And do not lose them. But do not keep them together with your data. And so on... Windows NT introduced encrypted file system a while ago. But it was never perfect. The encryption keys were stored on the same disk drive as the protected data. Not a good solution at all, as in case the drive was stolen, the thieves could recover the keys and decrypt the data. And not many people went to the extremes of storing keys on a separate device, like an USB dongle. And even if the dongle was used, the keys were leaving i...

I am having fun standing on the sidelines and reading all the comments heralding the victory of Blue-Ray over HD-DVD. Believe me. It does not really matter. Yes I agree Blue-Ray took the first podium place, leaving HD-DVD behind. I even like what has happened, selfishly, because I do like the Sony PS3 game console for its no - compromise design, and as you probably know, the Playstation 3 is by far the best Blue-Ray player. The recent Blue-Ray victory will drive the PS3 sales, accelerating the market penetration and this way creating more and more content (games and on-line services) for the console. So that is good for PS3. But aside from the PS3 effect... does it really matter which high - definition TV disc format won the battle? Only for a very short time period... Blue-Ray will repeat the fate of the SACD, the high definition audio format aimed to replace audio compact discs. It will be one of the shortest living new product / technology of the recently introduced. Before it de...

We live in a world, where marketing and hype exceeds the reality. This once was a "new school" of business. Now it looks like it is more and more the old school. People are tired with underperforming gadgets, promising to deliver excitement and joy. More often than ever, frustration is what they really deliver. I wrote about Windows Vista a number of times. A great example of a premature, overhyped product. Poor performance, and no meat, only the Aero Glass and Blue Screens (recently my laptop showed a blue screen of death reporting an exception in the Microsoft Winsock driver... Well I know Microsoft used to blame third party device drivers for the crashes.... But hey, bugs in the winsock library?... that means the product launch was way premature. Just a perfect example of what happens to a company when it is run by a bottom - line focused COO... Windows Media Center Living Room PC? I spent two days last week trying to set up the video drivers to display correctly on my 108...

As readers keep on following my blog, one trend I favor seems to be quite visible. To eliminate the PC. I have covered many gadgets with various functions and most of the time these functions could be handled by a PC. Be it a file server or a firewall / router or a gaming console, you can have them all implemented as a software running on a general purpose personal computer. But is this really a good approach? Last week I was completing version 2 of my living room setup. I ended up with a Full HD LCD screen with a HDMI input (boy, they are cheap now!). The HDMI input is coming from a Denon AVR-2308 audio amplifier (featuring HDMI 1.3a switch / repeater). The Denon strips audio signals from the HDMI stream to power speakers and passes video up to the TV Screen. There are two HDMI inputs on the Denon - one is connected to the Sony Playstation 3 console and the other to the Sony VAIO VGX-XL100 so - called a "living room PC" running Windows Media Center. There is an enormous use...