The cellular network you are using is not encrypted. This call can be intercepted by unauthorized listeners.

Thank you, Zain Jordan. I truly feel safe now, especially in a country where saying something the government doesn’t like will land you a lovely prison cell with a nice view of an endless desert.

UPDATE: iOS 5 Beta 2 and up!

Gevey unlock (and other turbo-sims/interceptors) do not work on iOS 5 beta 2 and above, including the final iOS 5 release!

Yesterday at WWDC 2011, Apple announced (amongst many other things) iOS 5, the upcoming version of iOS that’s to be released with the iPhone 5 later this year. iOS Developers and certain tech bloggers have been given access to this build, and we’re sure one of the biggest question the hordes of iPhone users around the world are asking is: Will my Gevey-3G unlock SIM interposer work???

With iOS 5 beta (build 9A5220p), the modem firmware has been upgraded to baseband 04.11.04 and cannot be downgraded to earlier versions, meaning the only possible SIM unlock would be a turbo sim/interposer (currently either Gevey-3G or Rebel SIM); hence the worried and nervous questions going around the online iPhone community.

And the answer? A relieving yes. At least for now, for iOS 5 beta 1, it does. The process remains unchanged — just insert the interposer, restart your device, accept the welcome message, dial 112, and toggle the Airplane Mode feature a few times. The Gevey SIM will still work to unlock iOS 5.0 beta.

However, in order to install iOS 5 you’ll need (in addition to access to the iOS 5 9A5220p IPSW firmware upgrade and the iTunes 10.5b27 build) access to a real SIM from whatever manufacturer your phone originally shipped with (probably AT&T) for the activation to go through. And you’ll of course need to have your phone registered as a developer device on the iOS Developer Center website. We tested this ourselves on an AT&T iPhone 4 that was previously running 4.3.3 with the Gevey unlock.

Enjoy your interposer-unlocked iOS 5 and let us know how it goes!

This is one of the very top SSD models out there in terms of performance and size, and it’s been proven in multiple benchmarks (though with the C400 coming out, things are set to change once more); and has proven to be a popular choice for MacBook owners due to the large size and incredible performance even without TRIM in previous versions of OS X.

So it’s odd that this is what we see:

Hopefully this will be resolved before the final release of 10.7. We’ll post updates if/when we get them.

If in the “System Profiler” (now renamed to the more apt “System Information” in OS X 10.7 Lion), you see:

Link Speed: 3 Gigabit

Negotiated Link Speed: 1.5 Gigabit

And are wondering where your remaining 1.5 (or 4.5 if you have a 6 Gbps SATA controller) gigabits went, then you need to upgrade the C300 to the latest firmware. This appears to be an issue with the 0002 firmware that is resolved in 0006. Unfortunately, this does not seem to make OS X 10.7 aware that the C300 supports TRIM.

Also a tip: if after upgrading to revision 0006, your OS X will hang at boot, re-run the upgrade. It won’t actually upgrade it again (and will finish instantly), but it appears to fix something important.

One of the most popular (and addictive) group of applications making the rounds on Android handsets these days are Barcode Scanners. Barcodes traditionally contain a very minimal set of information, namely just a product SKU that can be used to (somewhat-) uniquely identify items at the store or lying around your home. QR Codes are an extension to barcodes that have been updated for the 21st century: they’re specifically designed to be easily ready by the low-resolution cameras on mobile devices, quickly and accurately. SPARQCode itself is yet another layer of extension to the QR Code. It provides more functionality and adds support for extra usages.

A quick Google search for SPARQCode viewers for the BlackBerry fails to retrieve any interesting results. A similar search on AppWorld also shows no such luck – if you were to believe what you see, BlackBerry doesn’t (yet) have a usable SPARQCode viewer!

But that’s not true. It’s there, though the RIM Geeks over in Canada – in their infinite wisdom – put away that functionality in such an impossibly-illogical location. But it’s there.

If you saw that QR Code in the corner and said “Hey! That looks like the barcode I can scan to quickly exchange BBM PINs in OS 5!” you would be correct. BBM PIN Exchange in BBM5 is indeed an implementation of the SPARQCode. But not only does it use SPARQCode to make swapping PINs with your fellow CrackBerry addicts a lot easier, it’s also a fully functional SPARQCode scanner, too!

Check it out. Just launch BBM, hit the menu key, and select the “Scan Group Barcode” menu item, as shown below:

Now, instead of scanning your friends BBM, point the camera on your BlackBerry to the QR Code in the top-right corner of this post. Move your BB back and forth (it’s not very good at this!), and… walla! BB will ask if you want to load the link to the mobile version of Wikipedia.

Want to test it again? Give this SPARQCode below a shot. It’s for my brothers’ flight which will be arriving very soon – can you use this remarkably compact image to direct your BlackBerry to the flight details? Give it a shot, and post a reply with where the flight is coming from/going to!

Bottom-line: BlackBerry does have an excellent SPARQCode scanner right out of the box (beat that, iPhone and Android!) but, unfortunately, it’s very well hidden.

But Dan Frommer’s allegations in his latest post on BI don’t really add up. Frommer contends that the official twitter app for Android, which only works on Android v2.1 and up, is proof that Google’s mobile OS isn’t as “unified” as the competitors, and that this is a sign of early-onset serious fragmentation that will only get worse down the line. The thing is… it’s not.

It’s true that Android, available for deployment on any device manufacturers are willing to bundle it with, faces certain compatibility issues. With a multitude of devices, each with its own mostly-unique set of hardware and features, creating software that will run the same for everyone isn’t as easy as it is on the iPhone. But it’s nowhere near as much of an issue as Frommer makes it out to be.

For one thing, his “proof in the pudding” example of the official twitter app being unsupported except on v2.1+ has nothing to do with fragmentation. As any platform grows, matures, and gains new APIs, backwards compatibility is never a guarantee (unless you are Microsoft, that is!). It’s only natural that developers will need to set a cut-off point for which devices and platforms will be supported. And this isn’t an Android problem – every device out there, be it a cell phone,  a laptop, or a mainframe suffers from the same problem. Take the iPhone for example. Apple’s own OS 4 will be completely unavailable on the original iPhone. And even on the iPhone 3G, it’ll be there only in a highly-crippled form with no multi-tasking support.

The thing is, minimum OS/hardware specifications are not an indicator of platform fragmentation. They have absolutely nothing to do with it. While Android definitely does have some issues related to the wide range of hardware upon which it’s deployed, even that doesn’t necessarily have to result in fragmentation.

So you have a device that has a GPS chip and another that does not. Obviously a mobile map routing solution written for the first won’t work on the second – but who would expect/want it to anyway? A game that relies on the presence of accelerometer? Well, it’s not targeting users without an accelerometer in their device anyway! The point is – so long as the code goes through a single API to access any particular feature – whether or not that feature is actually available isn’t “fragmentation” at all. It’s just economics: you get what you pay for.

What would be fragmentation is if a mapping application for one Android handheld w/ GPS support doesn’t work on another Android handheld that also has GPS support just because the chips are different. Or because it has different drivers. But that’s not the case here! Android gives you a non-fragmented API to access the functionality of the hardware beneath – should your device support those features in the first place.

And that’s just about it. Pointing out that twitter requires OS v2.1 and above is a silly reason to accuse Android of being a fragmented platform – it’s like saying the iPhone is a failed experiment because an application designed to take advantage of multi-tasking 6 months from now won’t run on a device released 3 years prior: who cares!

Those keeping track of Apple’s purchases will remember that, almost exactly 2 years ago to the day, Apple bought California-based CPU designer PA Semiconductors. However, PA Semi specializes in PowerPC-based designs – a platform that Apple abandoned almost 5 years ago now. But Apple’s most recent acquisition is directly applicable to its current needs in the hardware market, and in particular, its forays into the ARM market. In the official iPad video, Apple engineers and executives discuss their need for a custom CPU in order to let them dictate where the ooomph and power will go, and to what purposes the transistors will be biased.

With all these buyouts and different chipsets in question, it’s easy to get confused. So what is the difference between the ARM, the PPC, and the x86, and where does it matter?

The world of CPUs is a dark, deadly, and dangerous place. After all, the CPU is said to be the literal “heart” of the PC – and as such, it’s the single most-heavily engineered component. Billions of dollars and manhours have gone into the design of these various chipsets and they’ve all been researched, optimized, fabricated, and sold in order to make your computer… better.

The biggest difference between these platforms is the design dogma they follow. The x86 is a CISC architecture: Complex Instruction Set Computer. The other two (PPC and ARM) are RISC-based designs: Reduced Instruction Set Computers. What does that mean? Well, to the end user, mostly nothing. But to the CPU designers and developers, it makes a world of a difference.

CISC architectures can have up to thousands of individual commands supported by the processor that can be used in machine code. Each of these assembly commands can range from a single operation to several hundred or more in length. On the other hand, RISC-based CPUs understand only a handful of different instructions, the minimum necessary to get the job done.

However, this in no way means that CISC is more powerful or that RISC is limited. The difference in the amount of supported instructions is easily explained away by two factors: supported modes, and wrapper operations. All the data dealt with in any computer program is stored in the memory. But in order for the CPU to actually use any of it, it needs to place variables in super-fast (but small and limited) memory locations built into the CPU itself, called registers.

Imagine trying to run the following line of code:

z = x + y

Each of the three variables in the above example is located in the memory. But in order to carry out the operation, x and y will need to be copied from the memory to the CPU, the addition instruction carried out, and the result then copied from the CPU to the location of z in the memory.

A CISC-based CPU like the x86 would have a single instruction that – when given the address of X, Y, and Z in the memory – would do just that. But in a RISC-based CPU, the assembly code would have to explicitly spell out the individual steps: first copy x to a register, then copy y to a register, then add them together, and finally copy the result back into the memory.

At first blush, it would seem that CISC is a much better option. After all, one instruction and the entire line of code is done. But it’s not about operations, it’s about time. Sure, a RISC-based program will need to carry out four distinct operations in order to do the same, but that doesn’t mean it’ll take any longer. In fact, RISC CPUs are consistently faster than their CISC counterparts.

If CPUs were day laborers, it would make sense that CISC is more efficient. After all, a single instruction gets the job done. But, thankfully, CPUs aren’t underpaid interns, they’re over-engineered miracles. The simpler design of the RISC CPU allows it to more efficiently optimize and carry out long sequences of code. The way things are broken down into short, simple, and clear instructions lets it carry out multiple operations at the same time (pipelining) and with less effort.

In fact, it’s now a universally accepted truth that RISC is better than CISC! Actually, because of how much more efficient RISC machines are than their CISC counterparts, most CISC CPUs convert their CISC instructions into RISC instructions internally, then run them!

So why are we still using x86? That’s mainly because of business matters. Intel had x86, Intel had money, and CISC won out. Today, with the optimizations and internal RISC conversions that take place, CISC vs RISC isn’t really about the performance any more. It’s about the business, the politics… and the power consumption.

The complexity of the CISC datapath and pipeline mean that it takes more power to get things done. Intel has worked some incredible miracles and accomplished some amazing things to get the power consumption down, ranging from dynamic scaling of the CPU clock to shutting-down parts of the CPU core when they’re not in use. But x86 remains a power hog. Intel’s Atom platform was an attempt at re-engineering the x86 to make it fit for mobile devices, but at the cost of performance.

There’s no reason that RISC can’t be used for the desktop. ARM or no ARM, there’s a plethora of RISC-based CPUs out there that can be easily adapted for desktop use. But the problem isn’t with the hardware: it’s with the software. Programs written for x86 aren’t compatible with anything else, even other CISC CPUs. That has prevented just about the entire world from trying any other platforms, mainly because Windows only supports x86 on the desktop. The last copy of Windows to support different CPU architectures was Windows NT, which shipped with versions for Intel’s x86, MIPS, Alpha, and PowerPC.

For anyone not on the Windows platform though, there’s nothing really binding them to the x86 platform. Apple chose x86 because, with PowerPC out of the running, x86 was the only viable option back in 2005. Keep in mind, just because ARM can run on the desktop, that doesn’t mean that ARM will run on the desktop: optimizations in the CPU world are always a compromise between performance and power consumption. And the current generation of ARM and other RISC-based CPUs is meant for portable equipment.

It would take some work to create a high-performance ARM CPU meant for the desktop, but that doesn’t mean it won’t happen. With Apple’s just-declared purchase of Intrinsity, it’s clear that it’s a possibility. With the tight grip Apple has over its platform and the strong hardware-software bond, it wouldn’t be too difficult to make the switch to yet another platform – after all, they did it 5 years ago and things worked out. But will they? Most likely not, it’s not exactly in their customers best interest and x86 really is a decent platform. But for the myriad of mobile devices that Apple is getting itself into, x86 isn’t the key. So look forward to more ARM goodiness for your iPad and iPhone in the years to come, but your MacBook is safe in Intel’s loving hands.

Back in 2008, Apple introduced the new Mini DisplayPort standard as the only video output method on the new MacBooks and LCDs. Mini DisplayPort is a freely-licensed VESA standard [1] and has now been adopted by a number of other display manufacturers, and is a miniaturized version of the original DisplayPort interface.

This week, the fourth revision of the HDMI high-definition video output connector was revealed in the form of HDMI D, weighing in at a mere fraction of the original HDMI connector size and intended for use with mobile and embedded high-definition video devices [2]. The new HDMI connector is expected to ship later this year, and is in direct competition with VESA’s Mini DisplayPort interface.

VESA is the international governing body for computer graphics standards, and has been designing video output standards since its conception in the late 80′s [3]. HDMI is a private group formed in 2002, and licenses its interfaces out to manufacturers at four cents a device + a $10,000 yearly fee.

HDMI doesn’t have many (if at all) advantages over DisplayPort, besides support for the xvYCC color space and Dolby audio codecs (as a part of the licensed technology). However, despite the licensing costs, HDMI has proved popular mainly due to its original mass adoption as a result of being signal-compatible with the DVI interface [4].

The new HDMI-D interface is smaller than the Mini DisplayPort, though both have the same maximum resolution/bandwidth and similar power requirements. The numbers are as follows:

References

1. The Case for VESA DisplayPort
2. HDMI-D Press Release
3. VESA – Wikipedia
4. HDMI FAQs
5. Mini DisplayPort Specification [PDF]

Despite PC users’ widely-varying taste and preference in operating systems and platforms, gamers need Windows. In fact, one of the biggest reason people around the globe tend to dual-boot is their undying love for gaming and the fact that no other OS out there can boast the wide range of gaming titles and genres available for their platform like Windows can. The traditional choice faced by most non-Windows users has been to either install and dual-boot Windows or bite the built and buy a gaming console – ask us, we would know.

But this is all about to change, thanks to Microsoft’s reckless abandon for one of its few truly-loyal userbases.

When Microsoft first began its frenzied Vista marketing campaign in 2006, one of the points it focused on most and repeated over and over again was just how big of a gaming revolution Windows Vista was. Gaming was a large part of the Vista WOW campaign, but it has since failed to disappoint. But this isn’t an article about Vista, it’s about how Windows is poised to lose its gaming advantage if Microsoft doesn’t get its act together sometime soon.

The problem is that Windows – standalone or in a dual-boot – is quickly becoming the lesser-appealing option when compared to a gaming console… in large part thanks to Microsoft’s ridiculous, biased, and fairly infuriating decisions to release games for Xbox and then for PC.

A major part of the gaming/entertainment Vista PR that went out around the same time as the OS: Microsoft Announces Spectacular Windows Vista Title Lineup. Spectacular? Hardly so. Take a look at the Microsoft Game Studios release history for 2006 and 2007, you’ll find a great disparity between the number of titles MGS released for Windows verses those for the Xbox (360)…

If you ignore expansion packs (the Zoo Tycoon development team seems to love these), you’ll find that Microsoft Game Studios released a total of nineteen titles for the Xbox over these two years, compared to a mind-blowing six titles for the PC over that same period – half of which were either available on the Xbox simultaneously or years before!

But what does Microsoft have to say about the obvious deterioration of the Windows gaming market?

The Windows gaming world continues to evolve, and we believe in the future of that property.

-Shane Kim, Microsoft’s Vice President of Interactive Entertainment

Sorry Mr. Kim, but we find that a bit hard to believe. Mr. Kim’s statement came in response to the recent (shocking) news that Microsoft’s (PC game development) Ensemble Studios – authors of Microsoft’s Age of Empires claim-to-fame hit series – would be shut down for "fiscal reasons."

Obviously Microsoft is in a hard place here, needing to cater to both of the (competing) PC and gaming console markets at the same time. However, due to the serious 3rd-party hardware/platform competition in the gaming console market it seems that Microsoft’s decision has been to give Xbox the priority here.

It’s obviously not Microsoft’s job to develop games for its own platform – technically, all they have to do for either the PC or the Xbox is develop the APIs and provide 3rd party gaming developers with the tools and support they need to make it work. And 3rd party developers have not let anyone down, with astonishing numbers of titles being published for both platforms.

But if Microsoft wants to ensure that its platform retains its current hold on the PC gaming market they’re going to need to do a bit more to convince potential Windows gamers to stick to their platform and not go out and get a gaming console instead. It’s quite a logical choice to focus on Windows here – there are literally millions of Windows users who would be using something else if it wasn’t for Windows’ vice-like grip on the gaming market.

The fact is, PC gamers and console gamers aren’t the same market targets. It won’t kill Microsoft’s Xbox division to treat their Windows gamers with a little bit more respect than they’re currently doing – if not for the users’ sake then for their own.

But no matter what Microsoft Game Studios does or doesn’t do, it can’t actually damage the Windows gaming platform – all it does is create a scenario wherein another OS can work hard and potentially overtake Windows at its own game (pun intended!).

Mac OS and Linux both have a rare opportunity on the horizon – but for it to have any impact on the current PC gaming sector’s dynamics, they’ll have to put a bit more effort into the gaming scene than they’re currently doing. Something that requires this sort of centralized coordination is definitely not one of Linux’s strong suites, so the ball is now squarely in Apple’s playing field, and it’s up to them what they do with it.

Basically, Microsoft needs to watch its step. The incentives for PC gaming are at their lowest levels in years with even real-time strategy games – the PC’s long-standing forte – being developed first for the gaming consoles and then, possibly, for the PC (yes, we’re looking at you, Halo Wars!).

And then there’s Bungie – cross-platform game developers bought up by Microsoft years ago, authors of the internationally-acclaimed “Halo” series, and now released from Microsoft’s reigns with its sights set squarely on developing games for the Mac once more.

At the end of the day, Microsoft’s size is getting the better of itself once more; with its own divisions failing to compete with themselves they way they should. Microsoft needs to pick up on this slow degradation of PC gaming satisfaction and do something to buck the trend, or else they could suffer some serious consequences.

For a device that’s supposed to do Firefox, Skype and not much more, an underpowered PC with a touchscreen isn’t going to accomplish much. For one thing, Firefox is a huge performance drain and a memory hog to boot that underpowered hardware (even on-par with an Eee) simply won’t support and for another, there’s no way to get PC hardware down to the sub-$200 price range.

What TechCrunch wants – whether they know it or not – is an oversized PDA, not an underpowered PC. And it’s not just a question of semantics, it’s a question of foundations and principles – and it makes a huge difference in terms of end-user experience and the bottom line.

For the functionality that TechCrunch is trying to pack into this opensource, mass-market web gadget, there’s nothing that wouldn’t work better, faster, and cheaper on specialized hardware rather than on generic PC components.

While the world is now in the midst of a touch-screen craze, it’s important to keep in mind when and where that works. For a web browser and a VoIP client, a touchscreen doesn’t provide much added value, but it does add quite a hefty amount to the bottom line. A couple of buttons at the top/side of the device that provide basic functionality (Go/Dial, Stop/End) would certainly suffice for most purposes. A thin slide-out keyboard is far-cheaper and more user-friendly than an onscreen keyboard, and would make things like entering site addresses and using email clients and Google Docs quite enjoyable.

A PDA-style ARM processor, running software compiled for the ARM platform could provide a more satisfactory end-user experience with regards to performance and can come in smaller form-factors and/or as embedded systems.

It’s important to bear in mind the difference between consumer electronics and a computer. Whereas Asus had to keep their Eee x86 so that it can run whatever a a PC user could demand from it, a web browsing tablet only needs to run what the manufacturer intends it to. In hardware design, there’s a constant compromise between flexibility and complexity which is directly tied to price, size, and ease-of-use.

A tablet designed to surf the web and run Skype doesn’t need to do anything else; but it shouldn’t do anything else if price and size are of any concern. It’s easy to get caught up imagining a device that can do anything and everything; but you can only go so far before things begin to spiral out of control.

The entire 8.x line has been of sub-par quality to date (8.3 and 8.4 in particular, which seem to crash randomly on a large percentage of Vista machines), hopefully the 8.5 release can provide a much-needed boost in terms of quality and stability.

It’s obviously too early to tell if the 8.5 releases addresses these issues, which are not listed in the release notes, but it’s possible that some of the causes of the problem have been resolved as a result of one or more of the bugfixes in this version.

• A cell-phone-wielding shopper enters the shopping plaza.
• Path Intelligence monitors mounted throughout the plaza detect that a new mobile phone is in the vicinity and log its IMEI code.
• As the shopper moves around the mall, his or her movements are continuously triangulated by the multiple Path Intelligence units, allowing movements to be mapped and saved for later analysis.

The good news: it’s totally private, there isn’t any (automated) way to map a particular record in the Path Intelligence logs to an actual person. The resulting logs can be analyzed for shopping patterns (where people go after visiting a certain store, peak hours of traffic, most popular regions, etc.) later on, providing valuable intelligence and allowing for improvements.

The bad news: The Path Intelligence logs — in-conjunction with other monitoring techniques such as cashier timestamps, credit card log, video surveillance, etc. — can result in the identification of the persons associated with logged behavior in the system; posing a real and tangible privacy/Big Brother concern.

The weird news: Everything in the above scenario can be directly mapped to an exact counterpart in the current web-tracking solutions in use:

• Shopper -> Visitor to a site
• Mall/Shopping Plaza -> Website
• IMEI code -> IP Address (unique, but not personally identifying on its own)
• Path Intelligence -> One of the many web-statistics companies

Everything from the tracking techniques used to the information gathered to the way its analyzed and used is directly taken from the way cyber traffic has been logged and analyzed for years. After all, why not?

Web monitoring solutions have proven to be reliable metrics for understanding the userbase of any given site; and more importantly, the number one tool to improving conversion rates and increasing the visits-to-sales ratio. If there are technologies that have proven invaluable to boosting the online commerce economy, it makes sense for people to attempt to apply these same methods to everyday life in the real world as well.

It’s somewhat of an epiphany to consider the amount of information available in cyberspace and how easy it is to obtain and analyze when compared to the physical world we live in. The quantity, quality, and pervasiveness of the data available to online far exceeds anything in the real world, and the use that it can be put to are truly amazing – and scary when extended to our normal lives.

Imagine for an instance the typical data available to a website owner enlisted with one or more of the web statistics services and just how useful such knowledge would be in the real world:

• Referrals. Who came from where, how people came across your store, and what they’re most interested in.
• Popularity Ranking. Know what stores in each mall are the most popular, down to the last customer. Find out exactly what sections of each store get the most attention (then compare it with sections are currently getting the most sales and try to maximize sales in those departments).
• Shopper Characteristics. As the Times article explains, the IMEI number can be traced back to the country the shopper comes from. In high-tourist areas (think New York, Las Vegas, London, Chicago, etc.) this kind of intelligence can provide great insight…

Basically, the real world is starting catch up with the online one (not the other way around, folks!), and there’s a lot it has to learn and a lot it has to benefit.

The problem with Express Gate isn’t that it’s Linux nor that it’s there – it’s the rather more-mysterious question of why it’s there in the first place. If ASUS had thought to make use of this Linux distribution to provide data recovery & diagnostics services, offer advanced BIOS configuration and updating options, or one of the infinite other creative ideas that one can manage with a light and fully-configurable OS that ships embedded with the motherboard, perhaps then we could see a use for it.

Instead, ASUS has opted to ship Express Gate with a Firefox-based web-browser and Skype (out of all things). Again, it’s not a matter of having something against either Firefox or Skype; but just the general lack of context for their being there. These days, a web browser is a means to an end. You don’t use it to browse the web, you use it to interact with the web. A web browser on a Live CD-like Linux installation isn’t as useful nor as productive as the web browser sitting on the desktop of your main OS, be it Windows or Linux.

ASUS’s major selling point is that Splashtop takes 5-seconds to load at most. If you stop and think about, it’s only impressive because it’s being taken out of context. 5 seconds is fast, but just how often do you need quick access to Skype and your computer isn’t already on? Most of us turn our PCs on and off once a day at most – and there are many that prefer to hibernate, standby, or just leave it on indefinitely.

While a “5-second desktop environment” is a highly-desirable feature, a “5-second basic desktop environment without the programs, applications and documents you need” isn’t.

At the end of the day, ASUS has an idea that has a lot of potential but isn’t being directed correctly. That spare desktop has a lot of room for usefulness and productivity, but a primitive web-surfing environment just isn’t one of them. Until Express Gate features a more-compelling feature set, it’s just another one of those PR initiatives. By “more-compelling” we mean “more exclusive” with applications and products that just won’t work as well on your usual OS (like the BIOS management and system recovery options we listed above), otherwise there isn’t any incentive to forgo the extra 10 seconds it takes to get into your real OS.

Express Gate was originally used as a way to get people to spend the extra cash for the higher-level motherboards costing a couple of hundred bucks extra, and now it’s being used to get people to choose ASUS over similarly-featured contenders. That wouldn’t normally be a problem – after all, extra features is always a great reason to choose one board over another – except in this case, it’s just fluff.

All that being said, it certainly is great to see that Linux has finally reached a level of prevalence where major motherboard manufacturers will consider making it a part and parcel of every board they sell – a kind of perverse play on all the anti-trust violations Microsoft has been accused of by convincing OEMs to ship all PCs with Windows from the get-go. And it’s important not to forget the role ASUS has played in bringing Linux to the masses in the past year – from the brilliantly-viral Eee to Express Gate, Asus has definitely done a lion’s share of work in making Linux as common-place as the PC itself. Hopefully future revisions of Express Gate can find a better use for Splashtop Linux and warrant a kinder review.

What are the most common causes of notebook sleep issues?

• A process running on the system does not allow the system to enter sleep mode.
• A hardware interrupt, such as some peripheral devices for example.
• An unstable driver which does not properly support sleep states or is just buggy.

I’ve owned several notebooks over the years, and almost every one of them have had an issue with sleep mode in one way or another, and over time I’ve learned a certain "practice" which ensures that sleep mode generally works when I close the lid of my computer…

1. Make sure that all of the latest updates are installed for your operating system (Windows Update on Microsoft Windows, Software Update on Mac OS X, your favorite package manager on Linux).
2. Close any running programs on the system (and exit any programs which are running in the notification area which is next to the clock on Windows systems).
3. Unplug all external devices (USB, FireWire, etc.) This includes your external keyboard and mouse if you’re using one, your printer, and whatever else you have plugged in. And no, your USB-powered rocket launcher isn’t an exception, even though it is really cool.
4. Use the "Sleep" option in your operating system to put the computer to sleep instead of the lid (Start > Turn Off Computer > Sleep on Windows XP, Apple menu > Sleep on Mac OS X).
5. Once the computer has gone to sleep, close the lid.

You’re probably wondering why it’s not a good idea to always rely on the lid of your computer to put it to sleep, and the answer is fairly simple. Notebooks have a sensor or switch which detects the position of the display (lid) and when the lid is closed to a certain degree it should trigger sleep mode… only that’s not always the case.

Some notebooks take up to one minute to fully go into sleep mode, and general habits have shown that you’re more likely to close the lid and immediately tuck your computer into its carrying case, which means you’re moving the computer around in mid-air before the hard drive head has gotten a chance to park, which could cause damage to the hard drive (and your valuable data). By using the operating systems "sleep" function and waiting for the signal that your computer is snoozing away (whether it be a flashing power light or a pulsating sleep light), you give the computer a chance to park the hard disk head and enter sleep mode correctly.

Mind you, some notebooks with older NVIDIA drivers on Windows Vista may cause your computer to go into a perpetual coma every time it falls asleep. If your notebook manufacturer hasn’t provided you with a newer graphics driver, I’d recommend consulting a sleep therapist LaptopVideo2Go.com, which has all of the latest NVIDIA drivers and modified INF files for installing them on any NVIDIA graphics card.

The problem is, these capacitors are also susceptible to internal damage and malfunctions, even if not as often. And when these capacitors do fail, it’s not as easy to tell nor as easy to fix.

Having recently purchased a Gigabyte X38-DQ6, I was disappointed to learn that their “Ultra Durable” gimmick didn’t necessarily mean that the motherboard wouldn’t ship with a bad capacitor in the first place. It soon became quite obvious the motherboard was afflicted with an ailment or the other: every time the PC would be improperly shutdown, the X38-DQ6 would begin to boot-cycle and refuse to POST until it was removed from the power for several minutes to an hour. And that period grew progressively longer until about a month later it still wouldn’t boot even after a 24-hour break.

The only good thing about the Gigabyte X38-DQ6 is the two year warranty – which I used to promptly ship the board back to the dealer and ask for a replacement. A week later, I was told to pick up the board; and upon my arrival I was informed that they had “thoroughly tested” the board and found nothing wrong with it.

Sure enough, the motherboard worked just fine once I’d re-assembled the machine; but a week later and it was power-cycling indefinitely once more. So I shipped the board back and was told that it was probably a bad capacitor (which I already knew, and tried to explain) and that it wasn’t detected since the GA-X38-DQ6 uses solid-polymer electrolytic capacitors which usually don’t leak or explode when they go bad – they just stop working the way they should without any visible symptoms of damaged/malfunctioning components.

Perhaps solid-core capacitors really are “ultra durable”, but companies like Gigabyte had better learn to start testing each individual capacitor on allegedly-damaged boards before declaring them free of defect and shipping them right back to their customers.