Due for sale in July, the Libretto W100 runs Windows 7 but abandons the traditional keyboard for a second 7in screen. You can still use the Libretto as a traditional laptop, with an on-screen keyboard complete with haptic feedback filling the bottom screen, or you can view a completely different application on the second screen.The Libretto is designed to work in both horizontal and vertical positions, switching automatically thanks to a built-in sensor. Reminiscent of Microsoft¡¯s now-binned Courier concept device, this could allow you to make notes in the right-hand screen while viewing a document in the other. See our first impressions of the Toshiba Libretto W100: first-look review, and more photos of the device, on the PC Pro blog.While the Libretto will likely gain the most headlines, Toshiba¡¯s Android-powered device ¨C the AC100 ¨C could have the most long-term impact. Its key advantages over smartphones are a 10.1in screen and full Qwerty keyboard.
The AC100 remains light, at 870g, and Toshiba has worked with partners such as YouTube to take advantage of the larger screen. It will include an 8GB solid state disk, 512MB of RAM, a 1GHz Nvidia processor, 802.11n wireless and, on some models, built-in mobile broadband.¡°There¡¯s a huge battery life of up to eight hours,¡± said Tony Alderson, product manager of Toshiba¡¯s consumer laptops, ¡°and that¡¯s not downhill with the wind behind it type figure, that¡¯s full usage browsing the internet, watching videos type figure. Indeed, it will last seven days on standby as well.¡±PC Pro has had the advantage of using the device for a couple of days, and we¡¯ve posted a first-look review of the Toshiba AC100 on our blogs. It's due for release in August.Toshiba¡¯s final announcement, the Port¨¦g¨¦ R700, can¡¯t match the AC100 or Libretto W100 for innovation, but is still a substantial release. Its key inclusion is a Core i3 or Core i5 processor in a 13.3in ultraportable. Previously, ultraportables have used ultra-low-voltage chips.
Toshiba claims this inclusion is possible due to a unique motherboard design, which positions all the heat-generating components in one small area of the chassis. A low-speed fan then continually pushes air over these components to prevent overheating, even when the system is pushed flat out.The end result, according to Toshiba, is battery life up to eight hours on the standard battery, despite the 13.3in screen and high-end processor. The R700¡¯s weight starts at 1.3kg and prices from ¡ê629 exc VAT. It goes on sale immediately (see the blogs for our first impressions of the Port¨¦g¨¦ R700).All three mobile devices were launched to coincide with the 25th anniversary of Toshiba laptops, and the company¡¯s UK marketing director, Matt McDowell, made it clear this was no coincidence. ¡°Hopefully we¡¯ve demonstrated we¡¯re redefining mobile computing again by launching a new era of innovative, smaller form factors.¡±I encountered an interesting problem a couple of weeks ago, when a website I¡¯d written years ago became a target for spammers.A simple page on the site enables users to request further information, but recently the site owners had started to receive lots of spam-type requests for this. They got in touch to ask what could be done about it, since they felt they were in danger of missing genuine enquiries among the hundreds of spam requests.
It was obvious that the requests were being generated by bots automatically filling in and submitting the web form, so my first suggestion was to add a Captcha element to the form ¨C the sort of thing that displays a series of wiggly, distorted characters and numbers that you have to recognise and type in.It was obvious that the requests were being generated by bots automatically filling in and submitting the web formIt was obvious that the requests were being generated by bots automatically filling in and submitting the web form The theory is that only humans can make sense of such images, but so much distortion is applied that often human users can¡¯t make sense of them, either. As such ¨C and because of a deep mutual hatred for the things ¨C my client asked if there was an alternative solution.I¡¯d seen sites that display a simple sum and ask for the answer, or show a picture and ask what it is, both of which seem like possible solutions. However, while talking to the clients, I had another idea, and asked if I could try something out and get back to them.It had occurred to me that these bots simply fill in all the form fields and submit the page, so perhaps there would be a simple way to confuse them? If we put an extra field on the form that wasn¡¯t used, and hid this using CSS ¡°visibility: hidden¡±, a human user wouldn¡¯t see it, and so wouldn¡¯t enter anything into it; a bot, however, would be fooled into filling the field.
All we¡¯d then have to do is test to see if this field contained anything; if it did, we could simply dump that form, since it must have come from a bot.I wasn¡¯t sure this would work, since it depended on bots not using the page¡¯s stylesheet to render it. It turns out, however, that I needn¡¯t have worried ¨C it worked like a dream.Five minutes of coding was all it took to stop the spam submissions. It¡¯s a useful technique that you¡¯re free to use on your own sites, although my usual 5% commission applies...Your boss has just won the lottery, sorted the wares of an online computer parts store by descending price, and bought you a 1.6TB solid-state storage system. So, what do you do with it?Obviously, 1.6TB is an enormous amount of space ¨C all four of my laptops put together muster less disk space than that. In fact, it¡¯s more than I have in traditional SSDs spread across all my machines.
What¡¯s more, this particular fantasy object ¨C the LSI Nytro NWD-BLP4-1600 ¨C doesn¡¯t stuff its massive storage behind a standard, slow SATA controller, the likes of which are increasingly impeding good disk I/O these days.No, this is 1.6TB delivered on an innocuous PCI Express card that slides neatly into one of those expansion card connectors that seem to spend the entire life of a server pointlessly empty.Let me set the stage properly before answering the question of quite what you do with it. This LSI device is representative of pretty much all the others on the market, in that it pretends to be a disk controller to the rest of the PC; the term ¡°flash memory¡± might appear in its specification, but that doesn¡¯t mean it¡¯s memory expansion.Obviously, 1.6TB is an enormous amount of space ¨C all four of my laptops put together muster less disk space than thatObviously, 1.6TB is an enormous amount of space ¨C all four of my laptops put together muster less disk space than that
This is all about real disk space, and since the route of attaching disks via expansion cards is well understood, at least by systems designers, it would be a peculiar and unsuitable machine indeed that refused to accept a card such as this as its boot volume.So, that¡¯s the first thing you might try if given such a device: blasting it up as a C drive and basking in fantastic, hundreds-of-times-faster performance. After all, the focus of activity in most PCs is the C drive, right?Well, yes, up to a point ¨C but the truth is a little more subtle than that. Whether you¡¯re talking about user PCs or servers, the reality of modern-day usage patterns and software designs is that the balance of reads and writes to your everyday C drive is split unevenly.There are lots of sizeable files that are only ever read ¨C except perhaps during an OS update ¨C and there are many far smaller files, isolated in only a few folders, that are written to regularly.In some cases, this might mean thousands of times in their lifecycle, while in others it could mean only four or five times before they vanish again.It¡¯s a bit of an indictment of developer imagination that while there are a dozen or so utilities that show you how much space is used on your disk ¨C and what¡¯s using it ¨C there are no simple gadgets that show you how busy a particular folder or file is. (I know there are several command-line tools, but these tend to focus on developers or network shares, which to my mind sidesteps most of the action ¨C and most of the audience ¨C in one fell swoop.)
Why does this even matter, Steve? Why are you bothering us with such nonsense? First of all, the degree to which your machine ¨C in fact, all of your machines, inside the server room or elsewhere, using Windows or otherwise ¨C depends upon the read/write cycle for a small collection of previously unimportant folders is becoming a major performance inhibitor.Much of your software wants to use one of about half a dozen temporary directory locations, and many developers believed Microsoft¡¯s throwaway statements to the effect that NTFS provides such wonderful caching that add-ons or strategies simply aren¡¯t required.Stage two of this head-scratcher is that flash-based SSDs don¡¯t especially like being written to. Reads are fine ¨C they can blast out data without major impediment ¨C but writes are more problematic. The more you pay for a flash drive, the higher its write performance should be, and the longer its lifespan before those writes start to fail or fill up all the available space.Now, people usually start looking for a disk-speed hike because write performance has exposed a bit of sluggishness in their system; it¡¯s the writes they want to boost. So, surely it would be madness to put in a bit of kit that has such well-known write problems? Here¡¯s where it pays to understand not only the price point and feature list of the item you¡¯re looking at to fix your problem, but also what¡¯s happening to the kit above it and below it in price.
Right at the top of the marketplace for flash memory are devices so insanely vast they stagger the imagination. Imagine a standard two- or three-height rack cabinet with, say, six drawers in it, and each drawer stuffed full of flash memory, packed in row on row like the baleen plates of a blue whale.Toshiba Kira is the company's new top-end brand (although the KiraBook has been out in the States for a year) so it's no surprise that the sole version chosen for the UK screams luxury from every silicon pore.The most obvious sign of this is the combo of screen and chassis, with a gorgeous 2,560 x 1,440 display offering incredibly vivid colours. At 13.3in across, that translates to 221 pixels per inch. While specs junkies may appreciate that, what really matters is that text looks sharp and pictures jump from the screen.The magnesium alloy chassis is another classy touch. The base feels rugged with no hint of flex; Toshiba says this is due to a honeycomb structure to counter the thinness of the metal. There is more flex in the screen, though, so we'd want to pop it into a case rather than slip it loose into a rucksack (note that the screen is protected by Corning Concore glass, which should help against direct attack).
The wide touchpad mirrors the widescreen, and its generous amount of space makes it a pleasure to use. While the keyboard isn't particularly special - it feels fine to type on but the keys don't have a huge amount of travel - it is backlit for darkened conditions.The Toshiba Kira is a slim machine, in part due to the incredible slimness of the screen. This, together with all the other nice design touches, mean this is a laptop that will gain just as many admiring looks on the train as it does in business meetings. If anything, it looks too good for everyday business use.Perhaps in deference to the design, Toshiba has limited the ports: there are two USB 3 on the left-hand side along with a full-size HDMI port, with a further USB 3 slot (which can charge even if the Kira is in Sleep mode), one SD slot and one headphone socket on the right-hand side. The obvious omissions are wired Ethernet and D-SUB or DVI.Other than this, though, there¡¯s little Toshiba has omitted from its top-end laptop. You¡¯ve got 8GB of RAM, a 256GB SSD and dual-band 802.11ac wireless. Plus it¡¯s Windows 8.1 Pro rather than Home, and there's a two-year warranty.Naturally it needs a hardcore processor to match the other specs, so it¡¯s no surprise to see an ultra-low voltage Haswell Core i7 4500U processor inside.
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