Windows 7, Netbooks, Kindle 2 and WUW

After bloggers raised a hue and cry about insecurities in Windows 7’s version of User Access Control (UAC)—which is less annoying and more granular than what’s in Windows Vista—that let a program switch UAC off without the user being aware of the fact, Microsoft has responded through the Engineering Windows 7 blog. “We are going to deliver two changes to the Release Candidate that we’ll all see. First, the UAC control panel will run in a high integrity process, which requires elevation. That was already in the works before this discussion and doing this prevents all the mechanics around SendKeys and the like from working. Second, changing the level of the UAC will also prompt for confirmation.” All of which basically means that it will be much harder to tamper with UAC by sending parameters to a DLL from a certified program and the ploy of switching off UAC behind a user’s back will not take place.

Netbook sales zoomed in 2008 with 14 million units shipping. That’s expected to almost double this year to 26 million. However, as per DisplayBank, unit shipments will plateau off in percentage terms and netbooks aren’t likely to beat 20% of the overall notebook market any time in the mid-term. That said, there are some interesting things happening in this market segment with what have hitherto been underpowered machines starting to flex some muscle. Netbooks powered by Intel’s dual-core Atom 330 processor pack a bigger punch (say, a 50% boost) and graphics will also see a performance surge with Nvidia’s GeForce 9400M finding its way onto some models. AMD and Via also have plans for this market segment. Both will offer dual-core processors for this form factor. Of course, all of this will mean that these devices will be more power hungry than before.

Amazon’s Kindle was the first e-book to look like something more than a curiosity and its successor the Kindle 2 builds on the device’s strengths. The Kindle 2 is slimmer and marginally lighter. To understand the Kindle’s scope for changing the rules of the game, you have to look at the panic its text-to-speech feature has created with the Author’s Guild objecting to it. Other than being svelter, the gadget reportedly has a better keyboard and a screen that displays 16 shades of gray as opposed to 4 in the first version.

Wear Ur World or WUW is MIT’s concept that lets you turn any surface—your hand, a wall, whatever—into a touchscreen display. Presently in the demo stage, it offers an interesting look at where computer interfaces are headed. Researchers Pranav Mistry and Pattie Maes write on their Web site “With the miniaturization of computing devices that fit inside our pockets, we are always connected to the digital world. However, there is no link between our interaction with these digital devices and interaction with the physical world. WUW bridges this gap by augmenting the physical world around us with digital information and proposing natural hand gestures as the mechanism to interact with that information.” From the demo, WUW lets you interpose information from a computer onto real world objects such as a newspaper or book or simply use your hand as a keypad to take some examples from the demo.

prashant.rao@expressindia.com