PC Pro August 2015

There is a common meme out there that the net was designed to be impervious to a nuclear attack. After all, it stemmed from the American military and university worlds, and keeping the key players connected was necessary as part of the Arpanet design. So it isn’t surprising that many believe it has the ability to cope with anything that’s thrown at it. And this is true, up to a point. For example, the protocols that control routing can cope with outages in the links, rerouting around a problem, providing that particular part of the net is set up to do this. This happens at the big hubs, because outages can’t be allowed to disconnect whole wedges of the internet in one swoop. It’s also true that you could set up…

All the extenders on review in this Labs were tested in a carefully controlled domestic environment, enabling us to compare the products objectively. We first connected each extender to a network powered by a Linksys EA6900 AC1900 router. To this network, we then connected two desktop PCs, one plugged via Gigabit Ethernet into the router, and one connecting to the extender via a tripleantenna 802.11ac AC1900 PCI Express card. Both PCs were fitted with SSDs to ensure no bottlenecks on that count. With the router and PC 1 downstairs, we set up PC 2 12m away upstairs, where wireless signal strength is normally weak. We then connected each extender in turn, and transferred 500MB video files from one system to another, measuring real-world transfer speeds over 2.4GHz, 5GHz 802.11n and 5GHz 802.11ac connections. We…

Flying with the iPad Air Regarding your podcast discussion about American Airlines flights being grounded by iPad glitches, I hold a long-lapsed private pilot’s licence, so I know a little about this subject. The take-off speed of an aircraft varies depending on the weight of the aircraft, which itself varies throughout the flight as fuel is burned. Take-off and landing distances also vary due to a whole host of factors, and weight and balance is, as you can imagine, hugely important. All this has traditionally been calculated for each flight using pen and paper. I’d imagine that using iPads not only reduces paperwork, but allows data to be transferred wirelessly between the pilots and the dispatcher, enabling turnaround time to be kept to the minimum. I’m sure American Airlines has vetted its procedures…

PRICE 38mm Apple Watch Sport, £249 (£299 inc VAT) from apple.com/uk (pcpro.link/250watch) Appraising a first-generation Apple product is one of the hardest things a reviewer can do, and the Apple Watch is a perfect illustration of why. You look at the specs; you look the price; you look at what it does; and you end up giving it a mediocre review because, on the face of it, competing products seem to offer so much more. Then Apple goes ahead and sells millions of them, and suddenly it’s setting the agenda for the whole industry. You end up looking like an idiot for missing what – with hindsight – ought to have been obvious. Just as the iPad wasn’t the first tablet, the Apple Watch isn’t the first smartwatch. But just like the…

You may have heard of Wholesale Clearance UK – it enjoys excellent press coverage. The bulk-buying business and reseller hit the headlines last summer for picking up England football mugs that had mistakenly had US President Barack Obama’s face superimposed in place of defender Chris Smalling. Stories such as these are good for business, but most of the outlet’s sales have historically come via search traffic – most of it via Google. Then one day, in April 2012, that traffic plummeted by 90%. “One moment we were riding high on Google’s trust, and doing really well,” Wholesale Clearance managing director Karl Baxter told PC Pro. “We took on staff, warehouses, and were expanding at a fantastic rate. As if overnight, it all came crashing down.” This wasn’t a one-off, 24-hour tech fault:…

Google Photos Photography fans will be keen to look at Google Photos, an extension to the firm’s existing photo-storage system. It aims to converge all of your pictures into one place, rather than leave them scattered across multiple devices and cloud storage. Google Photos will organise images automatically, by dates, places and even people (without the need for tagging). The flipside is that this involves reading metadata and using facial recognition, so those concerned about privacy may prefer to avoid the free service. While the search giant is offering unlimited storage, it’s setting a resolution limit of 16 megapixels for photos and 1080p for videos – sure to disappoint anyone with a decent DSLR. Google Photos is available immediately for desktop, Android and iOS. From smart jeans to encryption The Advanced Technology and Projects (ATAP)…