Technology, Books and Other Neat Stuff

It's been a little quiet here recently, what with Christmas and CES. But that doesn't mean I haven't been blogging, and 500 Hundred Words Into The Future has been getting plenty of pieces that come out a lot longer than 500 words...

Trust, but Verify

So is it time to kill IE? France and Germany think so. Me, I’m not so sure. The latest versions are solid, support most of the key Internet standards and run in limited user mode, with minimal access to the core OS and the file system.

I do agree with them on one thing, though. There’s really no excuse for still running IE6. After all, IE 7 has been out for nearly 40 months, and IE 8 for most of a year. That’s more than long enough for your developers or your software vendors to have updated the code of any intranet applications. You don’t have to have updated the underlying OS, either, as both run happily on Windows XP as well as Vista. If you’re relying on ActiveX controls for performance and security, then Silverlight gives you all the features (and browser integration) that you want, with the added benefit of a .NET sandbox and a modern JIT compiler for added speed.

One view of the IE 6 problem comes from the Adobe folk we overheard on a bus during the MAX conference. The problem with enterprises who haven’t yet moved off IE 6, they said to each other as they compared notes on customers they’d come across, isn’t the IE 6 front end; it’s that if you’re still on IE 6 now for a line of business app, it’s because you wrote it before you understood Web database programming properly and you have a badly written back end with millions of rows of badly stored but crucial data in that you don’t know how to get out. That means you’re dependant not on IE 6 but on the connectors you wrote between your IE 6 front end and your bodge-tape-and-string backend – and you can’t really blame Microsoft for that. 

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CES. It's a consumer business world

While the C in CES stands for Consumer, the show itself underlines many trends that will affect business computing in 2010. We’ve already written about the return to slate computing, but there’s a lot more at this year’s event for the IT pro to consider…

The most obvious is USB 3.0. It’s ten times faster than USB 2.0, and with hard drive sizes continuing to increase, it’s going to become an effective way of connecting external drives to a PC (or even a server). It also makes other technologies more interesting, and DisplayLink will be using it to improve the quality of its USB video connections. It’s also here right now – with Sony, Dell and HP all putting it in the latest versions of their business class laptops.

Netbooks are getting a big refresh too, with Intel's Pine Trail Atom giving them more power and more battery life. The real Atom story at CES is the launch of a netbook app store - from Intel. It's a part of the company's developer strategy, helping developers sell and deploy applications built using the netbook toolkits Intel announced back in September 2009 at IDF.

Then there’s universal connectivity. Devices talk to devices, over all manner of protocols. Intel is using multiplexed WiFi to connect displays to PCs without needing any networking (and we’re expecting WiDi connected projectors by the end of the year). Familiar protocols are joined with new ones, like Sony’s TransferJet, which uses a short range personal area network to transfer images from a camera to a PC. Even TVs are getting processors and connectivity, and platforms like Yahoo’s Widgets are turning them into another channel for delivering content and services.

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Slate Engine Time (Again)

If you were here in Las Vegas for CES, you’d think that the slate format tablet PC was here to save the consumer electronics industry.

Everyone has one – Steve Ballmer showed off HP’s Windows 7 offering in his opening keynote, while Dell unveiled a prototype 5” smartbook slate running a variant of Android. They’re not the only slate devices (or rumours of devices) at CES. Even the normally conservative Lenovo has shown off a hybrid notebook/slate running two different operating systems.

It’s a Pre-Cambrian explosion of slates, with as many sizes as there are LCD or e-Paper screens. There are slates for e-books, dual screen Android e-Paper devices with a mix of different size LEDs, and then a whole range of smartbook devices with ARM processors, and then there are the Intel-powered devices, using low power Atom systems. They’re all colours, all shapes, and all sizes, intended for everyone from the stay-at-home mother to the executive pulling together a portfolio of documents. Some devices are aimed at very clear markets, while others are designed to adapt to whatever their users want.

At least that’s the hype.

In reality slates and other tablet devices have been around a long time. I owned my first slate-like device back in the 90s, with the Apple Newton. I even spent some time using a Pen Windows-based device, a large screen tablet with a Windows 3.11-based touch OS. It turns out that tablet-format devices have been around almost as long as the PC itself.

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Killing Windows Mobile (In order to save it)

Analyst and futurist Mark Anderson’s annual predictions often leave you with plenty to think about. He’s one of those people with their finger on the pulse of the world – and not just technology, but economics and science. And even if you don’t agree with him, he’s sown plenty of seeds for discussion and debate.

The first two of this year’s predictions left me with one interesting thought: It’s time for Microsoft to admit that Windows Mobile has reached the end of its life and cancel all current and future development - and possibly to go a whole step further and do the same for Windows CE.

Mark’s predictions are this:

1. 2010 will be The year of Platform Wars: netbooks, cell phones, pads, Cloud standards. Clouds will tend to support the consumer world (Picnik, Amazon), enterprises will continue to build out their own data centers, and Netbook sector growth rates continue to post very large numbers.

2. 2010 will be The year of Operating System Wars: Windows 7 flavors, MacOS, Linux flavors, Symbian, Android, Chrome OS, Nokia Maemo 5. The winners, in order in unit sales: W7, MacOS, Android. W7, ironically, by failure of imagination and by its PC-centric platform, actively clears space for others to take over the OS via mobile platforms.

Why’s this? Well, Anderson suggests that 2010 will be the year that two big technology conflicts come to a head: The Platform Wars and the Operating System Wars. They may sound the same, but they’re very different – platforms are a lot bigger than operating systems, and services like Salesforce.com are on the way to becoming platforms, as is the combination of RIM’s BlackBerry OS, its BES and BIS servers and a whole new generation of web services. The OS Wars have been with us for a long time but they’re starting to coalesce around more than just desktop PCs.

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Feel free to comment over at ZDnet!

Well there's no need to worry - we've done the detective work for you and there will only be two versions on sale through retail channels - one for home users, one for businesses.

Here's the scoop over at our IT Pro blog:

There are going to be six -well, really five, actually three, but you'll only see two - editions of Windows 7 (not counting any special bits-left-out-please-the-lawyers N or K versions for the EU and Korea). While there’d been something of a campaign for just one SKU, like OS X, Microsoft’s multi-version release isn’t going to make much of a difference to you.

Click here to read the rest.

Here's another round-up of links to our blog over at IT Pro (now with a nice shiny redesign). We tend to put a couple of pieces up there a week, and if you want to read them as soon as they're published, it's also syndicated on LJ as itpro_sandm.

Click on the titles to see the full posts, and please make any comments over there. Oh, and rate the posts too, please!

Green if but for the licenses

Getting IT folk to agree is like herding squirrels, but there’s one thing we do seem to agree on, and that’s that virtualisation is a good thing. It saves money, it saves space, and above all, it saves energy. Throw in a bunch of offload processing for complex applications (a Tesla box or some Azul hardware) and you’re well on the way to a shiny green data centre.

With so many companies investing so much in virtualisation you’d think that software companies would be falling over themselves to develop licensing tools to support dynamic, flexible IT infrastructures. It’s surprising then to see that not only are they singularly failing to do so, but they’re also making it hard to justify installing software on a virtualised server. Microsoft has tried to appear to be a poster child for virtualisation licensing, but once you start drilling down into just what you can and can’t do with Hyper-V and the Windows Server 2008 Enterprise edition you’re in for an unpleasant surprise. Unless you’re ready to lock yourself into an Oracle-style site license there’s just no way to run your internal IT as a utility.

Intel predicts an all IA future, consigns CUDA to the footnotes

With Intel’s 40th birthday on the horizon (and with it the 40th anniversary of the microprocessor), Intel’s Pat Gelsinger took a few minutes yesterday to ruminate on the past, present and future - and to take a few questions.

Beginning with a look back to the i386, and the shift from 16 to 32-bit computing, Gelsinger pointed to a time of technical and industry transition, much like today. It was the point where Compaq moved ahead of IBM, and Windows and Microsoft began to shape the software industry. We’re in the middle of another shift at the moment, what Gelsinger called the “third era of Moore’s Law”.

O2: business iPhone 3G will sync to Exchange without iTunes

But you’ll still need iTunes on every desktop to install applications. Would you put that in your organization?
We spent Friday with Telefonica at their new headquarters in Madrid, a campus laid out around a lake to deal with the climate; solar panels, vanes that push the heat up, a tower in each corner and wide roofs to add shade plus wireless antenna sprouting in the flowerbeds like candelabra. Telefonica has technology plans for the networks it runs as well, which includes O2.

Even Telefonica can’t actually show off the new iPhone yet: O2’s Steve Alder kept his in his pocket and described it instead. What he did show off was the price: free if you pay £45 or £75 a month for the tariff or £99 if you want the cheapest £30 a month plan. Existing iPhone owners get the same deal, although you have to sign up for the full 18 month contract again. None of the plans let you use the iPhone as a modem with your laptop and the price for international roaming is a hefty £50 for 50MB of data.

Beyond the valley of the CPU

The white heat of technology in the 1980s was focussed on the BBC Micro. Not only was it the heftiest 8-bit machines around, its open bus made it possible to add more processing power. With everything from music machines to Z-80s running CP/M, the BBC Micro could share its keyboard with many different CPUs.

Those days are on their way back.

A nation of snoops and gossips

You have no privacy, Larry Ellison said a few years ago; get over it. Is that because of governments and security agencies keeping track of you - or because of how much personal information you hand out yourself? If you want to break into someone’s bank account, most of the ’secret questions’ used for security are probably answered on their Facebook account. And how about the information you give away when you sign up for a special offer or fill in a survey?

If you don’t remember to go tick the box to say it can’t go to third parties, some marketing companies will happily pass along anything they know about your religious beliefs (one in ten), ethnic background (one in seven) and sexual orientation (one in fourteen). And your mobile phone number and marital status… And if you don’t care who knows that, are you happy that one in four pass along your credit card details? Only 3% would hand over your national ID number if they had it - and they would keep secret your job performance, your biometrics - and possibly in light of the Facebook Beacon debacle, what movies you’ve rented.

The case of the disappearing disk space

Where has 32GB of disk space gone and how do I make Vista give it back, or there’s no such thing as a free lunch.

When we’re on the road at conferences I take a fair few photographs, and I copy a lot of PowerPoints and PDFs onto my notebook, not to mention photographing products I’m reviewing, and then there’s recordings of interviews… It all takes up space, so when I got an 8 megapixel camera the day we drove into Death Valley I did wonder if disk space on my notebook might be a problem.

Join the (beta) community

TechEd is Microsoft’s instant university, a place where developers and IT pros go to get information about the current state of all things Microsoft. It’s not really a place for big announcements - though the odd one sneaks out.

Most of the news from this year’s event has been about software moving from one stage of beta to the next. Whether it’s a new beta (like Silverlight 2) or a long running upgrade saga finally getting close to release (like SQL Server 2008) it’s not like a new release of Windows or a new Visual Studio. If anything we’re quickly moving into a world where the big bang launch is a thing of the past. Apple may be still spinning its “one more thing”, but even Snow Leopard will just be an evolutionary move. Instead public betas and community previews will become the way things get done, and the Web 2.0 perpetual beta will be the way of the rest of the IT business works.

Behind the scenes with the BallmerBot

The BallmerBot joined Bill Gates on stage at his last public keynote here at TechEd 2008 Developers in Orlando earlier this week. Waving an XBox Live lifetime subscription (Bill’s leaving gift from a grateful Microsoft, according to the latest version of the “Bill’s Last Day” video Microsoft first showed at CES), the robot waddled out of the wings looking like a cross between Johnny 5 and a Segway.

U-Bot 5’s new name may not be what the developers expected, but underneath the humour and the hype is a fascinating story of how PC technology and modern developer tools have simplified the development of what until recently would have been a very complex and very expensive piece of hardware.

In and out of the browser - how Microsoft and Google think differently

For years, I’ve been saying that Google would be mad to build its own operating system. It should leave the thankless task to Microsoft and Apple and Linux distributions; you can debate how good a job they do, turn and turn about, but the scale of what a desktop OS needs to do and the range of devices it needs to support is far broader than what you need to do in a browser or on a smartphone. I still don’t think Google has any plans to create its own OS, but it’s pushing beyond the browser as a development platform with Gears and App Engine and the like. Microsoft has a whole range of platforms in the browser, out of the browser and around the browser, from Windows and WPF to Silverlight to SharePoint to Office to SQL Server – to name just a few of the platforms Bill Gates touched on in his last ever keynote at Microsoft TechEd this morning.