Technology, Books and Other Neat Stuff

Here's a snippet of a blog post from ZDNet UK that I put up last night, in which I note that the man who really changed the Real World in Tron was Dillinger. After all, he's the man who gave us the ubiquitous touch screens that replaced keyboards back in the mid-1980s.

Dillinger, the father of ubi-comp:

Tron: Legacy was one of 2010's most anticipated movies, with a year or so's worth of teaser trailers and alternate reality games. We were lucky enough to get to a preview showing a couple of weeks ago, and it's one of those films that leaves you wondering about the technology its designers envisaged. Not the light cycles (as cool as they are, they're clearly fantasy machines!), what we're interested in are the Encom operating system and the touch screen tables used in the Encom offices.

The touch tables used in Tron: Legacy are an obvious descendent of the table Dillinger uses in the original film. In Tron, Dillinger logs onto the Master Control Program through his desk in Encom's offices. It's a desk that as well as having multiple windows (though they don't overlap and the fonts are really really large!) also has speech recognition tools – something we're still only just getting on our desktop PCs. Dillinger's terminal is more like today's Surface or iPad than an early 80s VDU – it's the birth of a ubiquitous computing world. I wouldn't be surprised if the original film's industrial designers had spent some time talking to the folk at Xerox PARC…

Read the rest at ZDNet UK.

We've been ferreting through Microsoft's job adverts, looking for hints about just what might be behind the viel of secrecy that has risen over Redmond since they started work on the Windows 8 series of operating systems. One came up with something very interesting, that fitted in with conversations we've been having with other IT journalists for some time:

What’s the future of the web?

On one side there’s Flash and Silverlight and the rich internet applications world, which is working on ways of taking the web outside the browser and onto the desktop, where it “lights up” applications and plugs them into a connected world of APIs and services. On the other is the HTML5 working group, and their vision of a browser that can do, well, pretty much anything. With HTML 5 there won’t be any need for applications – it’ll all be web pages running on super-speedy JavaScript engines and with CSS for look and feel.

Here comes the difficult bit.

They’re both right. There are things a well written RIA can do that a web page can’t, and there are things that web page can do that are impossible for a traditional application. With traditional code you need to push new applications to every desktop every time there’s a change. Even .NET’s click-once and AIR’s self updaters don’t make much of a difference – you still need the latest version of the code to get the latest features, and that (with a flagship RIA like Morgan Stanley’s Matrix) can be a hefty chunk to download. At least with a web page, one change and then everyone who uses it can get access to the latest version.

It’s all a trade off. Not every web site suits every user, nor does every RIA have a fully engaged audience. That’s why so much work is going into getting those experiences right, whether its online design tools like Mozilla’s Bespin, or Sketchflow in Microsoft’s Expression or the designer developer workflow between Flash Catalyst and Flash Builder. But a web page and an application are outside the operating system, and if web-centric OSes ever become common, they need to have some way of supporting and interacting with the web. That’s why there’s so much interest in Google’s ChromeOS and Microsoft’s Windows 8. They’re going to be the first real operating systems of the modern web.

Read more at 500 Words Into The Future on ZDnet...

I know I shouldn't read the comments on the BBC blogs (especially Robert Peston's), but there's a certain car-crash fascination with watching logical fallacies colliding with the real world. I keep my mouth shut, laugh a little and move on to the rest of the internet.

However there's one big howler that keeps recurring and that I'm starting to find (a) annoying and (b) extremely worrying.

The main thrust of this so-called argument is that Gordon Brown was never voted for as Prime Minister, and so has no mandate for governing the country. I'm really astounded by this, as it implies a complete lack of understanding of the British political system, and of just how the country is governed. Of course this basic ignorance might explain why a sizeable number of them believe that one BBC journalist's reports are responsible for much the current economic morass...

This then leads me to ask the obvious question: do these people know how a parliamentary representative democracy like Britain (and much of the Commonwealth) actually works? It also leads on to the sadder question: if they don't, how did they get to voting age without knowing anything about the political system that governs their day-to-day lives?

Britain isn't a presidential state like the USA or Eire or France. We don't vote for a President on top of our elected local representative. Instead we vote for a Member of Parliament, and the leader of the majority grouping in Parliament becomes the Prime Minister. We don't vote for a party slate or for a party leader - we vote for the person we believe will do the best for our constituency. If you voted for your MP believing that you were voting for Tony Blair or David Cameron or whoever, well, your mistake. But just because you don't know how the world works isn't an excuse for it not working the way you want it to.

If the majority party changes leader, well, they just go on to become Prime Minister, with no need for a general election. We may even get the rare situation where minority parties go into coalition and completely replace the majority government. Again, there's no need for an election. While these changes may mean a new person at the top, the person you voted for is still in Parliament - and still answerable to you for their actions.

I suspect it's time for a mass civics lesson, and a pointer to They Work For You.

It's enough to make me want to scream.

However I have a blog, so I'll just rant there instead.

I've been blogging about my first experiences with the iPhone 2.0 software over at IT Pro:

I've been spending some time with the iPhone 2.0 software, and I have to say I'm pleasantly surprised with many of the new enterprise features.

Setting up an iPhone to connect to an Exchange server was quick, and relatively painless. Apple's implementation of ActiveSync supports self-issued server certificates directly, and so smaller businesses can work the CEO's iPhone without having to set up an expensive third-part certificate. Each phone will have to be set up by hand, so you may prefer to stick with Blackberry or Windows Mobile for ease of management.

I've added plenty of images so you can see just what it all looks like. Here are a couple just to whet your appetites:





Go read the rest of the piece for the rest of the images!

Meanwhile Mary looked at one possible reason for buying an iPhone 3G - increased blocking of social networks inside the corporate firewall:

Sure the iPhone is cool, but how many people are buying a smartphone just to get Web access at work?

A lot of our friends who blog using LiveJournal (probably the most community-oriented blogging platform) have commented recently that they’re losing access to LiveJournal and other sites at work - so they’re buying a smartphone so they can carry on accessing them.

I keep wondering how much of the recent jump in smartphone Web browsing is down to phones being almost good enough, networks being almost fast enough and data plans being almost cheap enough - and how much of it is annoyed or paranoid people being forced to put their social network in their pocket to stay in touch during the working day.

Remember to make any comments over there!

(Oh yes, and the new iPhone software makes it easy to take screenshots - just hold down the home button and tap the power switch. The screen will fade for a moment and you'll find the image in the device's camera roll.)

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.

While we've been on the road in the US, we've not been neglecting our blogging duties. Here's a selection of entries from our tech blog, hosted over at IT Pro.

On Microsoft/Yahoo!:

Anyone who’s listened to me rant over the last couple of years will have heard me say that I expect Microsoft to takeover Yahoo!. With Google’s dominance over search, and Yahoo!’s success at what Microsoft wants to build into Live, there’s a certain logic to a merger of the two businesses. Yahoo needs the R&D boost that Microsoft can give it, and Microsoft needs the online presence of Yahoo!.

I wasn’t surprised to see that Microsoft has made a formal offer to Yahoo!, offering $44.6 billion for the company.

Microsoft’s been playing nice with Yahoo! for some time. It’s Windows Live Photo Gallery handles uploads to Flick, and Windows Live Messenger can talk to Y! users. The love goes both ways too, as Y! is one of the first applications to really take advantage of the Vista UI enhancements.

Reading Steve Ballmer’s letter to Yahoo! this morning I noticed a couple of quotes.

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On low cost 3G data and what it means for WiFi:

The usual round of email press releases dropped into the SandM mailbox this morning. One caught our attention, from the folk at PC World, which signals something we’re pretty sure is going to be one of the big IT trends for 2008.

In a tie up with 3, they’re going to be offering a free cheap laptop (or £350 off most) along with one of 3’s 3G dongle modems. You’ll need to sign up for a £35 a month data tariff for the cheap laptop, which gives you 3GB of data (with 10p/megabyte for anything over) at up to 2.8Mbps.

Ignore the free laptop (after all, PC World have a lot to get rid of, if you remember their recent results!) - it’s the 3G modem that really interests us.

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On bad tech patents:

The latest patent idiocies could put phone prices up and increase your security bill. And only one of the cases would be fixed by my own theory of patents (if you don’t yourself manufacture the item or use the process protected by a patent, I think you shouldn’t be able to benefit from the patent by extorting money from companies that do go to the effort of actually making something).

That would get rid of the patent trolls who buy up IP and sneak it past the patent office. Take the owners of the ludicrous new smartphone patent, which seems to ignore more prior art than I could shake a phone battery at. Read through the patent and you’ll find it’s not Nokia, RIM, Microsoft, HTC, Palm, Apple, Symbian, Sony Ericsson, HP or Motorola claiming to have invented the smartphone; it’s one Ki Il Kim of Minerva Industries, Los Angeles.

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On open phones and open networks:

We spotted a blog post the other day claiming that the iPhone set new standards as an open phone platform. Rubbish, I said; you can’t install your choice of applications without hacking the pone via an image bug in the browser - and if you do, then you can’t get the updates that come out because they fix the hole and lock the iPhone right up again. How can you call that open? Apple may have an SDK on the way, but the iPhone is as closed as one of LG’s shiny bling machines.

The examples in the article look odd to British eyes, as we’ve become used to ubiquitous high-speed data and unlocked smartphones. You can run Google Maps and get your location from the mobile phone masts? You can do that on Windows Mobile, and you can have Live Search and Yahoo! Go on there too, along with more apps than you can shake a stick at. And you can search your emails properly (once you upgrade to Windows Mobile 6; if your operator hasn’t made an upgrade available and neither has the manufacturer, check the enthusiast sites for ROM upgrades that won’t compromise security or stop you being able to get future updates).

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On using a mobile phone as a data modem:

We’ve been on the road for the last few weeks, doing a round of Stateside conferences and company visits. That’s meant relying on the “free” wifi in motels and conference halls. Consumer hardware really doesn’t cut it when you’re using a couple of Linksys routers to cover a hundred plus rooms - especially when it’s the cheapest motel nearest the CES halls. Every room was probably full of journalists and analysts trying to get online, and the routers just waved their little rubber feet in the air and gave up.

Normally that wouldn’t have been a problem. I’d have dug out a good book and gone cold turkey on my Internet addiction. After all, I didn’t need to read a dozen gadget blogs to tell me what I’d just seen that day. However I had the IT Pro editorial team back in the UK waiting for copy - and lack of connectivity wasn’t what I needed. I could have gone to a Starbucks for some of their wifi, but not many are still open at 1 am, even in Vegas. I could have used a 3G card, but this shiny new HP Compaq 2710P tablet is a Santa Rosa machine, so only has a ExpressCard slot - and my Vodafone 3G card is, yes, a PC Card.

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On wandering around MacWorld SF:

The Mac Air is cute, shiny, lightweight – and a true reflection of the Mac market in many ways.

Walking around the show floor at MacWorld shows the difference between the Mac and PC markets. There was the new Mac version of Office of course, Office 2008, which combines the logically arranged big icons of 2007 Office with the menus of every other version, adding the SmartArt and XML file formats without making a fuss about them. There was Bento, the build-your-own-catalogue tool for people who find FileMaker too complicated. There was Parallels, making an excellent business of putting Windows onto the Mac.

And then there were the colours. You can thank the Mac market for the different colour cases for iomega’s portable eGo hard drives, because Mac users are used to colours. We saw whale-print neoprene laptop sleeves, embroidered neoprene laptop sleeves, oversize purple leather handbags designed to take notebooks and more rubber, leather, plastic and metal iPod and iPhone cases than you could shake an unlocked iPhone at. Whatever your tastes in technology as personal jewellery, there’s a case to suit.

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On Oracle buying BEA and Sun buying MySQL:

It’s a sunny day in Silicon Valley. It’s also been a busy few days in boardrooms in the towns around San Jose. While Apple has been burning the midnight oil at One Infinite Loop while plotting this year’s MacWorld strategy, the lawyers’ Lexus convertibles have been powering up and down 101 with the documents that detailed this morning’s announcements.

Oracle buying BEA wasn’t a surprise, the two companies have been engaged in a takeover struggle for some time, and BEA’s capitulation, if not quite a foregone conclusion, was certainly on the cards. Sun’s purchase of MySQL came out of the blue. It’s actually quite logical though, as Sun has been moving away from its proprietary roots since Jonathan Schwartz took control of the corporate rudder.

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On the next generation of storage at CES:

Every now and then I want to throw my laptop out of the window in sheer frustration. I’ve certainly flung USB sticks across the room from time to time, by accident. I’ve also done a Bill Gates and left my travel mug on the car roof when we drove off (although unlike the spoof video in Gates’ CES keynote speech the mug wasn’t there when we arrived). Most flash drives can survive a certain amount of damage - or at least the flash memory can. A USB stick would probably survive the fall from a car roof but I have a rather fetching 1Gb earring made from a flash stick that was sticking out of Simon’s PC when he turned his chair a little too far and snapped off the USB connector.

If you expect to treat your data roughly, Corsair has the rugged, rubber-coated Voyager and the Survivor which screws into an aircraft-grade aluminium canister. The Survivor we saw looked a touch battered; Corsair had driven a tractor over it to test it out. Voyager drives were sitting in ice, water and sand but they still worked when we fished them out.

(Read More)

On "Mommy, Why Is There A Server In The House" and other CES goodies:

Just because it’s the Consumer Electronics Show doesn’t mean there aren’t a lot of products that matter for business here in Vegas.

Connecting to multiple monitors wirelessly is as useful at work as it is at home; manufacturers like IOGEAR and Samsung are doing that with DisplayLink’s chips and a future product will put the screen from your mobile phone onto a TV or monitor. A SlingCatcher lets you send video from one TV to another (so you don’t have to pay a second Sky subscription to watch the occasional show on a TV in the bedroom), but you can also use it to see photos, presentations, Web pages - and anything else that’s on your PC screen - on TV, which is handy for an informal meeting. Panasonic’s 150" screen is sized for a large meeting room rather than the average living room.

And then there’s Windows Home Server. It’s designed for the home - obviously. Microsoft has come up with an amusing ad campaign about Stay At Home Servers, complete with fake TV debates and a hugely funny children’s picture book entitled Mommy, Why Is There A Server In The House?

(Read More)

Comments over there please!

Also, if you want to see these as they arrive, in full, there's a syndicated feed for the blog at itpro_sandm.

...as Google managed to detect one of its own blogs as a spam blog, before handing over the URL to all and sundry. A good job that the spoof blogger that took it over wasn't a spam blogger...

Can we say "Ooops"? I thought we could...

Here's an interesting tree map graph of this page's structure, mapping the HTML that makes up everything you can see. Go here to make your own. The nodes are colour coded as follows:

What do the colors mean?
blue: for links (the A tag)
red: for tables (TABLE, TR and TD tags)
green: for the DIV tag
violet: for images (the IMG tag)
yellow: for forms (FORM, INPUT, TEXTAREA, SELECT and OPTION tags)
orange: for linebreaks and blockquotes (BR, P, and BLOCKQUOTE tags)
black: the HTML tag, the root node
gray: all other tags

Quite fascinating. I obviously have quite a complex template in play! That and the tables I occasionally use...

Original linkage from Chris Green

On our IT PRO blog a review with a difference: conference bags.

You can tell I'm a technology journalist. It's not the perpetually dishevelled look, the scrawled notebook, the geeky t-shirts, or the laptop covered in stickers, though I'm sure they're clues.

No, it's the regularly changing collection of backpacks that really gives things away. Nearly every big event you go to, there's a new bag to take away. Some people might be satisfied with that, but I'm always on the lookout for the bag that I can use every day. Most I try for a while, but then go back to one of the old standbys. In my case those are a battered old Intel IDF back pack and a Microsoft PDC shoulder bag.

I'm sure our local Oxfam dreads our arrival with a car load of conference bags from all over the world. However, if we didn't pass them on to charity our office would quickly fill with unwanted bags. So how do we decide what to keep, especially in these days of ever decreasing baggage allowances. I tend to classify them as good (worth trying for a while), bad (straight out the door - sometimes into the fabric recycling bins), and indifferent (which wait for the next charity shop run).

Read on to find out why I'm using the bag I'm using, and just where it came from (and why marypcb is using the bag she's recently picked up).

So what's your favourite conference bag?

It's time to gather up some links to recent blog posts on marypcb's and my blog at IT Pro . It's been a while since I've done this - so there's plenty for you to read.

• "Mini USB - it's not just a good idea, it's the law!" China standardises on mini-USB. That'll simplify the power supplies under my desk and in my luggage.
• "A Virtual Archive" Do you have problems with obsolete file formats? You're not alone - the team at the National Archive have an even a bigger version of the very same problem!
• "Why are you still using the post office?" There's a strike on today - so it's the perfect time to give up your paper habit.
• "Take the tablet, just not as it comes" Shiny new laptop; scuffed old Norton uninstaller - and the utility that does the job
• "Free Wi-Fi, free security holes" I'm not hacking the network, I'm trying to fix it... lucky for the hotel
• "How simple is too simple?" There's easy and there's deceptively simple; only one isn't a con
• "Women in Technology at Microsoft" Women in IT - want a job at Microsoft? Go for it…
• "The commoditisation of IT hits new highs" Next up - the Lego machine room!
• "Microsoft goes back to the future at TechEd" Few new announcements, and a non-vision vision set the scene for a week with 10,000 IT pros in Orlando
• "The wrong Dayton airport" Driving through the dawn to Dayton, Ohio for the flight to Orlando, we reach the airport in plenty of time. Shame it's the wrong one.

Enjoy!