Technology, Books and Other Neat Stuff

Over on our ZDNet blog I've been doing a lot of thinking about Windows 8 (especially with the arrival of the Release Preview), and over the last couple of weeks have churned out a few thousand words on it in reviews and blog posts. Here's a few recent posts from over there. Click through and comment there please!

Going Hybrid: the old new form factor for Windows 8

It's just over a week since the Windows 8 Release Preview hit the download streams, and it's certainly been an interesting week for the Wintel ecosystem, with a whole raft of new form factors and devices announced at this year's Computex. Ultrabooks look here to stay (even if Apple has taken a patent out on the thin wedge form factor they all seem to be using), and this year's new trend is the hybrid PC/tablet.

Except of course it isn’t new. And neither are the form factors.

I'm actually writing this piece on a hybrid PC/tablet, running Windows 8. But it's not a prototype, and it's not something cutting edge I've been lent by Intel or Microsoft. It's just a plain old HP laptop, one I bought about two years ago. It's covered in stickers and held together with Sugru, the epitome of a journalist's battered travelling machine. It’s not even particularly hi-spec, just a 1280 by 800 screen with a Core i3 processor and Intel integrated graphics. The only difference between it and many of the other laptops sold back in 2010 was that I stuck with my habit of buying a Tablet PC, purely for pen support in OneNote. The fact that the screen was also a touchscreen was more an inconvenience than a bonus, and I quickly uninstalled all HP's bundled touch applications.

Now here I am two years later, and the once pristine screen is covered in fingerprints and smears. That touchscreen I'd ignored, or occasionally used to scroll through web pages has suddenly become part of my workflow. In fact there are now fingerprints of my other Windows 8 test machine, a plain old Toshiba laptop…

Read more.

Playing Cluedo

Sometimes being an IT journalist is like being a detective. You look for little pieces of evidence, and then start to put two and two together to come up with something that starts to make sense. You're sniffing out information in a blackout, trying to find out what's going to happen when no one is talking outside a corporate cone of silence. It's why the Apple blogs look at each new piece of spare part to leak from China to see what the new iPhone will look like, and why those of us who track Microsoft look carefully at every PowerPoint and every piece of marketing collateral that we see…

It's like playing Cluedo (Clue, for our American readers), as you lay out the cards you have collected tell the world your deductions. Take for example the still rumoured 7-inch Windows tablet: "It was the Windows Phone four screen size rumour, in the Nokia World presentation, with the tablet icon in the PowerPoint".

And now we have the invitations for the Windows Phone Summit to peruse, an event that's rumoured to be where Microsoft will be unveiling Windows Phone 8, codenamed "Apollo" and expected to be the place where Windows 8 and Windows Phone finally meet.

Read more.

Imagining re-imagining selling Windows

Windows 8 is, as Microsoft likes to say, re-imagining Windows. With the Release Preview out the door and the final straight now ahead of Redmond, it's time to throw a little wild speculation into the froth of Microsoft-watching, as we like to do every now and then chez Simon and Mary.

What if (and I hasten to add, this is a big what if, and not a rumour or any whiff anything from the expanses of the Pacific Northwet) that re-imagining is much more than a new desktop and a new way of developing Windows applications? What if, instead, it's also a fundamental change in the way Microsoft builds and deploys its flagship software, delivering it in a (dare I say it?) more Apple-like way?

We all know the drill. Every three years or so, a new version of Windows arrives. Sometimes it's quicker, sometimes it’s slower. But it keeps on coming, on and on and on, tick, tock, tick, tock. It’s a cadence that drives PC renewal cycles and powers an industry. But it’s also a drag on innovation, forcing a drive to the lowest common denominator of plastic PCs and low cost components. If Windows is changing, then why not use those changes to change the entire PC industry at the same time?

Read more.

More generally:

Maker in the UK

The other weekend we visited Maker Faire. It's a fascinating place, a modern science fair full of neat technologies, hand-built hacks, and every type of machine tool you can imagine. Hundreds of thousands of people thronged the midway, while mechanical giraffes and flaming dragons strolled by. It was a geek mecca.

What's most interesting about Maker Faire is the enabling technologies and the organisations . There's something about the democratisation of sophisticated tooling through places like TechShop that's liberating ideas and innovation in ways that we really couldn’t imagine. Instead of having to invest in tooling, engineers and designers are able to use the shared tooling to collaborate on prototypes for hardware – a process used by the designers of the Square credit card reader that was everywhere at the Faire.

Sign up for TechShop, and you get access to everything from sewing machines to laser cutters. It’s a time-shared machine shop, that offers machine tooling using the same utility model as cloud computing. You'll get training and support, as well as access to new tools as they arrive. Showing what could be done, GE, TechShop and Quirky had set up a workshop at Maker Faire where Quirky engineers and designers were collaborating with the wider Internet to design a better milk jug, opening up the design process to interested bystanders – as well as demonstrating the capabilities of modern computer controlled machine tooling.

Read more.

You are the computer

Way back when, computers were people. Problems were broken up into lots of little pieces, and shared across a room full of mathematicians armed with logarithmic tables, Napier's Bones, slide rules and the like. That way codes were analysed, paths plotted, and ballistic tables computed, ready to simplify the art of war. No one person knew the answer to the problem, they just had their little part of it, ready to deliver and add to the corpus that would become the final answer.

People still are computers, and the underlying concept carries across to ideas like Amazon's Mechanical Turk, where problems can be spread across many thousands of users, parallelising complex tasks. It's an approach that can help analyse air sea rescue photographs, or run art projects that simulate artificial intelligence. There's also something similar that happens when a problem goes viral across a social network. Names and addresses can be found as minor connections expand across the world, people identified, property returned.

Read more.

Software with everything

Back when I started my career in electronics and IT we used to say "Chips with everything". But those days are gone, and there's a new sheriff in town. Today it's "Software with everything".

Here's the thing: I bought a razor.

It's the best shave I've had in a long time: blades that stay sharp, an almost never-ending lubricant strip, and a handle that fits into my hand. Someone did a lot of work designing it, and it's become just part of the background of my life. Most of the day it sits on a shelf in a bathroom somewhere, only getting used on weekday mornings in the shower.

Here's the next thing: it turns out it’s a computer.

Read more.

IT security? You're doing it wrong!

Sometimes change is abrupt, sometimes it just sneaks up on you.

For quite some time I've been thinking about the impact of many different trends on the world of IT, as virtualisation and cloud combine with new devices and service-oriented application development to change the way we build and deliver applications. It's one of those megatrends that we can see pushing its way through the industry, leaving trails of service clouds in its wake. But while it's big and very very visible, it's not the biggest change facing IT departments across the world. That change is already here, and it’s one that's sneaked up on us, arriving from left field with little or no fanfare.

It all stems from that cloud trend, and from the other big elephant in the room – IT consumerisation. How do we manage devices we don't control, and in fact that we can’t control, in a world where information flows from device to device, from server to server, and between data centres and the cloud? It’s a complex world that is getting more and more complex every day, one where organisations are managing not just their hundreds and thousands of servers and desktops, but adding in tens of thousands of devices offering mobile computing and storage.

It’s a nightmare for traditional IT. Managing servers, desktops and applications just doesn't scale – and users don't take to IT departments applying the management techniques they've always used to their personal devices. Everything we know about it IT management has turned out to be wrong.

Read more.

Time for the usual irregular round up of recent posts I've written for our ZDNet blog...

A Little (Digital) Bit Of Me

There's a conversation I've been having with many different people over the years. It revolves around trying to understand how we use context to make IT easier to consume. We keep approaching answers from different directions, from the worlds of search, of knowledge management, of business analytics, from the smartphone platforms, to the tools that power web search. The aim is simple – how do we make sure the right people get the right piece of information at the right time to make the right decision? Call it "right time information" for want of a better phrase.

Science fiction writer friends of mine think of it as "intelligence amplification", tools that make us smarter. There's an aspect of that in our relationship with our smartphones. I often think of mine as a "memory prosthesis", a note taking and search tool in my pocket. Instead of remembering where the pictures hung on a wall we recently painted, I just photographed then with my iPhone and uploaded them into the cloud using Evernote. How often do you quickly look up something on Google or Wikipedia or IMDB in the middle of a conversation? Getting that little bit of an intelligence boost is a big win, especially with such a small device.

But there's also a downside. How many telephone numbers do you remember these days? Or do you (like me) just look them up in your phone's copious address book? And do you find yourself missing that pocket intelligence booster when confronted by rapacious data roaming charges?

Read more.

Is there still a logical flaw in Apple's maths?

The problem, of course, is not knowing just how Apple calculates signal strength. It's all in the algorithm, converting the received signal strength into those bars.

RF engineers measure signal strength in dBm, a logarithmic scale that has the advantage of being allowing engineers to display both very large and very small numbers in very little space, by referencing everything to 1mW. That means that 0dBm is equivalent to 1mW of received power - roughly the output of a Bluetooth radio at a range of 1m.

0dBm is actually a lot of power for a mobile phone to be receiving. You can expect a phone to be receiving around -10dBm or about 100μW. That's not very much at all, and the signal strength fluctuations resulting from the complex RF environment mobile phones operate in can mean significant variations down from that. But a big change in received power is only a small change in the measured dBm.

It's quite easy to imagine a group of software engineers being given a set of numbers by RF engineers to expect that this nice linear dBm scale is in fact a nice linear measure of power. When writing the code needed to converting those negative dBm numbers into a bar chart, it's also easy to see those software engineers using (say) a 3dBm drop in signal to remove one bar, not actually realising that that 3dBm drop is actually a 50% drop in the signal strength received by the phone.

Read more.

It's a small small (basic) world.

There's a big problem facing the IT world: Where are all the new developers going to come from?

I'm from the 8-bit generation. We had our Spectrums and our BBC Micros, all with built in BASICs of all shapes and sizes, able to start programming from the moment that flashing cursor appeared on the screen, even if it was as simple as printing our name on the screen in an endless loop. Fire up Windows or Mac OS X or even Linux and you're there in a shiny happy world of windows and icons and apps. There's plenty of interaction, but no code.

Is it any wonder that developers have gone to the web? JavaScript is the new BASIC, a simple language that's easy to use and easy to get results. There are plenty of free development tools, and plenty of web hosts were you can show the world your code. But object oriented loosely typed languages like JavaScript are best thought of as secondary school languages, needing a reasonable knowledge of just what programming is before you get started. It's not very BBC Micro…

Microsoft's been making educational computing waves this week. First there was reference to engaging with the hobbyist community in the leaked Windows 8 planning slides. Getting hobbyist developers on board is something that Microsoft has been trying to do for some years now, with initiatives like Coding4Fun and the free Visual Studio Express tools. They've had some impact, but they still need work to get your code online and running.

Read more.

Outlook: Cloudy

It's Wimbledon fortnight, and living in south west London I'm watching out for the inevitable clouds and rain, something that made me think about the other cloud...

I'm not really one to use cloud services. I like my data safe and sound on my desktop or on my servers. It's under control, I know just where it is, and the data protection registrar won’t be asking me where I keep that address book.

At least that's what I liked to think.

Not surprisingly it turns out that that's not actually the case.

I did a little personal cloud audit the other day, while playing with Microsoft's new Live Essentials tools, to discover I seem to be living the "software+services" life without realising it…

First there's the obvious, uploading my photos to Flickr and using Gmail and Hotmail as backup (and disposable) email. My social graph lives in Facebook, and there are all manner of websites and services I use for everything from ebooks to video. Some of the sites and services have even managed to supplant the physical - I use the SkyPlayer in my Media Center PC far more than I do the satellite dish on the outside of the house.

Read more.

The hidden roots of the web: fifty years of PLATO

Imagine a computer network when you can connect with thousands of other users, can play multiplayer games, chat online and share information across the world, explore complex documents that link between pages and between different elements of content – all on terminals with local memory and high resolution touch displays.

Sound familiar?

There’s just one thing.

It’s 1973.

Ten years before the PC, and nearly 30 before the consumer Internet, the University of Illinois’ PLATO laid the foundations for most of the modern computing world, innovating in a unique “can-do” culture and inspiring many folk who would go on to deliver PLATO-inspired software.

Read more.

TechEd. It's all about the Ed, not the Tech.

We’re currently in a hot and humid New Orleans with 11,000 IT pros and developers, at Microsoft’s TechEd North America event. It’s one of those events that helps you drill down into the deep and dark places that underpin Microsoft’s growing technology stack with the folk behind the tools and the services. It’s about what’s here today, and what IT professionals will be using in the next few months at their workplaces and in their and their cloud providers’ data centres.

It’s not an event where Microsoft launches big new tools and features (though it’s happy enough to show some things it’s working on). Which is why it’s odd that people are comparing it to Apple’s WWDC, and expressing dismay that all Microsoft launched was a service pack for server and desktops with VDI enhancements for Windows, an enterprise service bus for on-premises and in-cloud applications, and upgrades to its cloud platform. (Actually, I’d have thought that was plenty enough for the show’s IT pro audience, already working on desktop upgrades, virtualisation consolidations, and massive application roll outs.)

Enterprise IT is a very different kettle of fish from Apple’s refashioning as a consumer electronics company. Microsoft’s TechEd customers are spending millions of pounds and millions of dollars on building and running data centres and on keeping business critical applications supporting the businesses they power. They’re people who think long term, who plan carefully, and test everything several times before deploying. Setting up a stateless application running on top of a set of federated cross-business service oriented components is a long way away from a shiny metal iPhone – especially when the application is being built on top of the AppFabric platform and can run on-premises or on Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform.

Read more.

Please comment over there!

The ZDnet First Takes blog is one of the site's group blogs, where Mary and I regularly post quick reviews of devices and applications we've found on our travels...

Here are a couple of recent posts.

Outlook Social Connector beta 2 and the LinkedIn connector

Outlook gets LinkedIn.

Microsoft today rolled out the latest version of the Outlook Social Connector, its Xobni-like tools for exploring the social network in your mailbox. Built around Outlook’s own search tools, the Social Connector adds a new pane to Outlook’s reading view, filling it with links to mails you’ve exchanged with your correspondents, meetings you’ve had and will have had, as well as feeds from external social networks.

This is the second beta of OSC, the first shipping with the Office 2010 beta. The new release adds support for Outlook 2003 and 2007, as well as changing some of the connector’s APIs. Microsoft has been working with social network partners since the release of the first OSC beta, and this release adds functions and features that simplify connecting with external social networks. It’s a quick and easy install, and once you’ve downloaded and installed OSC you can install the first third-party plug-in, from business social network LinkedIn.


Configuring the LinkedIn OSC plugIn

Read more.

Sony Bloggie PM5

Sony’s PM5 Bloggie HD video camera was unveiled at CES 2010 in Las Vegas. They’re Sony’s answer to Cisco’s popular Flip, and they could have been just another pocket video camera. Instead the Bloggie is innovative and interesting, and together with Sony’s desktop software suite, it’s doing something very different with video.



At first glance the Bloggie looks very like a Flip. Designed to fit in a pocket, it’s small and compact, with a lens that rotates 270 degrees. Point the camera lens one way, and it’s a standard video camera, recording 720P HD video and taking 5MP still images. Rotate it the other, and you can film yourself while still seeing what’s being captured. That’s why Sony calls it the Bloggie, suggesting that video bloggers can use it to record themselves before using the built-in software to upload videos to the Internet.

The real innovation comes if you’ve bought the optional 360 degree lens adapter. All you need to do is swivel the camera so it’s vertical, and connect the adapter to the lens. The result is a recording of everything that happens around the camera – in a distorted fisheye view. You can see what’s going on, but it’s hard to parse the images. That’s where Sony’s software comes in. It unpacks the 360 degree view, turning it into a long, thin, undistorted panoramic video.

Read more.

A new issue in the post means that there are a batch of recent hands-on and tutorial pieces at IT Expert.

Backing up Exchange

Like any other database, Exchange needs a little TLC if you want to recover from any downtime.

There’s more to backing up Exchange than just running a server backup. For one thing, like any other database, Exchange’s databases can’t be safely copied without temporarily dismounting the Exchange Store. Installing Exchange on a Windows Server doesn’t add Exchange support to its built-in backup tools, and Exchange 2007 doesn’t have its own backup tool either – unless you’re using Exchange 2007 SP2’s new Volume Shadow Services plug-in (which backs up the entire store but doesn’t give you the granularity of specialised tools).

Finding the right Exchange backup tool can be hard. There are many different tools out there, with many different feature sets. However certain features are essential, and should be at the top of your shopping list. The first, and most important, is a tool that can back up and restore the entire Exchange mail store – including primary and secondary storage groups. Coming a close second is the ability to work with individual mailboxes, allowing selective recovery if an end user manages to completely wipe their mailbox. Then there are archive tools, which can archive individual messages, while still leaving them indexed and accessible, reducing the demand on disk space without causing compliance problems. If you’re considering Exchange backup and recovery as part of a disaster recovery plan, a continuous replication system can help keep primary and recovery mail servers in sync.

Read more.

Working with BES 5.0

A new BES brings a very different way of working with BlackBerrys, with a new Web-based administration console that makes life simpler and more complicated at the same time.
The latest version of Research in Motion’s BlackBerry Enterprise Server is a very different beast. You might think you’re installing the same old BES when you upgrade your customers’ systems, but once it’s up and running you’re going to find a lot of changes – and a lot of really useful features that will make managing your clients’ BlackBerrys a lot easier.

End users won’t see many changes at first, unless they’re using devices that have the new BlackBerry OS 5.0 (which will be new BlackBerry models and upgrades to existing handsets from the start of 2010). Once devices upgrade to OS 5.0, they’ll get significant improvements to the BlackBerry messaging tools, making them behave much more like Outlook. Where BES 5.0 excels over previous versions is the new Web console ‘administer anywhere’ capability, along with improved policies and enhanced management tools.

Read more.

Configuring and Using the 3CX Skype Gateway

Save money by connecting an IP PABX to Skype for low cost international calls from IP desk phones, not just PCs.

Skype is turning into an effective business tool, giving your clients cheap international calls, and free access to 800 numbers all over the world. But not everyone likes making calls from a PC. If you can bring Skype into a VoIP network with IP handsets, it can become just another way to make calls, only at much lower rates.

If you’re using the 3CX VoIP system, this is simple. You can treat Skype as just another gateway for VoIP calls, alongside the supported hardware and software gateways. 3CX has another advantage; unlike many other VoIP systems, it’s both simple and free. It runs on Windows Server and the management tools use the built-in IIS Web server (and run as an ASP.NET Web application). Installation is easy and the free version provides many of the telephony features that a small business will need. If your clients need more, you can add functionality with the pay-for options, which also include support. If you find 3CX popular among your clients, there’s a reseller programme.

Read more.

Don't you just love the little BlackBerry guy they used to illustrate my piece on BES?

We're still blogging away over at ZDnet. In fact, some of our posts over there are getting quite long. Some are also more than a little silly. Here are three more recent entries, on odd naming choices, on unusual places to find multi-touch technologies, and on the Apple/Adobe HTML5/Flash wars. There's a lot of fun stuff happening in the world of technology at the moment, and we're really enjoying finding out about it and sharing it with the world.

So, without further ado, the first couple of paragraphs of each piece, along with a link to the rest.

When product naming clashes with H.P. Lovecraft

H.P Lovecraft's dark, weird fantastic fiction has become the first open source literature, where other writers have taken his mythos and his nihilistic view of human life in a dark and hostile universe and run with it.

Perhaps it is a vision of a dark and hostile mobile future, dominated by uncaring monstrosities that has driven Intel and Nokia to give their new mobile OS joint venture a name that comes straight from the pages of Lovecraft (or near enough for most purposes). It's just that the name they've chosen, MeeGo, is far too close to that of an animated, intelligent, malevolent fungus, the Mi-Go.

Read more.

Touch me somewhere else for a change

Multi-touch isn’t just for tablets. It’s soon going to be everywhere, as the underlying technologies (whether resistive, capacitive or optical) solve many complex user interface problems. Take the humble keyboard for example.

You’d think it was a simple piece of work, and something that couldn’t be made any better. However gamers and CAD users will tell you something quite different. It turns out that there’s a problem with the matrix of connections that connect each keyswitch together. Press too many at once and the keyboard controller can’t detect which keys are pressed. That’s why there’s anti-ghosting controls in your keyboard, tools that block certain key combinations from occurring. That complex combination of keys you need to finish a CAD model or to take down a gang of zombies? Sorry. It’s impossible. And what’s more annoying, different keyboards have different matrix layouts, and different key combinations locked out by anti-ghosting – even the wonderful classic IBM microswitch keyboards.

Read more.

Flash Fried?

The biggest problem with the Adobe/Apple Flash spat is that it’s being fought on the wrong ground.

Flash isn’t just about video on web pages, or animated adverts, or even about plugins versus HTML 5. As soon as you get into talking about those things, Adobe is bound to come off worst. After all, we all love open standards, and above all, we all love the open web. We don’t want to load extra applications to watch video, and we don’t want to have garish adverts thrust at us while we trying to read the news.

If you look at it in those terms, then Apple’s right to not put Flash on the iPhone and the iPad. Why burden users with code they don’t need? Web standards do everything the iPhone’s users want, and if they don’t, well, there’s an app for that.

The trouble is: that’s Flash nearly five years ago.

Read more.

Feel free to comment over at ZDnet!

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. 

Read More.

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.

Read More

Feel free to comment over at ZDnet!

I've created a syndicated feed for our ZDnet UK techblog 500 Words Into The Future.

500wordsrss

Enjoy.

A couple of recent pieces at ZDNet, as I flex my newswriting skills.

First, a piece on the Conservative Party's commitment to privacy rights and the roll-back of the database state. It's the first time I've seen folk from Privacy International, ORG and Liberty agreeing with the Tories...

The Conservative Party has promised to reduce government databases and introduce stronger measures to protect people's privacy, if it wins the next general election.

The shadow justice secretary, Dominic Grieve, on Wednesday introduced a policy paper, Reversing the Rise of the Surveillance State, that outlines 11 measures to achieve these goals.

Overall, the Conservatives are calling for fewer massive central government databases, stronger data-protection rules and fewer access rights — for both central and local government — to the information that is already been stored.

The party also pledged to introduce a greater focus on privacy, in both the public and private sectors.

"Government should be guided by the principle of proportionality, which means that fewer personal details are accurately recorded and held by specific authorities on a need-to-know basis only, and for limited periods of time justified on the basis of operational necessity," the Conservatives said in the policy paper.

And then (only just online), a quick first look at the Technical Preview of Microsoft's Office Web Apps. Is there finally competition for Google Docs from the Office suite? (The quick verdict: not yet, but there's still a long ways to go...)

Microsoft has unveiled a technical preview of its newly christened Microsoft Office Web Apps services.

The preview is an early first look, according to Office client product manager Chris Adams, who told ZDNet UK that the release was "by no means feature complete".

The technical preview was released on Thursday to a limited group of users, with a public beta due later in the year. Promised functionality that is missing from the preview includes cloud-mediated collaboration features — only Excel will support co-authoring for now, and only in the browser.

Out of the Web Apps, Excel and PowerPoint are the only Web Apps in the preview that allow the user to edit documents, leaving Word with only a viewer. According to Adams, "the goal with the first release of Web Apps was really to provide lightweight editing functionality and a high-fidelity viewing experience".

Files are stored in Microsoft's SkyDrive cloud storage service, which gives users 25GB of storage. Applications have a similar look and feel to the desktop Office suite, featuring the familiar ribbon user interface and the same icons. Excel has many of the formatting features shown in the desktop Office technical preview, such as Sparklines, while the Word viewer includes in-line search tools.

More to come, I'm sure!

A couple of recent news pieces on ZDNet UK:

First , on the RTM release of Windows 7:

Microsoft has finalised the Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 code and released it to manufacturing.

The announcement, made on Wednesday, marks the last engineering stage for both products before their scheduled release to the public on 22 October. Microsoft has spent nine months working on Windows 7 and the Windows Server update since demonstrating them at its Professional Developer Conference last year.

There is very little difference between the RTM (released it to manufacturing) versions and the release candidates that have been widely available since May, according to Microsoft executives who took part in a conference call about the announcement.

"Frankly, we didn't anticipate any major changes, and that's proven to be true", said Rich Reynolds, general manager for Windows commercial marketing. "The code is ready for the masses".

Read more.

And then, on the Windows 7 family pack, and the fact that it may not make it to the UK (where I get to share a byline with CNet's Ina Fried):

Microsoft plans to offer a 'family pack' for Windows 7 that can be used on up to three PCs in the US, but is not sure whether it will be sold in the UK.

The software maker acknowledged it would sell the bundle, which allows three installations of the Home Premium version of the operating system, in a blog post on Tuesday. However, in a conference call on the release to manufacturing of Windows 7 on Wednesday, Microsoft executives acknowledged that the family pack may not be released in Europe, including the UK.

"We're evaluating that, to see how attractive it will be to the market and how effective, as it's been designed for upgrades, and in Europe we will be having the 'E' versions, which are full versions," John Curran, director of the Windows Client group at Microsoft UK, said in the call.

Read more.

It you've got an Xbox 360 and 400 Microsoft points (about £3.40), then run, don't walk, to the Community Channel and download Kodu.

Learning to program has never been so much fun - and the simple graphical programming environment lets kids of all ages build their own apps. I was programming seconds after downloading the code, and there's a whole world of functionality I've yet to explore

To be blunt: Kodu just rocks. It's educational programming done right for today's console generation. This is their BBC Micro.



Here's why:

Learning to program used to be easy. Turn on a BBC Micro and you'd be ready to write your first BASIC program, and Sinclair's machines had programming shortcuts printed on their plastic keys. Then there was Logo, with its simple approach that let beginner programmers build more and more complex behaviours for its turtle cursor.

But something went wrong along the way. Good old BASIC vanished, and along with it the fun of programming. It was work now, and that's the way it always would be. Kids would play games on consoles before growing up to write Visual Basic applications in the office. Programming was now officially boring.

A group of researchers at Microsoft Research had a different idea. People had experimented with visual programming techniques before (remember the keypad on the back of BigTrak?), and applications like Microsoft's Robotics Studio were mixing it with declarative programming concepts

Experiments like Popfly had shown there was interest in programming for what Microsoft's Jon Montgomery called the "non-programmer" – the person who puts a Facebook badge or a Yahoo! widget on their web page. However the Microsoft Research work went in a completely different direction, bringing visual programming to the world of gaming.

Read more at TechRadar.

Look - it's got a turtle!