Troubleshooting 7
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in support, Beta, Windows, Microsoft on
I’m writing this blog entry on a run of the mill Dell XPS laptop. The only thing that’s different from the laptop you can buy today is that it’s running the pre-beta build of Windows 7 that’s been distributed here at Microsoft’s Professional Developers Conference in LA.
You’ve seen the reviews all over the web, and you’ve read the analysis of the effects on the Vista marketplace, and of Microsoft’s changing role in the industry. Let’s take that all as read, and use this as an opportunity to drill down into one of Windows 7’s more interesting new features.
One thing about the PDC, it’s an excellent place to meet Microsoft staff who rarely leave Redmond, and to learn more about the issues of programming and developing Windows applications. Unlike TechEd, it’s an event that looks at the future of Windows, and it regularly unveils new tools and technologies. We spent the week talking to people, and listening to all kinds of presentation.
Much of what’s been written about Windows 7 focuses on its consumer features - but there are a lot of things in the next Windows for the IT pro - many of which will make your lives a lot easier. New self service tools in the OS make it a lot easier to manage, as your users will be able to solve many common problems without having to call a help desk.
Windows 7 will identify and help solve problems with the new Troubleshooting control panel. Just type “fix” in the search bar to see a list of troubleshooting options. Alternatively you can use the new Solution Center to see where you need to start finding solutions.
The Troubleshooting control panel has 8 categories, each of which is full of the top issues that have been reported to Microsoft. If you look at the Programs section you’ll find tools for managing program compatability, along with quick fixes for Media Player and web browsing. All in there are over 100 listed root causes, with common solutions. There may be one or more solutions to a problem, and you’re given the option of trying them each individually or all at once. Just click OK and your machine should be running normally again.
The underlying technology is that old favourite, PowerShell, and that means it should be possible to write your own troubleshooting scripts for your own applications. It also means that you’ll be able to push management scripts to remote machines, pre-emptively fixing problems if you start seeing your users all accessing the same problem information.
I’ve already used it once, to enable the built-in bio-metric scanner on my laptop, as Windows didn’t come with drivers. The troubleshooter tracked down the Vista drivers, and gave me the appropriate download link - all in a single dialogue box, with no intervention from a system administrator…
With tools like this in Windows 7, you’ll be able to invest your time in developing new applications and services (and maybe investigating new platforms like Azure), rather than answering the phone. If your users need hand-holding, why not delegate that to Windows…
–Simon
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When will Windows Live stop treating CardSpace as the unwanted stepchild?
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Privacy, Identity, Networking, Server, Microsoft on
The cloud demands identity. Microsoft has a strong, secure, privacy-friendly identity technology that’s open, easy to federate and will transform the Web and the cloud. So why is Windows Live ignoring CardSpace?
OpenID is a great tool for logging in to a Web site that you want to use but don’t need to trust. You wouldn’t want to use OpenID to get into your banking site because it’s just not secure enough, but it’s great for not having to remember passwords for LiveJournal, Dopplr, Plaxo and the like. You log into one site and tell the others to ask that site who you are. OpenID is getting less vulnerable, but it’s simply not intended to protect really important information.
The information card system is secure; it’s protected by cryptographic keys, it’s got a user interface that makes it very clear when you’re being asked to log in to a site, what the site wants to know about you and it lets you choose from a ‘wallet’ of cards to prove your identity. That gives you security and privacy and ease of use together (which improves security by stopping people using the same password everywhere. Microsoft put it into Vista and Internet Explorer 7 as CardSpace (information cards are the generic system and there are implementations that you can use in Firefox and Safari, on Macs and Linux machines, CardSpace is just the Microsoft implementation).
And since then, I’ve been waiting for Microsoft to deliver the next pieces. A token server that a business can use to issue its own information cards, and to validate them so you can use them for access to internal apps, preferably federated so you can also validate partners. And a public service that issues not just the self-certified cards that anyone can create with their public details but managed cards that have useful information that you want to protect. When you wave your passport or driving licence in an American bar, the bar doesn’t - or shouldn’t take a copy of it; they just need to know you’re old enough to have one. Put your birthday into a managed card and you can prove that you’re over 16 for a shopping site without handing over details that could help someone hack your bank account if the site loses its customer details on a USB stick, because the site only gets the assertion that you’re old enough, not the actual day, month and year.
Issuing cards was going to be a function of ADFS at one point, because it fits with where enterprises store identity information; for development and resource reasons it went on and off the feature list and now it’s going to be a free component in Windows Server 2008 (and maybe other versions), code-named Project Geneva. Currently in beta at www.microsoft.com/geneva, there will be a feature-complete beta in the first half of 2009 and a final version in the second half. It leverages AD and SAML and x509, it interoperates with a wide range of line of business applications and it makes using secure identities easy in a business.
That just leaves a managed card service for those of us who aren’t in a big business and I’m still waiting. And in the PDC keynote today, Microsoft announced that Windows Live ID would be issuing a new kind of identity - but it’s not information cards.
So why is Windows Live ID proudly announcing that it’s issuing OpenIDs but not CardSpace IDs? Is it because OpenID is accepted by a lot of sites? So are information cards, and if you could get an identity you could trust from Windows Live other sites would be more likely to adopt them - because it’s easy to use Windows Live ID instead of running your own username and password system.
Is it because OpenID is, well, open?
CardSpace is the most open project Microsoft has ever done. The architect, Kim Cameron, has almost single-handedly changed the perception of Microsoft in the identity community, which isn’t bad for a company that was so roundly derided for Passport. The open nature of information cards “just isn’t up for discussion” Cameron said to me (before plunging into a discussion with senior VP Bob Muglia about why you can’t constrain the scope of identity to just in the cloud or just on the server or just on the Web or just on the desktop).
Is it because CardSpace 2 is going to better than CardSpace 1? It will let you transfer information cards from one PC to another, and when you go back to a site you’ve used an information card with before, CardSpace 2 will show you the card you used last - which means that even if a phishing site accepts information cards to try and fool you, you’ll be able to tell (and the phishing site isn’t going to get the details out of your card so scammers can’t steal it). But Microsoft has adopted the first version of plenty of its own technologies even when there has been something new and better just around the corner. And issuing managed cards today, cards that have been verified and are backed by an identity provider, would be a huge step forward.
If it’s because Microsoft wants somebody else to issue managed cards because a supermarket or a post office or a government already has relationships with people and systems for handling information - or because they look like a more natural place to prove your identity because they can prove that you have a loyalty card or a post office box or a passport - then I’d say yes, but you can’t wait for that to happen. Once the first managed identity provider proves its value then banks and services that sell you certificates will join in, but you can’t keep on waiting to go first them to go first.
I wonder if it’s the legacy of Passport. Maybe the Live team wants to be extra sure they don’t rush out with an implementation that could have problems and create another Passport backlash. Or maybe they aren’t comfortable with the way that CardSpace takes the power of identity away from the provider and gives it back to the user; issuing managed information cards would be admitting once and for all that Microsoft is never going to own user identities in the way that Passport envisaged. Everyone I’ve met from the Windows Live team so far is smarter than that, which leaves me confused. Because it’s ludicrous that Microsoft has a far superior identity technology to OpenID that it’s getting ready to offer to businesses and it hasn’t even talked about how to bring it to everyday Web users who need it just as much.
-Mary
Rated: 60% (4 votes)
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Under the MacBook hood with NVIDIA
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Processors, Silicon, Hardware, Laptop, Apple on
Apple’s switch from basing its laptops on Intel chipsets to NVIDIA’s new 9400M series has raised more than a few eyebrows. There’s a good reason for that switch, as I discovered when I had a conversation with NVIDIA’s Rene Haas last week.
In the past mobile graphics chips have been a poor cousin to their desktop relations. Some may have the same product numbers, but a fraction of the power. With the advent of technologies like OpenGL and the rise of General Purpose GPU computing (GPGPU), laptop GPUs looked like they were being left far behind. Popular software is starting to take advantage of GPU computing, with companies like Adobe taking advantage of GPU programming to accelerate and smooth operations in its latest version of the CS imaging and design suite. You couldn’t get the smooth rotations and zooms in Photoshop CS4 without OpenGL - and if your chipset doesn’t support it, you’ll just get an error message.
Apple’s new machines aren’t just using the 9400M for OpenGL. There’s a lot more to the chips than GPUs (though the 16 GPU cores take up most of the silicon). The chips also include much of the core system hardware you usually find as separate chips. The result brings the Northbridge and Southbridge into the same package, using much less real estate and allowing motherboards to be less than 1/2 the size, and at the same time giving increased graphics performance for the same power footprint. Laptops get better gaming performance, and applications get better user interface effects.
The MacBook’s improved video performance has been noticed, and it’s down to the 9400M’s built-in HD video support. There’s hardware support for the H.264 HD video codec Apple uses for its iTunes movies, as well as support for many of the decryption techniques needed to work with DVDs and BluRay. While Apple may not support BluRay yet, Windows will with Vista’s SP2 release, and NVIDIA’s chips handle the AES encryption used on BluRay discs, as well as handling high-end features like BD-Live.
The MacBook Pro shows off another of NVIDIA’s features, Hybrid SLI, which lets hardware developers add a second GPU for more processing power when it’s needed - turning it off when it’s additional boost is unnecessary. The Pro has an additional 9600MGT which can be used for gaming or intensive image processing - using more power than when a single GPU is used for word processing or web browsing
So why is NVIDIA producing this new chip? The main reason is the size of the laptop market. New laptops will outsell desktops by a large margin by 2012, and users want the same performance in their bags as well as on their desks. Only a small proportion of notebooks have discrete GPUs, with most using integrated graphics. GPUs need to compete with integrated chipsets on price, form factor and performance, so this is where a new single chip solution comes in to play.
There an interesting caveat to this story, too. NVIDIA’s CUDA GPGPU framework has become an interesting tool for developers who want to work with massively parallel application programming on GPUs. In the past it’s been resistant to talking about other GPGPU frameworks - but the Apple relationship is changing that. Apple has announced that it wil be supporting the OpenCL GPGPU APIs in the Snow Leopard release of OS X, and as a result, NVIDIA will be supporting OpenCL access to its CUDA frameworks. Supercomputer performance in a laptop will be a very interesting side effect of the 9400M chips.
This isn’t an exclusive deal with Apple, either. There will be more laptop manufacturers switching to this approach in future - so we can look forward to a much better laptop experience with Windows and Linux in the future.
–Simon
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I can see clearly now
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in smartphone, Web browser, Mobile, Apple on
The other day I finally bit the bullet, and traded in my old Blackberry Pearl for a shiny iPhone. I’d been using one to write some tutorials for IT Pro, and had finally got used to its touch keyboard - and had become used to the large screen and the high quality web browsing experience. I’d also started playing with the AppStore, and had found applications like Evernote, which promised to bring web, phone and desktop together. My memory is pretty bad most of the time, and a tool that could help me remember the things I’d seen seemed to be a rather good idea.
There was just one problem - the iPhone’s camera. I’m not complaining about its 2Mpx resolution, or even the lack of a video feed. They’re all par for the course with a cameraphone (unless you plump for those phones that are more camera than phone), and the iPhone’s is actually a pretty decent camera - most of the time. Where it falls down is its focal length. It’s great for portraits, for landscapes, as it’s a fixed focus camera that can keep most things in focus - as long as they’re more than about three feet away.
Using Evernote I found I was wanting to take photographs of pieces of text: the backs of business cards, notes scrawled on napkins, whiteboards. Evernote has a good online OCR service, putting OCR in the cloud and not on the phone, but it couldn’t cope with the iPhone’s blurry out of focus images.
Last week I got an email from the PR for Griffin, best known as one of the original iPod accessory companies. They’d just announced a new “business” case for the iPhone 3G, one that included what could be the solution to my iPhone text photography problem.
What was it?
A macro lens.
A couple of years ago Mary and I looked at a barcode recognition service that Microsoft Research was trying out. Like me, they’d found that phone cameras couldn’t cope with close-ups. They’d chosen to have stick on macro lenses manufactured, and for some time my tubby HTC Titan had a strange extra lens on the back.
Griffin’s Clarifi case is less obtrusive, with a little extra lens that slides over the camera slot in the case. It’s a workable solution, and it’s easy to quickly put the lens in place when you want to take a close-up photograph.
The million dollar question is, of course, “does it work?”. The answer is a qualified yes. It’s not perfect (but then plastic lenses rarely are), but it is a considerable improvement over Apple’s standalone fixed-focus implementation.
Here’s the before:
And here’s the after:
It’s not perfect, but it works pretty well!
One more step along the road to finding my ideal portable device.
Rated: 80% (1 votes)
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Email is the new smoking
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in People, Enterprise, Business, Email on
Doing email has the same random gratification built in as playing the slots, with the added excuse that a lot of it is work-related and sending or replying to a lot of email and emptying your inbox feels like you’ve got a lot done. Usually though, you’ve either asked other people to do things or, in my case, confirmed what real work I’ll be doing when I can drag myself away from the inbox. After all, I have email in my pocket most of the time, I have a laptop in the bedroom….
Except. I check email on the go when I’m waiting for a message, or when I’m on a tube and don’t have a book. I use the bedroom laptop for email, LiveJournal (a mix of blog and social network), Web surfing
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Analytics get distributed, parallel and mathematical
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in data warehouses, analytics, Applications, Storage on
We had a very interesting conversation today, talking about the next generation of business analytics with folk from Greenplum. The most interesting piece of their story was just how their application works with data.
With no legacy to build on, the Greenplum engineers could take a very different architectural approach. Traditional databases use a single store, and a single query engine. Greenplum’s tools break data up into parcels, sharing it across every machine in their data processing network. A central server keeps track of where the data is held, and manages queries - which can be broken up and delivered to the appropriate servers, the results being assembled by the controller. Supercomputer aficionados will immediately spot that Greenplum are using a shared-nothing approach, where queries can run in parallel on sections of the data - speeding things up considerably. Having a master controller handling scheduling means you can even use unmatched hardware for your data servers.
Complex joins can be handled in a similar manner, with queries moving data between servers and assembling results on many different processors. With quad core a commodity, and six and eight following close behind, it’s not going to be difficult to build a powerful data processing farm (and use the same hardware for other tasks when you don’t need high level analytics).
There’s another spin out of the architecture - you can mix different query types in one analytic operation. With Greenplum’s tools you can mix SQL with Google’s MapReduce, and even throw in the R statistical language for complex mathematical operations. Modelling is an important piece of business analytics, and means that Greenplum’s tools are able to compete with high-end analytical tools like SAS. There are plenty of interesting use cases here - perhpas you’re currently working with massive data sets that take a week to process and a day or so to feed into predictive models. With Greenplum you’ll be able to load the data in parallel and run your statistical models on the data - giving you a considerable speed advantage.
Moore’s Law has hit the wall. Intel’s spectacular U-turn showed as much, as clock speeds dropped and the number of cores went up. That’s left software developers with something of a challenge -
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Should you worry about power costs
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Enterprise, Futures, Hardware on
Rising oil prices and financial uncertainty might not be the only reasons the electricity that runs your data centre could get more expensive. A cold winter might mean brownouts and blackouts, which means now is a good time to check your UPS capacity.
It took 21 gigawatts to send Marty Back to the Future. Britain generates 70-74gW on its own but with six out of ten nuclear power stations out of action and the usual ‘routine maintenance’ we’re down to about 57gW. That’s fine as long as the weather stays mild, but if we get an early cold snap demand could peak around 62gW. It’s more likely that the energy companies will just buy more electricity from France and put the price up to compensate than that we’ll see energy rationing or unexpected power cuts. Either way, you need to plan ahead.
Should you really worry? Owen Cole, the technical director at F5 Networks, thinks so. “There is currently debate around whether the UK faces a real electricity shortage in the near future. Given that there is credible, independent research to suggest there is a real threat, enterprises have no choice but to incorporate this scenario into their business continuity and disaster recovery planning
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Credit crunch doesn
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in People, Enterprise, Business, HP on
It’s still about adding value according to HP’s software and services VP Tom Hogan. He was presenting to a group of 30 IT executives in London the other day and he thought he’d respect the mood of the moment. “I was very intentionally talking about cost reduction and efficiency because of all the uncertainty in the world economy. I wanted to pound the point on how IT can help save money,” he told us. But he’d read the mood wrong for the UK.
“It was interesting how many people said ‘Great, but we really don’t care about that. What we care about is how can we add more value in our line of business, because senior executives are still willing to spend more if they get the value from IT.’ It makes a point in this time of uncertainty. Ten years ago when the world was so unstable, IT would have been in shutdown. Now IT is so key that they’re still thinking about what to do next.”
Will what they do next include buying HP software? Take Mercury and Opsware and the ‘business technology optimisation’ tools that HP has built with them. They’re not tools for doing business with IT; they’re tools for turning IT into a business, for giving the IT department KPIs and scorecards they can track the way other business units do. Investing in IT that does IT might not be top of the shopping list tactically, but a real CIO does strategy these days.
Salesforce recently commissioned a survey of UK CIOs at small companies; Ian Parkes who conducted the research calls CIOs an endangered species. “They’re going to be rebranded as the chief operating officer or even removed. They’ve got to show value add, but they are not able to articulate it from the point view of looking for investment. Too often they do not have sufficient power to do what you would imagine a CIO would do, they are not board members and they don’t have that level of power or credibility within the organization.”
If you want to spend money on IT at the moment, you’re going to have to be able to explain the value and explain it in business terms.
-Mary
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Ruby in the Studio
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Software, Developer, Windows, Microsoft on
A while back Microsoft announced that it was changing the licensing requirements for Visual Studio. Yes, it probably was a response to the success of Eclipse, but it also changed the way Microsoft worked with development tools partners. Two significant announcements today show that it’s a strategy that is starting to pay off.
So what did Microsoft do? First, anyone could get access to the Visual Studio IDE. That meant you could use its editor, and its code completion tools with any language. You could host anything yyou liked in the Visual StudioShell, using it for modelling tools, for programming, or for just about anything you wanted. A generic multi-pane shell could host just about any application, from a E-911 call centre hub, to a (dare we say it in these times of crisis) bank trading desk.
The second part of the change was one of the most significant. Now you didn’t need to target Windows with your development tools. That meant you could use Visual Studio to host a PHP editor working against UNIX Apache web servers, or a development tool for Android or BlackBerry.
One of the tools announced today works in just that way. SapphireSteel’s Ruby In Steel is a Ruby On Rails development tool, built entirely inside the Visual Studio Shell. You can running the resulting code on any Ruby interpreter - whether it’s a Windows version (like Microsoft’s own IronRuby) or one running on a Linux web server somewhere on Amazon’s hosted RedHat EC2 servers.
While Ruby In Steel is a commercial tool,
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T9 through your menus as well as texts
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Telecoms, Beta, Toys & gadgets, Windows Mobile, Mobile on
Nuance is finally bringing out the version of Extended T9 that suggests features on your phone as well as words you’re trying to type. That’s only 20 months after I saw it at Mobile World Congress so you can colour me impatient, and today you can only download it for S60 devices and not Windows Mobile. Before the end of the year Nuance promises to announce a ’significant’ handset manufacturer and two operator deals for T9nav.
The way it works is that you just start typing, from the idle screen of the phone; if you type 258 you might be dialling a number that starts with 258, or you might be calling the Blue Note Cafe in Glastonbury, or you might be looking for ‘Blue Moon’ in your music library, or you might be trying to turn Bluetooth on. T9nav will give you a list of all those options and you can get things done with three or four clicks rather than navigating through menu after menu after menu after menu…
Michael Whers, the VP for evangelism at Nuance also showed me the voice control version, VSuite 3.x, which lets you say ’send a text to Chris Green’ plus a prototype dictation service that lets you dictate the text of the text, so to speak. The voice control runs on the handset, even on a basic feature phone, because there’s only so many commands you need to recognise; the dictation runs on a server in the cloud because you need a more powerful machine to recognise all the words you might want to use in a message. The real barrier to good voice recognition isn’t the phone - it’s the cheap headsets most people use which either have a cheap microphone or worse still, nose cancellation that just filters out the white noise and flattens the signal so much that voice recognition doesn’t work. Another prototype, Voice Search, lets you ask questions like ‘what hotels are there in Palo Alto, California’ and get not just a list of Web results but a list of Google Map links to the hotels.
Wehrs showed that running on an iPhone, although the app isn’t on the App Store for reasons he didn’t want to go into. He also pulled out another unreleased product; the HTC Star Trek flip phone running Windows Mobile Professional, with a Fake Cursor application to give you a mouse pointer so you can use the touch-screen interface without a touch screen on the device. As a dedicated Windows Mobile Standard user (you can have my HTC Excalibur when you pry it out of my hand and replace it with something in the same form factor that has 3G and GPS), I suspect this is a gimmick - the interface is designed for tapping with a stylus or a fingernail, but most of the applications I tried worked surprisingly well with the fake cursor. Don’t hold your breath though; it could be another 20 months before anything like this ships.
-Mary
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