Crazy as it sounds but have Microsoft fallen on hard times?

It’s a little different from the usual definition of being broke when they have so much money in the bank there probably isn’t enough “stuff” in the world for them to spend it on. Nevertheless, things are not looking up.

When Windows 95 was released, queues waited all night to buy it, even in countries where queues are more usually found between P and R. Some customers bought a copy before they had a computer to run it on. We haven’t seen anything like the excitement for Vista, nor has Microsoft made such a splash. No more paying the Rolling Stones a gazzillion dollars for a back catalogue track as they did with Start Me Up.

Pay for software?
In the past Microsoft have been able to rely on price being their advantage over Apple and others’ operating systems. They realised that no-one likes paying for software and hid the true cost of Windows in the purchase price of a new computer, riding on the back of ever-decreasing hardware prices. Following this course, there had to come a point where computers got so ridiculously cheap they became virtually free, as in the case of printers. Manufacturers would have to make their profits in consumables which is not likely to happen as electricity companies have captured that market. Similarly, most PC users stick with the operating system their computer arrives with so a new OS has to be something really special to generate direct sales.

When buying a version of Vista the true cost comes to light. PC World list eight ranging from a hundred quid for the severely cut-down version, up to £350 for the full Monty. Compare this with a copy of Linux and OpenOffice for free, or the single, full version of Mac OS X for £89 including delivery. Not only that, Microsoft dictate exactly where you can put your new software. Change the CPU in your PC and you have to get a new version of Vista. The words rip and off come to mind.

Obviously Vista use will increase as it is shipped on new computers but it seems Microsoft cannot compete on price alone especially as Apple reduced the cost of its own computers to match all but the cheapest PCs. When buying a computer the iPod generation may well look at a new Mac and think that as it runs all the other operating systems it might be the best one to go for. If they don’t like Mac OS X they can always run Windows instead and let’s face it, Macs do look cool. This could suit the rebellious nature of the young who look to grandad’s Mac rather than the Windows PC ma and pa want them to use.

Best of breed?
Another course open to Microsoft is to make their operating system the best of breed. It isn’t Mac snobbery that makes me think this is hardly likely to happen. Windows has been, at times, mediocre at best. Maybe not XP and Vista but I haven’t used it yet and note there have been several vulnerabilities found already and many devices and applications are unable run Vista until drivers are rewritten. At least DOS has gone for good, about 20 years too late.

Apple’s move in the 1990s to a modern operating system based on BSD Unix came just in time to save the company. The development tools, many of which come free with Mac OS X, have enabled Apple to create new applications rapidly and grow into completely diverse directions. They have turned from a computer company into a tight-knit, fast moving and fluid organisation who in a single bound have sewn up the music download industry. They are on-course to do the same for films, or at least compete with the best, and their next move will take them into direct competition with the likes of Nokia. Compare that with the monolithic nature of Microsoft, who, despite or because of enormous resources and hundreds of personnel, move at the speed of a pregnant yak.

What does the future hold?
Where are Microsoft now? Their .Net ambitions seem unfulfilled, the XBox has an uncertain future, tablet computers are hardly a daily sight, their iPod-beater seems beaten already and Microsoft Office is facing severe competition. The latter coming from two completely different directions, one in the form of OpenOffice and its derivatives adopted by governments around the world fed up with paying the Windows tax; the other from Google who also beat Microsoft when it came to search engines. Google’s free software is all that many computer users need, open source software supplying the rest. The latest move with Office using Open XML, a new proprietary file format, albeit one they have put up for ISO acceptance, is hardy likely to gain more users and especially as older versions of Office will not be able to open its files. The very similar OpenDoc format has ISO approval already and is native in OpenOffice.

In Dickens’ Hard Times, Thomas Gradgrind promotes a philosophy of rationalism, self-interest and fact above fanciful and imaginative pursuits until circumstances changed his view and he devoted the rest of his life to helping the poor the sick and the needy. It all sounds a bit like the latest I’m a Mac/PC ads and what became of rich old Bill.

I’ve been designing books lately. Usually a certain publisher’s books are a couple of hundred pages long, nearly all text and made as one file. Last week’s started in similar vein but when chapters 3 to 12 arrived, along came hundreds of graphics to extract from Excel, converted to Postscript in Illustrator before including in the book. This should have meant making the book in chapters, splitting each into its own file. These then orchestrated by the QuarkXPress book pallet, which sorts out the page numbers, starting positions for the first page (left or right) and so on. But by then it seemed too much effort. Bad choice!

Things went well until page 300 or so when chapter 10’s text flowed in. Calamity! QuarkXPress crashed, corrupting the file and refused to re-open it. The back-up copy, only a morning’s work behind, was opened and snooped around for indications as to what caused the crash.

Does anyone know how to use Word? This is the world’s most popular text processing package, although why is completely beyond my comprehension. For some reason the author had used multiple “languages” in their Word documents and as the text flowed in, the QuarkXPress file ended up having them all. Usually Word documents are still stuck in US settings, I don’t think I’ve ever found a British author who has changed this. As well as being full of tab-tab-tabbing or space-space-spacing to turn a line over, and return-return-returned to move to the next page. Worse still is leaving the amendments un-approved so that both the existing text and their suggested alterations are included in the book.

The other cause for the crash was a new one to us and took a while to solve. The author had set up style-sheets with similar names except for adding a digit so that “body text indented” became “body text indented 1″, “body text indented 2″, “body text indented 3″ and so on. As their text flowed into QuarkXPress these had been recognised except for the digit at the end so eventually there were 15 or so “body text” style-sheets. Trying to delete these crashed QuarkXPress. Another favourite problem solver half worked - saving the file as QuarkXPress version 6 and opening it in the old version of the program. The document was fine there, style-sheets deleted but on saving, it wouldn’t re-open in version 7.

Things looked bad, a week’s work up the spout unless a solution could be found. It was, simply by using the QuarkXPress Append function and selecting a body text style-sheet from another document to replace the “bad” ones. This deleted all the other unwanted ones at the same time and all was well. Needlesstosay, new documents were made for each chapter with the text and graphics, luckily made to run in-line with the text, cut and pasted into place.

Phew!

Why can’t we send files at the same speed as we download them? Workers in the graphics industry, printers, designers, publishers and the like, have been at the cutting edge of data-comms. The industry was arguably the first to become digital in the 1980’s, largely on the back of the Apple Macintosh systems of their time and forward-looking publishers such as Eddie Shah. Since then it has needed to transport huge amounts of data.

At first this could only be done out of house via floppy disks and soon, various types of removable or transportable hard disks too over the role. Apple abandoned the floppy nearly a decade ago but in the old days it was possible to put an 8 page newsletter onto a 1.4MB floppy because the images were added separately. Scanners were then so expensive they remained in the multi-thousand pound pricing point. As their price dropped, designers could take over even more of the page layout role and make yet another group of workers redundant. Typesetters, compositors, film planners, plate-makers and proof readers had already gone, now the scanner operators were next as flatbed scanners dropped in price and photography went digital.

The end result is as we see today with full-colour publications being created entirely digitally. Recent jobs done here have been multi-gigabyte in size and have to be transported via hard disks or DVDs and even then with images compressed as dreadfully damaging jpeg instead of the preferred LZW compressed tiff format.

Smaller jobs can just as easily be sent electronically and have been so, first via modem for a few megabytes, then ball-bustingly expensive ISDN for up to 100MB and now ADSL and cable for anything up to a gigabyte. However, it is only recently that upload speeds have increased from a miserly quarter or half megabit and even now, apart from hugely expensive SDSL, upload speeds are throttled back. It seems as though the data-comms business has been holding us back for the last two decades.

If ADSL is capable of delivering the much fabled “up to” 8, 16 and 24 Mbps for downloads, why can’t it be made available for uploads? I would be very happy to pay for two lines, one for incoming and one for outgoing connections, both running at the same maximum speed.

The broadband suppliers are currently charging around £20 to £30 per month for a business Max service or similar. Doubling this, for the same speed up and down would be reasonable, as would a cap on outgoing data to weed out the peer-to-peer junkies. Then my industry would be able to progress.

Sometimes life is too short to do boring things. Our office is within a mile of the town centre, just off the seafront in sunny West Worthing. Snow? What snow? This town used to be seriously uncool but now it is the secret jewel of Sussex only ten minutes commuting time on from Brighton. I spent last week mowing the lawns because the grass was so long it bent double. In the end it was four grass boxes full, quadruple a summertime load. I would much rather have gone for a lunchtime walk along the prom, round the pier and back via Marks and Sparks for a sandwich.

What I needed was a robot grass cutter but I doubt it would have been able to tackle the rough pasture our lawns had become. Unlike their robotic siblings, the vacuum cleaners, which are so good I cannot understand why every home and office doesn’t have one.

We got our first iRobot Roomba last November, bought direct from the US - where, like Amazon and eBay USA, we buy a lot of kit to avoid the inflated prices we see in Britain, aka Treasure Island. Google for stores selling the kit you want, telephone them, pay by card and arrange shipping to the UK. Not forgetting the 6 or 7 hour time difference, as I did the first time I called Montreal and woke the shop owner from deep sleep in the early hours. The cost of the robot plus delivery was about a hundred quid and Maplins do universal power supplies if the one supplied is only suitable for North America. Major manufacturers selling in Europe such as Electrolux, Samsung and Karcher are also doing robot vacuum cleaners but at a rip-off six to nine times the price and many look like rebadged iRobots.

These cleaning robots seem flimsy at first but turn them over and see the heavy-duty industrial motors and power packs. Set them to work and they happily scurry around from room to room, cleaning far better than we could ever be bothered with a standard vacuum cleaner. When we empty the robot’s waste bin it seems to have found a never-ending source of horsehair from the oak floors. Our robot has a strange relationship with the nest of snakes that live under our desks and we find ourselves arranging furniture to suit the him. He is often to be found “mounting” the base of our circular table as well. Best of all, he automatically takes himself back to his recharge station so all we do is press the start button and leave him to do the house and office all by himself.

Of course it had to happen. There are already magazines, books and various web sites telling how to hack the robot. The manufacturers even make one with a USB port. We anthropomorphise our little chap but some owners have taken to pimping their robots to ridiculous extremes. We haven’t gone quite that far, just found ours a corner to live in and chat to him as he buzzes around cleaning up after us. We are planning to get him a little friend, the iRobot Scooba that washes the floor as well as cleaning. If it could clean out my hard disks every now and again, so much the better.

Two events occurred this week that have significance for the publishing world. First, the world’s oldest newspaper has turned totally digital and second, Microsoft’s attempt to fast track their Open XML document format has hit the buffers.

Post-och Inrikes Tidningar comes from the land of ice and snow, with the midnight sun where hot metal used to flow, but no more for this Stockholm newspaper. Set up in 1645 by Queen Kristina, according to the Guardian, it has turned into a web-only publication listing legal announcements by corporations, courts and government agencies. The download comes as a PDF with more diaersis than an coach full of tourists and it all looks Greek, er… Swedish to me.
I have been blogging since the early 1990s when we were making electronic publications. First in proprietary software before moving to the cross-platform Adobe PDF format. By the end of the 90s these were multi-media, full-colour magazines available on-line and the cover CDs of printed publications. When the dot.com bubble burst and advertising revenues declined, we didn’t care because we had no advertisers, but the printed mags did and grew noticeably thinner, some to bulimia and eventual starvation. It seemed then that print’s days were numbered and with virtual publications such as the one you are reading now, major publishers are keeping a foot in both camps. The Times has just spent a billion million making its own website worse than it used to be and for some reason the Grauniad is still trying to get people to pay for their on-line content, largely composed of “I’m having a baby” and “All these ex-London journalists are taking Brighton downmarket”.
When Microsoft generously announced the intention of fast tracking their new Open XML document format for ISO approval, I for one was pretty downhearted because this is the default format for Office 2007. Especially as they simultaneously announced there wouldn’t be an early translator for Macs, nor for earlier versions of Office come to that. I had visions of returning Word files as unreadable and trying to get computing dimwits to understand I don’t care what formatting they put in their masterpieces, I strip it all out and start with plain old ASCII to design their latest blockbuster.
Thankfully 19 of the World’s governments agreed with me and put up strenuous objections to Open XML. For many, the existing XML-based and ISO-approved OpenDocument Format (ODF) is enough and they moved to non-proprietary formats and OpenOffice software. Adobe, who have always called PDF an “open” standard, have also applied for ISO approval. Their free Mars plug-in creates XML-tagged PDFs which for my use seems the best of both worlds. In addition, Microsoft have reluctantly agreed to offer an ODF translator as part of Office 2007 (no guessing whether it will actually work).
The UK government supported the British Educational Communications and Technological Agency Becta in researching open source compared with proprietary solutions and found that no gain was to be made by moving to Office 2007 but also interoperability issues are most prevalent between versions of Microsoft Office Applications. This is the same organisation who were pilloried by MPs in November for having outdated purchasing frameworks that denied schools the benefits of open source software. Universities and colleges are not bound by Becta rules, as a result the Open University winning a Mellon Technological Collaboration Award for its work with open source Moodle course management system.

It is sheer coincidence that I installed the brand new and free beta version of Little Snitch on the same day the Internet came under attack. Its new Network Monitor window kept showing messages stating the dns servers I use were not available. Not a problem I’d ever know about usually as Mac OSX automatically diverts to another set. But this was exactly the attack the Internet sustained.

For 12 hours from midnight on Tuesday at least three of the primary dns servers were flooded, including the US Department of Defences’ own. It seems the attacks, the worst since 2002, were coming from South Korea which as we all know is a friend of the US. Wiki does however tell us there at least 40,000 Muslims moved there since the end of the Korean war so draw your own conclusions. One thing is for sure, the way the Internet backbone is distributed was its saving grace and most users were not even aware that something was amiss.

Every Christmas holiday we watch astounded at the huge amount of traffic trying to break into our computers. We protect them at the router and with the OS’s firewalls but it doesn’t stop the attempts to get in. These usually come from universities in eastern Europe, no doubt routed there from whichever desert island the pirates are trying to hack us from. Nevertheless our firewall logs show an increase in access attempts of several hundred percent over Christmas. I even found one coming from a high school in the US and I emailed its network admin listed in whois who told me they found the culprits and put a stop to them.

Little Snitch is the Mac OS equivalent of ZoneAlarm for Windows, both are as essential as a firewall to stop unwanted network traffic. While a firewall prevents incoming access based on its rules about IP addresses and port numbers, outgoing traffic can use any port it wishes which makes it hard for firewalls to stop. This is where Little Snitch and ZoneAlarm come it. They compliment the firewall and filter connections based on rules for the application that tries to make an outgoing connection.

The effect of this is that any trojans, worms or other nasties who try to phone home will be spotted by Little Snitch which asks if you are aware of what the application is doing and whether it has your authority. This is also much loved by users who did not pay for the software they use and would prefer that the software’s publisher did not know they were using it. You know who you are, your eye patch gives you away.

The new beta of Little Snitch has changed a little from the previous version but especially annoying is that rules for Little Snitch v1, built up painstakingly over years, are not imported. Instead while it has various System and default rules it does mean a few days of constant requests to allow outgoing traffic, until the majority of your applications are covered. But the biggest surprise is how chatty computers really are.

Little Snitch’s new Network Monitor flags up every connection and for my Mac this was just about every few seconds. Many of these are from local traffic such as cupsd - the scheduler for the Common Unix Printing System; slpd - the BSD service local protocol; and nmblookup - the NetBIOS over TCP/IP used to lookup NetBIOS names to map to IP addresses. All of these chat with other computers and devices on our LAN. Others that flashed all the time come from open web browser windows where adverts phone home for example. With so much traffic, the constant changes to Little Snitch’s new monitor window become too intrusive and so it got closed. But at least it is there and interesting to see the huge amount computers chat to each other.

As for Little Snitch 2, it’s a no-brainer, it works, does exactly what it says it does, quietly and efficiently and is very cheap at about twelve quid. Recommended.

Have you seen the new traffic light symbols on foods? The little round blobs that are green for the good-for-you foods like water and porridge, orange for the boringly safe Daily Mail recipe foods, or red for all the cakes and crisps you really want to buy. The blob’s colour really tells you how quickly you will die if you eat all red ones.

It’s a very clear and easy to understand system, unlike the one that various shops and food manufacturers would prefer us to have. This has a completely confusing system showing %DA in the blob’s centre and no colour code either. Is it just coincidence that the makers of the highest fat, sugar and salty foods are the very same who have devised this stupid system? Their products would have so many red blobs Rudolph could hide in them.

Isn’t it about time the same coloured blobs were put on other things? Take computers for example: they could have a red, orange or green blob showing whether the video card is good for games. The same for the CPU, with a coloured blob showing whether it’s just another Celeron you can type faster than it can keep up. A green blob would show it is a Xeon that will blast away at just about any task without using more than a nanometer of it’s full potential. Dell laptops could have a special deep red blob to show how hot your thigh will get when using it as a, well… a laptop. Especially if you haven’t changed the battery and it’s “one of those”. Inkjet printers would surely have a red blob signifying how quickly they will spend your wealth on ink, with laser printers the same to demonstrate how much ozone they’ll pump into the office. My partner puts a large pot plant next to ours to absorb all the bad stuff.

Other electronic items could also benefit from blobs. Mobile phones would have a coloured blob rating their ring tone’s degree of inanity. After spending 20 minutes in Waitrose listening to Eric Satie ring-ringing on someone’s unanswered mobile phone (Satie as a ring tone - only in Waitrose, eh?). it’s turned me right off Gnossienne 5, if only they’d used Avant-dernieres pensees instead. Mind you, either are better than Nokia’s default, a definite red blobber. My tiny Samsung is so old I dare not use anything more than the standard telephone bell and even that sounds like a 1930’s American candlestick phone. But as all modern phones are much bigger I’ll stick with it.

Operating systems are a little more difficult to blob. Microsoft would probably be in the %DA camp and spurn the government’s blob rating. In any case, Windows XP would be an absolute redder, for the guarantee that it will crash at some point. Unlike, hum hum, Mac OSX and Linux which would have a fluorescent green blob for the same. Confusingly, according to Greenpeace, Apple would get a red one for its green credentials. Conversely, in the %DA, non-coloured blob system, Vista would be 25%DA as a measure of time wasted watching “helpful” wizards and non-essential dialogue boxes asking stupid questions.

Apple’s newly released TV Video Converter is designed to convert many of the popular video formats to Apple’s TV Video MP4 format. The files can then be played on a video iPod and the forthcoming Apple TV. According to their blurb it supports multithreading and batch conversions at a >200% speed, complete with a preview window and outputs to 640 by 480 pixels.

On first look, the application seems pretty much the same as other converters such as Techspansion’s iSquint and VisualHub the former of which is freeware but until I can get my hands on the Apple TV I don’t know whether they can give the same output format. The demo is limited to 5 mins only and doesn’t appear to allow drag and drop of movies into its list of files to convert. With such a short time available, speed measurements weren’t attempted.

I tried to convert a Quicktime.mov file originally recorded from Freeview digital TV in EyeTV and exported from there. Compared with the original .mov file, the Apple TV Converter output lost a noticeable amount of colour, perhaps the result of a conversion too far. Sound and image quality were similar/the same. A smaller animated .mov file originally 31.2MB was reduced to 21.3MB with no loss in quality.

EyeTV native files did not convert. As nearly all my recordings are in that format this is a bit of a problem because it means they will all have to be converted. However, the batch conversions mean that a few overnight sessions should solve that with the added advantage of reducing the amount of disk space needed to store them. EyeTV generates large, multi-gigabyte files per hour recorded which easily shrink to hundreds of megabytes when converted to MP4.

Apple TV Converter crashed once while converting a file, probably because I was mousing around its menus. The file output was not affected. Also the preferences menu item is greyed out but a separate Tools Preference isn’t.

During conversions the maximum CPU usage was only around 50% on a G5 2×2GHz with 2.5GB Ram. This is better than with iSquint which can be a bit of a CPU hog - although Apple’s multi-tasking OSX never gets bogged down and iSquint conversions can be left as a background task even when doing heavyweight Photoshop work. Presumably Unix nerds could tweak the nice setting to get better performance.

VisualHub, iSquint’s sibling, even offers easy Xgrid support which will distribute the load among all the available Macs on a network to gave you your our own mini supercomputer. Can Vista do that? That is a genuine question.

As Apple devised Xgrid it seems a big omission especially as I had to wait for my new G5 after they were all diverted to build the Virginia Tech’s 10 teraflop Supercomputer. One last point, the Apple TV Converteron-line Help menu option takes you to a site called mp4converter.net rather than an Apple site.