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

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

O2 will finally have a business tariff for the 3G iPhone, including a single bill for multiple handsets. And if you only want Exchange ActiveSync. O2 will be able to set that up for enterprises directly rather than making you put iTunes on each user’s desk to do it. You’ll be able to install apps you write for your own business without iTunes as well, according to Alder, but if you want to buy apps for the iPhone they’ll still have to come from the iTunes store - and you’ll still have to install them to each phone individually, through iTunes.

That’s going to hold back acceptance of the iPhone in the enterprise, which is used to the security and manageability of the BlackBerry. Even Microsoft has got the message, using industry standard OMA DM to control Windows Mobile 6.1 devices with the new System Center Mobile Device Manager using Active Directory. If you want to, you can force files on Windows Mobile handsets to be encrypted, block any application from Facebook clients to pre-installed games or stop users synching POP3 and IMAP email at all, as well as installing and updating apps automatically over the air to specific users or particular AD groups. And the VPN on Windows Mobile now uses IPsec and IKE (Internet Key Exchange) v2 rather than SSL for improved security and better management of mobile connectivity. Apple is picking IPsec too - but Cisco’s proprietary implementation of it.

O2 probably didn’t get the choice about getting involved in installing apps on iPhones; Apple is taking a  generous 30% royalty and doesn’t want to share that with operators now that it has to subsidize the cost of the phone. O2 plans to produce some apps of its own, which fits in with chief operating officer Julio Linares’ view that the future is services - the usual mobile operator to becoming just an Internet pipe. Even iPhone cynics like me have to be impressed by the usability; 80% of O2 iPhone users are actually using email, Web browsing and the other tools that make it a smartphone.
-Mary
 

(or “The return of the co-processor”)

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

Those days are on their way back.

Last week Toshiba announced a new range of consumer notebook PCs. Like many of Toshiba’s systems they’re designed to be media players, and in a side swipe at BluRay, they now come with an upscaling DVD drive. That’s where the coprocessor magic comes in, as Toshiba is using a derivative of the same Cell processor in Sony’s PS3 to drive its imaging software. A quad core version of the Cell sits alongside a dual core intel processor, and it’s used to handle a range of processor intensive tasks - acting as a feed to the GPU that drives the screen. Not only does it upscale DVD streams (very impressively) it also can be used to handle file transcoding (so your movies end up on your iPhone that much quicker), and also works well as a way of quickly indexing images and video.

Focused on video, Toshiba’s co-processor is also taking advantage of bundled web cams for a limited form of gesture control. Stopping a film by holding up a hand is effective, as is using a clenched fist as an in air mouse. Bill Gates’ departure reaffirmed his belief in alternative user infterfaces, and this is one approach to delivering those new ways of working.

Co-processors aren’t just for flashy graphics. Back in the 1990s I was writing mathematical simulation software, and at one point I had some electro-thermal models running on one of the MOD’s Crays. It wasn’t just any old Cray - it also had a co-processor in the shape of an additional vector processing unit. That vector co-processor made short shrift of my arrays of partial differential equations. Its direct descendent is a lot closer than an MOD research facility.

In fact, if you’ve got an NVIDIA graphics card it’s right in your PC’s GPU.

Back in January we wrote about Tesla and CUDA, and NVIDIA updated us on the next generation of the Tesla hardware earlier this week. The new G10 Tesla systems are looking very impressive, and the CUDA parallel programming language extensions are now able to work with standard multicore PCs as well as NVIDIA’s GPUs.

Memory is important when you’re using co-processors, and you need a lot if you’re signal-processing seismic data. Tesla will now support 4GB of directly attached memory per GPU, so a quad-GPU system can work with 16GB of data at a time. The numbers look good - and using Folding at Home a single Tesla 10 comes in at more than 40 times faster than a standard CPU, and more than 6 times faster than a PS3. Other demonstrations showed significant savings in space and in cost - one finance house has reduced its annual costs 9 times, replacing a 600 CPU options valuation system with a handful of front-end CPUs and 12 Tesla GPUs.

Of course with Snow Leopard around the corner, one of the obvious questions was about Apple’s support for OpenCL. It turns out that CUDA is best thought of as a personality layer on top of NVIDIA’s parallel thread execution (PTX) hardware, and it produces device-specific assembly code. There’s no reason why other GPU programming environments can’t produce the same PTX code - but CUDA will remain NVIDIA’s own route to the GPU as a processing tool, and it will be adding support for additional languages beyond C and C++ with Fortran just around the corner.

The future of the co-processor seems assured, for now at least. It’s time for software companies to start taking notice and to deliver on the promise of additional power beyond the CPU.

–Simon

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

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

These figures come from a survey done for StrongMail, an email delivery company, and show the difference you’d expect between data protection professionals believing customers should have more privacy than marketing professionals. But the real answer is if you don’t want something passed on, don’t tell anyone in the first place - because StrongMail’s figures also suggest two thirds of all companies have lost customer data somewhere along the line.

And make sure anything you’re passing on is something you’re supposed to know; according to Cyber-Ark’s survey a third of people who work in IT are happy to use the passwords they have access to for snooping on salary details, M & A plans, people’s personal emails and minutes of board meetings. And the passwords that protect anything that’s supposed to be secure? you know you don’t change them when someone in IT leaves. A third of admin passwords get changed once a quarter but nearly one in ten never get changed at all. If someone leaves in a bad mood, they can come back and check out personal customer details and company secrets any time they feel like remoting in.

If you want privacy for your own details or your company, it’s time to do something about it.
-Mary

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

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

Over the last few weeks I’ve been kicking along with only a few gigabytes of my 84GB disk free. Simon, who has the same laptop and takes just as many photos, had already removed the recovery partition to get 8GB back. And last week at TechEd I got down to just 1GB free,. I grabbed the biggest USB stick I have, which at 32GB is a sizable proportion of my hard drive space, and started looking for files to move, using the excellent WinDirStat to see a treemap and size-sorted folder list. Recordings and photos were the obvious place to start and after I transferred a few gigabytes of those I had enough room to download more PowerPoints and worry later. The figures didn’t seem quite right, but I was spending more time thinking about how soon we could move the server to Windows Server 2008 to get faster network file copying with SMB 2: I want to know if the 30-40x Microsoft is claiming will work for us.

Yesterday I sat down to copy the photos and recordings still on my tablet PC onto the server and after removing 3GB of recordings I had - about the same space I’d started with. I’d get up to 2.2GB and then go back down to 1.9GB or right back to 800MB free. I ran disk cleanup and deleted two 500MB files of crash reports that were hanging around waiting to upload, and felt I was rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. I ran WinDirStat and wondered why Windows needs 13GB of disk space, 6GB of which is in the WinSxS directory - ’side by side’ versions of files to avoid DLL hell. I kept coming back to the 8GB of photos that I wanted to keep on my notebook, the 11GB I use for OneNote and Outlook caches (recordings and attachments again), the fact that the conference files I was worrying about where only 2GB because the XML PowerPoint format is so compact…  and finally I looked at the summary at the top of WinDirStat that was telling me I only had 46GB of files on my hard drive.

Oh no, I thought; finally an application I care about that doesn’t run properly under Vista. Maybe every folder is just bigger. WinDirStat says it’s 20.9GB for the Users folder tree but Explorer says- well Explorer said 20.9GB as well. It’s not the swap and hibernation files; I can see 3GB for each of them in WinDirStat and besides, 84.2GB-46.5GB is some 32GB of disk space that’s missing. I cleared everything except the last system restore point: no difference. If I had 32GB of bad sectors, the hard drive ought to have raised the white flag in surrender by now. Where else would Vista be hiding disk space?

There’s a great new feature that Apple put into the Leopard release of Mac OS X called Time Machine, that takes a copy of all your files as you edit them, creating continuous backup so you can find files you’ve deleted and undo changes you made long after you’ve saved a document and moved on. Apart from the starry backdrop and the timeline scrollbar this is exactly the same as the Volume Shadow copy that Microsoft put into Windows Server 2003, which powers the Previous Versions feature in Vista, as well as System Restore. Shadow because you have to copy the ’shadow’ a file casts if it’s open or you can’t copy it at all, volume because it can get any or all files on that drive and Volume Shadow because, let’s face it, Microsoft has no clue about good product and feature names.

The interface is much less sexy too; you right-click on a file or folder and choose Restore previous versions. And how do you see how much space this really useful feature is using?

First you have to open a command prompt as an administrator; I run as a standard user because I don’t mind clicking on a dialog that confirms it’s me and not a virus mucking with the internals of Windows, so I hit the Start button, type CMD and right-click on the Command Prompt icon that appears to choose Run as Admin.  The command for working with Volume Shadow Services is VSSAdmin and the command to find out how much space it has its shadowy fingers on is:

VSSAdmin List ShadowStorage

By default, Vista gives 15% of total disk space or 30% of free disk space to System Restore and Volume Shadow Services, whichever is smaller. There’s no slider to adjust as there was in XP and the space doesn’t change unless you turn System Restore on and off - which deletes all the previous versions and restore points, so while it’s easy it’s not really a good idea. But you’re going to want to check and probably change the setting because a lot of PCs seem to think 15% isn’t enough and set the upper limit to - well, all the free disk space you have.  In my case Vista had used 15GB of space for previous versions, it had allocated itself 16GB of space and the maximum space was UNBOUNDED. Yes, all my free disk space. I could have gone back to the day I turned on the notebook and got the files I was editing - but that’s not much use if I can’t create any new files.

Put some limits on VSS by typing:
VSSAdmin Resize ShadowStorage /For=C: /On=C: /MaxSize=15GB
I was feeling parsimonious, and I keep most of the files on the SBS 2003 server which also runs VSS, so I gave it 5GB to play with. It allocated just over 2GB and filled 700MB immediately, so I suspect I get the changes on my files yesterday and nothing more. But I also get 39GB of free disk space, so I’m not complaining. 

I’m not sure if my notebook came from HP with VSS set to UNBOUNDED in first place or if SP1 might have changed this, so I don’t know who to name and shame. I have seen a lot of Vista users reporting that they’ve been losing disk space the same way, with UNBOUNDED set on machines from Dell, Lenovo and other big-name PC companies. But Microsoft gets a share of the blame, for adding a great feature with no way to control it except from the command line. Worried users will make the VSS space too small? Don’t take the slider away all together; just don’t let it go down below, say, 5GB. I can stop certain file types from getting shadowed by adding them to the HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\BackupRestore\FilesNotToSnapshot registry key. Temporary files are there by default; I’ll probably add MP3 files as I tend not to be editing these… but I’d rather do it without delving into the registry.

And if you’re running Vista Basic or Home Premium, VSS is running for System Restore and backing up your documents, but you can’t right-click to see and retrieve previous versions of a file even though they’re taking up space. Get a copy of ShadowExplorer  (only at version 0.2 but also free) from www.shadowexplorer.com and you can make the most of the disk space you agree to give up. 
-Mary

Running Vista? Planning to roll out Vista? Here are the top tips from this year’s TechEd IT Pro on improving performance.

Install SP1. If you can’t install SP1 it means you have one of 13 or so drivers that are so badly written that it’s not worth doing anything else to the system until you get rid of them. Of course Microsoft doesn’t want to come out and point the finger at companies like Dell or NVIDIA, so you’re going to have to figure out which drivers to try updating or replacing, or you could try installing from a Vista image that includes SP1 which works on some systems that can’t handle the update.

Give it a couple of days. Whether you’re installing Vista or SP1, the system has to watch what applications you like to load to make SuperFetch work properly – this arranges files and pre-loads them to make application and file loading seem faster. Vista isn’t born psychic; like a fake medium it has to gather clues before it can impress you with its prescience. Also, leave the machine on overnight to let the search indexer wade through your email and hard drive. Indexing backs off when you’re busy so it won’t slow things down, but you won’t get the instant access to your information that makes for the biggest productivity improvement in Vista until the index is done.

Plug in a ReadyBoost stick. Flash is getting cheap enough that a 4GB or 8GB USB stick or SD card won’t break the bank and it speeds Vista up as well as saving battery on a notebooks (flash is faster than hard disk for virtual memory and uses less power). And SP1 fixes what was more a matter of trust than a bug; when your PC comes out of hibernation SP1 now assumes that if your ReadyBoost stick is there it’s the same one you had in before and uses it straight away, rather than throwing away all the information on it and then putting it all back, just when your PC is busy un-hibernating and you’re busy waiting impatiently. If you don’t use ReadyBoost, HIBERFIL.SYS is arranged more logically so it’s faster to read back into memory anyway.

Check your drivers, BIOS and apps. In lab conditions, boot and un-hibernate times for SP1 have gone from 30 seconds to 17 seconds; anything longer than that and you’re waiting for something other than the OS.  

Check for managed code apps. Managed code has a lot of advantages, and managed code apps that are coded correctly will notice shutdown events and shut down like any other program. Only it turns out that about 90% of all the managed code apps Microsoft looked at weren’t coded correctly and didn’t shut down. SP1 addresses this, but if it’s a line of business app you should get the code fixed as well.

Install Windows Server 2008. Copying files on your Vista machine will feel much faster in SP1 because the copy is now cached: instead of writing the file straight to disk, Vista tucks it into memory and tells you it’s done, then sneaks it onto the hard drive in the background. The overall copy takes about as long, but you don’t notice it as much and the estimate of how long it will take is much more accurate. But if you’re copying files over the network, the way to get the 30-40x improvement that both Microsoft and independent experts like Mark Minasi have measured (that’s not 30-40% better, that’s 30-40 times better) is to have SMB 2 at both ends. SMB 1 goes back decades and isn’t suited to fast networks and big files because it requests and copies just 60K of the file before going back and asking for more, clogging up your network, tying up your server and trashing your patience.  Plus Vista RTM had four 8MB buffers for those 60K requests, so the disk had to seek 8MB every time it got another 60K, making for a longer write time (and I’d expect, a lot of fragmentation for the automatic disk defrag to sort out). SP1 has eight 32K buffers instead, so it can deal with the 60K chunks much more efficiently. Any flavour of Vista talking to another Vista box or a Windows Server 2008 box uses SMB 2 instead, which uses 64K I/Os, asks for everything at once and generally behaves like a grown-up file transfer protocol.

Don’t run the photo screensaver. This has been rewritten in SP1 not to steal all the memory on your system, so waking your machine up no longer requires a context switch to get your applications back into memory, but a blank screen uses less power anyway.

Update – or avoid – the CPU Meter in the Sidebar. This little tool for measuring performance was, well, introducing performance issues (and the way the Sidebar clock managed the CPU was eating battery). There’s a new version but there are also much more powerful alternatives. Even in SP1 I personally find the Sidebar (or something in it) often takes up to 50% of my CPU. Usually I just turn it off, but the next time it happens I’ll run Microsoft’s Windows Performance Toolkit instead. This is PerfMon on steroids, tracing down into individual DLLs and services (if you install the DEBUG symbols from the application vendor; Microsoft makes these freely available for its own apps). Don’t run it for too long; in three minutes Xperf creates a 100MB log file. XperfView lets you overlay graphs, hide the irrelevant apps and threads and manipulate the data to see what’s at fault, whether it’s an app, a driver, group policy being applied or even faulty hardware. Use the Xbootmgr tool to measure shutdown and startup issues. Get the tools from http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/system/sysperf/perftools.mspx and get tips on using them from the program manager Richard Russell at http://blogs.msdn.com/pigscanfly/.

Call Microsoft. You get free support questions on Vista from PSS until March 18 2009, so the sooner you install Vista, the more problems you can get fixed without paying for help.

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

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

Is this the end of the computing world we’ve come to know?

The answer is both a yes and a no.

It’ll be harder to write a software news story, that’s for sure, but that’s not really a problem. What’s really important will be the change in the way IT pros relate to the companies providing them with software. Commuunity-based development programmes mean that you’ve got a lot more clout than you’ve ever had. Instead of passively installing the code you’ver been given you’ve now got a chance to influence its development - so you can avoid big bang deployments that dissapoint and frustrate your users.

So what should you be doing?

It’s worth setting aside some hardware for test and development - and with virtualisation software now bundled free with most OSes, you can probably make do with one multi-core box, saving on space and power. Then sign up for the programmes related to the software and tools you intend to use. Once you’ve got the code you want, start using it the way you would in production, using real data (and if you can, real users).

The most important part of the process is possibly the hardest - you need to take time to join beta communities and take part in the discussions. Report bugs by all means, but also engage with the company representatives and describe your usage scenarios and any deficiencies you see. You’ll be surprised by how many people agree with you, and while you may not get an instant response from the developers, or even see the changes you want in the version you’re testing, your points will have been noted, and will be used to help define the next release of the software.

Beta software is an important tool. It lets you prepare for what’s next, and helps you understand new capabilities and interactions with existing tools. It’ll also make you ready for support demands - another area where beta communities can help, as you’ve got a ready-made peer group where you can share problems and solutions,

It’s a brave new community out there - so why not dive in and make the most of it.

–Simon

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

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

Developed by UMass Amherst and using Microsoft’s Robotics Studio as a development platform, U-Bot 5 uses dynamic balancing to stay upright on its two oversized wheels. The three heavy batteries aren’t between the wheels as you might expect, instead they’re in the top of the robot, acting as part of the pendulum.

Most of the robot has been specially fabricated, with only the screen and the web cam coming off the shelf. While a balancing robot is impressive enough, one that can lift and carry is even more inspiring. The simple hands are able to grasp most objects, and even throw a baseball (or an egg…)

It’s an impressive piece of work. What’s more impressive is that the software components can be reused by the next generation of hardware. That’s where Robotics Studio comes in, as it mixes .NET development tools with a visual programming environment. The various pieces of hardware are treated as independent services - and the resulting application can be tested in simulation before being loaded onto the robot hardware. With several people developing software vying for robot-time can be an issue, and physics-based simulation lets code go through plenty of tests before it’s loaded onto the hardware.

There’s some manual control, coming from an XBox controller, though this really only sets the parameters the robot’s control software works within.

The whole thing is fascinating, as it means that complex robots can be developed quickly, reusing the software developed for earlier versions. There’s no need to reinvent the wheel everytime you change the hardware All you need to do is modifiy the underlying run times, load the existing components, and away you go…

It’s just a little disturbing when you see a small metal device wandering around chanting “Developers! Developers! Developers!” while waving its shiny metal arms.

 –Simon

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

Silverlight is a lot of things, from Microsoft’s answer to Flash to Microsoft’s answer to Web based applications. Leave aside the video plugin side of it; the fact that Silverlight 2 (beta 2 due at the end of this week) runs .NET and programs written in dynamic languages on Mac and Linux as well as Windows is the most interesting part. And it’s not just for consumer Web apps; Facebook and Hotmail users aren’t happy with line of business apps in dreary basic grey when they get to work, and Silverlight is an easy way to spruce those up without slaving over a hot CSS schema for hours.

Adobe’s Air tackles much the same problem; how do you make powerful applications for the Web that work online and off, that look good and that work without installing anything (once you have the initial plugin or runtime). Air builds on Flex, so if you’re already writing Flash, you’ve got a head start. But there are a lot more .NET developers writing business apps, so although Microsoft demos consumer apps like the Crossfader social video sharing tool it talked about today, most Silverlight apps might show up at work, using Workflow Foundation and making data from SQL Server look good.

Silverlight is a subset of .NET and Windows Presentation Foundation, so developers are using familiar skills and Visual Studio plus Expression Blend for designers, who get to work on the live project, not in Photoshop mockups.  The visual development tools also appeal to disenfranchised Visual Basic developers who’ve been wondering what Microsoft has done for them lately….  Microsoft VP Soma Somasegar said Crossfader is being built by six developers and two designers in three months, which is more like Internet time than standard Microsoft time scales.

If Silverlight’s so good, why would anyone be creating Windows applications at all? Bill Gates finished his Q&A trying to balance that question. “Yes, you’ll be able to do amazing things in Silverlight, but there will always be things that you can do in Windows Presentation Framework that you can’t do in Silverlight. Why is that so? Well, it’s so because with WPF we get to assume we have the full power of the PC; we’re not just running in a browser environment. So, take things like 3D type things, virtual world type things, take things like ink recognition or playing video back at arbitrary speeds. WPF will, because it can connect in to all of Windows, expose those services and let people do new things.

“We need to keep the Silverlight download to be fairly modest. So, if you think of what that will be versus the entire Windows environment, we have a much bigger runtime to call on. So, we’re not saying that those get absolutely merged, but we will have exactly the right relationship. And even as you’re in Visual Studio or in the Expression tools, you’ll be able to say I want to author for the Silverlight piece and to let you know that if you’re sticking to the things that work in that world.

“Silverlight will probably have almost everything WPF has today, but WPF will keep getting richer and richer as we go forward.”

That’s the Microsoft dream and it’s one direction things could go. Google is pushing in completely the other direction. Last week at Google IO, Chris Prince and Aaron Boodman (better known as the designer of the Greasemonkey Firefox extension) were explaining why they don’t want you to think of Gears as taking Google applications offline. Yes it does that, but actually Google wants it to give Web apps to have access to all the capabilities of your PC the way desktop apps do. Why shouldn’t the browser get the power of your 2GHz processor and your 300GB hard drive? Why shouldn’t they be able to send you notifications in another window or show a progress bar? Why can’t you access USB drives from inside Gears or use a GPS to tell the Web app where you are?

Google filed its name off Gears so that it has more chance of becoming a standard, either as part of HTML 5 or by becoming ubiquitous as a plugin in its own right. Personally, I’m not going to be installing it on any machine I use.

It’s not just because it has no way to limit the amount of disk space it’s going to take for its local database (used by MySpace to give you search across the whole site without having to take up space on their data centre for those pesky index files). It’s only partly because it’s going to be able to use your GPS or other tools to get your location and there is currently nothing to warn the user and no options for choosing if and when Gears can get your location. Google seems committed to harmonizing with whatever standards HTML 5 includes for the things that Gears does, and I’m not the one who will have to detail with duplicate APIs from Gears and HTML 5 to do the same thing – that’s a problem for Web developers to juggle. And the fact that Web sites like YouSendIt already have real progress bars without needing me to download a plugin is a quibble rather than a complaint.

Mainly, I won’t use it at this point because of how Chris Prince explains why he thinks Web apps are so good in the first place. “Everything in the browser is inherently safe,” he said at Google IO. “There is no cost to install a Web app, you’re not afraid to click a link, and you can navigate away with no fear it will take over your machine.” Compared to the near-paranoia that’s is Microsoft’s attitude to the Web, from the phishing filter to the way IE doesn’t get the same privileges as a desktop app to the security-first attitude that permeates the company, calling the browser ‘inherently safe’ seems a little laissez faire to me.

Adding binary data files to JavaScript will certainly make for more powerful apps. Some of them might be Trojans; if Gears gets everything Google talked about that would be able to scrape files off a USB stick, record you talking with the audio APIs, add in your physical location and do whatever you can think of with it all, good or bad. If I’m not too busy playing with whatever features the Web app disguising the Trojan has I can navigate away from it – but if it’s using Gears to run offline, has it gone away?

The browser sandbox limits the features on my system that Web apps have access to. That’s a pain when you want to build a better app in the browser – but it’s a security measure if you want to build a better way of attacking my system. I asked Chris Wilson of the Internet Explorer dev team if I was being paranoid – he was the one who’d raised the issue about privacy with the GPS location in Gears at the end of the session. Maybe, he suggested - but with the number of security issues it raises, Gears isn’t going to be installed by default with IE any time soon…