Imagine a second, simpler operating system on your PC with fixed features, so it’s more secure - after all, if you can’t add more programs you can’t add a virus either. It would have to start up quickly, so that Windows wasn’t waiting for it, so it would be ideal for listening to music and watching video. I’m not thinking about virtualization per se, although that’s one way to achieve something similar; this is two operating systems side by side, both with access to the PC hardware, but one of them does much more limited and circumscribed things.

Can you tell what it is yet?

No, actually, I’m not talking about Palladium - sorry, Microsoft Next Generation Secure Computing Base. That grew out of an attempt to reassure Sony that it would be OK to allow DVD movies to play on a PC without piracy becoming endemic and turned into a much more useful and visionary idea about using public key cryptography not to identify people but to secure machines. It would have been a good way to implement the DRM it was associated with in the public eye, though wouldn’t have forced it on anyone who didn’t want to run it. Palladium loaded a secure piece of software called the TOR that acted as a secure area that could only run trusted code (written to public APIs), where the apps would be invisible to the main OS - all secured by the machine-specific key in your TPM and some new technology from Intel. 

Ironically, trust was the issue with Palladium; nobody trusted Microsoft to either be building a secure system that didn’t impact on a very robust interpretation of free speech or if it was, to do it right. The smallest part of the concept made it in a couple of versions of Vista as BitLocker; whole disk encryption secured by the TPM.
But the Palladium concepts are showing up in a lot of other places, including the NSA’s Security Enhanced Linux and Citrix’s Security Enhanced Xen - a small OS that runs as a secure virtual machine with isolated applications, using the TPM and Intel’s new hardware virtualization technology …

Intel even uses the words Trusted Computing Base, which might be a hostage to fortune given the fate of Palladium. The DRM discussion hasn’t started yet, but there’s a trusted channel to the keyboard, mouse, memory - and the graphics subsystem, which is what some thought would allow copy-protected DVDs to be watched in the secure area of Palladium, without the option to copy them. This time around it’s more likely to be copy-protected downloads: killing off HD DVD has actually made Blu-Ray less likely to get mass adoption,  as player and disc prices stay high.

There are far more benefits to Palladium-style secure computing than protecting the movie industry or saving the banking industry from having to upgrade anti-fraud backends. You may keep your AV up to date and your company documents secure, but one in six of all PCs that touch the Google site has a bot and they’re all sending you spam.

And while the systems that look so much like Palladium that I get déjà vu are still a little way off, Asus is already selling machines with Express Gate. Granted, this is more like the embedded operating systems you see on a lot of media notebooks; it boots up in eight seconds and lets you see your photos and play your music. It has an Internet connection, so you can browse the Web without waiting for Windows. But it also uses the TPM in Montevina and you can treat it as an isolated operating system, says the press release: “Friends and family can use your notebook to nip online, use IM, listen to music, play and view without having access to your data, the system or the Windows environment.” Very Palladian.
-Mary

A comment from Wyse popped into my inbox the other day, criticising the government for using desktop PCs instead of thin clients which are “inherently more energy efficient” (surprise surprise).

David Angwin, director of marketing for EMEA, claimed that “thin client computers give users exactly the same applications and performance as a PC and run on as little a tenth of the electricity.” Certainly, Wyse is one of the few thin client manufacturers who can claim to support a wide range of applications; I know one financial company who had to replace the first batch of thin clients they tried with Wyse kit almost within the week because the others couldn’t cope with video clips. But is that power figure the whole story?

Earlier in the year I was talking to Barry Goodall at the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. He’s spent a lot of time and effort greening the council’s IT and although he’s a big fan of server virtualisation, he has a much less positive view of the green credentials of thin clients after he disproved the figures in a Frauenhofer Institute report on green computing. “The report said we could save million of pounds by using thin clients, so we were quite interested in this! We looked at some of the details and things leapt out at us; in particular the power consumption of PCs was markedly higher than ours - we use Dell desktops.”

He was checking his Dells anyway, because Dell was claiming upgrading to model 745s would save as much energy as changing from CRT to LCD screens. “We have an electricity monitoring gadget from Maplin which I highly recommend: don’t trust anything the manufacturers tell you! It’s very easy and you need to measure it yourself.” His measurements showed the model 745s used the same 60 Watts of power as the Dell kit he already had; Dell’s 45 Watt figure assumed energy management features that weren’t turned on by default. “Energy saving features in the BIOS count for nothing unless you enable hibernation in Windows!”

But 60 Watts or 45, it was still a far cry from the 120 Watts that Frauenhofer was assuming for a desktop PC. That’s what you’d expect from a top-end home machine with a high-power graphics card for gaming; business desktops are rather more frugal.

That wasn’t the only place he felt the sums didn’t add up. “Although the report said in the text that they had accounted for PCs being turned on maybe ten hours a day, terminal servers are typically running 24/7. If you tot up the number of hours people work out of the year, even though it feels like you work all the hours God sends, it’s actually about 2,200 and the figures in their tables hadn’t taken that into account. When we plugged in the correct figures they supported the opposite arguments; with the number of clients per server they assumed, it was more expensive in terms of CO2 than a typical fat client environment. Thin client can be more energy efficient but you need to be clever and turn some servers off when demand is low; you have to be monitoring the workload so you can turn some servers off overnight and come the morning, start turning them back on again - though you’re running a little bit of a risk that maybe one or two servers won’t start up and you’ll struggle a little.”

When I talked to Jon Stewart at Cisco about security trends recently, he slipped in a few network arguments (as you’d expect from a network company). “I have a feeling [that] what you’re going to end up seeing is very thin, light application suites that are endpoint based and a very rich experience using massive network build out. It’s already started to happen; definitely BT has gone down this route. You’re basically saying the end point is going to matter less at a computational level. The display and the keyboard and the system that you interact with, is the most valuable. Think about Lufthansa going to wireless on their planes, they’re trying to solve the inability to do work when you’re mobile. Everything about handset mobility, you’re trying to solve work when you’re mobile. But each time it happens, less and less computational necessity exists on the device - you’re just getting the service on the device.”

But do we care less and less about devices? Again, you’d expect Steve Ballmer to favour the PC, but he told his audience at the Partner Conference that actually, all the devices that are getting attention are fat (we just need to make them easy too). “It’s ironic, people talk a lot about whether people want thin clients. And I don’t deny people want reduced cost, and complexity of management. I think we’re all hearing that from our customers. But people don’t want to really give up the richness and capabilities of a rich client. We even see that in phones. What’s going on in phones today? Phones are actually getting richer. That’s what Windows Mobile is, that’s what the iPhone is, that’s what Symbian is, that’s what Android is: all of these things are getting richer, and Windows PCs will be the richest, most capable device that most people ever own.”

Chatting with Peter Biddle, ex of Microsoft and now at UK enterprise social networking startup Trampoline, he suggested that as usual, what matters is both the device and the network. “Think about it; when did you last do any useful work without being online?”
-Mary

I wouldn’t be surprised to open a packet of cornflakes  and have a 3G USB dongle fall out, they’re getting so common. They may be convenient but they’re not the most efficient way to get a 3G connection on a laptop. A notebook with a built-in antenna gets 25% better bandwidth (because the better the signal, the more data throughput you get). And given that most 3G cells have only a 1Mbps pipe connecting them to the Internet , you need all the throughput you can get. 

The rumblings about EU regulation of SMS and mobile data costs carry on in the background along with OFCOM’s proposals for a voluntary code of conduct for ISPs to make sure your DSL line gives you the speed you’ve paid for, and OFCOM has also been making noises about checking out what speeds mobile broadband really offers. It’s a nice idea and it might concentrate the attention of the operators on the issue, but the speed you get depends on a mix of your handset, the Internet backhaul of the base station, how many other people are using data on the same base station - and the weather, so it’s hard to be precise.

I was impressed by the independent tests that Vodafone was trumpeting last month claiming they have the fastest HSDPA network. They’re claiming up to ten seconds faster to download a 2MB MP3 file (13.54 seconds) and four times faster to open a Web page (6.7 seconds). Anecdotally, Vodafone does feel faster than T-Mobile and Orange in the areas of London we visit, on EDGE and on HSDPA. With BT’s announcement today that it’s dropping backhaul pricing, if the mobile operators put in connections from the base stations to the Internet that are as fast as your connection from your phone to the base station, we’ll start to see which side of the network really needs to speed up.

I expect better battery life is also going to be better when you’re using built-in 3G than when you’re going through a USB port. The voltage won’t be much different but you can have much more sophisticated power management - and of course if you have a better signal, you don’t have to keep turning the radio up to try and improve things.

So Lenovo’s Centrino 2 announcements caught my eye today. Either the growth in the dongle market means Ericsson has dropped the prices of its 3G modules (scale, competition or a mix of the two) or Lenovo has decided that 3G is the best way to fight off the buzz around ultra-cheap machines like the Eee PC and Aspire One that cut features along with the price. Whichever it is, Lenovo is dropping the price premium for built-in 3G from around £100 to around nothing: from August 4th notebooks with a mobile broadband module will cost, and I quote, ”approximately the same price as those without”.

Although BT is now referring to the still-in-draft 802.11n proposal as a standard and putting it in the shiny new BT Home Hub (the rotating ten foot model of it at the BT event last night was a little scary), the n debacle drags on. At this rate, we might have HSDPA built into more laptops than 802.11n…
-Mary

Getting IT folk to agree is like herding squirrels, but there’s one thing we do seem to agree on, and that’s that virtualisation is a good thing. It saves money, it saves space, and above all, it saves energy. Throw in a bunch of offload processing for complex applications (a Tesla box or some Azul hardware) and you’re well on the way to a shiny green data centre.

With so many companies investing so much in virtualisation you’d think that software companies would be falling over themselves to develop licensing tools to support dynamic, flexible IT infrastructures. It’s surprising then to see that not only are they singularly failing to do so, but they’re also making it hard to justify installing software on a virtualised server. Microsoft has tried to appear to be a poster child for virtualisation licensing, but once you start drilling down into just what you can and can’t do with Hyper-V and the Windows Server 2008 Enterprise edition you’re in for an unpleasant surprise. Unless you’re ready to lock yourself into an Oracle-style site license there’s just no way to run your internal IT as a utility.

That’s good news for SaaS vendors like Salesforce.com, but it’s bad news for CIOs all around the world - and (in the long run) worse news for proprietary software developers. Why worry about falling over a hole in your Windows Server 2008 licence if all you really need is a set of virtualised Linux boxen running Apache, MySQL and PHP/Python/Perl. Fractional licensing is water off a duck’s back to open source and free software.

So what do proprietary software vendors need to do? First and foremost they need to realise that the landscape has radically shifted. Microsoft made one step in the right direction when it realised that cores didn’t equal CPUs and switched its licence model to handle the change in server architectures. It was quickly followed by much of the industry. Now the industry as a whole needs to accept that a server is an ephemeral construct which is tied to a purpose not to a specific piece of hardware, and businesses will need to be licensed either for a maximum number of live instances or for a total number of licenses over a set amount of time.

Why should a company by three server licences if it’s actually only going to have two live at any one time? Two licences should be sufficient. Of course there’s also the issue of disaster recovery, but those purchased licenses should also be able to handle snapshot images of the virtualised servers that are ready to be put into play at a moment’s notice.

At VMworld, back in February, BT’s Stefan van Overtveldt said that vendors weren’t ready for virtualisation licensing. As he said, “On a generic level what I would say is as I come from a software background myself I understand that it’s very hard for software vendors to look at different types of commercial agreements because tracking usage is harder than tracking physical copies”. It’s a perennial problem that goes back to the days of the mainframe - and one that vendors are unlikely to approach with much enthusiasm, especially as most businesses are actually over-licensed.

Any shift to fractional licensing will be likely to result in lower revenues (at least in the first instance), but even so, van Overtveldt is optimistic, and expects vendors to come up with appropriate tools and licenses, “The industry hasn’t come up with standards that say if you transmit this kind of data in this format we will track it and reduce your licensing costs automatically when you get below a certain level of usage. But I believe something will come.”

Let’s hope he’s right.

–Simon

No battery ever lasts long enough. The extended battery on the HP 2710 tablets Simon and I carry give us a full day of work, nine to ten hours or less if we turn on Wi-Fi. I’ve been typing since 8am this morning and online a few times and it’s now 1pm and I have four hours left. That’s just about acceptable, but it’s never enough - I’m wondering where the nearest power socket is. Two technologies we saw at the Future in Review conference this week could produce much longer battery life - if they ever make it to market.

Lithium ion batteries work by packing as much lithium as possible into the positive and negative electrodes inside the battery and them moving ions from them, through the electrolyte fluid and out to your device. The more lithium you can get into the electrode, the more ions you can get out of it. That’s how Yi Cui of Stanford is hoping to get a battery that lasts ten times longer. He’s replacing the usual copper electrodes with silicon, which can store ten times as many lithium ions .

That’s not news; we’ve known for 30 years that silicon stores more lithium, but it also swells up more than copper because of that - and when it swells up, the electrode breaks. Yi Cui’s breakthrough was using silicon nanowires that are much more supple; each wire is only 100 nanometres wide, but they’re very long. Silicon is also more stable than copper, so increasing the energy density doesn’t make it more likely for batteries to explode the way it does with current batteries. It doesn’t make it hotter either, because it’s the internal resistance of the battery that causes the heat, not the capacity.

Ten times as many lithium ions doesn’t mean ten times the battery life; by the time you add in the rest of the battery system, including the electrolytes and the packaging around it all, and some further developments that are still under wraps, you could get double the battery life of lithium ion today.

Startup Seeo is starting with the other half of the battery, replacing the electrolyte fluid with a plastic film that’s very like the polymers used to make motorcycle helmets. For one thing that means it’s much safer - no matter how hot the battery gets it won’t catch fire. But it also works with other battery chemistries than lithium; according to Seeo, some of the lithium replacements they’re looking at could give you 50 to 70 times the energy density of lithium, so you get a choice between smaller devices or longer battery life in the same size we lug around today.

We’ve seen a lot of new battery technologies over the years and few of them have made it to market. One promising zinc battery might finally show up in notebooks PCs this year, maybe, possibly - four years after I first saw it running a laptop. It’s not just that the chemistry might turn out not to work as well as it did in the lab. At the moment you can only charge a silicon lithium battery 100 times before it won’t charge enough to be worth using; that has to go up to 500 times before you’d think about putting it in a mobile phone you’d keep for two years and more like 1,000 for a notebook. Both Seeo and Yi Cui are aiming to charge as quickly as lithium ion, but they’re not there yet - silicon lithium batteries could take an hour to charge.

And hardware manufacturers have to see enough of a demand to change the power supply and charging system in a laptop or phone. Seeo’s lithium battery might fit into an existing device but that’s more about safety than longer battery life; a different chemistry will need a different charger. Silicon lithium batteries run at a slightly different wattage and the value that tells the system the battery is fully charged and doesn’t need more power is also different.

So are these new technologies going to languish the way others have? Maybe not. For one thing, people will pay more for longer battery life, so manufacturers have an incentive to switch. And for another, with the price of oil and petrol still rising, electric cars are looking more likely and both these technologies promise to scale up enough to power cars. When you can do that, a smaller battery for a phone or a PC almost comes for free.
-Mary

Every three seconds, HP sells a printer (two of them in Europe). That makes HP responsible for a lot of the 22 pages office workers print every day, half of which end up in the bin. All that paper and ink can make it hard to think of HP as particularly green, especially when Vyomesh Yoshi, the VP of the print and imaging division, talks about wanting to see more pages on HP printers.

Naturally enough, he doesn’t think it’s what much of a contradiction. “We are in the printing business; we don’t want customers to not print. We have to make sure they use it, but also make sure they use it effectively. We want to make sure every printer they buy from HP has lower energy consumption than any other printer. ” Make sure printers turn on “instantly” and people will be happier to turn them off; use the WebJet admin software to turn printers off at the weekend and you’ll save even more energy. “Make duplex printing the default and you can save a tremendous amount,” he says.

And if you think we throw away a lot of paper in offices, 20% of newspapers are discarded, as are 40% of books and 20-30% of marketing bumph. People print too many copies that go out of date, because of the setup charges on offset printing. Naturally again, HP has a solution; customised on-demand printing for everything from wine labels to out of print books.

HP is also pushing green ideas for the data centre like running the air conditioning four degrees higher by blowing cold air directly into the blades. The air coming out the back of the blades is a lot hotter - more like a sauna - but heat behind the blade doesn’t matter so much. But if CEO Mark Hurd is right to predict that data centres will use 50% less energy soon, it’s going to take more than hot air.

The reason smart cooling works is that HP puts sensors on each rack to make sure the air is only as cold as it needs to be. Without those, says HP fellow Chandrakant Patel , a home air conditioning system is more sophisticated what’s in most data centres. The next step is to use optical interconnects and lasers to replace copper data cables - which saves the 20% of your energy that’s heating and cooling the copper. More likely now HP Labs has come up with a photodetector so sensitive it works as a solar cell.

But the carbon footprint of a data centre includes the CO2 from the concrete used to build it, and the manufacturing and transportation of everything from the blades to the carpets. Really reducing that means calculating it and Patel is working on a framework to cover technology in general. That would measure the true energy cost, down to what it takes to deal with the fertilizer runoff from the fields growing the corn that’s made into the ethanol that goes into the biodiesel that drives the backup generator. It’s a huge undertaking, but it strikes me as more likely to help than maintaining that video conferencing can solve the problem by taking cars off the roads (hint: maybe not if that means more data centres to run the video conferencing).
-Mary

Microsoft makes a lot of noise. The company holds dozens of conferences, broadcasts its ambitions in every market from mobile phones to data centres to next-generation TV, goes on a buying spree, gets taken to court by everyone from Novell to the EU. HP also makes acquisitions and has ambitions in a lot of markets and employs over twice as many people as Microsoft, but it doesn’t make nearly as big a splash in the industry, for some reason. It’s not for lack of success. Microsoft boasts of the 31 million Windows Mobile phones it’s sold; HP boasts that eight out of every ten text messages are sent using HP technology (inside the mobile operators rather than in your hand).

Wherever Microsoft is, HP is there too (from mobile phones to data centres to next-generation TV); in almost all cases, selling infrastructure rather than competing software. The exception is system management and when a dealer asked Mark Hurd this week why he’d asked Steve Ballmer along to the event where HP was sharing what it wanted dealers to get excited about this year, Hurd pointed out that even there HP takes a wider view. “Microsoft is very focussed about managing Windows environments and Microsoft environments. That’s what’s important to them. And it makes sense for them to be the best in the world at that. We have to be the best in the world at managing heterogeneous environments; we have to be able to take an IBM environment, a Linux environment, a ‘insert name here’ environment and be the best. Microsoft has to optimise simplicity of management of the Microsoft environment. We don’t believe the world will ever be exclusive to Microsoft.”

Ballmer wasn’t offended by that and used the broader view line himself, emphasising all the places from printers to blade servers where the two companies collaborate. He’s also banking on HP to put some style and sparkle back in a PC marketplace that can look lacklustre compared to Apple products that look good even when they can’t compete on features. “We’ve got a lot of work we’re doing on the future of the PC and what that looks like; driving down price, driving up features, driving more excitement. Certainly neither Microsoft or HP likes the shots we’ve been taking with Apple’s adverts and the blah blah blah… On the consumer side there’s so much opportunity today, we can add value to business productivity ; we’re stepping back to remind ourselves what we can do.”

Adding features matters more than driving the price down to get businesses to keep buying new PCs every three years rather than pushing older machines to last a decade and that’s where HP Labs comes in.
HP cares about research, but it’s a means to an end – solving problems by creating products and services – rather than pure knowledge. For pure knowledge you stay in academe; although Microsoft’s Bill Buxton points out that he left academic research for commercial when he was asked to write business plans rather than papers. Mark Hurd is totting up his R&D dollars but it’s not the cost he complains about; “We spend 4.2 billion in R&D to get the best products and services and then only go after half of the market.”

Rather than squeezing the research budget specifically, he’s leveraging it and putting more emphasis on the D than the R. HP Labs looks five to ten years ahead, but it also collaborates with engineers to create products. Microsoft Research uses a mix of technology transfer and researchers who move across to product development groups to shepherd their project into the commercial world. The really important thing is that they can always go back to research afterwards; their job is guaranteed to be there.

HP takes a different approach. Phil McKinney is the CTO of the personal systems group – everything from iPaqs to the Blackbird gaming system that’s selling to developers to the 2710p tablet PC we both use to the shiny and cute new 2133 Min-Note UMPC (which manages to achieve Apple levels of desirability despite the Via C7-M processor – which might make it even more like an Apple product). But he also runs the Innovation Programme Office and I don’t think it’s named IPO by accident; it’s certainly about taking things public.
The way it works is that a team from the IPO works side by side with the researchers (quite literally; they sit at the next desk). For 12-18 months the two teams work together; the researchers carry on researching, the designers build products and gradually the researchers do less and less and the designers do more and more. Then one day the designers have learned everything the researchers have found out and they spend six months running that into the final product.

There are 28 products in the pipeline with the IPO, coming out two a year – which means starting with 1,800 pipedreams that get whittled down to 200 ‘workable’ ideas. Blackbird was the first, cherry-picking existing HP technologies like blade cooling and push-fit hard drives. The new DreamColor screens are the second. These are LCD screens with colour accurate enough to satisfy DreamWorks and there’s a 30” screen on the way. And there’s a team in HP Labs right now, sitting next to the data centre than rendered Shrek 2, working on the next project. Odds are, it will be something that Microsoft will be interested in…

-Mary

Motorola has backed down from two big challenges this week. The announcements about support for LTE signal that WiMAX isn’t going as well as the company hoped, although they’re good news for users because it means we’ll get more than one system capable of true wireless broadband speeds up to 100Mbps.

Realistically, the future is going to be a mix of multiple wireless standards: mobile operators with investments in 3G have always been going to move to LTE - that’s what the name means, long-term evolution of GPRS and 3G. They’re going to use high-speed wi-fi and WiMAX as part of the back haul along with anything else they can lay their hands on, down to home broadband connections with femtocells. Fast Internet connectivity is expensive. That’s why the dirty little secret of 3G is that there isn’t a single mobile cell anywhere in the UK with more than 1Mbps of backhaul, so whether your HSDPA phone is 3.6 or 7.2Mbps it’s going to crawl along as shared DSL speed.

Fixing that will mean using a mesh of different technologies and WiMAX is only part of it. Motorola has done pretty well out of its WiMAX investments and supporting LTE is logical - but given the investment Motorola put into Clearwire’s US WiMAX service, the company must have hoped for more from WiMAX alone.

And then there’s the handset division losing money and market share hand over fist, which took down CEO Ed Zander and could easily scupper his successor, former CTO Greg Brown as well. The problem is there’s no sign of a new phone to give the company another success like RAZR. The real problem is, that’s actually business as usual at Motorola.

The original eye-catching mobile phone was the StarTAC. I had the analogue and digital versions and loved both (bearing in mind that this was when you had to learn the primitive user interface and put up with it). With the analogue CELLect data card I did email at 2400bps, sitting on a train to London downloading email from CIX to my HP OmniBook (the one with the mouse on a stick). As close to the name and style of the Star Trek communicator as possible, the sleek little flip-phone was iconic, hugely successful - and followed by a long line of failures.

The RAZR was another one-off success that the company milked shamelessly, diluting the exclusivity and confusing the market with multiple versions painting it pink for Valentines day and adding that ultimate admission of guilt in a user interface - a help system. Since then Motorola’s biggest hit has probably been the Q: a good Windows Mobile handset that came with a woefully inadequate battery and abandoned the European market to HTC and Samsung when it took far too long to bring out a 3G model. Leaving the GPS out of the UK model while keeping the extra-large case adds insult to injury.

The MOTOFONE should have been a huge success; just 9mm thick with a simple user interface, a battery life measured in weeks and an epaper display. It could have been the ideal phone for everyone who finds cryptic menu commands confusing - but Motorola pitched this combination of simplicity and sophistication at the developing world and saw it eclipsed by a rugged rubberised Nokia with a built-in torch.

The Z10 was about-face that should have been a warning. Motorola had abandoned Symbian to reduce the number of operating systems it was developing, pinning future hopes on mobile Linux and Windows Mobile. But last spring it turned around and released a Symbian phone to try and compete with Samsung’s onslaught in the high-end feature phone space. Samsung released half a dozen models with the same features, and so did LG and Sony Ericsson; Motorola had chosen a crowded market and a picture of Jason Bourne on the box wasn’t going to help.

Motorola is an object lesson for anyone expecting mobile Linux to sweep all other phones aside. Turns out, it’s not as cheap or as easy to make mobile Linux work as it sounds in theory. Motorola had one very successful Linux phone with a model you’ve probably never heard of, the MING. This is a stylish touch screen phone with two speaker wires running through the clear acrylic lid (turning necessity into art) and a finger-writing system that copes with the complex characters of Asian languages. It’s based on a Linux platform from Trolltech and it swept through the Asian market.

The reason Motorola hasn’t produced a range of successful Linux phones for the US or UK using the same platform might have something to do with Nokia buying Trolltech. Or it might just be that as far as phones go, Motorola is a one hit per decade wonder.

With nothing impressive on the way from Motorola until at least 2009, splitting the company in half is a good way to get the handset division ready for a quick sale without dragging down the backend division that’s making money with or without WiMAX. Maybe someone else struggling to build a mobile Linux handset could snap it up. I wonder what Palm is up to these days apart from poaching everyone from Apple?
-Mary

The more you can see, the more you can do. I used to work in front of two 17″ monitors; the gap between the screens where the bezel interrupted the view just vanished from my vision and all I saw was a lot of Web pages, Word documents, spreadsheets and emails. A couple of years back, I damaged my ankle and couldn’t comfortably sit at a desk for several months and even when I could, I found I preferred working in a big recliner chair. A 17″ laptop was ideal but mostly I work on 12″ or 12.1″ widescreen notebooks - currently it’s an HP 2710p because it has such excellent battery life. My elderly Athlon had started crashing every 20 minutes with a hardware failure and besides, I didn’t want to go back to XP, so I put up with the smaller, single screen. Occasionally I’ve tried two laptops side by side - usually when I was reviewing one of them - but the switch from keyboard to keyboard is very disruptive.
I’d seen the DisplayLink technology before but it was seeing the wireless USB setup at CES this year that gave me the inspiration. If I could link my notebook to my two 17″ screens by wireless USB I could easily go back to twin screens without worrying about dealing with yet another cable. So we started juggling the office, to put my chair closer to Simon’s desk and with a flat surface where monitors could stand. This involved replacing a wall-mounted bookcase that would have tapped me on the head and I spent a happy Easter weekend decoupaging a pair of wooden Ikea drawers to put the monitors at comfortable eye height (they’d sat by an open window during one rainy summer and got very grimy).

Today we started hooking things up. Turns out two screens will really need some kind of wall-mount, hopefully on an extending bracket at an angle.I don’t have the wireless USB connection just yet so I’ll save DisplayLink for when I get the wall-mount and want two external screens and put up with a VGA cable for now. I’ve already used a strip of Velcro to mate the power and Ethernet cables so one more isn’t much more unwieldy.

For now, there’s one monitor perched on my right. This isn’t the same as screens side by side - but it’s ideal for parking a PowerPoint I plan to refer to or a Webex meeting I’m taking notes on. It came in very handy juggling hotel details and conference schedules for a trip, and then for having the details of last-minute cash ISA deals where I wouldn’t get distracted by them while I was on the phone talking about the next version of Windows Mobile. I can put my inbox over there and have messages and documents I’m writing in front of me. 

And Vista (or the Intel graphics driver or most probably the combination of the two) does a really good job of handling applications on multiple windows  - far better than XP and my old Matrox card. With the Matrox card, I had one VGA port and one DVI port with a VGA adapter in. Absolutely fine  - except that I could only watch video on the left screen; video streams on the right screen were black boxes.  And Windows extended my desktop onto the second screen and pretended I had one huge monitor.  That meant maximising a window painted it across both screens and dialog boxes popped up in the ‘middle’ of the extended screen - cut in half between the two displays and very hard to absorb.

Now, applications maximise to fill the screen they’re on to start with and dialogs stay on the screen they belong with.  If I close an application, unplug the laptop and go out, come back to the office and open the same application - the window opens at the same size and on the same monitor as the last time.

Internet Explorer still has a bad habit of pushing new windows onto the other screen - it’s always wanted to sprawl over the whole desktop like a cat on a Sunday newspaper - but nine times out of ten, if a page opens a new window it’s something I want to work on straight away anyway or I would have forced it into a new tab. I shall update the release candidate of SP1 to the release version of SP1 soon and then I can install the beta of IE 8 and see if that’s any more polite.

I’ve only had a second monitor for about four hours and I’ve got twice as much tinkering and timewasting done as usual. Now I shall settle down to some real work and although I won’t get twice as much done, I’m certainly expecting the extra real estate to make a real difference.
-Mary

When we landed in Los Angeles this trip, I was relieved and disappointed at the same time. We’d been expecting the new ten-finger sensors instead of the left-index-right-index-photograph dance you currently do, but they weren’t installed yet. I’m keen to see these in action, and I don’t expect to be in Boston, Dulles or Atlanta any time soon (they’ll be in all US airports by the end of the year). The current scanners are optical - rather like a bar code scanner in a supermarket. That’s a little slow and could be fooled by a fake finger (unlikely as the TSA agent would spot it).

Scanning ten fingers is good for security - more chances of a match with fingerprints the FBI has found at crime scenes where you’re as likely to get a thumb print as anything else. And if it’s not going to take five times as long, it must be using an active technology like the AuthenTec scanner in my HP 2710p notebook - and I want to see how well it works in a heavy duty situation.

I like the HP scanner because I don’t have to remember passwords any more, so I can make them longer and harder to break. I wish HP would write a driver to let me use it for scrolling and I can’t wait until the promised update compensates for the way the screen moves a little as I scan my finger so I don’t have to brace it with my other hand any more. This is much more about convenience than security, and I think my fingerprints are safe enough in my PC. I’m less happy about government use of biometrics, because the government has a terrible record on data security and a dubious one on protecting privacy.

Motorola didn’t reassure me after they did a pilot for biometric visas for the UK, Austria, Luxembourg, Portugal and Spain and the UK. “From the pilots we’ve been involved with, it’s clear that the biggest challenge is around working practices,” says Gillian Ormiston, senior solutions consultant for Biometric Identity Management and Security Solutions at Motorola. The biometrics worked fine - but switching from a paper visa process to tapping it all in on computer wasn’t always as smooth, and that’s where security problems - or just mistakes - can happen.

A friend of ours is cabin crew with a major UK airline and that meant he ended up in the pilot for the US visa biometrics some years ago. He and a colleague were scanned, photographed and welcomed to America. Next week he was back at the same airport, but his fingerprints didn’t match; turns out they’d switched the scans for him and his colleague.

It should have been obvious from the photo that our friend was the same person. It was, in fact, but there was no way to easily update the record to deal with the mistake. It took months to sort out and even if the TSA is very polite about secondary interviews, it adds at least an hour of sitting around being checked on before you can get into daylight and start adjusting to the time zone.

Security is a process rather than a state; it’s what you do rather than what you are. But the process of how you get to be secure - as an individual or a country - has to be right too. Just putting biometrics into a system doesn’t make it more secure.

-Mary