Beyond XP Mode: DOS applications on Windows 7
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Uncategorized on
Backward compatibility is a millstone around the neck of OS vendors. Just look at the trouble Microsoft had with Vista. Not everyone has the courage - or the following - to dump huge portions of its installed software base in the way Apple has in its transitions from 68000 to Power PC to Intel. That’s why virtualisation is such a useful too, it allows the latest hardware to run older less well-supported operating systems. Microsoft is using it to give Windows 7 users a virtual XP machine with its XP Mode (and its MEDV Enterprise Desktop Virtualisaton tools). But what if you want to run really old software?
That’s where the gamers come in.
There’s a whole culture out there devoted to preserving their favourite games. After all, good game design is art, mixing interactive story telling with the finest examples of digital images and animation. It’s also where new techniques are pioneered, in artificial intelligence, in speech synthesis, and in human computer interaction. Keeping those classic games alive is an important part of keeping digital culture alive - and in a fortuitous fallout, it’s also our best hope for preserving and using those old business applications that just won’t die.
We’ve been clearing out the spare room at the palatial SandM Towers, and a couple of old pieces of software came to light. One was a copy of an old favourite, Dungeon Keeper. It had been a good few years since I heard the games dulcet tones, along with the immortal “Your creatures are falling in battle”.But how was I to run a DOS game on Windows 7? The change to NT-based operating systems with Windows XP had left games like Dungeon Keeper orphaned.
A quick trip to Google revealed the answer to my problem: DOSBox
Not so much a virtual PC, more an emulator, DOSBox gives you a place to run your old DOS software, with emulation for most popular graphics cards of the time, and most popular soundcards. There’s even networking support and the ability to access serial ports to work with old hardware. While DOSBox doesn’t run DOS (so you don’t need a DOS licence!), it’s able to give you most of the familiar old commands with its own shell - and can map drives from the host PC to the virtual DOS machine. While it’s command line driven there are plenty of frontend GUIs to help you configure your environment, including mounting disks and drives.
There’s a lot that can be said for taking a tool designed for working with games and using it in your business. Even more when it’ll run on a wide range of different processors and operating systems. Tools like DOSBox will help you plan your Windows 7 migration, giving you more options for handling old software and for slowly transitioning unsupported applications to new, supported tools.
Hey, and you also get to play Dungeon Keeper. That, my friends, is most definitely a win.
–Simon
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Windows 7 gets a (sort of) 70 program limit
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Windows 7, Microsoft, Uncategorized on
I found an interesting Windows 7 bug today.
The other day I took my workhorse Windows Vista desktop machine over to Windows 7. It was a move that was somewhat overdue - but one that would finally put my desktop on the same level as my regular HP tablet. My usual way of working is to drive Vista and 7 through the search box - so it took me a couple of days to realise that the All Programs section of the Start Menu was blank.
All the shortcuts were there, just nothing showing.
Odd, I thought.
Annoying, I thought.
Ooops, I thought.
Search was still working, but I was trying to remember the name of a program for a friend who needed an unarchiver for a Windows PC he was setting up - and of course search doesn’t work if you don’t know what you’re looking for…
Hmmm.
Google showed that I wasn’t the first person affected by the problem, but most of the solutions people were suggesting (a) didn’t work and (b) could have left me reinstalling Windows again. It’s never a good idea to wholesale copy the registry from one PC to another.
Finally I found this blog post.
It turns out that there’s a bug in Windows 7 upgrade installs, where it limits the number of items in the All Users program menu to 70. While you can transfer items to a hierarchical directory structure (which will then let you see all your items as you open folders in the start menu), you could also do what I did - clear out the cruft of an untold number of installs of the odd downloaded utility or 30.
The result of the uninstallfest?
I can see all my applications again - and I’ve got a cleaner, less crufty PC.
It’s a fairly innocuous bug as bugs go, but it’s still annoying. Hopefully it’ll be fixed by the time Microsoft releases Windows 7 - but as we in the EU (unless we’re signed up to SA) won’t be able to do upgrade installs, we won’t know…
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Arizona, Utah and the myth of the perfectible network
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Networking, Telecoms, Wireless, Email, Mobile, Internet, Uncategorized on
Why bother with local storage and heavyweight applications when you could just use the cloud? Because they always work, that’s why.
To prepare for six solid days of meetings and presentations, crowds, queues and the three-ring CES circus, we’ve been driving through the quiet, cold American southwest. It’s been extra quiet and peaceful without email and phone calls. It’s not that we swore off connectivity to take a holiday. It’s not that there isn’t 3G and HSDPA coverage out in the wilds. We didn’t forget to enable roaming or run out of battery and I have a bag-ful of handsets to try out… It’s that the cellular networks that serve the Navajo Nation and many of the surrounding counties don’t have international roaming agreements.
Yes, there’s hotel and motel Wi-Fi - but you’re often sharing a very slow DSL connection with everyone else in the hotel that everyone else is using to upload their photos to Flickr. Plus, you don’t want to be tied to the hotel when you’re wanting to explore.
Cloud services and cloud storage are great for collaboration and for having files available on any machine you happen to pick up. But switching entirely to the cloud assumes that the network is always there, always working, always fast enough, always cheap enough and doesn’t run down your battery too much. Back in the real world, it’s too easy to run out of power or drive out of range for online to be your only option. And don’t say it’s a contrived case and only a few people will be driving around wanting to do email or update their diary in Monument Valley: there are plenty of places in Las Vegas where you can’t get connected either.
-Mary
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Runnning BES the Blackberry Way
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Uncategorized on
RIM’s WES 2008 event wasn’t just about the shiny devices (though the Bold is very impressive). It’s also about the nuts and bolts behind RIM’s platform, and about how you actually run your own Blackberry service. With plenty of RIM staff on hand, and giving presentations on everything from web design for Blackberry browsers to configuring RIM’s tools to work with the latest versions of Lotus Domino, there’s a lot of material to help you through your working day.
Blackberry Enterprise Server is a hefty piece of software, and RIM’s own network administrators came down to Orlando to show how they run their service. Not surprisingly they have one of the most complex BES infrastructures around, supporting all three mail server platforms (Exchange, Domino, Groupwise) and with three distinct user classes: bleeding edge Alpha users, advanced Beta users, and general everyday Production users.
With a complex environment like that, spread across the world, what’s the secret sauce? It turns out to be their domain database strategy, which is regionalised and segregated (by mail platform and by user class). Even so, RIM aim to have as few databases as possible, with the intention of keeping management simple.
The team gave out some numbers. They currently support 9300 Blackberrys, of several different generations. There are 42 BES servers in the company, supporting all the different combinations of geography, user type, and mail server (of which there are more than 55). All that’s handled with 9 domain databases - running on centralised high availability SQL Server systems with remote connections from RIM’s global BES network.
If you’re worried about your BES performance you can take a tip from RIM, which uses a mix of virtual and physical BES systems. They use 2GB of RAM for Exchange nodes and 4GB of RAM for Lotus (as BES runs on the same server as Domino). Best results come from placing BES local to the mail server it’s using as a message source. The servers are also connected to the local PABX systems, as part of RIM’s new voice service.
So how’s it all managed? Users are supported with a service desk and with self-service. Self-service is increasingly important, and using RIM’s web-desktop manager rather than the standalone desktop tools they can set their own activation passwords and upgrade devices without having to call on the help desk and server administrators.
Server administration is handled by the corporate database team and a team of BES administrators, with the aim of tracking the code people are using on any given day. Systems are monitored using familiar enterprise management tools, including HP Open View and Microsoft System Center. A reporting database handles configuration queries, while custom scripts and the Blackberry Enterprise Resource Kit handle log analysis (though there are always ongoing evaluations of alternate tools).
It’s important for RIM to have good management tools and practices, as it’s using several different versions of the BES code - the current release, the next service pack, and the next generation release. At any time 1000 users are early adopters, already on the next generation Blackberry Enterprise Server.
So what are the five key tips from RIM’s own administrators for a successful BES implementation?
- Keep your messaging environment healthy
- Protect the domain databases
- Ensure adequate server resources have been provisioned
- Remove orphaned/unused accounts from your mail servers
- Always document custom configurations (and also save logs)
– Simon
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If it ain’t got an API…
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Uncategorized on
We spent some of Friday powering up and down the 101, meeting folk at both Serena and Yahoo!.
There was a common theme to the meetings - the power of open APIs to power the next generation of consumer and business applications. It’s well documented, discoverable, APIs let us build the complex mashups of services and processes.
Discoverable is the key word. We need to be able to automate API access in our development tools, whether they’re GUIs like Serena’s new business mash-up tool, or whether they’re JavaScript code in my web development tool of choice, Aptana.
Yahoo! has been working on API-level tooling for sometime now, and a recurring theme of our lunch conversation was summed up in a question from a developer evangelist: “What APIs can we offer you next?” It was a question that made me think, as Yahoo!’s APIs have been at the heart of the web applications I’ve been writing recently. It’s Yahoo! Local Search that geocodes my postcodes for me, and Yahoo! Pipes that converts any web service into a simple JSON operator I can use in JavaScript to build cross-service mashups that down fall foul of the browser security model.
The latest tool to come out of Yahoo!’s research teams is Fire Eagle, a universal location broker. Tell Fire Eagle where you are, and you can share your location with applications that you’ve given access rights. The Fire Eagle API is designed to handle location information (along with the details of the providing service, so you know how accurate the information is), and authentication (making sure the right person gets the right level of detail).
APIs like these are a key to delivering on two key visions: cloud computing and SOA. When you’re using Fire Eagl, you’re subscribing to a service, either as an information provider or an information consumer. You’re also taking advantage of the infrastructure Yahoo!’s built, using compute resources in the cloud to manage your individual location information.
Analyst James Governor came up with an interesting list of signs that something isn’t cloud computing. At number 5 on the list was this: If there is no API
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The ISP Sandwich
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Uncategorized on
The UK government wants ISPs to control the traffic of illegal file sharing through their networks. If they don’t, the government is planning to introduce legislation to ensure they do. I’m left stuck with an image of King Canute trying to hold back the tide. Failed business models don’t need to be propped up with legislation…
So why isn’t it going to work?
First, some basic numbers. The BBC article on the government proposals suggests that there are 6 million broadband accounts downloading illegal files every year. That’s a hefty proportion of the UK’s 15 million or so broadband users. While broadband analysts Point-Topic predict that number to grow significantly over the next few years, it’s reasonable to expect file downloading to grow at a similar (or, More likely, faster) rate.
Then there’s the problem of identifying the traffic. While it’s possible to roughly identify the application sending each packet, it’s impossible to say exactly what it’s being used for. There’s no point in just labeling BitTorrent connections as illegal downloads, especially as many open source projects use it as a tool for reducing the load on their servers and for giving users faster downloads. There’s also the issue of identifying BitTorrent connections, as many clients connect on random ports and encrypt their connections. To a packet monitor a BitTorrent client delivering a copy of Open Office looks much the same as the latest episode of Doctor Who.
Traffic volume isn’t a signifier, either. That big download could be an MSDN file transfer of an ISO of Visual Studio or Windows Server 2008. It could even be someone using a cloud storage service like Mozy to upload several gigabytes of photographs to a secure online backup service. Or perhaps it’s someone using 4OD or the BBC iPlayer to download a TV programme they missed. With consumer DSL finding a business role as a tool for connecting branch offices it could even be an estate agency updating its database (with the myriad digital photos a house sale needs these days), or an insurance broker delivering a batch of scanned and signed forms to head office.
The bottom line is quite simple: it’s virtually impossible for ISPs to economically identify and filter user actions that infringe on copyright files. The cost of implementing filters is prohibitive (look at how long Google took to even start filtering YouTube), and the time needed to identify exactly which users do what over the network will detract from actually managing and running a commercial network.
There’s also another part to this story.
Running a consumer ISP is hard enough without having to cope with the additional demands of regulators. Customers are on the phone 24×7 demanding service levels that any business IT department would find impossible to implement. An increasing range of IP connected applications and services are stretching thin budgets to the very limit, as network engineers try to emulate a Star Trek chief engineer putting the Enterprise back together with nothing but string and sealing wax.
It’s an issue I’ve had personal experience with, as I used to run the technical side of UK Online - and that was back when dial-up connections were the norm. If it was virtually impossible then to manage usage, what’s it like for today’s ISPs that see an explosion of protocols and packets across their fragile networks.
Illegal filesharing is the least of an ISPs problems. Legal file sharing is a much bigger problem, as the protocols used by services like the iPlayer are inefficient compared to BitTorrent, and the expected traffic volumes are more than likely to overstress existing interconnect and backhaul bandwidth. It’s probably fair to say that ISPs are now finding themselves squeezed from both ends.
If bandwidth is an issue, then ISPs will find ways of controlling it. Plusnet is traffic shaping to reduce network load at peak times. It also produces graphs to show just what type of traffic is used - and when.
Plusnet also produces indivudual reports for each user to show what traffic they were generating. It’s an approach that helps users schedule their own downloads to appropriate times - reducing overall load, and letting users choose their own quality of service.
If
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Microhoo!
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Uncategorized on
Anyone who’s listened to me rant over the last couple of years will have heard me say that I expect Microsoft to takeover Yahoo!. With Google’s dominance over search, and Yahoo!’s success at what Microsoft wants to build into Live, there’s a certain logic to a merger of the two businesses. Yahoo needs the R&D boost that Microsoft can give it, and Microsoft needs the online presence of Yahoo!.
I wasn’t surprised to see that Microsoft has made a formal offer to Yahoo!, offering $44.6 billion for the company.
Microsoft’s been playing nice with Yahoo! for some time. It’s Windows Live Photo Gallery handles uploads to Flick, andWindows Live Messenger can talk to Y! users. The love goes both ways too, as Y! is one of the first applications to really take advantage of the Vista UI enhancements.
Reading Steve Ballmer’s letter to Yahoo! this morning I noticed a couple of quotes.
The first is the one everyone’s expecting. Microsoft needs Yahoo! to compete with Google:
While online advertising growth continues, there are significant benefits of scale in advertising platform economics, in capital costs for search index build-out, and in research and development, making this a time of industry consolidation and convergence. Today, the market is increasingly dominated by one player who is consolidating its dominance through acquisition. Together, Microsoft and Yahoo! can offer a credible alternative for consumers, advertisers, and publishers. Synergies of this combination fall into four areas:
Scale economics: This combination enables synergies related to scale economics of the advertising platform where today there is only one competitor at scale. This includes synergies across both search and non-search related advertising that will strengthen the value proposition to both advertisers and publishers. Additionally, the combination allows us to consolidate capital spending.
Microsoft has been talking about online advertising as a key play for some time. There’s a lot of advertising money out there, and even if you add in the efficiencies of online over other mechanisms, not enough if it is going to the online side. Google may have a lead at the moment, but it’s one that can be eroded. Besides, there’s enough money out there for everyone to do very well thank you.
The second quote is, for me, the more interesting:
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Claiming blog on Technorati
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Uncategorized on
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HD Trek
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Uncategorized on
Next week sees the arrival of the remastered original Star Trek series on HD DVD. We saw a check disk of it a while back, and were astounded at the quality of those 1960s images. You could see the patterns in the mesh of Spock’s space suit in a scene set in a frozen scientific outpost, surrounded by dead showroom dummies.
HD video is starting to go where no man has gone before on its own. We wrote back in May about the plan to place HD cameras a mile or so down below the surface of the Pacific, monitoring black smokers - and delivering the live imagery over the LambdaGrid high-speed academic network (which sadly failed to agree merger terms with Internet2 earlier this week).
Now it’s in space too, as the Japanese KAGUYA (which translates as Selene) lunar orbiter is carrying one of the first space-rated HDTV cameras. The probe is still in shakedown, but has started sending back some spectacular imagery.
JAXA, the Japanese space agency, has turned some of the imagery into two rather wonderful movies - one of Earthrise, and one of Earthset.
We’ve grown up with grainy episodes of Star Trek and even grainier Apollo television pictures, It’s good to finally get a HD look at another world for the first time - whether it’s a mile below the ocean, or a quarter of a million miles away, orbiting a hunk of rock…
HD’s on its way to the Internet, too. Microsoft’s Silverlight supports HD codecs, and Flash will soon join the HD scene (just in time for YouTube to decide one way or the other). It’s also on the way to the familiar DIVX video codec, as the San Diego company just bought a German codec development house that specialises in H. 264. Whether we’re using Silverlight, Flash or DIVX it looks certain that we’ll be looking at some form of HD video.If only we had the bandwidth to deliver it to the home…
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Highlights and low flights
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Uncategorized on
My trip to IFA was like one of the jokes that go on for hours.
The good news was I saw some really interesting products, had an argument about wheher Dell counts as innovative (feel free to convince me but I see them as the ultimate, though good value, beige box), found the hotel Internet connection well set up and used it to get checked in ready to come home. I still consider 22 euros for 24 hours somewhere the wrong side of extortionate (17 euros if you don’t want to connect a second laptop or a PDA and you know you won’t need more than 400MB of connection), but what I really liked about the Swisscom setup is that every time I connected in the room it reminded me of my user name and password for using wireless in the lobby and suggested
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