Rupert's DiarySlightly sanitised for the squeamish

According to the Baltimore Sun (free reg required - sorry), various bad manufacturers have been taking the mickey over the more relaxed regulations the Americans have for low powered transmitters. More precisely, the Septics have the freedom to use low-powered FM transmitters to link portable gear to domestic and in-car radios, stuff like the i-Trip that lets you listen to your iPod on the stereo without fiddling with wires.

That's a good thing, and I'm glad that Ofcom has decided to give us the same freedom for Christmas. The rules are quite tight, though; the signal is restricted to just enough oomph to struggle through a few feet of air. Otherwise chaos would reign.

Trouble is, some of the more aggressive newcomers to the American radio scene - Sirius and XM, both of whom supply thousands of subscription digital channels via satellite - have been telling their suppliers to build in more powerful FM transmitters than the law allows. This makes their listeners happy as it's more convenient to set things up and more flexible in the way a single XM or Sirius box can cover an entire house, but it's annoying the Hertz out of their next door neighbours. There you are, quietly listening to The Lord's Hour on God's Blessings Radio when suddenly some kickin' junglist riddims come pouring in. The worst affected are the public broadcasters, who tend to have weaker signals anyway.

Things are in hand, and both XM and Sirius have said sorry. Self regulation may yet win out. But how many other bits of similar naughtiness are underway in wireless data, where manufacturers feel free to sell 'pre-N' and 'draft-N' systems with, one imagines, equally scant care for interference with others.

It's been more than ten years since I wrote my first diary entry for ZDNet UK. At the time, the site was hosted as an offshoot of ZDNet.com, which has, like us, seen astonishing changes on and off the web. When the diary started, Google was Alta Vista, Wikipedia was a ripped-off copy of Encarta in a 4x CD-ROM, and broadband was a 28.8kbps V.34 modem. Wireless was still a term used more for the Goon Show than networking — 802.11 had yet to be born.

We move on, and so must the diary. The final entry has yet to be written — but this is the last one in this form. The original idea of writing up daily events online from a personal view has proved durable and popular; in 1997, someone even came up with a name for the general principle. Now it's got to the point where even sales and marketing have heard about it. And so, inevitably, the diary is becoming a blog.

There'll still be a weekly round-up, as well as a separate blog for all the stuff that is too whimsical, off-centre or just plain pointless to get into the diary proper. The rest of the ZDNet UK team — and, increasingly, voices from elsewhere in the industry — will also have their own areas. As can you: don't think you're getting off lightly. ZDNet wants you.

However, much hasn't changed. Microsoft continues to be found guilty of abuses of power while acting surprised and hurt that anyone could think such a thing — and rolls out operating systems late and with half the features missing. Steve Jobs still has his reality distortion field, this time persuading his army of fanbois that if you slap an Apple logo on a bog-standard Intel laptop you're getting real magic. Apple fanbois still write in by the hundred in response to things like that last sentence.

Here are some predictions for the next ten years. Microsoft will produce a free thin version of Windows — Thindows — for the home, with a £4.99 per month subscription model for online services and software. Apple will run out of ideas: Google will not. There will be two or three high-profile startups based on thin-client open source enterprise computing using information appliances; one of these may become a billion dollar outfit in record time.

Most of the action will be at the convergence of smart storage and networking, with increasing amounts of intelligence that knows about finding patterns in data and the most efficient ways to load information from multiple sources. Anyone who's used BitTorrent will know how it does things that nothing else can match: go to Oracle and ask for a database that can deliver gigabyte images from an exabyte store at 10Mbps. That's the sort of performance BitTorrent users get with a thirty quid a month cable connection, a three hundred quid PC and free software. Now, imagine those ideas in the days to come, when we've got 100-core processors running at a teraflop and gigabit global networking. We've barely started.

But there'll still be room, I hope, to write about the silliness and splendour of the human side of the IT industry, of important people doing daft things and daft people doing important things. Even as the global information machine mumbles in its sleep and stirs on the verge of awareness, there'll be a pub in Soho where a PR says something off-message to a hack not quite drunk enough to miss it. Until the day that happens, the diary will live — whatever it's called.

Wednesday 18/10/2006

Now look here. It's all very well accusing some of us online hacks of deliberately stirring up controversy in areas we know to be sensitive. And when certain big beasts of the American persuasion go on record as saying that they know exactly how to milk the Macintosh fanbase for thousands of hits, and do so cynically and repeatedly, a certain scepticism is not only allowable, but required.

But when we do some straight reporting of a straightforward story from those doyens of respectability, Gartner, and it just happens to say things about the Mac, it's a bit rich to blame the journalist for indulging in some wicked agenda.

But you wouldn't let it lie, would you? The talkbacks are still thundering in, in terms ranging from rank ridicule to fearsome anger. You'd have thought we'd have advocated the outlawing of football, with the teams, leagues and grounds to be devoted to compulsory Morris dancing (an idea of no little merit, as it happens). All we did was tell you what Gartner said, that one of the world's most profitable hardware companies should hand the keys to the kingdom over to an also-ran.

To be honest, we can't quite work out what Gartner's on about either. It seems to be advice along the lines of: "If you can't beat them — and you can't — you might as well join them", advice which sits oddly in the in-tray of a company that said "Think Different" and meant it. What next — ditch the iPod and move over to Dell's DJ range of MP3 players?

Thing is, even if the Gartner report was meant to be an attention-grabbing bit of controversy more than a sober, clear-minded attempt to demonstrate a superior strategy, you lot were just playing into their hands. They knew, as we know, as you know, that anything Mac not conforming to Stalinist levels of agreement with the omniscient, omnipotent Steve, will hit the headlines — and bring in the baying mob.

Don't bay. Don't mob. Show us that attention-whoring Mac copy has run its course, by not piling in with adjectives clattering off the keyboard. A few absolute flops of stories, and sanity will return.

But while you're sitting on your hands, consider what the real Apple story of the year might be. The options backdating scandal has yet to be resolved at Apple — that it happened, is not in doubt. Other companies in the same position have had to restate their results for the past few years — which shouldn't affect Apple. After all, $10bn in the bank is $10bn in the bank. But the other companies have also had to ditch their chief executives, many of whom proclaim their innocence just as strongly as Jobs.

He is by no means guaranteed to survive, no matter what Apple says.

If he goes, what then? Has anyone got any idea? Fanboys, feel free to pitch in.

Tuesday 17/10/2006

Solar power is the new corporate fish tank. Where once I sat in foyers watching fat carp idly float past the receptionist's head — I really must put more water with it — I'm now liable to be distracted by some display proudly clocking up the kilowatt-hours generated by a bunch of photovoltaic cells on the roof.

Meh. What I think about that is mostly unprintable: put up the results of your company's last energy audit, together with the resultant moves to increase efficiency and reduce waste, and I'll be impressed. But how many facilities managers know how many kilowatt hours each employee uses, let alone 10 ways to reduce that without impacting on working practices?

Innovative thinking has yet to scratch the surface here. There are so many ideas to explore: a desk job encourages indolence and spreading waistline — so have some leg-powered dynamos installed beneath the desk. Fitter workers, brighter screens, lower bills, cooler planet. How many reasons do you need?

Likewise, server design has a long way to go before I'll start to believe all these protestations of enhanced efficiency. For example: hard disk drives have electric motors, which are powered via at least eight conversion and distribution stages between them and the rotating machines in the power station. This is not good. Better by far to couple all the hard-disk shafts together and run them from a common driver — which again can be the IT team peddling. Let's face it, they're normally the ones most in need of exercise.

As for the rest of the server electronics, there may be no way to reduce the power the processors, memory and IO circuits use, but you can at least provide it from a source much closer to the hardware. A system of on-board microgenerators, perhaps, fed by water piped in from a nearby stream — which might also provide relaxation and recreation for employees by a water slide, or perhaps some in-house trout fishing.

Or we may fruitfully return to the ideas of the 1950s, when every home was going to be powered by a soup-tin sized nuclear reactor. With the enhanced techniques the semiconductor industry has created to build micro electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) and other nano-technology marvels, it will now be possible to engineer chip-sized uranium fission devices. I know there'll be concerns about safety, but with WEEE and ROHS legislation already in place for other environmental hazards, company culture and practice is ready for the next step. That's before the benefits of increased attention to detail and concentration which will naturally flow from the threat of meltdown, should an engineer make a mistake while installing, servicing or managing a nuclear-powered server.

I hear you, Dell, HP and IBM, when you talk about increased energy efficiency in IT. But until you start to come up with truly innovative ideas like those listed above, I'm not going to believe you.

Monday 16/10/2006

There's no exact day to mark it, and plenty of arguments to be had about the details. Nonetheless, 25 years ago TCP/IP was born — and with it, the beginning of the Internet. As the Internet Society says:

"Two of the core protocols that define how data is transported over the Internet are now 25 years old. The Internet Protocol (IP) and the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), together known as TCP/IP, were formally standardised in September 1981 by the publication of RFC 791 and RFC 793. "

If nations are languages with armies, then networks were protocols with marketing departments — until TCP/IP came along. For the first time, the people behind the standard had set out to be as general as possible, to make no assumptions about hardware or operating systems, but instead to create a lingua franca that had no other purpose than to link together whatever it could. The other networking standards around at the time — IBM's SNA, the ITU's X.25, the deep and mysterious SS7 — were tied to commercial interests, were expensive and complex solutions to badly defined problems, or were plain wrong.

TCP/IP was both utilitarian and visionary. It was also hotly opposed: when as a green young hack in the early 1990s I first sat in on presentations with networking companies, I soon found three approaches to TCP/IP. One was to ignore it altogether, and present whatever the company was flogging as the only such thing in existence. (This is still the preferred mode of most companies pitching their wares, and always, always wrong.) One was to dismiss it as transparently unsuitable for serious work; an experimental, flaky and largely unsupported flight of fancy that had no business pretending to be in the same world as the acronym explosion of the real stuff. The final way was to say yes, it's interesting, but it'll never get critical mass. Why, everyone uses the ISO standards — or why, IBM's got its networking all sewn up. Why would they change? Especially for something that didn't even have a real committee behind it, and no commercial imperatives protecting it?

Like a judo master, TCP/IP took those very weaknesses and revealed them as strengths. There were no government committees, seeking consensus from industry and abroad. There was no marketing department, double-checking every proposal in the light of existing and foreseen revenue streams. There were simply engineers and academics, dedicated to designing and creating the universal network, and all they asked was to be left alone to do it.

With nobody important or well-monied caring, the same people were free to give away everything they did. Which they did. The only things that mattered: rough consensus and running code.

And that won. I once tried to write a science-fiction story where everything the proponents of strong intellectual property law enforcement claim was actually true, and the smallest act of creation resulted in something that was rigorously protected: the only society I could come up with where that worked was stultifyingly feudal. As far as I could work out, the burden of enforcing those rights would utterly stifle most of what in the West are considered essential human freedoms, including the abilty to create anything at all of value. It made for a very dull story indeed.

The application of copyright and patent law would certainly have killed TCP/IP. It is a resounding irony that the value of nearly everything the big media companies are trying to control exists largely because of the Internet, which exists only because TCP and IP exist, which exist because they are free.

Man too is born free, but everywhere is subject to the terms and conditions included hereunto in the End User Licensing Agreement. Change the record!

Friday 20/10/2006

One of the intriguing aspects of the mobile-roaming rip-off is the way it has exposed a fundamental flaw in regulation. There is no European telecomms regulator, no Euro-Ofcom. There are various standards bodies such as ETSI, there are regulators in each state, but there's nobody responsible for the whole lot.

Unsurprisingly, perhaps, nobody seems to want one. Commercial concerns are against regulators in general, seeing them as annoying rule makers who always have reasons why something new should not be done for the first time, the existing regulators are jealous of their powers and influence and are no more likely to hand over either without an enormous fight, and the individual users... well, who listens to them?

But that means farragos such as mobile-roaming overcharging get free reign — nobody had responsibility for sorting it out, until a special team was convened. It also means innovations that require new spectrum rules get held back, compared to the speed at which they can advance abroad. In America, the FCC can say "Fiat Wi-Fi" — and lo, it comes to pass. (Actually, it said: "Let a class of services exist within the 2.4 GHz frequency band, and providing they follow some basic rules we don't much care what they are", which is far less biblical but works rather better.) Over here, we and the French and the Spanish and the Germans all get to set individual rules at different times and with different consequences, meaning that while the wireless companies are busy flogging 10 tons of kit in the USA they're still trying to work out what regulatory information to print on the packages over here.

The same's true for ultrawideband. The FCC gave UWB a St Valentine's Day present on 14 February, 2002, by issuing an edict allowing it to operate under fairly relaxed rules. How many European states have done the same thing? Do you want wireless USB at hundreds of megabits a second? The Yanks are getting it (and no, it's not causing any interference). We're not.

But then, who listens to the users? Radio regulation remains one of the last bastions of restraint of trade thinking, and it's hurting. They can get away with it for so long — when was the last time someone down the boozer complained about cross-border microwave allocation rationalisation? — but the seeds of resentment and revolution have been sown.

We gotta fight for our right — to radiate!

Thursday 19/10/2006

A ridiculous 24 hours of media tarting finishes at lunchtime today, when I make a brief appearance on BBC2's Working Lunch to talk about O2's new European-wide roaming tariff. As usual, I'd talked about what I was going to say with the researcher beforehand — the way presenters seem so well informed is because they've often been told what to say by their interviewees first, even if the interviewee doesn't realise this. However, the rest of the programme overruns and I'm left with two minutes of what was going to be an nice five-minute chat about the European Commission, the rapacity of mobile phone companies, and how to avoid being ripped off by them when abroad.

The reason things are so rushed is that Working Lunch has found itself riding a wave of one particular story, and is devoting a lot of time to both the story and the direct effect it's having on their audience. That story is one that everyone whom you and I know will have mostly ignored — the collapse of Christmas hamper company Farepak, in unusual circumstances that remain unexplained.

I was surprised that such things still went on — Christmas savings companies that collect money over the year and send off a hamper at the end — but with hundreds of thousands of customers putting in hundreds or thousands of pounds, they are substantial concerns. The impact of the company's failure on its clientele is also substantial: these are people who use the schemes precisely because they need to ring-fence money in order to budget for Christmas. With that gone, so are the festivities — and those Farepak customers who are also agents, selling the service on to friends and family, have an extra burden of guilt and disappointment.

And a lot of those affected are natural Working Lunch viewers — the programme's about finance, but it's on in the middle of the day so it's skewed heavily towards the retired and those who are otherwise at home. That demographic is largely invisible to those planning products and services, but it's huge, economically active and deserves attention. Working Lunch was feeling the effects of being one of the few places that could effectively represent and serve that group: the emails were pouring in, the phones ringing and the stories harrowing.

I'm guilty of assuming that everything I write about is part of some youngish, metropolitanish, well-heeled continuum. In the words of The Hitch Hiker's Guide, "Everyone was rich and nobody was poor. At least, nobody who mattered." That's wrong, caustically so, and cuts off a whole range of potentials and responsibilities — in all sorts of ways.

Worth remembering.

Friday 13/10/2006

It's Friday the 13th. What can possibly go wrong?

Oh boy. Where to begin?

We've got a corker of a story/we have it on very good authority that Vista in all its forms, together with Office and Exchange 2007, is due to have a launch on 5 December. In fact, our intrepid reporter Tom got it from the glottis of a Microsoft official at the very firstest of first hands. So, we publish.

Which makes it all the more marvellous that when fellow journalists on other publications phone up Microsoft HQ to confirm the story, it is stoutly denied. No way, they say. No idea what you're talking about. Since we're all in the great liberal media conspiracy together, the journos in question give us a buzz to see how well our story stands up.

"They're denying it!" our hacks-in-arms say. "Good!" we say. "That's another story!"

And indeed, one of Microsoft's multitudinous PRs gets on the blower to us shortly afterwards.

"No, absolutely not," says Weber Shandwick

"So when?"

"We've given a date range, and that's all we're saying."

"So why did a Microsoft executive give us an unambiguous date?"

"Can't say."

How odd. So, we get stuck into one of our internal Microsoft contacts.

It turns out that, oddly, everything is sort of true. Enterprise Vista in November, retail in January. And 5 December? A "launch event" for one particular public-sector segment, and only a tiny part of the rolling festival — if you will, Vistival — that MS has planned for us all. Not all launches are alike, and some live at the wrong end of the stick

This one's not really much of a story after all, so it heads towards the virtual spike. How annoying — almost as annoying as a DVD of Vista RC1 turning up in the post the day after RC2 hits the net.

But one Microsoftie has given us nothing but pleasure. Darren "Strangely" Strange, UK Product Manager for the 2007 Microsoft Office system, previously made me feel desperately old by turning up at our offices and looking like an escapee from the NME. But he's a good sport about some of Microsoft's sillier product names — and continues in that vein in a talkback to the report of our original encounter.

"Cheer up Rupert. For the record I am 35, and my blog link (which you omitted) is http://blogs.msdn.com/officerocker. I agree with you on SmartArt and OneCare but the best Microsoft US brand was the name they gave for their beta cd. There were different kits, the largest of which was intended for lonely developers which in their wisdom they named the 'master beta kit'. Perhaps you can understand some of the challenges I face."

More than happy to promote the blog, Mr Strange, which is not only interesting but illustrated with happy pictures of blue screens of death. And we are happy to once again applaud your very British attitude to those double entendres that, in the words of Ronnie Barker, can mean only one thing.

Thursday 12/10/2006

Symantec has spent this week talking about how it's going to grow to a $10bn company on the back of its grandly named Security 2.0 initiative. Well, we'll see. There's much talk of evolving threat landscapes, integrated packages and corporate-wide initiatives, all the sort of things I'd be doing if I was trying to build a $10bn company.

I'm not. And that gives me the freedom to feel profoundly depressed by the whole idea. What Symantec is saying, in effect, is that everyone else's software is flawed to the tune of 10 to the power of nine — and that there's room for growth on top of that.

One thing I find most exciting for the future of security is the use of virtualisation to detect and defeat attacks, with flocks of computers co-operating to analyse, trace and characterise the threats. A virtualised system has the ability to stop and examine itself for unusual changes, no matter how cleverly they try to bury themselves in the operating system: networked systems have the ability to compare notes, to move thread signatures around through peer-to-peer, to combine log results and conduct frighteningly precise analysis on what appeared when and where.

That's a lot of work, and I'm sure you can spot hard problems there just as easily as I can, but you end up with a Net-wide immune system that could be largely self-supporting and actively dangerous to anyone trying to subvert it. How would you feel if, three hours after you released your nastyware, a map somewhere in the CIA had a tapestry of pulsing lines all converging on your point of release?

Threats don't exist in isolation — and neither do the systems that are threatened. But security companies — Symantec isn't, ahem, alone in this — make their money by presenting solutions in isolation. An "evolving threat landscape" is best countered by out-evolving the environment it inhabits, not sticking to a boy-in-the-bubble model.

But if I was trying to grow a company, perhaps I wouldn't be too thrilled by coming up with solutions that were able to look after themselves: what's more important to the shareholders, the cure or the ability to keep selling it? Last year, Symantec decided to unveil its Research Labs, which had precisely one person doing fundamental research and around 50 others doing stuff related to existing products. Still, they promised to hire 10 more this year — some of whom may have joined the solitary headscratcher. It's hard to say: the labs don't have their own Web pages. A quick spin through Google Scholar shows a sprinkling of publications, but for a company flogging itself as a hotbed of advanced innovation it merits a strong could-do-better. For one heading for that sort of turnover on the back of technological excellence, it's an embarrassingly tiny showing.

At least, in a nod to two-point-naughtiness, Symantec has a blog. Well done, Symantec. Admittedly, at the time of writing it seems to be mostly full of product announcements and people complaining that the company's removed functionality from its latest releases without telling anyone — but hey, you don't reach 10 bill without breaking a few eggs.

Wednesday 11/10/2006

More news from America, where the serpent of the SCO vs IBM lawsuit is stirring in its sleep. The latest information — and the one thing in the past three-and-a-half years that rings the truest — comes from Larry Goldfarb, one of the chaps in charge of BayStar, an investment vehicle that coughed up $50m for SCO just before the company strapped on the breastplate of truth and grasped the trusty sword of righteousness, all the better to ride out into the Utah night and save fair maiden from evil dragon.

So far, the evil dragon is winning. However, Larry has now put a sworn deposition into the court saying that he was promised — PROMISED — that the dragon would turn tail and flee at the first sight of Brave Sir Darl, leaving a Huge Pile of Gold for all to share (especially Larry). And even if that didn't happen, he was promised — PROMISED — that the mighty king ensconced in Castle Redmond would see him right, know what I mean, guv?

Based on those promises, Larry handed over the Baystar bucks. It didn't take long for him to have misgivings, although he doesn't say exactly when he had the first nagging suspicions that in grown-up land, promises made without legally binding contracts are worth little more than fairy tales.

Perhaps it was when SCO's legal counsel didn't manage to show Larry the copper-bottomed evidence it said it had, which guaranteed the court case. Perhaps it was when Microsoft stopped returning his calls. Perhaps it was when he told SCO that he'd rather they concentrated on the lawsuit than making software which, if they lost, would be worth nothing, and if they won would be insignificant — and SCO ignored him.

In the end, the court statement sighs, he cashed in his chips and walked away some $35m the poorer. This is a fascinating insight into the way money works over there, and leaves me full of wonder.

According to Larry, three senior named Microsoft people were directly involved in convincing BayStar to hand over the money — something Microsoft has chosen not to deny.

No doubt we can expect some interesting statements to come from those people, courtesy of the IBM lawyers. In fact, there's a whole slew of new court documents coming to light, including — to his delight — an article by our very own Graeme "Scoop" Wearden, who also gets mentioned in dispatches by PJ at Groklaw for his recent article on the Goldfarb statement, which hooks in a lot of useful background. Which was, of course, triggered by Groklaw bringing the thing into the light in the first place.

One set of people have good ideas, then other people add their own particular brand of useful, so both sets of people receive a handsome return on their investments — and everyone else gets it for free.