Blog Currents - 29-08-2012

Post Article for 29-Aug-2012

This week it is time to look at the phone wars. Nokia and RIM the makers of the Blackberry are essentially out of the market leaving Apple, Samsung, Microsoft and a number of Asian providers. The biggest battle is currently between Apple and Samsung in both the phone and tablet spaces. Apple claims that Samsung has violated copyright by using rounded corners and copied their icon designs. Samsung has pointed out that others used rounded corners and similar icons before Apple did and in the greater scheme of things who really cares? That a rounded corner, something used since people bumped into a table with square ones, is even subject to copyright is absurd to start with. So far the battle lines have shifted back and forward between the two companies with different winners in different places. Now a new player has entered the fight, Google. They make the Android operating system that is so popular on Samsung devices. They also own all of the Motorola patents one of which is essentially the one that allows a SIMM to connect to a communications network. Guess which company whose products all start with a small i also connects to the communications network with a SIMM? An attack on Samsung is an attack on Android and by extension an attack on Google. Google has started the process of having all the 4s and iPad2 devices taken off the market because they are violating the Motorola patent. Note that they are not asking Apple to pay for the license just to get rid of their devices.

This would effectively halve Apple’s profits overnight and it is really Apple’s fault for starting this battle with Samsung in the first place simple because they were Apple’s biggest competitor and Apple has devolved into a rather anti-competitive company as Europe and other have pointed out recently. I’m not sure where this will all end up but I suspect that if Apple drops their suits and returns to an open competitive marketplace that Google will also back off. This is of course the best situation for the users and for common sense.

To help you find out if your new invention may be violating any “prior art” Google has developed a new tool their Prior Art Finder that looks at a variety of locations to see if someone else has done it before you. To get a patent your idea must be new, add something to the existing options and also be useful to industry. It works by taking key phrases in your submission and comparing it to what is already out there.

Some malware lingo for you. A “Black Hat” is a background hacker usually up to no good and typically for personal gain. In contrast the “White Hat” is usually a security tester or someone who works for a security organization and are sometimes called ethical hackers. A “Grey Hat” is somewhere in between and often break in just for fun. The term “Blue Hat” is used to indicate someone used to bug test a system but not part of a White Hat group. Now you know.

If like me you are a fan of future technology take a look at the web site http://leapmotion.com/ and run the demo. Then look at the price below. If your jaw didn’t unconsciously drop you are made of sterner stuff than I. This little box could revolutionize the future of input peripherals and bring us yet another step closer to the technology we say in the movie Minority Report. 

With Windows 8 due out in October I suspect there are a few who will want to try it out. By all means do so. To my eye it looks a bit like Windows 1 as far as the design is concerned but there are some who will like and adopt it. According to Dell enterprises, not so much. Dell is expecting a continuation of the transition to Windows 7 for the next year or so and any new moves to other platforms will be at the server end with Windows Server 2012, with the possible exception of tablet users.

There are three things that do not tend to work well with each other phones, computers and cameras. The latest devices like the Samsung S3 combine a computer and a phone quite well and while the camera is nice it is nothing like the real thing. Enter the new Android powered Nikon Coolpix S800c. It is basically a nice 16MP point and shoot camera with a 25-250mm equivalent lens, built in GPS, 125-3000 ISO and HD 1080p video. Now add an Android 2.3 Gingerbread operating system with access to all the usual Android functionality and apps with WiFi. This is the first camera with everything but the phone, probably the easiest thing to add in the next version. Still only two thirds the way there but getting closer.

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The Chinese underground is large and worth about $800 million. A recent analysis from the California University’s Institute on Global Conflict and Co-operation is probably way off as most Western analysis of Asian countries is typically poor. They claim a group of 90,000 people that have targeted an estimated 110 million internet users. They target banking information, online currency, spreading botnets and training others in black hat techniques mostly involving Trojans and a variety of phishing attacks designed to do ID fraud and identity theft.

They participants work using a loosely organized trading system. Web forums, chat clients, special slang based language and other tricks are used to mask activity from those who are watching. Baidu PostBar for example has over 5 million discussion areas. The administrators claim to be thankful for others pointing out how their services could be misused. Asians are polite like that. Tencent QQ is another service being used but not quite so helpful when it comes to shutting down the trouble makers.

Those familiar with Asia will not be surprised if the police in China are involved in some way either by working slowly or more actively involved.   

Blog Currents - 16-08-2012

Yes I have been a bit slack this past week. Here is last week's

It is time to start thinking about Windows 8. OK that’s enough. Windows 8 is primarily aimed at the tablet or touch based computer market. Yes there is a PC version and yes it has been adjusted for regular mouse and keyboard users but according to organisations like Gartner it is not all that suitable as a corporate replacement for Windows 7. With the previous longevity of Windows XP many organisations are just starting to move over to Windows 7 as a now well established and stable operating system so Windows 8 is going to have to be very good to tempt all but the most leading edge companies from moving off Windows 7 any time soon.

Last week I wrote about social media. Since then I read one article that highlighted a number of sources that in summary suggest if you are not part of the social media phenomenon then you could be classified as “suspicious.”  Forbes reported that HR departments in the US are wary of younger job candidates who do not use Facebook. If they don’t have such a site some bosses may suspect it had to be deleted because of problems. A Slate.com writer advised young people not to date anyone without a Facebook account. Slashdot suggested that no Facebook account could be a sign of a mass murderer. It is good to be old.

Privacy is always in issue in the digital age. Google has been caught out collecting all manner of information during their StreetView runs by grabbing all they could from any WiFi nodes they passed by. Australia has joined a number of others demanding that any data so collected must be destroyed, with third party confirmation. Apparently Google has been a bit naughty and did not delete it all back in March of 2011. SO here is the thing. This data would have been sorted, collated, cross matched and from this all manner of summaries and demographic information created. Deleting the raw data at this point would be a bit like the kind of thing we all do every couple of years to make space on our hard drives. 

So when was the last time you had some Raspberry Pi? Not that isn’t a spelling mistake because this Pi is a tiny $20 computer about the size of a credit card. If you pay an extra $10 you get twice the RAM and an Ethernet socket. The device is based on the ARM 11 processor and starts with 128 MB of RAM.  It comes with HDMI out, composite RCA support, SD car reader, and audio out and 1 or 2 USB ports. It weighs about 45 grams and equivalent in power to a 2004 era laptop. It runs Linux loaded via the SD card. It is designed for kids to learn about computers and is comparable to and has more features than machines $100 or more. You can plug in a keyboard and mouse, will connect to the TV and can be used to do normal computer things like browse the Internet, edit documents, play music and video up to 1080p and can work as a media center or even a home automation device. It can be used in robotics and should provide a lot of fun for a child so inclined.

Blog Currents – 2012-08-02

My first column back at the Bangkok Post is below the line stuff that didn’t fit comes first J

It is official Windows 8 and Server 2010 are in their final form and passed along to OEMs for testing and installation on new systems. Those with MSDN or TechNet will get access to Windows 8 on August the 15^th. Some will get it the day after e.g. those with Software Assurance contracts. If you are a Microsoft Action Pack Subscriptions (MAPS) user then your date is the 20^th and other corporates can get it on September the 1^st. The general release date for Server 2012 is September the 4^th. Final builds for Visual Studio 2012 and .NET 4.5 will be ready on August the 15^th.

 Apple was recently granted a patent for three dimensional touch technology that allows the user to define a 2D object and essentially pull it into 3D by drawing the fingers off the screen like say the Microsoft Kinect controller works or we all saw in the movie Minority Report. Apple was granted 23 other patents that are probably also based on earlier technology. The US Patent Office has a lot to answer for.

Ignoring the wars for the moment rumours are out of an 11.8 inch tablet from Samsung due this year with a 2560 x 1600 display resolution and a dual-core 2GHz CPU with Android Beam. This puts it in the so called “retina resolution” category and will beat Apple to market. There should be more specs leaked at the upcoming Berlin consumer electronics show.

The sigma rating for the Higgs Boson has not rising to 5.9 being about 299 in 300 million change that they are right. AT worst this makes the particle at the very least “Higgs like.”

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It is good to be back on the pages of the Bangkok Post. For those diehards who kept reading my Currents blog during the interim, you can now relax with the expanded Life section and catch up here. The new Currents will be the same as the old Currents but with less technical and programming bits in the shorter format. A lot has changed since I wrote last. For one I finally have a smartphone that is as near as possible to a computer and I even plugged a mouse into it recently. The lines between the PC and notebook have been blurred by the tablets and intelligent phones. 

One of the biggest fads these days for some appears to be tweeting. For those unclear on Twitter and tweating, a tweet is a mass broadcasted SMS message. Watching a recent TV show I caught the term “twates” being a tweet sent by a hater or as a hate message. This got me thinking of other possible tweet types. Twangs could be an angry tweet, twoves might be a tweet sent with a loving message. A twit would be a tweet sent by an idiot, a twaze being a lazy tweet or a tweet forwarded from someone else. A twat could be something about obese people and a tweep would be a tweet that puts you to sleep. The possibilities seem to be endless and I’m sure you can come up with some new ones of your own. Personally I find the general content of tweets to be boring, egotistical or inane so this is a not a technology I think will continue to develop in the future.

Two years ago I was still complaining that no-one had a smartphone that I would buy. Since then I have owned both the Samsung Galaxy S2 and the newer S3. There are many reasons why I did not and will never buy an iPhone including no battery replacement and no memory cards but the biggest reason is iTunes, a product that I personally consider to be no better than a virus. Another reason is that Apple has quite simply changed from an anti-establishment, trendsetting company to becoming the establishment and now playing catch up to the likes of Samsung and Android. The draconian control Apple holds over its customers borders on criminal.

Android has changed from an amusing entry into the marketplace to the most dominant operating system in the portable space today. Nokia and the Blackberry has fallen off the charts and depending on which report you read Android has toppled to once market leaders and does not look like it will be stopping anytime soon. With Windows 8 RE on ARM Microsoft has started to blur the lines between the PC operating system and the tablet market.

Using my S3 I can plug in a mouse and a keyboard and drive it like a computer. With a 4 core CPU and 16 GB it is more powerful than most computers were a decade or so ago and most of what a user would ever need is a free download and a few seconds away, which has generated the now common saying “there is an app for that.”

I learned two things when I recently tried to fix a new computer that had the Windows 7 64-bit operating system installed. The first was not to update any device drivers that were behaving well. The second was to right click on an application’s executable file and select the XP compatibility check box. For the first one just because you get the latest drivers from the manufacturer’s web site does not guarantee that they will behave well or to paraphrase don’t update them unless you need to. For the second if you can install a program but it does not run under Windows 7 selecting the compatibility option can have you up and running in a few seconds. This option was present in Home Premium Pro version I was working on so if you have this problem try it for yourself.

Some brief news items. Windows 8 is due out soon but a recent Gartner report claims that PC users will find it difficult to use because the paradigm is based around a touch screen. Rumours still abound on the release date of the iPhone 5 with the latest being September the 21^st and claims from Apple that 10 million customers are eagerly waiting in line to buy one. In related news Apple’s iPhone sales are down on recent quarter to quarter results. Samsung has sold 10 million Galaxy S3 units in the first seven weeks of sales and currently sells more smartphones than Apple. Proving once again that the US Patent Office is indeed crazy Apple is looking for $2.525 billion because of rounded corners on Samsung tablets. Finally for this week even with the Higgs Boson still not 100 per cent confirmed the theory is that there may be five different types of them.