January 5, 2010 by pdanderson
For many Microsoft watchers 2009 was the year of Windows 7 – the latest version of their market-dominating operating system – and Bing, the company’s latest salvo in the continued battle with Google over Web search. But in the background, and little noticed by the media, the company has also been re-thinking how it makes software and these changes are likely to have a more long-term impact on the computer world over the next decade.
Bill Gates has moved on. Ray Ozzie is the new Software Architect and he has brought new ideas about cloud computing, software as a service and, whisper it quietly, open source software. It is the latter that has caused most surprise and in the process has split the free and open source development community. A number of moves made by the company in the last six months have left some in that community talking about a ’sea change’ and others accusing it of simply using small forays into open source as another form of PR. With this in mind, Oxford University’s OSSWatch service commissioned me to research and write an in-depth article and this has just been published on their website. If you’ve got half an hour to spare before things get too hectic again why not have a look.
Tags: Microsoft, Open Source, OSSWatch
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December 4, 2009 by pdanderson
The homeless housing charity Shelter have come up with a high-tech way to get even the most determined Scrooge to part with his hard earned brass this Christmas. Take a look at HousingBling, an online app that lets you augment a scene from Google StreetView with various gaudy Xmas decorations in the style of Eddie Windass himself.
I’ve had a go and you can see our office online, suitably redecorated and complete with falling snow. Inspired. And yes, this grasping miser did donate.
Tags: HousingBling, Shelter
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November 24, 2009 by pdanderson
What will computers be like in 2020, or even 2050? Given the rapid pace of innovation, predicting the future of technology is notoriously difficult, but one thing we can be sure of is that it will use less energy. Thanks to rising concern about climate change there has been an astonishing level of interest over the last year or so in investigating ways to develop computers, displays, printers, data centres and other technology which use less energy. And the pace of innovation will only increase.
I’ve been busy in the last few months as a co-author on a major new report for JISC. The “Low Carbon Computing” report, published today, looks at how ICT can be made more energy efficient. The report takes as it premise the UK’s Climate Change Act and maps a future for computing which is framed by the CCA’s targets, processes and frameworks. By 2020 the public sector will be expected to have reduced its carbon levels to 30% less than it used in 1990. It is a ‘big ask’ and ICT will have a major role to play.
How to achieve these kinds of cuts? The sociologist, Anthony Giddens, is quoted in the report as saying we have to “Season policy with a dash of utopian thinking”. In this spirit the report covers a very wide range of emerging ideas and technologies varying from simple behaviour changes (switch off your PC when you’re not using it, for god’s sake!) to radical suggestions such as switching data centre equipment to run on DC power alone (more efficient to run from renewable sources). Along the way the report takes in a wide variety of interesting new ideas such as thermal energy harvesting, hydrogen fuel cells and nano data centres. We’ve deliberately looked at a long time period and the report presents a first attempt at a Low Carbon ICT roadmap for up to 2020.
The full report’s a bit of a beast at nigh on 80 pages, but there is a 5-page executive summary for the lightweights among you.
Tags: energy, green, green ICT, Low Carbon
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November 2, 2009 by pdanderson
Microsoft have done two important things this year. The first, Windows 7, you will no doubt have heard all about. Indeed, judging by the number of TV adverts for the launch last week you may be starting to get heartily sick of hearing about it. The second, though, is less well known but much more controversial: they’ve recently committed some of their hand-crafted-in-Redmond code to GNU/Linux. I’ve been writing about different aspects of this for a few people, but the first to publish is Prospect magazine. It’s quite a short piece in terms of the complexity of the issues, but will give you a taster of what’s to come.
Tags: GNU/Linux, Linux, Microsoft, Prospect
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October 29, 2009 by pdanderson
We’ve had a Sony e-Reader around the office for a few months now and we’ve used it from time to time to read a few heavyweight pdf documents on long train journeys. But it is only in the last few days that I’ve really got my teeth into it and used it to read an entire book.
Firstly, on the positive side, there is no doubt that it has saved me lugging around seriously heavy chunks of paper on a number of trips. The e-ink screen is good and after years of squinting at laptop screens when I inadvertently end up in a sunny window seat on the train, this is a real joy to read in bright light. It’s also pretty readable in low light. The ability to be able to zoom in on a particular page is also excellent.
Less positively, the page refresh is on the slow side, maybe a second, and this has a noticeable affect on your reading. I also found that the inability to thumb through a book or flick easily from one chapter to another became annoying after a while. You can do these things with the device’s various buttons, but it’s just not as intuitive. I’d also like to be able to scribble notes on pages which is a feature that’s only just been added to the new version of Sony’s device. As a Mac user I was also a bit annoyed that it took several months before Sony had a Mac OS version of their eBook library software.
Sony, of course, are not alone. Indeed, the launch this month of an international version of the Amazon Kindle has generated a lot of newspaper reviews (including an unusually excoriating one by Lynne Truss in the Sunday Times). Some even think these devices will be this year’s Christmas hit. Booksellers Barnes and Noble have got in on the act with an exclusive device called The Nook, which has just launched in America.
More interestingly, Spring Design have announced a dual screen device that has an 6″ e-ink screen area for book reading and another, smaller, LCD screen for Web surfing. The idea is that as you come across hyperlinked items in the book or report you are reading you can click and be taken (on the second screen) to the item in question. This points towards making e-books a different, more interactive experience to the traditional book (which has been much discussed in publishing circles).
Looking at these devices though, I have to say, I think there’s a huge, crisp, perfectly formed piece of fruit about to drop on this market. At the moment it doesn’t officially exist. It’s the Apple tablet and I suspect that will be the Christmas hit. In 2010, that is.
Tags: Apple, e-reader, Nook, Sony, Spring Design
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October 16, 2009 by pdanderson
For years there has been talk within the computer industry of optical computing being the next big thing. Replacing electronic components with light-bearing ones – think tiny fibre optic cables – promised startling breakthroughs in computational speed. But up until now there has always been a problem making the optical components small enough for computers.
A team of European researchers has just demonstrated ‘light on a wire’ technologies that could lead to computing systems that can combine electronics and optical communications in one system. They call it plasmonics and it makes use of a physical property called electron plasma oscillation to transmit both electronic and optical signals down the same wire. What’s exciting about this is that while the plasmonic technique has been demonstrated before, this team have managed to get the idea to work using existing commercial lithography chip-manufacturing techniques.
As Anatoly Zayats, a researcher who’s been working on the project on behalf of the EU, says: “For the last five years or so it has been possible to build an optical computer chip, but with all-optical components it would have to measure something like half a metre by half a metre and would consume enormous power. With plasmonics, we can make the circuitry small enough to fit in a normal PC while maintaining optical speeds.”
Zayats expects commercial results in five to ten years and a French chip manufacturer is drawing up plans. Looks like a good day for the European computer industry.
Tags: EU, Europe, optical computing, plasmonics
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Gutenberg fights back
February 16, 2010 by pdandersonMy colleague Gaynor has started a blog focused on the two things that she claims dominate her working life: words and nerds. One of her first posts reports on a workshop we went to the other day at which Nottingham writer Jon McGregor talked about his new book and its radical, ‘Berlin’, semi-hardback, physical format. Despite all the talk about e-books there is still innovation going on in Gutenberg publishing. Worth a read at: http://wordsandnerds.wordpress.com/
Tags: e-book, e-reader, Gutenberg, Jon McGregor
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