Does Windows BitLocker spell the end of the office loan laptop?

Friday, November 13th, 2009

This has been an interesting week for the USB key.

No really; the ubiquitous key, which has been implicated in incidents of corporate data loss around the world, now occupies a central role in Microsoft’s view of corporate security.

Far from being the main means by which secrets slip out of your organisation, the Microsoft security technique depends on carrying your BitLocker keys around on a USB stick.

This is a great leap forward, and I can foresee lots of corporates finding themselves strongly obliged to take up BitLocker, especially when you consider the surprising hard line being taken by the Information Commissioner, as reported in this BBC article. Let’s put the headline conclusion up here so you bear it in mind: if your company loses data, then it’s half a million quid as a fine.

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Microsoft still unsure of Windows 7 success?

Tuesday, November 10th, 2009

There are a few signs here at TechEd that Microsoft wasn’t quite as sure about the runaway success of Windows 7 as its fanboys (me included).

In planning the layout of the show stalls in the exhibition halls, Microsoft has ensured plenty of space to gently introduce skeptics to its new hot product. You can wander up and furtle about with example machines, and if you stand there too long a Nice Person will come up and ask if you’ve seen this or that cool feature. I thought I was being even ruder than usual by brushing them off – then some Russian delegates popped up beside me and showed me how to do that brush-off thing properly.

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Microsoft shows courage at Tech-Ed 09

Monday, November 9th, 2009

The initial signs for this year’s Tech-Ed Europe - Microsoft’s annual get-together for its product gurus, partners and IT professionals – being the sort of show rich with standing ovations are not good.

Microsoft is in Berlin around the celebrations of the fall of the Berlin Wall, just after U2 has smeared the town with its dubious neo-political imprimatur, and just before Thanksgiving in the US – it’s one of those periods that might well be marked by suggestions in emails as “a good time to bury some bad news”. But: there’s some good stuff here. Calm stuff; stuff which shows MS is getting down to business, and not distracting the world with dancing paperclips.

The basic raw headlines are that Exchange 2010 goes to public availability as from today, worldwide: and Microsoft is very pleased with some rational improvements. (more…)

The Windows 7 retail experience

Thursday, October 22nd, 2009

No, I didn’t get up early for the Windows 7 launch and no, I didn’t queue – though clearly, by the time I staggered to my nearest PC World, there had been some sort of stampede of the faithful.  They must have been frightfully early too because just before lunchtime, I was out of luck if I wanted a boxed copy of Windows 7 Ultimate.

My intention is to install Windows 7 on a pristine drive in a machine whose previous install (of Vista Business, according to the sticker) was as lost to me as the hard disk it had lived on. This is not the method you will hear most about, because the vast majority of people are assumed to be brave enough to just throw the Windows 7 upgrade DVD into their solitary home PC and just let the dice fall as they may.  Or, as the banners at PC World proclaimed, get a new PC, which just happens to have Windows 7 preinstalled on it.

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First Look: Dell PowerEdge R510 rackmount server

Monday, October 19th, 2009

Announced last Friday, a Dell PowerEdge R510 mid to low-end rackmount server has landed with a light-ish thud in my corporate testbed facility. I might be joking about the corporate testbed, but I’m not joking about the lightness: having just seen the bruises fade away after shifting my stock of HP LP2000Rs (by donating them to the London Cycle Campaign), it was a major relief to be able to carry and unpack the R510 without cups of tea for the battered-shins posse, cursing, and fresh dents in the back of the estate car.

Comparing the R510 with the old machines is hard, because the simple physical similarity wrongfoots you when you actually absorb the statistics. I gave away 5 LP2000R’s – the virtual machine images of them all would fit, and run, inside the R510 without complaint, and use rather less than half of the current required by just one LP2000R.

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The mystery of Vodafone’s mobile broadband filtering

Thursday, October 8th, 2009

Whatever your views on porn, I’m sure you will agree with me when I say that content filtering just seems like such a good idea. How nice to be able to decide what you see, especially when it seems that makers of adult materials go through occasional phases of trying their utmost to stick something in front of you when you’re looking for something else.

When that happens, I’d like my content filtering services not so much as a way of protecting my innocence, but more so I can just do my stuff without interruption. So I am having serious trouble understanding exactly what is driving the content filter on Vodafone’s 3G dongle service.

Some days, whole swathes of the net are invisible – not because they are known to be rude, but because Vodafone claims it can’t even decide whether they are rude, or not. Vodafone’s content filter is offline, so to be on the safe side it just bars all accesses to marked sites.

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Google and Firewalls, round one

Monday, October 5th, 2009

My mailbox has been filling up with pleas for an end to confusion. Not globally, just in the tiny bit of the sum total of human achievement which concerns Google and their applications.

For ages, I have been telling everyone within reach to get themselves a hardware firewall. I hate the fact that “Firewall” has come to mean a whole lot of different things to different people – some say it’s software, others believe it’s a thing a router just does as if by magic; others still say “firewall” and mean “endpoint”… but that’s a digression.

It seems as though Google’s calendar web application wants to actually sniff around in your machine, to pick up re-publishable events in whatever local calendar program you’re using – and it does it from afar. This means, it doesn’t work unless your PC is naked to the web on the particular traffic port it wants to use – and opinions vary over what port that is. There’s a slew of sync utilities, many forum threads, and ominous mentions of Port Forwarding configurations for various chunks of hardware. (more…)

How many MIPS is Honeyball holding?

Monday, September 28th, 2009

This picture shows PC Pro contributing editor Jon Honeyball cuddling an entire fabrication wafer of Intel’s Nehalem generation of Xeons.

Pardon the overall fidelity and quality of the shot but these opportunities don’t come up often, and it was in the middle of an auditorium of journalists, waiting their chance to fondle the wafer case and go cross-eyed counting how many processors are here: we thought it might be $200,000-worth but on the other hand we couldn’t figure out which revision or clock-rate these are.

The man from Intel messed up his own presentation by bringing this lot out, because he wanted to keep a beady eye on the thing as it passed through so many hands round the hall – though if I’m honest I had no independent way to verify that this was a wafer of Nehalems; seen one naked chip, you’ve very nearly seen them all.

But it all left me wondering which year in computing history this number of Nehalems represents? That is, how many MIPS are there in that wafer, and what point would that have equalled the total number of MIPS for the entire planet. My guess is 1957, but I’m willing to be corrected…

Nowhere near Vulcan

Sunday, September 13th, 2009

The usual reaction of a negative person, in a discussion about negativity, is “huh, you would say that” – but I think this BBC article on France Telecom & Suicides counts as a bit of a wake-up call. I can’t say that I strictly approve of the practice of going to your appraisal armed with a large knife – but it certainly illustrates a tendency I’ve seen before. Lots of techies are quite sure that they are unemotional – walking computers, puzzled by the unrestrained expression of those around them. Mr Spock is their role model; everything’s under control, no need to get emotional.

Clearly this isn’t quite going well inside France Telecom, and there’s obvious echoes (though not quite so extreme) inside our own giant quasi-monopoly technology companies; I don’t think I know a single person who doesn’t have a “bolshy engineer” story – though all of those stop a bit short of seppuku when the cable comes out too short or there’s rat-shit in the junction-box.

So what’s the outcome of this sunday morning muse? It’s hard to stay away from platitudes when talking about this topic, and “when was the last time you hugged Busby” isn’t a T-shirt I’d willingly wear: but I think it’s just plain good manners to think about ways to stay way from the kind of grand corporate morose glum-fest that seems to have infected our neighbours over the channel.

Cast away with Windows 7

Monday, September 7th, 2009

Well, not strictly cast away – and not strictly Windows 7, considering it was the Release Candidate. However, I did indeed spend a week on a boat with Windows 7 and a Vodafone 3G data dongle as my only contact with the outside world. Was this a careful benchmark test? No. It was getting up at 5:45am to catch the ferry and snagging the rucksack nearest the door.

The test was pretty low key. For one thing, Lough Erne doesn’t have great 3G signal strength; for another, the boat wouldn’t run the inverter for my T60 Thinkpad without the engine going, so opportunities to download mails and surf (that is, spread discord in various online fora) were limited by the need not to throw up from diesel-fume inhalation.

But Windows 7 RC1 grabbed the Huawei device that Vodafone package up, and inserted that in the dial-up networking pop-up (which for some weird reason shows in the taskbar under an icon that looks like a flat-screen monitor with a mouse stuck to the top left corner). It would connect from that presence when in Lower Lough Erne (that is, not roaming) but in Upper Lough Erne (on Vodafone IE) I had to run the Vodafone application so the roaming would kick in. (more…)