We cannot really understand yet how much technology has changed our lives. Those of us in our forties or older have the advantage of having seen a shift from an essentially analogue world to a digital one. We have seen interpersonal communication move from a pipe dream to a daily, second-by-second reality.

Today’s yoof have grown up in a world of Facebook, instant email, IM, smartphones in their pocket. They cannot function without an IP connection. It is more important to them than food. It is the new era drug that each of us consume. They know no different.

Thus it is particularly sad to see what happens when it goes wrong. And two very lovely people’s lives get turned upside down. Go over to the Vexentricity blog and read how a dependency on technology has ripped a family apart. And ask yourself this: honestly, how close are you to that reality too? And is that somewhere you want to be, or feel you ought to be? Or even should be?

Rather than buy a new laptop, I recently decided to recondition a four-year-old Acer to see whether it was up to the relatively light duties intended of it. This laptop had been my workhorse during a period when I was regularly flitting between my home office and business headquarters, and had almost no available space on its 140GB hard disk. The first job, then, was to do some weeding.

Microsoft Office was the first package to go, now that I use Google Docs almost exclusively. I found plenty of dross in the Downloads folder of course, but the real shock came when I looked through the list of Adobe programs installed on this machine and realised that I use almost none of them regularly any more.

When I bought this laptop, I reckon I spent around two thirds of my working day using Fireworks, Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash and Flex Builder – with the last of these accounting for the lion’s share. And yet, over the past year, Flash based development has dropped away almost entirely.

The rot began with Dreamweaver, which I’d been using since it was first launched in the mid 1990s. Since I began creating websites using PHP, and especially when WordPress became the basis of most of my web development, Dreamweaver became irrelevant and I’ve not used it for over five years now.

As I contemplate the future of my online development, for the first time I can’t see a place for Flash

Flash was a different matter. In the early 2000s, I moved from Adobe’s Director product to its lightweight cousin (at least, it was lightweight at the time) for e-learning development and created a series of authoring tools and online playback plugins based on it. There’s much to like about the platform, and our perception of what’s possible with rich internet applications was largely shaped, for better or worse, by the capabilities of the Flash player. So I have much expertise invested in my ActionScript knowledge and a big library of code.

And yet, as I contemplate the future of my online development, for the first time I can’t see a place for Flash. In the short term, this means extra work for me as I recreate these sophisticated applications using PHP and jQuery, but I can’t countenance investing time updating software created for a defunct platform.

The irony is that it isn’t Steve Jobs’ famous hatred of Flash that has caused this turnaround – the true villain of the piece is Adobe itself. By abandoning development of Flash for mobile, it eliminates Flash as an option for most websites. One in ten of the visitors to my sites uses a mobile device, a seven-fold increase over a year ago, so I’d be mad to develop in a form that excludes them. Had Adobe continued to improve the Flash platform for Android, I might have persevered – at least for sites that attract smartphone users rather than tablet owners. Perhaps I should thank Adobe, then, for making my decision easy. It’s now either HTML/CSS/JavaScript or app – and Flash makes for a very expensive app development platform.

In fact, the only Adobe product I use day-to-day now is Fireworks and that’s the only reason I’m keeping Web Premium on my main desktop. It’s also hard to see on what basis I would, in the medium term, be likely to upgrade even that one remaining product. Assuming that I’m not the only one re-evaluating in this way, this poses serious questions for Adobe’s future income. I think that’s sad because they’ve played an important role in shaping today’s web. Whilst it is making efforts, with Muse, Edge and updates to Dreamweaver, I can’t help feeling that the momentum is swinging away from Adobe. What I really want is a fully working browser-based versions of Photoshop, Fireworks and Illustrator that I can pay for on a per-use basis, and unless it has something quite remarkable up its sleeve, I can’t see myself upgrading to CS6.

The good news for me as a businessman is that I no longer need to budget for expensive licences. Adobe’s pricing policy has long been a bone of contention and, given the downward momentum placed on software costs by the advent of apps, Adobe’s looking increasingly isolated. And don’t even get me started on the fact that Web Premium costs £300 more to buy in the UK than the US (and yes, that’s comparing figures net of sales tax). Photoshop is the one remaining crown jewel – heaven help Adobe if a competitor comes along with a compatible application for a fraction of the cost.

Farewell Adobe. Delete.

As you may be able to see in the highest-resolution version of the snapshot above (click to enlarge), it’s not every day one comes across a physically distorted DIMM.

This is one of a set of eight 4GB sticks, originally intended to boost the performance of a Hyper-V host machine at Ratcliffe & Brown Wines & Spirits, the subject of a forthcoming PC Pro Business Clinic. The server upgrade wasn’t part of the subject, but it pretty quickly turned into a source of aggravation – this bendy SIMM is not immediately apparent until it’s placed on a flat surface, and I tend to land DIMMs on a lump of textile, like a mouse mat or a rucksack; anything but a conductive perfectly flat plane like a rack-mounted server lid.

Surprisingly, it sat in the DIMM slot perfectly well. Unsurprisingly, the server (a Dell PowerEdge 2970) spat the dummy the minute power was restored, quite accurately complaining about “unusable memory” in the scrolling front-panel display.

I don’t see many DIMMs that wobble to and fro when put down, or double as a leaf-spring the other side up

There didn’t seem to be a “too much torque on DIMM slot 8″ message, even though this was the source of the problem. I’d felt something a bit peculiar with the memory in my hand, but decided it was worth a try: in this particular case, the server was going from 16GB up to 32GB, and if one stick was faulty then we would have to take out the other half of the matching pair, reducing the available RAM to a comparatively meagre 24GB.

Once back out of the machine and laid on a flat plate, the bend became detectable: I don’t see many DIMMs that wobble to and fro when put down, or double as a leaf-spring the other side up: what amazes me is how it got through the memory vendor’s QA processes. Perhaps their tester has jaws that clamp the edge connectors firmly enough that the sundry distorted open-circuits on the stick are forced shut. But it’s visible even when the DIMM has gone back in the packaging, and doubly so when stacked in a pile with other, perfectly normal DIMMs.

Which leaves two questions: how on Earth do you put a permanent bend in a thing as strong as a plank of fibreglass? And, secondly, how did it manage to leave the factory?

In response to a recent survey telling us that schools are getting the teaching of Information Technology all wrong by not including “computer programs” in the syllabus, the BBC has offered up seven questions about computer programs. I urge you to take the quick quiz and then come back here when you’re done.

I scored five out of seven. I don’t know the correct HTML for inserting an image, and I couldn’t work out which subset of acronyms the question with GNU in it was driving at, mainly because the preceding five questions were not about “computer programs” at all; they were about the history of the people who happened to be involved in the invention of programming, either as a general concept (Jaquard) or as an incredibly early implementation (Hopper and COBOL).

I have to say – despite having earned a decent living for some time as a COBOL developer – I didn’t know Grace Hopper’s nickname and lucked out on that answer too, so really I should have scored a mere four. Knowing Admiral Hopper’s nickname wasn’t necessary to make my programs work or to earn me money, so I was in shameful ignorance, at least if you share the BBC’s perspective on the matter. To my mind, only two of the seven questions actually addressed the subject of the questionnaire.

I don’t ask that the guy who changes the oil on my Mercedes knows who Emil Jellinek was, because it’s not a necessary piece of information for him to do a good job

As you can probably guess, I regard this questionnaire as a terrible example of precisely the problem that the report is alluding to. Outside of the hallowed halls of hackerdom, almost nobody knows what size or shape the job of programming actually has, or how it should be thought about.

Of course, the “historian’s perspective” is one way to do it, but shouldn’t be confused with the artisan’s practical understanding of their tools. I don’t ask that the guy who changes the oil on my Mercedes knows who Emil Jellinek was, because it’s not a necessary piece of information for him to do a good job.

So the question rests with us: with the contributors and readers of PC Pro. Starting with readily available equipment (and personally I’d propose Free Pascal), what would you do to improve the comprehension of “programming”  - not only in schools, but in evidently confused and distant institutions such as the BBC?

Steve Jobs isn’t here to enjoy his triumph, but this week’s announcement that Adobe has stopped developing the mobile version of the Flash player would undoubtedly have delighted him. The title of yesterday’s Guardian story says it all: “Adobe kills mobile Flash, giving Steve Jobs the last laugh”. The first comment is even starker: “Flash – good riddance!”

So why has Adobe taken the decision? Is this really the end of the road for Flash? And is it really good news?

Inevitably most commentators are presenting the move as a vindication of Steve Jobs’ argument that Flash was inherently unsuited for lightweight mobile delivery.

Regular readers will know that I’ve never bought this argument,  largely because it’s untrue and ignores the fact that Flash was specifically developed to deliver the richest possible experience down narrow web pipelines and on everyday systems – and that it has kept to this strict mission throughout its life.

Retrospectively banning an established web technology – in use on an astonishing 62% of the top 97,000 sites according to Microsoft figures – was an extraordinary coup

As such, the lightweight rich Flash player and the new generation of lightweight rich handheld devices should have been the perfect match. If Apple had wanted to make Flash work on mobiles, it could have. I think that the existence and success of the Android player shows this is true (and performance would only get better) and that Jobs’ carefully crafted list of objections to Flash were entirely bogus.

My view, as I’ve argued before, is that Steve Jobs’ real motivation was entirely business driven. What is truly revolutionary about the new iOS platform is its business model, in which rich content and applications are delivered exclusively through native apps and through the App Store with its 30% commission. Seen in this light, the threat that Flash poses is clear: enabling the same rich content/apps to be delivered efficiently and securely, direct from producer to consumer, across all platforms, within the browser, and without commission.

You have to admire the man. Retrospectively banning an established web technology – in use on an astonishing 62% of the top 97,000 sites according to Microsoft figures – was an extraordinary coup. Somehow Steve Jobs pulled it off and even managed to make it seem that denying his users functionality, freedom of choice and competition was doing them a favour. Imagine what would have happened if Microsoft had tried to pull off the same trick.

Crucially Jobs’ action and success also made it possible – perhaps even inevitable – that Microsoft would follow suit. I think that the final straw for Adobe came with the recent announcement that Windows 8’s IE10 would only support the Flash player in its desktop mode and not under the new iOS-style, tablet-oriented Metro front end.

Of course that still left Android and the other Open Screen Project (OSP) partners  - who, incidentally, remain free to develop their own future mobile players (a possible USP for Google?). However, with both Apple and now Microsoft lined up against it, the writing on the wall was clear.

Flash could never become universal in the mobile space as it is on the desktop, not because it couldn’t deliver the goods and build the audience – it could – but because it wasn’t going to be allowed to. There was nothing Adobe could do about it; the mobile Flash player’s fate was entirely out of its hands. Adobe’s decision isn’t a vindication of Steve Jobs’ position, it’s just a direct consequence.

The future for Flash and HTML5 – in practice

That said, it’s the reality to be faced and, with even Adobe now turning its back on its mobile player in favour of HTML5, is this the end of the road for Flash?

It’s important not to get carried away and to stress that Adobe is only stopping development of the mobile player. The Flash player will still be developed for the desktop where it remains ubiquitous and reigns supreme and indeed unchallenged, now that Microsoft has effectively ditched Silverlight.

If Flash can no longer deliver to all users then developers and designers are going to look for a solution that can

However, to pretend that Flash on the desktop is unaffected is wishful thinking. Ultimately it comes down to the same argument: the web is all about universality. If Flash can no longer deliver to all users then developers and designers are going to look for a solution that can.

As soon as Steve Jobs banned cross-platform web extensions (Silverlight and Java as well as Flash) and established the iOS platform, then HTML5 became the only viable universal web solution for the long term. If you can do what you want to do in HTML5 then there’s little question that that’s the best way to do it. The fundamental shift from Flash to HTML5 in the browser is unavoidable, and now even Adobe is fully and clearly on board.

However while “doing Flash in HTML5” sounds simple and desirable, that doesn’t mean it is. Take the easiest example: the ubiquitous Flash-based animated vector ad. Now it’s certainly possible that this can be delivered via HTML5 rather than Flash (as the Flash blockers are now discovering). However what does this actually mean in practice?

Are you really going to code the vectors of the SVG objects by hand? And then the keyframes of the animation? And then what about the output? HTML5 browser support isn’t simple and varying HTML5 capabilities and implementations will likely need specialised handling. Again theoretically you could learn all the foibles and test against all the platforms and browsers, or then again, you might have better things to do.

The bottom line is that open coding is all very well in principle but Notepad isn’t going to cut it – to produce rich Flash-style results you’re going to need a dedicated Flash-style tool for design and output. And the most likely provider will be Adobe. No doubt the next version of Dreamweaver will add canvas tag capabilities while for more complex scenarios you will be able to use the all-new, dedicated, HTML5-native Adobe Edge.

Ironically, using Flash tools in this way will actually be the only option if you want to remain truly universal

Alternatively, Adobe has made it clear that it plans to graft HTML5 output onto its existing Flash tools whenever that’s possible, so why not stick with what you know?

Ironically, using Flash tools in this way will actually be the only option if you want to remain truly universal as it means that you will be able to cater for the HTML5-only tablet audience, including iOS and Metro, as well as the Flash-based desktop audience using pre-HTML5 browsers such as IE6, 7 and 8.

Sticking with Flash for authoring has other advantages. HTML5 has just about caught up with Flash-style banner ads circa 1995, but nowadays Flash Professional, Builder and Catalyst are powerful all-round rich internet authoring applications. Again, as I’ve written before it’s important to realise that HTML5 is not a direct and wholesale Flash replacement. There are plenty of scenarios – starting with simple and secure video streaming and stretching all the way to line-of-business applications – where HTML5/JavaScript simply isn’t up to the job.

The widespread assumption is that HTML5 will quickly close the gap, but is this realistic? For the foreseeable future all efforts will rightly be focused on getting browser support and compliance for HTML5’s existing features (with the official W3C HTML5 Recommendation not expected to be finalised for another three years). In the meantime Adobe is free to add more advanced capabilities, which is exactly what it is doing with the new 3D games engine in its new Flash player. If anything the gap is widening.

Flash goes native – and under cover

But what on earth is the point of adding such cutting-edge new features if you can’t deliver them on the future of computing, the cutting-edge new mobile devices?

Who said you can’t? Most commentators are assuming that Adobe is effectively throwing in the towel when it comes to Flash for the mobile market, but again this is a mistake. Yes the Flash player has been ruled out, but, as I discuss in my current RWC column in the January edition of PC Pro, the Flash tools remain as relevant as ever. In fact even more so.

In particular it’s important to note that Adobe’s recent announcement says:

Our future work with Flash on mobile devices will be focused on enabling Flash developers to package native apps with Adobe AIR for all the major app stores

Which makes it pretty clear that Adobe is planning to build on its existing Android and iOS native output with new support for Metro.

In other words, the mobile market isn’t a no-go area for Flash – quite the reverse. In fact if you want to produce work for all major desktop platforms – Windows, OS X, Linux and Chrome – and for all the major mobile platforms – Android, iOS, BlackBerry and Metro – Flash is the only way to go. When Adobe says that Flash/AIR is reaching more devices and more users than ever, it’s not just hype.

It turns out (again) that the rumours of the death of Flash are greatly exaggerated in both the desktop and mobile arenas. In fact the technology and platform is arguably healthier and more relevant than it has ever been, just in the new guise of AIR. Certainly the opening up of the new mobile form factor and of the new mobile app stores is an incredibly exciting opportunity for Flash developers.

In fact if Flash developers were given the choice between the app stores and the browser, I’m sure that most would choose the former. Likewise with end users. But the point is why should they have to choose? Why not have both? Or rather all three: universal HTML5, native code and Flash in between.

Web Flash: good riddance to bad rubbish?

Let’s stand back and think about what we’re losing as Flash is driven out of the browser.

Flash is a fundamentally different technology to HTML that seamlessly extends what the browser can do into new territory based upon vectors, animation, media, interactivity and advanced programmability. It’s a single, robust, actively and rapidly developed runtime running alongside and in partnership with the HTML-focused browser.

Crucially designers and developers can confidently target this single Flash runtime knowing that it will work on all supported platforms and browsers including, amazingly and uniquely, all curent versions of all browsers. Create and upload your single SWF and you can be confident that it will work as expected for all web users.

Apple and now Microsoft have conspired to drive an entirely legitimate and useful web standard with near ubiquitous support out of the mobile browser and into their app stores

Or rather you could. In its place, we have the promise of “just-do-it-in-HTML5”. As we’ve seen this is far more complicated than it sounds. To begin with it puts the onus on the HTML/SVG/CSS/JavaScript standards to deliver results way beyond their comfort zone (another assumption is that HTML5 is somehow going to be less flakey than Flash).

At the same time the shift to HTML5 is going to put the future of the rich web back in the hands of the multiple browser developers, meaning that the single Flash runtime is replaced by a mish-mash of competing capabilities. Does anyone else remember the Browser Wars?

And to top it all, how is the brave new world of HTML5 most likely to be implemented? Using the existing Adobe Flash platform and tools but outputting cut-down capabilities targeted at the multiple, less efficient HTML5 browser runtimes and with Flash fallback for the older desktop browsers!

What’s most depressing of all is the realisation that this entire mess is completely unnecessary. The obvious and overwhelmingly simpler alternative would be for Apple and Microsoft to remove their bans and to work with Adobe to make sure that the Flash player worked brilliantly on their new mobile platforms.

Instead, to further their own business interests, Apple and now Microsoft have conspired to drive an entirely legitimate and useful web standard with near ubiquitous support out of the mobile browser and into their app stores. In the process they have shattered the universal, write-once-view-anywhere rich web dream, added huge and unnecessary complexity to the process of web design and development and ensured that the future of the web for everyone on all devices and all platforms will be far poorer.

Yes Steve Jobs’ extraordinary decision to ban the Flash player has been entirely vindicated from his business-determined point of view. From the perspective of the web developer and the web user, this last laugh is anything but funny.

(Steve Jobs photo taken by Jon Snyder, c/o Wired.com Creative Commons Library)

I’ve just had a proper argument. My circle of friends and even a few colleagues at Dennis will tell you, this isn’t unusual of itself, so I won’t do the down the pub routine that relies heavily on the phrase “So then I said…”. I’ll give you the helicopter view.

It was an argument about Wi-Fi. I went to a meeting to go through re-wiring a retail shop to accommodate a CCTV system, the sales PCs, the PDQ card-payment setup, and the email workstation. There was also a couple of new ventures, in the shape of kiosks for customers to look through the website and ask about styles, sizes and colours not visible in the shop.

At this meeting were the proprietors, me, and a jobbing interior decorator. The list of snags, water leaks and bits of paint and the like was long and diverse: then we came to the wiring. Just a small shop, but very quickly we arrived at a total of 15 locations. It’s also an old building, which means that it won’t be falling down any time soon; but conversely, drilling holes is going to be a proper rufty-tufty builder’s job, one I am very glad I won’t be undertaking. Looking at the job in hand, the jobbing builder decided to propose a different approach: Why not just put in wireless?

Once the idea occurred to him, it snowballed. With Wi-Fi, customers could just be given an iPad, and wander freely around the whole space, paging through the website. How cool would that be? Wires aren’t needed then. I suggested this might not work out very well, given the background level of theft in that specific shop and the surrounding area too: and that it might not be terribly secure, in an area so full of other shops, offices, homes and restaurants. This is when the conversation kicked up a gear.

We are one of the last great self-taught professions, and from that many difficulties follow

The jobbing builder clearly believed that there is no such thing as a Wi-Fi security problem. To the point where anyone who suggested otherwise was to be cross-examined in an incredulous tone. There is no such thing as a passive Wi-Fi traffic listener Trojan, or those websites that crack WPA2 keys, or people whose credit card numbers or bank details are stolen via Wi-Fi or traffic spoofing. As far as he was concerned, Wi-Fi was the future; the idea that it could be much more expensive and complicated to segregate the network so that the CCTV in the changing cubicles didn’t get re-broadcast across the rest of the planet was, apparently, a stupid thing to suggest. All those videos on YouTube like this are clearly fakes.

I confess: I lost my cool with this tirade of ignorance. At the same time, I was thinking about Part P.

For those who have not come across it, here is the IET’s summary of Part P:  it’s the regulations that attempt to control who is allowed to do electrical wiring work. When introduced, I must say I agreed with the antis, because it seemed to me completely absurd that there could exist anyone who didn’t know how to wire up a wall socket correctly. It only takes a small tickle with 240v AC to entirely convince anyone of the need for proper safety in wiring. I can’t have been the only small boy to have successfully hidden the burns from an incautious poke about in the guts of a radio, surely…

This conviction faded slightly after I saw my first few 13A sockets with bare wires wedged into contact by the earth-pin shutter, and other similar sins, until these days I am pretty much entirely in favour of the concept of Part P. If someone wants to do that kind of work, then go and get the qualification, is now my attitude.

This is a very unusual conclusion to reach if you are a “computer person”. We are one of the last great self-taught professions, and from that many difficulties follow. Assuming that everyone is equally able to teach themselves, and equally able to draw the right conclusions from an individual view of a wider body of evidence, is (I believe) our greatest sin. This hasn’t been that much of a problem while IT and networks in particular has been the province of a priesthood, a charmed circle of übernerds: the problem comes when network technology starts to permeate into the skill levels that gave rise to Part P.

I’m trying to be polite and it might not work in my current mood, so I’ll settle for blunt: thick people think differently from nerds. It’s not a matter of less of something, like an IQ score, instead it has many aspects and parts. There’s emotion, there’s ego, there’s ownership of the topic, there’s animal cunning versus lofty and mistaken intellect: it’s a rich minefield of disasters, at least if your tempter works like mine.

The clever thing to do with this type of problem is to avoid getting dragged into Meldrew-like expressions of exasperation, but I will say that the inception and history of Part P makes me worry about the take-up of IP networking in the wider population of trades. Part P protects against a simple phenomenon – a pretty immediate and intensely memorable electric shock; good small network design protects against a rather more subtle, long-term and generally less physically painful series of mishaps.

But the underlying point to Part P remains that incidents arising from electrical wiring put in blithely by workers and DIYers, quite convinced they were doing it right, were prominent enough that Health and Safety decided to get involved. There is no equivalent body for network data security – unless, that is, you count the loss adjusters who now turn up when your bank account is emptied by an online data theft incident, and seek to prove that you were negligent in your use of the bank’s website to get them out of reinstating the contents of your bank account.

Happily for me, this particular client had been dealing with that type of mishap already, and were also better diplomats: they pointed out to the builder that he couldn’t very well remark on the superior strength and thickness of the Victorian buttresses and brickwork, and then recommend Wi-Fi. This contradiction provided a way out of the contretemps without too much loss of face all round – something that, as a classic nerd, I never have been very good at ensuring.

None of them has so far become a real product (though there are definite similarities between the 48-core Rock Creek CPU and the 50-core Knights Corner architecture). But it’s always fascinating to see what the chip giant’s boffins are working on. This week’s event – held at the company’s offices in Leixlip, near Dublin, and opened by Irish business minister Richard Bruton (above) – showcased several intriguing new ideas – as well as one eerily familiar one. Below the cut are some of the highlights.

The Personal Energy Cloud

The Personal Energy Cloud is Intel’s jargon for the halo of power consumption that follows you around – the wattage of the light bulbs you use, for example, and the intermittent drain of the television.

It’s a concept that neatly expresses what CEO Paul Otellini has described as Intel’s “long-standing obsession” with power consumption; but as yet it’s ill defined. Officially the aim is to help individuals “navigate the sea of energy data”; Eve Schooler from Intel Labs demonstrated how this might be accomplished using a sort of “Marauder’s Map” of electronic devices, which could be centrally managed, to help reduce power wastage and determine which individuals could access which resources when. For now though the energy cloud appears to be more a notion than a focused project.

The Personal Office Energy Monitor

Next to the airy energy cloud concept, the POEM system, demonstrated by Intel Labs’ Sylvain Sauty and Milan Milenkovic, seems almost prosaically practical. Designed primarily for large workplaces, it works by equipping every PC with a simple USB sensor unit which measures ambient temperature, light, pressure and humidity levels, as well as recording the power consumption of the computer itself.

By feeding this information back to a environmental management system, it becomes possible to minutely manage electrical services such as air conditioning and lighting, to ensure that each employee has what they need without any wastage. A friendly PC-based interface also allows employees to monitor their own power usage, and to send feedback via simple buttons with labels such as “I’m too cold”. Though Intel didn’t explicitly suggest it, one imagines that feedback like this could even permit a building to “learn” the perfect settings for each section of a building throughout a day.

Simple Energy Sensing

Simple Energy Sensing is a neat idea – a home energy monitor that can identify individual appliances from their characteristic electrical signatures – but there’s no escaping the fact that the demonstration system on display at Leixlip was the very same one I had already seen 16 months ago in California.

Intel’s James Song had the good grace to look slightly sheepish when I pointed this out, but directed me to research manager Charlie Sheridan, who assured me that the project is moving forward through domestic testing.

“We’re trialling the system in 15 employee homes in the US,” he told me, “and we’re preparing for our first aggressive push, into 200 homes in Texas. We’re also partnering with local utilities, in Ireland and the US.”

Did this mean Intel would be relying on electricity suppliers to monitor power consumption, after the manner of the now-defunct Google PowerMeter service?

“The involvement of the utility companies is purely to validate the technology,” Sheridan explained. “We’ll try to keep as much data within the consumer’s home as possible.”

Crowd & Sensor Sourced Services

Like the POEM system, Intel’s experiments in crowd-sourcing are unapologetically down-to-earth, but they could open up as yet unimagined possibilities. Simply put, the idea is to maintain a vast, anonymised database of sensor and GPS data, to “gather, process and share data securely” – and make it available to real-time applications.

One obvious use for the technology is for collating GPS data into real-time traffic reports, as already seen in services such as Vodafone Sat Nav. A prototype system, offering both laptop- and tablet-style interfaces, was on display (see photo).

But as Intel’s Ahmed Mohamed explained, by incorporating additional sensor data, more sophisticated services could be implemented within the same framework. For example, if large numbers of cars started sharing shock absorber data, it would be easy for councils to locate potholes in roads. The potential applications would be limited only by people’s willingness and ability to share data – and by the imagination of the developers.

The Dependable Cloud

Many businesses operate as hosted services, but there’s currently no simple framework for ensuring a particular set of legal obligations or policies is met by the host.

The Dependable Cloud – the brainchild of Intel’s Michael Nolan – is a framework which makes it easy for hosting customers to specify various policies, and for hosts to provide them. For example, for legal reasons a company might wish its virtual machines to run only on servers in certain geographical locations. Or, for reasons of security, it might want them to run only on hardware capable of enforcing trusted execution. The system can also help hosts manage SLAs in cases of reduced capacity, by automatically allocating resources according to service-level policies.

The Dependable Cloud concept hasn’t yet reached the likes of Amazon, but it’s already attracted support and funding from the EU’s SLA@SOI consortium.

DDR3 and Hyper Graphics

Intel engineers are always talking about optimising performance, so it’s no surprise to see some of their research projects focus on hardware metrics. The DDR3 analysis project, demonstrated by Matthias Grees, uses an interposer card that sits between the motherboard and DIMMs in a standard PC and measures bandwidth and power consumption in real time while applications are running. The data enables software engineers to keep track of how hard their programs hit memory, and helps hardware engineers develop better performing, more efficient memory controllers.

“Right now we use this internally,” commented Grees, “but if we wanted to we could productise this in about a year.”

The Hyper Graphics project has a similar aim, namely to monitor the use of L1, L2 and L3 cache in a running system. But rather than using hardware, this research, headed by Qiong Cai of Intel Labs Barcelona, runs applications and games inside a virtual machine that’s been modified to monitor cache requests. At present the project focuses specifically on the cache usage of integrated GPU, and has accordingly been dubbed “Hyper Graphics”.

The system is particularly useful for its ability to track “cache misses” – requests for data that isn’t in the local cache, which can cause significant performance degradation. With this information, developers can see exactly which parts of their software could be optimised to make better use of caching. And, since the system can simulate caches of arbitrary sizes, engineers can experiment with different cache arrangements to see precisely how larger or smaller caches would affect the performance of real applications.

Multi-Reality Interfaces

The name may sound like science-fiction, but the Multi-Reality Interface is another project with a solid real-world purpose. The idea is simple: the interface shows both a live video feed and a real-time digital representation of the same environment.

Though it wasn’t immediately obvious to me why this would be useful, Jochen Grün from the Universität des Saarlandes explained: the manufacturing industry is moving to a modular factory model, where a single building can be rapidly retooled to make different items with different equipment. This means onsite personnel may be unfamiliar with the machinery they’re using, and unqualified to carry out repairs in the case of a problem.

A multi-reality view allows a remote expert to give immediate guidance. The live video view (which can optionally be presented in stereoscopic 3D) shows the situation on the ground, while the digital representation can show sensor data and other necessary details. With this information, one expert can provide instant instructions and advice to staff across multiple sites, keeping maintenance costs to a minimum. And because the system is built on web standards, the onsite staff can follow along on any portable device.

Lego Digital Box

Intel’s joint venture with Metaio Software and Lego was demonstrated at IDF last month, but for most Research Day attendees today was their first encounter with the Digital Box system – and it’s safe to say this playful take on augmented reality stole the show.

Though nominally a research project, the system’s already being rolled out to toy shops worldwide. You activate it by simply holding a box of Lego up to a camera. As soon as the software recognises the box, it superimposes a 3D representation of the assembled kit onto the top of it, so you can see what it looks like. If you want to see from the other side, simply rotate the box: the 3D image is anchored to the box and follows its motion in real time. And just to liven things up, the generated image is populated with animated Lego characters.

The system relies on nothing more than a simple webcam, a standard mobile Sandy Bridge platform and custom software. But the impression is something special – as you can see for yourselves in this demonstration video provided by Metaio:

It has been announced today that Dennis Ritchie has died.  His death will not receive the news coverage afforded to Steve Jobs’ death and, having met him a couple of times, I am sure he would be shocked if it did. However, if in computing there is a case of other people standing on the shoulders of giants, Dennis Ritchie could be nominated as one of those giants.

The reason for this is that Dennis Ritchie will always be associated with two things: he invented the C programming language and he co-invented the Unix operating system. While both of these can trace their development back to previous languages and systems, it is what he made of them that is important, and what they became.

The C programming language has become the programming language of choice for many operating systems and many applications. Many other programming languages (C++, Java, PHP) carry the C syntactic heritage. Moreover, C showed a generation of programmers that they didn’t have to write low-level code in assembler language – a fact which is not questioned now. He also, with Brian Kernighan, wrote the definitive book on C – which should also serve as an example to many others about how to write books on programming languages.

Every operating system that came after Unix has copied some of the features that were first introduced in Unix. Unix had a unique way of looking at processes: processes were used for ’system function’ and new processes were created by duplicating other ones. Files were no longer collections of blocks but were collections of characters. As Unix was written in a high-level language it could run more easily on multiple machine architectures. The list goes on.

And the Unix of Dennis Ritchie gave us BSD Unix, which can be directly traced to Mac OS X and iOS. Moreover, Linux is a Unix clone, which means it needed something to copy in the first place. Dennis Ritchie didn’t stop after C and Unix but continued to work on operating system projects and have involvement with distributed computing research – which is where I met him in a project office in Cambridge.

In computing we tend to get distracted by the flashing lights and the polished interfaces, but we should not forget there are people who make it all work in the first place. Dennis Ritchie was one of those people.

(BTW Written on a Unix system (a Mac) and published on a WordPress blog running on a  Unix system)

In amongst the flood of details emerging about Windows 8 is the news that the IE 10 browser in the lightweight Metro front-end won’t support plugins. In the scheme of things this might sound pretty small beer, but it’s hugely significant for the long term future of Rich Internet Application (RIA) development and for the web in general.

Most immediately it’s another kick in the teeth for Flash, still reeling from Apple’s iOS ban. It’s not exactly a death blow, as the Windows 8 desktop version of IE will still support the player, but it’s clearly another major disincentive for developers who believed Flash was as universal as HTML.

Understandably all the focus has been on Flash, but even more telling and extraordinary is the realisation that the new no-plugin policy means that the Metro browser won’t even support Microsoft’s own cross-platform RIA technology, Silverlight!

So just what is going on?

Why has Microsoft changed course so dramatically, betraying its Silverlight vision and shafting its developers in the process?

Details on such a major announcement are disappointingly thin on the ground and largely based on an MSDN blog post (Metro style browsing and plug-in free HTML5). However the few reasons given to justify the decision such as they are – “the experience that plugins provide today is not a good match with Metro style browsing and the modern HTML5 web” – are very familiar. Essentially it’s the same argument Steve Jobs gave – “leaving the past behind” – when he outlawed plugins for iOS some 18 months ago. In short, it’s time for the web to move on from old-fashioned “legacy plugins”.

Regular readers will know that I have never bought this argument. More to the point, I know that Microsoft doesn’t either. After all, the company has spent the past five years arguing the exact opposite: namely that page-based HTML is great but that there are certain things that it just isn’t well suited to deliver: little things like high quality media streaming, digital rights management, interactive vector animations, device-based capabilities such as camera and microphone handling and, more generally, the richest possible, desktop-style web experience.

XAML & Silverlight

It’s precisely because Microsoft recognised the limitations of HTML – which remain true for HTML5/ CSS3/JavaScript/SVG – that the company has spent millions rethinking and entirely reworking its application development tools around XAML (eXtensible Application Markup Language). XAML is an open, XML-based markup language for building the user-facing front-end for both full-blown WPF-based desktop applications and, crucially, Silverlight-based lightweight RIAs ready for delivery via its own Flash-style cross-platform in-browser plugin.

So why has Microsoft changed course so dramatically, betraying its Silverlight vision and shafting its developers in the process?

Well of course Microsoft would say that it hasn’t. After all, the beautiful XAML-based technology lives on and thrives in Windows 8, it’s just that the end product won’t be delivered in the browser via Silverlight, but rather as standalone Metro apps. Moreover, with the promised Metro App Store, Microsoft is offering its developers a simple way to get their work out to users and to make real money from it based on the now well-established Apple model.

There’s a lot of truth to this and Metro is undoubtedly an exciting opportunity for XAML-based developers – but why not support Silverlight browser delivery too? How can Microsoft possibly argue that it can’t support its own existing lightweight Silverlight player within its own lightweight Metro front-end? In fact, if you really wanted to help Silverlight deliver on its potential, gain market share and reward your long-suffering developers, why not build Silverlight support into the Metro version of IE10 while relegating Flash to the desktop version?

It’s business – as usual

I think that the real answer to this question is also the real answer behind Steve Jobs’ decision to ban Flash: follow the money. Cross-platform, in-browser RIAs extending the universal browser to deliver rich and protected apps and content directly between producer and consumer aren’t a legacy problem to be solved; rather, they are a leading-edge, cloud-based threat to the platform-dependent empires that Microsoft and Apple have built up, and to the App Store and in-app content empires that they are currently building.

Keep the lid on the universal, browser-based user experience by killing off the in-browser RIA technologies and restricting the web to HTML5 and you get to deliver the full RIA experience outside the browser via your iOS and Metro apps, and via your platform-specific App Stores and in-app subscriptions. Not only is your all-important operating system and software ecosystem protected from third-party, cloud-based, cross-platform alternatives; you also get to take 30% of all paid-for app content, with no possibility of competition within your platform.

Look at it like this and Microsoft’s decision to effectively sacrifice its in-browser Silverlight vision makes absolute sense. The RIA vision behind Flash and Silverlight in which the web delivers on its full potential as a cross-platform, universal, open and truly rich connection direct between producer and consumer is a wonderful dream, but this is business.

It’s properly, seriously hot here at Monza. This is, many would say, the most theatrical of the Formula 1 weekends and in the 30-plus degree heat, there’s a vast amount of technology on show. Most of it’s related to making cars go round at over 200mph, and this is the province of items like a solid tungsten nose-weight, or a £200,000 steering wheel — and that’s what you’ll hear about when the big TV stations walk around the pit lanes or chat with the drivers and managers.

I didn’t do that. I went to the quieter truck back in the pit lane and met Anthony, who is the sole IT support man for the whole Team Lotus presence here at Monza. He showed me the calm, unassuming and cool-running short rack that is the heart of the telemetry and on-track analysis system.

It’s 22 VMs and a couple of iSCSI SAN boxes, one SSD and the other spinning disk, and there’s a little rack with colour coded RJ45 cables in it. Such is the pervasive nature of Team Lotus’ WAN that the colour codes aren’t your usual subdivisions between floors or departments: some of them (red, as I recall) lead straight to the car. There is of course a wireless radio somewhere back there, shared antennas servicing all the teams and all the cars — but data flows only inwards. They can’t remap the car out on the back straight on the fly.

What really struck me looking around all the kit on display (when I wasn’t being annoyed by the tyrannosaur snorts of those little car things) was just how ordinary it was. You might imagine that everything is cast from spun unobtanium, suspended on the wings of angels or something, but in reality what is inside the rack and even in the broiling-hot trackside seating for the team owner and team manager (this has a special name but I want Anthony to have a good appraisal this year, so…)  are all standard regular everyday bits of Dell hardware.

Part of the reason for this is that the maintenance of the kit fits into Dell’s mildly elevated service platform, no matter where in the world the team goes. The other part of the reason is that the Optiplexes driving the screens, read by the multimillionaire owner of the Formula 1 team, manage perfectly well in 50-degree heat.

And to prove my point, here’s a screen-snap I wangled out of Anthony, probably against his better judgement, of the entirely regular and normal IP-based network monitoring utility he uses to keep track of all the things on his WAN with an IP address.

The red blob, top right? That’s a Formula 1 car that happens to be turned off at the moment.