Dennis Ritchie RIP

Thursday, October 13th, 2011

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.

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Windows 8, Flash and Silverlight: some very bad news

Monday, September 19th, 2011

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?

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The everyday computing behind F1

Friday, September 9th, 2011

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.

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How phone-hacking feds have been fooled by the cloud

Friday, July 22nd, 2011

I was in a meeting last week where both of the staff from my client had a strong affinity for the word “layman”. Whenever I strayed into territory they preferred to find too technical, they would say “well, I’m just a layman…”. I’m thinking of a particular conversation about their server hard disk running out of space. “What” they asked “you mean the memory? We bought some more of that, didn’t we?”

I despair of the whole concept of the “layman”  - they seem to stop being laymen and turn into the copyright-smashers from hell when it comes to downloading the illegal copies of movies that make up the bulk of the space consumed on their file server, after all.

Now, I’m sure we all have our stories about wilful ignorance in pursuit of a bit of nerd-baiting, but this particular BBC article caught my eye, because it implies that the “layman” state of mind is doing a good deal more damage.

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Kicking off the Business Clinic at Sandy Balls!

Monday, July 11th, 2011

There’s a very special pleasure to getting out of town on a working day: a pleasure that’s doubled when you can borrow an open-topped car to do it in, and even more Brownie points attached to going somewhere with a fascinating story to tell.

This combination of plus points made me very happy to kick off PC Pro’s new Business Clinic feature – where Real World Computing contributors such as myself pay a free visit to a business for a spot of IT troubleshooting –  with an inaugural visit to see Dan Rooke, down at the Sandy Balls Holiday Centre in the northern extreme of the New Forest.

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Superzoom cameras: take me to the bridge

Tuesday, June 21st, 2011

There’s an excellent Labs round-up of Superzoom cameras (also commonly called “bridge cameras”) in the latest issue of PC Pro. My only criticism is that it doesn’t makes a strong enough case for its subject.

Most people tend to think that there are only two types of digital camera to choose from: point-and-click compact cameras majoring in convenience, and high-end DSLRs majoring in picture quality. Anything in between is – almost by definition – seen as an uncomfortable compromise. However I think that the vast majority of users would actually be far better off with this intermediate format.

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Mobile money: a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist

Thursday, June 2nd, 2011

Mobile money is the future, or so I’m assured by research into the use of Near Field Communications (NFC) systems, which says most of us will be using our smartphones to pay for stuff within the next four years.

First things first, mobile money is not new. And, no, I’m not talking about the fact that money itself is pretty damn mobile when you think about it — what I’m talking about provides a system whereby you don’t have to carry real cash and can instead just point an easily carried payment device at a retailer.

Most of you will immediately know what I’m talking about when I mention the name of this bit of wonder kit, this device that has revolutionised retail, that does away with the need to carry cash and that just about everyone is comfortable using: it’s called a debit card.

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Is the new Twitter Tsar a Ryan Giggs fan?

Wednesday, May 25th, 2011

Twitter is having another one of those ‘I’m Spartacus!’ moments. The last one was when the powers that be decided someone making a joke post about blowing up Robin Hood Airport was a potential terrorist and prosecuted the poor sod.

The Twittersphere responded by retweeting the posting in question, on the basis that the police couldn’t arrest everyone. The same thing has now happened following the ridiculous situation where everyone and their dog knows the identity of a footballer who stands accused of doing what footballers seem to do when not kicking a ball around and earning obscene amounts of money.

An MP even used his Parliamentary privilege to suggest the footballer in question was Ryan Giggs. Something the masses on Twitter have been doing for the past fortnight or so, with tens of thousands of tweets and retweets naming the Manchester United player.

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Microsoft connects you to the cloud at TechEd 2011

Tuesday, May 17th, 2011

Relax – when I say Microsoft’s “connecting you to the cloud” this isn’t the long-predicted release of a brain implant chip worthy of Cronenberg at his finest. It’s a bit more straightforward, though describing it to those not already in daily contact with the cloud produces furrowed brows – not because it’s hard to understand, but because systems designers considering a cloud rollout in their business can’t believe it’s not included already.

It is now. Robert Wahbe was the main presenter in the TechEd keynote, and he laid out a toolkit for linking your internal servers to your Windows Azure cloud instances. There’s Azure Connect, which is all about the TCP/IP pipeline between the inside of your organisation, and the inside of your cloud presence: and there’s Concero (not Concerto, before the subeditors shoot me), which is a data synchroniser, so you can have an internal server and a cloud server and keep the two in step.

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Adobe Creative Suite 5.5 isn’t a rip-off: the UK price is

Thursday, May 12th, 2011

My review of the new Creative Suite 5.5 (CS5.5) has just been posted and there’s plenty to talk about in terms of new functionality and what this means in relation to the future of cross-platform design.

However, it’s not so much the extraordinary and mouth-watering creativity of CS5.5 that is likely to strike users as the extraordinary and eye-watering cost. (more…)