Real World Computing
It's Vista time!
To remind you, just over a year ago, I made a mad dash to Taipei to visit Acer computers to celebrate its 30th anniversary. While I was over there, I had a long chat with a senior Acer vice-president, who was happy to tell me in detail about the angst the OEM vendors were feeling about the various versions of Vista that were about to come to market. Naturally, I couldn't resist uploading my recording to PC Pro HQ for digestion while I flew back over the South China Sea to Hong Kong, to await the overnight flight back to Blighty. And my comments have made it into the court depositions...
However, as is the nature of these sorts of legal cases, more and more information is being revealed as the weeks go by. The latest potential bombshell to land is that Microsoft dumbed down the GUI requirements in order for Vista to work on the then-shipping basic Intel 915 graphics chipsets. Indeed, some documentation claims that in the quarter before the launch of Vista, only half the machines sold were actually capable of running Vista in its proper 3D-rendered state, otherwise known as Aero. By dumbing down the UI in this way Microsoft was thus, according to the still-unproven claims, colluding with Intel to bend the market, or some other such legalese (noting that I'm not a lawyer), by restraining trade for competitors who might otherwise have beaten Intel to the punch. I have the feeling that this one will run and run, and that the class action suit could well get very nasty indeed.
iPhone developments
I've made the decision not to go to TechEd in Florida this year, but to instead spend my own money on Apple's forthcoming WWDC (worldwide developer conference) to be held in San Francisco. Apple has a very different way of handling press at developer conferences - you're only allowed into the keynote, and then are personally escorted to 1:1 interview sessions. At the end of the day, you leave and the conference runs on without you. Microsoft, like many other vendors, has a more open-door policy. With Apple, the entire conference (apart from the keynote, which is broadcast on the web) is covered by a non-disclosure agreement.
Nevertheless, I'm going because I want to see if this is the tipping point that I've predicted is coming. The iPhone SDK is an excellent start, but Microsoft can rightly claim to have had better development tools available for years for its Windows Mobile platform. Nevertheless, good tools aren't enough, and Apple recognises this - the forthcoming code distribution system, free if your app is free, is a masterstroke by Apple.
And the $100 million in venture capital funding is making many pause for thought. Rumours suggest a small "child of XServe" standalone server is coming, along with more efforts to make OS X Server (web ID: 165705) work for the small to medium enterprise business. That, coupled to the already-promised Exchange Server support in iPhone, might well make some serious waves. The only way to find out is to go and see.
FireWire hacking
News that a security researcher has created a hack for a PC that grants you full access to the memory of a host machine via its FireWire port should be taken very seriously indeed. The problem arises because the FireWire interface supports direct memory access (DMA), and thus can probe around inside the machine's memory quite cheerfully. Attach something nasty via the FireWire port and it can run riot inside the machine, looking up items in memory, for example.
