Real World Computing

One thing I've really come to appreciate in various "test" builds of 6.1 I've found lurking on the internet is that WM 6.1 Standard edition now has a cut, copy and paste facility. To be honest, I think it was pretty crappy that cut-and-paste were deliberately excluded from WM 6 standard in the first place, but I'm glad to see them finally there. The people who won't be happy are firms such as Orneta (www.orneta.com), which sells third-party copy-and-paste utilities for WM 6 Standard - Orneta's is great and is called Scissors. Also making its first appearance on the Standard version of WM is the Remote Desktop client, although of course without a touchscreen it's a bit clunky - still, at least the support is finally there.

Overall then, despite my disappointment with its headline-grabbing new home screen, I reckon there are plenty of welcome new features in WM 6.1, especially for companies that deploy the Standard edition. The introduction of RDP and cut-and-paste means that many "pro" users can realistically start to choose WM Standard devices now, whereas before they were limited to often heavier and bulkier WM Professional devices. And the decreased bandwidth and battery appetites are both very welcome, too.

Guten Tags?

An area of technology that always seems to get bad press is RFID, or radio frequency identification. I'm sure you're all aware of these chips, like tiny electronic barcodes that can be detected and read remotely. They come in two flavours: passive tags that don't have any internal power source and can only be read from about 10cm; and active tags that do, and can be read from hundreds of metres away. Actually, there's a third flavour called semi-passive, which has a power source for the onboard chip but doesn't use the battery for broadcasting as active tags do.

The controversy that you've probably read about involves the use of RFID for monitoring and tracking purposes. Certain supermarkets have used them to trigger a system that photographs anyone picking up razor blades (which are apparently the most shoplifted item in a typical store). Other people suggest that with RFID your movements could be tracked by "Big Brother" and, interestingly enough, they're more concerned when that Big Brother is big businesses rather than the state. For my part, I've grown weary of "technology can be used for bad purposes" headlines: we're surrounded by and make daily use of technologies that could be used against us; our internet habits and mobile phone usage probably already enable us to be tracked in more ways than RFID ever will. It's a shame when emerging technologies get a bad name purely because of fears about how they might be used.

To redress the balance, let's take a look at a good and useful RFID system. Actually, although I say "RFID", you won't find the phrase used anywhere on the packaging or the marketing materials for the system I'm talking about here, as they obviously don't want it associated with the negative press. As with London Transport's Oyster card, which also employs RFID technology, millions of Londoners are already carrying round scary passive RFID tags that their tabloid newspapers have been warning them about, without even realising it. The system I've been playing with is called Loc8tor (www.loc8tor.co.uk), and it's been around for a couple of years now.

Continued....