One Password To Rule Them All And In The Darkness Bind Them

The giants of the web are fighting to become your de facto passport to the digital world.

These days we’ve all got too many passwords to remember. The likes of Facebook, Google and Microsoft want to ease your burden by letting you use their accounts to access all of your other services. A growing number of sites and services let you login with your Facebook details, for example, turning your Facebook account into your online identity card.

Facebook recently upped the stakes by striking a deal with Telstra to let pre-paid mobile customers access their account directly from Facebook. Telstra pre-paid customers can track their account balance, top up their credit and view usage history. Considering how much of a hassle it can be to deal with telcos, organising your phone bill via your Facebook account sounds pretty useful.

The Telstra deal is part of Facebook’s move beyond a simple “service” to become a “platform” on which other applications and services run. Game developers were quick to get onboard but Facebook wants to expand much further. Its aim is to develop a microcosm of the internet within Facebook’s walls, so in theory you never need to stray beyond Facebook’s grasp. Naturally this doesn’t sit well with the likes of Google and Microsoft who also have their own vast ecosystems and want to “own the customer”. Remember, if a service is free you’re often the product.

Of course Facebook and the others giants of the web aren’t introducing extra features such as phone bill management to make your life easier. They’re doing it to make sure that they’re so tightly entwined in your life that you can’t walk away. Facebook wants you to be too reliant on your account to abandon it. In return it gets to track what you do in every corner of your life.

Facebook and the others aren’t evil, they’re simply trading your privacy and personal information in return for convenience. It’s a reasonable trade to make if you comprehend what you’re trading and take the time to understand the various privacy settings. But Facebook does seem to benefit from the fact that many people don’t comprehend this transaction and think they’re getting everything for “free”.

Long before Facebook was on the scene, Microsoft dreamed of acting as our digital passports. Microsoft’s Hailstorm system was later renamed Microsoft Passport Network, .NET My Services and .NET Passport. You probably know it as a Hotmail account.

When Passport was integrated into Windows XP way back in 2001, Microsoft’s chief research and strategy officer Craig Mundie said the public would fully accept Microsoft as a trusted repository for all their personal information within five to 10 years. Clearly he was wrong about that one.

Of course Microsoft’s Passport efforts failed because most people trusted Microsoft about as far as they could kick their computer. Yet the concept of trust has changed considerably in the last decade. Today people trust the likes of Facebook and Google with a surprising amount of personal information. But it remains to be seen whether they’ll become our one password to rule them all.

Want Windows 8 For Free?

I’ve written about the impending release of Windows 8 extensively over the last few months, but that’s been largely on the basis of Microsoft’s own announcements regarding the latest iteration of its operating system software. This month, Microsoft’s taken the same steps it took with Windows 7 and released a “consumer preview” edition of Windows 8 that you can download right this minute if you’re so inclined.

Microsoft’s offering up the ISO of Consumer Edition in both 32 and 64 bit versions as a direct download from its servers for anyone who cares to grab them. If you’re keen, head over to

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows-8/iso

and choose the language (English, Chinese (Simplified), French, German or Japanese and then whether you want the 64-bit or 32-bit version. Generally speaking that should be the 64-bit version, especially if you’re going to install it on a system with more than 4GB of RAM, as 32-bit Windows can’t “see” any RAM above that limit — actually technically just above 3GB, in fact.

There’s a few caveats there, however; for a start, the 64-bit English download itself weighs in at a hefty 3.3GB, which will take both some time and some serious chunks of your data allowance to actually download. It’s supplied as an ISO image — that’s essentially an archived CD image, although it’s also possible to convert a USB flash drive to perform the same function. From there, it’ll install in much the same way that existing Windows operating systems do, with the only remaining catch being that this is still early software — the full retail version of Windows 8 is expected to ship later in the year — and it’s also time-limited software. When the full version of Windows 8 ships, you should be able to migrate a consumer preview version into the full version of Windows 8, but it’ll cost you whatever Microsoft decides to charge for it. Still, if you’re keen to see what Microsoft’s got just around the corner and have a spare PC — which needs to have the relatively moderate specifications of a 1GHz processor, 1GB RAM, 16-20GB free hard drive space and a DirectX 9 capable graphics card — it’s well worth checking it out. Bear in mind that if you do install the consumer preview onto an existing Windows PC and choose to install the operating system as an “upgrade”, you’ll overwrite the existing operating system — which almost certainly isn’t your best move!

Understanding Windows 8 Tablets

When Microsoft announced Windows 8, it was with a renewed focus on taking on the most popular computing commodity of recent years, namely tablets. Windows 8 will feature a standard desktop interface along with a new touch-based interface, known as Metro.

Microsoft refers to Metro as a “design language”, which is a fancy way of saying that products that are Metro compliant will have a consistent font and design look. Microsoft’s current look for the Xbox 360 console is Metro-based, but the most prominent product that Microsoft’s brought to market to date has been the Windows Phone 7 operating system; if you want a taste of what Metro on Windows 8 will be like, Windows Phone 7 should be your first port of call.

Metro isn’t just Microsoft slapping a skin on Windows 8 and continuing on its merry way with desktops and laptops, however; it’s also the core way that a new version of Windows 8 will run. Historically, Windows has primarily been written for Intel’s x86-based architecture, and that doesn’t change for Windows 8. What comes on board is a version of Windows 8 for devices running on ARM (Advanced RISC Machine) processors. ARM processors aren’t the devices used for most desktop or laptop systems, but they are widely implemented in the tablet and smartphone space, due to their lower power requirements, which means that Windows On Arm (officially WOA) will most likely first appear on tablet-style products.

This isn’t Microsoft’s first stab at Tablets; many years ago Microsoft launched Windows XP Tablet Edition with great fanfare but, aside from some very niche markets, virtually no traction in the market. Windows XP Tablet Edition was in essence a touch-capable (but not terribly functional) version of XP; subsequent operating systems from Microsoft have included touch compatibility but little of great significance was done with it at an application level.

There’s a significant change present for Windows on ARM, however, and that’s due to the fact that ARM isn’t x86; no legacy — that is,  existing or old Windows applications — will run at all. Instead, new WOA applications will have to be written from the ground up.  Microsoft’s likely to supply most of its applications in WOA forms. It’s already known that versions of most (if not all) Microsoft Office applications will have WOA equivalents, although they may only run in the desktop mode, even on tablets. Internet Explorer will also be bundled for browsing purposes, and while it’ll be Internet Explorer 10 in name, it won’t support plugins that will work on the x86 version of IE 10. That means, at least for the time being, that things like Flash won’t work on WOA devices, although it’s always possible that third party browsers or plugin workarounds may emerge.

Windows On ARM also means Microsoft will have even more devices to technically support; while there are many millions of potential x86 combinations of things like graphics cards, network interfaces and peripherals, for the most part external vendors handle those kinds of drivers. But you don’t — and can’t — change the graphics card on a tablet, and that means each iteration of a Windows 8 tablet will need its own updates. So far, it seems most likely that you’ll only be able to get Windows 8 on ARM pre-installed on a pre-approved tablet, so updates shouldn’t be too much of a problem.

In many ways, it’s identical to what Apple did with the iPad and iPhone. It’s theoretically possible that it could have ported the full OS X operating system across, but that would have had an effect on battery life — and not a good one. Starting afresh does mean dropping a lot of application compatibility, but if Microsoft can grow an application ecosystem to rival iOS, it should be able to overcome that particular hurdle. Microsoft has been very active in its developer community in recent years, and it’ll be fascinating to see what comes to WOA.

Will Kinect For Windows change the way you use your PC?

One of the more interesting things to come out of this year’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas was Microsoft’s official announcement of a Windows-compatible version of its Kinect camera. Kinect, if you’re not familiar with it, is a camera array with 3D sensing capabilities that Microsoft first launched for its Xbox 360 games console. The cameras within the Kinect sensor track your body movements in real time, and this allows the Xbox 360 to offer both physical screen selections — swiping your arms around to select things or change pages — as well as more “physical” gaming experiences, including a number of fitness titles.

Kinect might have its roots in gaming, but it didn’t take long for keen hackers to see the potential in hooking up the sensor to a regular PC and use its 3D modelling capabilities for other purposes. To Microsoft’s credit, it didn’t shy away from or try to block the hackers; there was (in effect) unofficial “support” for Kinect hacking; Microsoft didn’t specifically sell the sensor to do anything but gaming, but was happy enough with some of the side efforts that came out of it. If the hackers broke a Kinect sensor or two along the way, Microsoft was more than happy to sell them another.

Kinect for Windows changes that arrangement somewhat. For a start, the “official” Windows Kinect (which will launch in Australia on February 1st) is more expensive than the Xbox version; a sensor and software will cost $299, something Microsoft puts down to the Windows Kinect sensor being a standalone product; it figures that money can be made with Kinect games on the Xbox 360, whereas the PC version may not generate any more income directly.

It’s also somewhat annoying to note that the official CES announcement pegged the price at $US249, but the Australian price is a chunky $50 more; while there are some tax considerations to take in mind, not to mention shipping, that kind of price difference does sting a bit.
The really interesting question for Kinect For Windows is what it’ll be good for. Clearly there’ll be some cross-porting of existing games titles, but that leaves the Kinect as only a rather expensive games controller.

There’s all sorts of potential for a touch-free navigation environment on the PC, albeit one that’d work a lot better for a PC connected like a home media centre than one connected to a notebook that’s sitting right in front of you. Microsoft’s claim for the Windows sensor (and not the cheaper Xbox one) is that it’s optimised for close up work of this kind, but I’m a little lost to work out what’ll make the most sense for that kind of interaction (outside of certain mobility limited scenarios) that couldn’t be done just as well with the tap of a mouse button or click of a keyboard. The new Windows 8 “Metro” user interface is built on Microsoft’s experiences with touch on the Windows Phone platform, and I can see how that could work with Kinect, but at the same time interface designers will have to work around implementing both Kinect and standard interfaces; at a $299 per user price point I’m not totally convinced that many will.

Windows 8: Good For Laptops And Tablets

Microsoft recently held its BUILD conference, a developer-only event at which the highlight was the unveiling of Windows 8. It wasn’t exactly a shock reveal; there’s been plenty of information on Windows 8 available up in bits and pieces, but this was Microsoft’s first peek under the curtain at the nitty-gritty of Windows 8 itself. As you might expect, Windows 8 is expected to run more quickly than its predecessors, but then, Microsoft’s very unlikely to reveal that it’d run slower. A lot of small details emerged, such as the fact that support for NFC (Near Field Communications) will be built into Windows 8, as will simpler setups for refreshing a system prior to selling it, removing malware more efficiently and a revamp of some standard Windows user interface sections such as the Task Manager.  Cloud syncronisation and a very Apple-like App store for Windows applications will also feature on the full desktop client, which at first glance looks an awful lot like Windows 7 does now. That could well change, but a lot of the real meat of what Microsoft had to show off was to be seen in how it’ll adapt Windows 8 for the tablet market.

Microsoft’s had tilts at the tablet market for years now, but outside certain specialised niches, they’ve never had that much success — especially in the era of the iPad. Windows 8 has a lot of tablet-specific features, including a full tablet user interface called Metro that Microsoft showed off at the Build conference on a Samsung supplied tablet that all attendees got to take away with them. Microsoft’s built on the interface ideas it first showed off with its Windows Phone 7 devices, and the results are quite spectacular. It’s also worth noting that while Windows tablets to date have all run on Intel hardware, Windows 8 will also run on more power-efficient ARM processors, although there will be tradeoffs for the ARM models, which won’t run legacy Windows applications, just the specialised touchscreen ones. Whether by whatever time Windows 8 launches it’ll be able to make a dent in the iPad’s near dominance of the tablet market remains to be seen; a good half dozen Android tablets haven’t managed that, and the rest seem to be bogged down in legal battles with Apple.

Microsoft haven’t announced a timeline for when Windows 8 will ship (except to say that it’ll ship “when it’s done”); at a guess I’d say we’d be lucky to see it on store shelves and in laptops, desktops and tablets before at least the middle of next year.

Windows 8 Might Just Dull Computing’s “Cutting Edge”

It’s been something of a maxim in computing circles that processing power (however you choose to measure it) increases over time. This is a good thing, given that it enables faster performance and the development of new applications that would simply be impossible under older hardware. There’s Moore’s famous Law (really more of an observation, but I’m nitpicking) that the number of transistors that can be placed on an integrated circuit doubles roughly every two years. More transistors equals greater performance, in other words.

That pace of progress is a good thing in certain ways, but it does mean that systems can become obsolete from a technical standpoint long before they actually stop working as functional machines. The salespeople of the world would be delighted for us all to update our desktops and laptops every one to the three years, but there are plenty of PCs that manage service lives of a decade or more, even though what’s under the hood is well behind the cutting edge. They certainly won’t run the latest games, many of the latest applications or operating systems.

Except, that is, when they do.

Speaking recently at Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference in California, Tami Reller, corporate vice-president of the Windows division announced that the next version of Windows, currently known only as Windows 8, should have the same minimum system requirements as Windows 7 currently does. It won’t be quite the same experience across systems, as Windows 8 will dynamically adapt performance based on the system it’s running on.

Without a doubt, Windows 7 currently runs better on a high end system than a low end one, but the important detail is that Microsoft’s planning to keep the minimum supported specification effectively frozen for quite some time, especially when you consider that the system requirements for Windows 7 are essentially the same as they were for Windows Vista. A 1GHz processor is hardly cutting edge, but if Microsoft can keep to Reller’s claimed (and widely reported online aim) of “keeping system requirements either flat or reducing them over time” then Windows 8 might just run on some very old hardware indeed.

It’s early days yet — we won’t even see Windows 8 on store shelves this year, and there’s speculation but no strict timeline for when Windows 8 will launch.

It’s a fascinating move from Microsoft, especially in contrast to the software offering that (at the time of writing) Apple’s just about to launch, OS X 10.7, AKA “Lion”. Like its predecessor, “Snow Leopard”, Lion won’t run on older PowerPC based Macs, but it also drops the software that allowed older PowerPC applications to run from the operating system entirely, as well as not supporting some of the very first Intel-based Macs either.

There are catches here; obviously some systems do die a death faster than others whether due to wear and tear, design or even just old-fashioned bad luck. New hardware isn’t just about processing power; you can also add other new and interesting features to a system by updating it regularly, and depending on your use of a computer, that may make sense to you. If you’re on the other end of the spectrum and need every last watt of power you can wring out of your hardware, Microsoft’s plans are certainly more appealing than Apple’s.

Macbook Air: Is Thin Enough?

I’ve spent the past couple of weeks testing out Apple’s second take on its ultra-portable laptop concept, the Macbook Air. When Apple launched the first model of the Air, I was somewhat interested by the very thin form factor, but totally taken aback by the price; more than two thousand dollars for a machine that wasn’t, to put it bluntly, even poking at the sides of being cutting edge a couple of years ago.

The Air comfortably fits into the category of what used to be called “ultraportables” right up until the first netbooks hit the scene and radically reinterpreted not only the size of notebook systems but most markedly their pricing. It’s undoubtedly something that’s affected the pricing of the Macbook Air (and many of the competing ultra-thin Windows equivalents), as the new models start at a much more moderate $1,199.

For a system as innately portable as the Air, that’s a pretty good buy, but it’s still not without its catches. The processor still isn’t cutting edge — an ultra-low voltage 1.4GHz or 1.86GHz Intel Core 2 Duo — although the internal storage, which now only comes in solid state drive (SSD) format, is. Solid State Drives contain no moving parts, so they’re rather more durable than traditional hard drives, as well as drawing less power and running much cooler. The catch there is that they’re more costly, and as such, the entry level Macbook Air that I’ve tested comes with a slender 64GB of available storage. An external, older normal USB hard drive would seem like a very sensible choice for any Air purchaser.

The first model of the Air infamously had a single USB port that had to service any external peripherals, including ethernet ports, external drives and adaptors. The new model doubles that number, which at least means you could (for example) use a USB modem and USB storage drive at the same time. Like its predecessor, an optical drive is noticeably absent, although you can install software on a client PC or Mac to share an optical drive to the Air over a network.

I’ve used plenty of netbooks over the past couple of years, and the Air does neatly overpower them in terms of raw processing power. Where it’s technically feasible to, for example, edit a spreadsheet or adjust an image on a netbook, you need plenty of patience, and the Air does manage that a little better. Then again, Netbook prices have continued to tumble over time, so there’s still a fair pricing gap between a standard Netbook and the Air, or for that matter a fatter, more regularly specified PC notebook.

For heavy travellers, the light carrying weight, full sized keyboard and very quiet and relatively cool operation of the Macbook Air make a reasonable buying case. Those on more limited budgets, or who want the even smaller form of a netbook would do well to trawl the online stores, where some of last year’s models can be had for less than $500.

Is Touch Going To Be Enough?

For a very long time, there have been pushes to move computing beyond the confines of the keyboard. The mouse as a computing device actually dates from 1963, but it was the mid 1980s before mice in computing became particularly widespread. In recent years, even the mouse has been updated, improved and worked upon, whether it was the switch from mechanical, ball-based mice to laser-guided devices, or the move from cabled to wireless mice, or even the more oddball mice concepts out there, such as Air Mice that double as 3D pointers.

Mice themselves might become a technological oddity as (if you’ll pardon the rather obvious pun) touch really does take hold. Tablet PCs are the obvious place where touch is most prominent, but it’s not the only “digital” platform; a number of vendors offer PCs and notebooks with inbuilt touch capability, thanks to the fact that Windows 7 natively supports touch based input. To date, I’ve not been thrilled by touch on Windows 7, largely because while it works, there aren’t that many applications that make as much sense within the way that Windows 7 applications are written to use touch rather than a mouse and keyboard. That doesn’t mean a new application can’t use touch sensibly, but at this stage it’s a nice thing for Windows 7 rather than a key feature.

Operating systems that use touch as the basis for everything and are written that way, such as Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS fare better in this regard, because software developers think of them in those kinds of terms.

Touch still relies on physical contact, and one of the other reasons why I’ve yet to be really wowed by a touch-capable notebook is the physical effort involved in reaching over to the screen. Not that this is an onerous task per se, but simply because on a regular notebook, you’re still reaching right past a perfectly usable keyboard and trackpad to press an onscreen button that could be clicked on instead. It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me. Even that effort might rather rapidly become something rather quaint, however, and via a rather unusual agency: Console gaming. Specifically, Microsoft’s Kinect, an add-on camera for the Xbox 360 console. The Kinect is intended (at this stage) for games, as it allows a gamer to wriggle, jump, box, or do whatever the game commands, and see those movements mapped onto an in-game character. That’s the theory, but it took very little time at all for intrepid hacking types to grab hold of the USB-connected Kinect camera and use its body-mapping technology for all sorts of other purposes on a PC. Interestingly, Microsoft hasn’t jumped on the lawyer-heavy bandwagon to stop this kind of thing, and some press interviews suggest that a Windows version of Kinect might not be that far away. Suddenly, all those cool sci-fi images of people working on virtual floating computer displays that don’t exist at all are very close indeed.

Augmented Reality Makes Reality Easier To Understand

There’s a phrase used in software all to describe a utility that’s so essential, so brilliant, that it simply sells the hardware around it: The Killer Application.

Not as deadly as they sound, it should be pointed out. Windows, in its time, was a killer app. So was the original Netscape browser, so (arguably) was id Software’s Doom. Killer Applications don’t even have to be applications that launch a new idea as much as they refine an existing one, and if you want proof of that, look at Google. When Google launched, there were a plethora of general purpose search engines on offer. These days, if Microsoft wasn’t pouring buckets of money into Bing, there’d only be Google.

One of the big buzzwords that has been labelled as a killer application in recent years has been the concept of Augmented Reality. This is taking a device with an inbuilt camera (typically a smartphone) and often location awareness (usually GPS), and matching the two to enable the screen on the smartphone to display additional information about the location around you. To date, it’s largely been used simple games and for navigation-style applications, such as pointing out where nearby restaurants are, or for interacting with Wikipedia entries for local points of interest. Reasonable stuff, although the number of people actually willing to wander around unfamiliar environments holding an expensive smartphone up to their faces is, not surprisingly, rather low.

I’ve recently been testing out something that could well be the next great killer augmented reality application, even though it’s on a platform that’s very well established: The iPhone. As with all things iPhone, it’s an app, and in this case, it’s a translation application called Word Lens. And as with most killer applications, it’s not really in what it’s doing — which is essentially just crude machine-based single word translation — but in how it melds existing technologies with new ones to achieve its purpose.

The use of software to aid in language translation goes back decades, but until relatively recently it was largely limited in use to those in fixed positions. What Word Lens does is use the iPhone’s camera to capture text, then translate it on the fly and superimpose it over the onscreen display. The end results can be a little shaky depending on how well you’re focusing the camera and whether the font used on the text is easily readable or not, but for basic translations, as long as you’re aware of the essential context of what you’re looking at, it’s surprisingly good. For those with a sense of the impish, it’ll also reverse words or blank them out altogether in the free demo version. For now, it’ll only support English to Spanish or Spanish To English, but apparently other languages are in the works.

Word Lens isn’t the only augmented reality application with utility at its core on the market, even though it’s one with immediate impact for any traveller, especially as it works without an active data connection. Google’s been slowly improving its Google Goggles application (available for Android and iPhone), which uses the same kind of image recognition for immediate searching as well as simple translation via optical character recognition, although its text-handling capabilities are nowhere near as good as that offered by Word Lens.

Where Augmented Reality applications like Word Lens or Google Goggles get it right is by reducing the need to interface with the application down to a few seconds, rather than a constant connection. You’re much more likely to pull out a phone and take a quick snapshot than you are wander around with your phone on prominent display. Equally, by providing a genuinely useful service, such as translation or the display of a quick search to help you understand something, they’ve got the real ability to provide genuine value.

Twenty Five Years Of Windows

The chances are pretty good that you’re reading this on a Windows-based computer. Rough estimates suggest there are around billion personal computers on the planet, and Windows accounts for around ninety percent of those systems. Even if you are using a Linux or Mac OS based system, you’ll have felt the impact of Microsoft’s market-leading operating system.

A quarter of a century ago as I write this, if you were using a computer, the odds are quite high that you weren’t running a version of Windows, even though that was when Windows 1.0 was brand spanking new and on the software seller’s shelves after a couple of years of development. The cutting edge system you’d need to run it required MS-DOS 2.0, two double-sided disk drives, 256K of memory and a graphics adaptor. If there’s a lift where you work, it’s probably over the minimum specification to run Windows 1.0 now.

By what you’d expect from an operating system Windows 1.0 wasn’t much to get excited about, and the DOS (Disk Operating System) it ran on was arguably a bit more interesting than what Microsoft referred to as an “operating environment” than an operating system.

At the time, IBM-compatible PCs were solid business tools, but at the smaller business end of things plenty of users got by on systems as simple as the Commodore 64 and its 8-bit ilk. Microsoft couldn’t even make particularly good advertisements if this pitch for Windows 1.0 (featuring current Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer doing his best dodgy car-salesman impersonation) is anything to go by: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rl5a9qUX_D4

It wasn’t until the third release of Windows, and its network capable upgrade, Windows 3.11, that Windows really picked up steam and became a truly competitive operating system. Microsoft continued with DOS-based Windows operating systems through Windows 95, 98, 98SE and the particularly poor Windows Millennium Edition before switching over for Windows XP to the codebase used for its more business-centric Windows NT lines. While Windows XP has its problems, it’s a note of its success that nearly a decade after its release, there’s still plenty of systems running Windows XP quite happily. It’s quite likely that its successor, the much derided Windows Vista, won’t be seen much in a decade, although the much more stable Windows 7 just might have that chance.