When I'm Mobile...

I do a lot of work from the field...almost literally the trenches. *grin* So the laptop I use has every possible connectivity option under the small G2 star we orbit around...even an antique 56K modem!

But the option to take the laptop with me is sometimes stymied by the destination or the abruptness of the "housecall" I have to make...so I have started placing copies of the important documents and such to a place where I can access them from anywhere on anything that professes to have a browser. My email is Gmail, I have a .Mac account to use their synchronization, shared calendaring, and hosted disk space services, and now I have begun to get familiar with the Google version of office productivity software - their spreadsheets in particular.

Look, pretty much we all know Excel, yes? So to have this ability through a browser makes the worry of which version is installed, which virus macros are going to delete my data, etc. non-existant. Security? Ha! Don't talk to me about security. If you are still in that fallacy, I could just point out all of the recent news articles on stolen laptops, purchased lists, and so forth. No, instead of security, your best defense is distribution...have your data anywhere you want it to be and if something gets stolen or compromised, you simply make the contents out of date or useless.

Yeah, Microsoft's twigging this whole thing slowly but surely...however, like their damnable Xbox-Live pseudo-ISP mockery, to use their products you will have to use their atrocious MSN services. I'd rather put up with Google ads than be pestered with a .Net key login and other proprietary muck. I want my YouTube to be Microsoft free, my itunes not married to a Windows Media player, and my spreadsheets so shackled to the latest rev of Excel that I can never really share them with others.

So when I'm mobile, I don't have to worry about forgetting my laptop, or having it in two places at once...and as far as data synchronization is concerned, there are dynamic links that work across the Internet...so there!

Quest for Small, Part 2: The Sublimely Ridiculous

Okay, okay...I suppose I should watch my punnish use of titles and make sure I can reuse them properly. But you see, with the announcement of this week's goofiness, I just had to use the "Quest for Small" title again. Note the addendum.

So now: EGAD! I've heard of making products just to fulfill Microsoft's oddishness, but seriously - did anyone actually expect to get work done with one of these?

Now, I'm not a big fan of Windows-based PCs to being with, as recurring readers of this blog will know. But I must deal with them from time to time as they are attached to much of my lab equipment and what gets brought to the dig by my co-op students and visiting firemen. Still, I found one of these lying on a lab table the other day and messed with it a bit. Aside from making my eyes need bifocals before their time, it was peppy enough. Apparently, these things run a standard version of Windows XP, and you just have to get used to the pen or thumbwheel to get around. But now Microsoft has made these sorts of devices "official" and (like the Tablet PC) are using their massive 5K kilo gorilla mass to get us (the normally unsuspecting consumers of the world) to "buy" into it.

But wait! There's more!

Not to just let the idle concept of a hand-held, pocket-fitting PC for traveling suits be the goad, Microsoft now hoists the dreaded iPod killer approach to their own site. Don't just take these with you to do work, they cry, take them to watch this week's episodes of "Lost" through Apple's iTunes! Play proprietary encrypted MP3 software on our un-open Media Player (while we carp incessantly on Apple's approach to doing so and not on Real Media's)! Bring World of Warcraft with you on the fly and watch it tank before you even log in!

Plu-eeezeee.

Don't buy this eye-candy. You want a hand-held device that lets you work remotely, watch movies, play games, etc. from Sony? Spend one-tenth the cost of this Microsoft band-aid driven UX180P and get a PSP. It has WiFi. It plays movies. It plays music. It synchs with Outlook. And the form factor and ruggedness has been tested for three years. Want to do mobile music and video? Get an iPod. If you must REALLY have mobility computing, then ditch the Windows anchor and examine the existing or state-of-the-art solutions that don't fail on a whim. You know their names...you just didn't think they'd be useful enough? Give me a break. Vote with your usability, not your eye-candy brain. Blackberry, Palm, cellphones, etc. If your mobility requires the ability to hook up and do PowerPoint at the other end, Palms do that. Heck, iPods do that! Don't kill your eyes over this so-called "need"...work with your brain, not the Gen. 01 junk Microsoft creates just to get your cash, Nash.

'nuff said...now get back to work and do it on something that won't make corneal replacements a thing of your future!

Open Source-a-me!

Many users have been poking into places that they shouldn't be, so to speak, without knowing the consequences. As with Ali Baba, open source has its forty thieves, ready to extract their revenge for the young adventurer daring to stray into their territory.

Let me explain the allegory.

In the original Thousand and One Nights, Schezerade told this tale of the lowly Ali, who happened to stumble across the lair of the forty thieves, heard the well-worn password, and discovered the Cave of Wonders - filled with the treasure of the thieves' years of stealing from others. Now, in a normal world, thieves try to pawn this loot for untraceable cash to fund their excessive ways, so Ali is literally stealing loot from thieves. Ali's morality was seen as heroic because those who would never see the excess of the thieves in their lifetimes would instead drain them of their loot. As usual, in Ali's tale, the listener backs the vagrant adventurer and roots for him to win - not the thieves, nor the original owners of that which was stolen.

Suppose you need a graphics editing program. As a business owner, you may see two options: Photoshop in its current form of $600 - $1300 (depending on if you need just the one app or the entire suite), or the Gimp, which is free. Both handle Photoshop formatted files, use Photoshop-API plug-ins, have roughly the same UI...but obviously, the Gimp is free and so you save the money. If everyone were to take this approach, Adobe would file for Chapter 11 within a year. Pundits of the open source movement would say, they deserved it, since they created software that was too expensive for people to buy - hence the reason for creating the free version. So the Gimp exists only because of the need for a Photoshop program, and so all of the work that was well-earned by Adobe will never be compensated.

Demand for open source versions of commercial applications abound. OpenOffice for Microsoft Office, Gimp for Photoshop, etc. Probably the same amount of man-hours was used by both the commercial and the free version to create the compatible application...yet more and more people are moving to the open source variant. Whole governments are doing this to retain document compatibility yet cut off the licensing and upgrade nightmare. But here is the caveat of Ali stealing from the thieves - if Microsoft's next version of Office contains a Office-only check to make sure only Office can use specific new features, will more reverse engineering by the open source programmers cross the line and become illegal?

My son is looking into a soprano saxophone, and after days of extensive websearch, I found two that stood the test of his teachers and parents alike. Most band members know of the Selmer brand...and at normal pricing, such a saxophone runs about $800. eBay has a few here and there slightly less. There's also a Bently brand out of the UK...unknown in the US, but praised over there. It, too, is under $800, which is about the limit we can afford for his experiment into this new instrument. But there's also the Sellmar and Sallmer brands...one-offs, we'd call them...for under $400 that are imitations preying on the name compatibility. Which do I buy? Where is the best investment? If I could pick up a free saxophone from a music store, would I trust it to play notes properly? To be compatible with replacement parts and proper tuning?

I'm not against the open source concept at all...but to me, the open source product should be oriented towards adding value instead of just replicating the commercial product. Graphic Converter is a spiffy shareware program that has all of the editing and conversion features I need from a Photoshop-like program...for $35. I use this, not Photoshop, nor Gimp. It has batch conversion and batch edit...something neither of the other two candidates have, plus a bunch of other features. I got a fresh approach on an old editing problem and the cost was low due to the fact that it's just one guy that has to be supported by sales...not a monoculture such as Redmond.

Let's hope the rest of open source and shareware moves in that direction...to take the advantage of being different and producing something truly wonderful. That way, it will be a vein of gold that Ali finds in the cave and not the labors of someone else that have been pilfered.

We Didn't Start the Firewall...

The average number of stories on Microsoft Vista daily exceeds two dozen or so...but this one...

I had to check the calendar to make sure it wasn't April 1st again...this surely isn't true. Microsoft is intentionally crippling what passes for a firewall in their next version, state of the art operating system? In these days of malicious invasion by anything and everyone looking for kicks, this is being put down to "strong feedback from our customers". I don't buy that. The first thing I see when I go into a client are the holes in their technology...it's second nature to me now, since we deal with security consulting...and to introduce anything into a corporation that has holes would normally lose someone a job.

If this sort of statement is meant to scare us, it has. If it was meant to put us on alert for how to deploy this version, it did. If it was meant to caution us as to the negligence on their part, SSDD. About the only positive thing that came from this was an attempt at honesty as to the usability of a yet unreleased product. Mac OS X, Linux, and just about every other OS in commercial and enterprise use comes with firewalls ON and fully configured to keep things nice and clean. Color me confused as to why Microsoft wants to keep the outbound traffic lanes totally open...anything can come in through 80 these days, which is open if you want web browsing, so to let any invasion to spead outward...

Hopefully, before the actual Vista-leaden PC is out on the streets, they reconsider this...or at least from the home user's standpoint.

Quest for Small

As an anthropologist, I am often appalled at the way other perceptions of our craft are misinterpreted. I suppose it's similar to how Hollywood slices and dices the psychiatric profession - we laugh at the Freudian image that is overused of stolid and Victorian-era dressed misanthrope sits and listens without producing meaningful results. In truth, today's psychiatrist or psychologist (the two genres are confused so often, but they are unique and independent approaches to analysis) are nowhere near that viewpoint...but that is the image that worked its way into the Western cultural matrix and so is used to convey the role without going into hideous amounts of backstory.

With respect to anthropology, we are seen as Indiana Jones...the adventurous individual that fights snakes, evil doers, etc. to find the Holy Grail. The image also associated with us, once we find the results, is of selling them to the highest bidder. Nothing could be further from the truth, of course. The modern anthropologist (and the mythos-associated paleo- or archaeologist...clad together in folks' minds like the Freudian Siamese twin) is more like the lab technician on the CSI shows. We search for the smallest of findings and extrapolate backwards from the trivia to its place in the whole of the culture we seek to model. And a model it is, as most ancient cultures did not have a fully digital matrix of cultural symbology as Western civilization does today for future of my kind to not have to guess at.

Mark and I were haggling at this idea the other day, and it was amazingly similar to his client's perception of what the concept of an IT "geek" is today...and I told him so. My perception of our culture's defined model of an IT geek is a pale-skinned, bespectacled youthful male with geek-speak t-shirt, dirty and unwashed hair and pants, eyes glued to the raw glow of the tube placed mentally in front of him. Again, the reality of this is far from the truth.

Now, I don't work for these folks...but I study them absent-mindedly as it is my chosen profession. I am not a sociologist, per se, but as a whole, an anthropologist frames the Way of Man as an artwork of evolution, and in this timeslice, the IT geek typifies the same role as the peak technologist of this era. In previous eras, we have shipbuilders, artisans, and hunters take that title.

As with most of my prodigious mental hypertexts, this rationale led me to flash upon what is perhaps the best cultural exposition of Man's early years at the dawn of true culture, brought to film, which is the last century's cultural recording media - a small and under-rated movie called "Quest for Fire". Hideously panned by the normal reviewers, thought of as "too aesthetic" by most, it paints a decided realistic timeslice of the timeframe at which humans began to work with altering its environment. The main character in fact learns how to use a small technological tool from a culture that has already mastered it, and in doing so, changes his tribe's way forever. While not histrionically or anthropologically 100% correct, it comes much closer than anything else about another mythologically-cast socio-image...the cave man. Hence the link.

All of these "typecast" roles in history...the psychologist, the anthropologist, the geek, and the cave man...can all be symbolized by the concept of an individual searching for the small. Not, as they are often plastered into imagery, the large. By looking at the small, we examine everything it is built upon, like looking at a single Lego brick and inferring the complete build. Unless you get it right, the whole concept goes wrong...and such is the danger of the observer changing the observed through just the simple process of observing.

So when you next look at the geek or the trench-digger or the shrink, stop and ask yourself why these non-appealing and deprecatory terms came to be, instead of honorable ones like "consultant", "technician", or "healer". Why force yourself into accepting the media-framed images of our kind, when you can simply look again and understand these folks' role in changing our culture by studying and working with the minutiae?

[Insert your "it will never happen" allegory here]

Yes, all of them have been used in the past couple of days. Pigs are seeking ground clearance at SFO. Mr. Sympathy himself has added showshoes to his closet. All this because Apple has done something that changed a fundamental computing methodology -- that you aren't supposed to be ambidextrous. It has officially sanctioned the use of Windows XP on Apple hardware. Called Boot Camp, it lets you run WinXP and MacOS X on the same piece of hardware. So you no longer have an excuse to "why not buy a Mac". It runs native Windows software...faster than any other similar stalwart. Without emulation. Without damage.

Steve is smart. You never say something is impossible...everyone will work out a way to make it so. Instead, you do it right and then let the proverbial chips fall into appropriate locations. They aren't supporting Windows. They aren't writing Windows stuff (yet). They just made a good call on the availability of decent, fast processors and as a side-effect, gained the ability to boost hardware sales...and make loads of new friends in the process. I foresee the next step...the ability to run any application as a process under X...Mac apps, Java apps, UNIX apps, Windows apps. Install that copy of WinXP legally on the machine, and X will legally load the right DLLs and spawn the native Windows program as a process under X. Don't think that can happen? Remember Classic?

So what's going to happen is this: Apple makes significantly smooth products. Microsoft and other Windows vendors just got a whole new set of customers...Mac users who still needed a Windows-specific program that hadn't been ported. Dig the IT support geeks who stop a Mac from walking in now. The geek opens the latch and voila! Windows! So you get to sneak it in to work with.

Microsoft can't yell...each Mac will have to own a copy of WinXP. Microsoft should actually love it...it gets the Justice Department off its back. End users should love it...run Oblivion on a Mac, at the same time of getting mail via Entourage. Cool thing is that, as a separate process, if a Windows app crashes, no blue screen of death. Just a "the application -- has unexpectedly ended".

What's the long term result? Unknown. One can guess. From our perspective, we've been lugging a single laptop around for ages...I run Virtual PC and start any version of Windows to test things with. It will be nicer to have native speed, but it wasn't a major option for me.

Steve and the Cupertino Clan will continue to make insanely great stuff. Ever imagined Final Cut running native under windows? How about iLife? It may now happen, as they just released both to run under the Intel Macs. Windows users want the speed? Hey, how about putting the Intel version of X on your Dell? Still need to run Outlook...well...no problem!

By giving up the legacy of "classic" and the shackles of PPC, Apple is now poised to release software, operating systems, and hardware for everyone. Expect more soon, and hope your investment guy bought you apple when it was $25.

Slow down...you're moving too fast...

The buzz last week was all about how Microsoft has announced a public delay to the next version of Windows, named "Vista". Everyone was crying...vendors for not being able to sell more hardware before Christmas (people will not buy new PCs unless it comes with bling-bling), software authors for not being able to ship their Vista-specific titles, developers for not being able to close their Vista-related projects, and Intel for griping in general.

But before the stock market plummets on this announcement, there are two points of view not heard from -- the IT gurus who will have to roll this 7-year itch out to the end users, and the end users who will have to go through yet another drastic change in their lives. For these two camps, there is nothing but joy at the delay...as this will postpone the drastic loss of productivity time until calendar and budget year 2007.

Let us digress into why they want no part of Vista until it is proverbially jammed down their throats by the media and forced migration gods.

True users care not for bling-bling...they want the machine to start, to work, and to be consistent. They buy cars that will last five years. They will always eat the same foodstuffs. It's not about snazz and glitter...it's about productivity. Managers want eight hours of work out of me per day, they think, so I don't want to be impeded by rebooting three to six times a day, having to constantly hide Office paperclips, worry about the lack of anti-virus updates, and so forth. If the vendors and manufacturers want to roll these sorts of changes out, why not in small, incremental and non-destructive steps? Why every two to three years are we forced to take giant steps and fall behind for three to six months?

There is somewhat of a slowing of this process...Gartner's reports on the overall percentage of Windows XP and Office 2003 non-adoption are significant. And XP is almost seven years old. We still support people with Windows 98 and Office 97 - ones who have no need for the bling-bling, and their problems are being forced to upgrade. Why is that an issue? Oh, many know this answer...in order for Microsoft to be profitable, the world has to buy in to every upgrade and force the issue of upgrading hardware and accessories. A similar process exists in what Detroit and Los Angeles feed the world, but since the IT industry moves at lightspeed, the tremors from this Vista upheaval are more like earthquakes.

Detroit has been forced to re-examine the vox populii as gas prices and usage trends change. Los Angeles is also reworking itself due to advances in Internet delivery methodologies. Perhaps Redmond should be working on more of a relaxed, revisionary approach instead of yearly Office upgrades and quantum-leap Windows versions. Worry more about getting it to work RIGHT instead of bling-bling.