The most recent articles from Incisive Media

Transmute 1.65

Chris Wiles — 2009-11-14T15:53:00.000Z

Chris Wiles, V3.co.uk, Saturday 14 November 2009 at 15:53:00

Quickly convert your bookmarks between browsers

Most of us use the same web browser across multiple computers. Synchronisation tools such as Mozilla Weave or Foxmarks enable us to keep the same bookmarks across various computers where you have Firefox installed. It’s a seamless process. Just add a website to your bookmarks and, when you start up your other computer, you’ll find the same bookmark updated in Firefox.

Snag is, we don’t always use the same browser on every machine. Some users prefer Firefox on their Windows desktop and Safari on their Mac-based laptop. Now with Google Chrome, some users have moved to this as their browser of choice. Sadly there’s no Mac or Linux version available.

Synchronising different bookmarks across your computers is another problem entirely. You can’t synchronise your Firefox and Safari bookmarks, automatically.

Transmute is an answer to this problem. It is a simple conversion tool that enables you to import bookmarks from one browser and then export for another. For example, load the bookmarks from Google Chrome on your Windows desktop and export for Apple Safari on your Mac.

The only downside is that this app is Windows-only, so you can’t convert between your Mac browsers.

Free Ashampoo Burning Studio 2010 from V3.co.uk Software Store

2009-11-14T14:49:44.000Z

TypePad Blogs, Saturday 14 November 2009 at 14:49:44

We recently launched the V3.co.uk Software Store with the idea that we can arrange our own direct promotional offers with our important...

We recently launched the V3.co.uk Software Store with the idea that we can arrange our own direct promotional offers with our important software contacts. However, in addition to special offers we also want to bring you a range of free full apps which we can give away for a limited period of time.

Ashampoo Burning Studio 2010 is the first full commercial application and this is a special version of their popular burning suite designed as a promotional tool for the full Burning Studio 9. Burning Studio 2010 is still a very valid and powerful free disc burning tool. It enables you to produce and burn your own data and audio discs, with the minimum of fuss. That's the primary reason why Ashampoo Burning Studio became popular with users, as it's a burning suite that enables you to concentrate on burning discs as quickly as possible.

Ashampoo Burning Studio 2010 free download link.

Developers walk out on App Store

Phil Muncaster — 2009-11-14T13:51:00.000Z

Phil Muncaster, V3.co.uk, Saturday 14 November 2009 at 13:51:00

Increasing frustration with Apple's approvals process

Just a day after the developer of the popular iPhone Facebook app turned his back on the project, another high profile developer has walked away from the ecosystem after expressing dismay at the reviews process.

Rogue Ameoba, the firm which makes the popular Airfoil software for the iconic device had its Airfoil Speakers Touch 1.0 software approved months ago by Cupertino, but the firm then discovered a bug which they duly fixed by creating an update – version 1.0.1.

Paul Kafasis, chief executive of Rogue Ameoba, explained in a blog posting that despite the new version being merely a bug fix and identical in functionality to the original, it took Apple over three and half months to approve.

He added that a key reason for the delays was that the app used “Apple Logo and Apple-owned Graphic Symbols”, even though it used them according to Apple’s own fair usage rules.

“Apple is acting as a gatekeeper, and preventing you from getting the software that developers such as ourselves are trying to provide you,” wrote Kafasis.

“We wanted to ship a simple bug fix, and it took almost four months of slow replies, delays, and dithering by Apple. All the while, our buggy, and supposedly infringing version, was still available. There’s no other word for that but ‘broken’.”

Kafasis and his firm seem not to be alone in their frustration with Apple’s App Store approvals process. Joe Hewitt, who developed the hugely popular and high profile Facebook app for the iPhone also quit the ecosystem, telling TechCrunch, “I am philosophically opposed to the existence of their review process.”

Microsoft opens up Windows 7 to advertisers

Phil Muncaster — 2009-11-14T13:45:00.000Z

Phil Muncaster, V3.co.uk, Saturday 14 November 2009 at 13:45:00

Redmond sells desktop branding experience

Microsoft has taken the unprecedented step of allowing marketers to re-brand its new Windows 7 operating system.

Redmond announced yesterday new “Windows 7 theme experiences” which are currently being trialled by a handful of big name brands, including Ducati, Porsche and Twentieth Century Fox.

The Windows Theme Experience includes Internet Explorer 8 add-ons, Windows 7 and Windows Vista Web-connected gadgets, Windows 7 backgrounds and borders, and operating system audio elements, all designed to help advertisers better connect with consumers.

The Windows Personalisation Gallery, meanwhile, gives advertisers the opportunity to use backgrounds, slide shows, borders and application audio elements to push their brands via the desktop experience.

“The new Windows Theme Experience and Windows Personalisation Gallery in Windows 7 allow consumers to customise their technology to reflect the things in life they are most passionate about,” said Darren Huston, corporate vice president of the Consumer & Online organisation at Microsoft.

“These are great examples of Microsoft innovation and technology coming together to enable top global brands to reach audiences in new and interesting ways.”

Although the move may strike some observers as a strange one for Microsoft, which has never sold desktop space before in this way, it clearly shows the firm seeking to boost income from areas hitherto untapped.

The themes can be downloaded from the Personalisation Gallery, although they are being promoted on an opt-in basis.

Transmute Portable 1.65

Lee Collins — 2009-11-14T11:54:00.000Z

Lee Collins, V3.co.uk, Saturday 14 November 2009 at 11:54:00

Quickly convert your bookmarks between browsers

Synchronising different bookmarks across your computers is another problem entirely. You can’t synchronise your Firefox and Safari bookmarks, automatically.

The only downside is that this app is Windows-only, so you can’t convert between your Mac browsers.

Note that this is the portable version of Transmute.

Top 10 issues overloading IT managers

Iain Thomson and Shaun Nichols in San Francisco — 2009-11-14T05:04:00.000Z

Iain Thomson and Shaun Nichols in San Francisco, V3.co.uk, Saturday 14 November 2009 at 05:04:00

Things that cause sleepless nights for the IT plumbers

As we bring our Information Overload summit to a close, we have decided to name and rank the biggest culprits for the overload, the issues which more than anything else are causing companies to drown in a deluge of data.

Some of these problems have been around since the dawn of the computer age. Others are new, brought about by new technologies and different ways of working and servicing IT infrastructure. Nevertheless they all cut into the IT manager's time.

Honourable mention: Web management

Iain Thomson: Watching what people are doing on the internet is one of those tasks that IT managers are increasingly being tasked with, but I've yet to meet one that like the job.

Managers are increasingly overloaded these days and the prevailing view is they have more than enough on their plate without playing censor to an entire company. Yes, if someone's spending all their time looking at porn on the internet that's an issue for a company, but it's a problem in management, not in IT, seems to be the prevailing view.

If a company is that worried about web management then they should hire the services of someone like Websense to do the job for them, not force stretched IT departments to take up the role. The only time the IT department should get involved is after a complaint – either from someone on the floor who's spotted what's going on or from a manager who's concerned about lost productivity.

Shaun Nichols: The tasks of monitoring and managing web access has only become more difficult as interest in new web services has grown. Now, sites such as Twitter and Facebook aren't purely for consumers, but many companies are also making use of them for promotion and customer relations.

This means that simply blocking everyone off from these services is no longer possible, as they have become work tools.

At the same time, more and more new sites are popping up, more blogging platforms, social networks and casual gaming portals are emerging every day, making it far more difficult to keep up with what can and can't be blocked.

Then on top of it all, there's the ever-growing ranks of malware infections and phishing scams connected to web applications and tools, making the risk of security breaches through the browser stronger than ever.

As such, the task of web management at the corporate level is becoming both more complex and crucial at a most inopportune time.

Honourable mention- Integration of Web 2.0 tools

Shaun Nichols: It's one thing to have to deal with cloud computing, taking existing processes and applications online. It's another headache entirely when you're asked to find completely new uses for web tools.

We've all known at least one or two bosses and executives that love to throw about the latest buzzwords and demand that everyone adopt the latest business crazes, even if nobody is completely sure why they are doing so. Blogs, wikis and social networks are increasingly popular for companies as internal tools, and their implementation can be quite a task for IT staffs, particularly when nobody is quite sure how they will be used.

The only reason that we haven't placed this issue higher on the list is because it isn't really IT's problem. Yes, setting up and managing those services takes a bit of time and effort, but the real issue is how those services will be used, and that is mainly the concern of executives, managers and end users.

Web 2.0 tools can be very valuable to a company, but they are only useful when implemented correctly and used to improve communication and collaboration. Really, it's far more a human issue than a technological one.

Iain Thomson: The growth of Web 2.0 has caused some additional headaches for IT managers, but it's not as bad as it could have been.

Because much of this content is user generated then the demands on the T ma nager's time aren't too onerous. It's setting up the systems in the first place that's the real time waster.

A lot of I managers have also been rather smart about how they deploy such systems. Increasingly they will set them up, but in the spirit of user generated content they are tapping the users to police and edit such information. It's a smart move, but also a logical one.

10. Cloud integration

Iain Thomson: In many ways cloud is nothing more than a fashionable term from client/server but no matter – it's this year's thing and as such there's strong pressure on IT managers to get into cloud services.

While cloud computing offers many advantages it is increasingly looking like firms are better off hiring third parties to set up and run a cloud infrastructure. EMC is currently working with Intel to set up a do it yourself cloud system and Amazon is involved too. But building a cloud syste3m from scratch is still an enormous responsibility.

It's also something that shouldn't be rushed into. Some board members don't seem to get this. A cloud system is incredibly complicated to set up and operate and the consequences if it all goes wrong are huge.

Shaun Nichols: One of the biggest problems of could integration is that not everything goes into the cloud. As a result, companies are left with a mixture of cloud-based services and locally-stored applications.

This presents several headaches, the first of which is integration. How do you get your cloud applications compatible with your other applications, and how do you make sure that everyone is on the same page?

Then there's the management issue. Instead of simply having to manage who has access to applications and accounts on the local network, administrators now also have to keep track of online identities and access to web based services.

9. Internal/external data breaches

Shaun Nichols: IT has enough to worry about these days, and adding new security worries only adds to the problem.

Companies should already have policies and protections in place to deal with security and data breaches, but the growing piles of data only make it harder. As new storage systems go live and archives expand, the task of managing and tracking access only gets harder, and sometimes files and users can slip through the cracks.

Then of course there's the worry that not only are files left unencrypted and drives unaccounted for, there's also the possibility that people purposely decide to steal data and destroy systems. With more data than ever and fewer people to manage it, the chances of a disgruntled employee causing damage to a system only increase.

Iain Thomson: As we're seeing the greatest threat to a company's data is not the spooky external hacker, but the enemy within.

The insider problem is something that IT managers are only just getting to grips with. The biggest threat is still the clueless user – the idiot who decides to set up their own Wi-Fi point and forgets to lock it, the user who clicks on an unidentified attachment or the half-wit who sets their password as Passw0rd.

But there is also the problem of the wilful thief. This can either be the employee who is leaving for another job with a competitor and is sweetening the deal by bringing over corporate data or someone with a grudge who wants to cause harm. With more and more people getting laid off it's this scenario that is increasingly a concern.

8. OS migration

Iain Thomson: Shaun and I disputed this in the list, with Shaun thinking it should barely have made an honourable mention. But with the launch of Windows 7 it's higher on the priority list than it has been in the past.

Windows 7 is going to make operating system migration a much bigger deal than it has been in the past. Most companies have steered clear of upgrading from XP to Windows Vista because of the failings of that operating system. Instead XP, which is stable, has been left to rule the roost.

However, upgrading these systems to XP is going to be a major headache. To move from XP to Windows 7 will require a full system wipe and that spells a lot of trouble. I suspect IT managers are going to simply suggest a full hardware upgrade instead.

For those corporates not in Windows the problem is much simpler. If you're running Linux then the steps for upgrading the operating systems are much simpler but still problematical. If Apple is the company's operating system of choice then the job is also less difficult, but such companies make up a tiny fraction of the market.

Shaun Nichols: Last week we noted that the operating system was becoming less and less relevant to the actual practice of computing. And while I maintain that belief, I must also concede that it's still a huge issue, particularly in times of transition, such as what we are now in with the move to Windows 7.

This latest transition could be especially tough for the many companies who opted not to move to Windows Vista. For those companies, there is the unenviable task of taking stock of which machines are capable of running Windows 7 and which will need to be upgraded or replaced.

If you decide to switch to Linux or OS X, you have other headaches to deal with, such as making sure you have the same applications or at least new ones which can handle the old files. While operating systems have become far more compatible in recent years, there are still big problems to deal with.

7. Patch deployment

Shaun Nichols: This is a given to anyone who has spent time in enterprise IT. With more users, more workstations and more software to manage, the process of installing patches and fixes only becomes more difficult.

The addition of virtualised machines and servers only makes things more complicated, particularly as malware loads increase and exploits become increasingly common and dangerous.

One bit of relief has come from the vendors. Companies such as Microsoft, Adobe and Oracle have begun issuing regular, scheduled updates rather than issue individual fixes for each bug. This allows administrators to set a date and plan ahead for testing and deployment of patches. The down side is that this can leave machines vulnerable for a longer amounts of time, but for most the trade off is more than welcome.

Iain Thomson: Patching has certainly improved, and the lot of the IT manager has got a lot easier. But not so fast Shaun, a lot of these easing up has come from a difference in malware writing rather than a great effort from application and operating system vendors.

In the good old days when malware writers were simply maladjusted amateurs computer networks were beset by worms whose jobs was to spread as fast as possible and provide the author with bragging rights. In such circumstances when a worm hit the IT manager had to drop everything and patch systems as soon as possible.

But these days the opposite is true. Malware writers want to get in under the radar and steal all that valuable information without being recognised. Patching is still essential, but the need for it is less visible and I fear this may be fostering a dangerous sense of complacency, particularly given the speed with which patches are reverse engineered.

6. Remote workers

Iain Thomson: It's difficult to dispute the value of home working in most cases. People working from home are generally more productive, happier and healthier than their office brethren. I can say this with some confidence since both Shaun and I are writing this in the comfort of our own homes and communicating electronically.

But home workers are often not the friend of the IT manager, under certain circumstances. If the worker is using their own PC at home then it is an unknown quantity and the IT managerm can't control the security settings on the remote worker's computer. The one time (we know about) that Microsoft has lost source code for example came about because a home worker got an infection and allowed hackers into the network.

The other problem comes when staff are working overseas on business trips. When you entering the US and many other countries then the government retains the right to take a copy of the hard drive of any computer entering the country and that can be a security nightmare.

The simplest way to handle this is to issue company hardware to remote workers. For those working from home this ensures that security standards are kept. For those travelling a blank laptop can be issued and then confidential data can be sent via VPN once the traveller has cleared customs.

Shaun Nichols: Iain, we are lucky in that we were working from a branch office to start with. Since even when we are in San Francisco we're remotely accessing systems based in London, telecommuting is pretty much a non-issue. It's also a nice snapshot of just how much we take for granted the work behind setting things up for remote workers.

For IT staff, this sort of thing can be a major headache, as evidenced by the number of companies which specialize in setting up and managing network access and management for telecommuters. Aside from the headaches of leaving the network open to outside connections, there's also the matter of access controls and oversight of what information is being accessed and stored.

As Iain noted, one good way to solve this is to simply issue employees with hardware for home use, but not every company has an extra notebook to hand out, and sometimes employees will simply insist on connecting with their own machines. Either way, you're left with more machines to manage and more traffic to worry about.

5. Compliance

Shaun Nichols: Whether its Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA or any of the other regulatory acts, more and more firms are being tested with compliance regulations. Dictating everything from access policies to the use of encryption, local and federal laws are making file protection and management mandatory.

This is a big enough issue on its own, but when combined with the increasing amounts of data and stricter financial pressures, ensuring that everything is in compliance can become a huge task.

What's even more troublesome is the risk involved with not being in compliance. Violations alone can be bad for a company, but should a massive data breach or other incident occur while a company was not meeting government standards, the consequences could be devastating.

Iain Thomson: While regulations are essential for the maintenance of stable, beneficial capitalism they are also the bane of the IT managers life.

Companies are increasingly having to hold increasing amounts of information in order to comply with the regulations government has been laying down, and it needs to be stored for years but accessible when the auditors come knocking.

When these regulations were first brought in management just threw up their hands and ordered the IT department to save everything. After all, storage was dirt cheap and getting a few hundred extra gigabytes cost a pittance compared to the fines the company would accrue if they were found to be in breach of the law.

This however is no longer sustainable. The amount of data companies are generating and the costs of keeping it are growing at such a rate that we are going to need new storage options, or better regulations.

4. Overmanagement by non-IT staff

Iain Thomson: To my mind this should have been higher but Shaun talked me down. I've just lost count of the number of IT managers moaning about the fact that they are being asked to do the impossible by management that have no idea about technology.

The cycle usually goes like this. A salesperson gets a meeting with a senior manager and promises them the moon on a stick with a flashy demo, lots of promises and occasionally a night on the town. I know of one senior IT salesman with a large corporation that can get virtually anythingt through expenses in the quest for a contract – hookers included.

The manager who's been one over then tells the IT manager about this new technology and insists that it be implemented. With any luck they will do this before the contract has been signed, since they need the IT manager to tell them if the plan is feasible or not. However, it isn't unknown for the whole deal to be signed and sealed before the IT manager even knows about it.

The second way this manifests itself is when managers ask for the impossible. They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing and this is true, especially in IT. There are too many cases of managers watching something like 24 and ordering such systems to be installed in their company, only to be told that they are living in a fantasy world, in the nicest possible way.

Shaun Nichols: There's the old saying that too many cooks spoils the broth. It's even worse if several of those cooks lack the culinary skills to make so much as a bowl of cereal.

We're still in a strange era in that a great many senior executives are at an age where they need to know technology but are just not able to completely grasp it. The type of people who only a few years ago learned how to send email and still worry about teenage anarchists "hacking the mainframe." These are the same people who see IBM commercials during golf telecasts and on Monday morning say "I was watching Tiger Woods sink a putt this weekend when I got this idea I think we should try…"

Add the aforementioned to Iain's picture of slick salespeople and junior executives who feel it is fine to promise the world and then dump all the actual planning and implementation off on the IT people, and you can understand why your company's tech staff can be more than a bit cranky at times.

3. Virtualisation

Shaun Nichols: Virtualisation can be a great way to save money, increase efficiency and generally give IT departments much more to work with.

Unfortunately, it can also make things far more complicated. The problem is elementary: you take one physical server and turn in into several virtual ones, and you will be left having to monitor, manage and maintain far more servers than you ever had to before.

The number of tools and systems for managing and monitoring virtualised server deployments is growing every day, which only pays further testimony to how complex the task can be. Not only do you have to manage the various virtualised servers themselves, but there is also the hypervisor and virtualisation platform as well as the server hardware itself.

All in all, a virtualisation deployment can be a major asset to a company, but it can also be a nightmare for IT when problems arise.

Iain Thomson: Virtualisation is like living in the Playboy mansion with a whisky swimming pool – great idea but in practice it can be less than edifying, as anyone who's seen Hugh Heffner or the effects of liver failure can tell you.

Nevertheless it is the wave of the future, and as some have pointed out can bring major cost savings in terms of operation costs. But the downside is increased management time and complexity.

There's no getting around the fact that we will all be running a lot more virtualised servers in the future. But how we handle them will be the true test of the technology. I suspect that we're going to see a major shift in management tool technology, of the same scope as the shift to object orientated programming revolutionised the software industry. It is needed, and cannot come soon enough.

2. Storage

Iain Thomson: As companies and individuals we are now generating more content than at any point in human history. We're also having to store it for compliance purposes and this presents the IT manager with something of a problem.

It's an understandable human need to store everything that's done online. However, simply storing the data isn't the only problem, it's when someone wants to access it that the real fun kicks in. A good storage strategy needs to address both concerns.

Storage is essential, particularly off-site storage. If the company takes a physical hit you need off-site backup to be safe. In my first journalism job we had a break in and lost all our hardware, with two issues of the magazine and one handbook on and no backups. It took three weeks of hard labour (ie 100 hour weeks) to pull us back from financial ruin.

So an IT manager needs to be a master of the craft. Simply copying everything on the hard drives takes a huge amount of space and is rather wasteful. After all if someone has sent a large Powerpoint presentation to fifty staff there's no point in saving it 49 times when once will do. This explains why the bidding for Data Domains was so fierce.

Storage also remains a security problem. It's scary how often companies create storage systems that don't involve encryption. Miss this and the company not only faces a loss of data but also a law suit.

Shaun Nichols: This is of course the heart of information overload. We are creating more content than ever, through more channels than ever, with more tools than ever and it all has to go somewhere.

No matter how many analysts, hardware vendors or service providers we talk to, the warning is always the same: don't just throw more hard drives at the problem. Archives have become so large and so complex that it's not sufficient to simply increase the storage volume any more. Indeed, with budgets shrinking it isn't even possible for many companies.

Instead, the constant theme seems to be make better use of the storage you have. Iain mentioned de-duplication, erasing multiple copies of a file you only need to back up once. Other suggested fixes include tiering data, moving to online backup systems and using snapshots rather than full system backups.

Whatever the remedy, it's clear that simply expanding storage isn't enough any more, companies have to take a new look at how they manage their data and approach storage.

1. Budget constraints

Shaun Nichols: There's never a good time for a recession, but from a technological standpoint, this latest one could not have hit at a worse time.

Advances in hardware, software and network technology have given birth to entirely new fields of the industry, and just as many companies were looking to see the fruits of those new technologies, the economy took a dive and IT budgets everywhere took a major hit.

When you get down to it, the top two items on the list are pretty much interchangeable. The amount of data keeps growing and the budget for managing it keeps shrinking. From these two issues the entire problem of information overload really springs.

The crisis may, however, have a silver lining. Just as the Great Depression brought about economic and social reforms that improved the quality of life in later decades, this latest recession could necessitate advances in the approach to IT management and the business culture that will help speed up the recovery.

Having learned how to do more with less, IT departments could emerge from the crisis better able to manage their systems and with a greater understanding of how to squeeze the most out of the resources on hand.

Iain Thomson: Oh Shaun, you are a little ray of sunshine at times. I hope you're right about the recession being a good thing.

There is never enough money to do everything in IT. The only people with unlimited budgets are government security systems and even they must bow to the accountants at times. I suspect in a hundred years from now IT managers will still be complaining about having to do too much with too little funding, unless we're reached the Singularity by then and are no longer running the show (and I for one welcome our new overlords.)

But your broader point you may have hit the nail on the head. We have to learn to do more with less, and if the recession helps that then it's certainly a silver lining in a very dark cloud.

Programmers charged in Madoff case

Shaun Nichols in San Francisco — 2009-11-14T03:13:00.000Z

Shaun Nichols in San Francisco, V3.co.uk, Saturday 14 November 2009 at 03:13:00

Developers took payoff to cover up Ponzi scheme

A pair of computer programmers have been charged by the US government for their roles in the infamous Bernie Madoff case.

According to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), developers George Perez and Jerome O'Hara helped Madoff run his elaborate Ponzi scheme for some 15 years by falsifying computer records and forging financial documents. The men are said to have played a crucial role in Madoff's multi-billion dollar scam.

The commission alleges that the two programmers helped Madoff by creating phony trade records and stock reports to cover up non-existent transactions. Additionally, the SEC said that the two maintained a system known as "House 17" which created falsified documents and reports.

"Without the help of O'Hara and Perez, the Madoff fraud would not have been possible," said SEC New York regional director George Canellos.

"They used their special computer skills to create sophisticated, credible and entirely phony trading records that were critical to the success of Madoff's scheme for so many years."

At one point, the commission said that O'Hara became unsure about his role and threatened to leave the operation. Madoff is said to have retained the two by raising their salaries 25 per cent and giving each a $60,000 bonus.

The commission is asking that the men turn over the money along with other earnings from the work, in addition to imposing other financial penalties. Additionally, the pair could face up to 30 years in prison on related criminal charges.

Activists launch online copyright database

Shaun Nichols in San Francisco — 2009-11-14T03:04:00.000Z

Shaun Nichols in San Francisco, V3.co.uk, Saturday 14 November 2009 at 03:04:00

Copyright Watch will catalogue international laws

A number of advocacy groups are teaming up for the launch of a new copyright database.

The new Copyright Watch site is slated to serve as a reference base for users on copyright laws around the world. Amongst the groups participating in the effort are the US-based Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and Electronic Information for Libraries (EIFL.)

By providing clear explanations of local and international copyright laws, the groups hope to keep users from running afoul of regulations and avoiding suits from copyright holders.

The groups hope that the new site will serve as a single destination for users looking to obtain information on copyright laws both within their own countries and in locations around the world.

"Details of copyright law used to be important only for a few people in creative industries," said EFF international outreach coordinator Danny O'Brien.

"But now, with the growth of the Internet and other digital tools, we are all authors, publishers, and sharers of copyrighted works."

Additionally, the groups hope that the site can highlight the differences in copyright laws around the world and help push lawmakers to reassess copyright laws which may be overly restrictive or at odds with those around the world.

Wine 1.1.33

Chris Wiles — 2009-11-14T00:00:00.000Z

Chris Wiles, V3.co.uk, Saturday 14 November 2009 at 00:00:00

Run Windows apps on a Unix system

This is the software publisher's description.

Wine is an Open Source implementation of the Windows API on top of X and Unix.

Think of Wine as a compatibility layer for running Windows programs. Wine does not require Microsoft Windows, as it is a completely free alternative implementation of the Windows API consisting of 100% non-Microsoft code, however Wine can optionally use native Windows DLLs if they are available. Wine provides both a development toolkit for porting Windows source code to Unix as well as a program loader, allowing many unmodified Windows programs to run on x86-based Unixes, including Linux, FreeBSD, Mac OS X, and Solaris.

The Wine project started in 1993 as a way to support running Windows 3.1 programs on Linux. Bob Amstadt was the original coordinator, but turned it over fairly early on to Alexandre Julliard, who has run it ever since. Over the years, ports for other Unixes have been added, along with support for Win32 as Win32 applications became popular.

Wine is still under development, and it is not yet suitable for general use. Nevertheless, many people find it useful in running a growing number of Windows programs. Please see the Application Database for success and failure reports for hundreds of Windows programs, as well as the Bug Tracking Database for a list of known issues, and the Status page for a global view on Wine's implementation progress.

Three HP All-in-One printers to be won

Tim Smith — 2009-11-13T17:14:00.000Z

Tim Smith, Computeractive, Friday 13 November 2009 at 17:14:00

Plus £100 worth of ink for each winner

We’re facing ever-increasing demands on both our time and space so anything that can save us both is worthy of attention. Computeractive has teamed up with HP to offer three lucky winners an HP Photosmart Premium All-in-One printer and scanner with a bundle of ink cartridges.

The HP Photosmart Premium All-in-One is a very capable printer that doesn’t even need a computer to give of its best. There is a touchscreen on the front that can be used to view, edit and print photos.

If it is connected to the internet (wireless networking is built in) it can send them to the Snapfish online photo printing service. Bluetooth can be used to transfer photos from mobile phones. As well as printing the All-in-one includes a capable scanner that can either be used for everyday documents or photos from film cameras.

To make sure you get the best possible quality print outs with this capable device, we are also giving away £100 worth of ink cartiges. This should be enough for a year's worth of normal use; research HP has carried out with Innovationstechnik showed that genuine HP ink cartridges printed 34 per cent more pages than compatible brands. For more information see www.hp.com/uk/inktest.

For your chance to one this great computer, simply answer the question below before 7 January 2010.

For more information about the HP Photosmart Premium All-in-One Printer visit the HP website.

Roundtable: Virtual victory

Fleur Doidge — 2009-11-13T17:06:00.000Z

Fleur Doidge, CRN, Friday 13 November 2009 at 17:06:00

Virtualisation offers considerable financial and environmental advantages to users, finds Fleur Doidge

Virtualisation is becoming a reality in more organisations as public and private sector alike seek to reap the advantages of cost and resource savings coupled with increased efficiency across the IT infrastructure. A trend rather than a technology, virtualisation is becoming entwined in the thinking of the desktop administration department as much as in the server room, and even in SMEs.

Neil Sanderson, virtualisation and management product manager at Microsoft, says the industry is just at the stage where virtualisation is taking hold across a wider range of organisations.

Smaller end users, however, may need more assistance than large enterprises to deploy and integrate complex, overarching technological strategies such as virtualisation. And that is where, of course, the channel comes in.

“For the past few years, it was the preserve of large organisations with large numbers of servers. It is now something much more available to everyone, both on the server and on the desktop,” says Sanderson.

“There are more options, and prices are coming down. And the benefits are much more prevalent.”

Partners can reap the rewards due to the clear return on investment (RoI) that may be demonstrated to customers of all sizes. Partners alone have the experience and expertise to follow through on the promise of virtualisation, by educating and explaining to customers what it means and what technologies it might involve.

Consultancy is key with offerings such as virtualisation that are more about a different way of understanding and deploying the whole gamut of IT infrastructure than buying and selling any particular type of technology.

Building on server consolidation

Virtualisation allows users not just to consolidate on the server side but build on that over time and develop increasing efficiencies and improvements via an overall solution.

On the desktop, virtualisation can be used just for the applications, or users can virtualise the entire desktop in a thin-client type approach. This is an area in which public sector customers in particular are interested, due to the large and dispersed nature of the organisations. And almost every customer wants to save money, with budget high on the agenda.

“What virtualisation really means is that you have got options,” says Sanderson.

David Caughtry, director of e-business at specialist distributor Computerlinks, agrees with Sanderson, saying that he is definitely seeing more interest in virtualisation from customers.

“The obvious benefits of virtualisation include reducing the physical hardware and lower power consumption,” says Caughtry. “People are now realising that you can extend the total cost of ownership (TCO) for end users by bringing in strategies around power consumption. The green story is very strong at the moment. IT managers are very aware of the rising costs of data.”

As virtualisation extends its tendrils throughout the whole IT infrastructure, customers are also seeing security benefits as long as they remember that a collection of insecure virtual servers can be just as insecure if not more than a bunch of physical servers.

Many tools now exist to make their manageability vision real but customers will need reseller help to achieve it.

“And larger security vendors are now coming to market with virtualised offerings for their products,” says Caughtry. “Customers need to see what is happening in that virtual world. The reality is that the threats are still the same.”

Virtualisation is really moving more towards the desktop, though, as the understanding and practice of server virtualisation becomes more embedded in the culture of business IT. And users are driving that move to virtualise the desktop, in part because more of them are working and expect to be able to work just as well remotely whether at home, in an airport, at a business conference or at the office.

Customers are requesting virtualisation

Nick Hutton, principal consultant at specialist virtualisation reseller 360IS,

says customers are actually requesting virtualisation. Rather than having to sell it from concept up, end users of all sizes are demonstrating some understanding of virtualisation.

“A year or so ago, a lot of our customers were large enterprises, but in the past 12 months with the price coming down, Microsoft’s entrance into the market and the growing popularity of Citrix solutions, we are seeing smaller companies probably with 200 or so employees asking about virtualisation,” says Hutton.

That said, securing and managing the virtualised environment remains a challenge for customers and an opportunity for the channel.

“Virtualised services, desktops and so on may be managed by the same processes that are used to manage the physical environment. But about 70 per cent of virtualised environments will be less secure than the physical environment,” Hutton adds.

Des Lekerman, managing director of managed services provider Eurodata Systems, says he too has seen prices come down coupled with a shift in end user thinking from his company’s midsize-to-large customers. Microsoft’s Hyper-V R2 is also playing a role, as is the ability to deploy management tools and help people get visibility of their infrastructure.

“They were deploying virtualisation specifically for disaster recovery in the early stages,” he says. “We were trying to persuade those customers to deploy virtualisation into production environments, but they were not sure about that they wanted to stick with the disaster recovery side. In the last 18 months, we have seen a big shift to using virtualisation for production systems.”

Virtualisation may merely exacerbate the management challenge that has always been there. An IT team that buys a number of physical servers may not know where they all are and what they are doing but the same also holds true for virtualised servers.

“However, what it means is that if you want 80 servers you can just bang your head against the keyboard 80 times, and there they are,” says Sanderson. “But you need to take all those servers and keep them up to date. And then actually knowing what the performance is of all those apps in those virtualised environment is a real management challenge.”

Education and skill-sets

Computerlinks’ Caughtry says education is key and will represent a “huge” opportunity for the channel.

“Show customers how they can make more on their bottom line when budgets are squeezed,” he says. “There is still a large amount of education needed on how to manage it, control it and the like. Resellers can provide the services and enable success around a virtualisation project, looking at business issues, all the way through to deployment and ongoing maintenance.”

Lekerman says business skills and the right technical skill-sets must be sourced by the channel. Parts of the virtualisation market are still immature suggesting that some skills may prove hard to locate or in the right combinations sought by channel partners, especially small ones without a large human resources budget.

“We have been in this market for three-and-a-half years, so we have got a team of people,” he says. “But we are finding a lot of education there too that needs to go on. With Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), there is still a big gap. Everyone in the market is talking about it but there are not any large-scale customers who have put it into deployment.”

Some traction is now being seen in the NHS and gradually it is spreading into mainstream business, but the awareness is only spreading and developing slowly.

Steven Black, principal technologist at VAR and consultancy Charteris, says that from a Microsoft solutions point of view, the cost model around VDI can be difficult to understand.

This can hinder sales, because it is not as easy to demonstrate a clear financial benefit to the customer. Proving the total cost of ownership calculations can be tricky or at least trickier than in traditional server virtualisation. Then all the applications must be packaged on top of getting the infrastructure right and ensuring their network can support it.

Emerging VDI and service opportunities

That said, the opportunities for VDI appear to be developing.

“We are seeing customers who thought that VDI was a kind of panacea,” says Sanderson. “You just run the desktop in the datacentre and run it through on some kind of thin client device. It is not a guaranteed return; you need to understand what you are looking to deliver.

“We do have the Lancashire constabulary looking at building a VDI infrastructure for their offices, but [on top of] the traditional benefits of server virtualisation, carbon dioxide savings and opex. They can be working with the local authority, but still access data over their app from wherever they are.”

Couple that with savings made and the channel still has a convincing sell

as long as resellers can explain the benefits clearly to potential customers.

VDI will not always be the right solution; simply virtualising the applications on

the desktop rather than the entire desktop itself may deliver benefits.

“I think it is an incredible opportunity for partners to give value. Like with server virtualisation, there is a large amount of consultancy,” says Lekerman. “We are finding that above the physical apps and hardware there is a big managed services opportunity.”

Ensuring customers have the right processes to make the most of their virtualised deployments is also critical, according to Black. Tools from the physical side, along with the right processes, can be implemented on the virtual side. If they are not, the final result will suffer.

“A customer who licenses a virtual server that hosts many virtual machines will only need to [make that mistake] once, because they remember the pain. We ask what tools do you have in place to manage the services?” he says. “You need product, good processes, tools, and people in place.”

A practical example

Hutton says 360IS recently completed a virtualisation deployment for financial services company Demica. This customer provides specialised working capital solutions via consultancy, advice and IT services to various banks and financial institutions. Its London data warehouse processes billions of dollars in transactions from around the world.

Each of Demica’s new customers had its own dedicated server a veritable and diverse server sprawl. Meanwhile, demand for its services had increased.

The consultancy found that only one out of every 20 or even every 40 of the physical servers was needed, with RoI for the consolidation achievable in six months. 360IS deployed a virtualisation appliance with integrated hypervisor, resulting in reduced hosting costs, power consumption and real estate alongside lower hardware maintenance requirements.

The new set-up should be more resilient and easier to scale up allowing faster provisioning of new customers and better use of shared storage.

While consultancy was critical to the assessment and design, the physical infrastructure is streamlined. A single hardware platform eases maintenance, upgrades, capacity planning and management while reducing costs.

“As we start to talk more about utility computing, cloud computing, and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), do we not think that even IT companies worry less about the [actual physical] cables, nuts and bolts of a solution?” says Hutton.

The future for the channel is increasingly in a focus on business benefits for the customer, and using whatever technology is best suited to the solution that produces that result. Just like virtualisation, in fact.

NetApp expands programme with Hyper-V

www.channelweb.co.uk/2246195

BBC relaunches Wii iPlayer channel

Dinah Greek — 2009-11-13T17:05:00.000Z

Dinah Greek, Computeractive, Friday 13 November 2009 at 17:05:00

Free catch-up TV and radio service improved for Wii console

The BBC’s iPlayer catch-up TV and radio service is relaunching on the Nintendo Wii as a dedicated Wii channel.

Although owners of the games console have been able to watch iPlayer programmes via the Wii internet channel since April 2008, there have been a lot of reported problems; including interference and people found the interface difficult to navigate.

In addition, the service has been compromised with recent firmware updates.

The broadcaster said the new Wii version of the iPlayer has been designed with a full-screen user interface.

Erik Huggers, director, BBC future media and technology, said: "It's important that we offer audiences more ways to access the huge range of BBC content available, and this improved version of BBC iPlayer underlines our commitment to reaching new audiences by making BBC iPlayer available on as many platforms as possible."

Nintendo Wii users who want to download the iPlayer to their Wii console will need to have a broadband internet connection. They can then go to the main screen of the Wii Shop Channel and from there to the BBC iPlayer Wii Channel.

The iPlayer is free but once downloaded, users need to click on the BBC iPlayer icon to launch the new full-screen service, then select and play the BBC TV or radio programme they want to watch.

The iPlayer is also available on Sony’s Playstation 3 games console and the BBC also launched a trial of the service on the Freesat TV platform this month.

Goverment cuts time DNA data can be retained

Dinah Greek — 2009-11-13T17:00:00.000Z

Dinah Greek, Computeractive, Friday 13 November 2009 at 17:00:00

Home Office said DNA data will be destroyed after six years not 12

The Government has said it will reduce the length of time it plans to retain the DNA of people who have never been convicted of a crime.

Earlier this year the Home Office said it would retain this DNA data for 12 years, after the European Court of Human Rights ruled last December that the UK system of keeping this data indefinitely was illegal.

Jacqui Smith, the then Home Secretary said DNA samples, such as mouth swabs, hair or blood, will be destroyed as soon as they are converted into a profile.

However, it said it would be 12 years before the fingerprints and DNA of those arrested for, but not convicted, of crimes of a serious violent or sexual nature are automatically deleted.

However opposition parties and civil liberties groups felt this didn’t go far enough and the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) also called for adjudication.

John Wadham, the Commission’s legal director said: “It would be sensible for the Government to get this right now or it could face many more expensive legal challenges."

Then earlier this week, the Home Office announced it was cutting the length of time it would keep DNA samples from 12 years to six.

However police will be allowed to keep DNA from those arrested for terrorism for an indefinite period, even if they are freed or found not guilty.

Whether this will be enough to prevent a legal challenge from the EHRC is not clear The DNA of thousands of people have been added to the UK’s DNA database since the ruling last year.

Last month the Conservatives said one in 10 Britons now has a profile stored on this database.

Advert regulator to get more online powers

Dinah Greek — 2009-11-13T16:56:00.000Z

Dinah Greek, Computeractive, Friday 13 November 2009 at 16:56:00

New rules will allow ASA to regulate more website content

The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) will soon be able to act on complaints about content and advertising on UK websites.

Proposed changes to the Committee of Advertising Practice's (CAP) code will extend the independent advertising regulator's power to cover content on companies websites.

Anyone who thinks an advert is misleading or offensive or in breach of another of the CAP Code's provisions can complain to the ASA, which adjudicates all complaints that fall within the Code's remit.

The ASA receives around 2,000 complaints about website content each year, but the regulator is unable to act on website content "except sales promotions and advertisements in paid-for space".

This means that, for example, banner ads appearing on a newspaper's website are within the ASA's jurisdiction but promotions by that advertiser or company on its own website are not.

Winston Fletcher, the chairman of the Advertising Standards Board of Finance (Asbof), which raise the funds from advertisers needed to run the ASA, said: " At the moment marketing on websites is totally unregulated – they are outside of the ASA's remit.

"The changes we are working on will extend the CAP Code and bring websites the ASA's remit."

He said sanctions are usually unnecessary because once a company has been informed about a problem it usually makes the required changes.

“But we can impose sanctions. This rarely happens but it can result in advertising space being denied to an advertiser or if the breach is serious, we can refer it to the Office of Fair Trading,” he said.

Full details of the proposals will be published once they have been approved by CAP, The Advertising Standards Board of Finance, the ASA Council and the Advertising Association, whose Digital Media Group undertook the original work on the remit extension.

It is anticipated that the extended remit will come into operation during the second half of 2010.

A lightbulb moment

Trewin Restorick — 2009-11-13T16:51:00.000Z

Trewin Restorick, BusinessGreen, Friday 13 November 2009 at 16:51:00

Trewin Restorick get excited by some bright thinking and ponders the nuclear option

It may be the level of alcohol I consume, but in a typical week I swing from bouts of acute depression thinking that we will never solve the climate crisis through to optimism. On Wednesday hope kicked-in as I was on the judging panel for a major company assessing the environmental ideas that had been developed internally.

Initial dread that I would be bored stupid listening to 16 different presentations was quickly replaced by pleasant surprise at the quality and variety of the ideas. In particular it was massively encouraging to see how close we are to a commercially viable new generation of LED lighting. The new bulbs are predicted to save one tonne of carbon and £500 over their lifetime. I have put one in at home. It works perfectly on a dimmer switch, the quality of the bluish-white light is far better than the harsh yellowness of a CFL and, unlike a CFL, it doesn’t contain any mercury. It is possible that the introduction of the bulbs could be supported under one of the Government's energy efficiency initiatives making them easily affordable.

We are going to add one of the bulbs to our Energy Bike display to demonstrate their energy efficiency and the quality of the light they produce. Yet another good reason to hire the displays!

Compact Awards

On Tuesday, I spent a surreal evening at the Dali Museum on the South Bank which was the venue for the Compact awards. The Compact is a brilliant concept that is designed to help improve the relationship between Government and the voluntary sector. Unfortunately, the idea has had as much traction as an eel on skates and I sense a diminishing level of enthusiasm for it.

For four years I co-Chaired DEFRA's Compact Group which was why I was invited to the award dinner. Much to my amazement DEFRA won the Central Government award. I do feel that the Department has achieved some good things largely due to the dedication and enthusiasm of a small group of volunteers but I do find it concerning that it was sufficient to win and suggests that other central Government Departments need to do more.

Nuclear

I started my time in the environmental movement being passionately anti-nuclear, a position that was reinforced by the Chernobyl disaster. I am still convinced that if Government had made significant investment in our energy infrastructure over a decade ago we could have had a diverse and de-centralised energy infrastructure that would not require nuclear.

However, this investment was not made and in the intervening years the scientific evidence around climate change impacts has become more robust and worrying. Given these two things I am now a reluctant nuclear convert and therefore support the Government's announcement to build 10 new nuclear plants.

Obviously the announcement poses many questions. What is the public appetite for nuclear, will the fact that the Government has "cleared the planning undergrowth" enable them to build the plants quickly, how is the Government going to be able to hide the level of public sector subsidy that will be required to build the plants and will we suffer from short term supply problems and rising energy costs because of the slowness of the decision-making?

10:10

Last week I committed to participating in the 10:10 initiative and have decided to measure my personal carbon footprint. This week I started on the process by looking at what should be the easiest bit the carbon produced from my use of electricity.

The first step is to discover how carbon intensive is my electricity supplier. My supplier is Good Energy and I visited electricityinfo.org to see how much carbon is produced for each kilowatt of electricity I use. The great news for me is that Good Energy is the only supplier which gets all its electricity from renewable sources (the average for most suppliers is just 5.9 per cent) and as a result my emissions from this source are counted as zero. The average across all the other suppliers is 0.460kgs per kwh. A good start, next week I will look at my gas use.

Trewin Restorick is chief executive of environmental charity and advisory body Global Action Plan

This article first appeared on his weekly blog Trewin Says