I've got the power - digital power

The issue of supplying power that I mentioned in iMac or iTablet is an interesting one. Many people are getting used to the idea of USB devices that require no external power connection. To call these devices "self-powered" is incorrect because they are anything but, the correct term is "bus-powered" because they draw their power from the USB bus itself. Without the USB connection they are quite literally powerless.

To me drawing power from a single DC bus is a good idea, for home appliances that bus is the mains AC power connection - a bus that is dedicated to providing power. Mains is AC to facilitate easy conversion to a variety of voltages and to deliver a lot of power with the minimum of energy loss in the power delivery lines. However digital components have standardized on a variety of low DV voltage power inputs (+-5V,+-12V) and except for the CPU and graphics card are for the most part low power consumers. Furthermore modern switch mode power supplies make transformerless conversion of power inputs to various output values childs play. It makes sense to have a single power bus and discrete power supplies blocks that have all the digital power outputs available.

Instead of a plethora of 1.5V, 3V, 6V, 9V, 12V and more unregulated power bricks with transformers (aka "wall warts") hogging our power strips, why not just simple DC based power strips? Indeed why not make a smart power bus where the device can tell the power strip what it wants in the way of voltage and current and a smart power strip (aka power bus controller) that can tell the device "Yes, power is available" or "No, insufficient power available". The latter saves an after the fact failure of all connected devices due to blowing a fuse or tripping a switch, and allows a device that is underpowered to fail gracefully e.g. a sound system that can say "sorry, that's as loud as the volume can go with current power input". It also allows the power hub to negotiate power requirements and power down idle devices, eg. asking your computer, at the behest of the power company, if it can reduce its power requirements by 50%. The computer could do this by powering off the screen and the hard-drive and the graphics card and go into sleep mode. If the system is needed again the power hub could give the power company a few seconds notice of an impending increase in power demand which might be very useful to help the routing of residential and commercial power to the right places at the right time.

There's really no reason why any of these things can't be done. Even communicating back to the power company can easily be done with standard AC powerline transmission technologies. I just hope that future bus designers will cotton on to the whole issue of delivering power on the I/O bus. If they give it and its associated problems the investment in innovation it needs it will go a long way to removing this last "analog" anomaly of digital systems.

iMac or iTablet?

Looking at the new G5 iMac it occurs to me that they came close to creating the iTablet. For home computer systems, or indeed home anything, I've never been that fond of integrating discrete components into one box. But with display technology that has evolved to the point where its "good enough" then why not? After all a laptop or tablet computer is just that - everything in one box - and looking at the new iMac it looks really like a table computer except for integrated power supply (i.e. batteries) and a touch screen for pen input.

Perhaps Apple missed an opportunity there? After all the iMac concept has always been a home computer that's as integrated and home friendly as possible. Wouldn't the ability to remove it from its stand and take it around the home with you fit nicely in with that concept? I have to admit that of the many modes of computing I find myself desiring, the "mobile in the home device with a large screen" is one of them. So perhaps in the 17" model Apple should have added a removable drive bay that could be swapped out for a battery and upgraded that screen to be pen friendly...

In the meantime would I buy an iMac? Well ignoring for a moment the fact that I'm just not an Apple person, the answer is still an emphatic "No". The reason is that highly integrated devices need to be highly reliable. I want to be sure that all the components will be reliable for a period that exceeds the useful life of the device I know for a fact that hard drives do fail - I've helped people recover from no less than three failures in the last year and several more before then. Power supplies fail, graphics cards fail, displays fail (LCD backlights in particular) etc. etc. Replacing any one of these on an iMac is going to require an expensive trip back to Apple or some hairy warranty voiding surgery that is surely as risky as opening up a laptop. Not something the average home user would want to do.

How should home systems be built then? Well its obvious - like hi-fi systems, or at least how they used to be built. Think about it, hi-fi systems are built from discrete single function devices (we'll exclude that strange American abberation, the integrated amplifier and tuner) connected together with simple plumbing (phono cables and speaker wires). All the components are independently upgradeable and there is only one single point of failure, the amplifier, which in itself is trivially replaced in the event of failure or upgrade.

With USB2.0, 1394b and gigabit (or more) ethernet we have several connection technologies that can all serve to link discrete storage, graphics, I/O and computing components together. What is more the same connection technology could be built into all home appliances, especially if it was as industry standard as ethernet which can be made wireless very simply (although USB will soon have its own wireless equivalent). All that is needed then is some standardized form factor that allows a small stack of discrete components to neatly be stored and feed power and integrated systems like the iMac can become quaint anomoly of the early 21st.

Techno humor

I once looked into the kind of jet engines used in the model aircraft world. These mini jet engines put out a few horse power each and suck down a pint or so of jet fuel a minute. A few horse power may not sound like a lot but think of what that could do when attached to a very light model airplane. Now think of what it could do when strapped to the back of a wheelchair.... Sounds crazy? Well apparently Giuseppe Cannella didn't think so. He managed to produce a thirty mile and hour wheelchair for this mother-in-law. The question is, was he trying to give her street cred or just trying to kill her?

Mobile computing - how it should be?

Slashdot has just reported on the new "Mandrake in a box" version of Linux which they are calling Mandrake Globetrotter. Basically its a Mandrake Linux distro pre-loaded on one of those awfully nice FA Porsche desgined mobile USB drives from LaCie. LaCie drives (even the non FA Porsche versions) are beautifully designed and engineered and this particular one doesn't even need a power supply, sucking its power from the USB power line.

Assuming your computer can boot from a USB drive - and most manufactured in the last year or so should be able to - then you can plug in the drive, boot from it and be running Mandrake Linux on any PC or even laptop in a flash regardless of what is installed on the default system drive. Its exactly the kind of thing your system administrator doesn't want you doing and exactly why a well locked down computer system will restrict access to external drives and BIOS configuration. However if its your machines you're playing with then why not?

From my perspective, given the tiny size of the LaCie drive (3 by 5 inches, 0.65 inches thick) it goes a long way to my idea of truely mobile computing. For a long time now I've been moaning about how Windows and other OSes don't give you true mobility. Sure you may have a mobile computing option like a laptop, PocketPC, Palm, or even some kind of PDA-phone device, but what about all that sync software you have to run everywhere just to keep track your contacts and calendar info up to date on all your machines? Lets face it, most of the time sync software barely works between two machine, let alone three or more. And what if you're in an Internet Cafe and don't have your favourite mobile gadget to hand? Or a phone booth?

Wouldn't it be just great if you had a USB key sized device with about 1Gb of storage that included a wireless connection and thumb print verification? Call it the "Mobile Me" and think of it as a GSM SIM card on steroids. Take Mobile Me up to the host computing device of your choice - PC, laptop, Linux box, PocketPC, Smart Phone, Internet cafe kiosk, ATM, phone booth, etc. etc. Give your thumb print to the host machine and to your Mobile Me allowing both to communicate. Data on your Mobile Me becomes accessible to the host device for the session and you essentially see what Windows users would call their "profile" on the host device, and Linux users would call their home directory. The Mobile Me device could contain just data, or applications (for portability make them Java applications), or a combination. Either way the upshot is you'll have all your familiar data from contacts, calendars, email, bookmarks to hand and ready to use, quite possibly along with a few of your favourite applications.

Sure security is an issue - you need to make sure the host system isn't stealing the data from your Mobile Me, but that can be done via appropiate technologies. Besides - when you go to an Internet Cafe and access your banking web site how do you know your keystrokes aren't being logged? If the host device is inherently trusted - because its your own device - then there is no problem. Now you can truely roam between your home PC, work PC, Pocket PC, or whatever device can understand the protocols.

Now I realize that a few people are getting close to this. Its now possible, though not trivial, to load up a USB key with a copy of the Mozilla Firefox browser and Thunderbird mail reader and have them use a profile stored on the key. That takes care of your email, bookmarks and contacts. But this still takes some work when setting up the configuration and launching it - plus of course you have to have a compatible software setup e.g. Windows both ends or Linux both ends for this to work. Also Windows supports roaming profiles but these are not really designed for truely mobile disks, rather networked disks that are always there. Anyone who has looked at the amount of junk Windows puts under your Documents and Settings directory will soon realize that a slow writing flash drive isn't going to be a satisfactory solution.

Thus in the mean time I aplaud Mandrake for releasing their Globtrotter solution, even though it wasn't such a huge innovation - just a logical step in the right direction to truely mobile computing. Remember mobile computing should really be about having your data and your applications running where you want them on whatever general purpose computer is available to hand - that's the object oriented view of the world. Computers should be just computers and your data should be unique, protected and available to you at all times. Duplicating devices and data in multiple places should be, like soooo last century.

Imagine this scenario - next time you get on transatlantic flight from New York to Paris the flight attendent hands you the latest "Mobile Me" compatible computing device with widescreen hi-res screen, internet connection and all the latest bells and whistles. You scan your thumb print on it, activate your Mobile Me device and the device boots and runs your applications and your data as if you'd owned it all your life. When you're done you press the big red reset switch on the device and its purged of all information other than its BIOS and you hand it back. As you get off the plane you pull our your smart phone and repeat the process... mobility achieved.

Check mate?

I'm not usually a big fan of lawyers and that's partly because I hail from Europe where people are not nearly as litigious as the Americans. Well, that's not really very hard when Americans are the most litgious people on the planet (I think). However when I read articles like this one at eWeek about IBMs latest application for summary dismissal of SCOs copyright litigation, well I have to take my hat off to some smart lawyer working for IBM. It really exposes the fascinating brinksmanship side of great legal battles, although at this point I believe most people would think SCO should be the one looking for a brinksmanship play.

Certainly its a high stakes game and for some IBM lawyer to figure out that SCOs very own actions in trying to collect royalties for Linux mean its effectively torn up the GPL, well that was a master stroke. With the GPL in tatters, SCO is like some minuscule sea critter which finds that the very large cave it just crawled into for shelter is actually a giant fish that has just swallowed it. Now IBM can claim that SCO has demonstrably infringed its copyright on hundreds of thousands of lines of code donated under the GPL for the good of Linux, making SCOs claim of a few thousand lines of stolen code (if that) look like a storm in a teacup. Hence SCO either need to back off its claims of copyright infringement by IBM, or be obliterated by the counter claim against its own infringement.

Like a king locked in the jaws of checkmate, the only honorable thing to do is conceed and step away from the table while it still has at least a shirt for the ride home.

Service Packs: 2, Yawns: lots

Today just back from a long vacation I decided to install Windows XP Service Pack 2. Since the normal user install is not yet available from Windows Update I downloaded the entire two hundred and something megabyte "IT professional" install. I then kicked it off and went and did some other things...

The last thing I saw before leaving the machine was that it was analysing my system and backing up files. Next thing I saw when I came back to the machine was nothing running so I figured it had failed mysteriously. However it seems I had arrived just as it was getting ready to reboot automatically which it soon did. After the reboot I saw a "Please wait" similar to that which is displayed on a disk check, and then it booted into a safe mode and again displayed "Please wait..." After a short while I saw the cursor at in the egg timer mode and no disk activity. Eventually I figured the install had failed and my machine would be forever screwed up. I hit the reset switch and prayed to whatever gods guard the gates of luckyville (there's a lady luck but I don't know her name).

Fortunately it worked and on reboot I got the normal logon screen and after logon I was presented with a security control panel which merely informed me I had no anti-virus program running, which I don't, and gave me a handy list of AV providers. After much searching around I eventually discovered that this security panel is about all there is to SP2. Oh sure there are doubtless countless bug fixes included but of the user visible changes this is probably the only one of significance. At #2 I'd put the improved wireless network browsing facility, but that's a fire and forget thing. Beyond these two things it appears the rest is under da hood.

So, service pack level 2 achieved but at the expense of many a yawn while the two hundred and something megabytes downloaded. Surely all those megs weren't only for a pesky builtin Windows firewall?