TechTakes

Green Electronics

Take a look at the EPEAT (Electronic Product Environmental Assessment Tool) for information on how to evaluate, compare and select desktop computers, notebooks and monitors based on their environmental attributes. You can find which manufacturer models meet these specifications, which are required for more than 95% of electronic device purchases by U.S. federal agencies, and are increasingly being adopted by other governmental bodies and private companies. You can reduce your energy consumption and minimize other environmental impacts throughout the product lifecycle.

Microsoft Will End Format Wars

Microsoft announced yesterday that Office 2007 Service Pack 2, slated for release in early 2009, will provide support for files in the international standard Open Document Format (ODF). Although Microsoft succeeded in having its own Open Office XML (OOXML) specification declared an international standard for document portability, allowing users to open, edit, and save documents in ODF or OOXML formats will reduce pressure on the company from governments and large customers worldwide who want documents in formats that provide a clear path for access and archiving. With Microsoft software on an estimated 95 percent of computers, this move may have the paradoxical effect of retaining Microsoft's dominant share if it successfully figures out how to play in the cloud against competitors such as Google.

Windows XP: Service Pack 3 and Product Lifecycle News

With the release of the final service pack for Microsoft Windows XP, and the coming end of retail availability and Microsoft support for Windows XP, it might help to keep the following dates in mind as you think about upgrading to Windows Vista.

First, Windows XP Service Pack 3 (SP3) is available now through Microsoft's Windows Update for single computers or as a standalone download for IT staff in a networked environment. Free support for issues arising from installation of XP SP3 is available from Microsoft through April 14, 2009.

Here's the timeline:

June 30, 2008: end of retail availability. Microsoft will no longer offer Windows XP through retail outlets. Manufacturers such as Dell can continue to install Windows XP Professional at a customer's request under "downgrade rights" for purchasers of Windows Vista until their inventory of Windows XP Professional is exhausted. This applies only to purchases of Vista Ultimate and Vista Business versions, and allows a downgrade only to XP Professional, not XP Home.

January 31, 2008: Microsoft will no longer sell Windows XP to original equipment manufacturers.

April 14, 2009: end of free support for XP. Microsoft will continue to provide security updates through 2014, but product support for customers without Microsoft support contracts will be charged at prevailing rates (currently $259 per incident for live support, or $99 for email support).

April 8, 2014: All support for XP ends.

The bottom line: Vista is inevitable, and with Service Pack 1 now available, the sooner you make the change, the more you'll get from your investment. (Put it on your list of upgrades along with the need to buy a digital television or set-top converter box by 2009.) There are many tools available to help you figure out whether your current computer and peripherals will work well enough with Vista and how to learn Vista. Check out the links to Microsoft Vista pages on TechInfusion's web site for a handy collection of Vista resources; I don't usually mention TechInfusion in my blog, but you'll find that these pages will save you time searching Microsoft's site, and will provide you with information on new topics you might have missed.

Finding WiFi Hotspots

Finding a wireless internet hotspot used to be important just for laptop computer owners. No more. But before we go to the phones, JiWire has a handy free search engine that lets you find more than 240,000 wi-fi hotspots in more than 134 countries, both free and paid. They have mapping tools to help locate the hotspot, although it would be nice if the results page allowed searchers to sort by type of connection or vendor so that one could find all the free locations, or all the locations served by a particular vendor.

Skype users have several options. Mobile subscribers who have a data plan for internet access can save minutes on their mobile plan by installing Skype Mobile, which comes in flavors for Windows Mobile PocketPCs and smartphones. Calls placed with Skype from a mobile phone use the data plan allowance rather than the voice minutes. If you have an unlimited data plan Skype calls to other Skype users cost no more, and for $3 per month you can get unlimited local and long distance calling to landline and cell phones in the U.S. and Canada. There are also a few models of cordless and wireless phones on the market that will work in the home and/or at wi-fi hotspots, taking the mobile phone expense out of the picture.

Email Overload? Fix Your Xobni.

Ok, I meant inbox. On April 21 I posted an item about new email helper applications, and a new San Francisco-based company, Xobni, was one of them. At the time they were in private beta and not available to the general public. Now they are, and I recommend you take a look. You can read more in Brad Stone's New York Times article today. Although Xobni is for Outlook only today, the vision is to apply the same intelligence to all email applications. Imagine being able to track all conversations, files, phone numbers and contact information and more across your various email accounts, in a single window. Check it out for free today, and hope they succeed.

BooHoo for MicroHoo?

Microsoft walked away from its marriage proposal to Yahoo after Yahoo kept asking for a bigger ring. Steve Lohr reports that Yahoo's major shareholders probably would have taken $35 per share, substantially below the Yahoo board's holdout price of $38, but also substantially above Microsoft's final offer of $33. Amid concerns that Yahoo would "burn the furniture" if Microsoft tried hard-ball takeover tactics, the Redmond giant retreated. But it's not over. Yahoo really doesn't have anywhere to go except toward Google, a move that would likely bring more antitrust scrutiny than Google wants, and might not be approved by regulators in the U.S. and the E.U. Even if speculations about some kind of Yahoo-AOL merger ripen, with Time Warner shedding its cable unit and looking to dump AOL there wouldn't be very deep pockets to shore up such a deal. On the other hand, if Yahoo's stock tumbles down toward $20 per share, maybe News Corp, which flirted with Microsoft in the Yahoo bid, would make a move – but it's doubtful that they would offer Yahoo shareholders the same price Microsoft did, especially on depressed share prices.

So for the moment Google is the winner. Yahoo will be under tremendous pressure to prove that it has something worth keeping, Microsoft will have to rely on Live Mesh and other internet strategies, and the rush toward internet applications needing only a browser rather than a big operating system will continue to dampen Microsoft's desktop-centric business lines. But if Yahoo doesn't perform, look for a renewal of this story and a second chance for a patient and persistent Microsoft to come back into the picture, perhaps on more favorable terms.

Border Searches and Your Data

The United States Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in California has ruled that the government has the right to search the contents of laptops, cell phones, USB drives and other data-bearing electronic devices when travelers enter the country (US vs. Arnold). The case was brought when border agents found child pornography on Michael Arnold's laptop and pressed charges. A district court had accepted Arnold's claim that the government lacked "reasonable suspicion" for conducting the search, and disallowed the evidence found on the laptop. The Ninth Circuit reversed the district court finding, citing earlier decisions that established the government's sovereign right to protect its territory and that "searches made at the border . . . are reasonable simply by virtue of the fact that they occur at the border . . . ." The argument that the contents of electronic devices might involve personal, private, or proprietary data and information did not persuade the court that a different standard exists or should exist for conducting a search of those materials.

 

I'll let the Association for Corporate Travel Executives and the Electronic Frontier Foundation lawyers, joined by other privacy and civil rights groups, decide whether this case is one that has a chance of being heard by the Supreme Court. A few previous posts on this blog have covered the issue of risk in bringing data over the U.S. border, including earlier news on the Arnold case. The practical question: what is a traveler to do, whether on business or holiday? Not take the GSM cell phone? Put all data on a drive accessible from the internet, and carry a stripped down-laptop that has only applications, and no files? Put an encrypted USB drive in checked baggage, playing the probabilities that luggage won't be lost, stolen or searched to such a degree that the drive will be discovered? Larger businesses will no doubt develop policies driven by businesses need and risk assessment. Smaller companies and individuals should be thinking about this as well.

From the Research Labs . . . Memristors

There you go, the newest term you can sling around to prove your scientific engineering creds. Appearing in a 1971 thesis written by Leon Chua and proving to be highly elusive, a research team from Hewlett Packard describes their successful hunt for "the missing circuit element" in the current edition of the science journal Nature. Michael Hopkins's synopsis of the article and this new development appears in Nature News, and John Markoff has a great write-up in today's New York Times.

What's the big deal? First, a memory device that might be up to ten times smaller than today's memory chips, which are close to being as small as they can get. Second, a type of memory that "remembers" its state when the power is turned off, dramatically reducing the amount of power consumed. Imagine computers that "wake up" instantly to the state they were in when powered off, rather than having to consume power constantly to keep their memory intact. Third, memory that has the potential for more value states than just the binary 1's and 0's used today, leading to new applications where mimicking biological functions such as speech or image recognition is important. Fourth, a manufacturing process that can use the existing chip fabrication plants that manufacturers have spent billions building.

Memristors are not as fast as current memory chips, so there are some questions about how it will perform in large-scale applications. There is another technology being developed by IBM and Intel competing for the next-generation prize. So the battle of the Titans is underway. Stay tuned.