By Jin Nan Goto

One real annoyance of modern technology may not be around much longer. The days when the types of power cables between different handsets varied widely are numbered.  The GSMA announced a agreement between 17 cell phone companies and several major handset makers (LG, Motorola, Samsung, Nokia, and Sony Ericsson) which will work to make Micro-USB the standard connector type for Cell phones.  This is a very welcome change (although one that will probably cost the Cell phone companies a good chuck of lost revenue), and micro USB is a very good choice as it can be used to transfer power and data.  Since the cables can be reused with other phones and devices, consumers will spend less money on chargers and less of these cables will be sent off to landfills.

Mini and Micro USB chargers are already widely used in for handsets.  Motorola, RIM (makers of Blackberry), and HTC (uses a mini USB connector for the G1).  China already mandated that all cell phones in China be able to charge through USB. In fact, whenever I buy a cell phone I go out of my way to makes sure that it can be charged by USB.  However many of these phones use an older USB specification “Mini USB” and not “Micro USB” which is the new proposed standard.  Meaning, I’ll need to buy at least one more car charger.

External Links

CNET

WSJ Online

By Jin Nan Goto

I wasn’t planning on writing another post about the Engineering Windows 7 blog since I already mentioned it last week. But this latest post from the E7 blog is about User Account Control and I couldn’t resist.  Bottom line is UAC is coming to Windows 7.  This is probably disappointing news for many who considered UAC to be too obtrusive and obnoxious (although I don’t think anyone thought UAC wasn’t coming back).  Still, the Windows 7 people are working to improve it and lower its annoyingness.

Now that we have the data and feedback, we can look ahead at how UAC will evolve—we continue to feel the goal we have for UAC is a good one and so it is our job to find a solution that does not abandon this goal. UAC was created with the intention of putting you in control of your system, reducing cost of ownership over time, and improving the software ecosystem. What we’ve learned is that we only got part of the way there in Vista and some folks think we accomplished the opposite.

Based on what we’ve learned from our data and feedback we need to address several key issues in Windows 7:

• Reduce unnecessary or duplicated prompts in Windows and the ecosystem, such that critical prompts can be more easily identified.
• Enable our customers to be more confident that they are in control of their systems.
• Make prompts informative such that people can make more confident choices.
• Provide better and more obvious control over the mechanism.

Excerpt from Engineering Windows 7 Blog

Designed out of a desire to make Vista the “most secure version of Windows ever” UAC has done a lot to change a very destructive aspect of Windows, which is that everyone ran Windows as an Administrator.  UAC has not only helped by warning users when installing software(or malware), it has also helped developers create better software that was more conducive to allowing users to run as a limited user and improve security. Malware is generally not able to install itself without permission when running as a limited user.

The older versions of Windows (Win95, Win98, WinMe) were all single user operating systems. This is where the user had full control over modifying the system.  The newer versions of windows (Windows 2000 and later) were multiuser capable, This allowed the for limited user accounts as well as administrator accounts. The data from Microsoft’s Windows Feedback Program showed that around 75% of computers have only one user account Which defaults to the Administrator account.   In the past many software developers made assumptions that the computer would have full access to be able to modify the system.  The E7 blog admits that even some developers at Microsoft made those assumptions as well.  This really made running Windows XP as a limited user incredibly difficult.

With Vista and UAC, developers had to take a hard look at the programs that required Administrator rights and whether they could (or should) change them to not require elevation.  If they did require elevated privileges the secure desktop popped up and the user had to explicitly allow it.

We also found that there were many cases in previous versions of Windows where we had lumped things together when instead only part of the task really should have required the user to be an administrator.  For example, in Windows XP you had to be an administrator in order to change the time or the time zone of the system. The reason that time functions are usually restricted is that you can do some pretty sneaky things if you can change the system time — like trick system logs or backdate emails.  But as it turns out, changing the time zone of the machine so that a business traveler based on the West Coast goes to their meetings at the right time when they are visiting New York really doesn’t need to be protected — so in Windows Vista, we split that out and now allow a standard user to change the time zone.

Excerpt from Windows Vista Blog

Vista has been incredibly effective in reducing the number of programs that require full administrator privileges, and this is only improving as time passes.

However the implementation of UAC in Vista is far from perfect.  While you want to warn users against doing things that are dangerous (installing un-trusted software or messing with the registry/or device manager) the frequency of prompts runs the risk of the user ignoring them and always approving.  The darkened screen of the secure desktop is somewhat alarming and unfriendly to users.  Also, in Vista even an administrator is not “really” an administrator.  They run as a standard user unless they need to approve an action.  This upsets experienced users who know what they are doing and want full control over their computer.  Still an improved version of UAC is a really important addition to the future Windows 7.

External Links:

Engineering Windows 7 Blog
http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/archive/2008/10/08/user-account-control.aspx

Windows Vista Blog
http://windowsvistablog.com/blogs/windowsvista/archive/2007/01/23/security-features-vs-convenience.aspx

By Jin Nan Goto

Over the past month there has been a very interesting series of post on the Engineering Windows 7 blog written by Microsoft employees who are active in the development of the upcoming Windows 7. Starting September 10 the Engineering Windows 7 blog team started writing posts based on data they had collected through the Windows Feedback Program. While the posts are not unveiling exciting new features, they give a lot of insight into the decisions and considerations being made when designing Windows 7.

The Windows Feedback Program collected data from volunteer users of Windows XP and Windows Vista in order to collect raw data on how these volunteers use their Windows computers. The data was then aggregated and used to improve the features on Windows.

These posts, written by various members of the Windows 7 team, share a lot of the conclusions from the data gathered (complete with graphs and charts). Some of the data is very interesting. One thing they found was that, as display resolution on monitors increased, many users were adjusting the screen resolution down so that text and other elements on the screen would be larger.

“We have found that a large percentage of our program participants lower their display resolution from the highest usable for their display. Looking at the data coming from the Windows Customer Experience Improvement Program to compare to, and noticed a similar trend: over 50% of customers with 1600×1200 screen resolution displays are adjusting their resolution down to 1024×768, likely because they find it uncomfortable to read the tiny text on high resolution displays. The negative effect of this resolution change is the loss of fidelity to the point where reading text in editors and web browsers is difficult.”

In this case the data showed the Windows 7 team that they needed to spend time to find a way to accommodate those users who lower their resolution for visibility reasons, while at the same time allow them to make full use of their high resolution monitors.

These posts are quite interesting. Here is a list of all the ones released to date (although it seems like there are more coming).

• Engineering Windows 7 blog
• The Windows Feedback Program
• ­ Follow-up on High DPI resolution
• More Follow up to discussion about High DPI
• User Interface: Starting, Launching, and Switching
• Follow-up: Starting, Launching, and Switching
• User Interface: Managing Windows windows

http://www.nasaimages.org

Together with the Internet Archive, NASA has posted 50 years of Photos, audio and other Images of its space program.  I looked through it and these pictures are amazing.  Its really wonderful that people can see these great and historic images.  Here is an explanation from the site about the project.

“NASA Images is a service of Internet Archive ( www.archive.org ), a non-profit library, to offer public access to NASA’s images, videos and audio collections. NASA Images is constantly growing with the addition of current media from NASA as well as newly digitized media from the archives of the NASA Centers.

The goal of NASA Images is to increase our understanding of the earth, our solar system and the universe beyond in order to benefit humanity.

Support NASA Images
NASA and Internet Archive entered into a Space Act Agreement in 2007 to create this service, but the Internet Archive receives no financial support from NASA. The project is currently funded through a grant from the Kahle-Austin Foundation. We are actively looking for additional financial support in the form of grants and sponsorships. If your organization would like to support this important project, we want to hear from you. Please contact us at info@nasaimages.org . “

Microsoft released the results of their Mojave Experiment today.  Microsoft rounded up 120 non-users of Vista who had a negative view of Windows Vista.  They were given a 10 minuet demonstration of the newest Microsoft Operating System “Mojave”.  Mojave reception was very positive and after the demonstration many of the respondents were surprised that this new OS was actually Windows Vista.

This is a more aggressive break from Microsoft’s normal marketing practices (which generally include creating a new logo for the packaging).  An interesting aspect of the methodology is that each 10 minuet demo was tailored to the interests of the individual.  For example, if someone was concerned about security and Viruses the demo was geared more towards items such as IE 7 Phishing filter and bit-locker drive encryption rather than stuff like media center and desktop gadgets.  According to the Official Vista Blog this was not part of the Microsoft’s new $300 million advertising campaign for Vista.

Microsoft is getting some criticism from this experiment.  Blog Headlines Read “Microsoft tricks users into liking Vista”.  However that kind of analysis misses the point.  Mojave reveals a lot of the Groupthink surrounding Vista.  Millions of people have computers that run Vista and their experiences are generally positive.  I’ve been running Vista since the day it was released and I like it.  It’s not to say that there weren’t issues with its release.  I had software which didn’t work with Vista and was never made compatible with Vista (incredibly irritating considering the software was published by Microsoft).  People did have problems with Vista just as people had problems with XP when it came out and their pain shouldn’t be ignored.   I’m stuck with a bad Intel graphics driver for Vista that always crashes and gives me a back screen for a split second while it recovers.  It’s annoying but it’s not driving me to back to XP.  Vista has been out for over a year and a half and most of the issues at launch have been fixed (well not my issue but that’s not the point).  Mark Twain once famously said “Rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated.”  On the same note, the bad things said about Vista have also been exaggerated.

New Search engines are created all the time and generally they don’t generate a lot of headlines.  Most new search engines are resigned to the fact that they won’t be able to compete with Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft.  They target small niches.  Not the case with Cuil because its challenging the reigning champion, Google.

The minimalist layout of the Homepage resembles Google very much.  In fact it was created by some former employees of Google.  Cuil boasts over 120,000,000,000 indexed pages and that it indexed them better than Google.  Although that claim was challenged by Michael Arrington of Tech Crunch.  It also takes aim at some of Google’s perceived shortcomings.  For instance Privacy.  It has a very visible link to its privacy policy and, unlike Google, it does not keep logs of users search activities (something that will please some privacy conscious people who worry that Google knows too much).  Cuil’s black background also seems to allude to the idea that if Google changed its background color to black it would lower worldwide power usage.  An idea that Google looked into but dismissed.

Cuil promises a lot, but the big question is whether it will succeed or if it was just hype.  Cuil is doing the same things the Google is doing and that Yahoo is doing and Microsoft is doing with their live search.  Search is incredible competitive, and Cuil doesn’t seem to do things any differently.  Other search sites like Mahalo or Technorati strive to be different, but Cuil seems to just try and replicate Google’s success.

Links

Ars Technica

Cnet

Tech Crunch