Guidance for upgrading to Windows 7 RTM

The purpose of this post is to help you start with a copy of the Windows 7 RTM code and upgrade an existing installation, especially if you installed the Windows 7 release candidate.

Note that this is not a detailed how to – there’s plenty of those on the Web already, and anyway it’s really not that difficult. Instead, this is a list of some of the gotchas that could put a spoke in the smooth ride that Microsoft promises but so often fails to deliver. Rule one: be patient…

1. Copy the installation files onto your hard disk. It’s faster than installing from a DVD and allows you to make a small tweak that you’ll need if you’re upgrading from the Windows 7 RC (release candidate) as I did. Even better, install from a second hard disk or a USB stick, as this will speed things further.

2. Get a proper copy of the OS and check the files are all valid. If you don’t do this, you could get a third of the way through the process only for the installation process to throw up an error because it couldn’t read a file. That’s annoying.

3. If you’re upgrading from the release candidate of Windows 7, then you need to make a small alteration to \Sources\cversion.ini, as an in-place upgrade, as opposed to a fresh installation, is not officially supported. However, it does work without problems if you do the following:
i) Open cversion.ini with Notepad. This is what you’ll see:
[HostBuild]
MinClient=7233.0
MinServer=7100.0

ii) Alter the first line so it reads:
MinClient=7000.0

iii) Save the file. That’s it.

4. Start the installation and load up your patience.

5. After a few prompts, the system will tell you that it doesn’t need your attention: effectively, it’s telling you to go away and come back in a while. If you’re upgrading an existing installation, that timescale is longer than you think. I left it running overnight and it took over six hours to copy across an installation of several hundred gigabytes. Don’t be tempted to reboot if it seems to be doing nothing at the start of the ‘Transferring settings’ section.

6. If you do reboot before the process completes, check the logs in the c:\$WINDOWS.~BT\Sources\Panther folder, especially setupact.log, to find out why it failed. There’s a workaround available here for an installation that gets stuck around 61%-62%. The system should then roll back to your original OS – it worked three times for me after rebooting at different points in the installation process, despite the dire warnings about doing so.

7. Why might you want to do this?
i) Your Win7 RC licence key runs out in June 2010
ii) The release candidate manifested a few glitches
iii) The release candidate certainly included some debug code, slowing things down.

Each of these three reasons is a good one to get onto the RTM code asap – together they’re compelling. Unless of course you decide that Windows 7 is not for you and you want to go run Ubuntu…

Filed under: How-To, operating systems , How-To, microsoft, release candidate, upgrade, windows 7, windows 7 rc

Time to end loyalty card schemes

Am I alone (distraction: how many rants start like this?) in thinking that few of the trappings of the modern world are as annoying and deeply insidious as the loyalty card? Every shop in the high street offers one, it seems, so it can’t be a bad thing, or they wouldn’t get away with it, would they?

“Do you have a loyalty card,” they twitter. I’ve just encountered the final straw – hence this posting.

On the face if it, what’s not to like? You give the organisation your name and address, they send you a card, and you get a percentage point or two off your shopping. In these hard times, many a mickle makes a mackle.

But they never tell you the whole story. They will never come out and say that, if you subscribe, the company will bombard you with offers that, based on your spending patterns, they think you will want. Well, maybe you will, maybe you won’t, but would you rather not make those choices at a time of your own choosing, under your own steam as it were, rather than being manipulated by some marketing droid or, worse, by some marketing algorithm deep in a data centre somewhere?

If those cards weren’t worthwhile to administer, then companies such as Tesco – feted in marketing circles as among the most successful deployers of such schemes – wouldn’t do it. The reason it’s worth it is not because they get their hands on your spending patterns, which of course they do and which raises other issues – see below – but also because you spend more. Each marketing mailout increases demand for whatever it is that’s being pushed at the consumer.

So whatever discount you’re promised, you’re almost certain to have blown it out by buying more stuff you wouldn’t have bought had the scheme not been in place. That’s more profit for Tesco.

What’s more, the cost of the scheme is offset by hiking prices, as demonstrated by the Morrisons chain of supermarkets which cut prices when it abolished its loyalty card scheme back in 2004. and Asda told the Daily Telegraph it wouldn’t be implementing a scheme because: “It would have cost £60m to set up and £20m to £30m a year to maintain.”

But more fundamentally important is the loss of privacy that these cards entail. As the Telegraph feature referenced above reports, one campaigner likened having a loyalty card to walking around with a barcode stamped on your backside.

What I buy is my business, not that of a marketing programme. The data my buying provides means that more snippets of data about me sit in the public domain, waiting for some future organisation to hoover up and use in ways as yet unspecified.

Those who made this argument ten years ago were shouted down as paranoid. But today, with the growth of huge databases, accessible worldwide, as companies amalgamate and share data, and as basic security issues – such as not walking around with databases on a device liable to either theft or absent-mindedness, such as a laptop of USB memory stick – seem to be beyond either commercial organisations or the government, it behoves us all to hang onto those snippets.

Piled up in one place, a lot of snippets make a profile. Many a mickle makes a muckle.

Filed under: Privacy, data protection, mergers & acquisitions , loyalty cards, loyalty schemes, marketing, Tesco

What’s the prognosis for true high-speed mobile data?

The mobile industry confuses its customers and doesn’t deliver what it promises.

We all talk much about the latest technology, and how it will transform this that or the other element of our personal and/or working lives.

I spent quite a bit of time yesterday talking about LTE — also known as 4G by some, but not everyone, in the mobile industry. It’s known as 4G because it succeeds 3G, today’s iteration of mobile broadband technology. Even though, confusingly, some of it, such as HSPA which can give you as much as 21Mbits/sec is known as 3.5G.

And LTE isn’t 4G technically, because it doesn’t quite meet the definition of 4G laid down by the global standards body, the ITU, according to one analyst I spoke to. So you’ll find LTE referred as 4G or as 3.5+G, LTE-Advanced — which does meet the 4G spec — or just plain LTE. WiMax, incidentally, is 4G according to the ITU. No wonder the mobile industry confuses its customers. There’s a pithy piece about LTE and 4G here.

But that’s all by the by in some ways. The important thing about LTE is that it promises 100Mbit/sec download and 50Mbits/sec upload speeds. If you know anything about the technology, you’ll know that in practice some 25 percent that is likely to be eaten up by protocol and other overheads. You’ll also know that a further 25 percent is likely to be lost to distance losses, cell sharing, and clogged up backhaul networks.

All this is due to arrive over the next ten years. Yes, ten years. Roll-outs are unlikely to start happening in the UK before 2012, more likely 2015.

Except that this is so much hogwash.

I was in the middle of London — yes, challenging conditions due to the concrete canyon effect, but the kind of area in which the mobile industry has to demonstrate its best technology. And the best mobile data rate I managed inside or out was a standard GSM-level 56kbits/sec. This is early 1990s technology.

So if 20 years after its invention and 15 years after its introduction, that’s the best I can get in the middle of one of the world’s leading capital cities, I suspect it’ll be 2025 before I see LTE speeds.

You know what? I’m not sure how much I’ll care by then…

Filed under: mobile , cellular, communication, ITU, LTE, mobile, mobile operator, Wireless

Computing is making progress, but so slowly…

I’m sitting in a hotel room on a press trip. Flown on a flight landing at 1000, the first official engagement with the vendor (who remains for the moment anonymous) is tonight. I’ve had all day to hang around and do work stuff. Naturally, you’re never as efficient as you would be at the office, with all the stuff around you that you need. Not least, a nice cup of tea.

But here in the room, miles from anywhere, I’ve hotel-provided wi-fi for free, a laptop whose battery life is measured in half-day – this dual-core machine with 4GB of memory and a 15.4-inch LCD-lit screen lasts for up to seven hours on one charge – and a phone with no charger that won’t last more than a day and a half. I thought I’d brought a cable but managed to forget it in the early dawn rush to the airport. But all I need is a mini-USB to USB cable and they’re near-ubiquitous: I’m reasonably confident of finding or borrowing one sometime in the next 24 hours.

Five years ago, the battery life of laptops was abysmal, and phone chargers were all proprietary. And if you’d asked for wi-fi anywhere but a city centre, you’d have been looked at as if you had horns growing out of your head.

Things are improving, if slowly…

Filed under: Uncategorized

Dust to dust…or is that CPUs?

A quick follow-up from a news story I wrote for eWeek yesterday entitled ‘Moore’s Law – Still Driving Down The IT Footprint’.

The story concerned the research by Stanford University professor, Dr Jonathan Koomey, who found that Moore’s Law was active for long before Gordon Moore coined his eponymous observation. Koomey reckons that Moore’s Law will result in the huge growth in mobile devices with fixed computational needs, such as controllers.

Their requirements won’t grow but the growth of smaller, more power-efficient processors will come towards them, to the point where battery life becomes a non-issue.

Then you’ll get ‘dust’, as this fascinating paper posits. Read and enjoy!

Filed under: Wireless, mobile , cellular, communication, mobile, Wireless

Democracy loses to Murdoch – again

Capitalism tends to create monopolies. Over time, we’ve all come to appreciate that monopolies are generally a bad thing (perhaps with the exception of a few areas such as utilities and railways) and should be curbed.

They accumulate too much power in one organisation’s hands, and, because of lack of competition, tend to be able to raise prices to any level they like as well as reducing product choice.

And the media is an industry where that’s particularly egregious because it tends to undermine the democratic process. Here’s a case in point.

According to Ofcom, the UK’s media and telecoms regulator, Rupert Murdoch’s satellite TV operation BSkyB has now reached a point where the regulator has published “a further consultation as part of its pay TV market investigation” as a result of its “concerns about the restricted distribution of premium sports and movies channels operated by BSkyB”.

Specifically, Ofcom is concerned about the “limited distribution of football and movies”, which has seen national games such as cricket and football disappearing from terrestrial TV, and instead commanding premium prices on top of already-expensive pay TV bundles. The regulator said that it “considers that Sky has market power in the wholesale supply of channels containing this attractive content, and that it is acting on an incentive to limit the distribution of these channels to rival TV platforms”. It won’t let its rivals have access to that content for a reasonable price.

Ofcom issued that statement on 26 June 2009. On 6 July, in a little-reported speech – note that Murdoch-owned newspapers dominate the UK market – the UK’s opposition leader David Cameron, who looks set to become UK Prime Minister in 2010, has promised that Ofcom “as we know it will cease to exist….Its remit will be restricted to its narrow technical and enforcement roles. It will no longer play a role in making policy.

“And the policy-making functions it has today will be transferred back fully to the Department for Culture, Media and Sport.”

Only one organisation will benefit from Cameron’s new policy: BSkyB.

In other words, the opposition leader, who is now being politically backed by Murdoch in his many media outlets, is already paying back the political capital that Murdoch has invested in him. That’s despite the Tories’ much-trumpeted belief in competition – which clearly does not apply when there’s Murdoch brown-nosing to be done.

The result will be even greater concentration of media power in the hands of one organisation, fewer outlets for not just movies and sport but news too, and – doubt it not – further politically motivated attacks on the UK media’s one big success story, the BBC.

And, incidentally, if you doubt that the BBC, despite its faults, is a success story, just ask any informed observer outside the UK if they would like to see a BBC-style setup replicated in their own country: none will demur.

If the product in question were rivets, perhaps this would be of little moment. But the product is information that’s required by the electorate.

I leave the logical conclusion to your conscience.

There’s more on this in the Guardian here.

Filed under: Uncategorized , bskyb, democracy, media, ofcom, politics, regulation, rupert murdoch

New wave of real-time collaboration arrives?

When it comes to document collaboration, things can only get better. We’ve seen Google Wave make a splash (sorry) and, together with collaboration tool Google Docs, you could live and work without ever loading any software. Ever.

But this approach has limitations, not least of which is that you can only use the Google-hosted applications, you don’t get to choose your applications, and you really only get the full benefit when all your data is hosted by Google.

Scary? For some — especially financial and similar enterprises encircled by legislative constraints and cautious customers — yes. Even the rest of us might not feel entirely comfortable about it.

One new company, oneDrum, reckons it’s got an answer: keep the applications and documents you use every day and collaborate with colleagues and others in real time using its Java-based (and so platform-independent) platform.

oneDrum is a British company that’s most of the way towards launching a serious competitor to Google Wave and Google Docs. CEO Jasper Westaway welcomes Wave because, you guessed, it helps educate the market and validate the concept. “Without them, we wouldn’t have gone to the market with this”, CEO Jasper Westaway told me.

Westaway says that what he likes about Wave is the way that it blurs the lines between conventional email, IM chat and so on; oneDrum does the same but you can use any application you like. oneDrum’s eponymous platform is set to launch by the end of July.

I tried it. While the software is a bit flaky — it’s still a private beta — it allows users of Microsoft Office applications to open applications and share documents. If you share a spreadsheet, for example, you can each edit the same sheet transparently, with changes appearing instantly on a cell-by-cell basis as if you had made them locally.

An example scenario could involve a sales manager who sees a presentation being opened up by a junior member of his sales team, and changes being made that aren’t relevant for the client the junior exec is about to visit. The boss can step in and make further changes in real time; he or she could also embed comments along the way, effectively using the application as a chat interface.

It works in Office via the Windows COM interface, which is redirected by the Java sandbox across the collaborative medium — in my case it was the Internet but could be a private network — so that the applications running at either end are unaware that they’re collaborating across the globe. “We use the automation API and detect changes and push them out to open copies”, says Westaway.

The underlying mechanism is a Skype-like peer-to-peer system: there’s no central repository. “The overlap with Google Wave is that we use the same operational transformation algorithms“, the benefit of which is that “the algorithm works at whatever level is appropriate for the content, whether bytes or paragraphs, for example,” says Westaway.

And if you go offline, will any changes that happen to be stored on that machine be replicated? Westaway reckons that it depends: “As long as someone is online, you can pick up the changes, it’ll work.”

You could imagine too that there might be problems with security — in some organisations, they’ll want to know exactly where the data is going, for example. “Next year, we’ll offer enterprises the possibility of hosting a central repository for compliance reasons,” says Westaway. “We’ll roll out features that will be attractive to organisations such as banks who want compliance-ready applications. We say to them that we will be ready for you soon — but not yet.”

To start with, the service will be free, but oneDrum will eventually be releasing a subscription model that will include features such as the ability to backup all changes.

Westaway reckons the business is easy to scale, and that that it’s fairly easy to add new applications to the roster. So Westaway reckons that by the end of 2009, support for OpenOffice, for Office for Mac, and Google Docs will be cooked and ready to go, with more in the pipeline.

We’ll have to wait and see how this early promise holds true but, for the moment, the peer-to-peer service, which will be free, could form the basis of a new wave of collaboration without tears.

Filed under: Application collaboration , collaboration, communication, google, onedrum

Google Wave: is it evil?

I just finished watching the whole hour of Google’s presentation of Wave, its new collaboration tool. It’s a fascinating idea, bringing together a multitude of communication tools, such as email and instant messaging, while making them more intuitive to use.

From the demo of the early developer code, you could see that the threading of conversations happens naturally, even when not all participants are involved from the start, while you can still keep parts of the conversation private. You can see messages in real time as you type (not good for poor typists) or you can do it in a more familiar ‘type and hit Return’ kind of way.

Content isn’t restricted to text, it can be anything that the developer chooses to add; the demo, which happened at Google IO, its recent devcon. And of course it’s all hosted in the cloud: all you need is a browser.

The idea looks great, the elimination of boundaries between IM and email is a liberating idea because you can still use it just like email — that is, you can choose when to answer messages and not be jumping around to someone else’s set of priorities — it’s smarter, and the browser becomes the only communication tool you need.

So why is it that I found myself wondering if this is really such a good thing? Two things: firstly I’m concerned about the fragmentation of email. Let’s assume Google Wave become insanely popular. Even so, there will always be people who aren’t using Wave but who stick to email and IM. It means you now have another communication channel to understand and manage. That’s on top of the Facebooks, the Twitters, the MySpaces and so on, all of which have private channels of communication that you need to check.

And then there’s the deeper concern: am I really comfortable trusting Google with my communications? With email I can choose from hundreds of suppliers and dozens of pieces of software. None of them want to index and understand my content even remotely on the scale that Google does. And when, due to some force majeure, it drops its ‘do no evil’ philosophy (assuming you buy into that idea from a Wall Street-quoted public company), what then?

Is this just me being paranoid?

Filed under: Uncategorized , collaboration, communication, email, google, google wave, instant messaging

Oracle buys Sun — but who really wins?

The big news this week this is undoubtedly the $7.4 billion purchase of the troubled server company Sun Microsystems by database specialist Oracle. But, given the very different nature of the two companies, will it work?

Well-known in the industry for being the favourite of developers and geeks, and among its customers for its high-powered, reliable but expensive systems, Sun has nonetheless suffered financially since the implosion of the dotcom bubble. Its accounts have bled red for years, and selling the company seems for eons — that’s eons in IT years — to have been the only way out.

Just two weeks ago, IBM made overtures to buy the company. This author among others could see that there would be some synergies, although I struggled to see how Big Blue would swallow Sun’s server range, given that it has a well-established and rational product portfolio already. IBM and Sun would have fitted together mainly on the software side, where the acquisition of Solaris, a major platform in the database world, along with Java and many open source technologies including OpenOffice, would have sat comfortably alongside IBM’s espousal of open source, and its conversion from hardware to software and services company.

It wasn’t to be. Sun demanded too much of IBM — more here — and the deal fell through. We wondered at the time how Sun could have let it happen, and accused the Silicon Valley stalwart of greed and complacency.

What we didn’t know was that it had another suitor in the wings, one willing to pay Sun’s pretty substantial asking price.

Early post-purchase signs are good. Most analysts and observers see more positives than negatives emerging from the deal. Oracle is a software company first and foremost, while Sun’s revenues stem mostly from hardware.

What’s more, Sun’s Solaris is a major platform for Oracle’s eponymous database, which means that Oracle can now offer the whole stack, from raw iron upwards, and so is in a better position to offer more tightly integrated solutions. As the company’s acquisition statement said: “Oracle will be the only company that can engineer an integrated system — applications to disk — where all the pieces fit and work together so customers do not have to do it themselves”.

Some systems integrators may suffer as a result, but that’ll be some way down the line, after two or three product refresh cycles.

The deal has even got some of the opposition thinking. As Colin Barker reports from an HP product launch in Berlin (which I was unable to make, sadly): “HP executives thought that the news was interesting and it was not difficult to see their internal calculators trying to work out any options the move would give them.”

So far so fitted.

But big questions remain to be answered. Sun has always been a fairly open company, and has always seen itself and wanted to be seen as part of a wider community. When open source came along, Sun gradually adopted it and, with no little external persuasion it seemed at the time, even made some of its own, expensively developed technology open source.

In complete contrast, Oracle has rarely if ever done that — apart perhaps from its development of its own version of Red Hat Linux, which the market has largely ignored. Oracle’s proprietary approach and eagerness to squeeze every last dollar out of its large enterprise customers is the stuff of legend.

This is unlikely to change, especially now that it can lock down those customers to a tightly integrated hardware platform. The reactions of those customers, of the competition, many of whom are in alliances with either or both the parties to the acquisition, and of the channel remain to be seen.

There will be layoffs too, given the economic situation, and the more obvious lack of need for duplicated sales, marketing or HR departments, for example. One analyst is reported to have predicted up to 10,000 job losses. I would expect the culture shock to squeeze quite a few through the out door.

But if you’re a customer, you might prefer not be locked in. If you’re a hardware partner of Oracle’s, you’re likely to be re-thinking that deal, big time. HP is in that boat, given that it’s co-developed servers for Oracle, in the database company’s first venture into hardware, back in 2008. And if you either work for Sun or are one of the developer community in Sun’s orbit, you might well find yourself wondering where to go next, whether voluntarily or not.

My take is that most customers will stay put. It’s not the time to start launching into expensive new IT roll-outs. That’s not to say that those with an aversion to single-supplier deals won’t bail as soon as possible.

However, the pressure on the competition in the current climate is likely to result in more mergers and acquisitions, and a jungle populated by fewer but bigger beasts.

But who and which? Here are some questions: will IBM swallow EMC? Will Cisco buy Brocade? And could Microsoft finally buy Yahoo!? And how many more yachts will this deal enable Oracle CEO Larry Ellison to buy?

Filed under: Servers, mergers & acquisitions, operating systems , hp, ibm, mergers, microsoft, oracle, Servers, sun microsystems

EU takes the Janus position

The UK government has on many occasions shown itself to be more interested in spying on its subjects than on fixing the recession — and this week’s no different but the European Union seems with one hand to be aiding and abetting such activity, and with the other hand, bashing the UK round the head for something similar.

This week brings us news that the European Union has followed up its threat of legal action against the beleaguered New Labour administration by instating a case against the UK for allowing BT to test Phorm’s deep packet inspection and behavioural advertising. Customers were unaware that their data was being examined by BT for commercial purposes.

As a result, the EU has told the UK that it must comply with the EU Directive on privacy and electronic communications, which is equivalent to a legally enforceable requirement, and which mandates that member states must “ensure confidentiality of communications and related data traffic data by prohibiting unlawful interception and surveillance” unless the users concerned have consented.

The legal case follows numerous letters, to which the UK government responded that it was happy that the Phorm system meets European data laws, and then ignored further requests for clarification.

On the other hand however, the EU’s Data Retention Directive has provoked widespread condemnation. This compels member states to store users’ communication information for a full year starting on 15 March 2009. It means that every email, phone call and text message sent or received will have to be recorded.

The thinking behind it is that: “retention of data has proved to be such a necessary and effective investigative tool for law enforcement in several Member States, and in particular concerning serious matters such as organised crime and terrorism, it is necessary to ensure that retained data are made available to law enforcement authorities.”

That’s despite the assertion in the directive that, in a democracy, “everyone has the right to respect for his private life and his correspondence”. It does however go on to say that the directive: “relates only to data generated or processed as a consequence of a communication or a communication service and does not relate to data that are the content of the information communicated.”

In other words, it’s the contact not the content that will be stored — although this does include your user ID, IP address, DSL line (where appropriate) and the date and time of contact.

Even so, it seems contradictory for the EU to be lambasting the UK for spying on Internet traffic, while on the other hand it’s insisting that your phone bill be made available to the local police forces.

Filed under: Privacy, Surveillance, data protection , bt, european union, phorm