Of course they can’t.  Stealing data isn’t the same as stealing silverware.  It’s easy to tell if the forks and spoons have been swiped – they aren’t there anymore.  But data that has been stolen is still there, comfortably ensconced in its rows and tables.  It might be possible for Sony to search logs and audit files and compare them with the attack vector (if they can figure it out) and conclude that no unauthorized access took place.  But even if they succeeded, who would be silly enough to believe them?

Sony spyware

This isn’t the first time Sony has damaged its customers and tried first to stonewall, then to attempt a fix, then fail to do so.  Six years ago, they silently planted rootkits on customers’ computers.  As any good spyware distributor would, they convinced their victims that they were running benign software – or, in this case, simply listening to music they had purchased.  All Sony’s victim had to do was to play a CD from Sony/BMG on a PC and cha-ching!  Spyware was installed that even included phoning home to Sony servers.

Sony initially denied the findings by Mark Russinovich (Microsoft system internals guru), then confessed that it was all part of their Digital Rights Management scheme.  Then they released a purported fix that was not made available directly to consumers.  The fix, by the way, required installation of an ActiveX control which reported information about the user’s hardware back to Sony!  Oh, and sometimes it crashed Windows.

Why would anyone trust Sony ever again?  If I were looking to replace/supplement my Wii, I wouldn’t give the PlayStation a second thought.  For that matter, I wouldn’t look at a Sony computer either.  Who knows what they might tuck away amid the bloatware and other “features”?  More DRM spyware?

Not that I’m complaining – I started writing software professionally (assembly language and COBOL) in 1973.  I’ve done it or taught it ever since.  It’s time to call it a career and get on with the rest of my life.  My only regret is that nobody is happy enough to see me go to give me a gold watch. 

Am I closing down Kokomo Beach – the blog, not the municipal water park?  No, I may still feel the occasional urge to shout something into the ether.  I just won’t feel guilty about not doing it.

According to a study Reisinger cites, of 278,498 corporate and public sector PCs analyzed, “almost half are still running Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 2.”  Analysis and marketing firm Net Applications reports that as of June 2010, XP is running on 62% of the world’s PCs.

A lot of XP’s persistence can be attributed to IT departments’ unwillingness to upgrade, but that resistance is showing signs of beginning to crumble.  The combination of technical obsolescence, a tentative economic recovery, and pressure from Microsoft may make some of Reisinger’s reasons less compelling in the next year or two.  But his third reason caught my attention:

Discussions about Microsoft’s decision to discontinue its support for Service Pack 2 have left out a key component that can’t be overlooked: People in developing countries rely on XP…. But if [Microsoft] decides to turn its back on XP before it should, the company would also effectively turn its back on people all over the world who rely on XP to get technology into their lives.

If the enterprise does finally let go of XP, the financial pressure on Microsoft to abandon it altogether would certainly increase.  But what of those non-enterprise users both here and abroad who depend on XP?  What if W7 is not an option, whether because of hardware limitations or the cost of upgrading?

it’s easy to imagine the XP ecosystem reduced to a stagnant backwater where applications go to die and tens of millions of un-patched, increasingly vulnerable computers remain attached to the Internet, running browsers that can’t render HTML5 and CSS3.

In that world, the only realistic alternative would be Linux.  If Microsoft were to walk away from XP, it would accomplish what Linux evangelists and fanboys have been unable to do – convert millions of users from Windows to Linux.  And once converted, these users would never again be Microsoft customers.

A radical proposal

Other than continuing support for XP forever, there is one way Microsoft can hang on to those users and hope to upgrade them to Windows 8 or 9 or whatever and bring them back into the market for Windows applications:  Open-source XP.  Once the enterprise is safely in the W7 (or W8) fold, the financial impact to Microsoft would be minimal.  An open source XP would attract more developers than a dead, closed XP would.  Users would benefit.  And Microsoft could actually look pretty good.

I’m just sayin’

I’ve flirted with Linux, but found its many interfaces clunky and the availability of applications compatible with the rest of the world (Windows) too limited.  Since OS/X, Macs have been intriguing, but the price premium has always been too high for serious consideration (Apple’s vaunted cachet is worth about a dime to me). In the absence of real alternatives, I’ve stuck with Windows (and Office and Visual Studio) for both desktop and laptop computers. They work – very well in many instances – and I can exchange Excel spreadsheets, Visio drawings, Word docs, and C# code with colleagues.

Given my investment in Microsoft products, I’ve been following the Microsoft death watch with some interest. According to the noisier parts of the blogosphere and some industry “analysts” with their laser-like prognostications, iPads and iPhones will replace laptops and desktops (except for some Macs, of course). Google’s Chrome OS will take over the handful of remaining netbooks. All software will run in the cloud (except for Steve Jobs-approved stuff from the iProduct app store). Hotmail and IM are already dead, so it’s pretty much over for Microsoft. One guy actually predicted that the end would come within three years [I’m kicking myself for not bookmarking his piece or clipping it to Evernote].

Bloggers and “analysts” v. numbers

Well, it looks like the reports Microsoft’s demise are as premature as the reported death of the PC and the passing of computer files. On June 25, Microsoft put some numbers up on its official blog. As MC Siegler of TechCrunch put it,

The intention was obviously to lend some perspective to some of the negative coverage Microsoft has been getting recently. There’s no way around it, the numbers are impressive.

Indeed they are. I think I’ll go ahead with my planned desktop upgrade to Windows 7, Office 2010, and Visual Studio 2010.

While reading my email (Gmail) on my Motorola Droid this morning, I found several industry newsletters waiting for me. That last one caught my eye, so I opened it to find …

	… that it was going to tell me – among other things – what Motorola would have to do to make the upcoming Droid X successful. I have a small vested interest in Droids, so I selected the link at the very bottom of the page.
	That link opened the mobile version of eWeek’s “News and Views” (see URL) which showed me, um …  nothing related to the lead story. No problem; obviously, the “More…” link would take me to the story – or at least a link to it – right?
	Actually, no. There were links to several stories, but nothing related to what Motorola would have to do, yadda, yadda, yadda. So, rather than click through more of the 73 available pages of links, I went back to the email to see if I’d missed something.
	Aha! My bad. Scrolling down a ways, I found what was obviously the correct link to the story on eWeek’s site. So I selected it and got ready to …
	… go read the story on my PC! So much for the mobile web, at least as far as eWeek is concerned.

]]> http://www.kokomobeach.com/opinion/when-mobile-newsletters-go-bad/feed/ 0 http://www.kokomobeach.com/tech/phpstormwebstorm-released/ http://www.kokomobeach.com/tech/phpstormwebstorm-released/#comments Wed, 16 Jun 2010 12:32:30 +0000 steve http://www.kokomobeach.com/tech/phpstormwebstorm-released/ PhpStorm 1.0 and WebStorm 1.0 have been released by JetBrains. Pricing is about where I had hoped it would be – and even better until September 1, 2010.

For PhpStorm

• Commercial license until September 1, $149, $199 after
• Personal license until September 1, $49, $99 after
• Freebies are available for classroom and open source project use

For WebStorm

• Commercial license until September 1, $99, $149 after
• Personal license until September 1, $39, $69 after
• Freebies are available for classroom and open source project use

Both IDEs are available for Windows, Mac OS, and Linux and both have 45-day trial downloads available.

Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with JetBrains in any way and have no financial interest in the company or its products. I have been using the PhpStorm beta for several months.

With those thoughts in the back of my mind, I came across an article on Tech Republic entitled “Dust off that dinosaur computer”. Naturally, that got me thinking about – not my next, but my first computer (ca. 1983).

It was a Kaypro II with an 8-bit Zilog Z80 processor, 64KB of RAM and two 195KB 5-1/4” floppy drives. It ran the CP/M operating system and set me back 1,600 1983 dollars. It was “portable” (at about 26 pounds) with a keyboard that folded up and covered the floppy drives and 9” monochrome, text-only monitor. Its main claim to fame was the fact that Arthur C. Clarke used one to collaborate via modem from Sri Lanka on the screenplay for 2010, the sequel to 2001: A Space Odyssey.

With a “cheap” Epson dot-matrix printer (about $300), I was set up to write class materials, magazine articles, and software in assembly language, COBOL, and, later, Turbo Pascal (well, I only wrote enough COBOL on that machine to write a review). I also learned SQL using a public domain package named Silver SQL.

The aforementioned article provides a concise summary of the most important/most popular personal computers from the ‘70s and ‘80s. I recommend it for anyone who used these machines or who is curious about the early days of what were once called “microcomputers”.

As it happened, I was teaching a course in program design that didn’t focus on any programming language at all, just logic. Research published by David Scanlan of California State University, Sacramento confirmed my classroom experience that, properly used, old-fashioned flowcharts did a good job of conveying program logic to students. Since I required flowcharts for most of their assignments, wouldn’t it be great if I could evaluate the students’ designs by simply running them? With these two streams of thought converging, I set out to develop a visual programming language with simple, yet robust syntax.

In 1989-1991, I designed a language named “FLOGO” (not to be confused with the robotics programming language for children developed at MIT a few years later).  FLOGO consisted entirely of 6 symbols (derived from standard flowcharts)  and 11 keywords together with variable identifiers and basic mathematical and logical expressions. With the design in hand, the next step was to build an IDE (in object-oriented Turbo Pascal). The IDE enabled the construction of programs by dropping symbols (such as input, output, or branch) onto a spreadsheet-like grid, adding imperative text to the symbols (restricted by the type of operation the symbol represented), and connecting the symbols to specify execution sequence. The programmer developed what was essentially a directed graph representing the program’s logic.

Dr. Jack Crenshaw to the rescue!

So far, so good, but to be useful, the graphs had to be exectutable. Never having taken a compilers course – but owning several books on the topic – I was a bit apprehensive. Then I came across a series of articles (originally posted, I think, on CompuServe) that presented a very straightforward way of parsing input and emitting machine code. With very little effort I was able to turn the principles into an interpreter that ran inside the FLOGO IDE.

So if there’s a compiler in your future and you think LEX refers to Superman’s nemesis and and you’re pretty sure a YACC is a big, hairy animal, have a look at “Let’s Build a Compiler!” by Dr. Crenshaw. His examples are written in Pascal but other than “begin” and “end”, where C and Java programmers would expect “{“ and “}”, the code should be easy for users of those and similar languages to follow.

In case you’re wondering, FLOGO has been lost in the mists of time. I published (including the FLOGO language design) but perished anyway and didn’t have time to pursue it after leaving academia. The language specifications and code got lost in their travels from hard drives to 5-1/4″ floppies to other hard drives to 3-1/2″ floppies across multiple computers. A couple of paper copies of conference proceedings are all that remain.