Googles Chrome OS starts to get real but still falls shy

The two examples of printing and storage underline that a Chromebook is not just a laptop with a new OS but a new way of computing. Not only does it differ from traditional laptop OSes, but it also contrasts with the iPad and other tablets. Sure, tablets rely more heavily on cloud services than PCs do, but they provide local apps and storage, as well as direct connectivity. Those apps can overcome some of the limitations of the tablets; for example, there are iOS apps that let iPads print directly to wirelessly connected printers, not just to HP's models or through a computer you have to leave on. Maybe we'll see such apps eventually for Chrome OS, but Google has purposely kept Chrome OS limited to retain the purity of its cloud vision.

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What this all means is that a Chromebook probably won't replace a laptop, at least not anytime soon. Odds are it'll be used like an iPad: as an additional "+1" device for use on the go, in cafés, at conference halls, in lobbies, and during quick trips. In that sense, it competes with the Apple iPad, Motorola Mobility Xoom, and the Motorola Mobility Atrix Lapdock, which also are designed for on-the-go computing, but the four devices approach such mobility differently. It will be interesting to see if the Chromebook approach of pure reliance on the cloud gains traction compared to the Lapdock approach of augmenting a smartphone when on the go and the tablet approach of the iPad and Xoom of providing a mix of local and cloud services.

As Chrome OS gains polish, its Web apps look clunkier
When I first used the Chromebook, I was concerned about the lack of fit and finish in the demo apps at Google's Chrome Store. Now that the Chrome OS itself has gained polish and responsiveness, the Chrome OS Web apps feel even clunkier. Using Webmail, for example, is an awkward experience compared to using a "real" mail client, whether on a laptop or tablet.

Web apps don't handle direct manipulation well, such as dragging mail folders, so they tend to be more labor-intensive in their usage and less sophisticated in their capabilities. Although I appreciate Chrome OS more and more, I really dislike the Web apps -- which are what you would use day to day for anything other than basic Web activities.

Google really needs to redefine what a Web app is, perhaps by taking its Google Docs suite and making them work like a "real" app suite. Right now, Google Docs is fine as a waystation for shared data and on-the-go touch-up work, but it's not a comfortable tool for real editing, calendaring, emailing, spreadsheet work, or presentation work. (Microsoft's Office Web Apps is no better.)

Google has promised to add local storage to Google Docs, so you can keep working on files when disconnected, but it hasn't yet delivered, despite an original claim of a March 2011 beta release. It's harder these days to be disconnected, if you're willing to pay for data access -- even airplanes offer in-flight Wi-Fi service. But there are periods of the day when you are disconnected, such as during your commute or waiting for take-off in a plane -- and not everyone can afford all the 3G and Wi-Fi plans to stay nearly always connected.

Currently, a tablet can handle that mix of online and offline situations, whereas a Chromebook cannot. Chromebook users need to make sure their files are synced before they lose their connections. The good news is that if you don't close the browser window and the battery doesn't die, the document you were working on stays in the local cache and should sync when you regain connectivity.

I believe the connectivity issue will not be a deal breaker for most users -- but the awkwardness of the Web apps compared to using a laptop or an iPad will. After all, an iPad is a lot lighter and easier to carry around than a Chromebook, though a Chromebook has the advantage (like the Lapdock) of providing a full desktop Web experience, unlike the iPad or other tablets. And you can get a light laptop that's no bigger or heavier than a Chromebook -- with full computing capabilities. The Chromebook beats laptops in terms of battery use, but that may not be enough of an advantage to be a substitute.

Still, there's something compelling about the Chromebook concept. Chrome OS is showing more promise now than in its December 2010 beta debut, but still feels gawky compared to an iPad. Google has a little time before commercial Chromebooks appear. Here's hoping it has some truly amazing Web apps in development ready to redefine today's low expectations of what a Web app can do.

Microsoft Office 2010 takes on all comers

Microsoft Office 2010 takes on all comers: Corel WordPerfect Office X5
There was a time, in the DOS days, when WordPerfect was for many professionals the word processing program. Law offices still swear by it, since it's heavily backward compatible with previous versions and has features that appeal to legal professionals.

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WordPerfect has since been made part of a suite that contains the Quattro Pro spreadsheet (originally from Borland) and Corel's own Presentations application. The newest version of the suite, WordPerfect Office X5 (or version 15), was released in 2010, and has little to attract users from other suites. It's slightly less expensive than Office 2010 -- the home version is $99 and runs on up to three PCs -- but SoftMaker Office and the various OpenOffice.org derivatives all offer more.

When you launch WordPerfect, Quattro Pro, or Presentations, the first thing you see is the Workspace Manager -- a way to automatically set the program's look and the menu options to one of a number of included templates depending on the user's preferences. Aside from the standard WordPerfect mode, there's Microsoft Word mode, which includes a toolbar of document compatibility options and a sidebar that gives you quick access to common document functions; WordPerfect Classic mode, which emulates the white-on-blue look of the old DOS-era WordPerfect and even the macros of same; and WordPerfect Legal mode, which brings up toolbars related to legal documents.

If you open anything other than native WordPerfect documents, the program runs a conversion filter first, a process that can take anywhere from a fraction of a second to a minute or two depending on the file size and source format. The conversion process for OpenDocument word processing (.odt) documents, even small ones, is much slower than for Word files (.doc or .docx), and as with the other programs here the level of fidelity for document conversion will vary widely. For instance, inline comments from both Word and .odt documents were preserved, but any information about who had made specific comments didn't seem to survive the conversion.

The mortgage calculator spreadsheet loaded in Quattro, but just barely. The charts didn't display any values, and the sheet itself lost most of its functionality; most of the cell formulas didn't work. While I was able to get an existing PowerPoint presentation to import, the transitions were all replaced with simple wipes and many presentation details (such as the aspect ratios of slides) didn't translate accurately. That's where file format support ends -- WordPerfect Office can't open spreadsheets or presentations in Office 2007/2010 or OpenDocument formats.

Most of what drew people to WordPerfect in the first place has been aggressively preserved across the many versions of the program. Take the way WordPerfect deals with document formatting: The user can inspect the formatting markup for a document in great detail and edit it directly. It's a great feature.

But the general stagnancy of the program is off-putting, like the fact that WordPerfect still doesn't support Unicode after all this time. Open a document with both Western and non-Western text and you don't even see gibberish -- non-Western text simply doesn't display. For this and many other reasons, WordPerfect Office X5 is unlikely to appeal beyond WordPerfect's existing user base.

Servers made huge rebound in 2010, but sales will be slower this year

Perhaps Apple chose the wrong time to get out of the server market. The company stopped selling Xserve at the end of January. Now the 2010 server numbers are in, and they're looking pretty good. Server shipments grew 16.8 percent during 2010 and revenue by 13.2 percent, year over year, according to Gartner. It was a remarkable turnaround compared to 2009, when shipments and revenue fell 16.6 percent and 18.3 percent, respectively. Manufacturers shipped 8.8 million servers for the year, generating $48.8 billion in revenue.

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Gartner largely credited the rebound to x86 server upgrades delayed by the economic crisis set in motion by the September 2008 stock market crash. "2010 was a year that saw pent-up x86-based server demand produce some significant growth on a worldwide level," Jeffrey Hewitt, Gartner research vice president, said in a statement. "The introduction of new processors from Intel and AMD toward the end of 2009 helped fuel a pretty significant replacement cycle of servers that had been maintained in place during the economic downturn in 2009."

Blade server revenue rose by 29.5 percent and shipments by 12.6 percent. HP and IBM led shipments, with 47.3 percent and 25.4 percent market share, respectively. In the broader server market, IBM and HP fought for revenue leadership, both topping $15 billion, with 31.4 percent and 30.8 percent share, respectively. However, HP revenue growth more than doubled IBM's. That said, IBM had much better margins, shipping fewer servers (1.16 million) than HP (2.8 million). HP ended the year at No. 1 in shipments and revenue -- 31.7 percent and 31.4 percent, respectively.

Fourth Quarter 2010

On the other hand, perhaps Apple got out of the server market in the nick of time. While Gartner expects server shipments to grow in 2011, the pace will be slower. The analyst firm estimates that the replacement cycle peaked in 2010. Fourth-quarter shipments foreshadow the trend. Shipments grew only by 6.5 percent, although revenue rose a more robust 16.4 percent. Manufacturers shipped 706,202 servers during Q4, generating $4.3 billion in revenue.

Still, the market may not yet have pushed through its growth potential. "We also need to recognize that the market is still in a fairly tentative recovery mode," Adrian O'Connell, Gartner research director said in a statement. Many companies are still in cost-containment mode and, although 2010 growth levels were strong, we're still some way off the revenue highs that we saw in 2007."

Dell and IBM had strongest revenue growth -- 26.4 percent -- during fourth quarter. Shipments rose 3.8 percent and 6.9 percent respectively. IBM ranked No.1 in revenue share (35.5 percent), while HP lead in shipments (32.1 percent) -- another sign of IBM's higher margins.

Every region brought double-digit growth but Japan, where server shipments declined by 4.4 percent, during Q4. Asia-Pacific: 22.4 percent. EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa: 10.4 percent. Latin America: 12.3 percent. North America 24.5 percent. But, again, most of the growth came in x86 servers.

As it typically does, Gartner singled out EMEA, where HP's huge success is upsetting RISC and Unix server shipments. HP had a colossal 43.6 percent share of server shipments (307,959 units) -- or more than the rest of the top-5 combined. "The x86 market is becoming ever more critical to the overall server market," O'Connell said in the statement, emphasizing that in fourth quarter, x86 revenue accounted for two-thirds of total server revenue.

With x86's rise came legacy servers' demise, with RISC and Itanium Unix system revenues falling 19.3 percent year over year. "These weak results are compounded by product transitions but are also indicative of the positioning difficulties that Unix vendors are facing," O'Connell explained. "The challenge remains for Unix vendors to move upstream and fight for mainframe business, whilst also defending against Windows and Linux encroachments into their own installed bases."

Microsoft, Juniper urged to patch dangerous IPv6 DoS hole

MORE URGING: Microsoft security expert warns over SharePoint data at risk

Some Windows networking consultants are so concerned about the hole and Microsoft’s lack of interest in fixing it, that they have been warning users directly. “There is a serious Windows vulnerability for RA flooding as a denial-of-service attack on wired LANs. It only takes between 5 to 20 packets to CPU-bound every Windows 7 or Server 2008 machine on that subnet,” said Microsoft MVP Ed Horley, Principal Solutions Architect at Groupware Technology to attendees of the Rocky Mountain IPv6 Summit in Denver, Colo., last week. “I have heard rumor it can also lock out Playstation 2 and Xbox consoles. With enough packets it requires a hard reboot to recover.”

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Although several workarounds exist, each has a significant drawback. One is to turn off IPv6, http://www.networkworld.com/topics/ipv6.html which also disables new Microsoft technologies that rely on it, such as DirectAccess, a service that allows Windows 7 machines to have an always-on remote access connection to Windows Server 2008 R2 servers. Remote Access is touted as a money-saving option as it replaces the need for a separate VPN in Windows environments.

Experts also advise using a router that has implemented a Cisco technology called RA Guard - and while Cisco routers support RA Guard, not all routers do. RA Guard was submitted as an informational document to the IETF, RFC 6105, but it is not on track to become a standard.

Juniper, for instance, has no intention of implementing it and is instead waiting for IETF RFC 6164. “RFC 6105 IPv6 Router Advertisement Guard, published about nine weeks ago, is an informational RFC, as opposed to an IETF Standard, that documents Cisco's proprietary RA-Guard technology. Cisco asserts that at least one of their patent applications (US PPA 20080307516) covers this technology. While Cisco has stated that should RFC 6105 become a standard then they will make a royalty-free license available, since this is not yet a standard there is no such option. We can however achieve much the same functionality simply by applying access control lists,” said Juniper’s Peter Lunk, director of product marketing for high-end security systems.

Lunk added: “Conversely, RFC 6164, released last month, is a ‘standards track’ RFC (which is to say on the way to being, but not yet, a standard) supported by Juniper, Google and IBM and others that addresses many of the same issues in a much more open manner. We expect this to be ratified as a full standard at the next IETF meeting in July.”

BACKGROUND: Jeff Doyle on the case for enterprise IPv6

Heuse has also called Juniper out on the carpet for dragging its feet to fix the hole. Juniper’s Lunk argues that the RA advertisement problem stems from a flaw in the ICMPv6 protocol and should be fixed by the IETF.

“The flaw in the ICMPv6 protocol has only been identified in a small subset of older Juniper products, and only when configured as a host rather than a router,” he said. “According to the protocol, devices configured as hosts must accept and process all advertised routes. This is an inherently dangerous thing to do. If our customers must use auto-configure mode on the IPV6 host on an open LAN, then we strongly recommend whitelisting sources of acceptable routes which will protect them from bogus advertisements.”

FSF: Microsoft is Bound by GPLv3 Terms If It Distributes GPLv3 Code

Last month, Microsoft's legal department proclaimed it doesn't consider itself bound to the terms of version 3 of the General Public License, with respect to certificates it distributed for software, services, and support from Novell. Today, the Free Software Foundation responded by saying if Microsoft distributes software covered by GPLv3, then it's bound by the terms of that license.

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"Microsoft cannot by any act of anticipatory repudiation divest itself of its obligation to respect others' copyrights, reads today's FSF statement. "If Microsoft distributes our works licensed under GPLv3, or pays others to distribute them on its behalf, it is bound to do so under the terms of that license. It may not do so under any other terms; it cannot declare itself exempt from the requirements of GPLv3."

The crux of the dispute centers around whether, when Microsoft agreed to issue certificates for Novell's customers, it effectively distributed software on Novell's behalf. Microsoft has made the case that Novell is the distributor in this case, and that it's just picking up the tab.

The reason why it all matters is because version 3 specifically declares that a licensee doesn't have the right to claim to hold anyone to whom it distributes that code free from patent obligations. The basic theory here is that no distributor can claim ownership of any part of the software, so it can't then presume to hold someone to whom it distributes that software free from liability or infringement for it.

FSF's motivation may be to find a way to legally extend some of that privilege Microsoft granted to Novell last year, to everyone else who might be a recipient of that same software even if Novell's not the distributor. That's probably why Section 11 of the new GPL reads, in part, as follows: "If, pursuant to or in connection with a single transaction or arrangement, you convey, or propagate by procuring conveyance of, a covered work, and grant a patent license to some of the parties receiving the covered work authorizing them to use, propagate, modify or convey a specific copy of the covered work, then the patent license you grant is automatically extended to all recipients of the covered work and works based on it."

Last July, Microsoft's proclamation contained the following: "While there have been some claims that Microsoft's distribution of certificates for Novell support services, under our interoperability collaboration with Novell, constitutes acceptance of the GPLv3 license, we do not believe that such claims have a valid legal basis under contract, intellectual property, or any other law. In fact, we do not believe that Microsoft needs a license under GPL to carry out any aspect of its collaboration with Novell, including its distribution of support certificates, even if Novell chooses to distribute GPLv3 code in the future."

Microsoft went on to say its Novell agreement does not grant any patent rights to any of Novell's customers, through its distributed certificates or otherwise - meaning, it's not granting Novell's customers the rights to use software whose rightful ownership Microsoft wants to retain the right to contest later. However, the company did decide to rescind the portion of its certificates which grant recipients the right to receive support on GPLv3 licensed code from Novell - which was actually in compliance with an earlier FSF request.

But the FSF didn't want last month's proclamation to be the last word. "Microsoft has said that it expects respect for its so-called 'intellectual property' - a propaganda term designed to confuse patent law with copyright and other unrelated laws, and to muddy the different issues they raise," reads the close of the FSF's statement today. "We will ensure - and, to the extent of our resources, assist other GPLv3 licensors in ensuring - that Microsoft respects our copyrights and complies with our licenses."

In the meantime, the issue of whether issuing a certificate toward the purchase of software by someone else constitutes legal distribution of someone else's software, remains open.

WinDVD gets Profile 1.1 certification from Blu-ray

Corel said Thursday that its WinDVD playback software had received certification from the Blu-ray Disc Association to playback discs that use the Profile 1.1 standard.

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With the certification, WinDVD would become the first non-hardware playback option available on the market capable of supporting the updated standard. The first discs based on 1.1 are expected to hit the market in early 2008, as will the version of WinDVD with the capability.

Profile 1.1 allows Blu-ray publishers to use the picture-in-picture functionality that has been a standard on HD DVD discs since the beginning. Also added in 1.1 is mandatory internet connectivity support, among other enhancements. Many of the changes to the Blu-ray standard are likely in response to criticisms of the format by analysts, who say it lacks many of the next-generation features than HD DVD already had.

Certification process begins for Verizon's open devices

The open network era officially begins for Verizon Wireless, as the company's first choice for testing and certification of anyone's CDMA devices, for customers to bring to the network at will, begins testing new equipment today.

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The first independent laboratory for the certification of wireless devices for enrollment by customers to Verizon Wireless' CDMA network, is now officially online. As previously announced as early as November of last year, that lab will be run by Intertek, an established global testing and certification service headquartered in London.

Under VZW's historic plan announced last November, the manufacturer of any handset that wishes to be able to use the VZW network may submit working prototypes to Intertek for testing and certification. All that Intertek will be testing is connectivity, and whether candidate handsets contain anything that may conceivably interfere with the network; beyond that, VZW does not care what operating system a candidate may contain, or what applications may be used. In fact, senior executives have suggested that the company encourage very specialized devices with unique applications be welcomed into the certification process.

Verizon won't necessarily be selling these devices in its outlets or to its customers; it's still up to each manufacturer to make the sale. However, it will be permitted to tout its certification for the VZW network once it's received from Intertek.

VZW's statement this morning made it clear that Intertek may be the first of several third-party labs, and that the relationship between the two companies is not exclusive; a quote from Intertek's VP of operations, David Dennis, characterized his company as "the first testing laboratory approved under the Verizon Wireless Open Development Initiative."

That said, Intertek's not a small operation by any measure. In the first half of this year, it racked up revenue of £457.4 million ($783.7 million at current exchange rates), an increase of 28.6% annually, with profit before taxes of £62.9 million. It lists its corporate founder as none other than Thomas A. Edison in 1896, through the founding of a department called the Lamp Testing Bureau within the company that would become GE. The Bureau then became the independent Electrical Testing Laboratories, which has since been absorbed by Intertek.

Developers of even the most limited set of handsets, even if they produce fewer than 100, won't need to ship prototypes halfway around the world. Intertek maintains over 1,000 laboratories in 110 countries, including throughout Asia, Eastern Europe, and South America.