EARTHED TECH

Microsoft is facing an ongoing legal challenge in Argentina from an open source company which alleges the software giant used its Windows Starter Edition to dominate the country’s operating system market.

Argentinian software company Pixart SRL launched the lawsuit in September 2008 but the possibility of the case being heard has become more likely in recent weeks, according to the company’s lawyer Dr Uriel Blustein of Estudio Blustein & Asociados.

“It is a suit filed in the ‘National commission for Fair Trading’, for an alleged abuse of dominant position,” Dr Blustein told eWEEK Europe in an email this week. “The Commission in is the process of deciding whether the trial will take place,” (i.e. whether there is enough evidence to justify an investigation).

Don’t cry for us Argentina, says Microsoft

Pixart alleges that the market share of its Debian-based Linux distribution, Rxart, has been undermined by uncompetitive pricing practices from Microsoft. In a document outlining its case against Microsoft, Pixart argues that the existence of PCs pre-installed with a cut-down version of Microsoft Windows XP, known as Microsoft Stater Edition, was effectively used to undercut machines loaded with Rxart.

“Microsoft decided in late 2007 to pursue a policy of aggressive pricing subsidies to try to recover the market economically and financially suffocating Pixart SRL, mainly through a version of the operating system called ’starter edition’,” the document states.

Pixart claims to have had an installed base of around 320,000 units in 2005 but that base has been gradually eroded by the existence of Windows Starter Edition, and more recently Windows Vista Home Basic.

For more go to: eWEEK Europe UK

Confession time. I am a comic book fan. There I have said it.

Some prefer the term “Graphic Novels” but it’s always come across as a bit defensive to me. Comics are something to be ashamed of so let’s come up with a more grandiose title.  Then again lumping together the likes of Watchmen and The Beano because they both have speech bubbles is about as useful as saying The Exorcist and Home Alone are both films.

Apart from dipping into the occasional “graphic novel”, I haven’t been a heavy user of comics for a while. That is until last week when I started playing with my iPhone and found a whole HellBoy series posted in the App Store. Afters some more exploratory surfing, I discovered specialist comic reading apps such as ComiXology and iVerse. Rather than downloading comics straight from the App Store, these tools give you a neat user interface and a payment system. In the case of iVerse you get your own cute little wooden shelf in which all your purchases are lined up for your browsing pleasure. Each comic costs around 59p to download which is about equivalent to a music track – and is fairly reasonable.

But what is really neat is the display interface which means that you can choose to view a whole page of the comic – as you would do in the traditional paper-format – or by flipping the screen horizontally you can reach each panel blown up to full-screen. This panel by panel viewing of the comic format is really enjoyable – and feels even more natural than flicking through paper pages. What’s more, the iphone screen is almost the perfect size and resolution for viewing the images and text.

Now I realise comics aren’t everyone’s cup of Kryptonite but I think the iPhone – and it’s various imitators – could represent a real revolution for the comic book industry. Marvel has just this week licensed some of its top titles – Spiderman, Captain America, X-Men – internationally to ComiXology an indication that there is market share to be had.

Reading plain text on the iPhone or another e-reader is Ok but not exactly compelling. But the combination of images and text which comics represent feels like a natural fit for mobile devices such as the iPhone – and potentially the iPad. Combine this with the renewed interest in comics generated by the rash of recent Hollywood blockbusters based on graphic novels – The Dark Knight, Wanted, 30 Days Of Night, Watchmen – and before too long more comic book fans might be ready to reveal their secret identities.

For more check out this review on CNET

The head of Germany’s main IT trade body told the audience at the opening ceremony of the CeBIT technology exhibition that one in four of his countrymen are happy to have a microchip inserted for ID purposes.

Professor August Wilhelm Scheer made the comments at an event this week to announce the start of the show which runs until Saturday in the German city of Hanover. With around 4000 companies from over 70 countries expected at the event, CeBIT continues to be the largest tech show in Europe according to its organisers.

As well as foretelling the imminent demise of the CD and DVD, Professor Scheer said that implanting chips into humans was going to become commonplace. “The speed of the development is not going to be reduced this decade,” he told an audience of tech execs and politicians including German Chancellor Angela Merkel. “Some developments can already be seen. CDs and DVDs are going to disappear as material sources of information. Wallpaper will be replaced by flat screens and many of us will have chips implanted beneath our skin by the end of next decade.

Rather than being based on pure speculation, Scheer said that his organistion BITKOM had actually conducted research which had shown that a quarter of Germans would be happy to have a chip implanted if it meant they could access services more easily.

For more go to eWEEK Europe UK

Smart businesses have always recognised the importance of maximising their most valuable asset – staff – with an effective human resources department. But amid the faltering recovery from the financial crisis, HR is increasingly being recognised for its strategic value as UK plc look towards growth.

To help HR meet this increasingly strategic role, proactive firms should investigate how IT can be used to make HR an even more precise discipline, says Richard Beatty, professor of human resources and leadership at Rutgers University, New Jersey.

“Only 15 per cent of positions – not people – really have a direct impact on the creation of customer and economic value in firms.” he says. “Unless you know and understand where that is happening and manage towards that through the smart use of data and analytics then you will probably under-perform as a business.”

But while Beatty sees the potential of technology to increase the sophistication of the HR, he has questioned whether this “people-centric” discipline has the technical pedigree to cope with a more data intensive role.

“The language of organisations is numbers; HR isn’t very good at data analytics,” Beatty told a recent CFO conference in Orlando. “They don’t think like business people. Many of them entered human resources because they wanted to help people, which I’m all for, but I’m also for building winning organisations.”

For more go to: Silicon.com

Start-up Israeli security company Trusteer claims to have hit on a different tactic when it comes to combating financial malware and making activities such as online banking more secure.

Rather than trying to eliminate every nasty from a user’s desktop, the four year-old company claims its Rapport software establishes a secure link between a customer’s desktop and the bank’s systems, excluding any malware in the process. The approach has been greeted with enthusiasm by analysts with a recent report from Frost and Sullivan neatly distilling the problem and Trusteer’s response to it.

“This new approach makes the basic assumption that the end user’s computer will always have active malware scripts and applications,” the report states. “In the battle of protecting information from malware, Trusteers’ solution takes the right approach of focusing on what needs to be done rather then fighting a lost battle.”

And it is not only analysts that are impressed. Banks including RBS and Natwest are already urging their customer to adopt the software, with HSBC becoming the latest financial services company to jump on board.

But despite its promise, Trusteer – and the customers using it – have come in from some criticism from more traditional anti-virus companies. Graham Cluley, a security expert with Sophos has blogged about dubious metrics used by RBS to encourage customers to adopt Rapport. He also criticised the decision by HSBC to allow its customer to save their log-in IDs locally – not connected to the Rapport software deal according to Trusteer – which he described as usability wrongly triumphing over security.

For more go to: eWEEK Europe UK

Questions have been raised over some of the security measures introduced by HSBC to protect online banking customers, including the decision to allow ID information to be saved.

In a statement released this week, HSBC announced that it has introduced a security application called Rapport from tech company Trusteer – based in the US and Israel – for download by its customers. Despite being frequently described as “new software” in the HSBC statement, Rapport is already being used by several other banks including RBS, Alliance and Leicester and Natwest, according to Trusteer.

Commenting on the availability of Rapport to its customers, HSBC’s digital security manager Nick Staib said that downloads of the software had surpassed expectations. “I am delighted that so many customers share our interest in keeping personal and banking details safe,” he said. “Rapport is software that I use myself and I am happy recommending to friends.”

According to Trusteer and HSBC, Rapport works by “locking down browsers to prevent unauthorised access to web pages and to the confidential information that flows through the browsers”.

But despite the recommendation by HSBC, and Trusteer’s own claims, security experts have questioned some previous claims about the software. Consultant for rival security specialist Sophos, Graham Cluley said he wouldn’t comment on how effective Rapport was but referred to an earlier blog posting about RBS’s claims for the software.

For more go to: eWEEK Europe UK

The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), which has been hit by strikes over redundancies, has signed a massive desktop services deal with Fujitsu, which itself has been hit by strike action over pensions.

In a statement released this week, DWP IT director general and chief information officer John Harley said that the department had awarded its desktop services contract to Fujitsu with the new contract due to start on 1 September 2010. The exact worth of the deal has not been disclosed but some reports have placed it in the region of £1 billion.

Although DWP has already used Fujitsu for some IT services, this latest agreement sees the computer services specialist oust HP from one of the largest IT contracts in the UK. The deal involves around 140,000 desktops and, according to Fujitsu, is the single biggest desktop and thin client outsourcing deal in the UK.

For more go to eWEEK Europe UK

Apple has been criticised by free software campaigners over the way it controls music and other content on platforms including its newly launched iPad tablet device.

Launched on Wednesday at a event in San Francisco, the Apple iPad is expected to be released in the UK in March equipped with Wi-Fi access only with larger capacity 3G-enabled models available later in the year. As well as allowing users to browse music and video content in the same way as the iPhone and other Apple hardware, the iPad will also tap into an iBooks bookstore application launched alongside the device.

But free-software campaigners have criticised the iPad and iBooks launch as another example of the computer maker’s attempts to control digital content through technical measures known as digital rights management (DRM). Anti-DRM campaingers from the Free Software Foundation set up “Apple Restriction Zones” on approaches to the Yerba Buena Center For Arts, where the Apple launch was held.

For more go to: eWEEK Europe UK

The idea that Apple is going to disrupt publishing with iBooks (and iPad) in the same way it did the music industry with iTunes is to completely misunderstand how the market for books is going to develop.

I have tried the e-reader software on the iPhone and other devices and no matter how good it is supposed to be reading on a screen is just not comfortable. Not for reasons of eye-strain so much as of distraction. Knowing the device you hold in your hands is capable of letting you watch a movie of browse the web means that its hard to concentrate and lose yourself in reading in the same way as holding a novel.

But more importantly – e-books are fundamentally a red herring. Why go to the effort of reading a page of text at all – when the device you are holding is capable of rendering the author’s voice or even a cast of actors to you at the press of a button. And what is more, audiobooks are portable and can be listened to on the move. The future of publishing is not the replacement of books with e-books but the return to the oral tradition of story-telling which is word of mouth – something that Stephen Fry has argued predates the written word by thousands of years.

E-books are at best a transitional technology with a niche audience – novels will endure and in the meantime the popularity of audio-books will grow.

Getting the board to approve IT projects requires not only good presentation skills but also the ability to speak the same language as the rest of the business, says Andrew Donoghue.

While it’s debatable whether IT leaders are actually any less articulate than senior managers from other areas of the business, the idea that technical staff lack communication skills is certainly a persistent one.

One of the issues may be that IT concepts are fundamentally complex and as a result are more difficult to explain.

While this may be the case, some experts claim that effective technologists should be able to talk about what they do in direct and easily understood terms. “If an IT technologist can’t explain in plain English what it is he is trying to do or what are the issues, then the techie knows what he is doing but needs to go on a communication skills training course – or he is lying to you,” says David Chan, director of the Centre for Information Leadership at City University.

While basic communication skills can be learned, for some technologists it’s not that they can’t express themselves. Rather they struggle to communicate effectively because they are insulated from the wider imperatives of their business, say experts.

Adam Thilthorpe, director for professionalism at the British Computer Society (BCS), says there is a tendency for heads of department – including the CIO – to think only in terms of their part of the organisation.

“The first thing [for IT leaders] to do is to set all projects in the context of the business. That means the sector and market that the organisation operates in, not an internal departmental view. More and more the technology part of IT is commoditised and it is the information part, and the person who controls that, who holds the key to future success. The CIO should be uniquely positioned to best take advantage of this knowledge,” he explains.

Other key issues to address, given the depressed economy and emerging legislation prompted by the financial crisis and environmental concerns, are costs and compliance.

“The language of the boardroom is finance but to ensure that you are fluent, an understanding of Sarbanes-Oxley and similar corporate governance issues is a must.

CIOs must also take ownership of the exciting stuff, like innovation, and set it in the context of competitive advantage for the organisation. No CEO is ever going to be interested in IT for IT’s sake,” says Thilthorpe.

The best CIOs, it seems, are able to speak to the rest of the business in terms they understand and anticipate the questions and requirements they have for a new system.

“Our IT department is very good at not going down purely the technical aspects of an IT system. We will think about what are the right solutions from a business perspective,” says Ian Sibbald, financial controller of Cranfield Business School, who interacts with senior IT staff on a frequent basis.

For full article go to: Silicon.com