China takes questions for Obama from Internet users

China's state-run news agency Friday started collecting questions from local Internet users for U.S. President Barack Obama, who is slated to speak to Chinese youth next week during his first visit to the country. Obama is scheduled to hold the session in Shanghai next Monday as part of a three-day visit to a country of rising economic and political influence worldwide. China and the U.S. have appeared to wrangle over the details of the dialogue session, such as whether it will be broadcast live. China's Xinhua News Agency opened an online forum for users to submit questions and said the Web site would broadcast the event.

Chinese officials often portray the Dalai Lama, Tibet's exiled spiritual leader, as a dangerous separatist, while he is usually seen as a peaceful religious activist in the West. "Do you really understand our China?" another question read. Questions that appeared in the forum ranged in tone from innocently curious to accusatory and nationalistic. "China's total elimination of serfdom [in Tibet] in 1959 was identical in nature to Lincoln's abolition of slavery in the U.S.," one post in the forum read, repeating a comparison made by a Chinese foreign ministry spokesman at a press briefing the previous day. "Mr. Obama, do you plan to meet with the Dalai Lama after leaving China?" Demands for greater religious and political autonomy in Tibet are among the most hot-button issues in China. Other questions were more personal. "What kind of Chinese name would you pick for yourself?" one post read. A representative at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing said a final decision on the format of the event still had not been reached. Xinhua did not say if the event would also be broadcast on other Web portals or on TV. When asked earlier this week if the event would be broadcast, Ben Rhodes, a U.S. deputy national security advisor, told reporters that Obama hoped to reach as wide an audience as possible at the session but that details remained to be worked out, according to a transcript of his comments.

Chinese leaders including President Hu Jintao have held rare online chats with Chinese Internet users in an apparent attempt to boost the government's image. Local Internet companies are expected to erase sensitive comments that appear on blogs or other parts of their Web sites and can face punishment for failing to do so. Chinese authorities heavily police the Internet for sensitive political content, pornography and other material deemed harmful.

Cloud computing, virtualization proponents getting antsy

While many organizations have only begun down the cloud computing and virtualization roads in the past few years, some in the industry can't wait to take these technologies to the next level. "The easy steps in consolidation and virtualization have been taken," said Martin McCarthy, president of 451 Group, during introductory remarks for his company's annual client conference in Boston this week. This was a theme I heard repeatedly at the event on Tuesday from users, analysts and vendors. Now new hybrid cloud environments are emerging where IT is asking what workloads they will own and which they will put on third parties, he says. FAQ: Cloud computing demystified  David Allen, CTO of backup and recovery company i365, told me that "The lines are blurring between what's on premise and what's in the cloud." Allen says his outfit, a Seagate company, increasingly sees its role as helping customers use the cloud for storage, though not necessarily moving everything to it.

Currently, cloud integration between providers is mainly at the lowest common denominator level, Allen says. What really has him pumped is a future in which various vendors' clouds interact (like say i365's and Microsoft's Azure) and in which advanced analytics and other services can be offered to exploit data stored in the cloud. On the virtualization front, early adopters said they are looking to make their next step. The hospital first got into virtualization after finding end users, namely doctors, were dissatisfied with IT services despite Genesys having good clinical systems. Dan Stross, CIO for Genesys Regional Medical Center (a 410-bed hospital 50 miles north of Detroit), said during a panel discussion that his organization is ready to move virtualization to back office systems after reaping benefits from it at kiosks used by medical staff on hospital floors.

It turned out that physicians were mainly frustrated by kiosks that saddled them with 45 second logins and logoffs that might work in an office setting but not in a situation where doctors are moving from kiosk to kiosk throughout the day ("Anything over 10 seconds and they're mad before they even see the application."). He also tossed off this line that I liked: "Physicians can remember every bone and muscle in your body, but don't ask them to remember more than 2 or 3 usernames and passwords," he says. That technology enabled Genesys to get initial logins down to 10 seconds and subsequent ones to 5 seconds or less, and it supports single sign-on. Best desktop virtualization software Genesys wound up going with a virtualization product from nSuite (now Symantec Workspace Corporate) because the company was very focused on healthcare organizations. The company's desktop virtualization effort also involves low cost, low energy thin clients from Wyse. Genesys will look to virtualize applications and stream them to its office environment, he said.

As if virtualizing desktops supporting 30 different applications wasn't enough, next up is virtualizing the back office, which is home to about 100 more applications, Stross said. Rachel Chalmers, a 451 Group research director, noted that while many expected benefits of virtualization have been realized – energy efficiency, decoupling of hardware and software, automation – increasingly virtualization is being recognized as a producer of less obvious results, including HIPAA compliance. The pitch from Len Rosenthal, VP of marketing with Virtual Instruments, during a sit-down meeting between sessions was that many organizations fear making the leap to virtualizing their most important applications because of possible performance issues (his company sells products that give visibility into apps performance by examining SAN I/O performance and determining whether ports are underused or overused). "Virtualization has largely centered around the low-hanging fruit up until now, the testing, development and file serving environments," he says. "Virtualizing Oracle, SAP and Siebel applications is the next frontier." Follow Bob Brown on Twitter at www.twitter.com/alphadoggs Chalmers said that she expected desktop virtualization to fall off after early adopters in the investment banking community saw their businesses implode along with the economy, but she has been encouraged to see hospitals, schools and government agencies pick up the slack.

China rules Microsoft violated intellectual property rights

A Beijing court has ruled that Microsoft violated a Chinese company's intellectual property rights in a case over fonts used in past Windows operating systems, state media said Tuesday. Microsoft plans to appeal the case, a company representative said in a statement. The Beijing Number One Intermediate People's Court this week ordered Microsoft to stop selling versions of Windows that use the Chinese fonts, state broadcaster CCTV said. The ruling comes as Barack Obama visits China for his first time as U.S. president.

A U.S. business association this week appealed to Obama for further efforts to protect intellectual property rights in China, where pirated copies of DVDs and computer software including Windows are widely sold on streets and in bazaars. The visit has brought renewed focus on tensions over piracy and the trade of high-tech products between the countries. Microsoft originally licensed Zhongyi's intellectual property more than a decade ago for use in the Chinese version of Windows 95, according to Zhongyi. Microsoft agrees with the court that the key in the two cases is a dispute over the scope of licensing agreements, the Microsoft representative said. Zhongyi argues that agreement applied only to Windows 95, but that Microsoft continued to use the intellectual property from Windows 98 to Windows XP. The court reportedly also ruled that Microsoft's use of a Chinese input system from Zhongyi did not violate any licensing agreements. But it disagrees with the ruling on the coverage of the agreements, which it believes also include its use of the fonts, the representative said.

Pirated versions of Windows 7 were on sale in one Beijing bazaar weeks before the software officially went on sale last month. Windows XP is the most widely used OS in Chinese offices and homes, but countless users run pirated copies. Microsoft offers Windows 7 in China for a lower price than in developed markets, and often labels its software "legal" to differentiate it from the pirated versions common in the country. Windows 7 Home Premium costs 699 yuan (US$103) in China, compared to $199.99 in the U.S.

Sybase smooths enterprise path for iPhones

Sybase is extending its Afaria mobile-device management platform and database software to the Apple iPhone, taking advantage of new enterprise features in Version 3.1 of the iPhone's software to give IT departments more control and capabilities on the popular handset. Going on sale in the middle of this month, Sybase's Afaria 6.5 will finally give administrators the kinds of controls they have had previously for mobile platforms such as Symbian, Microsoft Windows Mobile 6.1, Research In Motion BlackBerry and PalmOS. Apple's recent iPhone 3.1 release added the capability to lock down certain settings on a device so the user can't change them using the phone's configuration utility, said Mark Jordan, senior product manager for Afaria. Though many enterprise employees bring iPhones into the office and rely on them for personal communications, the device originally caught on as a consumer gadget for music, Web browsing and entertainment applications, and has only gradually made inroads as a workplace tool. That allowed Sybase to give enterprise IT departments the power to do things such as block applications, define the required password strength and lock down Wi-Fi and VPN (virtual private network) settings.

With the new Afaria, enterprises can make and change settings on employees' iPhones over the air based on overall policies for certain departments, job descriptions and other criteria. Administrators can now establish a trusted relationship between Afaria and the employee's phone using a certificate, he said. Among other capabilities, they can also require device authentication for access to a corporate directory and set up compliance reporting on the employee's use of the phone. Also on Tuesday, it announced tools for the Sybase SQL Anywhere database to be used for synchronization of data between an iPhone application and a back-end database. Sybase announced Afaria's iPhone capabilities on Tuesday at the iPhone Developer Summit in Santa Clara, California.

Using SQL Anywhere, internal developers and software vendors can build in bi-directional synchronization between an on-device app and relational databases including Sybase, Oracle, SQL Server, DB2 and MySQL. This frees employees from having to depend on the cellular data connection to get work done while on the road, Jordan said. Also on Tuesday, the company's Sybase 365 subsidiary introduced a turnkey system for mobile banking on the iPhone. There is a beta test program now open for SQL Anywhere for iPhone. With it, banks can allow their customers to check balances, transfer funds among accounts, securely communicate with bank representatives, find branches and automatically dial the bank, Jordan said. The Sybase mBanking 365 iPhone platform is available now and is already deployed by BBVA Compass as the BBVA Compass Mobile application.

1Password 3 beta now open to all

Encumbered by passwords? Want to help out some classy Mac developers in their quest to kill bugs dead? Eager to try unreleased software? If you missed out when Agile Web Solutions was offering a private beta of 1Password 3 to customers on Snow Leopard, there's good news! 1Password 3 is now available as a public beta for one and all.

Feel special? Yes, that means you. You should! 1Password 3's new features include 1PasswordAnywhere, which allows you to open a 1Password Agile Keychain as a folder with a password-protected Web interface on any operating system. Software Licenses now have their own category, complete with icons and a new vault-like appearance. You can even add and edit existing items in your Agile Keychain from the browser, but only on Mac OS X computers that have 1Password 3 installed and the Agile Keychain selected.

There's also a separate dashboard for iPhone and iPod Touch syncing that will allow you to sync just the passwords you want to 1Password Touch. 1Password 3 also features touch gestures inspired by those in Apple Mail; a brand new UI; metadata tags to better organize items; the ability to create, edit and remove fields for Login and Wallet items; and 64-bit support for Snow Leopard. First, it requires that you're running at least Mac OS X Leopard 10.5. Second, since it's a beta, you really should backup your 1Password Keychain just in case this beta spawns the dread lord Cthulhu and your passwords are dragged into an inky black abyss. (We are assured that this is a very remote possibility, but you can never be too careful.) Finally, it'd be nice if you had an account at Agile Web Solutions' support forums to tell the developers about bugs you've found or learn about bugs that have been discovered by fellow beta testers. Before you give this software a try, you need to be aware of a few things. It's all part of being a good beta tester. If you've purchased 1Password 2 before then, fear not! The beta of 1Password 3 is free for everyone, but the full version will cost $40 with the same 100% money back guarantee as 1Password 2. If you've bought 1Password 2 after February 1, you'll get an upgrade for free.

You can upgrade a single user today for the limited time price of $20 or upgrade a family license for $30.

Quicksilver beta 57 released, not dead yet

Fans of the launcher-and-do-everything utility Quicksilver have been concerned for a while that it had might have transformed into a Norwegian Blue parrot. Although Jitkoff has since released Quicksilver as open source, the fact that he's being paid to work on similar software, combined with widespread Quicksilver problems after the release of Snow Leopard, led many to believe that Quicksilver's days were numbered. (And if they are, there will probably be a trigger to count them.) A maintenance release on November 6 brought basic compatibility with Mac OS X 10.6, but many plugins remained broken, and the process of getting much of the functionality working wasn't easy. The primary developer, Nicholas Jitkoff, is now a Google employee and the author of the far less featureful Google Quick Search Box.

It seemed questionable whether any more upgrades were in the pipeline, so we Quicksilver addicts can be heartened by Monday's release of 1.0 beta 57. (The last official "stable" version was 1.0 beta 54 in December, 2007, and 1.0 beta 57 upgrades from beta 56a7. Obscure versioning being, of course, part of Quicksilver's charm.) The update doesn't bring new features, but that's not a problem to the Quicksilver community, 95 percent of whom (myself included) can't figure out how to use all of the functionality that's already there. It's not much, but it's reassuring to know that we're in the "I'm not dead yet" routine rather than the parrot sketch. Instead, the change log highlights a dozen things which "don't crash anymore," and several behind-the-scenes tweaks and upgrades. One oddity: you may have missed this upgrade, as it doesn't seem to have been released through regular channels. So either I'm running the latest version of an open-source project, or my MacBook (and around 400,000 other people's) is about to self-destruct in a hotkey-triggered fireball. I found it on MacUpdate, but there's no mention of it on Blacktree's web site, Wikipedia (that's a first), or in the automatic update mechanism.

Readers with more sense than I have may want to wait a while before installing. And despite its problems, it still has lovely plumage. Quicksilver is free software; users of older versions of Mac OS X can download relevant versions directly at the Blacktree site.

Microsoft launches new version of MSN

Microsoft plans to start rolling out a redesigned MSN.com on Wednesday in the U.S., the first major update for the page in more than 10 years. That's a sharp departure from the previous design, which featured around 40 links on just the top third of the page. Frequent visitors to the site will immediately notice one major change: The new page has only half the number of links as the old one. The site has also dropped the trademark blue background for a simpler white page.

Users also said that they sometimes had a hard time finding what they were looking for, they were dissatisfied with search results prior to the launch of Bing, and they said the site had an outdated look and feel. The new design aims to address user feedback and complaints, said Erik Jorgenson, corporate vice president for MSN. Customers said they want a single site that is easy to use, he said. "What they don't like is too much clutter," he said. Microsoft called Wednesday's launch a preview of the redesign, meaning it will appear for some people immediately but will become widely available in the new year. The site is now divided into just a handful of sections, many of which are fed information that may be personally relevant to the specific user. Those who don't immediately get the new site can visit preview.msn.com to see it. For instance, a box in the lower right corner of the home page includes three tabs: Windows Live, Facebook and Twitter.

A box in the lower left corner of the page displays local weather, headlines and events. The Facebook tab shows a list of friends' recent updates to Facebook and lets the user update their Facebook status from the MSN page. Clicking on the local link launches a new page, MSN Local Edition. It also displays more detailed weather information and a local map where users can view traffic data. That page uses Bing search to draw in local news and information.

The site draws on users' IP addresses to deliver local information to them. That page won't launch Wednesday, but in the future people who have Silverlight installed may begin seeing the page. Microsoft will also be testing out a version of the home page that uses Silverlight. In the Silverlight version, clicking on the Twitter link, for example, pops up a box where users can view updates as well as trending topics. Yahoo, Microsoft's biggest portal competitor, also recently redesigned its home page, but with different results. Around 50 percent of MSN.com users already have Silverlight, Jorgenson said.

The Yahoo page still includes a long list of links to other pages and otherwise mainly features a list of links to news stories. MSN will also still offer MyMSN, a customizable page, but Microsoft has found that not many people use it. "A large majority of users aren't willing to put time into customizing and personalizing," Jorgenson said. Yahoo users can build themselves a customized page to include instant messaging, stock quotes, e-mail, weather, calendar and other tools. The new design represents a change in thinking at MSN. "We've moved away from the days of being an Internet directory of everything to everyone," he said. As many as 100 million people in the U.S. visit MSN.com each month, Microsoft said.

Instead, MSN wants to deliver useful content across areas that it believes users find most important, Jorgenson said.