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.