Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Ubuntu, told The Register that converged devices – phones that can also be PCs – are the future of personal computing.Shuttleworth was at Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona last week, where Ubuntu exhibited to show off its phones, tablets, and IoT (Internet of Things) initiatives.Among the displays was BQ's Ubuntu tablet, which has both a tablet mode and a windowed mode that can be enabled when attached to an external display, keyboard and mouse."We’re showcasing Ubuntu as a converged OS," said mobile product manager Richard Collins. "It’s one codebase that can go onto any device that has some kind of need for a display, one SDK that developers can use. We’ll do the magic to make sure that apps scale for the display. All of that has been engineered into our first tablet product. If you connect a mouse and keyboard, it is running a full Ubuntu PC."Ubuntu smartphones were also on display, destined for the Chinese market, from brands well-known in China, such as Meizu. Collins said that Chinese vendors wanted to build their own ecosystem, and that Ubuntu gave them freedom to do that.

At MWC Microsoft, along with partners such as HP and Acer, were pushing the idea of Windows 10 Mobile as a converged phone and PC, using the feature called Continuum. Shuttleworth said he was delighted.“We’re quite lucky because HP made this big announcement that they were going to do a convergent device, a phone that could be a PC, and we’ve already got it. It really shifted people’s mood. We’ve been saying that we could build, as an open source project, a single device that could run across all these form factors. People have said that’s a little crazy, and now suddenly we’ve got some of the biggest companies in the world saying that’s a great idea,” he said."There’s stuff coming down the pike in terms of changes to personal computing form factors which I think will take this and make it the standard way everybody works. It’s hard to see now, but I’m convinced that’s the future," he added.
Shuttleworth also talked up Ubuntu's Internet of Things credentials. Running Ubuntu Core on devices improves security, he said, thanks to easy updates.

"We’re just a common operating system, but the way we’ve structured that solves one of the key problems for the world, which is the security of the internet of things. That means for example that last week’s major global compromise of Linux libc, which affects pretty much every home router in the world, all the carriers in the world could have fixed that problem if they were using this mechanism, because they would just have pushed the update, and they wouldn’t have to wait for the device manufacturers or do it independently," he said."If you imagine a world where everything has a little bit of Linux in it, this is a much healthier world because the core Linux piece can be updated independently of the piece running the fridge, or the piece running the home router."What are the advantages of Ubuntu over Google's Android, which is also Linux-based?"In the devices space the key question is, is that a small server running that Uavia drone, or is that a phone? If you think of it as a server, then people’s natural inclination is to use a server operating system. If you are the developer thinking, I’m going to write that software on my laptop running Ubuntu and I’m going to test it on the cloud with Ubuntu, so the natural place to run it on the drone is Ubuntu," he said.

"In phones Android has a phenomenal position. We serve the needs of people who want a very secure personal computing platform, and that’s enough for me. If personal computing gets reinvented again, who knows, we could be in front of that next wave."We are certainly at the front of this [IoT] wave. The Google car, the Tesla car, the Audi car, all of those self-driving cars, they all run Ubuntu. A bunch of the leading drone manufacturers, they all run Ubuntu. Robots run Ubuntu, and so on. In the Internet of Things, Ubuntu is the Android. In phones? We’re small but feisty," he told me.In tablets and phones, Ubuntu has the same issues as any mobile OS that is not iOS or Android, which is lack of applications. In this respect, even Windows 10 Mobile is ahead. Libre Office is no fun on a tablet, because it is not designed for touch."We have a new generation of apps that have been designed for touch and convergence," Shuttleworth assured me, but added, "You’re right, we do need to create a new set of apps."

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For this reason, your next phone is unlikely to run Ubuntu.The convergence idea is also an open question. While smartphones now have the computing power to equal basic desktop computers, the difficulty again is whether converged apps, that run seamlessly both as mobile and desktop software, really make sense.HP's solution is that you use Windows Mobile as a client for cloud-hosted remote applications when docked to an external display. At MWC, Intel showcased another idea, with Android and Linux stacks side by side, running different sets of applications.You know what it's like. The Boss asks you some technical question, you give him a non-technical answer and he suddenly thinks you're lying to him – or worse – that you don't know what you're talking about.He needs it explained to him in a manner that sounds technical, but isn't too technical for him to stack overflow. ON A FRIDAY AFTERNOON."A WordPress site?" I ask "Configured with every plugin under the sun? Loosely 'administered' by the PR team? Hosted on a cloud server in who-knows-where, chosen with the same care and attention you'd use in picking a toilet to use after seven pints and a bad curry and a half hour tube ride which only gets you half-way home."

"Never updated, never vetted, protected by what's probably a one-bit self signed SSL key?""With content that was just sucked out of our old web server and sports massaged into the new server by someone who left their A-Z of IT night course just before C, when Butchery came up?"The Boss has his sarcasm-proof hearing aids in so I'll have to spell it out plainly."It is so insecure that the hosting company remirrors it every hour.""So... it takes an hour to be compromised?" he asks, using a word he must have recently heard at an IT Manager's round table somewhere."No, it takes about 30 seconds to compromise, but on average it takes about an hour for the robots to find it." I reply."Well what are the vulnerabilities?" he asks – again with the technical words. (It's possible he's had a stack upgrade somewhere along the line)"I could tell you – but the quantum rule of insecurity applies.""The what?""The quantum rule of insecurity – which states that the act of observing how vulnerable a host or service is changes the insecurity level of the service. Have you not heard of Schrödinger's Laptop?""Schrödinger's Laptop?""There's a laptop, in a box, with a bomb. The bomb is actually timed to explode at some unknown time in the future – BUT if you lift the lid there's a switch connected to the lid which will make the bomb go off immediately. So the question is, is the laptop working or not?

"Is it powered on? Is it open?" the Boss asks, like a helpdesk savant."You're missing the point – the point is that you might not KNOW if the laptop was working or not, but as soon as you open the lid it will DEFINITELY not be working."So... you're saying that... the laptop might have... different... states... than just working or not working.""Who cares, it's not my laptop," I reply. "And it's not my webserver either. We told them to get a reputable hosting company if they put it on the cloud and they just clicked on the first thing that came up in their Google search.""I see. So back to this laptop –" the Boss says, breaking out a small sweat as the CPU cranks up "– are you saying that it could be considered to be alive, dead, neither … or both?""Oh it's dead." I say. "It's got Windows 8 on it.""But you don't KNOW it's dead. And anyway, my home laptop has Windows 8 on it – nothing wrong with it!"

"Knowing isn't the point – But we all know 8's a machine killer. ""But the only way you could be 100 per cent sure is by opening the lid!" he says"IT'S RUNNING WINDOWS 8!" I say "Of course it's dead. Anyway, I wouldn't open the box, I'd just tell security that someone left them a vintage slab of Tennents Extra for helping them to push start their car.""But what if they haven't help push start a car?""Trust me, the only thing OUR security would push start is the ciggy lighter in their car or the call button at a drive-thru deep fry house. And besides, the words 'Tennents Extra' ring in their ears so loudly the tinnitus will block the rest of the sentence out.""So you'd maim a security guard just to prove a point?""It's one of OUR security guards! They gain a stone a year, have a three figure BMI and an average life expectancy of 27! I'd be doing them a favour!""So how do we make our website secure – as it sounds like we don't host it?"

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"You're right we don't. But there are some simple steps we generally take to secure a rogue service hosted in the cloud.""Yes?" "Well first we find the ACTUAL cloud site that is hosting the service – in this case a web site.""...and get a consultant in to patch it and run penetration testing?" the Boss says, with more technical words than he knows what to do with."No. Generally we get a work van, a brick, and three or four large drums of petrol with the filler caps removed..."...The Boss finally realises the futility of trying to engage me in technical conversation in pub-countdown time and wanders off to his office.The PFY is just about to say something to me when there's a medium >crump< sound from outside the office.San Francisco tech darling Docker will today push its Docker Datacenter (DDC) subscription service into general availability.DDC basically lets developers within an enterprise build and test apps inside containers, and deploy them into production using on-premises systems or virtual machines in the cloud. From laptop to server, apps running in their boxes should just work. Docker dubs this a container-as-a-service (CaaS) platform.

Crafted from a mix of open and closed-source software, DDC was first glimpsed in June last year and has been in beta for a while now. It was created after corporate programmers started using Docker containers to package apps with libraries and other dependencies on their laptops, and sysadmins wanted centralized tools to push this code live in a reliable and scalable manner.DDC basically sticks casters on containerized apps and rolls them off coders' laptops, across the factory floor, and out into the sunlight for customers to prod and poke. Docker calls this an end-to-end lifecycle of development, but where's the fun in that?At the heart of the thing is the Docker Trusted Registry, which lets admins manage and store Docker images. Software stacks are then built from these images, tested and deployed using Docker-supplied tools. Images can be cryptographically signed off by developers so that only trusted images end up on production systems.DDC also includes the Docker Universal Control Plane – a key ingredient and the bit that has technically hit general availability today – and, of course, Docker Engine.

Below is an overview of the architecture: programmers build and test their images on their dev machines, then push them to the grey blob which is the Docker Trusted Registry, where files are organized and access is strictly controlled. Then images are deployed to on-premises or cloud-based systems as required.If anything it encourages developers to break up their monolithic enterprise applications into separate components that all the cool kids are calling microservices. A new or updated logging microservice can be created by a developer, tested, and pushed to the registry as a Docker image, and then rolled out live as a container for apps to seamlessly use when ops is happy with the change."We've seen our customers take changes that require months to complete, and reduce their deployment to hours," Scott Johnston, Docker's senior veep of product management, told El Reg."For example, the ING bank in Europe would take nine months to deploy a change: it would have to go through all the steps of code review, Q&A, load testing, and staging and so on."With a monolithic application, changing just one line is so fraught with risk. After going in all with microservices, changes can be pushed without having to do a full recompile and rebuild: you can go from nine months to hours."

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