All your bases to belong to Gates

recently wrote about Microsoft Singularity O/S and the implication it may have on the slightly shattered Longhorn/Vista. As a new initiative is launched off the ground, I immediately get unnerving reflexes. What is most disturbing is Microsoft’s history of pushing companies away from their platform in what can be described as the “embrace, extend and extinguish” tactic. Will Singularity make the transition in strategy, namely being more ‘kind’ to third-party software, or will it only re-enforce the ‘iron fist’ regime and render third-parties obsolete?

Microsoft’s history and current practices have led to friction with the European Commission. With anti-trust ignited in Korea lately, some speculate that it could lead to a quicker spread of Linux in far east Asia. Korea have requested the removal of some bundled, pre-installed software. Microsoft, in turn, threatened to take their toys and go back home.

More recently we heard that Microsoft will push towards their own implementation of anti-virus software for their own platform. By doing so, they are pushing aside companies and vendors that have taken care of that market so far, essentially making up for Microsoft’s mistakes and flaws. Ironically, Microsoft will have incentive for bug creation. After all, it will be them who can charge to have that fixed, by selling anti-virus software. In recent hours we have heard about Microsoft’s entry into VoIP — the means being a takeover of another small company.

Microsoft Office 12 is said to support PDF creation in the trunk, which has so far been possible only using Adobe’s professional and premium software. Thus, Microsoft merely take food from the mouths of Adobe developers, much like they did to Netscape. They seem determinded to intercept or steal the popular PDF format. Office which exports PDF’s is merely an unneeded bloat, as well as an imitation (see screenshot alongside more examples). For imitation and theft, Microsoft have recently lost some cases in court too. Office is no more functional than Open Office, which many still wrongly perceive as Office in a brown paperbag. Office itself evolved from existing applications that emerged in the 70′s and 80′s and it continues to be the primary money-making cow.

Any innovative software on the Windows platform is pushed outside by imitation, bundling, extension and introduction of mysterious proprietary formats. Adobe, a giant that has merged with Macromedia, are facing yet another threat from Microsoft — a Flash alternative.

Some would say that Microsoft also snub OpenGL in their next version of Windows, possibly to be dropped in favour of Microsoft´s DirectX. Some time ago I read that no support for Palm handhelds will be included in Vista either. As for the ‘Internet front’, there seems to be a push towards ASP and .Net, not to mention opaque sites that are made strictly MSIE-compatible.

What will Microsoft do about Google Desktop 2, which has just come out? Google appear to invade Microsoft’s territory and I can’t imagine that Microsoft are too happy about it. In fact, Google are their worst fear (confer Winner Takes All). The year to come will be an intersting one to observe. With Linux, Firefox and Google (among many more) spreading and reaching Average Joe’s desktop, we are yet to see changes that are difficult to ignore.

Related items:

• Google-IBM Desktop Search
• Google Desktop (version 1) Released

Recommended (contextually-related) reading:

• Reasons to Use Linux

HIS item is about my personal research and, in particular, its recent development and progression, which may take it in a different and exciting direction. I currently work on assessment of registration algorithms, which I have described in some depth over at MARS — my research-related publishing platform. The latest item discusses everything at a more technical level.

Below lies the diagram which describes a possible framework, which is still at its ‘propsal stage’. The ultimate aim is to provide an e-Science workbench for medical image analysis. My experiments account for a mere subset, where image/volume sequences need be aligned.

Click image for full-sized version

The memo/statement titled “Reining in Google” is becoming rather popular in cyberspace. It discusses Google’s attempt to re-write copyright laws or at least reach a point of acceptance through persistence. They have already begun scanning books in 3 large libraries despite the looming lawsuits. I recently mentioned an item which Google had posted in defence of Google Print, but has it not gone out-of-hand already?

Where is the Google that I used to know? The Google that vowed not to do evil and even considered employing me as a system administrator. I am filled with mixed emotions. Before the IPO, Google reflected on Page and Brin. It is now that lunatic Schmidt and thousands of greedy investors.

UPDATE (05/11/2005): With reference to a previous mentioning of Microsoft book scanning, it is now official. Microsoft begin digitising books as well.

Longhorn spherical desktop screen-shot
Taken from a Microsoft meeting/demo in Chicago (click to enlarge)
Apparently, over-complexity did not permit this to become a reality

ERHAPS struggling to cope with existing Windows code, an operating system like Longhorn/Vista had to be re-built from scratch. To weed out competition, Microsoft face some serious dilemmas and have just taken some action.

Windows code, which was admittedly insufficiently modular, could no longer be run properly. Troubled and over-occupied with bug fixes and time-critical security patches, the O/S ended up ‘plastered’ all around. Consequently, Longhorn (Vista) lacked several long-promised features. This disappointed many customers and gave no compelling reason to ever upgrade. At present, Windows is conspicuously lagging behind some innovation and development over at Apple, not to mention Linux.

Major news are flowing in as I speak. Microsoft now turn their attention to a new operating system that will be built from the ground up and be named Singularity. Is it possible that Windows is so flawed (beyond our comprehension) that even Microsoft recognise a need to restart? Is the market unaware of the mess Windows closed-source actually is? With so many necessary patches and bloat, it seems to have gone out of the programmers’ control. With managers and staff leaving Microsoft (notably Lee), experience, competence and leadership are lost as well.

Apple was once in a similar situation. Mac OS 9 was rather weak. It seemed to have reached a dead-end and was often complemented by Windows software such as Internet Explorer and Outlook Express. Then, Apple took Darwin as codebase while merely discarding OS 9. Nowadays, we can only behold what a good product they ended up with. Marketing, however, has a limited budget at Apple.

From Microsoft’s Web site:

Singularity is a research project focused on the construction of dependable systems through innovation in the areas of systems, languages, and tools. We are building a research operating system prototype (called Singularity), extending programming languages, and developing new techniques and tools for specifying and verifying program behavior.

It sounds as if Microsoft primarily target the research niche, which is dominated by platforms other than Windows (predominantly Linux).

Bill Gates arrested in his younger days (photo in public domain)

OBERT Scoble is a well-known Microsoft evangelist and blogger. He has recently set up a free blog in wordpress.com, which is of course based on Open Source software. I decided to ask him what he was up to. I was highly skeptic as he made this questionable migration of his popular blog and heavily-requested feeds. Earlier this week I sent Scoble an E-mail and got a disappointing reply; both of which I post verbatim below:

Me:

You are of course aware that you run your blog on Linux while evangelizing Windows. Hypocrisy?

Robert:

No.

An evangelist must be credible if he wants to be listened to.

The only way to be credible is to actually use other methodologies and products.

You must have evangelism confused with marketing. The two are not the same.

Rather than being critical of Open Source or PHP/MySQL, he implicitly revealed devious intentions; at least that’s the way I interpreted it. Only a couple of days later Scoble posted an item titled “WordPress Sucks”. He gets paid to say that stuff. He came in to give a critique and when the WordPress community posted follow-ups in defense of WordPress, they simply echoed his unjustifiable rants.

To make matters worse, Scoble opted for a free software package and complained about an extremely powerful feature in WordPress: RSS feeds. Is he complained about WordPress feeds, he could bash his wrath anything (or envy anything for that matter). Owing to that, he loses credibility rather than gain any.

Scoble on WordPress was a ticking bomb from day 1 and it exploded prematurely for all the wrong reasons. Like Matt said, WordPress is the Burger King of feeds. WordPress.com must become more selective when it comes to people it permits access and subscription to. I once mentioned the importance of WordPress invites. They are perhaps insufficient as they only deter splogs and mirrors, not enemies.

LASHDOT points to a laughable patent, which is mentioned in the New Scientist. Coffee beer might soon be no weirder than ice tea or even my odd adaptation to concentrated coffee.

A drink somewhere between coffee and beer could soon be on the menu. Nestec, part of the Nestlé empire in Switzerland, has filed patents in every major market round the world on a “fermented coffee beverage” that pours and foams like beer, but smells of strong coffee and packs a concentrated caffeine kick.

Only two days ago, the guys at the gym were joking about Starbucks and coffee junkies. “Give me 5 shots of latte!”, they said. Will that joke become a reality shortly?

Other items on coffee:

• Concentrated Coffee
• Coffee Leads to Stress
• Mister Coffee

SearchStatus in action

ITE ranks are largely volatile and this post addresses the issue by referring to a few case studies. msn.com has just returned to PageRank 9, having stooped down to PageRank 2 during early stages of an ongoing Google update (Jagger Update was briefly mentioned in the past). Moreover, I have just noticed an Alexa rank (context/what is Alexa) oddity:

If one takes a glimpse at:

http://www.slate.com/

It’s surprising that it bears the Alexa rank of 2, which means that it is (grossly) estimated second in the world in terms of Web traffic.

Surprising, is it not?

Flicking back to MSN (Yahoo has been number 1 for quite some time and Google is typically third):

msn.com bears the Alexa rank of 2 just as well.

Are Alexa ranks not telling the full story? Is that a bug? It is a form of ambiguity, but not quite so. Perhaps Slate Magazine have plenty of traffic, but judging by other traffic metrics such as Netscraft, that is highly doubtful if not impossible. So how can it be on par with MSN? I used to think that Alexa provided a meaningful measure for the top 100 or so sites. Recently, it lost its credibility for a whole variety of reasons. For example, its spying on the innocent surfers recently led to my observation that the Web Archive can crawl hidden pages.

Mind you, the PageRank oddity mentioned above is not to be ignored either. It reminds us all that PageRank should be with a pinch of salt, especially throughout major updates of the indices.