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

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.

have already introduced my latest Open Source project (namely Iuron, the Semantic Knowledge Engine) a few times in the past. This afternoon I will be meeting who is questionably the father of the Semantic Web to discuss this project. However, I begin to suspect that Google have picked up on similar ideas by now. From the article which can be found in the Edge (among other places):

“We are not scanning all those books to be read by people,” explained one of my hosts after my talk (at Google). “We are scanning them to be read by an AI.”

There is a certain hint in that Web site as to long-term intentions and goals at Google. Overall, I don’t know if Google have beat me to it, but I suspect it was not something too crypic or far-fetched. Anyone in the field of machine learning must have thought about it at one stage or another. I hope that my speculation is mistaken and that Google will stick with naive indexing of unreliable Web content.

Speaking of threat from the giants, Google Reader, being an AJAX-rich Web application for reading feeds, has had direct impact on Feedlounge, which is an application I help test. Ever since the launch of Google Reader, Feedlounge development has been in a rather idle and fragile state. I hope Iuron will tread strongly despite the known perils. It is a non-profit, Open Source initiative after all.

UPDATE: I have been told that knowledge representation might be a greater barrier than I had imagined. My preconceptions regarding its maturity were slightly optimistic.

Dozens of remote sessions occupying a cluster. Terminals shaded on the left monitor (click to enlarge)

HATEVER operating system we use, the idea of using remote terminals should not be foreign to us. These days, it is rather common to log on to a computer remotely and manage it from afar as if we were actually there.

Inter-Platform Connections

Windows users frequently stick to VNC, which requires a high-bandwidth connection and grabs the entire desktop/workspace metaphorically ‘across the wire’. Nonetheless, there are some smart algorithms (c/f Citrix clients), which only re-draw elements once they change, so speed/bandwidth might not be the utmost concerns.

Linux users, on the other hand, are capable of establishing transparent connections with Windows machines via VNC, for which there are many applications in existence (Remote Desktop or rdesktop among several more variants). Linux also takes a different approach in its most natural method for remote access. Take, for example, SSH connections wherein individual windows get ‘grabbed’ and communicated over the network, only upon demand. Everything else should be managed from the command-line interface (CLI), e.g. bash and xterm. This might be less natural to the majority of users nowadays, especially to those unfamiliar with CLI’s.

Windows connectivity to *nix protocols can be established using the renowned PuTTY. In the case of Telnet or RLogin, applicability might be slightly different, but merely all protocols seem to have been covered. In fact, Windows typically supports telnet at its core (Start » Run... » telnet » ENTER). This establishes a somewhat mutual relationship. Windows users can remotely log in to Linux machine (might need a commercial X-session if not CygWin) and Linux users can connect to Windows hosts. In modern Linux distribution, all necessary toolsets are already pre-installed from what I can gather.

Extreme Use of Remote Access

When carrying out some computer vision experiments, I was at times using over 30 Pentium 4′s. These were used for quite a considerable overnight resource hogs. The communication barrier was merely inexistent; I an fortunate enough to work upon a 100Mbit Ethernet backbone. To give some indication of how fast the connection actually is, I can transfer an entire CD (~650 MB) across campus in less than a minute. That unbelievable speed is at times truly needed. I estimate that I use up bandwidth of over 100 GB per month, mainly due to backup necessities.

As regards extreme use of remote login, this is one of the most exciting experiences, to me at least. Rather than conducting large-scale experiments over the period of one month on a single CPU, they can be distributed, thus completed within a day. Nothing can beat that in terms of productivity. AI is known to be resources-greedy. Our computer vision methodology falls under that branch too. I will soon write about the use of supercomputers to run my experiments, albeit this is still under negotiation.

Traffic Chain

I could no longer resist my geek spirit so I decided to experiment with the idea of SSH chaining. The dependency of one machine upon another is something that intrigues me, so often I log in remotely to one machine, which in turn connects to another.

I decided to set up a larger SSH chain wherein I connect to my own computer via an entire ‘ring’ of machines, using SSH. I wanted to see how this affects speed and responsiveness in applications that ‘travel’. Needless to mention, this also cripples all computers in that ring. This observation has some interesting implications on its own. These intermediatory machines can be perceived as purposeless routers. If one computer in the chain is reset, the whole chain collapses and the connection is lost. It may also take a while to re-build, which to me at least, is amusing.

Cluster Control

On to some more extreme uses of SSH, some time ago I read about use of SSH to control entire computer clusters in parallel. In essence, the user will be sending any given command to an ‘army’ of computers (clients or computational hosts). The tool is not very flexible, but can be valuable under particular circumstances.

I quite liked the critical spin that a Slashdot contributer put to an article on the move to digital TV.

After budgets cuts led to the layoff of engineers and scientists at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a US Senate committee has approved a $3 billion dollar subsidy to assist Americans in their difficult transition to digital television in 2009.

While we should all know that it is science that drives innovation, money gets spent where the long-term future is uncertain. Television and advertisements that accompany its existence shape up a tremendous industry. However, it is a well-established fact that economy cannot safely propagate to the future (Wall street and the ‘bubble effect’) whereas exploration and new discoveries are capable of putting the States at the forefront. This all comes at a very sensitive time when the whitehouse issues budgetary cuts on science and research while creationism and defence (or contrariwise armament) are better catered for. I am truly concerned.

The local gym – photo captured in July

ODAY I decided to re-prioritise a few hobbies and activities in my life. Thus far things have gone rather well, but I was at times susceptible to pressure and found it hard to cope with the amount of work that came my way.

I have maintained a stringent habit of working out consistently for nearly 10 years. At the start, when I was only 14, I stuck to short sessions that verged the high frequency of 7 times a week (i.e. a brief daily routine). This soon was reduced to just 6 and around 2001 was altered again and became just 5. A few years ago this was already downed to 4 and a half and this week I have finally settled at 4. This trend is somewhat worrying, at least to me. I am certainly not at the point in my life where I ought to head ‘downhill’ although I admittedly reached a plateau. I still work out approximately 8 hours a week, but I find myself more bound to the Palm handheld throughout. I simply must record my thoughts. I soon realise that I must stay connected more often. That is truly what I enjoy, inevitably.

Earlier today there was an unusually nice atmosphere at the gym so I even fell asleep there. It is not the very rare exception, I might point out. The nice music that is played on the TV set and perhaps the lack of pressure led to this, not to mention the erratic sleep patterns which I have recently adopted. The workouts themselves appear to be getting easier, psychologically in particular, over the years. This may have plenty to do with the fact that I prevent self-imposed pressure and time-constraints. I learned from past mistakes, I presume, as pressure becomes a deterrent strong enough to discourage exercise altogether.