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

ECENTLY I came to discover more about the personaility of Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, perhaps possessed by the measles. He has become yet another one of the ugly guys in the block, perhaps even topping the man above. He was caught yelling “I’m going to f—ing kill Google” and throwing a chair across his office. Anger management comes to mind.

Given the aggressive behaviour of Microsoft, it was not too surprising when Massachusetts prepared a proposal that will drop Office in favour of Open Source solutions. I wish them to best of luck in their future endeavours, which are sure to insire the remainder of the country over the long term.

Massachusetts is preparing to deliver another challenge to Microsoft’s core PC software business: a directive to force all 50,000 desktop computers used by state employees to be stripped of Microsoft’s Office, the suite of applications used on an estimated 95 per cent of PCs the world over. Instead, they would be required to run an open-source version, such as OpenOffice or StarOffice – software produced by volunteer programmers and distributed free of charge.

Mazda are replacing cylinder car locks and make use of electronic keys. Such keys come in the form of a USB drive, also known as a USB key or a pen drive. This move is reminiscent of the new Linux-based IBM laptop, which uses fingerprint recognition for user authentication.

Such moves accommodate for a revolution in security, but also a sudden change of habits. For example, keys are easily duplicable while borrowing or stealing of someone’s fingerprint is not possible. Moreover, it promotes cybercrime while circumventing traditional crime. From the article:

In addition to starting the engine, the flash drives can be used to transfer driving directions for long trips along with the latest songs for the day to the Sassou’s internal hard drive.

A comparison to evaluate running costs over a length of time

ECENTLY, a fair bit of discusion focused on costs of Windows in the enterprise versus Open Source solutions. There are still many arguments between those whose familiarity with Open Source-based systems does not coincide with that of the manager. Furthermore, heavy advertising campaigns which Microsoft launched make it difficult to avoid deceit. More than ever before, there are vicious attempts to convince the public that Open Source is more costly, less secure and even bound to vanish.

One of the more disturbing facts is that a large corporation, which at present feeds on billions from the public, is able to run a propaganda whose budget is merely infinite. Despite all, we now come to discover that IBM have run their own independent TCO study, in which they compare cost (taking effectiveness into account) of the different solutions available. The study concludes that:

Linux is 40% less expensive than a comparable x86-based Windows server and 54% less than a comparable Sparc-based Solaris server.

This provides a long-anticipated answer to many who required it. A typical system administrator, who is inclined to favour Linux, can now use the above as concrete backing. The manager who makes the final decisions will sooner or later digest these facts and figures.

Related items:

• Microsoft-funded Benchmarks
• Reasons to Use Linux

The Science Blog outlines a method for teaching the computer various languages without any human involvement, i.e. in a data-driven manner.

[computers can learn languages] “…autonomously and without previous information infer the underlying rules of grammar. The rules can then be used to generate new and meaningful sentences. The method also works for such data as sheet music or protein sequences.”

Having quotes the above, I believe there is nothing truly novel to find in the study. The blog item does not have any mentioning of Markov models. That, in my blunt opinion, is proof that the author fails to grasp the real merits of the method. It also appears as if the author has limited knowledge in the field which is technically discussed. The ability to look at sequences of words up to a certain depth (as much as brute-force permits) presently produces nice textures in graphics and get good flow of coherent text (a paper-generating tool from MIT comes to mind).

The method can indeed perform more admirably than by making use of probabilistic models solely. It can extract grammatical content, but so can logical inference and theorem prover programs like Vampire (Voronkov and his students from Manchester University). As a matter fact, a few years ago, as part of a course on languages and semantics, we wrote programs in ML that translated English sentences into first-order logic. This technology has been out in the wild for many, many years.

Sounds like a royal phone

OR a while I have been reading about a big announcement, which is bound to be delivered by Apple’s founder and CEO, Steve Job. It now seems as if the iPod will be combined with a mobile phone, but let us wait and see.

Related local items:

• All iPod Owners Can Get Compensated
• Computers Become Hosts

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

ICROSOFT have recently raved about their Get the facts campaign [rel="nofollow"ed]. This vigorous campaign aims to convince the public that Windows Web servers outperform Linux equivalents. The study upon which this is based is Microsoft-funded, who often wave big bucks at the face of academic research groups, as well as employ them. Microsoft-funded researchers have been caught red-handed in the past. They published fraudulent or questionable results when surveying security among Windows, Mac and Linux. Initially, little did they bother to mention who funded the research, but eventually, all conclusions were binned in a sector-wide embargo due to these biassed reports.

Sadly, for any impartial review, there must be funds allocated, which are often provided in the form of greedy commercial backings. Likewise, when some results are available, money can be used to run a propaganda. The extent of such propaganda is related to the size of the bank account — something that Linux, for example, is adverse to.

Quite recently, Open Source bodies refused to fall for industrial benchmark temptation and be victims to Microsoft’s marketing tricks that are constantly being pulled. The latest such manipulative situation is a scenario involving an offer from Microsoft to fund 50% of a research comparing enterprise Linux performance to that of Windows.

Microsoft’s open-source point man Martin Taylor has expressed interest to
jointly develop a study on deploying Windows versus Linux with the Open
Source Development Lab (OSDL).

…

“As far as working with Microsoft on a study, Microsoft could probably find
one negative line on Linux in a 100-page research report that it would
spend $10 million marketing while ignoring the other 99 pages,” he (OSDL
CEO) said in his e-mail to ZDNet Asia.

Quanta Plus – a Web development editor (click to enlarge)

wo of the most common arguments/wars in UseNet, as well as various forums, are over Linux distributions and favourite text editors, which are very fundamental tools, particularly in development.

There is no ideal text editor. Different editors suit different purposes and a different editor should be used depending the user’s level of skills. Below, for example, are various editors that I use for numerous distinct yet related tasks:

• NEdit – for editing C and tables (can make rectangular selections)
• KWrite – C++ due to colours, smart indentation, etc.
• KEdit – includes a well-integrated spellchecker
• Notepad – very light
• Wordpad- rich formatting
• BBedit (Mac) – much of the above, yet commercial (i.e. expensive)
• MATLAB editor – colour syntax highlighting, debugging capabilities (e.g. breakpoints) are integrated into the editors, consistency and cohesiveness with the rest of MATLAB
• Quanta – Web development in KDE – widgets for markup, code generation for tables, and more (see screenshot at the top)
• cPanel File Manager – editing on server-side using the browser

The bottom line is that there is no best editor (likewise there is no best Linux distribution). Perhaps this explains why there are endless arguments that end up nowhere. A developer would need to use different editors at different times. I can think of 5 distinct types of text editors that I use at the moment: MATLAB, C/C++, HTML and simple (plain) text. even E-mail and newsgroups clients can be considered editors just being themselves, not to mention textareas and forms in the Web browser.