It’s not e-waste until the hardware is dead

LOT of PCs that were perfectly fine 5 years ago were made obsolete not by dysfunctional hardware but by resource-greedy monopolistic and monolithic operating systems such as Windows Vista. This was bound to be a blessing to GNU/Linux, said one member of the Manchester LUG around 2006 when Vista was being finalised. He was right. Several years down the line, machines which were back then acceptable cannot possibly run the latest Windows, leaving GNU/Linux to fill the gap with its many distributions (suiting old and new).

Some machines, such as this one, come with Puppy Linux by default (I’ve just bought one to serve as a services monitor). There are other such machines that typically run GNU/Linux.

So yes, I’ve been checking about an extra unit to run a third monitor on. What strikes me as important is that the only two sites that I found so far [1, 2] both indicate that OpenOffice.org is a hot item even on Windows. With ODF and all, how would Microsoft feel? And to what extent will GNU/Linux benefit?

hat happens when the network does not function or functions very poorly? What happens when the Internet is altogether down or goes on and off almost indefinitely/infinitely? The problem need not apply to the Internet connection as a whole; it might for example be a DNS server, a particular Web site which is necessary to access, a server at work, or even a message/call which is anticipated. When there is no estimated time for service restoration one can just assume that normality will resume shortly. Only in retrospect can one decide that it would have been better to just walk away and do something else (even offline) until the problems are resolved for good.

Before going any further, it is worth naming the motivation for this post. Yes, it’s BT again. All morning so far their service has been awful; sometimes the connection goes down altogether, requiring reconnection to SSH servers (which takes a lot of time). It also leads to gaps in IRC logging, makes Web surfing a real nightmare, and so on. Connection persistence is crucial here. The rest of the time there seems to be a capacity issue, so any bandwidth-heavy process is out of the question. To be fair to BT, for the past couple of months their service has been perfect, after a rather rocky first month (weekly unscheduled hangups) and many problems with setup (explained in length in this blog).

In any event, the point worth making is that in many circumstances in life there arises a dilemma where one must decide whether to walk away from the temporary problems early on (when they first occur) or wait patiently for a while and if so, how long for. The correct thing to do — if there is at all such a thing as “correct” in this context — very much depends on the knowns and unknowns; it may also rely on communication with people who are more familiar with the problems encountered (e.g. those in the back rooms). The network of people can better assess whether to plan for a contingency offline or just carry on waiting. This is why it’s a sort of network uncertainty problem. There is never a solid solution to it and the hours lost due to downtime can only ever be minimised by becoming better informed and also preparing alternative activities to pass time (I escaped the bad connection to write this post from the City Centre).

oogle Plus (G+) and Google Profiles look very similar and almost identical. Is Google merging them? It seems possible. It actually goes deeper than this. Google has become a major content network and not just a gateway to information. Not anymore anyway. Will Google use people’s personal data to push ads? Well, it’s already doing this. The transaction is hosting in exchange for changing one’s perception on behalf of advertisers, but the real problem is the proprietary nature of G+).

“As of 07/01/2011,” say a lot of older profile pages, “Groups profiles have been disabled. Your profile information will be available for export from your profile until 11/01/2011. This change will not affect the nicknames you might have chosen for yourself to participate in groups. It will only affect the custom profiles fields, such as your photo, location, and occupation. More details are available here.” The cited page says: “Beginning July 1, 2011, you will not be able to change your Google Groups profiles. You will be able to download the contents of your profile until November 1, 2011, at which time your Google Groups profile will be deleted.” Just deleted, eh? Unless Google Groups is shutting down, it seems possible that a migration route to G+ might be offered with an ultimatum of sorts.

The date is very close to that of G+. Might it be the reason for change? Groups profiles were ripe to abuse by trolls who abuse the scoring system (Google allows the same user vote an infinite number of times and thus game the system). The key question is, will Google try to convert many users to people with a G+ account, without going through conventional routes? Other than privacy invasion, there is not much to be gained from such networks. The way Google treats personal information matters because Google is… well, Google.

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Summary: Tim and Roy do the first show where an outline of topics was prepared in advance by both sides

Tim and Roy speak about a variety of subjects ranging from Nortel’s patents, Google’s amazing Android growth, and Google Plus to Ubuntu decline in the news, Sabayon Linux 6, Mozilla versions, and KDE 4.7 (RC). Roy mentions his Argos/Archos revelations from yesterday while Tim brings up a Microsoft rumour and ACS:Law news.

The show features “Love Is A Dirty Word” by Jason Collett, “Luxury” by Tigersapien, and “Divide & Conquer” by Vandaveer. We hope you will join us for future shows and consider subscribing to the show via the RSS feed. You can also visit our archives for past shows. If you have an Identi.ca account, consider subscribing to TechBytes in order to keep up to date.

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s a demonstration of canonical forms and stress reduction complemented/guided by multidimesional scaling, I’ve created an animation which shows the process applied to each image in the Face Recognition Grand Challenge (FRGC) 2.0 set — albeit Fall Semester only in this case — in turn, in order to approach a more mutually-isometric and pose-agnostic state where distances are tied to inherent surface details (curvature, size, etc.) and the accompanying static image, as seen below, shows the original image too (added at the top). To use this within an objective function it will need to be clearer how points are selected consistently and where correspondences can autonomously be chosen to improve overall performance. The triangulation in this case is Delaunay-based although 3 methods have been implemented and they offer room for further experimental work. The factors affecting performance may be the PCA component, the triangulation, the placement of points, the optimisation of lengths, the pre-processing (ICP for instance), and few minor technicalities less worthy of consideration. Each one of these represents one parameter among many but feasibility tests — those exploring whether the overall framework is effective in the first place (distances as an encoded signature resistant to expressions) — must come first. Based on a preliminary look, this ought to serve as a reasonable discriminant, but many of the pertinent parts of the framework may need tweaking based on trials and errors.

Note: this is an except from an ongoing project and a document exceeding 200 pages so far. It will be released later this year.

inally, for the first time ever, I have gotten a site whose front page is PageRank 7. That would be Techrights. I didn’t see it coming and this is part of a group effort, so it’s a victory for many of us who worked on it for years. I cannot think of another Linux-oriented site which has PageRank 7 or higher. It’s an important milestone for sure, even if it’s mostly symbolic.

Today was generally a great day and I met an old friend who is now a boxer. Did some programming, ran successful experiments, and some of the changes are compiled without an issue, removing the zlib dependency from Cyrus. Now is the time to have these tested and the plan is to use the existing interfaces with some test data and detect mis-correspondence in CRC polynomials. Tomorrow, heavy blogging will resume and maybe a trip to London will wait until Monday.