ARNING: this item is unhealthy to self-proclaimed and avid Windows users. To me, it sometimes seems as though Windows is much like smoking. It takes a lot of your money and as the addiction grows (dependency on software), it requires you to assign a decent proportion of your wage to it. Eventually, in return, it punishes you despite its high cost.

The fact that a majority people stick to Windows does not bother me. They insist on using it and I respect that decision. Being told what is good for you is probably the toughest challenge. I continue to see my colleagues spending a great deal of their time doing things which are by all means unnecessary, e.g. filesystem maintenance and virus checks. There is also a perpetual penalty due to, e.g. trial version of software with disabled features, O/S collapses and so forth.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the table, some people are able to get their work done without worrying at all about these man-made problems, which inherently are inexistent in computing. Finally, returning to my point above, Windows users often punish themselves, but no deliberately so. The least we can do is offer redemption from the habit and prove that better ways exist.

OU can help yourself to a quick glance at Google’s complex at London, which is going to be accommodated with hundreds of engineers fairly soon. Be warned that the ZDNet server, which is flooded by Slashdotters at the moment, is extremely unresponsive. It must be suffering from the ‘Slashdot effect’. In fact, it was only hours ago that ZDNet engineers got mentioned here at the datacentre in Manchester Computing (where I am at the moment). I am not sure what the reason was, but I saw the memo on the desk and wondered if ZDNet plan to upgrade or migrate. I would like to believe that.

Back when I was in touch with Google’s recruiters, only the headquarters in Zurich and Dublin were in question. I wonder why London was not even mentioned at the time. Perhaps it is a newly-erected branch for their future operations, which are said to take advantage of dark fibre and mobile machines with 3.5 perabyte (3,500,000 GB) of storage.

“We’re talking about 5000 Opteron processors and 3.5 petabytes of disk storage that can be dropped-off overnight by a tractor-trailer rig. The idea is to plant one of these puppies anywhere Google owns access to fiber, basically turning the entire Internet into a giant processing and storage grid.”

am not entirely sure how long Google Print (renamed Book Search) has actually been up for. I have just carried out a standard Google search and was suddenly advised to use Google Print to search among books. This was apparently an arbitrary promotion of their new shiny service.

Below are my first impressions and impulsive observations (primarily complaints):

• The top inch of two of each page in each book initially gets displayed as a scan (-)
• The search pages incorporate the option to purchase the book (+)
• Users are encouraged to open an account with Google Print. I am not too fond of this. Registration opens the door to dependencies, much like the signup with Google Sitemaps, which is a pre-requisite to taking advantage of Google Analytics (-)
• The interface is light-weight, clean and navigation is intuitive (+)

All in all, Google Print does not appear as bad as I anticipated. I said a few things against it and a few things in favour. Nonetheless, having so many books scanned and available for viewing per subscription raises a brow or two. It somehow gives Google ownership over the books and will discourage crowds from going to the public libraries. On-line music sales had similar impact on record stores.

A new study contends that, in contrast to the widely-held view, search engines give a chance to new businesses and sites. Traffic tends to be centralised in the ‘high-status arena’, so the study offers a rare contradiction.

A paper questions whether search engines make popular sites more so

THE winner takes all, it is widely supposed in computing circles. Indeed, geeks have coined a word, “Googlearchy”, for the way in which search engines encourage web traffic towards the most popular sites. The belief that search engines make popular websites ever more popular, at the expense of other pages, is now being challenged by research.

An academic study suggests that long-standing habits are difficult to break for a reason. It attributes this chronic and dangerous entity to physiology. This might, at least in part, explain why so many of us struggle to change recurring activities or rid ourselves from addictions.

Old habits don’t die. They hibernate.

Habitual activity–smoking, eating fatty foods, gambling–changes neural activity patterns in a specific region of the brain when habits are formed.

CLI anywhere, at any time

CCESS to particular computers can be crucial, especially while travelling. There are a variety of ways for achieving full remote access, though simple, text-based shell access is supported by even weaker devices and light-weight software.

I recently read about someone who thought of handling Web servers from a Palm Treo, using E-mail, which is supposedly a universal API. I consider E-mail to be the wrong tool for a simple task, even if one uses cron jobs and collects the output via E-mail (similar to a hack I once mentioned. Alternatively, shell access can be obtained in one of the following ways:

• Cellular telephones: using CUTs
• Web-based: MindTerm, e.g. from Duke University
• Windows: PuTTy
• Windows mobile: I have seen an SSH client in action and it looked quite clean
• UNIX variants and derivatives: Built-in functionality
• Palm O/S: pssh, free and apparently based on PuTTy, though it is hard to tell for sure
• Blackberry: For that, one might have to pay nearly $100. That’s the chance one takes when steering away from Open Source. Palm may not be Open Source-oriented, but its users’ ideaology differs.

POV-Ray – The Kitchen by Jaime Vives Piqueres

recently wrote about Microsoft’s attempt to gently push away any technology that is not theirs. Among my list laid OpenGL and DirectX, which is a Microsoft ‘tool’ for putting an end to interoperable 3-D rendering (frequently gaming) in favour of proprietary. The added value is zilch. It is merely required to re-inforce the shackles of a monopoly.

I kindly advise that you sign the petition to stop this from happening. At present, OpenGL support is discouraged in Windows Vista, which looks grim for a world where interoperability prevails.

In the current implementation (as of 2005-09-22) of the OpenGL graphics library in Windows Vista – a soon to be released new version of the Microsoft Windows operating system, OpenGL is not a stand alone library. Instead it functions as a wrapper around DirectX, and is frozen to the vanilla version of OpenGL 1.4.

This means that OpenGL applications in Windows Vista will, most likely, suffer from severe performance loss, that, when an OpenGL driver is loaded, the Windows operating system will have odd behaviours and that future versions of OpenGL will not affect the Windows Vista platform. This would result in less developers actively supporting OpenGL, and as a result, less applications written which are easy to port to another platform or easy to maintain.