The recent report by Gartner, the State of Open Source 2008 (http://www.gartner.com/; report G00156659), as summarized on their site provides some very interesting conclusions:

1. By 2013, a majority of Linux deployments will have no real software TCO advantage over other operating systems.

2. By 2012, 90% of enterprises will use open source either direct or embedded.

3. By 2011, open source will dominate software infrastructure for cloud-based providers.

4. By 2012, software as a service (SaaS) will eclipse open source as the preferred enterprise IT cost cutting method.

The State of Open Source 2008

OOXML needs to die. It's clear that OOXML is a faux standard -- not because it's a vendor standard. There are lots of vendor-created standards which are real standards (e.g. PostScript). No, OOXML is a botch because it's expressed in terms of an undocumented Microsoft graphics library. OOXML is all "and then a miracle occurs". You've seen that cartoon, right? Where the left and right sides of the blackboard are filled with equations, and the blank space in the middle says "and then a miracle occurs". Well, when there's a miracle required, there's no science even if the miracle is surrounded by scientific-seeming accoutrement. A standard which is expressed in terms of miracles is still a miracle and not a standard.

Any standards body that approves OOXML needs to blush. Any company which submits OOXML as a standard needs to blush.

Microsoft needs to blush

The Navy will acquire only systems based on open technologies and standards.

Vice Adm. Mark Edwards, deputy chief of naval operations for communications, broke the news March 5 to a Navy IT Day audience in Vienna, Va., sponsored by AFCEA International.

“The days of proprietary technology must come to an end,” he said. “We will no longer accept systems that couple hardware, software and data

Listen up Sam... Fed take note!

Navy to focus only on open systems

I suspect an Apple-Google partnership could outfox the Microsoft-Yahoo hairball, and that the Safari-iTunes-Android trifecta looks pretty interesting as the new client platform. What do you think?

iPhone: Are iPhone and Air the Beginning of the End?

ok, i promise not to let this blog devolve into a series of posts about twitter, but i think this is worth mentioning.

We used to play color wars at summer camp. Near the end of the year the entire camp would split up into colors, red, green, black, blue, etc... and compete in a series of events: tug of war, egg toss, basketball - sort of like the movie Meatballs, except all within the same camp.

During the summer we were divided into discreet units, older kids here, younger kids there, Hiawathans by the lake Tawasenthans by the ropes course, etc... But when it came time for color wars you had no idea who would be on your team. It was a release, and it was viciously fun.

So, for a while I've been thinking about how a color war might look online. How would you play tug of war, or other group games that were silly, time limited, and awesome... and more importantly how could you create teams within an already functioning environment to have that same people-mash-up effect that we did at camp.

Twitter seemed perfect. So yesterday AM I posted this tweet, this tweet, and this tweet.

And now it has gone haywire. I regret having caused a day of spam...but...

There are dozens of teams, some of which are hundreds of players deep. Many of the players don't really know what they joined or why, but for me and the wonderful coders that are working on this, it is a perfect implicit structure that can be used to start setting up the colorwar events. And beyond this, it is an idiom that can be used to create rapid affiliation and action models in the future.

let the games begin.

"And beyond this, it is an idiom that can be used to create rapid affiliation and action models in the future."

Boo Ya!

Colorwar 2008 (Best Web Site Abuse!)

ok, i promise not to let this blog devolve into a series of posts about twitter, but i think this is worth mentioning.

We used to play color wars at summer camp. Near the end of the year the entire camp would split up into colors, red, green, black, blue, etc... and compete in a series of events: tug of war, egg toss, basketball - sort of like the movie Meatballs, except all within the same camp.

During the summer we were divided into discreet units, older kids here, younger kids there, Hiawathans by the lake Tawasenthans by the ropes course, etc... But when it came time for color wars you had no idea who would be on your team. It was a release, and it was viciously fun.

So, for a while I've been thinking about how a color war might look online. How would you play tug of war, or other group games that were silly, time limited, and awesome... and more importantly how could you create teams within an already functioning environment to have that same people-mash-up effect that we did at camp.

Twitter seemed perfect. So yesterday AM I posted this tweet, this tweet, and this tweet.

And now it has gone haywire. I regret having caused a day of spam...but...

There are dozens of teams, some of which are hundreds of players deep. Many of the players don't really know what they joined or why, but for me and the wonderful coders that are working on this, it is a perfect implicit structure that can be used to start setting up the colorwar events. And beyond this, it is an idiom that can be used to create rapid affiliation and action models in the future.

let the games begin.

"And beyond this, it is an idiom that can be used to create rapid affiliation and action models in the future."

Boo Ya!

Colorwar 2008 (Best Web Site Abuse!)

The Thingamagoops are really just simple, analog type synthesizers that you control in a different way.

The Thingamagoops have oscillators just like any synth. On analog synths the oscillator that creates the actual tone you hear is called a VCO or voltage controlled oscillator. The Bleeps work a little differently so we'll just call it the main oscillator. Instead of using a keyboard, the main oscillator in the Thingamas is controlled by a photocell. Here's what the waveform from the main oscillator looks like.

When there is a lot of light hitting it, the resistance across the photocell goes up and the oscillator yields a higher pitch. Less light lowers the resistance and pitch. When the switch on the right is up, the oscillator is in a high range and when it's down it's in a lower range.
One neat thing about the photocell is that it reacts to different kinds of light. Florescent lamps and TV screens give the Thingamagoops a harsher tone while natural and incandescent light produce a cleaner one.

Just like any analog synthesizer, the thing-a-ma-s have another oscillator that effects some variable. This is usually called a modulator or LFO. Here the modulator's waveform is pretty close to a square wave.

$100 ducks for VCO Synth Fun! Check the video on the jump...

Thingamagoops!

The expected release of the Mac OS X version of “PwnageTool” has been delayed until sometime next week.

Legal enquiries were made to the DevTeam about the validity and legality of the contents of the tools, we would like to stress that no third-party copyrighted software will ever be released by the DevTeam.

Also, initial feedback from Beta testers has indicated that a few small changes and additional features should be developed.

Another major request from the Beta testers and demo viewers is that the team brings forward the release of the Windows version, with the feedback that has been received the team has decided to expedite the release of the Windows tool for a dual platform release sometime next week, iPod touch support will also be finalized.

The DevTeam would like to thank the users for being patient and waiting for the upcoming release.

The video presentation that was released yesterday has been viewed over 100,000 times in 24 hours proving the overwhelming demand for the application.

To summarize :-

*
Pwnage Tool Application releases _sometime_ in the next week for Mac OS X 10.4.x, 10.5.x and Windows.

*
The tool contains revised logos and icons.

*
PwnageTool does NOT ship with any Apple licensed software, Intellectual Property, trademarks, logos or images.

*
As my Mother would say “If you are going to be late, arrive with flowers”.

pwnage delay [iPhone Dev Team]

Last month we were contacted by the late Geoffrey Frost's personal adviser at Motorola; until Frost's death in 2005, Numair Faraz worked under the Motorola's former CMO -- the man widely regarded as the father of the RAZR. Like many (ourselves included), over the years Numair has become increasingly disenfranchised with the company's direction -- enough so that he compelled us to publish his letter to Motorola, its board of directors, and MOT investors everywhere regarding the company's egregious missteps and mismanagement.
---

Dear Greg Brown, and the rest of the executive team at Motorola,

As you may or may not recall, I worked with Geoffrey Frost as a personal adviser during his days as Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer of the company. I was the one quoted in Forbes in 2003 as saying "Motorola's biggest problem is that Samsung kicks ass," and eventually came to spend nearly three years working with Geoffrey during his efforts to revamp the company's mobile lineup, which eventually saw the launch of the RAZR. As I told the company's senior designers at Motorola's 75th anniversary meeting: create something cooler (and more expensive) than anything else out there, and everyone will want it.

After the success of the RAZR, while Geoffrey was tied up every which way in ROKR development, meetings, criscrossing travel, and so on, through his associates I implored the company to beef up their software expertise, and focus on creating socially networked devices (this was in the years before MySpace and Facebook became the juggernauts they are today). Your predecessor, Ed Zander, had little interest in this, and instead insisted on parlaying his relationship with Steve Jobs into the ill-fated ROKR effort in order to prop up Motorola's stock price.

Zander, who seemed to care more about his golf score than running one of America's greatest technology companies, left all of the hard work to Geoffrey; I've always considered it Motorola's dirty little secret that the strategy for their entire profit machine was run by the company's CMO -- not the rest of the company's executives, who are as inept now as they have ever been.

Many close to Geoffrey believed Ed Zander worked him to death, putting the pressure of the fate of the company in his hands. [That was certainly the buzz around the industry at the time. -Ed.] I took his untimely death in 2005 very hard, and knew that the company would head downhill in the aftermath. On a personal note, Lynne, his wife blamed the company for his passing. She committed suicide soon after.

Meanwhile, Ed Zander continued to reap the dividends of Geoffrey's work as the company made billions in profit from overselling the RAZR for years. Instead of channeling that money into the obvious -- further development of groundbreaking consumer devices -- Zander purchased enterprise companies such as Symbol ($3.9b), and engineered billions of dollars in stock buy... [ Read More (0.5k in body) ]

Motorola insider tells all about the fall of a technology icon ...

"Passing the Turing test is the holy grail of artificial intelligence (AI) and now researchers claim it may be possible using the world's fastest supercomputer (IBM's Blue Gene). This version of the Turing test pits a human conversing with a synthetic character powered by Rascals software crafted at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. RPI is aiming to pass AI's final exam this fall, by pairing the most powerful university-based supercomputing system in the world with its new multimedia group which is designing a holodeck, a la Star Trek."

AI Researchers Say 'Rascals' Might Pass Turing Test