I know that a lot of big thing have happened in the past week which are worth writing about including the death of Marvin Zindler, the collapsed I-35 West bridge in Minneapolis, and Metro's giving everyone a choice on Richmond as to how they are going to get railroaded (but at least they will have some public artwork to look at). Still, I wanted to blog about some notable events which are happening in Nerd World.
1) First, the news came across the wires two weeks ago that checkers has been solved. I should clarify that statement a bit. From a Game Theory standpoint, the game of checkers has been weakly solved, meaning that once you get down to a position where you have 10 checkers on the board, then the developed program cannot lose! The program will always at least obtain a draw, if not a win.
Now I can hear right now a lot of chess players jumping to their feet, shouting that chess is ultimately unsolvable. All I can say is that most chess players have programs these days, which says quite a bit about the state of player's attitudes these days.
2) Neal Krawetz, a security researcher, has written a program which can compare the metadata on image files and determine if a file is an original or whether it has been Photoshopped. The article goes on to describe how most of the Al-Queda images we have been seeing in the media have possibly been doctored up.
3) Several weeks ago, I noted how Microsoft was developing touch screen computing, which would revolutionize the computing experience. I noted how developers in Penguin land needed to get their act together or M$ would leave them behind. Well, it seems that developers in Penguin land are doing just that with MPX (Multi Pointer X-Window). The good news is that MPX will recognize multiple users at once.
4) Dell is indeed shaking up Linux land and is seeing some demand for Linux. The good news is that Dell (and Google) is / are starting to lean on developers for better drivers.
5) Meanwhile Red Hat, which is the leading Linux distributor, is not sitting still. They are coming out with their own Linux desktop. Meanwhile, Information Week brings up the hoary old argument of whether 300 different Linux distros is fragmenting and hurting the adaption of Linux. Remember that Unix forked in the 1980's between Sun's Solaris, IBM's AIX, HP's HP-UX, and lots of others, which opened the door to Microsoft winning over the desktop.
6) Last, but probably most interestingly, here is an article with noted Australian (former) kernel developer Con Kolivas, where he talks about his frustrations with kernel development which led him to quit working on Linux.
My own .02 worth is that Linux will continue to be a niche hobby OS until we can develop reliable drivers which always work! Also, the Open Office suite needs to be improved so that it always can open and deal with Adobe and Microsoft Office documentation.
A quick story about Linux and drivers. Several weeks ago that the Big Evil Company, one of our processors came in with a USB stick which he wanted to mount on his Linux desktop. My senior counterpart, an incredibly knowledgeable, hard working, and diligent guy, fiddled for some 2 hours trying to get a USB stick to work on his desktop. There's more to the story than issuing a simple mount command, but if Linux is going to make inroads on $200 - $800 copies of Microsoft Vista, then we need to make sure that the user experience is painless and that things work the first time and every time - end of story. Otherwise, the world will continue to pay the steep Microsoft premium and the world will stay a WinTel type place.
Wizard
Posted by The Mighty Wizard at August 4, 2007 11:37 PM