Thoughts on Windows

HP has a long relationship with Microsoft… [Note from Mark: someone inserts some hypocritical blah blah about how we used to love each other - sure hasn't been the case since I've been here]. Today the two companies still work together to serve their joint customers – HP customers buy a big chunk of Windows licenses – but beyond that there are few joint interests.

I wanted to jot down some of our thoughts on Microsoft’s Windows products so that customers and critics may better understand why we will not use Windows in our phones and tablets. Microsoft will characterize our decision as being primarily business driven – they say we want to taste decent margins for once – but in reality it is based on technology issues. Microsoft will claim that we are a closed system, and that Windows is open, but in fact the opposite is true. Let me explain.

First, there’s “Open”.

Microsoft Windows products are 100% proprietary. They are only available from Microsoft, and Microsoft has sole authority as to their future enhancement, pricing, etc. While Microsoft Windows products are widely available, this does not mean they are open, since they are controlled entirely by Microsoft and available only from Microsoft. By almost any definition, Windows is a closed system.

HP has many proprietary products too. Though the WebOS operating system we’ll use in our phones and tablets is proprietary, we strongly believe that all standards pertaining to the web should be open. Rather than use Windows, HP has adopted HTML5, CSS and JavaScript – all open standards. HP’s mobile devices will all ship with high performance, low power implementations of these open standards. HTML5, the new web standard that has been adopted by HP, Apple, Google and many others, lets web developers create advanced applications without relying on proprietary APIs (like Windows). HTML5 is completely open and controlled by a standards committee.

Second, there’s the “full application ecosystem”.

Microsoft has repeatedly said that HP mobile devices will not be able to access “the full application ecosystem” because 75% of applications are Windows applications. What they don’t say is that almost all these applications are also available in a more modern form, using Web standards and implemented as a service, and usable on HP’s upcoming phones and tablets. Microsoft Office, Outlook, financial software etc all have excellent Web-based alternatives. Users of HP’s phones and tablets won’t be missing many applications.

Third, there’s reliability, security and performance.

Windows has had an awful security records for twenty years. We also know first hand that Windows is the number one reason PCs crash. We have been working with Microsoft to fix these problems, but they have persisted for several years now. We don’t want to reduce the reliability and security of our phones and tablets by using Windows.

In addition, Windows has not performed well on mobile devices. We have routinely asked Microsoft to show us Windows performing well on a mobile device, any mobile device, for a few years now. We have never seen it. Microsoft publicly said that Windows would work well on a device starting with the first Windows CE in 1996. Then came Pocket PC 2000, then Pocket PC 2002, then Windows Mobile 2003, then Windows Mobile 5, 6, 6.1 and 6.5, none of which was any good. And now they say it will be with Windows Phone 7. We think it will eventually ship, but we’re glad we didn’t hold our breath. Who knows how it will perform?

Fourth, there’s battery life.

To achieve long battery life, mobile devices must use thin and efficient software and Windows is anything but that. It only runs on power-hungry Intel processors while the same features can be delivered by much smaller and more efficient processors when using WebOS. Not only does the battery last longer, the devices are lighter and don’t leave burn marks on your clothes.

Fifth, there’s Touch.

Windows was designed for PCs using mice, not for touch screens using fingers. For example, many Windows applications have such crappy UI that users depend on tooltips to figure out what a button does. They pop up when the mouse arrow hovers over a specific spot. WebOS revolutionary multi-touch interface doesn’t use a mouse, and there is no concept of a tooltip. Most Windows applications will need to be rewritten to support touch-based devices. If developers need to rewrite their Windows applications, why not use modern technologies like HTML5, CSS and JavaScript?

Even if HP phones and tablets used Windows, it would not solve the problem that most Windows applications need to be rewritten to support touch-based devices.

Sixth, the most important reason.

Besides the fact that Windows is closed and proprietary, has major technical drawbacks, and doesn’t support touch based devices, there is an even more important reason we will not use Windows on our phones and tablets. Windows is an abstraction layer that covers very different underlying hardware.

We know from painful experience that letting a third party layer of software come between the hardware and the developer ultimately results in sub-standard apps and hinders the enhancement and progress of the platform. If developers grow dependent on third party development libraries and tools, they can only take advantage of hardware enhancements if and when the third party chooses to adopt the new features. We cannot be at the mercy of a third party deciding if and when they will make our enhancements available to our developers.

This becomes even worse if the third party is supplying an operating system that runs on hardware from many vendors. The third party may not adopt enhancements from one platform unless they are available on all of their supported platforms. Hence developers only have access to the lowest common denominator set of features. Again, we cannot accept an outcome where developers are blocked from using our innovations and enhancements because they are not available on our competitor’s platforms.

Windows is a multi-hardware abstraction. It is not Microsoft’s goal to help developers write the best application for HP’s phones and tablets. It is their goal to help developers write applications that will run on Windows devices from all hardware manufacturers. [Note from Mark: should I describe how Microsoft has been getting in the way of how our PCs talk to our printers and making a mess of desktop printing for the last 20 years or is this off-topic?]

Our motivation is simple – we want to provide the most advanced and innovative platform to our developers, and we want them to stand directly on the shoulders of this platform and create the best apps the world has ever seen. We want to continually enhance the platform so developers can create even more amazing, powerful, fun and useful applications. Everyone wins – we sell more devices because we have the best apps, developers reach a wider and wider audience and customer base, and users are continually delighted by the best and broadest selection of apps on any platform.

Conclusions.

Windows was created during the PC era – for PCs and mice. Windows is a successful business for Microsoft, and we can understand why they want to push it beyond PCs. But the mobile era is about low power devices, touch interfaces and open web standards – all areas where Windows falls short.

The avalanche of Web-based applications accessible from Web-enabled mobile devices demonstrates that Windows is no longer necessary to access application functionalities of any kind.

New open standards created in the mobile era, such as HTML5, will win on mobile devices (and PCs too [Note from Mark: maybe I should remove that parenthesis or we'll give Ballmer a heart attack]). Perhaps Microsoft should focus more on creating a great Web-centric platform for the future, and less on criticizing HP for leaving the past behind.

Mark Hurd
April, 2010

[UPDATED 2010/5/18: I hear echos of "should I describe how Microsoft has been getting in the way of how our PCs talk to our printers and making a mess of desktop printing for the last 20 years or is this off-topic?" in the statements Mark Hurd made during his post-earning analyst call today: "when you look across the HP ecosystem of interconnected devices, it is a large family of devices and we think of printers, you’ve now got a whole series of web connected printers and as they connect to the web, [they] need an OS.” Though I am really puzzled by the next line: “Hurd adds that HP prefers to own the OS to “control the customer experience” as it always has in printing.” HP doesn’t control the customer experience at all in printing, because of Windows. It’s only because we are so used to it that we don’t realize how awful the printing experience is, whether using a connected printer or over the network. Glad to see that they intend to apply the Palm acquisition to this problem too.]

[UPDATED 2010/5/26: According to some, this breakup letter from HP caused a breakup inside Microsoft: The reason Robbie Bach was fired]

Related posts:

1. A look at Web services support at Microsoft
2. Steve Ballmer gets Cloud
3. Dear Microsoft, here is my $0.25 Windows license fee for the month
4. With M (Oslo), is Microsoft on the path to reinventing RDF?
5. Microsoft’s Bob Muglia opens the virtualized kimono
6. WS-Discovery and WS-DeviceProfile public review

Don’t put anything on any social network that you don’t want to be made public.

Don’t count on your privacy settings on the site to keep your “private” data out of the public eye. Here are the many ways in which they can fail (using Facebook as a stand-in for all the other social networks, this is not specific to Facebook):

• You make a mistake when configuring the privacy settings
• Facebook changes the privacy mechanisms on you during one of their privacy policy updates
• Facebook has a security flaw that bypasses access control
• One of you friends who has access to your private data accidentally/stupidly/maliciously shares it more widely
• A Facebook application to which you grant access betrays your trust in accessing the data and exposing it
• A Facebook application gets hacked
• A Facebook application retains your data in its cache
• Your account (or one of your friends’ account) gets hacked
• Anonymized data that Facebook shares with researchers gets correlated back to real users
• Some legal action (not necessarily related to you personally) results in a large amount of Facebook data (including yours) seized and exported for legal review
• Facebook looses some backup media
• Facebook gets acquired (or it goes out of business and its assets are sold to the highest bidder)
• Facebook (or whoever runs their hardware) disposes of hardware without properly wiping it
• Etc…

All in all, you should not think of these privacy settings as locks protecting your data. Think of them as simply a “do not disturb” sign (or a necktie…) hanging on the knob of an unlocked door. I am not advising against using privacy settings, just against counting on them to work reliably. If you’d rather your work colleagues don’t see your holiday pictures, then set your privacy settings so they can’t see them. But if it would really bother you if they saw them, then don’t post the pictures on Facebook at all. Think of it like keeping a photo in your wallet. You get to choose who you show it to, until the day you forget your wallet in the office bathroom, or at a party, and someone opens it to find the owner. You already know this instinctively, which is why you probably wouldn’t carry photos in your wallet that shouldn’t be shown publicly. It’s the same on Facebook.

This is what was so disturbing about the Buzz/GMail privacy fiasco. It took data (your list of GMail contacts) that was not created for the purpose of sharing it with anyone, and turned this into profile data in a social network. People who signed up for GMail didn’t sign up for a social network, they signed up for a Web-based email. What Google wants, on the other hand, is a large social network like Facebook, so it tried to make GMail into one by auto-following GMail contacts in your Buzz profile. It’s as if your insurance company suddenly decided it wanted to enter the social networking business and announced one day that you were now “friends” with all their customers who share the same medical condition. And will you please log in and update your privacy settings if you have a problem with that, you backward-looking, privacy-hugging, profit-dissipating idiot.

On the other hand, that’s one thing I like about Twitter. By and large (except for the few people who lock their accounts) almost all the information you put in Twitter is expected to be public. There is no misrepresentation, confusion or surprise. I don’t consider this lack of configurable privacy as a sign that Twitter doesn’t respect the privacy of its users. To the contrary, I almost see this as the most privacy-friendly approach: make it clear that everything is public. Because it is anyway.

One could almost make a counter-intuitive case that providing privacy settings is anti-privacy because it gives an unwarranted sense of security and nudges users towards providing more private data than they otherwise would. At least if the policy settings are not contractual (can you sue Facebook for changing its privacy terms on you?). At least it’s been working that way so far for Facebook, intentionally of not, as illustrated by all the articles that stress the importance of setting our privacy settings right (implicit message: it’s ok to put private information as long as you set  privacy settings).

Yes you should have clear privacy settings. But the place to store them is in your brain and the place to enforce them is by controlling what your fingers do before data gets on Facebook. Facebook and similar networks can only leak data that they posses. A lot of that data comes from you directly uploading it. And that’s the point where you have control. After this, you really don’t. Other data comes from tracking and analyzing your activities and connections, without explicit data upload from you. That’s a lot harder for you to control (you rarely even get asked for your privacy preferences on this data), but that’s out of scope for this blog entry.

Just like banks that are too big to fail are too big to exist, data that is too sensitive to leak from Facebook is too sensitive to be on Facebook.

[Note: this post is somewhat off-topic for this blog. But here is a variation that brings it back to one of the usual topics of discussion: can’t the exact same thing be said for Cloud Computing in general? Isn’t data too sensitive to leak from the Cloud also to sensitive to be in the Cloud? Which of the points above, which apply to personal data in social networks, don’t also apply to enterprise data in Cloud platforms? What additional safety

Related posts:

1. Don’t tell Facebook what you like, tell Twitter
2. Integration patterns for social data: the Open Social Data Bus
3. Twitter changes the rules for URLs in tweets: the end of privacy or the end of the 140 character limit?
4. Expanding on “twitter with a brain”
5. There should be a word for this (Blog/Twitter edition) part 2
6. There should be a word for this (Blog/Twitter edition)

#9 The temptation to repeat a brilliant tweet of yours that went unnoticed when you expected a RT storm in response (maybe it was a bad time of the day when everyone was offline? maybe it fell in a twitter mini-outage?)

#10 The new pair of eyes you get the second after you post a tweet.

#11 The act of sharing (e.g. via delicious…) or RTing a URL to an article you haven’t actually read (but you think it makes you look smart). For example, I’d love to give a test to everyone who RTed this entry.

#12 The shock of seeing a delivery error when DMing someone you were positive was following you (this is related to definition #1 from part 1, so Shlomo’s followimp could apply).

#13 The minimum number of people to follow on twitter, of blog feeds to subscribe to and of Facebook friends to have such that you can cycles through all three continuous and never run out of new content. In the TV world, the equivalent would be the minimum number of cable channels needed to cycle through them and never feel like you’ve established that there is nothing worth watching.

#14 The awful feeling when the twitter/blog/facebook cycle from #13 breaks on a Friday night because others have a life.

#15 When a twitter conversation has reached a dead-end because of the short form. When the response you get makes you wonder what the other person understood from your last tweet. But forcing a clarification would take a half-dozen tweets at least and risk turning you into a twoll (another coinage for the twitter era, by Andi Mann).

#16 The compression rate of a sentence: how hard it is to further compress it (e.g. in order to squeeze in an RT comment), whether all the easy shortcuts have been taken already.

Please submit your candidate terms for these definitions.

Related posts:

1. There should be a word for this (Blog/Twitter edition)
2. Don’t tell Facebook what you like, tell Twitter
3. On Twitter
4. Expanding on “twitter with a brain”
5. The fallacy of privacy settings
6. Twitter changes the rules for URLs in tweets: the end of privacy or the end of the 140 character limit?

“Architects should focus on the introduction of each subject. This introduction contains a general overview of the subject, the requirements that influenced its design, and a short description of its operation as well as the entities that are used. The introductory sections require knowledge of Java concepts like classes and interfaces, but should not require coding experience.”

I am like so totally overqualified for my job. Hell, I even know what packages are.

(from the recently released OSGi version 4.2.)

Related posts:

1. First release of the CMDBF specification
2. CMDBf 1.0 specification released
3. Review of the CMDBf specification version 1.0
4. HP has submitted a specification to the DMTF Cloud incubator
5. Application management roundtable
6. Between skinny and bloated

#1 The ego-crushing realization, in the course of a face to face conversation covering topics you’ve written about, that the other person has not read your blog/tweets on this. Even though the first thing they told you when you met 10 minutes earlier is that they love your blog.

Candidate: followimp (from Shlomo).

#2 Conversely when someone brings up in the conversation something you wrote and had forgotten you did (maybe we need two words here, one if you are happy to be reminded of this and one if you’d rather not have been).

Candidates: twegreat and twegrets, respectively (from Shlomo).

#3 Seeing the corner of the blogo-twitto-sphere where you hang out light up in response to someone’s post even though you wrote up the same thing two years ago. At least you were trying to explain the same thing, but your brilliance went unnoticed.

Candidate: deja-lu.

#4 The frustrating (for system modelers at least) intermixing of data (your text) and metadata (e.g. the identification of the tweet you are responding to) in Tweeter conversations.

Candidate: metamess.

#5 (This one comes from @Beaker) The art of carving up tweets from others to be able to retweet them in 140 characters.

Hoff has a suggestion: Twexter (Twitter + Dexter).

#6 The art of guessing early the Twitter #hashtag that will emerge as a winner for a given topic.

Candidate: foretweetude.

#7 The frustration of having too many blog drafts and no time to write them up.

Candidate: blocrastination. And Neil WD offered logjam in the comments.

#8 (added on 2009/10/22 after seeing this) The feeling of nakedness one has while his/her blog is offline.

Candidate: e-vanescence.

[UPDATED 2010/3/8: See part 2 for more.]

Related posts:

1. There should be a word for this (Blog/Twitter edition) part 2
2. On Twitter
3. Don’t tell Facebook what you like, tell Twitter
4. Expanding on “twitter with a brain”
5. Twitter changes the rules for URLs in tweets: the end of privacy or the end of the 140 character limit?
6. What you’ve been spared (aka blog drafts boneyard #1)

The Cloud stuff is where the fun is, but if this Twitter thing is going to be of any use for real work I need to find who to follow in the IT management, application management and systems modeling areas. Any suggestion beyond @cote, @MouthOfOpenNMS, @dmcclure, @puppetmasterd and @theitskeptic (I feel like I am just Twitterifying my blogroll)?

And even then, finding people to follow seems to be the easy part. It took me about 20 minutes last night to realize that I am not going to read all the tweets (and I currently only follow 18 people). Worst case I’ll just track the direct mentions of my handle and some occasional hastags during interesting announcements. And scan the rest once a week. I assume that’s what the Twitter natives like @cote do as well (I seeded my list by picking names I recognized from his 1,130-long follow list). Advice?

The other issue is the 140 characters limit of course, but this should be easier to get used to. In the Apple/Palm tweet last night (about how this might show us what enforcement options standard bodies have) I wanted to invoke Stalin’s dismissive “The Pope! How many divisions has he got?” quote by replacing the pope with the USB Implementers Forum (USB-IF). But no room left unless I sacrificed the image of a working group chair breaking the knee cap of an offending implementer (which, as an ex-WG chair myself, I see some upside to).

Is it bad form to post multi-part tweets? How about, say, 50 parts? I need a protocol to guarantee delivery and order on top of the Twitter API. Maybe REST-* can help me… ;-)

I also wanted to ping Andy Updegrove with the hope that he’d comment on the USB-IF letter (he has looked at the iPhone before, but not this specific issue) for an authoritative opinion. But he doesn’t seem to be on Twitter. The nerve!

And then there is the “follower” thing, which I guess I am now supposed to start obsessing about (folks, if I don’t have a hundred followers by week end the kitten gets it).

In the real world, there are a few people who return my emails and occasionally agree to have lunch with me, but that’s a far cry from calling them “followers”. Even my wife would spit her coffee if I referred to her as my “follower”. But on Twitter, I just posted three tweets yesterday and I already feel like a religious guru with my 24 “followers”.

Jokes aside (on the cult-leader overtones of the word “follower”), the fact that these people are identified is a nice improvement over blog subscribers (who, to me, are just an occasional number within the user-agent field in my Apache httpd logs), at least until they comment/email. Nice to “see” you.

One more step in the slippery slope towards total egomania. Blog > Twitter > Live webcam of the inside of my stomach.

Related posts:

1. There should be a word for this (Blog/Twitter edition) part 2
2. There should be a word for this (Blog/Twitter edition)
3. Don’t tell Facebook what you like, tell Twitter
4. Expanding on “twitter with a brain”
5. Twitter changes the rules for URLs in tweets: the end of privacy or the end of the 140 character limit?
6. The fallacy of privacy settings

But, and this is where the Microsoft-bashing starts, there is one area where password-masking is inane: wifi keys. Unlike passwords, these are never things that you have picked yourself, so they are harder to type, often hexadecimal (the one I chose, for my home network, I never have to type).  And where do we do this? Either in a meeting room, where the key is written on the white board, or in a dentist waiting room, where it is pinned on the wall. In almost all cases, everyone in the room has access to the key. And if it is not on a wall, then it is on a piece of paper that’s right next to my computer and easier to snoop from. Masking this field, as Windows XP does, is plain stupid.

But stupidity turns into depravity and sadism when they force you to type it twice. I understand the reason for entering passwords twice when you initially set them in the system (accidentally entering a different password than what you intended can be trouble). But not when you provide them as a user requesting access (accidentally entering the wrong password just means you have to try again). So why does Windows insist on this? In the best case (I enter the key correctly twice) I’ve had to do double work for the same result. In the worst case (at least one is mistyped) I am in no better situation than if there was only one field but I have done twice the work. And this worst case is twice as likely to happen, since I have twice the opportunity to foul-up.

When confronted with this, I usually type the key in a regular text box (e.g. the search box in Firefox) and copy-paste from there to both fields in the Windows dialog box. But I shouldn’t have to.

While I am at it, do you also want to read what I think about the practice, initiated by MS Word as far as I can tell, to include formatting in copy/paste by default? And how deep you have to go in the “paste special” menu to get the obviously superior behavior (unformatted text)? Not really? Ok, I’ll save that for a future rant. Let’s just say that this idea must have come from a relative of the Windows wifi-key-screen moron. Just give me their names and I’ll be the arm of Darwinism.

[UPDATED 2009/6/26: Bruce Schneier agrees with Jakob Nielsen. So this is an issue at the confluence of security and usability on which both security guru Schneier and usability guru Nielsen are wrong. Gurus can't always be right, but what's the chance of them being wrong at the same time?]

No related posts.

I was listening to a podcast from a history program from France Inter (French public radio). It was about the eruption of Mount Vesuvius that destroyed Pompeii and Herculaneum in AD 79. They played a clip from a BBC program that explained that the lava coming down was “five times hotter than boiling water”, a figure that the French host later repeated.

Never mind the fact that, on the Kelvin scale, the same lava is only twice as hot as boiling water. More on the siliness of applying percentages to temperatures here.

Related posts:

1. Too hot to count
2. Lyon shares

Here is a list of the topics covered below:

• Messing with a blogger’s head (stats pumping)
• Google search suggestions (resistance is futile)
• Google to navigate rather than search (faster than bookmarks)
• What’s a computer (can you build one with a spoon and a rubber band)
• Is this a site or a feed (this site’s encapsulation is broken)

Messing with a blogger’s head

I recently looked at the HTTP logs for this site. Maybe I am the last blogger to realize this, but it looks like the online blog readers (e.g. Google Reader, Bloglines…) tell you how many subscribers they have for your feed. They do this through the user-agent HTTP header, which gets logged. It looks something like this:

Feedfetcher-Google; (+http://www.google.com/feedfetcher.html; 102 subscribers; feed-id=…)

Of course that’s only on a per-feed basis, so you need to add all the feeds (Atom and the different RSS versions) to get a total. Still, it’s a lot more visibility than I had before.

My first thought was “hey, some people are reading, better watch what I write”. But I quickly discarded that in favor of a more intriguing idea: if bloggers use this data, how hard would it be to mess with their heads? After all, this is not verifiable. Anyone can send HTTP requests with any user-agent they want. I can pick a blog and starts sending HTTP GET requests on their feeds with a user agent that pretends to be “Feedfetcher-Google”. And I can set the “subscribers” number to anything I want. To not be too suspicious, I could slowly pump it up, to look like a realistic increase.

Of course, an alert blogger would probably smell a rat if the number of subscribers shoots up and the number of incoming links and comments didn’t change, if the site still didn’t show up near the top of Google searches, or if the technorati “authority” didn’t change. Etc. There are pleny to ways to reality-test this. But people have an amazing ability to suspend disbelief when they like what they see, however logic-defying. If you don’t believe me, I have a pile of mortgage-backed securities to sell you.

This stat-pumping experiment could be done as a practical joke. It could be done out of meanness.  It could be done as an unethical and pointless sociological study (how many subscribers does it take for someone to go buy a Porsche on the assumption that the traffic will eventually turn into $$$, how does the impression of popularity change the writing on the blog…). It could even be done as a fraud (guaranteed increase in your subscription numbers if you sign up for my blog marketing service or you get your money back: just check your logs to see the results… – of course you could also generate fake users to create real subscriptions). It hits bloggers where they are the most vulnerable: the ego.

If you are thinking of doing this as a way to be nice to someone who needs encouragements, it will probably backfire. Before you process, listen to act two of this radio show (description: “A group called Improv Everywhere decides that an unknown band, Ghosts of Pasha, playing their first ever tour in New York, ought to think they’re a smash hit. So they study the band’s music and then crowd the performance, pretending to be hard-core fans. Improv Everywhere just wants to make the band happy — to give them the best day of their lives. But the band doesn’t see it that way.”)

Google search suggestions

When you enter a Google search query (on google.com or in the Firefox search bar), as soon as you’ve typed a few characters it proposes to complete your search terms (BTW, it’s not just Google, it is now an well-know extension to OpenSearch but Google pioneered it, at least according to the spec). Something about this just doesn’t sound right. If you think you know what I am looking for, why not propose the most likely answers rather than trying to complete my search request? If you get it right, then I’ll stop typing and I’ll click. Plus, Google already concentrates viewers on a small set of pages for each search query, with this feature won’t they compound this by concentrating people to a smaller set of queries, further shrinking the Web?

Since Google feels free to give me plenty of unsolicited suggestions, here is mine to them. If you are going to hand-held people as they write their queries, provide suggestions that desambiguate rather than suggestions that overly constraint. For example, if I type “python”, I get these suggestions:

“python tutorial”, “python list”, “python strong”, “python ide”, “python download”, “python for loop”, “python datetime”, “python re”, “python time”, “python os”, all clearly about the programming language. Wouldn’t it be more useful to detect algorithmically that results from searching on “python” fall into three largely disjoint groups, to detect a common word in each group and to ask the user to qualify their “python” request with either “programming”, “snake” or “monty”? Rather than the simpler but, in my opinion, less valuable approach of showing the most popular search queries that start with “python”?

On the other hand, this “most popular” feature has one benefit: it provides plenty of fodder for pop psychology, as I found out when tried to ask Google why they provide these search suggestions. As soon as I typed “why”, I got suggestions including “why men cheat” and “why did I get married”.

The part I like about all this, is the meta-meta aspect. Google doesn’t only suggest what you might want to read based on your search, they even suggest what you might want to search on. What’s the next meta level? Suggesting that you want to do a web search when you’re not even thinking of doing one? You can bet they will if they can. What a butler indeed.

Google to navigate rather than search

Still on the topic of Google, but a positive comment this time. It struck me one day that pretty much every single bookmark I have in Firefox is for an Oracle-internal site, not the public Web. After thinking about it for a minute, I realized the reason: Google doesn’t index the Oracle intranet. When I find a good page there, I can’t be sure I’ll be able to find it again easily, so I bookmark it. On the Web, on the other hand, why bother bookmarking it. I pretty much know I can find it from my Firefox search bar.

Most of the time, when I use Google, it’s not to find a new page. It’s to get back to a specific page. Case in point, when I want to look something up in the XPath spec (which I have done a few times lately in the context a CMDBf). I know it’s on the W3C web site, I could go there and navigate to the page in a few clicks. I also have a copy of it on my disk, I could open my file explorer and get it from there. But instead I just type “xpath” in Google. Again, I am not looking really “searching” (trying to find information about XPath), I am just navigating (finding my way back to the spec).

So I started a post to share this brilliant insight, at which point I saw (using Google in “search” mode for once) that Robin Cannon has already perfectly described it.

So I’ll just add a few thoughts to complement what Robin wrote:

• I am sure the implication in terms of advertising have long been studied by Google (I would guess that people who use Google for navigation are a lot less likely to click on ads than those who are actually searching).
• AOL had to die for the “AOL keyword” to live.
• There are serious privacy aspects to letting Google know what you’re up to all the time (but I am not logged into Google, I clean up my cookie jar relatively often and, at least at work, I am behind a large enough firewall to have a mostly anonymized IP).
• Somewhat ironically, there a potential security benefits. For example, the HP employee credit union is called “Addison Avenue credit union”. Googling for “addison avenue” gets you right there. If you mistype the name and ask for “adison avenue”, you get a suggestion that maybe you meant “addison avenue”, along with a list of links related to “madison avenue”. That’s enough data to realize and correct your mistake. On the other hand, directly typing adisonavenue.com into the navigation bar could have taken you to a spoof site (in reality it takes you to a link farm, not quite as bad, but you never know what it will turn into tomorrow).

BTW, am I the only one who doesn’t know what 2 of the top 3 “Google Fastest Rising Search Terms 2007″ relate to (from the list in Robin’s post)?

What is a computer

It started with this New Scientist article: Ten weirdest computers. With all these examples, how do we define what a computer is? Fundamentally, it’s a physical system that can process data. Meaning that you can define a logical data model that can be mapped to the physical characteristics of the system. And the system is such that it (through the laws of physics) changes in such a way that after a time its new physical configuration represents data that corresponds to a calculation that took place on your original data. You get the resulting data by measuring physical characteristics of the system (not necessarily the same physical characteristics that you controlled to represent the input data) and deriving the result data from it. In short, to use a computer:

• Step 1: you create a system that represents your input data
• Step 2: you let the laws of physics “do their thing” on the sytem
• Step 3: you measure the system to derive your output data

For example, take a spring scale and a bunch of 1kg weights. That’s a computer. At least it can add (within a given range). To calculate “4+8″ you put four 1kg weights on the scale, then you put eight more, then you read the number next to the needle and it should tell you “12″. This is an example in which the physical characteristics that you use to provide input data (putting weights on the scale) is different in nature from the physical characteristics that you measure to get the output (the position of the needle, which is really a way to measure the compression of the spring in the scale).

Based on this, we can ask the next (and more practically useful) question: what makes a *good* computer? It has the following characteristics:

• easy to set up
• easy to measure results at needed precision level
• not too many side effects (e.g. energy consumption)
• fast and versatile (planting a pine tree seed and waiting for a pine cone to come out in order to calculate a Fibonacci sequence is a little too slow and too specialized)
• able to process large amounts of data (that’s where the mechanical scale doesn’t… scale).

On that last topic, there are two ways to process large amounts of data. The way used by current computers is to process little at once but very fast and in a way that makes it very easy to use the output of one operation as input to the next one. The alternative would be to compute a large problem in one go of the physical system. For example, maybe one day we’ll know how to represent a mathematical problem in DNA form, such that we know that the solution to the problem corresponds to the DNA sequence most useful to a bacteria in a given environment, e.g. most likely to resist a given antibiotic. Setting up the computation system, in this case, would be engineering the antibiotic that selects for the problem’s solution. You can put that antibiotic in your Petri dish (or in the food of your 1000 cows, now that’s a “computer farm”), wait for a few days, then sequence the DNA of the bacteria that’s in the dish (or in your cow’s “output” matter, think of it as a “core dump”).

You can think of it as the RISC versus CISC debate, except with many more orders of magnitude in difference between the alternatives.

It is also interesting to note that networks and storage mechanisms (the other two consitutive elements of a data center, along with computers) can be thought of in a very similar way. If step 2 doesn’t change the data and can be made to last long enough, you have a storage system (e.g. engrave text on stone, store stone for a few thousand years, read text from stone). If instead of being far apart in time the locations in which you perform steps 1 and 3 are far apart in space (with 2 still not changing the data), then you have a networking system.

Is this a site or a feed

Like 99% of the blogs out there, this site is just an HTML rendition of an RSS (or Atom) feed. Isn’t it a little silly to have millions of Web site (visited by humans) that have their structure dictated by a machine-to-machine protocol? It is especially ironic on a site like mine, which occasionally talks about data models and protocols (and on which you would therefore expect the difference between the two to be understood). But no. Every time a new release of CMDBf comes out, for example, I create a new post with an updated version of the pseudo-algorithm for performing a graph query. Rather than having one page that gets updated (with potentially a “history” feature to access older versions).

As much as I’d like to blame the limitations of WordPress, I think it’s more a sign of my laziness. There are plenty of WordPress extensions that I have never considered. Or I could move to Drupal. The key question is, is there a way to get a site that is more useful as a unit (“show me what information William provides on his site”), while keeping the value of the feed (“tell me when William adds new content”) and not adding to my workload?

Related posts:

1. Anthology of blog posts about protocols and data formats
2. There should be a word for this (Blog/Twitter edition)
3. There should be a word for this (Blog/Twitter edition) part 2

- White House IT support.

- Hi, it’s Barack Obama.

- Good morning Mr. President and welcome to the White House.

- Thanks. Hey, I have a problem with the computer on my desk.

- Is it the screensaver? I know, it’s pretty embarrassing. President Bush got it from the vice-president and he really liked it. I was planning to remove it before you arrive this morning, but you got here before me. Sorry about that.

- Forget the screensaver. It’s the keyboard.

- Pretzel crumbs again, I am sure. Just shake it upside down.

- No it’s just the “Z” key.

- What about it?

- I’ve been pressing “control-Z” all morning. The economy is still a mess, the deficit is still huge, we’re still stuck in Iraq and Guantanamo is still open. And now my hand hurts. What gives?

- …

- Can you help?

- I am sorry Mr. President, I am afraid you cannot undo the work of the previous administration that easily.

- Really? Well, how on earth am I going to do it?

- I think it will take a lot more work.

- You’re positive I really can’t use “control-Z”?

- No you can’t.

[UPDATED 2008/11/9: Looks like he is not deterred: "Obama Weighs Quick Undoing of Bush Policy" (New York Times article, November 9, 2008)]

Related posts:

1. Too hot to count

The first email was a request for help about finding a specific view on a Flash-based app (one that, I must shamefully admit, was created by Oracle). The answer came quickly, in the form of a screen capture of the Flash app with the multi-level menu open and pointed at the menu entry that produces the requested view. Does anything with this strike you as wrong?

If not, look at the email that arrived the following day. A fellow Oracle employee wanted to advertise for rent an apartment he owns in the new One Rincon Hill tower in San Francisco. In order to provide a link to the floor plan, here is what he had to put in the email:

Plan 5 – see http://www.onerinconhill.com (Lower right “Skip intro”, then follow the link on Residences and Views -> Condominiums -> Tower One -> 1 Bedroom -> Unit 05)

No need to comment on the “skip intro” part. We all know how stupid these “intros” are. BTW, it would be nice if you didn’t have to download the entire Flash file before clicking on “skip”. But this is a “no Flash, no service” site. There is no alternative. Ironic for a tower in which 95% of occupants own an iPhone (the remaining 5% are  Android-wielding Google employees, also Flash-challenged).

Even more ironic is that fact that Flash is used on this site to navigate menus (usefulness: zero) and when you get to the floor map it’s a plain static image. Even though that’s the place where you could provide innovative features in Flash (like having a list of typical furniture items that people can drag and drop to see how to use the space).

You could say, NRA-style, “Flash apps don’t screw up web sites, bad Flash designers screw up web sites”. Sure. It’s not Flash per se, it’s the way it’s used. There is a good case to be made for small areas of web pages being delivered through Flash for increased interactivity (rather than having Flash become a navigation mechanism). But just like with the gun, when you are on the receiving end the difference seems pretty academic.

In a blog entry three and a half years ago (an entry which, in retrospect, is a strong contender for “most obscure, pretentious title”), I recalled hearing Tim Berners-Lee explain in 1999 on the radio how he came up with the idea of a URL: before the Web, people would create small files that describe where to find information in a human-readable way. TBL wrapped this in a consistent format, the URL.

And now, more than 15 years after TBL’s invention, Flash-drunk nitwits are recreating the problem he solved and forcing people to again “create small files that describe where to find information in a human-readable way”. When WS-Addressing decided to deprecate URLs, they at least provided a replacement (the EPR). What is the Flash equivalent going to be? Who wants to write the DARC (Distributable Addressing for Rich Clients) specification?

[UPDATED 2008/10/3: Someone pointed me at the "solution" for this problem: SWFAddress. Looks interesting. Except that this is an extra step that the Flash developer needs to know about and implement. If your Flash developer has that state of mind and level of competency, you've already solved 95% of the problem. For starters, s/he won't create your whole site as a Flash movie, s/he will just use Flash judiciously on the site. I don't see how SWFAddress is going to help with the throusands of mostly clueless Flash developers who keep banging out Flash-only sites. If you really want a technology solution to the general problem, it would probably require something like a click tracker that generates a trail of crumbs and packages it in a URL. But I don't think the solution here is a technology solution. It's more a "get a clue" solution. After all, almost no web site has an empty, pretty-looking, entry page anymore (except Flash sites of course), even though those were pretty common at a time.]

Related posts:

1. Taking control of the Flash player
2. Let’s try it, if all goes well it will fail
3. Less bloat, more oxygen
4. A sign of life from the CML working group
5. Sorry, CMDBf doesn’t make coffee either
6. Going dot-postal

Well, not really. This letter is just damage control of course and whatever reassuring verbiage they put doesn’t mean anything. Everyone is just playing pretend, which is how this whole “identify theft” problem started (“we’ll pretend that the SSN is confidential information and that we can use it to authenticate people”).

A few months ago I wrote that it is now safe to steal my identity because the credit watch service provided by Fidelity following their similar screw-up (laptop stolen from a car that time) had expired. Of course the new breach comes with two years of credit monitoring, courtesy of the incompetent bank.

So here is yet another reason to not buy credit monitoring services (in addition to the fact that they don’t work and that you can get the same thing for free): it’s only a matter of months before the next breach and the free two years of credit monitoring that will ensue.

Related posts:

1. It is now safe to steal my identity
2. Agriculture Department and Census Bureau to the rescue
3. Let’s try it, if all goes well it will fail
4. We won’t get rid of SSN-based authentication anytime soon…
5. Taking control of the Flash player

• a) My office is in the same area code as Stanford University.
• b) The area code appears twice in my phone number
• c) The number of the beast doesn’t appear in my phone number.
• d) An even number can only be in an even-numbered position if the value of that number is also its position (the leftmost digit is in position 1).
• e) The number of occurrences of non-zero numbers is always less than the value of the number.
• f) The answer uses as few different numbers as possible to meet all these conditions. For example, if 123-123-1231 and 123-412-3412 both met all the constraints above (which they obviously don’t), then the answer would be 123-123-1231 because it only uses the numbers 1, 2 and 3, while the other uses an additional number (4).

Asking your Oracle-employed brother-in-law to look me up in the employee phone book is considered cheating…

[UPDATED 2009/1/23: Clarified last bullet with an example, based on reader feedback.]

Related posts:

1. OVF work in progress published
2. XPath brain teasers: graph queries in XPath 1.0
3. CMDBf work in progress
4. Expanding on “twitter with a brain”
5. SML feedback session

Every time I run into a “no Flash, no service” site, I have a flashback (if you think the pun is funny then consider it intended) to 1995. That’s when Jean-Michel Jarre (the French musician, of Oxygène fame) launched his first web site, jarre.net (now de-commissioned). As a pioneer of electronic music, it wasn’t surprising to see him be one of the first artists to use the Web. As someone who likes to illuminate entire cities with laser beams, it wasn’t surprising to see him use overkill technology. So his Photoshop-wielding consultant created an entire site where each page was just one big image, with embedded text. It took forever to load and the stupidity of the approach shocked me so much that I remember it 13 years later. All the links were based on server-side image maps (the x/y coordinates of the pixel that you clicked on get sent to the server where a map links these coordinates to a target URL). The way HTML was at the time, you couldn’t use fancy fonts, colored text and elaborate wrapping (but you could blink!). And we all know that you simply can’t provide dates and locations of upcoming concerts without colored text, twisted fonts and a fancy layout.

The Internet Archive doesn’t have a copy of this original Jarre site, I don’t know if it has survived anywhere other than in my scarred-for-life brain. And if you go to JM Jarre’s current site, guess what? It is a Flash-only site. With my non-Flash Firefox all I get is a black page with a sentence (in French only, and not even grammatically correct) pointing me to the Flash download page. Looking at it with my Flash-enabled IE confirms (after a long wait for the Flash content to download) what I expected: other than a few videos (which could indeed use a simple Flash player embedded in the HTML page), there is no value whatsoever in using Flash for this site. The photos of his 80’s haircut would look just as good/bad in HTML.

Just like there are some usages for which image maps are appropriate, there are some for which Flash and friends are the right tool. But if they were only used where they belong, there wouldn’t be nearly as much hype around them. Poor Coté would have to spend more time with boring IT management geeks and less with Flash hipsters.

Related posts:

1. A flash of anti-genius
2. Taking control of the Flash player
3. Guest on the Redmonk IT management podcast
4. Oracle/BEA, WS-Management and MMS: announcements of the day
5. Too hot to count #2
6. A sign of life from the CML working group

• The content of a configuration record: data
• Who can access that content: metadata
• Who can set access permissions on that content: meta-metadata
• etc…

Trying to keep the layers separated (good luck Savas) is tempting for performance reasons but it’s like trying to shore up an ever-leaking levee in the face of a major storm. Semantic technologies get a lot of power out of the fact that they don’t even try.

I was prompted to write this because I recently learned that it also happens in medicine:

• Hypoparathyroidism: low parathyroid hormone
• Pseudohypoparathyroidism: normal parathyroid hormone levels, but a problem with the parathyroid receptor such that the symptoms are the same as those of hypoparathyroidism
• Pseudopseudohypoparathyroidism: normal parathyroid hormone levels and a normal parathyroid receptor, but presents with the same symptoms as pseudohypoparathyroidism (but without the consequences)

Good luck getting your health insurance to cover a pseudo-disease. Don’t even bother calling them about a pseudo-pseudo-disease.

[UPDATED 2009/5/1: For some reason this entry is attracting a lot of comment spam, so I am disabling comments. Contact me if you'd like to comment.]

Related posts:

1. Tutorial and pseudo-algorithm for CMDBF Query operation