Andrew’s Blog

This week is notable in the lives of lovers of Microsoft Windows everywhere for two key events: the retirement of Bill Gates, who will now work full-time for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and the retirement of Microsoft Windows XP, the operating system for lovers of the Teletubbies everywhere.

Microsoft is a company whose success is very much based on fate and being in the right place at the right time.  This has happened on two key occasions.  First, they were lucky enough to secure a deal to provide the operating system for IBM’s upcoming personal computer, which would end up dominating the market place.  This happened largely because IBM’s meeting with Digital Research failed.  IBM turned to Microsoft instead, then known for Altair BASIC and a notable letter which ushered in the proprietary software industry.  Microsoft bought out a company that did a cheap CP/M clone, this became MS-DOS and the rest is history and a legacy of drive letters.

The second occasion was the launch on Windows 3.1.  Windows 1 and 2 were relatively unsuccessful, but Windows 3.1 turned out to be ‘good enough’ and at the right time.  Based on its success, Microsoft broke off their collaboration with IBM on OS/2 and concentrated solely on Windows, turning their work on OS/2 into Windows NT which eventually replaced the MS-DOS line of Windows implementations which contains Windows 95, Windows 98 and Windows ME.

Both of these developments were successful for one key reason: cost.  There were other computing platforms around at the time of MS-DOS; it was by no means the first and certainly not the best.  There were other graphical interfaces around at the time of Windows 3.1 (including Apple’s Mac OS, which lead to a lawsuit between the two).  Microsoft succeeded because these systems were relatively cheap compared with the competition at the time.  Back then, there was no Free UNIX implementations in a usable state.  There was no world-wide web, so marketing dominated user’s ideas of what was out there.  This is even more important when you consider that back then computer users were generally more adept than they are now that the general public have a computer in their home.  Microsoft was successful in the workplace; this was the first experience of using a computer for many and the use of Windows became an inbuilt part of our society to the extent that our children are now reared on it from an early age.

Ironically, it is cost that will be Microsoft’s downfall.  Why? Because the cost of Microsoft software has not fallen, but risen over time.  Comparatively, computer hardware is now cheap to the extent that a personal computer in 2008 can cost so little that the additional cost of Windows licensing takes up a significant percentage.  Don’t think you’re paying the Microsoft tax? It’s factored in there at some point, even if it’s not made clear.  Even the OLPC for the fair world will have a levy of $10 for a Windows license.

The other reason for Microsoft’s dominance is apathy.  The majority of computer users don’t care what they use, as long as it lets them write a letter to Auntie June thanking them for their christmas presents, download the Top 40 via iTunes or browse numerous hilarious videos on YouTube.  This is also why the Mac has become successful; they don’t have any ethical advantage over Microsoft (Mac OS X is equally non-Free and worse than Microsoft if just simply because people tend to trust Apple more) and sell their machines purely on the basis that it will be a bit more stable than Windows, look a little nicer and because the hardware is just shiny.

This is why releasing Windows Vista was the worse thing Microsoft could have done, and why it has effectively hammered the nail in their own coffin.  In XP, they had a platform that had stood the test of time to an extent.  It was by no means good, being more like a battered old armchair; comfortable and homely to many users.  But by the end of this week, it’ll be dead.  Microsoft are currently intending to support it on the new breed of eeePC-style computers, if just so they don’t let GNU/Linux systems get a look in; Microsoft arrogance couldn’t allow that.  And of course, people going out and buying Vista AND XP is double the profits for Microsoft.  However, try as they might to call buying a $50 XP install from Dell a downgrade, the computer industry in general knows this isn’t the case and Microsoft firmly have egg on their faces over Visaster.
Thus, they have to been seen to push forward with Vista, but doing so will only further irritate their users.  Microsoft has made many enemies over time, but now even its friends are turning against it.  XP was relatively stable and fast, being designed for machines circa 2001.  Vista, by comparison, is a behemoth, a stellar example of badly written code that needs vast computer resources to run what is in effect just an operating system. The apathetic users we mentioned earlier don’t use Windows; Windows for them is actually Microsoft Word or the like.  If running just the operating system itself requires ridiculous hardware, then adding applications on top just makes things worse, not to mention all the crazy physics-defying DRM ideas Microsoft has stowed away in there.  There are already lawsuits because ‘Vista-capable’ machines just…well..aren’t.

But Microsoft had to release Vista.  Why? Because their flawed model of proprietary software requires this.  To be seen as being active, Microsoft have to appear to be working on a new version of Windows to satisfy its critics and, more importantly, its shareholders.  There has to be something new in the pipeline to make more money.  The problem is making money on a new release means getting people to want to buy it and that means having something people want.  The problem is there is nothing in Vista for most people, and most people are satisfied with what they already have.  There may have been lots of copies of Vista going out, but the majority by far will be because it’s on the new machine Mr and Mrs Jones just bought.  And that counts even if Mr and Mrs Jones then download a copy of Ubuntu, wipe off Vista and install Ubuntu instead because little Johnny recommended it to them.

With Vista then, it seems the sadists have finally had about enough.  Unfortunately, rebelling against this seems to mean choosing another version of Windows at present; hopefully many can instead be convinced that a GNU/Linux installation would be a better choice, especially as XP becomes unsupported and its a choice between that or Vista.  Microsoft do seem to have made some laudable efforts to improve things in Vista, but as always with them these improvements tend to be rushed and/or flawed, and additionally, the majority of the audience that would appreciate these changes have long since left for pastures new.  The remaining Windows users are those who just want things to stay the same; if they wanted change, they’d have installed a GNU/Linux operating system a long time ago or maybe just gone out and bought a Mac.

It will be interesting to see how long Microsoft continue to survive.  Things have gone south ever since the monkey took the helm.  As a GNU/Linux user, it’ll be interesting to watch from the sidelines.  Hopefully this drama will keep Microsoft from irritating the Free Software community with even more with spurious patent claims…

Higher education in the UK is in something of an interesting state these days. Driven by a desire to become a commercialised consumer-pleasing entity, the focus on research and education has been lost in favour of a desire to sate businessmen and government ministers, while filling the coffers. This is demonstrated clearly by our current influx of undergraduate students. It is now the University (and thus the department’s) job to attract as many students as possible from a mass of lemmings who follow the path to university simply because it’s the ‘done thing’. Gone is a time when students applied to university because they actually had a desire to learn, as is a time when students were awarded places based on merit not on making up the numbers. These days, our department is fined if they don’t make a certain allocation of students. As a result, we get second-rate students who aren’t really interested to make up the shortfall. There are of course exceptions, but these are getting more rare as years go by.

I’ve been struck by quite a few examples of this student apathy over the last year, and been made clearly aware of the exam treadmill that gets them here in the first place. At our student-staff liason meetings, it has become clear that students now feel it is the university’s job to spoon-feed them every piece of information, in just the same way this presumably happen in college beforehand. It seems they just can’t be bothered to try out examples for themselves, especially not outside of lectures or tutorials, and actually copying down notes is just too much effort. No, ‘give us printed notes’ they say; even when the notes are available online, that can be too much. ‘You should teach x, y and z as well’; because they can’t be expected to learn for themselves.

Very little is learnt by staring zombie-fashion at notes. Just copying down notes is pretty much equivalent to reading through them about ten times; the information is ingested in the process of writing them on paper. The only way to truly learn is to try; doing lots of examples will teach a concept much faster than a dry lecture. The only way to enjoy learning is to initiate the process yourself; do it because you want to, not because you have to. The latter is the most essential point that has been lost. Because students are largely no longer enthused by what they are learning, they don’t apply themselves in anything like the same manner. Such lifeless learning was once solely the domain of the school classroom, but a system where over 90% go on to university means that the same thing now filters into our colleges and universities.

Equally, it seems we are not even allow to tell them when their work is not up to scratch. It can’t be really average or poor; it can only be average or poor when applied relatively to the rest of the class. Nonsense is now good, if it’s better than the utter nonsense which is merely average. What if we hand out low marks? Clearly we’re not marking things ‘properly’; we’re not following the ‘marking scheme’.

At least one good thing comes from this; those of us who are are actually intelligent, those are of us who actually enjoy doing what we do, are even more unique than before and should hopefully stand out from the crowd when the time comes to go hunting for jobs.

I finally got down to making some progress on the new VT web app today.  This was mainly thanks to staying late at the department (still there now actually) due to it being Mesude’s birthday! I’m currently expecting Henry to turn up any minute so we can go down to Zizzi’s to celebrate.

Anyway, this morning I converted some of our old undergraduate projects to Mercurial and put them on the VT server.  You can now find the demonstrators system and the Recursive Meta Scraper there.  DCS Central is the name of the new project; a rather pompous name at the moment for what essentially is a small Java class I wrote ages ago to query the departmental printers and an XSL stylesheet which generates our current people listing on the VT website.

This currently only happens via a static XML file.  The next thing to do is to get a Java servlet firstly to do the processing (as opposed to the web browser) and then to make the XML generation dynamic, taking the people list from a database.  Finally, we add some stuff to the web app to allow us to modify this database.  And as a result the VT web site hopefully becomes a shade more maintainable.

There are still a few things missing from the stylesheet.  We don’t yet handle RAs and research students, but this shouldn’t be too different from the academics. The main addition is that students need a supervisor list and a thesis title.  The latter will eventually link to a longer blurb pulled from rmission.  I’m in two minds about including academic rmissions.  Most of their work should be maintained in projects which will also eventually be listed via vt.

There are also a few other modifications.  We need to allow the default makeperson URL to be overridden, mainly so alumni can be listed.  Alumni will only really differ in being listed on a separate page, so they should be able to use the same stylesheet and just be generated from a different link which does a different database query.

At least there are real results from this at last and not just ideas in my head!

Well yesterday turned out not to be a hacking day at all, but rather a day dismantling VT and installing a new disk (80gb from support).  It’s not yet active (we need some more downtime to setup the new disk, and move data back and forth) but it should mean we have a lot more room to breathe!  Thanks to Simon for his help with the beast; getting a new hard disc into a desktop case proved to be a very non-trivial process!

Today marks the start of hacking on the new VT web application. IcedTea6 and Tomcat are now available on VT, along with a wiki. I’ve also asked support to set up a vtdevel@ alias for us so I can keep track of who is using and abusing VT. The code for the web application will be hosted in VT’s mercurial repositories as usual.

Some planned features:

• Generate some of the really dumb ™ VT web pages, like the people and project lists.
• Generate publications lists from the publications database via George’s corporate author hack.
• Handle seminar announcements
• Monitor lab resources

Feedback welcomed.

Also a quick reminder to all that Google Summer of Code 2008 applications now close on the 7th of April. Hopefully we will have some successful students from UniShef this year.

Install Mac OS X on a case-sensitive (i.e. real) filesystem. It’s wonderful to watch how all the badly written applications break in strange and wonderful ways. Oh the joys of proprietary software development and not being able to fix completely stupid bugs like this…

So it’s January again and the department is only just now starting to get back up to full steam. I’ve been back in since the 2nd in order to give myself plenty of time to get going again while it’s quiet. I actually quite like it like that. For most of the first week, there were very few academics in. Notably, Phil was around (the mark of a good head of department) and Marian was also in towards the end of the week. Other than that, it was pretty much just me, Monika, Kirsty and a few other VT students (Henry and Maslita then Mohammed and Ali on the Friday) around our part of the building.

Henry spent most of the time trying to finish sorting out his new accommodation and, most importantly, his Internet connection. It seemed like a good idea to go with the discount O2 gave him via his existing mobile contract in theory. In practice, their website was obviously designed by idiots and caused no end of problems. Why should we have to tell the web site that we’re logged in? Surely it should know!

Ibby also made an appearance on the Thursday (although much later than I expected from his phonecall the day before!) and Henry suggested some post-birthday drinks which was very nice of him. We spent a couple of hours in the Swim, having a good chat before going home.

This nice little spell of quite winterdom was over by the next week when people started to reappear en mass. There still weren’t enough people to warrant a postgraduate seminar session though, on the Monday, so it was cancelled much to Ramsay’s dismay at the loss of pizza. Most of my time over the last two weeks has been spent on getting the Sun stuff going, of which you can ready more on my other blog; other than that, it’s been lots of nice chats over cuppas as usual.

The biggest event of the last couple of weeks has to be our impromptu night out. Last Thursday, me and Henry bumped into Emily in the kitchen (she having returned on Monday, when we sadly took all the Christmas decorations back down) and were given a rather strange invitation to a night out. You see, she didn’t ask us if we wanted to join her but rather if we’d meet up with her if we were already going out. Kind of bizarre. We weren’t sure what to do, given the short notice. I know Em would never go out at such short notice, so it seemed a bit cheeky her expecting us to.

In the end, we decided to go and I texted Em to let her know. We were forewarned it was apparently a ‘girly night’, whatever that means, but even without any mascara, we still decided to go. Unfortunately, we were a little late in getting across to the Varsity and when we got there at 9, Em had left. We stayed for a drink anyway, then went across to the quieter Cavendish for another. As usual, the Varsity was playing loud music for the very few customers it has, while it was noticeably quieter but packed with people in the Cavendish. After some interesting chat, the two of us headed down to the Leadmill, again via the Globe, having agreed to meet Emily there.

The streets were desolate, with the Cavendish seemingly having the majority of tonight’s party people. To say we got to the Leadmill later than we have before (about half eleven), and yet it was still nearly empty, it shows how much the night-going population of Sheffield is dominated by the students, who were all still mostly away on Christmas vacation. We spotted Em and friend not long after getting there, but there seemed to be little hint of the girly night we were told about. Rather than interrupting her, we waited until she spotted us as well and decided to come over.

The night was a bit different to what I remember the last Thursday at the Leadmill being like. The music in the main room was way more cheesy than before, being a smattering of all sorts of pop music, while room 2, rather than being the usual indie stuff, was playing house music. Sadly, as always popularity surrounds the worst music, and the poor DJ in that room had very few people on the dancefloor. These kids today just don’t have any taste — I mean, Peter Andre? The guy kept repeating tracks too which always annoys me. 3 Britney Spears songs (1 twice)?

It worked out well though, because I think the DJ in room 2 realised he didn’t have to play to the crowd but could just play what he fancied. We went back and forth a few times; I got Henry to join me in there the first time, then the second time he initiated us going in there after hearing that the guy had moved on to playing some trance. The main dance floor was a joke. Not only was the music not too good, but the majority of people there weren’t even dancing and seemed to take it badly that some of us wanted to actually enjoy ourselves. They’d rather just stand there like idiots and get drunk.

Towards the end of the night, there were people falling all over the place, so I escaped once again to the other room, especially when I heard the DJ was now playing some drum ‘n’ bass! That made me very happy, even I was one of only about three people in there, while the rest were staggering around in the other room to Whitney Houston. Admittedly, it was commercial drum ‘n’ bass (Pendulum’s ‘Slam’ followed by Puretone’s ‘Addicted to Bass’) but this was still a league above what the annoying wedding DJ was doing in the other room. It’s always a sign of a bad DJ when they feel the need to talk to their audience and tell you what tracks they’re going to play. Honestly, it was like listening to Hallam FM or something.

The DJ finished the night with some old skool stuff, and then I met up with Henry again and we walked back up towards his house. I was in no rush to get back and I didn’t want to leave him until I knew he was cognoscent enough to get home okay. All in all, it was a good night and I enjoyed the chance to have a good chat with Henry. He’s a really good friend.