Eddy's occasional random thoughts

Marc Andreessen's blog today mentioned this cool demo:

This uses video goggles with a head-tracking sensor to remotely control the orientation of a camera mounted on a pilot-less plane, letting you virtually explore the heavens.

Apart from the general wow-factor of flying around the sky without ever leaving the ground, it reminded me of another piece of impressive technology I came across recently: quad-copters.

Here, a high-speed DSP is used to combine realtime feedback from gyros and sensors on position, wind direction, etc. to control four rotating blades independently allowing for stationary hovering in a wide range of conditions with no pilot input required. Great for remote video surveillance etc.

Combining these two pieces of technology seems like a perfect opportunity. Has anyone done it yet?

And a missing piece of the puzzle: even using stereo cameras to feed the video goggles, the image will still be flat since there is no way to remotely focus it (other than relying on auto-focus). Has anyone developed a set of video goggles that can track the eye's ability to focus on specific objects? Combine that with a pair of remote cameras that can track the eye's focus in that way and you could have REAL telepresence (once the latency isn't too high, of course).

Isn't it great that we live in an age where such amazing technology is affordable enough to let people devise interesting hacks in their spare time...?

Last night, I attend the monthly meeting of SAGE-IE, the Systems Administrators Guild of Ireland (old website here).

The evening's talk was on Google Apps, presented by Sam Johnston and Laurent Gasser of Microcost. I had only been peripherally aware of Google Apps, so I figured it would be a good chance to find out some more.

Sam & Laurent both gave engaging and enthusiastic presentations. Microcost is in the business of helping enterprises to move their internal services (e-mail, calendar/scheduler, collaborative document editing, etc.) to Google Apps, with the potential for both large cost savings and significant improvements in productivity.

Some random interesting titbits I took away from the evening:

• Total cost of upgrading a corporate workstation to Windows Vista is estimated as €2,500 (Microsoft estimate) to €5,000 (independent estimate). This is enough to provide the same user with 50-100 years of Google Apps service. (Google Apps are $50 per user per year for a premium subscription).
• Microcost use Amazon's S3 to store enterprise's back-end data, with another service encrypting the data to/from Amazon (to address any potential privacy concerns). Not clear to me how this interfaces with Google Apps, since this was glossed over.
• There are significant productivity gains from having proper, shared document editing. When documents always live in the cloud, anyone (with appropriate authorisation) can access them from anywhere, anytime. Multiple users editing the same document can arrive at a final version much more quickly and effectively than the more traditional route of swapping Word and Excel files via email.
• A big advantage of online apps, such as Google Apps, is that upgrades can happen completely seamlessly without the user having to do anything. Upgrades are small and frequent, rather than large and infrequent. Since everyone using the app is updated simultaneously, there is more scope for making fundamental changes to the underlying code without having to be as concerned with backwards compatibility.
• One audience member was concerned that organisations could become dependent on certain functionality which might then disappear in a future release, with no control or comeback. Laurent conceded that this was a possibility for individual users, who may grow attached to some particular quirk of the system, but less likely to affect enterprises where Google (or whoever) track user preferences closely.
• There was also some concern over whether organisations would be willing to move all their data into the cloud. Another audience member commented that larger organisations are already used to giving up control of some or most of their data, by way of internal data centres and outsourced IT support, so they don't see it as a big leap. For smaller companies, this is a more significant hurdle.
• Laurent mentioned that in over a year of using Google Apps, he has yet to find any signficant bugs or stability concerns. I think this is key: Google tend to make very reliable and solid web apps, which instill confidence in the user. They have a lot of experience building fault-tolerant systems. If the execution is less than 100%, I expect most users would lose confidence very quickly indeed.

Also, as an aside, Sam mentioned that Trinity College recently announced that they will be moving all student email to Gmail. He expects most other colleges to follow in their footsteps.

The presentation finished off with a look at Mike Wesch's recent Digital Ethnography video which puts a lot of the Web 2.0 stuff into context. I hadn't seen this before (though it's been creating quite a buzz), and it's well worth watching - download the 67 MB high-resolution version for the best experience.

The US magazine Consumer Reports (similar to Which? magazine in the UK) has been in the technology news recently. As part of a comprehensive test of antivirus software packages, they commissioned a consulting company to create 5,500 new viruses to see how well market leading programs would cope.

The antivirus industry, led by McAfee, was immediately up in arms when they heard about it. Imagine the risk to society of these viruses escaping into the wild! What blatant disregard for consumer safety! And other similar scaremongering...

It only takes a little scratching below the surface to show that their concerns are, at best, misguided. The viruses created for Consumer Reports were simple modifications of existing viruses, altered so that their signature was no longer identifiable. The viruses were kept in a secure environment, and all copies were removed after testing - only a single CD remains, which is kept in a locked and secure cabinet on site.

Surprise, surprise - McAffee's package didn't do particularly well in the test; it relies heavily on a signature database to identify new threats. When viruses were still something of a novelty, this approach worked well - it often took weeks before a new virus gained notoriety, giving McAffee plenty of time to respond.

By now however, it is so easy for would-be virus writers to develop new viruses, and variants on existing viruses, that a pure signature-based approach is no longer sufficient. A more pro-active approach is needed, that can identify virus-like behaviour and quarantine or block the affected program. Of course, there will be legitimate tools which end up looking like a virus - commercial tools can be recognised and permitted explicitly, while a mechanism can be included to allow users to grant access to other programs on an as-needed basis.

Maybe the industry should use two distinct terms - "Virus removal", for packages that can remove existing viruses which are already known to the program, and "Antivirus" for packages that can detect new virus strains and prevent infection in the first place. (Somehow, though, I can't imagine vendors thinking this is a good idea.)

Whenever Which? reviews product categories that I know well, I find myself disagreeing with their conclusions; this doesn't give me much confidence in their reviews of other products that I'm not familiar with. People I trust have made similar comments about Consumer Reports. In this case, however, they're on the side of right. More power to them...

(In case you're wondering, the top rated antivirus packages were from BitDefender and ZoneLabs. The full report is only available to subscribers.)

I recently came across an article at security website Dark Reading which explains why Vista isn't written in .NET.

There are a few different reasons given, but the main one is that Microsoft have a lot of hardcore C++ OS programmers who didn't want to switch to C#. Because C# is type-safe, it's a lot harder to do some of the standard C tricks of peeking and poking memory locations, tweaking bits in registers, etc.

This is a shame, because while that type checking can be frustrating at times, it does give an awful lot of protection from malicious coding techniques. Given the rate at which Microsoft publishes Windows Security Updates, you'd have thought they'd be very keen to adapt a more secure computing environment.

Another reason given was performance: since .NET code is pseudo-interpreted, it is not as efficient as native C/C++ code. That's a red herring though - my experience with .NET has been that it runs more than fast enough for almost anything you're likely to do with it. Like any environment, you can easily write bad code that runs like a dog; you can also write good code that runs very fast indeed.

And as if to prove my point, the current non-.NET betas of Vista run incredibly slowly, at least on my Athlon 2400 system with 1 GB RAM and a very fast Radeon graphics card. Intel must be rubbing their hands with glee...

Network World just pointed me towards an intriguing Wooden Periodic Table of the Elements.

It's really very nicely done - check it out.