After Munich, what? Paris perhaps

Last year the city of Munich famously snubbed Microsoft and plumped for open source software when upgrading its 14,000-PC system. Last week, the French government announced that it was moving many of its installations to Linux. And now it seems that the Paris city administration is thinking about doing the same.

What’s going on? It would be nice to think that public officials across the world are waking up to the perilous lock-in implicit in continuing to use Microsoft software. But it might just be that they’ve cynically twigged that the best way to squeeze whopping discounts from Redmond is to threaten a move to Linux. Thoughtful article about all this in IT.director.com. Excerpt:

“It is interesting to note in all of this that the Linux battle has become political in a major way. National and local governments across the world (the list is long and includes China, Japan, Brazil and much of Europe) have got the Linux bug, for three reasons. The first is that they think that they are paying too much for software, particularly desktop software. The second is that they believe that Open Source will do more to stimulate the local software industry than the purchase of proprietary software from a US provider. The third is that Windows poor security record has cost Microsoft a good deal of credibility. Microsoft can say what it likes about the fact that Linux suffers security breaches too, but the fact is that the expensive worms are the Windows worms.

Paris has yet to make a decision, but the simple fact that it is contemplating the Linux desktop indicates the inroads that Linux on the desktop is now making. The Linux momentum is growing and the Linux market share will inevitably grow with it. This is all a self-feeding phenomenon. The more success it has, the more that Novell, Red Hat and the rest will invest in improving usability and the greater the number of vendors that will see Linux as the platform of opportunity.”

The monoculture debate

The question of whether a Microsoft-based monoculture makes the world more vulnerable to catastrophic failure is interesting and complex. Following on his earlier essay on the subject, Ed Felten has published an excellent report of the debate at USENIX last week between Dan Geer and Microsoft’s Scott Charney. Here’s the gist:

“Geer went first, making his case for the dangers of monoculture. He relied heavily on an analogy to biology, arguing that just as genetic diversity helps a population resist predators and epidemics, diversity in operating systems would help the population of computers resist security attacks. The bio metaphor has some power, but I thought Geer relied on it too heavily, and that he would have been better off talking more about computers.

Charney went second, and he made two main arguments. First, he said that we already have more diversity than most people think, even within the world of Windows. Second, he said that the remedy that Geer suggests — adding a modest level of additional diversity, say adopting two major PC operating systems with a 50/50 market share split — would do little good. The bad guys would just learn how to carry out cross-platform attacks; or perhaps they wouldn’t even bother with that, since an attack can take the whole network offline without penetrating a large fraction of machines. (For example, the Slammer attack caused great dislocation despite affecting less than 0.2% of machines on the net.) The bottom line, Charney said, is that increasing diversity would be very expensive but would provide little benefit.”

More from the ‘You couldn’t make it up’ department

“There was only one way Microsoft could screw up its dominance among Web browsers, and by golly, those clever folks up in Redmond seem to have come up with it: Allow a neverending string of increasingly dangerous security flaws to scare users away. And when a government agency posts what amounts to a public service announcement on behalf of the competition, you can almost hear the self-destruct mechanism clicking down. Last week was particularly rough for Internet Explorer, with the disclosure of a nasty, data-snatching Trojan that exploited a combination of vulnerabilities that had gone unfixed for months. Then Microsoft issued a work-around that didn’t really solve the problem. Now comes word that there’s yet another hole through which this evil can creep. But IE still has a few things going for it, namely ubiquity and inertia. “Mozilla has shown itself to be a capable browser and has only gotten better with each release, but until something bad happens to more people, then the interest in moving to that is not going to be that high,” said Dennis Barr, IT manager at civil engineering consulting company Larkin Group Inc., in Kansas City, Mo.

That’s right — the perceptions are the problem: From Steve Ballmer’s annual State of the Empire memo to the Microsoft troops: ‘We must also work to change a number of customer perceptions, including the views that older versions of Office and Windows are good enough, and that Microsoft is not sufficiently focused on security.'”

Truly, you couldn’t make this stuff up. Thanks to Good Morning, Silicon Valley.

The prius of progress

One unintended side-effect of buying an offbeat car is that it encourages one’s friends to make outrageous puns. I’ve already been asked if I will become ‘Prius sensitive’. And someone has even adapted Oscar Wilde’s crack about a cynic being “someone who knows the prius of everything and the value of nothing”! It’s tough being an innovative consumer. Sigh.

Latin tag

Quentin wants to know what’s the plural of Prius. The answer, surely, is Prii. (Just like alumnus and alumni). Er, Quod Erat Demonstrandum.

Textual versatility

According to an AP report, a Singapore student, Kimberly Yeo, 23, managed to type a complicated 26-word message on her phone in 43.66 seconds. This beats the existing text message record of 67 seconds, set last year by Briton James Trusler in Sydney, Australia. Contestants had to type: ‘The razor-toothed piranhas of the genera Serrasalmus and Pygocentrus are the most ferocious freshwater fish in the world. In reality they seldom attack a human.’ Using predictive text was not allowed, and the punctuation needed to be spot on, too.”

Geek transportation

Yesterday, after the kids had bounced up and down on the back seats and checked the HiFi, and I had solemnly examined the electronics, we bought a Toyota Prius.

It’s got a daft name and is nothing to look at, but it’s revolutionary (well, for the automobile industry anyway) underneath the surface. It’s the only hybrid drive car available in the UK (Honda make one which is available in the US, I think), has sensational fuel consumption (65.7 mpg) and very low emissions (104 g/km — low enough to exempt it from the London Congestion Charge) — and the government gives you money (£700 I believe) if you buy one. We’re collecting it on July 5.

I bought it mainly because I’m feeling increasingly uneasy about sitting in traffic jams doing little other than warming the planet. I’ve driven Saabs for 25 years and loved their safety and reliability, but when I looked to see what they could offer by way of fuel economy and emissions in their new cars, it became clear that they haven’t even begun to think about the problem.

One reason I investigated the Prius was that prominent members of the geek community in the US (e.g. the NYT’s David Pogue) have been extolling their virtues. After I’d announced our decision, I was told that Harrison Ford drives one. Not sure this is much of a recommendation. But Quentin has just pointed me to Matthew Wilson’s Blog. Matthew is a serious geek and has bought the top-of-the-range model — “A black 2004 Prius with all of the options. I mean everything. GPS navigation, bluetooth phone hookup, speech recognition, in-dash 6 disc CD changer (tape too), driver and passenger airbags, side impact airbags, side curtain airbags, HID headlights (you know, the annoying blue ones, like on BMW’s), smart entry and ignition (no keys, just the fob, and you don’t take it out of your pocket)”. Mine’s just a modest T4, and I feel envious already. Sigh.

Go to Google, enter “out of touch management” (without quotes), and click I’m Feeling Lucky. Talk about being hoist with one’s own petard … [Source:Technology Review RSS Blog Feed]

Bug update

My new DAB radio is indeed interesting. Apart from the ‘rewind’ caching facility, it also has a slot for a Secure Digital card (the kind that many digital cameras use), so one can record off-air. (Er, for one’s own private use, of course.) And it has a USB port. Which at 128kbps makes for good quality MP3 recordings. Hmmm… this has intriguing possibilities. Somebody’s put a lot of thought into this little gizmo. In fact, if it weren’t such a terrible joke, I’d say s/he was a dab hand at design.

The Bug

This, believe it or not, is a really neat DAB radio.

What makes it really interesting is that it has local storage — so it caches the current programme, enabling one to do instant rewind. It’s the beginning of TiVO for radio. Oh, and it’s also an alarm clock.