O (b LOG N)

A Peek Under Microsoft’s Secret ‘Bigtop’

A Peek Under Microsoft’s Secret ‘Bigtop’
Rather than attempting to tightly couple a few high-performance systems together, Microsoft is looking at the consequences of loosely coupling a larger number of moderately powerful computers to achieve a similar result.

Bigtop’s first commercial manifestation will likely be as some kind of large-scale project, most likely a distributed grid-computing operating system, the sources added.

Bigtop is one of Microsoft’s incubation projects. It falls under the domain of Craig Mundie, the Microsoft senior vice president and chief technical officer in charge of advanced strategies and policy, sources said.

Bigtop consists of three components, all written in C#, according developers who said they were briefed by Microsoft. These are:

• Highwire: Highwire is a technology designed to automate the development of highly parallel applications that distribute work over distributed resources, the aforementioned sources said. Highwire is a programming language/model that will aim to make the testing and compiling of such parallel programs much simpler and more reliable.
• Bigparts: Bigparts is code designed to turn inexpensive PC devices into special-purpose servers, according to the sources. Bigparts will enable real-time, device-specific software to be moved off a PC, and instead be managed centrally via some Web-services-like model.
• Bigwin: According to sources close to Microsoft, Bigwin sounds like the ultimate manifestation of Microsoft’s “software as a service” mantra. In a Bigwin world, applications are just collections of OS services that adhere to certain “behavioral contracts.” These OS services can be provided directly by the core OS or even obtained from libraries outside of the core OS.

Well, this sounds awfully familiar to me. I’m awfully surprised to see this in the news.

Music of the last ice age

German archaeologists have discovered one of the world’s “>oldest known musical instruments — a 30,000-year-old flute finely carved from a woolly mammoth’s ivory tusk.

Reuters Pictures of the year - 2004

An impressive gallery of powerful photos taken over the last year.

A fact a day keeps the stupids away

Sunil has a new site that I must say is very cool. So cool in fact that I am posting it here and running it on my blog roll. Now he just needs an RSS feed.

Skunkworks at Apple

“Even now, I look back and wonder if I was horribly taken advantage of, or whether I was in control. I can’t honestly tell.”

Ron Avitzur’s relates his story of being a contractor at Apple, having his project killed, and his unwillingness to give up. Instead he and a friend began a clandestine development project to complete their graphing calculator application. Although he had been terminated by Apple, he hired contractors using his own savings and setup secret offices in Apple’s headquarters. In the end, his application was adopted by Apple and he was paid a ‘nominal sum.’ This is an interesting story of two guy’s determination to finish what they started.

People around the Apple campus saw us all the time and assumed we belonged. Few asked who we were or what we were doing.When someone did ask me, I never lied, but relied on the power of corporate apathy. The conversations usually went like this:

Q: Do you work here?
A: No.
Q: You mean you’re a contractor?
A: Actually, no.
Q: But then who’s paying you?
A: No one.
Q: How do you live?
A: I live simply.
Q: (Incredulously) What are you doing here?!

Logitech MX 1000 Laser Cordless Mouse

My father-in-law gave me one of these Logitech MX 1000 Laser Cordless Mouse for Christmas. It was actually on the top of my Christmas list, but somehow my wife missed it. Luckily, my father-in-law heard me complain about my trackball dying on me an picked me up the MX 1000. I have only used it for a day so writing this now may be somewhat premature. Here is what I think so far:

• It is spectacularly precise and works exceptionally well on any surface, even reflective ones. Kudos on this front.
• The shape of the mouse is very nice, but I have big hands and I wish it were a bit bigger. However, I realize it is probably perfect for the majority of the market.
• The placement of the TEN buttons are great, except it seems to me that the forward and back buttons could be a bit more forward (this could be due to my big hands though).
• I love the TEN buttons, BUT — and this is a big but — why the hell can’t you modify the settings for the left and right scroll mouse buttons in the Setpoint control panel? You can set all the buttons, but these two? What the hell? Those are the two I immediately attempted to modify.
• For my final complaint. And this one is a doozy. I cannot get the damn back/forward buttons to work in Firefox! What a disappointment! Moreover, I sure wish someone would write a Firefox plug-in so that I could assign buttons to functions of Firefox. For example, open tab — close tab, etc.

Overall Rating: 8.5/10

I was complaining about the lack of functionality in FireFox, but I just discovered the fix in Logitech’s extensive online forums:

You have to set the mouse buttons to generic buttons in order for them to work in [some] applications.

Open the Logitech software setpoint/mouseware:
go to the mouse button assignments for the button you want;
on the select task hit other
next to to it there is a set function button
select generic button
hit apply

Now the mouse will send regular [Win] impulses.

Now that I have that issue resolved I increased the overal rating. It would have to be bluetooth and more mobile for it to get a 10/10.