|
|
Home | Switchboard | Unix Administration | Red Hat | TCP/IP Networks | Neoliberalism | Toxic Managers |
| (slightly skeptical) Educational society promoting "Back to basics" movement against IT overcomplexity and bastardization of classic Unix | |||||||
|
|
Switchboard | ||||
| Latest | |||||
| Past week | |||||
| Past month | |||||
[Oct 15, 2004] The table of equivalents - replacements - analogs of Windows software in Linux. (Official site of the table) by Valery V. Kachurov, Artem Nesov and Timofey Korolev
[14 Oct 2004] Google Desktop Google Desktop is the newest thing from Google. It integrates seamlessly with the web-based Google; any search on the web now shows desktop results as well. Email messages that it finds are displayed in the browser window. It's supposed to index AOL chat logs as well as all the usual document types.[May 20, 2004] Linux security system. VXE
VXE - Virtual eXecuting Environment
Main problem with UNIX security is that superuser can do with system anything he wants. There are programs (daemons) which work with superuser privilegies, for example popd, sendmail, and accessible from network (Internet/Intranet). There could be bugs in any program, so intruder connects to such programs via network, exploit existing bugs in it and get a control over all host.
VXE (Virtual eXecuting Environment) protects UNIX servers from such intruders, hacker attacks from network and so on. It protects software subsystems, such as: SMTP, POP, HTTP and any other subsystem, already installed on the server. There is no need to change configuration of existing software - just PROTECT it.
So, VXE solve the following problem: protects host and particular subsystems, which work as superuser and can have bugs. This is the situation we have in real life.
VXE can be used for various tasks, for example:
- daemon protection, as mentioned above;
- provide user access to command line (shell, telnet) with restrictions (VXE describes - what tools and files are available for each user, and these restrictions can't be broken by any tricks);
- with VXE it is possible to allow user CGI hosting; VXE limits resources available to programs supplied by user, so it is painless to have user uploaded CGI scripts;
- etc.VXE is available under GPL license at http://vxe.quercitron.com
[Jan 25, 2004] NYT Dr. Olga Ladyzhenskaya, 81, Mathematician, Dies By JEREMY PEARCE
Dr. Olga Ladyzhenskaya, a mathematician whose work with differential equations contributed to advances in the study of fluid dynamics in areas like weather forecasting, oceanography, aerodynamics and cardiovascular science, died on Jan. 12 in St. Petersburg, Russia. She was 81. The cause of death had not been determined, according to a spokeswoman for the Association for Women in Mathematics, in College Park, Md. Dr. Ladyzhenskaya was a member of the organization.
Her primary work was on calculations that were developed in the 19th century to explain the behavior of fluids and known as Navier-Stokes equations. As a researcher first at St. Petersburg University and later at the Steklov Institute of Mathematics, also in St. Petersburg, she worked through the solutions for the equations, which show how a number of variables relate in time and space.
Among other practical uses, the equations enable meteorologists to predict the movement of storm clouds.
In the 1960's, Dr. Ladyzhenskaya published her observations in a text that is still cited in the field. "Ladyzhenskaya did not describe the basic equations, but she contributed significantly to their solutions," said Dr. Peter D. Lax of the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University. "She was also always a rebel and treated as one by the Soviet government."
Olga Aleksandrovna Ladyzhenskaya graduated from Moscow State University and received a doctorate from Leningrad State University before earning another doctorate from Moscow State in 1953. After teaching in the physics department at St. Petersburg University, she joined the Steklov Institute, which is affiliated with the Russian Academy of Sciences.
Dr. Marshall Slemrod, a mathematician with the University of Wisconsin, said Dr. Ladyzhenskaya had an American counterpart in John Nash, the Princeton mathematician and Nobel laureate whose life is depicted in the film "A Beautiful Mind," and who also studied partial differential equations.
"She was perhaps the premier worker on the Russian side," Dr. Slemrod said. "If you believe your weather forecast, you have to solve the exact equations that she studied."
Her later work involved the study of elliptical and parabolic equations that are used in probability theory.
Dr. Ladyzhenskaya's reputation as an independent spirit was furthered by her friendship with Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, the author and dissident, and by reports that her father had been killed by Soviet officials, Dr. Lax said.
She was head of the Steklov Institute's laboratory of mathematical physics and was made a corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Sciences in 1981, before becoming a full member in 1990.
Earlier in her life, Dr. Ladyzhenskaya was briefly married. She has no immediate survivors
Russia Russian 'Brain Drain' Leaves Future In Doubt (Part 1) By Francesca Mereu
Russia's scientific establishment -- once among the world's best -- has been reduced to a skeleton of its former self, living off crumbs from the federal budget. The post-Soviet decade saw tens of thousands of science professionals leaving the country for better opportunities abroad, and more than a million scientists leaving the profession for other jobs within Russia. In the first of a two-part series on the state of Russian science today, RFE/RL looks at the problem of "brain drain."
Moscow, 30 July 2002 (RFE/RL) -- After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, Russia inherited nearly all of the Soviet era's scientific resources. But the Russian research establishment, like many other sectors of Russian society, was hit hard by the economic crisis that followed the collapse of the communist system.
According to a research project conducted by Harvard University history-of-science professor Loren Graham, the past decade of transition has seen Russian government funding for research and development drop from about 1 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) to less than one-third of 1 percent. In Soviet times, this figure never dropped below 2 percent. This, combined with the steady decline in GDP figures over the past 10 years, amounts to a bleak picture for science, once the keystone of Soviet glory.
Further emphasizing the decline of Russian science is the steady outflow, or "brain drain," of science professionals seeking opportunities abroad. The Harvard study indicates that Russia has lost between 10,000 and 30,000 scientists since 1991. Other estimates put the number far higher, at some 200,000.
Aleksandr Karasik is a professor at the Moscow Engineering Institute and a laser-technology researcher at the Moscow General Physics Institute. He said that nearly all of his former colleagues are now working abroad. "The outflow [of personnel] in science is really noticeable [in Russia]. For example, I used to be the head of a leading lab for nonlinear fiber optics. Now 90 percent of my [former] lab employees are working abroad: in the United States, in Mexico, and other countries," Karasik said.
The situation is even more dire when one looks at the problem of "internal brain drain," where science professionals remain in Russia but give up their vocation to pursue better ways of making money. Recent estimates in Russia suggest that as many as 1.5 million scientists -- researchers and technicians -- have left their jobs over the past decade.
Petr Zverev is the head of the Laser Department at the General Physics Institute. Now in his 40s, Zverev said nearly all of his university colleagues have changed their profession during the past 10 years. "If we take the group of 20 people with whom I graduated from the Moscow Physics Institute, now only five of them work in the science sector. Others are working in the banking sector or do business. Among those five [still working in science], only two of them are working in Russia. The other three have emigrated to other countries," Zverev said.
Low salaries are one factor driving scientists away from the field. Scientists' wages during the Soviet era were considerably higher than average. By 1997, however, their salaries had dropped to 30 percent below average, and since then have dropped even further. Now, scientists' salaries rank 10th out of 11 employment categories in Russia, ranking above only those working in arts and culture.
In practical terms, this means even those professors who work as department heads and maintain impressive research and publishing schedules may earn as little as $100 a month. Postdoctoral researchers may earn only $60 a month.
Olga Zharenova is a researcher with the Center for Political Information and the coauthor of a book on brain drain in Russian science. She said depleted government coffers mean not only low salaries for scientists but also little or no resources for new equipment. This, as much as anything, she said, is driving Russian scientists abroad. "The problem of money [for salaries] is not the most important one [for scientists]. The most important thing for them is to make progress with their research. [This is the reason why] the lack of modern equipment and technology is tragic for them," Zharenova said.
In the Soviet era, where the national interest was focused on advancing the country's space and military-industrial sectors, scientists were provided with the most modern technology and equipment available. But now, Zharenova said, Russian scientists are often struggling to conduct research with equipment that is upwards of 15 years old.
Karasik said buying his lab a modern laser system would cost about $100,000 -- "money we wouldn't even dream of," he added.
The combination of poor salaries and impoverished research budgets has, not surprisingly, turned many of Russia's best and brightest students away from science. The average age of Russia's scientists today is between 50 and 55 years, compared to the West, where it is 45. This, Karasik said, is another big problem. "The main problem is that now you don't have young people coming to work in science. The best-qualified groups we prepare [at the institute] usually leave after they get their degree. They either go abroad or they just give up working in science and start doing something else. You can understand them. Science isn't prestigious anymore. [Scientists] earn next to nothing, and [young people] can easily earn more just by selling telephones," Karasik said.
The situation, Karasik added, is only likely to get worse. Although the number of students enrolling in scientific institutes is still high, many are looking only to get an inexpensive, high-quality education they can then take abroad. But as the last generation of Soviet-era professors ages and retires, Karasik said, there will be no one to take their place.
The Kremlin appears to be addressing the problem. Gadzhimet Safaralev, deputy head of the State Duma Committee for Education and Science, said Russian President Vladimir Putin is aware of the crisis facing the scientific community. In the past two years, researchers received all the funds allocated to them in the budget. Moreover, budgets are once again on the rise. In 2000, funding for science increased by almost 39 percent, and Russia now spends some $1.3 billion on science annually. The numbers are expected to increase even further in the 2003 budget.
But such improvements still fall dramatically short of science budgets elsewhere. The United States, for example, spends some $652 billion annually on research and development.
Earlier this month, a group of scientists held a demonstration in Moscow asking the government to honor a 1996 law stipulating that at least 4 percent of federal budget funds be directed at research and development. The Finance Ministry said this target will be realistic only by 2010, a time many Russian scientists say will be too late.
Safaralev said it is difficult to argue for higher science expenditures at a time when Russia is facing economic crises in a number of crucial sectors. But he said even now many scientific institutes can improve their economic standing by renting out space to commercial firms. He also said scientific institutes enjoy considerable tax breaks from the state. "There is a lot of tax relief. On the whole, if you calculate how much academic institutions get, it is much more than 40 billion rubles [some $1.3 billion]. In real terms, the financing for science turns out to be 56 billion rubles [some $1.8 billion]. But a simple scientist doesn't know about this," Safaralev said.
But Karasik said he feels the government is not truly interested in improving the situation. "It is unclear how the problem is going to be solved in the near future. I feel that the government is not interested in [solving] it. It seems to me that, on the one hand, [authorities] want to keep the country's [former scientific] prestige alive and [don't want] science to be destroyed. But on the other hand, you don't see any concrete changes that make you think the situation is going to change for the better in the near future. We're going to lose forever the rich scientific potential we amassed over many years," Karasik said.
Both Karasik and Zverev say their research has survived during the past 10 years thanks to help from foreign foundations. Since 1991, foreign organizations have provided more than $4 billion to research and development. U.S. billionaire and philanthropist George Soros has personally donated some $130 million. The Harvard University study on Russian science indicates that currently nearly 17 percent of research-and-development work in Russian science is funded from abroad. At some of the country's most prestigious institutes, that number rises to between 25 and 50 percent.
Russian science funds are doing their part as well. But scientists say they themselves are limited in the amount of support they can provide -- often it is only enough to cover the cost of a single computer. For now, dedicated scientists like Zverev and Karasik spend a few months of every year working abroad at foreign research centers in order to make ends meet at home.
(This is Part 1 in a two-part series.)
[Nov 14, 2003] Google puts coders to the test Third was Eugene Vasilchenko, who earned his master's degree in computer science from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology. Fourth was Tomasz Czajka, from Warsaw, Poland.
Google puts coders to the test
25-YEAR-OLD OUTPROGRAMS 5,000 OTHERS
By Matt Marshall
Mercury News
Turns out the Europeans can beat the best of Silicon Valley.
Jimmy Mardell, 25, of Stockholm, Sweden, was announced the winner Friday of Google's second annual Code Jam. He beat out more than 5,000 of the world's top programmers who signed up to compete in Google's contest to solve coding problems on deadline.
The announcement Friday came in a small, crowded room at Google's Mountain View headquarters where 25 finalists anxiously awaited the word. They'd battled in a two-hour final of four rounds, and all of them wanted to be Chief Geek.
The day went to the skinny young guys in jeans who left chocolate wrappers atop their computers.
Mardell, wearing a big smile, playfully flexed his arm muscles to loud applause. He received a large white envelope, purportedly containing his $10,000 prize, from Alan Eustace, Google's vice president of research and systems engineering. Might it also have contained a Google job offer?
Mardell hadn't opened it yet, but said he's happy at his new job in Sweden working for Elucidon, an information retrieval company. ``In a slight way, Google is a competitor,'' he said.
Someone handed him a glass of champagne, but the congratulations didn't last long: The crowd rushed by him, jockeying for position to read the solution to the final question of the round -- which no one had solved -- freshly displayed on a computer screen.
Second place went to Canada's Christopher Hendrie, 27, a computer scientist at a company called Bioinformatics Solutions. He'll spend his $5,000 check on gadgets for his KLR 650 motorbike, he said.
Third was Eugene Vasilchenko, who earned his master's degree in computer science from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology. Fourth was Tomasz Czajka, from Warsaw, Poland.
Eustace said there were no women in the group of 25 finalists. But he noted that the company hired two top female programmers last year, as ranked on the popular TopCoder Web site, which organizes competitions for coders, and hosted Google's. Google did not permit its employees to compete.
Mardell is ranked fifth on TopCoder, and his victory Friday was sweet because he beat TopCoder's top ranked coder and several others. He'd met many of them online, few in person. By hosting the gathering, Google surely boosted its ``geek cred.''
``Google's on the very short list of companies I'd work for,'' said Steve Newman, 36, of Portola Valley, who placed fifth and led the Bay Area's participants.
In coding, like at the horse races, you can have good and bad days, the contestants said. ``One mistake and you're out,'' says Urs Hoelzle, Google fellow and former vice president of engineering, who helped conceive of the idea as a potential recruiting tool.
Thomas Rokicki, 40, director of technology at Sunnyvale's Instantis, was the oldest finalist. He faced long odds, competing against the young ``savants,'' he said. So he took a risk, trying the hardest problem first to gain more points. The gamble failed, and he tumbled to around 20th. Still, he insisted that coding skill doesn't decline with age. It's just that older folks get rusty with lack of practice. Besides, he'd almost cracked the toughest problem: ``If I'd had five to 10 minutes more minutes, I'd be the one sitting up there with a big smile and a check in my hand,'' he said.
[Feb 2, 2003] MC 4.6.0 was released by Pavel Roskin. Version 4.6.0 that was the first "after-Gnome" version of mc that can be called stable. In addition to removal of graphic interface, and the code was somewhat cleaned.
Porting GCC and Binutils to Windows CE
Earlier this year, Vitaliy Pronkin, a young Russian programmer, launched a project to port the open source GCC C/C++ compiler and supporting tools (library, manager, linker, etc.) to Windows CE and the Pocket PC platform. The result, according to Vitaliy, is that it is now possible to develop applications directly on a Pocket PC PDA using the standard C/C++ programming language. Specifically, source code written in eVC (MFC isn't supported yet) can be built and then executed directly on the Pocket PC (or other Windows CE device) without conversion or additional runtimes, he says.
To learn more about this interesting project, WindowsForDevices.com conducted an email interview with Vitaliy Pronkin regarding his GCC/binutils port to Pocket PC and Windows CE. Here's what we learned . . .
WindowsForDevices: How long has the project existed?Vitaliy: I started it somewhere in March, 2003. I built the cross-compiler and tools quite quickly, then began to work on a native port; and when the compiler and assembler were done, I found a big problem with the linker that I couldn't solve for a long time. I almost stopped work on the project, and resumed only several weeks ago. But this time, I found the problem quickly, built some other tools, and when the work was done I created a website with first public version.
WindowsForDevices: Who is working on the project?
Vitaliy: The answer is short: only me.
WindowsForDevices: Why did you start the project?
Vitaliy: You know, there are several other programming/scripting languages ported/created for the Windows CE platform -- PocketC, Perl, Python, nScript, and so on. But they aren't suitable for real development -- they either require an additional interpretator at runtime, or support only a subset of the language, or can't be used for writing native PocketPC and console applications by their nature. Also, I want to develop/test programs on the go on my primary language, C/C++, and want source codes/output binaries to be compatible with other systems without requiring special runtime conversion. Really, we can use PocketPC devices in many, many ways, but weren't able to develop normal programs on them! (I tried to use Java because its compiler is also Java-based and I got it running without problems, but it's very slow and in any case worse than generating native code.)
WindowsForDevices: Is it the only C/C++ compiler available that actually runs directly on a Pocket PC / Windows CE device?
Vitaliy: As far as I know, it's the only real onboard C compiler
WindowsForDevices: What are the project's general objectives and goals?
Vitaliy: My main goal was simply to build a normal C/C++ compiler and tools for the Pocket PC platform. By "normal", I mean that it must be able to compile code taken from a desktop system with little or no changes, and that the code generated won't require any additional runtime libraries or interpretators to run.
WindowsForDevices: What is the project's current status?
Vitaliy: Briefly: My main goal is achieved. I can build samples from the Microsoft SDK (not all, perhaps; I haven't tested everything yet) without changes -- you only need to remove two commas from the resource file.
In more detail: I just ported GCC/Binutils; its pocket version has all features from the desktop one (I don't think I need to describe them here). However, the SDK isn't just a compiler and linker -- it's a set of tools plus libraries plus includes, and so on, and here I have much left to do. Includes and libraries can be taken from the standard Microsoft SDK (some changes to includes may be required because of differences between the GCC and Microsoft compilers). Tools consist of the compiler itself, assembler, linker, preprocessor, and resource compiler.
What's currently unfinished: no MFC support, no standard C++ libraries (IO streams, etc.), there are problems with floating-point emulation, and exception handling isn't fully supported.
WindowsForDevices: What versions of Windows Embedded does it work on?
Vitaliy: I have tested it on Windows Mobile 2003 and PocketPC 2002 devices. Basically, it requires an ARM processor but doesn't use any special system features -- it's just set of console tools! So I think it will work on any Windows CE device with an ARM-compatible processor. But I don't have any other devices to try, so I'm awaiting feedback from owners of different devices.
WindowsForDevices: What is the advantage of your GCC/binutils tools over Microsoft's standard language tools?
Vitaliy: Because I didn't want to build tools better than standard but just wanted to have them onboard, I can simply answer that there are no advantages -- source code is compatible and enough. But now I want to be able to compile not only GUI applications using standard libraries taken from desktop eVC, I also want to compile console applications taken from any system and originally written for GCC compiler. I can't guarantee that this will be done sometime (and really I don't want to simply port many GNU libraries and tools), but at least standard C++ libraries and exception handling will be done, I hope. Taking into account that the standard eVC tools don't support C++ style exceptions and many standard libraries/functions (especially for developing console apps), it turns out that my tools are in some cases better than Microsoft's.
WindowsForDevices: Where can developers obtain the software?
Vitaliy: The "official" download site is here. It can also be downloaded from PocketGear, but I recommend visiting official site regularly -- I'll update it more often than any other download location. I think there will be many new versions in the near future.
WindowsForDevices: What's your future development roadmap?
Vitaliy: Of course the main task is to test it on different sources, find, and fix existing problems. After that -- exception handling, standard C++ library, MFC support, shell for easier usage, text editor, and maybe some other libraries for better compatibility with different sources.
WindowsForDevices: Thank you for sharing your thoughts on your project -- and good luck!
About Vitaliy Pronkin: Vitaliy is a 19-year-old student attending the Department of Mechanics and Mathematics of Moscow State University. His specialties include programming, web-development and design, and system administration. In the small amount of time that remains after studing and work, Vitaly likes to find relaxation in music, computer games, and collecting "small figures of snails." Vitaly says one of his goals is to make PDAs more independent from desktops.
Google was launched less than four years ago by two graduate students in computer science: one, a Russian émigré named Sergey Brin, now 29; the other, a Michigan-reared engineer named Larry E. Page, now all of 30. As a gateway to 3 billion Web pages, Google is a strangely unadorned site: 37 words, four tabs and a blank space where you type in a query of up to 10 words. Google's over 10,000 networked Google computers crawl through an index to those 3 billion pages, rank them with an equation that includes 500 million variables and spit out up to a few thousand listings. The ranking takes 500 milliseconds; the computers can handle a peak rate equal to 7 million queries per hour.
But Google has become much more than merely a search service. It is a daily tool and main entry point for millions of users, stealing the spotlight from the browser (Explorer or whatever) and Internet portals like Yahoo. It is a labor of love for programmers, who have built applications off of Google and posted them like trophies on the Web. One does a "smackdown," comparing the Internet ubiquity of two words ("love" beats "money," but not by much); another creates poems (see boxes).
For Wall Street and Silicon Valley, Google is the great bright hope for an initial public offering that might revive moribund tech stocks. And Google has become its own meme, the stuff of New Yorker cartoons and a brand, like Kleenex and Band-Aid, that is in danger of becoming a part of the English language. You don't search for something on the Web anymore. You Google it.
Google now can be queried in 36 languages, with more to come. At the posh Hotel Bel Air, in Los Angeles, manager Lisa Hagen makes a point of Googling all guests before arrival, searching out better ways to spoil them. "If we find out they like to jog early in the day, we make sure they get a room with morning sun," she says. In Boston, Mark Kini manages a small limousine service that spends 80% of its ad budget on Google and other search sites. Says he: "It's how we survive the recession." In Westport, Conn. consultant Elena Amboyan's kids use Google daily; even when they research something at the library, they say they're Googling it.
It is all much more than Brin and Page ever had in mind when they started. "Sure, I'm surprised by the success," says Brin, unassuming, rumpled and wiry, his sneakers scuffing the upholstery of a conference-room chair. Users love Google, he says, because they find things there when they are desperate to know an answer. Keep offering better results and you hold their loyalty forever--and sell them stuff. Page adds that Google has become "like a person to them, helping them and giving them intelligence any hour of the day."
The passion and success igniting Google, and its emergence as a new interface for the Internet, have made it a rich, fat target for rivals. Yahoo (NasdaqNM:YHOO - News) is taking aim. So is the biggest search outfit, Overture (NasdaqNM:OVER - News), a little-known billion-dollar vendor that provides unbranded search services for other Web sites and has sued Google, alleging patent infringement. A gaggle of some 200 Web sites in China is reportedly going after Google, too.
And now Google faces the most lethal threat of all: Microsoft (NasdaqNM:MSFT - News), aroused, is taking aim at the popular site. This bears an eerie resemblance to the rise--and calamitous fall--of Netscape, the first commercially successful Web browser.
Will Google be the next victim of a Windows that swallows everything? To help ensure a future, Brin and Page brought in a grown-up as chief executive, Valley veteran Eric Schmidt, 48. Fittingly, Schmidt had abundant experience struggling against Microsoft in his two previous jobs: He was chief technology officer at Sun Microsystems (NasdaqNM:SUNW - News), then chief executive of Novell (NasdaqNM:NOVL - News), two companies that thought, wrongly, they had Microsoft licked. Google's founders credit Schmidt with successfully managing their company's most intense period of growth.
To survive and succeed will require lots of talent, lots of acquisitions and lots more money. More important, Google will need to quell the hubris that is much in abundance at the jubilant company these days. To be at Google is to bask in your own public relations. The hallways of the company's four buildings in Mountain View, Calif. are decorated with articles from around the world praising the company. One current job posting includes duties as Google's company historian. Over 70 of the 800 employees have Ph.D.s. Google's head of engineering admits his big-brained staff is in awe of itself; he hopes the simplicity of the Google page masks that from the outside world.
In some ways Google feels like the giddy dot-coms of the stock-market bubble, circa 1999. Informal to a fault, Google offices are littered with party-colored lava lamps, bins of free Coke and candy and giant plastic balls that invoke Google's multicolored logo. The cafeteria serves free lunch to the workaholic ranks (and dinners, too; there's lots of code to write). When pizza gets delivered at one o'clock in the morning, plenty of people are on hand to devour it. Every day a thousand more résumés arrive from people hoping to join this work party.
But the dot-com parallels end when you look at the finances. The dot-bombs burned through tons of other people's money. Google makes a pile of cash on its own. After it went live in September 1999--six months before the Internet bubble finally popped--Google took in perhaps $25 million in 2000. Then it leaped fourfold to approach $100 million in 2001 and tripled to $300 million last year. Its gross could more than double this year to $700 million, estimates Safa Rashtchy of U.S. Bancorp Piper Jaffray.
Google, privately held--and determinedly so, for now--won't talk numbers, but it does brag that it just logged its ninth consecutive profitable quarter.Its revenue flows include ads (the bulk); search services for Yahoo, America Online and other sites (perhaps $100 million there); and custom-tailored, bright yellow servers for corporate accounts.
"Cheesy as it may sound," says cofounder Brin about the company's early days, "we never thought in terms of revenue streams." Now he must, for the next year or two could determine whether Google delivers on the high hopes it inspires in so many quarters or instead falters, glorying in its early success while others plot its doom.
Google traces back to 1995, when Sergey Brin and Larry Page, whose fathers taught college math, met at Stanford. The sons saw search as an interesting problem in organizing very large datasets.
At the time, users typed in a few words and got a list of thousands of Web sites using those words, but most of the results were irrelevant. Brin and Page quelled users' frustrations by adding order to this randomness. They judged a listed site's prominence by how many other Web sites valued it enough to have links to it. They gave sites a resulting "Page rank" (for Larry, not Web pages). This cliquey if democratic approach was later augmented by other algorithms that weight sites by other variables--news sites get a higher ranking than a 16-year-old's personal Web log.
The two grad students soon found their results were a step above any other kind of search. They had dubbed this system Back Rub, after the "back links" that pointed to a site. They adopted the name Google in early 1997, in a tribute to scale, a play on the number known as a googol--a one followed by a hundred zeros. The universe does not contain a googol atoms. The denizens of the company headquarters breezily refer to it as the Googleplex, that being the word for the unimaginably large number defined as a one followed by a googol of zeros.
Brin and Page introduced Google to the world in a paper they presented at the World Wide Web Conference in April 1998. Naively, they were downright hostile to advertising, calling it "insidious … because it is not clear who 'deserves' to be there, and who is willing to pay money to be listed." A few hundred million in revenues later, Brin has changed his mind. On a Google results page, he says, "There are eight spots for ads and ten search results. It's a lot of room for diversity."
Soon after, the pair began trying to sell their technology to Web sites, including Infoseek, Excite and Yahoo. They found no takers; one chief executive told them that if his site could search only 80% as well as everyone else's, that was okay by him. "That company is now out of business," Page says. Then their faculty adviser invited them to a breakfast with Sun Microsystems cofounder Andreas Bechtolsheim on the Stanford campus. Midway through the demo, Bechtolsheim stopped them and wrote a check for $100,000 to Google Inc.
This presented a problem, as Google didn't yet have a bank account. There wasn't even a "Google Inc."--they hadn't yet decided to form a company. The check sat in a drawer for several weeks, and then they got serious.
By June 1999 Google had raised almost $30 million from venture firms Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, plus Stanford and individual investors. Three months later the Google site officially blasted off. It could scan 30 million Web pages. Today it culls 100 times as many, and still taps only half the Internet; the rest lies behind corporate firewalls or in isolated islands unlinked to anything else.
As Google began to thrive, the Web world was crashing, and this, too, proved lucky for the pair of founders. As dot-coms collapsed, Google took over cheap office space, barely used Aeron chairs, dozens of servers and platoons of out-of-work programmers. By mid-2001 Google was profitable, employed several hundred people and was seeing traffic grow 20% every month. Thriving despite the surrounding downturn, Google went shopping for a seasoned chief executive. "My job was to impose a little order," Schmidt says now. "I made it clear that I wasn't coming in to get rid of the founders." Sergey Brin gave up his chairman mantle and assumed the title of president of technology; Page, who had been chief executive, is product president.
While the two techies concentrated on improving their search formulas, Schmidt focused more on building a better business model. Google had run ads with its search results for a while, but on a fixed-fee basis. Its main rival, Overture, publicly held and with $668 million in sales last year (it projects $1 billion in revenues this year), had already gone a step further. It exacted higher fees from advertisers by selling them rights to given keywords so their ads pop up first when those words are entered in a query. Sponsors paid on a cost-per-click basis instead of the usual cost-per-thousand-visitors.
At one point in 2001, Google officials even met with Overture to compare notes, Overture officials say. In December 2001 Google started a similar test on its Usenet section, unveiling a service called Adwords. The response was so enthusiastic that, by February 2002, Adwords had been extended to all Google listings. It grew to 100,000 bidders in ten months, and thousands more advertisers are still signing up. Total Web advertising fell about 5% last year, to $6.5 billion, while search ads almost tripled to $1.4 billion and could hit $7 billion in five years, says Piper Jaffray's Rashtchy. (Google itself advertises very little, instead relying on word of mouth.)
"Some companies have purchased thousands of keywords, and they use them to test multiple products against multiple words," says Sheryl Sandberg, director of the wildly successful Adwords program. Noting most all Adwords bidders are U.S.-based, while half of Google searches are by users overseas, Sandberg sees huge growth in foreign markets. "The monetization should follow. This is a global bid," she says. Ads are sold in 11 languages.
Schmidt calls the success of Adwords "a total accident--when we went off fixed pricing, my only directive was В'Just don't let revenues drop.'" His foes at Overture allege instead patent infringement, suing Google in April of last year; one month later America Online (NYSE:AOL - News) dropped Overture in favor of Google Adwords. The case is likely to drag on for a long time.
In Adwords, businesses use an auction system on the Google site to bid for the most popularly searched words and phrases. Google gets paid every time someone clicks on the ad itself. Bids start at 5 cents per click but can go to $15 or more for high-end products like helicopter parts. Critically, Google demotes a sponsor to a lower rung on its page if its response rate is too low, elevating a rival's ad for getting more clicks. This imposes a built-in pressure on businesses. They're even asked to revamp wording if less than 0.5% of viewers click on their ads. By contrast, many traditional banner ads get click rates of just 0.3%.
This could transform the $193 billion business of direct marketing. Junk mailers constantly work on narrowing the recipient list to the people most likely to respond and on jazzing up the envelopes to trick them into looking inside. Google ends the guesswork. People directly declare what interests them, and Google feeds them an appropriate ad. The ad's few pitch words are critical. For big corporate accounts like Dow Chemical, Google account executives continually recraft the message, like a haiku of commerce, aiming to maximize the click-through.
Google's long-term dream is to index all of the world's public information and make it searchable--everything from driver records to radio shows and films--and reap profits from it. This is scarier than it sounds. Google holds an archive of 800 million postings to Internet newsgroups, from alt.sex.bondage to alt.humanities.classics, most of which it bought on the cheap just before Dejanews.com went out of business in 2000.
It is a strange bazaar of information and a repository of embarrassment for people who were forthright (or shortsighted) enough to forgo anonymity in their postings. Google easily unearths the Web's first mention of Microsoft; and Sergey Brin's 1992 complaint about selling his car; and the musings of a married midwestern academic who posted a plea on alt.sex.fetish.tickling. Ours for the ages, unless he follows Google's somewhat obscure directions--located in the "Groups Help" section--on removing work from the archive. Even posts like that one trigger a precision-targeted ad: One offers "Discount 14-K Gold Anklets." Like much of the Web, Google also makes good money on porn.
While Google wants to own the world, Microsoft is going after Google. It now has 70 engineers working on search technology, and by some accounts it could triple that staff. Its new best friend is Overture, which already provides search services for Microsoft's MSN online service. Overture scientists frequently visit Microsoft in Redmond to plan next-generation features. Microsoft also could acquire a search company this year; one likely candidate would be San Francisco-based Looksmart (NasdaqNM:LOOK - News). Neither Overture, with a market capitalization of $669 million, nor Looksmart, at $328 million, would be more than a bagatelle for Microsoft, which has $38 billion in cash.
The Google guys profess to be unfazed. They have assiduously avoided the sins of Netscape, which belligerently jeered at Microsoft's efforts to build a Web browser. "Netscape mooned the giant," says one Google exec, noting Google welcomes Microsoft ads on its site. Plenty of other threats abound. Yahoo, despite investing in Google and paying for its service, in December paid $235 million in cash to acquire faded search firm Inktomi. Overture recently spent $177 million for the Web-search assets of Fast Search & Transfer and AltaVista, while Ask Jeeves (2002 revenues $74 million, net loss of $15 million) put up $3.8 million for Teoma. Even Google's engineers admit Fast and Teoma deliver results comparable to theirs.
Google has bought some prizes of its own, including personalization technology that "learns" what you are interested in based on previous searches; and a company called Blogger, which helps people set up their own Web-based diaries, or Web logs. More "blogs" mean more content, yielding more pages on which to run ads and more links to other pages. The more links, the better Google's results. Most recently Google scored a company called Applied Semantics, whose content-scanning techniques can be used to tailor ads not just based on the words a user searches, but also on the actual pages he reads on the Internet. That buy was a double score for Google--Applied Semantics had been selling those services to Overture. In the week following the purchase, Overture's shares fell about 30%.
The need to acquire more tech could add to the pressure for Google to go public, so it could use its stock as currency. Both Brin and Page are daunted by the prospect of baring Google's secret financials and losing focus in the drive to boost profits every quarter. "I fear we'll grow shortsighted and lose the wider potential applications of our company," says Brin. "The biggest thing we'd lose is the opportunity cost of what we could do if we didn't go public."
But Google's growing ranks want it, Wall Street bankers yearn for it and clues hint that all of them will get it. In the overcrowded office of Sheryl Sandberg, the 33-year-old Adwords chief, sits a crimson lava lamp given to her by investment bankers at Morgan Stanley. Very hip, very Google-geist. The former U.S. Treasury official says with a laugh, "They have high hopes for us."
Downstairs, past a Google grand piano and a few big plastic balls, Chief Executive Schmidt convenes a meeting of two dozen managers for a project they refer to as "Keeping Eric Out of Jail." They are altering Google's billing and accounting systems to comply with the new Sarbanes-Oxley Act--a law that applies to all public companies but no private ones. It may take until October to comply, but Schmidt's urgency is palpable.
Every Friday he holds a companywide meeting, preaching to a cocky flock. Along with Brin and Page he talks business, technology--and attitude. He reminds these whiz kids to count on nothing. Remember the Netscapes, he exhorts, the high-tech stars that gained fans, made paper millionaires of the early staff and then burned up in the heat of competition. Just about everybody, save Google's massing rivals, hopes they're listening.
Three short notes on Russian Crypto History
Tetris is Hard, Even to Approximate
Authors: Erik D. Demaine, Susan Hohenberger, David Liben-Nowell
Comments: 56 pages, 11 figures
Report-no: MIT-LCS-TR-865
Subj-class: Computational Complexity; Computational Geometry; Discrete Mathematics
ACM-class: F.1.3; F.2.2; G.2.1; K.8.0In the popular computer game of Tetris, the player is given a sequence of tetromino pieces and must pack them into a rectangular gameboard initially occupied by a given configuration of filled squares; any completely filled row of the gameboard is cleared and all pieces above it drop by one row. We prove that in the offline version of Tetris, it is NP-complete to maximize the number of cleared rows, maximize the number of tetrises (quadruples of rows simultaneously filled and cleared), minimize the maximum height of an occupied square, or maximize the number of pieces placed before the game ends. We furthermore show the extreme inapproximability of the first and last of these objectives to within a factor of p^(1-epsilon), when given a sequence of p pieces, and the inapproximability of the third objective to within a factor of (2 - epsilon), for any epsilon>0. Our results hold under several variations on the rules of Tetris, including different models of rotation, limitations on player agility, and restricted piece sets.
By ALEX PHAM,
[email protected]
One of the first games played on the personal computer also happens to be one
of the most enduring games of all time.
Introduced in 1984, "Tetris" has sold 50 million licensed copies. New
versions of the game are being released by THQ Inc. for next-generation
consoles and, of course, the PC.
What gives the game such longevity? "Tetris" is easy to play but difficult to
master, taunting players for hours at a time.
Despite changes in the game's graphics, the core game play is essentially
identical to the original version created by Alexey Pajitnov to run on a
Russian computer on a black and white screen using only text-based shapes.
Pajitnov was a scientist with the Computer Center of the Academy of Sciences
in Moscow when he began making puzzle games as a way to test new computers.
His first game involved seven shapes built from four square blocks, giving
rise to the name "Tetris" that comes from the Greek word tetra, meaning four.
The shapes fall from the top of the screen--players rotate them as they fall
to fit with the changing grid, below.
Although the game has achieved spectacular sales, Pajitnov did not begin
receiving royalties until 1996. Before that, the money went to the Academy,
his former employer, and the Soviet Ministry of Commerce. To remedy that,
Pajitnov and Henk Rogers established a company, now called Blue Planet
Software Inc., to develop and license all "Tetris"-related products.
These days, Pajitnov, 46, is designing puzzle games for Microsoft Corp.
Q: What made "Tetris" such a popular game?
Nobody knows. That's the biggest secret. There are several theories. One is
that it appeals to the human need to have order and harmony. You have a
random, chaotic situation, and your mission is to create order. The other
theory that all your achievements, the blocks you arranged, disappear as soon
as they're lined up. So what you have in front of your eyes is all your awful
mistakes. It makes you want to fix it all the time. But again, nobody really
knows.
Q: What did the original game look like?
Imagine you have black and white screen, no color, no sound. The field is
dotted with asterisks. The squares are created by using square brackets.
Imagine working with "Tetris" in text mode only, where you're working only
with letters and numbers. But if you look at it, you will immediately
recognize the game.
Q: How has "Tetris" evolved?
There were several steps in its life. The first was my own design. I designed
the game for a very old Russian computer called the Electronic 60. There
weren't graphics, so in order to draw a square, I used two square brackets.
That was the first version. Then the game was published in the U.S. for the
first time in 1988 by Spectrum HoloByte. The big step, however, was with the
Game Boy version in 1989. For many years, that was the best possible version
of "Tetris." It was very well balanced. The rules included everything I
really wanted. The squares were soft-dropped, not hard dropped so you could
see the blocks as they fell. That was a pleasant small detail that makes the
game more controllable. You'd be amazed how small details are very important
to players. The next major improvement came with "The Next Tetris," published
three years ago on PC and PlayStation. This version introduced the "cascade"
effect, or a chain reaction that occurred like an avalanche when you
completed a row. This created an unbelievably good feeling for the player.
It's one of the best feelings in gaming you could imagine.
Q: How involved are you with the development of "Tetris" now?
I am still involved in the design. Really, though, there are lots of
designers and developers who did many of the improvements in "Tetris." My
role is very modest. All the new versions for "Tetris" were designed by Henk
Rogers and other Blue Planet Software designers.
Q: How could you possibly improve "Tetris?"
In the newest version that will come out this fall, we have six types of
puzzles. Each version is for a different audience. For example, we have a
puzzle called "Hotline." This game will be good for beginners and for players
with a short fuse--people without patience who want feedback right away. Then
there is "Squaretris." That's where you can make other configurations. This
version is a little more strategic. People who like to think will really
enjoy it. The fact that we have such variety is very good. It will keep up
the feeling of novelty.
Q: Are three-dimensional puzzle games necessarily better than
two-dimensional games?
I am a professional designer. So all my managers asked me for 3-D. I know 3-D
is very fashionable now. It looks very good on the screen. But our brains
haven't adapted. People have problems with 3-D. Look at Rubic's Cube. It's
three by three by three, like a tick-tack-toe cube. But it's extremely
difficult for a regular person. That's why if you want to do a 3-D puzzle,
you should be really cautious. The best achievements are in
two-and-a-half-dimensional puzzles. Take a regular 2-D puzzle, and put it on
an interesting surface. It looks good, but the level of complication of the
puzzle remains reasonable. Switching to full 3-D is no problem technically.
The main problem is that people won't be able to play them. Basically that's
what happened with "Tetris." In 1990, there were two puzzle games, "Blockout,"
which was a fully 3-D game, and "Welltris," a 2-D game. "Welltris" was one of
the top 10 games in 1990. "Blockout" wasn't.
Q: What makes a good puzzle game?
Every game is a very complicated product. For me, it's like a movie. The idea
is the most important thing, what kind of mechanics are in the game. The
second thing is the balance. It should have rules simple enough to be
understandable, but the game should still be challenging. From a designer's
point of view, this is the most complicated thing. Graphics and sound have
become more and more important. In early years, we didn't hear about this
stuff at all, and now it's one of the critical things. The rest is just small
professional secrets.
Q: Do you have any advice for a budding game designer?
Just sit down and do it. The good designer comes with his game and says
what's wrong with it.
Q: Where do you draw your inspiration?
Different designers have different sources of inspiration. Myself, I usually
start with a traditional puzzle. If you come to my office at work, you will
see it is full of toys--wire frames, jigsaws, pyramids, and lots of toys with
interesting shapes. I work with them all, and I like to solve them.
Last week I got a call from Stalker Software Inc. Stalker makes CommuniGate Pro, a full-featured mail server that supports SMTP, POP3, IMAP4, ACAP, LDAP, and a few other standards acronyms. It includes an extremely well-designed Web-based administration system and Web-based access to email. It includes antispam features, mailing list management, and even personal Web sites for your users.
The reason Stalker called is because, according to the company's own benchmarks, CommuniGate Pro on Linux skunks Microsoft Exchange in terms of performance, based on Exchange benchmarks performed by IBM. The comparison is between Exchange 5.5 SP2 running on Windows NT 4.0 SP4 versus CommuniGate Pro 3.1 running on Red Hat Linux 6.0.
Stalker used the same brand of machine, the IBM Netfinity 3000, but actually used less powerful hardware than IBM to run its tests. Stalker has published the details of its tests at http://www.stalker.com/MailTests/Matching.html, and compares the results to IBM's benchmarks for Microsoft Exchange (see ftp://ftp.pc.ibm.com/pub/special/serverperformance/nf3000_exch_090899.pdf).
LinuxWorld does not endorse either benchmark, but we find them both to be believable. And that isn't only because -- unlike the recent benchmarks by Mindcraft and ZD Labs -- these results tend to support the anecdotal evidence that Linux outperforms Windows NT.
Although the benchmarks themselves are an apples-to-grapes comparison, a cursory examination of the Stalker benchmarks reveals that the company's approach appears to be far more solutions-oriented and realistic than that of Mindcraft in its benchmark several months ago. For example, Mindcraft pummeled servers with requests for static Web pages, which is rarely how a Web server is used today.
Stalker could have contrived a similarly unrealistic test scenario for mail testing, such as confining all its mail traffic to be internal to the server. To its credit, it created a far more realistic test environment. It routed a good portion of its mail outside the server, and even added nice touches, like simulating POP3 users checking their mailbox when no new mail was waiting.
We find the benchmarks particularly interesting in view of the continued rapid growth of Linux in the ISP market. If CommuniGate Pro truly boasts the speed and scalability claimed by the vendor's benchmarks, it is increasingly likely that it might be hosting your next ISP mail account.
All things considered, I recommend you keep an eye on Stalker Software Inc. To help you along, we spoke with Stalker Software Inc. President Vladimir Butenko about the benchmarks, and about Stalker's strategy of competing with Microsoft Exchange.
LinuxWorld: How does the hardware compare between your benchmarks and Microsoft's?
Vladimir Butenko: There is a difference. We both used a Netfinity 3000. They also had RAID 0. We had one plain SCSI drive. Their computer was 550 MHz. Ours was 500 MHz even. They had 768 MB of RAM, while we had just 64 MB. So generally speaking, what we have is just an out-of-the-box Netfinity 3000. What they had was a Netfinity 3000 with a lot of additional things that cost much more.
LinuxWorld: [in disbelief] You had 64 MB of RAM?
Vladimir Butenko: Yeah, that's it. And it didn't use all of it for the test. The server, during a 3 hour period, it needed approximately 25 MB of RAM. And that was it. Because what we actually tested was the type of environment you can now see in the office. Not the type of environment you'll see in a couple of years where most people will switch to Web email. Those things require more memory. But for regular use, CommuniGate is extremely efficient on resources. On this kind of load it didn't need a lot of memory.
The bottom line is [that] we succeeded in submitting 4.5 times more messages. So in all areas, it was 3 to 5 times faster than what they have on that beefed up Netfinity.
On the other hand, they claim 70 percent CPU utilization. In our test we were well below that -- between 29 and 31 percent. We do not think that any server that consumes 70 percent of CPU can be used in a production environment. Any peak load will bring it to its knees. You need to have some space in CPU power.
Also, unlike those guys, we did not use a 100BaseT network. We used 10BaseT, regular 10BaseT. So it's more common to the office [environment]. It emulates the normal kinds of collisions on the net.
If you have a clean connection to the Internet, and [a] very, very steady load, then probably you can tolerate a 70 percent CPU load. But in a real-life environment as we saw in our tests, the load changes from time to time. If you're already at 70 percent CPU, you'll easily run out of steam, which causes a huge degradation of speed.
LinuxWorld: If they had used 10BaseT, wouldn't that have reduced their CPU load?
Vladimir Butenko: They wouldn't be able to submit the high number of messages in that case. And we submitted 4.5 times more! If we had used 100BaseT, we would have been able to submit 7 to 10 times more messages. The problem is the disk. What we saw as a bottleneck was the disk I/O system on this particular machine.
Actually, this is true of all installations of CommuniGate Pro. It's easy on the CPU, and as fast as your disk I/O system allows. If we had used RAID it would have been much faster.
LinuxWorld: Realistically, how important is messaging speed? Does it really matter if it takes 5 or 20 seconds for a message to be delivered?
Vladimir Butenko: That's not the point. Sometimes it's important too -- the time of delivery. But the main thing is that I'm talking about the queue. And not delaying that queue. If the speed of your disk I/O system is not fast enough for the load you put on the server, the queue starts to grow. And if it starts to grow, it will never [stop growing].
If you see that the queue has started to grow, then within a day or a week, you'll definitely end up with a million messages in queue. On average we saw about 50 message in the queue. But these messages should appear and then go. If it starts to grow, it means your disk I/O system is not up to snuff.
LinuxWorld: How big did the Exchange queue grow?
Vladimir Butenko: They claim 1000 messages, but it's hard to compare because the queuing mechanisms are different. The main thing is that the queues in all the steps -- and we hope that Microsoft didn't cheat here -- that the 1000 messages were during the test and not at the end of the test. That means the queue didn't grow. If it is steady for several hours at some certain levels, that's OK. It didn't grow. The most important thing is that the queue does not grow.
We also checked different tasks. They definitely used the proprietary MAPI protocol. We used standard SMTP and POP as most of the mail systems support.
What we have in difference here is that they claim they established all the connections they needed for the test, and then performed those operations with those connections. In our case we couldn't do that, because it wouldn't be real for an SMTP or POP system to keep the connection open all the time.
Also, on big servers, there are many POP sessions where people check their mail but nothing is there. So, during our tests, we had a test load that emulated connections to a mailbox with messages, where it delivered and deleted all messages. But also we had connections to empty mailboxes. This part was completely absent in the Exchange test.
One thing I wanted to mention was that the document for the Exchange benchmark was not clear as to whether messages were sent outside of Exchange. Because in the references, it says "messages sent" means messages transmitted from Exchange to MTA. On the other page it says X number of messages were sent. We don't know if any messages were sent outside the server.
So we don't know if the test included the time needed to send messages outside the server. In the corporate environment, we do not believe that all the communications is within the corporate network within one server. It is completely unclear from their document if the test sent outside the server.
LinuxWorld: What about IMAP testing?
Vladimir Butenko: It's too difficult to compare the operations. We would like to do that because people need some type of benchmarks on IMAP. But in the regular office, it is much easier to compare what Outlook does and what a regular POP client does.
For example, with IMAP, a lot of people are interested in copying between mailboxes and things like that. These are things that were not reflected in that particular Microsoft Exchange test.
LinuxWorld: How do you compare feature-wise? In order to convince customers to consider CommuniGate Pro as an Exchange replacement, don't you need to have the calendar features and the ability to perform as a drop-in replacement for Exchange using Outlook?
Vladimir Butenko: The only thing we are lacking is full support for the proprietary calendaring. CommuniGate Pro already supports IMAP-based calendaring with Outlook. And we hope that by the end of this year we'll have complete support. And also, Microsoft is moving Outlook calendaring to a standard.
In other areas, CommuniGate Pro offers much more functionality than Exchange. It has the same security features as Exchange in terms of secure connections [and] Web interface.
If we look at antispam features, for example, Microsoft Exchange has only the basic set. We have a complete set of antispam features. If we look at IMAP servers, Microsoft has the implementation of the basic IMAP function. We have the complete implementation of IMAP, including ACL, shared mailboxes -- this applies to everything.
LinuxWorld: Have you looked at HP OpenMail for Linux yet?
Vladimir Butenko: We know that it exists. It looks like a direct port from their old system to Linux.
LinuxWorld: I found it more difficult to administer than CommuniGate Pro. But we're talking about competing with Microsoft Exchange now, and one thing HP OpenMail has is that MAPI plugin -- so that as far as Outlook users are concerned, they don't know that they are not talking to an Exchange server.
Vladimir Butenko: We don't think we'll do the same thing. My crystal ball says Microsoft will move to a calendaring standard very soon. Calendaring is the only feature that people use MAPI for.
LinuxWorld: So you're saying you'll end up in the same place as HP Open Mail but you're taking a different approach?
Vladimir Butenko: No. The calendaring protocol is already standardized. It was standardized almost a year ago. November, I believe. Both Netscape and Microsoft committed to move their clients from proprietary protocols to that protocol. They are all moving toward this standard -- not fast, but they're moving. They will all use that standard protocol which is now only supported by Sun calendaring server.
In addition, Outlook can support calendaring features over IMAP. But Microsoft uses something proprietary which we haven't discovered yet. So as long as you keep connected to the server, the calendaring works. But if you disconnect and someone else connects to the same mailbox, something happens so you can't use it.
LinuxWorld: It seems like a bold assumption to say that Microsoft is actually going to fully support an open standard. Their pattern is to keep at least something in there proprietary to lock you into a Microsoft product. So how do you deal with it?
Vladimir Butenko: I asked the lab to check what's going on. We can see at least what Outlook attempts to do so we know where the problem is. I believe that they use a couple of nonstandard commands to keep things synchronized. If we see those commands, we'll put them in and support them.
We still think that major manufacturers, including Microsoft, will migrate to standards-based calendaring. What they use now is not standard. They just use IMAP as a calendar store. But we'll be doing both: we'll be concentrating on the standards-based calendaring, and we'll see whatever nonstandard things we have to do with IMAP in order to support calendaring with an Outlook client.
LinuxWorld: If you had to draw a pie chart of where your sales are, which platforms you sell into, how would it look?
Vladimir Butenko: On the lower end, which means the corporate or enterprise license from 50 to 200 accounts, or even to 1,000 accounts, most of the systems we see are NT, Linux, or Mac OS. On the high-end, which is something less than 100,000 accounts, we have 80 percent on Solaris, 15 percent FreeBSD, and maybe 5 percent Linux. We have the exotic systems like AIX, too, but they're usually in the middle.
LinuxWorld: What's your high end on accounts per server?
Vladimir Butenko: If it is not a cluster, it is usually 100,000 or below. We do not recommend running more than 150,000 or 200,000 accounts on one server. Many sites have between 30,000 and 70,000 accounts, and most are below 150,000. If you go beyond that, you need a cluster.
At ISP Con, we will show static clustering. I don't believe we'll be able to show everything there, like dynamic clustering. The static clustering is designed for a site with a size of up to 1 million accounts. And dynamic clustering is needed for a live site where fault tolerance is very important, because dynamic clustering allows you to switch to any server in the cluster at any moment without any reconfiguration. All servers are dynamically recognized. If one of the servers dies, it redistributes the load automatically.
LinuxWorld: Thank you for having taken the time to talk with us.
Cyrillic fonts Russian homophonic keyboard; Russify browsers; Mail and News Russification -- an excellent page for Windows users
WebCopier Multifunctional Offline Browser by Maxim Klimov
BeOpen.com Interview with Hans Reiser of ReiserFS -- he used the top Russian talent to write the filesystem. In this interview he shares his view on small business opportunities in Russia
BeOpen: Why did you relocate to Russia of all places? Is there some hidden vein of file system coding talent in the former Soviet Union nobody else knows about?
Reiser: Actually, I read in the newspaper about the horrible salaries that people were making here, and I thought that this was an opportunity for me to give them an opportunity. At the same time, I also thought it was an opportunity to make possible a dream that I'd always wanted to do -- run my own company. And it worked. It was really quite difficult, but in the end, the whole thing worked out.
If I had it to do over again, I would work in the U.S. for several years and save up my money and then would have come over to Russia with the money I saved up, so that I could be here in person rather than communicating over the Internet.
BeOpen: Why? I thought it was a truism that open source projects can get by with a minimum of face-to-face interaction.
Reiser: I personally like to have everyone all in one large room. I know this isn't the popular model with most people, but information diffuses. It's useful to have people within eye contact of each other. The most productive work environment that I was in was back at the University [of California], where it was my fellow students and I working at a large computer. We were within eye contact and could share information casually. You share a lot more information when you don't have to get up and walk to somebody's room.
The cost of information diffusion is less when you can talk to someone than when you send them an email. The costs of sending an email aren't prohibitive, but there are costs.
Even now we mix the two models, though. I still have employees who don't work in Moscow. I have one who works in St. Petersburg, one who works in the Ukraine and another who works in Asia, but for the most part, I tend to find the best work gets done when people are located in the same room.
Having said that, I should also say that there are many advantages in doing work over the Internet, especially in Russia. Usually, companies here are crippled by customs officials and all sorts of equivalent government controls. When there's no physical object to move around, there's no opportunity for a customs official to get involved. You don't have to pay a bribe to use the Internet.
Maybe this will change. Maybe 200 years from now governments will be involved in controlling the flow of information over the Internet. Maybe not. It remains to be seen. If we're vigorous enough in making it difficult for them to impede our ability to interact with each other, maybe we can avoid that. Still, there are always people eager to set themselves up as highway robbers.
BeOpen: The stories about the Russian business climate definitely can raise the hair on the back of your neck. How does it differ from the U.S., at least from the entrepreneurial perspective?
Reiser: You make of it what you will. If you have a small business, it's the same as doing it in the United States. If you have a large business, Russia is lethal. I would say that large companies should stay out of Russia, because Russian culture is very accustomed to large organizations that don't work. Large governments and large businesses are virtually indistinguishable in that regard. Russian culture has achieved mastery at foiling the aspirations of the persons at the top of large organizations. I would say that Russia is much better for small businesses than large businesses
BeOpen: Why is it so lethal for larger businesses? Is it because of the corruption?
Reiser: It's more than that. If you're in a situation where you have to manage by receiving reports, you're doomed. If you can be satisfied by a pretty report -- and most corporations are -- then you're just doomed.
I think Cisco could make a go of it here, because their management style is heavily based upon random sampling. That's why Cisco has been able to scale so large and so effectively. Random sampling will working Russia as well as it would anywhere else. You have to randomly sample quality, and you have to randomly sample production and output to make sure the information you as a manager are getting corresponds with the information your customers and employees are getting.
It's the same in any culture, I guess. There's a saying: Cultures do not differ. They only exaggerate. This is more true in Russia.
BeOpen: What is the attitude toward Open Source and free software in Eastern Europe. People like Richard Stallman have observed that in Russia and China, people tend to be more hostile to the notion of community software development, because it smacks of socialism, a concept most view as terribly outdated.
Reiser: I understand why Richard says that. I would say that people don't want to talk about it anymore, but there are still people who want to do it. They just don't want to talk about the theory and the wonderfulness of it.
Not every person is the right person to recruit to a project. Not every person is going to be attracted to Open Source software. There are people in Russia and the United States who just have no real interest in giving software away for free. They just don't see what it gets them, and the easiest thing is to just avoid trying to do business with them.
BeOpen: What about the flip side of that argument. How do people view the notion of using community-based software development methods as a means towards free market, capitalistic ends.
Reiser: I'd say it's viewed with great skepticism. I don't think anybody working with it is planning to get rich. We probably will make them financially well off over the next several years. And it's my hope that we will make quite a bit of money, but I don't think they chose to work on this project because they saw this as their best route to becoming wealthy. I think most of them are working on this because they are scientists and they care about it from a scientific perspective.
BeOpen: What's the talent pool like in Eastern Europe? We already know that a significant portion of Linux development is coming out of that region. Has it been easy to find quality programmers?
Reiser: I think if you take the cream of any nation, it's going to be great. The advantage that we have is that there's a lot less competition for the cream of Russia. We're able to offer the deeply talented a good opportunity that they probably won't find elsewhere in Russia. If you want to do core operating systems research, here in Russia, we're one of the best opportunities to do it. That definitely helps with recruiting,
BeOpen: Here in the U.S., we've had a few ventures pop up within the last year in which companies have tried to create an eBay auction style process, letting freelance programmers bid on projects for U.S. software firms. One company, the Seattle-based CoSource, said they were getting a number of bids from programmers in Russia, because the salary differential between U.S. and Russian-based software work is so high.
Reiser: That makes a lot of sense that the low bids would come from Eastern Europe, because the salaries are much lower here. That's changing very quickly, though. Prices are going up for programmers, because Russia has opened up. Now prices of 1,000-3,000 are common for top people. My guess is that $1500 per month is about the going rate for a highly successful senior developer. When I started, it was a lot less. Fortunately, we're making money now and so we're able to pay the increased rates.
Sergey Brin, a native of Moscow, graduated with honors with a bachelor of science degree in mathematics and computer science from the University of Maryland at College Park. He is currently a Ph.D. candidate in computer science at Stanford University, where he received his master's degree. Brin is a recipient of a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship. Brin's research interests include search engines, information extraction from unstructured sources, and data mining of large text collections and scientific data. He has published more than a dozen publications in leading academic journals, including "Extracting Patterns and Relations from the World Wide Web"; "Dynamic Data Mining: A New Architecture for Data with High Dimensionality," which he published with Larry Page; "Scalable Techniques for Mining Casual Structures"; "Dynamic Itemset Counting and Implication Rules for Market Basket Data"; and "Beyond Market Baskets: Generalizing Association Rules to Correlations."
OLinux: When did you start this company? What was your initial motivation and how do you see it nowadays? Sergey Brin: We started working on Google in 1995, as a research project at Stanford University. In 1998, we formed the company, Google Inc., and launched the search engine in beta to the outside world. This happened in September 1998. Our goal was to created a very simple and easy-to-use website that offers the best search engine in the world. This is still our goal, and we plan to continue to focus our business on search technology for some time to come.
OLinux: Please, evaluate rapidly Google evolution in terms of pages served using its tools? Can you describe something that really helped the project to succeeded? Have any idea of number of sites using Google search engine? Number of pages served by google engine every day?
Sergey Brin: Google currently servers over 20 million searches per day on our own website (www.google.com), and over 50 million searches per day on our own site and our partner websites (Yahoo, Netscape, Cisco, etc.). Have so many smart and talented employees has really helped our company succeed. There are over 25,000 websites on the Internet that use the Google search engine.
OLinux: Why should a site choose Google search engine instead of others? What are the better features Google bring to users?
Sergey Brin: Google offers users better quality search results, a simple, easy-to-use interface, high performance, and an exclusive focus on just being a search engine. We also offer cool features like caches pages, stock quotes, news headlines, links to online maps.
OLinux: Let's talk about P&D and Software Engineering (Se): How many people work in SE activities developing google main tools? What is its policy toward investment in P&D?
Sergey Brin: We have about 80 engineers and R&D team members, and we're big fans of investing heavily in R&D.
OLinux: How is the research & development coordinated? What are the analysis and programming tools used? Are there any special quality control, auditing on code produced?What are the main projects under way?
Sergey Brin: They're very closely intertwined; developers do research and vice versa, and everyone talks a lot. Communication is very good between both of these groups.
For programming we use gnu tools: gcc, gdb, gnats. We use p4 for version control. For network installs, we use a variety of our own software, in addition to rsync. Machines are built on-site here at Google, configured, then shipped over to one of our three datacenters.
We have a detailed regimen for code reviews and testing (QA).
The main projects we're working on, outside of improving the overall quality of our search engine are: Google wireless search technology, a variety of voice recognition projects, and Google international search technology bringing Google to more users worldwide.
OLinux: Currently, Google search engine runs in more than 5000 Red hat Linux servers. I read that Google system install and configure 80 servers at a time. What kind of tools coordinate this mass installation? What are the administrative tools used to monitor, check and replace servers failures? How is Linux used at the Google Projects? Why was Linux choose to improve Google search engine?
Sergey Brin: Actually, we currently run over 6,000 RedHat servers.
Linux is used everywhere...on the 6,000+ servers themselves, as well as desktop machines for all of our technical employees. We chose Linux because if offers us the price for performance ratio. It's so nice to be able to customize any part of the operating system that we like, at anytime. We have a large degree of in-house Linux expertise, too.
Most of our administrative tools were developed in-house, as well.
OLinux: What is Google security policy and how is it implemented?
Sergey Brin: Most of our machines are behind a router and not accessible to the outside world. The outside-accessible machines (webservers) are carefully audited for security holes.
We also use ssh an awful lot. :-)
I see you received your Ph.D from Moscow State. Political ideology aside, do you think the Russian education system is more effective than that of the US? What element is most lacking in US higher education today?
IZ: The short answers: you cannot put ideology aside; elementary education.
Now the longer ones. It is extremely difficult to compare the systems. And the results would depend on how deep you are ready to dig. First, consider the purely subjective feelings. (Especially important since "objective" comparisons produce almost pure garbage.) Yes, it feels like the Russian system gives much better results than the U.S. one. On the other hand, look at top level achievers. Obviously, the "stars" in the U.S. were not less starry than the "stars" in the SU.
One of the reasons for a possibly skewed perception is an unbelievable concentration of resources in Russia. Let's look: scratching the surface, SU was significantly larger than US, it is enough to mention 10 (or 11?) time zones. It was a big surprise for me when after several months in US I understood that my feelings about the size were exactly the opposite to the "objective" sizes. Digging into these feelings brought the following conjecture: subjectively SU was a disk with the radius circa 25 miles.
Why? Imagine that 80% of everything good was in Moscow. Out of the rest, 15% were in Leningrad and Kiev. (I'm still subjective!) Well, there is some distance between Moscow and Leningrad, but given sleeper trains, it mostly disappears. This was squeezing resources into a very tight knot. The critical mass requires high mass and high density simultaneously, both were present. The synergetic effects were omnipresent.
Imagine a prevalent migration of talents to metropolises with a negligible back-current. Imagine that top students go not to 25 different universities, but to one, and stay there (the math department in the Moscow University is 5..10 times larger than the largest math departments in the USA). What does this lead to? If you are a good student, then the proportion of good students around you would be much higher.
This skews perceptions, but there is also a giant "objective" boost due to increased interaction between "stars" (and "starlets"). US students in general are much more ready to work hard, but their achievements in the domain of their immediate speciality are only as good as those for Russian students, and not spectacularly better. Typically their knowledge outside this narrow region wishes a lot of improvement.
Additionally, for the most of the beneficial factors, one would not want to copy them. Why "stars" remain in Moscow? Because there was no way to go abroad. What choices there were for a bright kid? Very few. Learn, learn, and learn. What choices there were for philanthropy? Very few. Teach, teach, and teach. Just consider the payroll differential, which was at most 2x--4x. So even if elementary education was relatively low-paying, the enthusiasts would not be stopped by this: the difference was not that striking.
Consider also differences in the spending pattern. It was not absolutely ridiculous to spend 10% or 15% of your income on books. Books being cheap, you could allow yourselves to buy all the decent books in your wide speciality, and several related specialities, not even mentioning what is called "literature" in US. Clearly, there is no way to graft this to the US situation.
Now a theory one of my friends favors, take it at least as a parable: The humanitarian aspect of the elementary education in the U.S. is based on tolerance, basically, all the ideas are considered created equal. Pluralism, respect for opinions of other persons, the ability to look at the problem from different sides and so on. So far so good. Now: math is based on exactly the opposite premise: some arguments are correct, some are wrong. People can tell them apart.
This creates a conflict. Correspondingly, all non-mechanical aspects of math, which is the ultimate device to transfer knowledge in a reproducible way, and to build new knowledge, are censored out (not necessarily consciously). Now kids come to university: "Proof? Eh?" Bad? Would you like to sacrifice the widespread tolerance to improve math?
So my point is: a lot of ground for success of the Russian education system was hardwired into the ideological situation. However, it might be that the situation already bootstrapped itself into a self-supporting state of a widespread readiness to get fascination from a play of mind, even if this play requires some nontrivial mental tension. Maybe this readiness can survive the "return to the normal ideology."
Suppose that all you need is such a readiness in a sufficient number of teachers, and this would create enough interested pupils to form the next generation of such teachers. How to bootstrap such a situation in U.S.? There may be some US-specific answers which I would not be able to even imagine. Something crazy like a philanthropist buying an hour a week on MTV, with MTV specialists who know how to speak to kids-of-today collaborating with science enthusiasts and some cold minds (so that it would not degenerate into another kindergarten like Sesame Street).
Myself, I favor something less focussed on the situation of today. Say, there are teacher's conventions anyway. Why not organize math/physics/chemistry/biology/linguistics problem-solving competition there? It would be quite low-budget. Here I mean "cool" problems, as on international olympiads (but of course, slightly simpler). It should not be hard to find volunteers to design the problems, the Bay Area already has a Russian-style math olympiad running.
Society
Groupthink : Two Party System as Polyarchy : Corruption of Regulators : Bureaucracies : Understanding Micromanagers and Control Freaks : Toxic Managers : Harvard Mafia : Diplomatic Communication : Surviving a Bad Performance Review : Insufficient Retirement Funds as Immanent Problem of Neoliberal Regime : PseudoScience : Who Rules America : Neoliberalism : The Iron Law of Oligarchy : Libertarian Philosophy
Quotes
War and Peace : Skeptical Finance : John Kenneth Galbraith :Talleyrand : Oscar Wilde : Otto Von Bismarck : Keynes : George Carlin : Skeptics : Propaganda : SE quotes : Language Design and Programming Quotes : Random IT-related quotes : Somerset Maugham : Marcus Aurelius : Kurt Vonnegut : Eric Hoffer : Winston Churchill : Napoleon Bonaparte : Ambrose Bierce : Bernard Shaw : Mark Twain Quotes
Bulletin:
Vol 25, No.12 (December, 2013) Rational Fools vs. Efficient Crooks The efficient markets hypothesis : Political Skeptic Bulletin, 2013 : Unemployment Bulletin, 2010 : Vol 23, No.10 (October, 2011) An observation about corporate security departments : Slightly Skeptical Euromaydan Chronicles, June 2014 : Greenspan legacy bulletin, 2008 : Vol 25, No.10 (October, 2013) Cryptolocker Trojan (Win32/Crilock.A) : Vol 25, No.08 (August, 2013) Cloud providers as intelligence collection hubs : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2010 : Inequality Bulletin, 2009 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2008 : Copyleft Problems Bulletin, 2004 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2011 : Energy Bulletin, 2010 : Malware Protection Bulletin, 2010 : Vol 26, No.1 (January, 2013) Object-Oriented Cult : Political Skeptic Bulletin, 2011 : Vol 23, No.11 (November, 2011) Softpanorama classification of sysadmin horror stories : Vol 25, No.05 (May, 2013) Corporate bullshit as a communication method : Vol 25, No.06 (June, 2013) A Note on the Relationship of Brooks Law and Conway Law
History:
Fifty glorious years (1950-2000): the triumph of the US computer engineering : Donald Knuth : TAoCP and its Influence of Computer Science : Richard Stallman : Linus Torvalds : Larry Wall : John K. Ousterhout : CTSS : Multix OS Unix History : Unix shell history : VI editor : History of pipes concept : Solaris : MS DOS : Programming Languages History : PL/1 : Simula 67 : C : History of GCC development : Scripting Languages : Perl history : OS History : Mail : DNS : SSH : CPU Instruction Sets : SPARC systems 1987-2006 : Norton Commander : Norton Utilities : Norton Ghost : Frontpage history : Malware Defense History : GNU Screen : OSS early history
Classic books:
The Peter Principle : Parkinson Law : 1984 : The Mythical Man-Month : How to Solve It by George Polya : The Art of Computer Programming : The Elements of Programming Style : The Unix Hater’s Handbook : The Jargon file : The True Believer : Programming Pearls : The Good Soldier Svejk : The Power Elite
Most popular humor pages:
Manifest of the Softpanorama IT Slacker Society : Ten Commandments of the IT Slackers Society : Computer Humor Collection : BSD Logo Story : The Cuckoo's Egg : IT Slang : C++ Humor : ARE YOU A BBS ADDICT? : The Perl Purity Test : Object oriented programmers of all nations : Financial Humor : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2008 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2010 : The Most Comprehensive Collection of Editor-related Humor : Programming Language Humor : Goldman Sachs related humor : Greenspan humor : C Humor : Scripting Humor : Real Programmers Humor : Web Humor : GPL-related Humor : OFM Humor : Politically Incorrect Humor : IDS Humor : "Linux Sucks" Humor : Russian Musical Humor : Best Russian Programmer Humor : Microsoft plans to buy Catholic Church : Richard Stallman Related Humor : Admin Humor : Perl-related Humor : Linus Torvalds Related humor : PseudoScience Related Humor : Networking Humor : Shell Humor : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2011 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2012 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2013 : Java Humor : Software Engineering Humor : Sun Solaris Related Humor : Education Humor : IBM Humor : Assembler-related Humor : VIM Humor : Computer Viruses Humor : Bright tomorrow is rescheduled to a day after tomorrow : Classic Computer Humor
The Last but not Least Technology is dominated by two types of people: those who understand what they do not manage and those who manage what they do not understand ~Archibald Putt. Ph.D
Copyright © 1996-2021 by Softpanorama Society. www.softpanorama.org was initially created as a service to the (now defunct) UN Sustainable Development Networking Programme (SDNP) without any remuneration. This document is an industrial compilation designed and created exclusively for educational use and is distributed under the Softpanorama Content License. Original materials copyright belong to respective owners. Quotes are made for educational purposes only in compliance with the fair use doctrine.
FAIR USE NOTICE This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available to advance understanding of computer science, IT technology, economic, scientific, and social issues. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided by section 107 of the US Copyright Law according to which such material can be distributed without profit exclusively for research and educational purposes.
This is a Spartan WHYFF (We Help You For Free) site written by people for whom English is not a native language. Grammar and spelling errors should be expected. The site contain some broken links as it develops like a living tree...
|
|
You can use PayPal to to buy a cup of coffee for authors of this site |
Disclaimer:
The statements, views and opinions presented on this web page are those of the author (or referenced source) and are not endorsed by, nor do they necessarily reflect, the opinions of the Softpanorama society. We do not warrant the correctness of the information provided or its fitness for any purpose. The site uses AdSense so you need to be aware of Google privacy policy. You you do not want to be tracked by Google please disable Javascript for this site. This site is perfectly usable without Javascript.
Last modified: March 12, 2019
