Information Technology Research Update by Diomidis Spinellis Department of Management Science and Technology Athens University of Economics and Business (AUEB) http://www.dmst.aueb.gr/dds/ Volume 3 Issue 2 October 8th, 2003 A free periodic newsletter providing summaries, analyses, insights, and commentaries on information technology research brought to you by the Information Systems Technology laboratory http://istlab.dmst.aueb.gr In this issue: - The Monkey Trial - Four New Research Outlets - New Trends in the Operating System Software Market - MIT's Courses are Now Online - Silly Web Sightings The Monkey Trial ---- The "Face value" column of the Economist newsmagazine (August 30th-September 5th, 2003) featured Darl McBride SCOs CEO. Titled "Of monkeys and penguins" the column compares the SCO case to the Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925 where religious fundamentalists fought with progressives on the right to teach Darwin's theory of evolution in American classrooms. The Economist column argues that a similar culture war is now raging: fundamentalists "buttoned-down types clinging to proprietary and closed computer systems" against evolutionists "the pony-tailed set championing collaboration and openness in the form of Linux". The article discusses possible motives behind McBride's strategy mentioning how Caldera's owners once profitably sued Microsoft and how McBride won in 1998 a "seven-figure settlement" by suing his employer at the time (IKON Office Solutions) for breach of contract when they forced him to move office outside Utah. The text also contains details about the Las Vegas SCO presentation pointing out that the lines shown have been published many times over the years. It also speculates on Microsoft's role mentioning that Microsoft is one of the few companies who have paid for a SCO license although it has no need for one. The article ends by noting that "like the fundamentalists of 1925, he [McBride] may end up being a footnote in history; or he may arrest the Linux evolution". Four New Research Outlets ---- ACM is starting up three new Transactions publications and a new magazine. The titles and content of these publications point us towards emerging technologies that will prove to be of lasting importance. ACM Transactions on Speech and Language Processing (TSLP), will be an electronic quarterly publication with an annual printed volume for libraries. TSLP will publish high-quality papers in practical areas of theory, design, development, and evaluation of systems that process human language in text or spoken form. IEEE/ACM Transactions on Computational Biology and Bioinformatics (TCBB) will be jointly published by ACM and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). The quarterly publication will emphasize the algorithmic, mathematical, statistical and computational methods that are central in bioinformatics and computational biology; the development and testing of effective computer programs in bioinformatics; the development of biological databases; and important biological results that are obtained from the use of these methods, programs and databases. The ACM Transactions on Sensor Networks and Applications (TSNA) is being formed in response to the growth in interest in sensor networks over the past 10 years, reflected in the accelerating pace of activity in research, funding, and conference events. The quarterly publication will take a systemic approach, covering the physical sensor layer, sensor signal processing and networking levels, and applications. Finally, in October ACM will launch its new online magazine Computers in Entertainment. A quarterly Web-based magazine, CIE will publish refereed research papers and informative articles about online games, CD-ROM software, CGI movies, interactive TV, virtual reality, animatronics, and other entertainment technologies. More details: http://www.acm.org/pubs/ New Trends in the Operating System Software Market --------------- (Reported by Dimitrios Dalaklis, Naval Postgraduate School) The summer of 2003 was for Operating System (OS) vendors hotter than ever. The competition between Microsoft's Windows and Open Source Linux suddenly intensified. On the afternoon of 28th of May, the city council of Munich, Germany, announced that they have chosen Linux for their 14,000 PCs and 16,000 users, in a move to make Linux their standard desktop operating system environment from Windows and to include open source software for their office applications, following Mayor Christian Ude's proposal. With this decision Munich established itself as the first major city to have a significant portion of its IT infrastructure supplier-independent and sets also a clear indication of more competition in the software market. This is not a decision for a specific IT partner, but a strategic positioning based on a noncommittal market evaluation. "It is one of the largest desktop migrations to Linux ever seen," said Gartner Dataquest analyst Nikos Drakos in London. Until spring 2004, a detailed concept of implementation and migration will be developed. Then on the 5th of September, more interesting news for the open source front came. The governments of Japan, Korea, and China announced that they are planning to co-develop an open-source operating system to replace the Microsoft operating system for large-scale use in their respective countries. The initiative was said to bring the three countries together in the development of the software, as their technology "bigwigs' from private and government agencies were set to meet in late 2003 to discuss specifics of the collaboration. Linux would be positioned at the core of the initiative and would be implemented in critical areas of business and government service networks, shrinking Microsoft market share in the whole Asian region. Previously, Linux only occupied marginal positions in the data center, particularly in non-critical file, print, and e-mail services. MIT's Courses are Now Online ------ MIT's promise to put its courses online has materialized. Available on MIT's OpenCourseWare web site is educational material comprising 500 courses, from 33 academic disciplines and all five of MIT's schools. OpenCourseWare does not require any registration, and of course, does not offer access to a degree or to MIT's faculty. Browsing through some of the courses one is left with the feeling that the major differentiator behind the material is the fact that the specific course is offered at MIT. As one would expect from an academic endeavour, the course notes put together are of varying quality and coverage. Some courses contain only their syllabus and assignments, others include course notes, others class presentations. These elements are often available for many courses from universities all over the world, including ours. MIT's OpenCourseWare puts them under a common roof with the same interface for the first-level links. To close on a lighter note: a recent slashdot comment argued that the last thing our world needs is a publicly available online MIT course on Advanced Nuclear Engineering. Silly Web Sightings ------------------------------------ (pointed by Alexios Zavas, AUEB) A Web site http://www.eurobilltracker.com allows anyone to enter the serial number of their Euro bills into a database. The database is then used to track bills and their diffusion across Europe. As an example, about 18% of the notes appearing in Greece had come from Germany, while 6% of the notes appearing in Spain had come from Greece. A different site titled "Primate programming" apparently offers trained primates (chimpanzees) as subcontractors for implementing information technology projects. Finally, the site offers to its readers the ability to view the Monkey Shakespeare Simulator in action. Based on the premise "If you have enough monkeys banging randomly on typewriters, they will eventually type the works of William Shakespeare" the site simulates a monkey typing at random and compares the result against Shakespeare's works.