The reason why Nokia went on to open the source code is, Android.

Major manufacturers like Motorola, HTC jumped to play with Google’s Android early on. At the same time Apple whipped a brilliant product – the iPhone – with a neat OS under it. The duo – i.e. Android vs. iOS – competed so much that both left very little on the plate for Nokia to chew on. There wasn’t enough coolness-left-to-do left in Symbian or may be Nokia didn’t have the bandwidth to pursue it that way. The market share of Nokia fell. Eventually, Nokia was cornered with two choices: be quicker than the rest to one-up their operating system, or be submerged under. The third choice, of course, was to open the source. And so did Nokia.

BTW did you also notice that, in the chip-set based mobile segment too, Nokia is seeing massive competition (read erosion) in the markets of its stronghold. What exactly is the reason for it, can you guess? Among smartphones, the announcement by Opera is a sign of relief for Nokia. A resurrection of Symbian, their move for survival in the face of stiff competition.

Well here are some details of the new faster Opera Mini for Symbian handsets:

It carries all the innovations Opera Mini is known for, such as Speed Dial for the users’ favorite websites, tabbed browsing and an attractive user interface. Supports more devices than ever (read about too many models ), faster start-up time, improved page-load and scrolling performance, especially on older devices, full support for device text input methods, better fonts, integration for copy & paste, email client and an option to choose default access point without annoying dialogs.

Opera claims “ Nokia smartphones based on Symbian are very popular among Opera Mini users, and this release translates into a better browsing experience, while saving on data traffic charges and fees“. Well great move Nokia, or else how could Opera have made a better browser on top of your handset?

And if you are a Nokia smartphone lover then you may perhaps want to download the latest Opera Mini for your handset. Go surf, tell us if it felt better!

IMG credit: Cast Away, Hollywood

But all this is about past, and let’s not talk about it.

Talk of the town today is real time internet & social media. In fact social media is such a f**ked term over the internet these days that I really don’t feel like using it. But it”s a living present that one could confirm with every Tom, Dick and Harry on Twitter who is busy selling the social media opportunity to the industry. Whatever, let’s not get into that either.

Let’s extrapolate into the future.

Step back and look at last 100 years in development of Computer Science, Electronics and other traditional Technology first. It all started with simple calculators (Wilhelm Schickard), Charles Babbage, Lady Ada Lovelace and then branched out in to specific fields of research which have been sought after & contributed upon by some of the best brains of our society. A branch of science driven by logic.

Through it came basic internet (disruptive in all respects, as we are witnessing it) which has now progressed into real-time internet where Twitters and other services around the world help humans gain insight, knowledge, trends and information in a ‘decisive fashion’ along the real-time-line of our existence.

So what is next?

Paradigm of Machine Intelligence:

Is it not the turn for Artificial intelligence, Genetic algorithms, and Neural networks to take over? Or it is. These fields of research too have been under continuous development by the best human brains across the world and numerous abstractions have already been successfully delivered by passing generations of computer scientists. For roughly fifty odd years or so. Now what if such an ensemble of layered knowledge of simulated intelligence goes out in the open over the internet for a prolong period of time? Does this sound like a tipping point where mass usage of simulated intelligence in technology would take over the regular solutions available?

Entrepreneurship is an indicator:

Rising entrepreneurship in the field of AI is a strong indication of where the subject is headed. Adapting different use-cases of machine intelligence, there are several quaint startups that offer great value already. For example we have Siri – the first intelligence based Mobile app, Gestures from SixthSense Technologies, Minority report act from Oblong Industries and even in Biotechnology there is Genetic 2.0 which talks about “beginning a parallel genetic code with 256 blank four-letter codons that can be assigned to amino acids instead of the available 64 triplet combination that exists in our lifeforms today “. So new, stronger life forms it talks about.

Another awesome example of Genetic Algorithms is that of work by a brilliant musician-cum-emeritus professor from University of California – David Cope – who created EMMY (derived from Experiments in Musical Intelligence) a computer application which composes and plays operatic music. As good as original Mozart or Bach. Having developed an application which qualified the Turing test with indistinguishable musical ability, Prof. Cope confirms that any creative pursuit of man-kind is just a recombination of something “heard” or “lifted” from elsewhere. Call it plagiarism. He even reverse-engineered centuries of music to its roots & forebears to prove his finds. “Nobody’s original,” Cope says. “We are what we eat, and in music, we are what we hear. What we do is look through history and listen to music. Everybody copies from everybody. The skill is in how large a fragment you choose to copy and how elegantly you can put them together.”

Let’s murder the Captcha now, for example.

The test of “humanness” on internet hangs by a thin thread of binary files. There is anti-circumvention clause of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) in the United States to prevent mass scale circumvention of Captcha and an exemplary case of injunction against a violating company too. All major commercial services such as Facebook, Google & Twitter rely on Captcha & Phonetic test for humans.

But technically speaking how unstoppable is it to programmatically parse the binaries that allows the bots to create bot accounts without any human intervention? If one looks at the pace of on-going research in Voice Recognition or Image recognition it seems pretty reasonable to assume that Captchas are soon gonna have to die and something more “undoable” by machines will have to be put in place. Evolution yet again, until the next wave of upgrade!

Well more than the defeat of Captchas or of Voice Binaries is a concern that of applying the Genetics Paradigm to human generated passwords which too are more-often-than-not simply composed. Passwords are easily predictable piece of data for all practical purposes and technically speaking I am not talking about social engineering. Composing passwords is not as much complex or original an activity as is composing music. And when music itself can be genetically attributed to cut-copy-paste syndrome to the aboriginal sounds of animals, birds and other objects how easy it’d be to work out cracks for passwords using genetic algorithms?

Genetics is more than Computer Science

Evolution applies to Nature. So does it apply to industry, businesses, technology, governance, communication and our children too. Let’s hypothesize a Neural Network and open it over the internet to simply tell us a ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ before buying a particular scrip on the Tokyo’s stock exchange! And now if this neural network is trained with data-sets of masses (applying the social media paradigm here) and its corresponding result-sets – frequently called as intelligence of the crowd/market (one can compound training with real-time data inputs also) – then how powerful would such a neural network be? Will it give an answer with impeccable accuracy as to how the scrip’s gonna perform on the stock exchange? Theoretically yes, coz it will have infinite sample size of training over social nature of internet and time, right?

Code named ‘Awareness’

Human brain is claimed to be the only object in the world which is aware of itself. It is powerful, it can think, decide, learn, store, process, collaborate and get tired too. In fact most of evolutionary physical limitations of the human body (as compared to animals) can be attributed to the available alternative of using a powerful brain in our defense. Brain too evolves naturally and slowly over generations & generations of people. But for technology, the realm of evolution is much faster. Our society pulls out best brains competitively and puts them on projects of intelligence. These best brains contribute philosophy over philosophy over philosophy and build on the capabilities of the machines. Now when this process is opened to crowd-sourcing, developer community, open-source paradigm and other contributory concepts what we might eventually end-up with is “accelerated evolution”. Until one day we would have another object which is aware of itself. Or at least more intelligent than a single human brain.

Now the question is: how far is such day?

TCE, or Thiagarajar College of Engineering, Madurai is one of Tamil Nadu’s finest Educational Institutions. In an organization that uses Debian as it’s OS of choice, two students Sowmy Narayan and Sarvesh Ghautham have rolled out their own version of an Ubuntu clone.

The following is an interview , done over Email, with Sowmy, one of the Lead Devleopers of the new Linux Distribution called TCE Operating System  Services, or TOSS.

What was the basic, or the most primal inspiration for making your own Distro ? What did you feel was lacking in the current 200-odd Linux Distributions out there ?

The primary goal of TOSS was to create a single Operating System that would cater to the needs of students from all streams of Engineering. In our experience, Linux distros that target regular desktop users seem to be a difficult choice for users who want to do advanced tasks like Electrical/Mechanical Simulation, Multimedia programming etc. On the other hand, those few distros that do offer support for such advanced users seem to assume that all engineers are geeks! Our goal was to create an environment where all users would feel right at home and still access and use engineering,design as well as simulation software.

Why was Ubuntu the choice for the fork (the base ) ?  Why did you not choose more mature Distro like Debian, Fedora Core, Slackware, etc.

With ease-of-use being a key point in our mind, we set out to create a distro that would enable users to install software with minimum hassle. Apt and Synaptic are wonderful tools in this regard, hence bringing down our
choice to Debian and Ubuntu. Of these, Ubuntu, in its 5 years of existence, is arguably the most popular distro out there (and also easier to remaster). Hence the choice was obvious.

Who were the initial members of the team ? And how big is the team now ?

This project started only a year ago and our initial core team members then were myself and Sarvesh Ghautham, both 3rd year CSE students of TCE. Now the team has expanded to 4 comprising our immediate juniors Raghavendhra and Saravanan.We also have for support the 700 member GNU/Linux Users Group of TCE.

What was your working environment ? Collge lab ? Dorm room ? Home bedroom ?

Since this started as a mini project out of boredom, we worked entirely in the amicable environment of our College lab.

Who helped you in this initiative ? TCE facutly ? Did you receive any financial backing ?

The Principal of TCE, Mr.Abhai Kumar and the HOD of CSE Dept, Mrs.Mercy Shalinie were omnipresent to back our venture. We are indebted to the staff of CSE Dept of Thiagarajar College of Engg. without whom TOSS might not have been possible. We were also backed to the hilt by our seniors, especially Aswin and N.G.Karthikeyan.

Raseel : How much time has it taken for you guys to make the TOSS-1.0 release ? Any road-map about future release ?

We started in the December holidays last year and the first version TOSS 0.1 came out on February 9 2009, released by TCS CTO Mr.Ananthkrishnan. TOSS 1.0, basically a stabler and upgraded version of 0.1 came out in May ’09 while TOSS 2.0 may be released anytime before December. We plan to make future releases more regular with a possible 6-month release cycle.

You mentioned that the 0.1 release was made in February 2009 and the release was done by TCS CTO Mr.Ananthkrishnan. Can you elaborate more on how he got involved ?

TCE’s annual 11-day inter-college Technical Fest ‘TecUthsav’ this year began on Feb 9 and Mr.Ananthkrishnan was Chief Guest for the Opening Ceremony. TOSS was officially released as part of the event and hence the first CD was released to the public by Mr.Ananthkrishnan.We must add that 3 days later,during the TecUthsav CSE Day, Yahoo! India R&D chief Mr.Chidambaram Kollengode received a copy of TOSS and briefly reviewed it.

Why was the particular choice of softwares and what was the inspiration for adding the Engineering softwares likegEDA, nasm, qCad, Electric, etc. ?

We use OpenOffice,GIMP,VLC,Rythmbox and Firefox the applications mentionedabove.The reason for all these choices is the same. They are popular, easyto use and most importantly Open Source software. Also as mentioned in our answer for the first question, our primary goal was todevelop an OS for engineers and engineering application developers.

Is there any new software or patches in terms of code or scripts that you have added in TOSS ?

Yes indeed. We have a couple of small ‘in-house’ apps coming with TOSS  2.0.Toss-Menu is a Cairo Menu/GnoMenu-style eye-candy menu for the Gnome Desktop intended to be a replacement for the default GNOME menu. Toss-archiver, is a tool to backup all personal data and TOSSDM is a lightweight desktop  manager/configurator. However these small apps are just the beginning where we got a feel of Linux and GUI programming. Our ultimate aim, is to develop our own Kernel and thereby develop TOSS as a full-fledged OS than just a Linux distro.

Have you guys taken any active steps to involve more of the community? Can the community contribute in any way like code patches,documentation, etc. ?

While we provide full and ready support to any member of the public, at the moment TOSS is more of an internal project within TCE. Hence unlike many other distributions, artwork, patch and software development is restricted within the realm of GLUGOT and the CSE Department.

Are you guys open for a donation or financial backing for doingthis full time ?

We may consider such offers.

Any glimpses of what the next TOSS Release might have in store for the users ?

Better look and feel,essential patches and security upgrades, a ‘cooler’ booting and working experience, newer Kernel, optional ext4 support are allon the anvil for TOSS 2.0. With the release slated soon, we hope the wait has been worth.

Have recorded any numbers as to how many downloads may have taken place ?

Shortly after its release,TOSS was reviewed by the popular online magazine Softpedia. The number of downloads through the Softpedia link alone is nearly 950. Apart from this we also distributed nearly 100 CDs during TecUthsav ’09 and our college’s SFD celebrations. We havent kept track of the number of downloads directly from the site, but from the Softpedia figures, about 2000 downloads is a safe estimate.

Rolling out a Linux Distribution, maintaining it, adding features, engaging the community and all the while yearning to write your very own kernel may sound like a lot of work for most established software companies. However, just like entrepreneurs who know no fear, the TOSS developers have set out on their mission.

It makes me proud to know that a Linux Distribution of this caliber has be rolled out of India. With more and more youth from even rural areas taking part in the Open Source software movement, I hope there are more Distributions being rolled out.

Would you like to read more interview about these indigenously developed Distributions ?

The Future

“Even as I enter the elevator of my building to leave for office, I decide it best to check my client’s status with whom I have a meeting scheduled in another half an hour. I log-in to my micro-blogging/status-update portal through the Elevator’s Control Panel. Phew ! They have still not reached. I’m glad someone thought of putting a browser into the Panel. With another 100 floors to go, I think I can watch a couple of Video messages till then.”

“Man… the traffic is killing me. Wonder if there is a shorter route. I love the new Flash 202.45 look on my wind-shield. What madness it must have been to follow directions on a device NEXT to you, rather than on your windshield. Now why didn’t they embed the browser in the windshield in the first place ?!!”

“There’s Sam. I don’t know why he has to dress-up like a College kid in the office. And playing YouTube videos on his T-Shirt. What is he , seven ? And they are not even 3D. I’m glad I decided to stick with the Fashion trends and got that awesome, albeit expensive T-Shirt with HTML72. The Hi-Def on it is almost life-like.”

“I hate the fact that she has the latest Reliance Nano FingerTop. That thing has only about 340KB of RAM. My stupid FingerTop has a huge 1MB goop of DDR18. The damn thing needs 5 seconds to boot up and start the Browser and MemCleaner. They say, hers has the MemCleaner as a plug-in. I wonder how they managed to start a hologram projector, built in camera and a MemCleaner all under a second ?”

Although the scenes mentioned above may seem like passages right out of a Isaac Asimov novel,the way the browser wars are turning out, do you see the future turn out any other way ?

The Staggering Facts

With a 10 Million plus downloads, more than 30 million users, a record breaking “Most Downloaded Software in a Day” accolade to it’s name and a developer base that spans the world with even blind and visually impaired individuals actively contributing, there can be little doubt that Firefox as a browser will be to us in the future, what device firmware is to us today.

Making a cool $55 million plus yearly, I think Mozilla Corp. is one of the richest not for profit , open source organizations in the world. It’s browser share is more than that combined of all other browsers, except Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, … combined !! Releasing on all the 3 top platforms, Windows, Linux and Mac, Firefox is also available on Solaris, BSD and now even on embedded platforms like the Maemo. One of the only softwares in the world to have a thousands of plugins written for it with new ones being written everyday, Firefox must be the only software that is released in over 70 international languages including more than 10 Indians (with an additional local dialects). The robustness of this software is clear from the fact that there are other projects like Fennec and Flock which are based on the same browser engines.

Today

Few browsers have achieved the success that Firefox has in such a short period of time, considering that the browser was not developed by a commercially successful Software company. However, an unrelenting attittude towardsopen standars, security considerations and a development & testing model that might put many propeitary software product life cycles to shame, has made this one of the most loved browsers of all time.

Even as the world wishes Firefox a very Happy Fifth Birthday, Mitchell Baker, CEO of Mozilla Corp., speaks out her mind in a lengthy but an elaborate interview about the past, present and future of the most popular browser in the world.

It’s been five years since four geeks decided to write a browser to surf the World Wide Web. I think in another five, the rest of the world will use their work to write a browser to surf…. Life !!

]]> http://www.pluggd.in/firefox-an-introduction-after-5-years-297/feed/ 2 http://www.pluggd.in/n900-nokia-announces-its-first-linux-phone-297/ http://www.pluggd.in/n900-nokia-announces-its-first-linux-phone-297/#comments Thu, 27 Aug 2009 19:55:04 +0000 Raseel http://www.pluggd.in/?p=5110 Read More »]]> Nokia, announced today the company’s first Linux based phone, the N900. While leaks and rumors of this product were being circulated from since a few months ago, the official unvieling seems to have most tech-bloggers, geeks and Linux enthusiasts highly impressed.

The phone is based on a Linux Mobile Software platform called Maemo. Maemo was one of the popular open source mobile software stacks covered in a previous article.

With Nokia embracing the newly released Maemo 5 Linux based mobile platform for one of it’s most expensive and highly awaited “iPhone killer” products, albiet the fact that thier own Symbian OS has also been a winner among mobile phone OSes, clearly indicates the dominance of Linux as the next generation platform for Mobile devices.Nokia has a great website for showing off N900 as well as Maemo’s prowess.

Nokia's Linux Phone -N900

The new device has quite a lot of impressive features like a powerful OMAP processor with OpenGL ES 2.0 support, 1 GB of Application RAM, widescreen touch display, QWERTY keyboard, 5 MP camera, GPS and Quad-band GSM, EDGE, GPRS and WCDMA support, on the hardware side.

On the software side Maemo 5 has a lot of amazing features like the Mozilla engine based browser, a complete suite of open source applications for Media playback , support for Adobe Flash 9.4, multiple desktops , Widgets and an Application manager. Another cool thing about Maemo 5 on the N900 is it’s support for multi-tasking which is sure to show an enhanced performance, possibly even better than the iPhone.

All in all, this one does seem likea device that could give others like the Android-based HTCs or Webkit based Palm Pre’s a good run for their money. However, literally speaking, currently speculated to be at a price range of  $700, it is a bit pricey and by the time it is available in India, it will still be about the Rs.32,000/-plus category.

What are your views on N900 ? Will it be in competition against the iPhone ? Or will it dominate the Linux-based Mobile phone market only ?

AIX : Advanced Interactive eXecutive, were a set of UNIX-based proprietary Operating Systems developed by IBM for the PowerPC family of processors. It was derived from the BSD Unix codebase, but modified to suit IBM’s product portfolio. In fact, IBM later used one version of AIX to run on their mainframes, System/370. AIX and IBM also became famous for the lawsuit by the SCO group, the last owners of the unforked Unix code. The latest version of AIX offered by IBM is Enterprise ready scalable, open-standards based and supports Virtualization.

MAC OS : The only Operating System that comes close to the popularity of Windows and Linux, is the ultra-cool Mac OS by Apple Computers. Apple likes to call it the “smartest operating system in the world” and all those who have laid their hands on a MAC would agree. The modern version of this OS, MAC OS X, or Mac OS 10, is derived from a company Nextstep’s NeXT OS. The new OS broke the tradition of Apple’s tight integration with the PowerPC processors and was available on Intel’s x86 architecture. Even today, MAC OS outnumbers Linux in terms of Desktop deployments and potentially in the number of fanatics. And as if that was not enough, Apple has now ported an embedded version on the OS on it’s highly successful iPhone mobile phone.

HP-UX : HP Unix, is HP’s home grown proprietary implementation of the Unix OS. It has been developed and sold by HP from since 1983 and. It powers a lot of data-centres and other mission critical server deployments Banks, Railway systems, etc. Like modern OSes it now has a support for Virtualization and runs on a gamut of HP’s hardware products.

VxWorks : It is the world’s most popular Real Time Operating System used in Embedded Systems for hard mission-critical time constraints. It is sold by WindRiver which claims to have taken the numero uno position in Embedded Linux. VxWorks recieved a minor setback when a problem known as Priority Inversion was experienced on the Mars’ Pathfinder mission,  jeopardizing the whole mission. It is however, still the top player in this field and is used in all kinds of systems from Boeing aircrafts to Military operations to the Robots.

Solaris : This list started with OpenSolaris and will be concluded by it’s parentage, Sun’s Solaris OS. Solaris was originally derived from SunOS. This family of OS was developed naturally, for Sun’s own Sparc family of processors but like any modern successful operating system has been ported to the x86 architecture. Sun claims that it has “more applications than any other OS”. Solaris uses the Common Desktop Environment and easily one of Sun’s most successful software products.

A lot of other interesting, older operating system like VAX’s VMS or  Apple’s open source Darwin or the QNX RTOS or Cisco’s IOS, have not been covered here, but that’s only to maintain the brevity of the posts. Also, the OSes mentioned in these two parts have been more successful than most others.

But still, do you know any other open source or closed source operating systems that have had as much impact ?

Or, here’s food for thought … is there scope for any new Operating Systems that may have features missed by these OSes ?

Without further ado, let us familiarize ourselves with some of the more popular open-source non-Linux Distributions or Operation Systems :

OpenSolaris : OpenSolaris is Sun’s attempt at opening it’s traditionally closed but highly successful Solaris OS ( Sun Solaris is covered in Part 2 of this post on closed source POSIX Operating Systems). It is licensed under Sun’s CDDL. It is available as a LiveCD , a USB Distro as well as installable DVD variant for the Sparc as well as x86 family of processors. Built on the GNOME desktop environment, it also comes with other cool open source software from Sun’s foundries like the venerable ZFS file system for Data Centres.

FreeBSD : FreeBSD , like many other flavours of BSD is a fork of University of California, Berkley’s Unix operating system. It has ports on a number of popular platforms like Ultra Sparc, PowerPC, ARM, etc. FreeBSD is touted as been the “unknown giant among operating systems”, since it is used as a production OS by a surprisingly large number of companies including Apple, Yahoo, Cisco, Juniper and NetApp. It is also a favourite among embedded system developers for it’s security, robustness  & compatibility features and is used in some residential gateways, set-top-boxes , etc. FreeBSD’s adorable mascot Beastie is one of the most popular logos in the open source world.

Popular Open Source Non-Linux Based Operating Systems

PCBSD : PC BSD is actually derived from FreeBSD. However, PC-BSD was designed for the layman. It comes with a KDE desktop environment complete with the 3D desktop effects and acceleration. Apart from all the features of FreeBSD like stability, virus-free environment, etc., PC-BSD has an astonishingly large number of applications ported or written exclusively for it.

NetBSD : NetBSD, some say runs on everything except a toaster. And then someone went and made it run on one. It is the most widely ported OS in the world. It is another fork of the venerable Berkely Unix, BSD. Again, a favourite among embedded systems developer for reasons mentioned above, it embraces the BSD license making it a financially more viable OS to to adopt.

OpenBSD : Rumor has it that Theo de Raadt, the venerable NetBSD developer forked this Distribution from NetBSD because of personality clashes. However, some like to believe that the reason was more technical since Theod de Raadt wanted to focus on security, open source nature, documentation, code quality, etc. As a result OpenBSD is called the most secured OS in the world, since it implements certain security features which others tend to ignore. In fact, OpenBSD’s logo is a Blowfish, the name of the popular security cipher.

Apart from the ones mentioned above there are more BSDs like DesktopBSD, DragonFlyBSD and a few other commercial, propreitary BSDs, but I think we have covered enough for one post.

GNU/Hurd : Hurd was actually the kernel being developed for the GNU operating system before Linux. It “sits” on top of the “Mach” micro-kernel which is used by Apple’s MAC OS X. Since GNU embraced the monolithic Linux kernel, the Hurd project has been sidelined and although it would interesting for a geek to study it, no known high profile commercial deployments are known… or advised.

React OS : ReactOS is NOT a POSIX operating system, but it is such an interesting project, that an exception was in order. ReactOS is based on the Windows design and aims at being completely compatible with WinXP, Win2003, i.e, all the applications and drivers developed for the Windows family would run without ANY changes on ReactOS. The ReactOS kernel, like the rest of the OS , is written from scratch and is COMPLETELY FREE. This feat has been possible only by painstakingly reverse engineering the Windows architecture. I think a few screenshots would say much more than words what this team has been successful in achieving.

This is a Linux world, and it is not advisable for any startup to embrace any of the above OSes. However, it must be remembered that some of the biggest names in the IT industry use some of the above OSes as highly robust  and secure servers. Others are projects of huge potentials and could be tomorrow’s Linux.

What’s your opinion on these OSes?

Look forward to the next part of this series (we will cover commercial and proprietary Distributions based on POSIX).