If anyone noticed, Google wave died. It certainly wasn't the wave of the future...

Google Wave - collaboration of the future?

Here's an interesting new initiative from Google: Google Wave. The embedded video is about an hour and a half, so have some time available before you decide to take a look. Good presentation, and some interesting concepts on wide-ranging collaborative topics.

Google Chrome OS - a new Linux distro?

Wow, it has been almost exactly 2 years since I've updated the blog here. I suppose I've been busy. Anyway...

I do have a special interest in Operating Systems, and I am intrigued by the recent announcement that Google is creating their own, brand new, OS, named "Chrome" (just like their new browser).

I do have a few questions about some of the notes in the that blog announcement. First off, this quote: "The software architecture is simple — Google Chrome running within a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel." Hmm...doesn't sound as much like a new innovative operating system when it is running a Linux kernel, does it? Linux has been around for many years an open source initiative. The new windowing system is of interest; perhaps it would be a replacement for Gnome or KDE. But, does a new windowing system make a new OS? A windowing system is more or less an application running on top of the OS. None of the media reports I've seen have picked up on that the Google Chrome OS is depending (perhaps greatly) on Linux.

Not that this is necessarily bad, but Linux is a monolithic, and some might say bloated, operating system. To contrast, Apple's recent OSes have also been based on a UNIX-like operating system (Mach), which takes a different architectural approach - it is a micro-kernel based system, which at the surface would make more sense for a lighter operating system. Anyone interested in comparisons between these architectural approaches can look search the web for "Tanenbaum Torvalds" to see (perhaps endless) debates on these approaches.

I also have another question about the blog post. From the post: "Even more importantly, they don't want to spend hours configuring their computers to work with every new piece of hardware..." This is one area where Microsoft has it over Linux - mostly due to the massive popularity of Windows. A new piece of hardware usually must come with Windows drivers, so the configuration usually isn't all that painful. This is hardly the case with Linux systems, where the drivers lag the hardware, and configuration of a Linux system to work with a new piece of hardware isn't necessarily straightforward, and can take many hours for early adopters. The blog post simply states that Google's new OS will take care of this...should we trust that at face value?

Perhaps Google's new OS is really nothing more than another new Linux distribution with a new windowing system. We shall have to wait and see how much innovation is really there, but until more details are divulged, count me in as a skeptic.

Here's a book I have to put on my reading list...

Dr. Lisa Randall, of Harvard University, is one of the world's current experts on particle physics, string theory, and cosmology. In view of some of my posts below regarding dimensionality in our universe, her book Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe's Hidden Dimensions looks like a must read.

Thanks to one of my colleagues at work for making me aware of this...

Web 2.0

Before I get to the titular topic, it is worth checking out Marc Andreessen 's blog, which I recently stumbled upon: /http://blog.pmarca.com/. There is lots of interesting information about the Web there, and also about entrepreneur-ship in general. His recent post on personal productivity posted here is at the very least a fascinating read that might challenge some of your own views on achieving high personal productivity.

In any case, the post I wanted to highlight in this post is on Web 2.0 - and exactly what it is. The full text of the post and replies can be found here:

http://blog.pmarca.com/2007/06/why_theres_no_s.html


Here is the salient points I took from the article:

"Web 2.0" is a very fuzzy term originally used as a name for a conference on web technology. Web 2.0 isn't a new set of standards or even strictly a new set of technology. Although we might like to think of a variety of "spaces" in cyberspace - usually to categorize technology - these spaces are conceptual in nature where the reality is "market, product and company". There really isn't a "Web 2.0".

One respondent to the blog post (who helped to chair a recent Web 2.0 Expo) commented:

" - web 2.0 is about rich client-side applications (aka ajax, flash, etc)
- web 2.0 is about tagging & ratings & voting (aka Flickr, Loomia, etc)
- web 2.0 is about user participation & user-generated content (aka Digg)
- web 2.0 is about APIs, RSS, and web services (aka Amazon, Google, Yahoo, eBay, etc)
- web 2.0 is about mashups & remixing content (aka HousingMaps, ChicagoCrime, etc)
- web 2.0 is about web 2.0

anyway, while it's tough to define, and it's broad & overly fuzzy, it still is relevant.

- dave mcclure"

which sounds to me like fairly recent technological developments for the web. Web 2.0? Perhaps...

Oh, and by the way, if you don't know who Mark Andreessen is, shame on you. Look it up.

Happy Birthday, Leonhard Euler

Yesterday was Leonhard Euler's 300th birthday. Happy birthday! to one of the most prominent and prolific mathematicians this world has ever seen. In my mind, one of the most unique characteristics about Euler was that he was how normal he was outside of his genius. Most great mathematicians seemed burdened by their genius in how it affected their lives outside of their profession - indeed, many of them had psychological or social difficulties (ever see the movie "A Beautiful Mind"?). But Euler seemed to escape all of that; his remarkable contributions were all the more unique in how unremarkable the rest of his life was.

From Two to Ten Dimensions

In real life, we know that we live for the moment in three dimensions - we can call them height, width, and depth. (Mathematicians cleverly call them "x, y, and "z", or some other combination of letters.) We can also view time as a dimension as well - so we can say that we live in four dimensions - the three spatial dimensions and time.

In a future post, I'd like to talk about 'time'; it's a topic I've thought about a lot recently. But, to set the stage, we need to delve into the "dimensionality" of our current reality.

Our reality has these three spatial dimensions. We can construct three straight lines, meeting at a single point, which are all ninety degrees away from each other - the x, y, and z axes. Even though it is possible mathematically, we cannot imagine a way to create a new line, intersecting at the same point, that is ninety degrees away from each of the other three lines. If we could do that, then we would have a fourth spatial dimension.

Although four dimensions are impossible to imagine, we can gain some insight by going in the other direction; that is, we can imagine a reality which has less dimensions than the one in our reality. This is the pretext for the book Flatland by Edwin Abbott Abbott. This rather dated book, originally published in 1899, describes what life could be like if lived in only two spatial dimensions. For those interested, this book is in the public domain, and can be downloaded in its entirety here.

After reading this text, we then wonder if there really is a fourth spatial dimension, and if so, how would we living in three dimensions interact with it? Fourth dimensional beings (and perhaps we ourselves have a fourth dimensional component?) would view our existence quite differently than we who are trapped in it do, much like we would view the world of the flatlanders.

Interestingly, today's physicists and mathematicians now theorize that there are indeed more than three dimensions plus time in reality; the current thought is that there is ten dimensions. Ten may seem like a rather arbitrary number, but you can visit the site Imagining the Tenth Dimension by Rob Brayton to see an interesting flash production which attempts to explain the current thinking.

I personally would not be surprised if there are indeed more than 10 dimensions. In fact, I expect that there are infinitely many dimensions (there certainly are mathematically). But, what is reality?