Earlier today Nokia announced it will acquire the remaining 52% share of the Symbian Limited to take over controlling interest of the mobile operating system provider with 91% of the outstanding shares. This alone is interesting but what is fascinating is they also announced their intention to open source Symbian to create “the most attractive platform for mobile innovation and drive the development of new and compelling web-enabled applications”. The press release reports the acquisition will be completed at 3.647 EUR/share at a total cost of 264m EUR. The new open source project responsible for the Symbian operating systems will be managed by the newly set up Symbian Foundation with support announced by Nokia, AT&T, Broadcom, Digia, NTT docomo, EA Mobile, Freescale, Fujitsu, LG, Motorola, Orange, Plusmo, Samsung, Sony Ericcson, ST, Symbian, Teleca, Texas Instruments, T Mobile, Vodaphone, and Wipro.
Other articles on the acquisition:
· http://www.techcraver.com/2008/06/23/huge-news-nokia-acquires-symbian/
· http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/nokia_acquires_symbian.php
This substantially changes the mobile operating system world with all major offerings other than Windows Mobile, iPhone, and RIM now available in open source form. The timing of this acquisition strongly suggests that it’s a response to a perceived threat from Google Android ensuring that, even if Android never gets substantial market traction, it’s already had a lasting impact on the market.
--jrh
Sent my way by Eric Schoonover.
Update: Added iPhone to prooprietary mobile O/S list (thanks Dare Obasanjo).
James Hamilton, Data Center Futures
Bldg 99/2428, One Microsoft Way, Redmond, Washington, 98052
W:+1(425)703-9972 | C:+1(206)910-4692 | H:+1(206)201-1859 | JamesRH@microsoft.com
H:mvdirona.com | W:research.microsoft.com/~jamesrh | blog:http://perspectives.mvdirona.com
Yesterday the Tribute to Honor Jim Gray was held at the University of California at Berkeley. We all miss Jim deeply so it really is a tough topic. But it was great to get together with literally 100s of Jim’s friends and share stories and talk about some of his accomplishments, his contributions to the field, and his contributions to each of us. Jim is amazing across all three dimensions but what is most remarkable is the profound way he helped others achieve more throughout the industry. We’re all better engineers, researchers, and human beings for having been lucky enough to have known and worked with Jim.
Also announced yesterday was the creation of the Jim Gray Chair at Cal Berkeley. Bill Gates Eric Schmidt, Marc Benioff, and Mike Stonebraker each donated $250,000 which were matched by a $1,000,000 from the Hewlett Foundation.
Seattle PI coverage: Gathering in Berkeley, Calif., today to honor legendary scientist, Microsoft researcher Jim Gray.
The morning, general session agenda:
• Welcome - Shankar Sastry
• Opening Remarks - Joseph Hellerstein
• A Tribute, Not a Memorial: Understanding Ambiguous Loss - Pauline Boss
• The Amateur Search - Michael Olson
• Jim Gray at Berkeley - Michael Harrison
• Knowledge and Wisdom - Pat Helland
• Why Did Jim Gray Win the Turing Award? - Michael Stonebraker
• Jim Gray Chair - Stuart Russell
• 500 Special Relationships: Jim as a Mentor to Faculty and Students - Ed Lazowska
• Jim Gray: His Contributions to Industry - David Vaskevitch
• A "Gap Bridger" - Richard Rashid
• Thanks to the U.S. Coast Guard - Paula Hawthorn
The afternoon, technical session agenda:
· Welcome - Shankar Sastry
· Opening Remarks - Joseph Hellerstein
· A Tribute, Not a Memorial: Understanding Ambiguous Loss - Pauline Boss
· The Amateur Search - Michael Olson
· Jim Gray at Berkeley - Michael Harrison
· Knowledge and Wisdom - Pat Helland
· Why Did Jim Gray Win the Turing Award? - Michael Stonebraker
· Jim Gray Chair - Stuart Russell
· 500 Special Relationships: Jim as a Mentor to Faculty and Students - Ed Lazowska
· Jim Gray: His Contributions to Industry - David Vaskevitch
· A "Gap Bridger" - Richard Rashid
· Thanks to the U.S. Coast Guard - Paula Hawthorn
The event was video recorded and streamed via http://webcast.berkeley.edu/.
Update: the video will be at: Tribute to Honor Jim Gray - General Session (thanks to George Spix for sending my way).
Second Update: A good article by John Markoff of the NY Times: A Tribute to Jim Gray: Sometimes Nice Guys Do Finish First.
--jrh
James Hamilton, Windows Live Platform Services
Bldg RedW-D/2072, One Microsoft Way, Redmond, Washington, 98052
W:+1(425)703-9972 | C:+1(206)910-4692 | H:+1(206)201-1859 | JamesRH@microsoft.com
H:mvdirona.com | W:research.microsoft.com/~jamesrh | blog:http://perspectives.mvdirona.com
I forget what brought it up but sometime back Sriram Krishnan forwarded me this article on Mike Burrows and his work through Dec, Microsoft, and Google (The Genius: Mike Burrows' self-effacing journey through Silicon Valley). I enjoyed the read. Mike has done a lot over the years but perhaps his best known works of recent years are Alta Vista at DEC and Chubby at Google.
I first met Mike when he was at Microsoft Research. He and Ted Wobber (also from Digital) came up to Redmond to visit. Back then I led the SQL Server relational engine development team which included the full text search index support. I was convinced then, and still am today, that relational database engines do a good job of managing structured data but a poor job of the other 90 to 95% of the data in the world that is less structured. It just seems nuts to me that customers industry-wide are spending well over $10B a year on relational database management systems and yet only being able to effectively use these systems to manage a tiny fraction of their data. As an increasing fraction of the structured data in the world is already stored in relational database managements systems, industry growth will come from helping customers manage their less structured data.
To be fair, most RDMBS (including SQL Server) do support full text indexing but what I’m after is deep support for full text where the index is a standard access method rather than a separate indexing engine on the side and, more importantly, full statistics are tracked on the full text corpus allowing the optimizer to make high quality decisions on join orders and techniques that include full text indices.
If you haven’t read Mike’s original Chubby paper, do that: http://labs.google.com/papers/chubby.html. Another paper is at: http://labs.google.com/papers/paxos_made_live.html. Chubby is an interesting combination of name server, lease manager, and mini-distributed file system. It’s not the combination of functionality that I would have thought to bring together in a single system but it’s heavily used and well regarded at Google. Unquestionably a success.
--jrh
James Hamilton, Windows Live Platform Services
Bldg RedW-D/2072, One Microsoft Way, Redmond, Washington, 98052
W:+1(425)703-9972 | C:+1(206)910-4692 | H:+1(206)201-1859 | JamesRH@microsoft.com
H:mvdirona.com | W:research.microsoft.com/~jamesrh | blog:http://perspectives.mvdirona.com
The only thing worse than no backups is restoring bad backups. A database guy should get these things right. But, I didn’t, and earlier today I made some major site-wide changes and, as a side effect, this blog was restored to December 4th, 2007. I’m working on recovering the content and will come up with something over the next 24 hours. However it’s very likely that comments between Dec 4th and earlier today will be lost. My apologies.
Update 2008.04.13: I was able to restore all content other than comments between 12/4/2007 and yesterday morning. All else is fine. I'm sorry about the RSS noise during the restore and for the lost comments. The backup/restore procedure problem is resolved. Please report any broken links or lingering issues. Thanks,
-jrh
James Hamilton, Windows Live Platform Services
Bldg RedW-D/2072, One Microsoft Way, Redmond, Washington, 98052
W:+1(425)703-9972 | C:+1(206)910-4692 | H:+1(206)201-1859 | JamesRH@microsoft.com
H:mvdirona.com | W:research.microsoft.com/~jamesrh | blog:http://perspectives.mvdirona.com
What’s commonly referred to as the Great Firewall of China isn’t really a firewall at all. I recently came across an Atlantic Monthly article investigating how the Great Firewall works and what it does (see The Connection has been Reset).
The official name of what is often called the Great Firewall of China is the Golden Shield project. Rather than acting as a firewall, it’s actually mirroring content and manipulating DNS, connection management, and URL redirection to implement its goal of restricting what internet users inside China can access.
This project has been widely criticized on political and social fronts – I won’t repeat them here. It’s also been widely criticized on technical grounds as ineffective, weak, and easy to thwart. Again, not my focus. This article simply caught my interest technically as content filtering at this scale is an incredibly difficult task. What techniques are employed?
Like many software security problems, no single solution solves the problem fully and the main goal of the Golden Shield project is to add friction. If it’s painful enough to get to the content they are trying to prevent from being accessed, few will bother to access it. Essentially the goal of the four levels of protection they are using is to add friction and it’s friction rather than prevention that ensures that few Chinese internet users see restricted content in any quantity. The four levels of protection/restriction are:
1. DNS Block: sites that are on the current blacklist get DNS resolution failure or get redirected to other content. This was the technique employed against google.cn to force them add filtering to their web index. For some time , all access to google.cn was redirected to their larger Chinese competitor baidu. The other application of this technique is to return DNS lookup failure so, for example, searches for http://www.illegalsite.com will return “not found”.
2. Connect: In parallel with connection requests leaving China, they are inspected. If the IP address is on the current IP blacklist, connection reset will be sent which will cause the connection to fail.
3. URL Block: If the URL contains words on the illegal word blacklist, the connection is redirected infinitely. I’m not sure if they are only sniffing the URL or also doing reverse DNS to get the site name as well but, if unacceptable words are found in the URL, they redirect the connection repeated. Some browsers hang while others return an error message.
4. Content Block: At this level the DNS lookup has been successful and the connection has been made and content is being returned to the user. As the content is returned to the requesting user inside China, it’s being scanned in parallel for unapproved keywords and phrases. If any are found, the connection is broken immediately. As well as breaking the connection mid-way, subsequent requests from that client IP to that destination IP are blocked. The first block is short, but consecutive attempts drive up the length of the IP-to-IP connect block period and may eventually draw official scrutiny.
In addition to these techniques to block access to content outside-of-China, an estimate 30,000 censors scan and get removed unapproved content posted within within China (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_the_People%27s_Republic_of_China).
The Golden Shield project is reportedly also being used in the opposite direction to prevent access to some content inside of China from outside the country.
There are many means of subverting the Golden Shield including using a proxy server outside of China or setting up a VPN connection to a server outside of the country. Encrypted connections will also get through as well encrypted email. However, all these techniques are non-default and require some work on behalf of the user. Most users don’t bother so, for the most part, the goals of the Golden Shield are attained even though it’s technically not that strong.
The Atlantic Monthly article: http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200803/chinese-firewall?reddit
Wired Article: http://www.wired.com/politics/security/magazine/15-11/ff_chinafirewall
Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_the_People%27s_Republic_of_China
--jrh
Thanks to Jennifer Hamilton and Mitch Wyle for pointing out the Atlantic Monthly article.
James Hamilton, Windows Live Platform Services
Bldg RedW-D/2072, One Microsoft Way, Redmond, Washington, 98052
W:+1(425)703-9972 | C:+1(206)910-4692 | H:+1(206)201-1859 | JamesRH@microsoft.com
H:mvdirona.com | W:research.microsoft.com/~jamesrh
I’m long been a big fan of modular data centers using ISO standard Shipping containers as the component building block:
Containers have revolutionized shipping and are by far the cheapest way to move good over sea, land, rail or truck. I’ve seen them used to house telecommunications equipment, power generators, and even stores and apartments have been made using them: http://www.treehugger.com/files/2005/01/shipping_contai.php.
The datacenter-in-a-box approach to datacenter design is beginning to be deployed more widely with Lawrence Berkeley National Lab having taken delivery of a Sun Black Box and a “customer in eastern Washington” having taken delivery of a Rackable Ice Cube Module earlier this year.
Last summer I came across a book on Shipping Containers by Marc Levinson: The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger. It’s a history of containers from the early experiments in 1956 through to mega-containers terminals distributed throughout the world. The book doesn’t talk about all the innovative applications of containers outside of shipping but does give an interesting background on their invention, evolution, and standardization.
-jrh
James Hamilton, Windows Live Platform Services
Bldg RedW-D/2072, One Microsoft Way, Redmond, Washington, 98052
W:+1(425)703-9972 | C:+1(206)910-4692 | H:+1(206)201-1859 | JamesRH@microsoft.com
H:mvdirona.com | W:research.microsoft.com/~jamesrh
Earlier today I viewed Steve Jobs 2005 Commencement Speech at Stanford University. In this talk Jobs recounts three stories and ties them together with a common theme. The first was dropping out of Reed College and showing up for the courses he wanted to take rather than spend time on those he had to take. Dropping out was a tough decision but some of what he learned in these audited courses had a fundamental impact on the Mac and, in retrospect, appeared to be a good decision or at least one that lead to a good outcome. Getting fired from Apple was the second. Clearly not his choice, not what he would have wanted to happen but it lead to Pixar, Next and rejoining Apple stronger and more experienced than before. Again, a tough path but one that may have lead to a better overall outcome. Likely he is a better and more capable leader for the experience. Finally, facing death. Death awaits us all and, when facing death, it becomes clear what really matters. It becomes clear that following your heart is what is really important. Don’t be trapped by Dogma, don’t live other people’s lives, and have the courage to follow your own intuition. Clearly nobody wants to approach to death but knowing it is coming can free each of us to realize we can’t hide, we don’t have forever, and those things that scare us most are really tiny and insignificant when compared with death. Facing death can free us to take chances and to do what is truly important even if success looks uncertain or the risk is high.
The theme that wove these three stories together and Jobs parting words for his listeners was to “stay hungry and stay foolish”.
It’s a good read: http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/jobs-061505.html. Or you can view it at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1R-jKKp3NA.
Sent my way by Michael Starbird-Valentine.
--jrh
James Hamilton, Windows Live Platform Services
Bldg RedW-D/2072, One Microsoft Way, Redmond, Washington, 98052
W:+1(425)703-9972 | C:+1(206)910-4692 | H:+1(206)201-1859 | JamesRH@microsoft.com
H:mvdirona.com | W:research.microsoft.com/~jamesrh
I get several hundred emails a day, some absolutely vital and needing prompt action and some about the closest thing to corporate spam. I know I’m not alone. I’ve developed my own systems on managing the traffic load and, on different days, have varying degrees of success in sticking to my systems. In my view, it’s important not to confuse “processing email” with what we actually get paid to do. Email is often the delivery vehicle for work needing to be done and work that has been done, but email isn’t what we “do”.
We all need to find ways of coping with all the email while still getting real work done and having a shot at a life outside of work. My approach is fairly simple:
· Don’t process email in real time or it’ll become your job. When I’m super busy, I process email twice a day: early in the morning and again in the evening. When I’m less heavily booked, I’ll try to process email in micro bursts rather than in real time. It’s more efficient and allows more time to focus on other things.
· Shut off email arrival sounds and the “new mail” toast or you’ll end up with 100 interruptions an hour and get nothing done but email.
· I get up early and try to get my email down to under 10 each morning. I typically fail but get close. And I hold firm on that number once a week. Each weekend I do get down to less than 10 messages. If I enter the weekend with hundreds of email items, I get to work all weekend. This is a great motivator to not take a huge number of unprocessed email messages into the weekend.
· Do everything you can to process a message fully in one touch. I work hard to process email once. As I work through it, I delete or respond to everything I can quickly. Those that really do require more work I divide into two groups: 1) those I will do today or, at the very latest by end of week, I flag with a priority and leave in my inbox for processing later in the day (many argue these should be moved to a separate folder and they may be right). The longer-lived items go into my todo list and I remove them from my inbox. Because I get my email down to under 10 each week and spend as much of my weekend as needed to do this, I’m VERY motivated to not have many emails hanging around waiting to be processed. Consequently most email is handled up front as I see them and the big things are moved to the todo list. Very few are prioritized for handling later in the day.
· I chose not to use rules to auto-file email. Primarily I found that if I sent email directly to another folder, I almost never looked at it. So I let everything come into my inbox and I deal with them very quickly and, for the vast majority, they will only be touched once. If I really don’t even want to see them once, I just don’t subscribe or ask not to get them.
· Set your draft folder to be your inbox. With email systems that use a separate folder for unsent mail, there is risk that you’ll get a message 90% written and ready to be sent, get interrupted and then forget to send it. I set my draft folder to be my inbox so I don’t lose unsent email. Since my email is worked down to under 10 daily, I’ll find it there for sure before end of day.
· Don’t bother with complicated folder hierarchies—they are time-consuming to manage. If you want to save something, save it in a single folder or simple folder hierarchy and let desktop search find it when you need it. Don’t waste time filing in complex ways.
· Finally, be realistic: if you can’t process at the incoming rate, it’ll just keep backing up indefinitely. If you aren’t REALLY going to read it, then delete it or file it on the first touch. Filing it has some value in that, should you start to care more in the future, you can find it via full text search and read it then.
Jeff Johnson of MSN pointed out this excellent talk on email management called “Inbox Zero” by Merlin Mann: http://www.43folders.com/2007/07/25/merlins-inbox-zero-talk. Merlin’s advice is good and he presents well.
--jrh
James Hamilton, Windows Live Platform Services
Bldg RedW-D/2072, One Microsoft Way, Redmond, Washington, 98052
W:+1(425)703-9972 | C:+1(206)910-4692 | H:+1(206)201-1859 | JamesRH@microsoft.com
H:mvdirona.com | W:research.microsoft.com/~jamesrh
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