tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-70491564416292341572024-03-14T07:16:36.001+05:30kpowerinfinity on Technologywhere are we headed?kpowerinfinityhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08844550390473205890noreply@blogger.comBlogger19125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7049156441629234157.post-10427363495726736472008-09-22T12:47:00.000+05:302008-09-22T12:49:13.141+05:30Moving to WordpressI am finding it extremely difficult to manage two blogs, and hence moving all the content over to my Wordpress blog. You can access the older content as well as new at <a href="http://kpowerinfinity.wordpress.com/">http://kpowerinfinity.wordpress.com</a>kpowerinfinityhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08844550390473205890noreply@blogger.com86tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7049156441629234157.post-57499257728365597062008-09-15T09:54:00.000+05:302008-09-15T09:58:41.615+05:30Lehman: Hubris, followed by Nemesis?Financial Times has a very good read on the state of Lehman Brothers, which grew to be among the top 4 investment banks in the world. It says how Richard Fuld's never-say-die attitude has saved it in the past and put it on a growth trajectory, but this time, perhaps, he held back far too long [<a href="http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/e5f99648-8285-11dd-a019-000077b07658.html?nclick_check=1">link</a> shared by Rave]:<br /><p></p><blockquote><p>Lehman’s collapse is worrying for financial markets and for Wall Street as a whole. It is also a tragedy for its 24,000 employees, who were drilled into unwavering loyalty and cohesion by Mr Fuld. Many held a lot of their wealth in Lehman shares, which have lost most of their value.</p><p>It is also a tragedy for Mr Fuld, in the classical Greek sense. He had devoted so much of his life and his personality into moulding the bank he could not accept its decline. If he had sold out earlier, Lehman might have survived but he was too proud. It was hubris, followed by nemesis.</p></blockquote><p></p>I hope there is still a white knight somewhere who can save Lehman, because I wonder if its collapse will bring down the house of cards.kpowerinfinityhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08844550390473205890noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7049156441629234157.post-38007760737715649822008-09-10T22:07:00.001+05:302008-09-10T22:16:13.458+05:30Google Crawler hitch brings down UALThis would rate pretty high in Ripley's Believe It or Not! Google posted a 2002 news story on its front page about UAL going bankrupt, which brought down UAL share prices rock bottom. [<a href="http://seekingalpha.com/article/94837-united-air-false-google-story-triggers-massive-sell-off?source=yahoo">link</a>]<br /><p></p><blockquote><p>Shares of UAL lost 75% of its value in seconds, plummeting as low as $3 from $12.30 prior to the story appearing on Google. Some investors in UAL stock lost a ton of money. The stock hit an all time low on heavy volume.</p> <p>The shares bounced back after the market realized it was a 6-year old story on the company’s 2002 bankruptcy filing that appeared on Google. Investors who sold on the news were stuck.</p><p>Google declined comment on the incident. Later, it blamed the <em>Sentinel </em>for posting the 2002 <em>Chicago Tribune</em> article on their website. The Nasdaq Stock Market, where UAL shares are listed, said trades triggered by the erroneous report wouldn’t be rescinded. The Google story then was picked up by Income Securities Advisors, a Florida investment newsletter, and disseminated over Bloomberg News triggering a wave of panic selling. It appeared as ”United Airlines files for Ch. 11 to cut costs.”</p></blockquote><p>Amazin' ain't it? No wonder Google is facing <a href="http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/09/09/1835248">antitrust investigations</a> due to the immense power it yields.<br /></p>kpowerinfinityhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08844550390473205890noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7049156441629234157.post-88818894783704565702008-09-03T09:58:00.001+05:302008-09-03T12:09:25.324+05:30Chrome and Email check!Google just released <a href="http://google.com/chrome">Chrome</a>, its open source browser which has a bundle of new features like making tabs different processes. In some ways, it seems to be a throwback to the days of IE6 where tabs would actually be processes! However, the new paradigm gives a tabbed UI and a process based backend, which should be interesting to try.<br /><br />One big advantage with Chrome is going to be finding out which processes are badly designed and hog memory -- something that is pointed out in <a href="http://ejohn.org/blog/google-chrome-process-manager/">this blog post</a>.<br /><br />I decided to give it a try to opening all the new emial services (Gmail, new Yahoo mail, and Live Mail) in separate tabs and testing their memory usage:<br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhEM9wewrs4lL9nr2f8mNyUeiV-r5y7_t2IOPbXMWNhaa9K_ysaeM-F_2r7NvAgA163Z9d9wZbOXaBbw4QwlczrkrAcO6d7IuAWyrTXb5_Ov6nSH7oH11OttC2gTuWWJzh-9lV80Q2pUpnX/s1600-h/chrome-task-manager.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhEM9wewrs4lL9nr2f8mNyUeiV-r5y7_t2IOPbXMWNhaa9K_ysaeM-F_2r7NvAgA163Z9d9wZbOXaBbw4QwlczrkrAcO6d7IuAWyrTXb5_Ov6nSH7oH11OttC2gTuWWJzh-9lV80Q2pUpnX/s320/chrome-task-manager.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5241649019501253346" border="0" /></a><br />It seems to me that that all the mail programs actually use up a lot of space (and Gmail/Y!mail top it at around 20Mb each -- looks like there was some GC happening and Gmail process collected back some memory). Live mail seems to be the most lightweight!<br /><br />However, what I am worried about -- if my mail tabs are using up that much space and it is only going to go up as these applications add more complexity, why would I not use a desktop based mail client, and switch to a web based client while on the go? A lot of times I have to face flaky connections, and it seems obvious that web based mail clients are downloading a ton of stuff everytime!<br /><br />The pain point of offline mail clients is the ability to keep perfectly in sync with the server (IMAP notwithstanding and perhaps that should be worked upon) and the ability to install updates, due to which their UI is now lagging behind web based counterparts. If desktop applications can figure out some way of cleanly installing new features and keeping things completely upto date, would they get back in vogue?<br /><br />Update: And this is what the condition was after leaving the tabs open for about 3+ hours:<br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjXcBsCFRDAYBB33I5JKvGmvM_piQv7zQbBvqDBgJcfFM7svMEDzlnEV2uBlMa9ny_bAqpOPTyEFI-ccYiZoEBugDzF81ETbVeHThjqSDoUI93l0e0cmYbSdOzrlPtJL-esXwLYbzN6Jd41/s1600-h/chrome-after-3-hours.jpg"><img style="cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjXcBsCFRDAYBB33I5JKvGmvM_piQv7zQbBvqDBgJcfFM7svMEDzlnEV2uBlMa9ny_bAqpOPTyEFI-ccYiZoEBugDzF81ETbVeHThjqSDoUI93l0e0cmYbSdOzrlPtJL-esXwLYbzN6Jd41/s320/chrome-after-3-hours.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5241680712335407106" border="0" /></a>kpowerinfinityhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08844550390473205890noreply@blogger.com194tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7049156441629234157.post-83516716767821104022008-08-09T19:50:00.002+05:302008-08-09T19:52:47.311+05:30Why is FDI out of US more profitable than FDI into the US?<div xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">Mihir Desai of Harvard Business School says that portfolio investments into the US have been far more profitable than direct FDI investments. Inbound FDI into the US has averaged a return of 4.3% while outbound FDI from the US into other countries is about 12.1%. At the same time Wall Street went up more than any other markets in the world. Why is it so? Mainly because US companies traditionally invest in more controlled markets and have the advantage of getting cheaper cash and a better product and marketing portfolio (as a result of the controlled markets), while at the same time MNCs investing into the US have no such advantage of low-hanging fruit. [<a href="http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/5984.html">original article</a>]<br /><br /><blockquote><p>Why is it so difficult to make money as a direct investor in the<br />United States? Indeed, much of the rhetoric on investing environments<br />argues that the major destinations for U.S. outbound FDI—the developed<br />markets of Europe and Japan and the emerging markets of China and<br />India—are filled with capital controls and ownership restrictions. How<br />can the United States as a destination end up being so much less<br />attractive despite the relative absence of this usual litany of<br />investment obstacles?</p><p>Part of the answer may lie precisely in how these obstacles tilt the<br />playing field between local firms and multinational firms. In a series<br />of papers, [HBS associate professor] C. Fritz Foley, [University of<br />Michigan professor] James R. Hines Jr., and I have shown that distorted<br />environments are precisely where multinational firms have an advantage<br />relative to local firms. In countries with weak capital markets and<br />burdensome regulatory regimes, multinational firms can use their<br />internal capital and product markets to access global resources while<br />local firms can't. In effect, these distorted environments burden local<br />firms, create opportunities for institutional arbitrage for<br />multinational firms, and can lead to a successful set of foreign<br />activities for multinational firms. </p><p>The United States, in contrast, creates few such opportunities for<br />low-hanging fruit for foreign multinational firms relative to local<br />firms. As such, the conditions that may underpin the profitable<br />experience of U.S. firms as they expand abroad are not there for<br />foreign firms investing in the United States. More generally, the<br />presence of highly competitive local firms in the United States<br />undercuts efforts by foreign multinationals that don't have truly<br />differentiated capabilities. Simply replicating strategies that were<br />successful at home is likely to be insufficient in the United States. </p></blockquote><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /></div>kpowerinfinityhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08844550390473205890noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7049156441629234157.post-447066750657190062008-08-05T22:07:00.002+05:302008-08-05T22:09:43.495+05:30Second Highest Bid auctions<div xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">Found this interesting post on Sriram Krishnan's blog where he describes the origin of the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vickrey_auction">Vickrey auction</a> that is used by Google and Yahoo! for the online advertising. Very interestingly, although it has some side-benefits of removing winner's curse and bid shading (see links on Sriram's blog), the real reason why this process was adopted [instead of the traditional English auction] is that the Google systems people wanted to reduce the loads on the server that would have resulted from people changing their bids rapidly:<br /><br /><blockquote>There have been several <a href="http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_10/b3974071.htm">articles</a> documenting the work of Google's Salar Kamangar and Eric Veach in bringing this to AdWords. What is lesser known (atleast to me )is that they implemented this model to solve another problem entirely. I came across this <a href="http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/%7Ehal/Courses/StratTech07/Lectures/Advertising/ads-campus-talk-2006-2007.ppt">old talk</a> from a Google employee - in the speaker notes, it talks about how Kamangar and Veach implemented this feature to stop advertisers from logging into the system and modifying their bids constantly (since that's what people tend to do in an open English auction). By implementing a second price auction, they were hoping to reduce the load on the system.<br /></blockquote></div>kpowerinfinityhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08844550390473205890noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7049156441629234157.post-33870281217857655412008-07-28T15:37:00.000+05:302008-07-28T16:28:08.846+05:30Google, SEO, Knol and the rest of the worldGoogle recently launched <a href="http://knol.google.com/">Knol</a>, their wikipedia competitor which allows experts to <span style="font-style: italic;">own</span> articles. The concept is interesting because Wikipedia allows free-for-all authorship, and by making the articles edited by experts and listing their owners clearly on the knol, Google hopes it will get higher quality content. The editors will stake their prestige on the quality of the content, and overtime Google could also share Adsense revenue with them.<br /><br />However, a has also raised quite a storm in the teacup since <a href="http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/2008/07/28/GooglesAssaultOnWikipedia.aspx">people are speculating</a> that Google will take undue advantage of its search traffic to drive usage of knol. Google has pretty much become the traffic policeman of the new web -- telling people where to go, and getting them there through its vast knowledge of the contours of the internetland. However, as is often the case in India, what do you do when lawmakers become lawbreakers? When a cop's car breaks traffic rules, do you give them a ticket? While I am hopeful Google will not quite reach the level of Indian police (or even <a href="http://www.indiauncut.com/iublog/article/the-private-treaties-of-the-times-of-india/">Bennet, Coleman & Co.</a>), but the question of Knol getting undue advantage (as against the much better established Wikipedia) can not be brushed aside.<br /><br />The importance of Google's dominance of the web came to the fore front yesterday during a discussion at the <a href="http://groups.google.com/group/occ-kolkata/">Open Coffee Club's first meeting in Kolkata</a> yesterday. Angshuman of <a href="http://www.taragana.com/">Taragana</a> complained that he had a hard time when Google dropped him out of their indexes for some reason he is yet to figure out. While he has several conjectures such as his wordpress translation plugin due to Google might have labelled all his pages as duplicate/spam, or changing his URL syntax using <a href="http://httpd.apache.org/docs/1.3/mod/mod_rewrite.html">mod_rewrite</a>, he couldn't really figure out what the problem was. Using the <a href="https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/">webmaster tools</a> wasn't much help either. Finally, the way he resolved it was by telling the Google representative that he would stop his Adsense spending if his website wasn't restored -- he claims that is the only thing that works with Google. Being dumped by Google indices is quite scary for any website owner, almost like not being reachable from the Start button on a windows box, and there needs to be better mechanism to deal with such 'mistakes'.<br /><br />Microsoft has often been accused of using its Windows strength to push its other services, and now Google could do the same. While Google has been the poster child of the internet, and we all continue to use its services in good faith, ignoring trespasses into content creation space, brushing aside its transgressions as mere mistakes -- one can hear whispers today and one expects them to soon transform into noises. The onus is on Google to uphold its "don't be evil" philosophy, and communicate its positive action proactively to the rest of the world. It has already done well for the last few years, but the time has come to be more open, more forthcoming, and more accommodating, or might find itself in the same boat as what Microsoft, AT&T and other monopolies have been in the past.kpowerinfinityhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08844550390473205890noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7049156441629234157.post-86350203777657635012008-07-20T15:44:00.000+05:302008-07-20T15:50:19.101+05:30The sub-prime crisis from K@WJust discovered a great resource on YouTube -- Knowledge@Wharton has a channel there. See this video on the sub-prime crisis:<br /><br /><a style="left: 0px ! important; top: 15px ! important;" title="Click here to block this object with Adblock Plus" class="abp-objtab-09778430760797469 visible ontop" href="http://www.youtube.com/v/zf9d1XkxtQk&hl=en&fs=1"></a><object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/zf9d1XkxtQk&hl=en&fs=1"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/zf9d1XkxtQk&hl=en&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object><br /><br />To add to the video, I have also heard that once the sub-prime crisis started making its presence felt, the prices of the homes the sub-prime borrowers had bought fell and they realized that the amount they would pay was lower than what they would get by selling the houses. That only precipitated the crisis.<br /><br />There are more interesting videos <a href="http://www.youtube.com/user/knowledgeatwharton">on the channel</a>, including <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TszOUpuVA38">this one</a> -- an interview with Sunil Mittal where he talks about entrepreneurship and his beginnings in the bicycle industry.kpowerinfinityhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08844550390473205890noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7049156441629234157.post-18136168342354476332008-06-15T13:09:00.001+05:302008-06-15T23:19:53.222+05:30Water Powered car unveiled in Japan<a href="http://www.genepax.co.jp/en/">Genepax</a>, a Japanese company, has unveiled a car that can run on water. It apparently extracts Hydrogen from water and uses it to create energy to fuel the car. The prototype was driven around in the city of Osaka in Japan. <a href="http://www.engadget.com/2008/06/13/genepax-shows-off-water-powered-fuel-cell-vehicle/">Engadget has more details</a>:<br /><blockquote><br />The key to that system, it seems, is its membrane electrode assembly (or MEA), which contains a material that's capable of breaking down water into hydrogen and oxygen through a chemical reaction. Not surprisingly, the company isn't getting much more specific than that, with it only saying that it's adopted a "well-known process to produce hydrogen from water to the MEA." Currently, that system costs on the order of ¥2,000,000 (or about $18,700 -- not including the car), but company says that if it can get it into mass production that could be cut to ¥500,000 or less (or just under $5,000)</blockquote><br /><br />There is a video from Reuters that I have tried to embed below, but I am not sure if it will show up on the final blog (<a href="http://www.reuters.com/news/video?videoId=84561&videoChannel=74">here's the link</a> to the Reuter's page that houses the video):<br /><br /><a style="left: 0px ! important; top: 0px ! important;" title="Block this object with Adblock Plus" class="abp-objtab-05635777291691977 visible ontop" href="http://www.reuters.com/resources/flash/includevideo.swf?edition=US&videoId=84561"></a><a style="left: 0px ! important; top: 0px ! important;" title="Block this object with Adblock Plus" class="abp-objtab-05635777291691977 visible ontop" href="http://www.reuters.com/resources/flash/includevideo.swf?edition=US&videoId=84561"></a><object style="width: 100%;" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" data="http://www.reuters.com/resources/flash/includevideo.swf?edition=US&videoId=84561" width="344" height="320"><param name="wmode" value="transparent"><param name="movie" value="http://www.reuters.com/resources/flash/includevideo.swf?edition=US&videoId=84561"><embed src="http://www.reuters.com/resources/flash/includevideo.swf?edition=US&videoId=84561" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" width="344" height="320"></embed></object><br /><br />Update: Looks like there's more to it than meets the eye. See <a href="http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/06/14/1737231&from=rss">this discussion on Slashdot</a>.kpowerinfinityhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08844550390473205890noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7049156441629234157.post-59538152791751883562008-04-01T16:08:00.000+05:302008-04-01T16:15:46.775+05:30EasyEclipse - Making life easy for DevelopersLink: <a href="http://www.easyeclipse.org/">http://www.easyeclipse.org</a><br /><br />I went back to Java after quite sometime, and had a tough time installing some plugins (<a href="http://www.easyeclipse.org/">Visual Editor</a> in particular, it is not supported as yet on the current Europa release and only on the previous Callisto) this site is really handy in case you want to get a setup with everything you need already installed. They have bundled everything together and everything just works!<br /><br />They have also divvied it up into broad areas such as 'Desktop', 'Web', 'LAMP' and so on -- targeted towards programmers in that category. Apart from the fact that they have these distros, it was also a great place to find out what were the most useful plugins for development on the eclipse platform. I didn't even know they have very useful plugins even for things like database management and SVN.<br /><br />A life saver for people not experts on eclipse, I must say.kpowerinfinityhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08844550390473205890noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7049156441629234157.post-14353653922315572502008-03-27T07:36:00.001+05:302008-03-27T07:48:26.408+05:30The World is Round Again!Came across an interesting article while browsing the net for Tata-JLo (!) deal yesterday. Pankaj Ghemawat, a chaired professor at Harvard Business School disagrees with Tom Friedman that globalization has reached its peak but instead believes that a lot of trade, immigration as well as "bits" travel only within national boundaries, and there is still a long way to go before we can knock down the walls we have built over centuries.<br /><br /><blockquote>The findings fly in the face of Friedman's famous work. Take flows of people. Much as we would like to believe that this figure would be astronomically high, it is not. Says Ghemawat, "If you look at the stock of first-generation immigrants divided by the total population of the world, it is barely 2.9%."<br /></blockquote><br />In fact, he claims that in some metrics, we are just about reaching the 19th century level of globalization:<br /><br /><blockquote>"On the people's side, the current ratio of immigrants to world population is slightly lower than in 1910. On the FDI side, we have probably reached new heights, but it wasn't until the 1990s that we got back to the FDI-to-GDP ratio that the world was seeing in 1901," says Ghemawat.<br /></blockquote><br />I can imagine this happening because of the FDI from Britain, France, and Spain into their colonies (which had been quite impoverished by then by monies being sent back as profits). A lot of flow today is in the reverse, the Tata-JLo deal being a case in point. It would be interesting to see detailed numbers, or perhaps they are present in the book.<br /><br />In fact, at some point, I thought the claim that there is actually increasing localization of products which goes against globalization was being made. For instance, Coke and Wal-Mart and McDonalds have to take local tastes into account. I wonder if this would count as a case of more globalization or less globalization. I guess parts of it can be argued either way.<br /><br /><a href="http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/An_antidote_to_Thomas_Friedman/articleshow/2899335.cms">Link to the original article.</a>kpowerinfinityhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08844550390473205890noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7049156441629234157.post-52331297279783763302008-02-21T11:41:00.001+05:302008-02-21T11:41:50.303+05:30Should prizes make a come back as against grants?<p>A very interesting article by Tim Harford about how prizes were a motivation for a big chunk of research which got productised earlier, and how it could be making a comeback. The advantage is quicker solutions, involvement of a more diverse community with more diverse ideas, cutting bureaucracy, fame and fortune for the inventors, and of course, problems getting solved. He cites how a competition was used to build an accurate clock used to predict the longitude of ships, and how today, from the Gates Foundation (for pneumococcal disesases) to Netflix (for machine learning algorithms) is using a cash prize as a motivation to involve people to solve important problems. It could also be used by governments to replace patents for solving large problems. He says:</p> <blockquote> <p>Champions of prizes see them as a component of a wider system to promote innovation, rather than as an outright replacement either for grants or patents. Instead, the hope is that prizes will help to compensate for the specific weaknesses of those alternatives. <p>The downside of a patent is fundamental to its design: in order to reward an innovator, the patent confers a monopoly. Economists view this as, at best, a necessary evil since monopolies distort prices. In the hope of raising profits from some customers, they will price others out of a market. The most obvious victims are consumers in poor countries. <p>In an ideal world, prizes could replace patents. Instead of offering a patent for an innovation, the government could offer a prize. The inventor would pocket the prize but would not be allowed to exploit any monopoly power, so the innovation would be freely available to use in products for poor consumers – cheap drugs for Africa, for instance – and, importantly, in further innovations. But to explain that idea is to see its limitations. How could the government know enough about the costs and benefits – and even the very possibility – of an innovation to put a price tag on it and write the terms of reference for a prize competition? For this reason it is hard to see prizes replacing patents in most cases. But it is not impossible. <p>The modern heir to 18th-century prizes for canning, water turbines and finding longitude at sea is the advanced market commitment for vaccines for the poor: the goal is clear, the costs and benefits can be guessed at, and the quasi-prize nudges the patent system to one side with a prize contract that respects the patent but, in exchange for a large subsidy, radically constricts the holder’s right to exploit it.</p></blockquote> <p>Prizes may be an effective way to build technologies that solve a specific problem, but I doubt if they can help in unknown sojourns into the world of science. Most of our applied technologies are build upon these basic scientific fundamentals and I don't know if a gold-rush will lead to the newest laws of physics, or fundamental rules in mathematical logic. Issues of ownership of Intellectual property are also a little ambiguous, and have to be specified clearly up front. In many cases, gauging the ramifications of a new mathematical theory, or basic physical laws might be extremely difficult (which is the reason Nobel prizes are awarded after the work has been established over a long term).</p> <p>All said and done, I am sure prizes (not just the cash, the fame and respect as well) make for great motivation and we might see a lot of it.</p> kpowerinfinityhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08844550390473205890noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7049156441629234157.post-72448944005231225612008-02-08T00:05:00.001+05:302008-02-08T00:09:05.797+05:30Bitwise 2008 - Can it get any better?<p>I still remember Bitwise 2006 very fondly -- all the last minute action, with the teams participating, running around to arrange problems, solutions, making sure everything runs properly. And it's been 2 years since then. It's very proud to see Bitwise 2008 progressing so well, with teams from almost 43 countries and clicks from 75! It can't get any bigger than this. It all started in 2001, and has come so far since then!</p> <p>If you fancy yourself as a ace programmer, and you think you can unravel the double helix in your sleep, if you live and dream algorithms, crunch numbers when nobody's looking at you, you gotta participate in Bitwise, the <em>real</em> test of your abilities. It's the largest algorithm intensive online programming contest in India organized completely by students from one of the best engineering institutions in the country. You compete with the best brains in the area worldwide, and there are a sweet USD 2500 on offer as prizes.</p> <p>Do you have it in you? <a href="http://www.bitwise.iitkgp.ernet.in/" target="_blank">Visit the Bitwise 2008 site and register NOW</a>.</p>kpowerinfinityhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08844550390473205890noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7049156441629234157.post-79889752989176066122008-01-12T19:28:00.001+05:302008-01-12T19:28:07.548+05:30Swarm Intelligence<p>In a previous post on the <a href="http://kpowerinfinity.blogspot.com/2007/12/honey-bee-algorithm-for-allocating.html" target="_blank">Honey-bee algorithm for allocating servers</a>, which I found quite fascinating, I had pointed out I had referred to a <a href="http://www.antoptima.com/admin/pdfrassegna2/pdf028.pdf" target="_blank">paper on Swarm Intelligence</a> by Eric Bonabeau and Christopher Meyer published by Harvard Business Review, and finally I got time to go back and read it and I found it quite fascinating! The paper describes case studies where people have used algorithms inspired by nature (ants, bees) which use a decentralized model of computation and optimization. </p> <p>The paper points out that the main advantages of using algorithms like these are flexibility, robustness and self-organization. The algorithms work in a completely decentralized manner, and work on the principle that the wisdom of all the ants (or the small agents) can be harnessed in such a manner that the whole is far greater than the sum of its parts. Also, the algorithms are invariably robust to failure and adaptive since they don't make use of a central decision making bodies and there is a lot of experimentation with new sources of food (or results in the case of algorithms).</p> <p>The paper also points out that there are several cases where these concepts have been used successfully (both in business and academia):</p> <ul> <li>Optimally routing telephones calls and Internet data packets seems to be a tough problem because if we use a centralized algorithm, it will neither be robust nor adaptive. Algorithms based on swarm intelligence come to the rescue since they are not based on a central decision making body, but rather work on the principle that the scouts recruit other agents to follow new promising paths. <li>Fleet management and cargo management also suffer from similar problems. The paper points out that Southwest Airlines found out that in some cases, letting cargo go to wrong destinations and recovering is faster and more robust than always making sure that all cargo is handled correctly. <li>Small simple rules that lets people take decisions for themselves usually works best. This has since been shown to work very well for companies such as Google as well.</li></ul> <p>There are more case studies in the paper, but what's fascinating is that these techniques become even more popular now-a-days because companies have realized that it is easier to tolerate failure than to eradicate it -- more so in the context of the Internet where there is a race to build systems that are self-correcting (such as <a href="http://labs.google.com/papers/mapreduce.html" target="_blank">Map-Reduce</a>, <a href="http://lucene.apache.org/hadoop/" target="_blank">Hadoop</a> and <a href="http://research.microsoft.com/research/sv/dryad/" target="_blank">Dryad</a>). Also the new realities of the emerging architectures (multi-core, highly parallel, massive clusters grids) is going to mean that we have more parallel horsepower to run our applications and such self-organizing algorithms are going to become even more popular in the computing community.</p> <p>However, one concern would be programming models for such computing bedrocks. We still don't understand how to manage parallel computation very well to ensure that interpreting such algorithms in code is going to remain difficult for the average programmer for quite sometime.</p> kpowerinfinityhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08844550390473205890noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7049156441629234157.post-31896197087401204312008-01-11T12:05:00.000+05:302008-01-11T12:18:42.408+05:30Parallel Programming + Type inference + Scientific notation: A Winner?I came across this <a href="http://www.linux-mag.com/microsites.php?site=multicore&sid=main&p=4730">article in Linux Today</a> which describes <a href="http://fortress.sunsource.net/">Project Fortress</a>, an open-source effort from Sun to provide a language based on Fortran to easily write parallel programs. The project seems to be built on top of Java. Some salient features seem to be:<br /><ol><li>Implicit parallelism: If you want to execute a loop sequentially you have to explicitly write that. The <span style="font-style: italic;">big</span> claim is of course, using this efficiently on multi-core machines.<br /></li><li>Support for unicode: As a result, the scientific research community can make use of greek alphabets in their code, and even use things like superscripts, subscripts, and hats and bars! This means that your code is going to look a lot more like your algorithm.</li><li>Automated Type inference: The system has extensive type inference (the kind that functional languages and C# 3.0 have) and that means that your code is far more readable.</li><li>Extensive library support: In fact, even some parts of the main system are implemented as libraries. They expose the parsed AST to the programmer, and give him extensive control.</li></ol>These sound quite interesting, and it seems that the scientific computing language of the future is going to look a lot like Fortress, if they are successful with this effort.kpowerinfinityhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08844550390473205890noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7049156441629234157.post-75864087905341245982007-12-26T14:15:00.000+05:302007-12-26T14:34:13.077+05:30Honey Bee Algorithm for Allocating ServersI came across an interesting article in The Hindu (<a href="http://www.gatech.edu/news-room/release.php?id=1605">see the story from GaTech news</a>; I couldn't find the link on The Hindu website) today which described work done by <a href="http://www.isye.gatech.edu/visitors/profile.php?entry=ss210">Sunil Nakrani</a> and <a href="http://www2.isye.gatech.edu/%7Ectovey/">Craig Tovey</a>, researchers in GaTech, on using a decentralized profit-aware load balancing algorithm for allocating servers for serving HTTP requests for multiple hosted services on the Web. The interesting, thing is that the algorithm is based on how Honey Bees in a bee-hive decide where to collect nectar from. I decided to take a look at the <a href="http://www2.isye.gatech.edu/%7Ectovey/publications/papers/bee.oct19.2004.masi2.pdf">paper</a>.<br /><br />Essentially, the <span style="font-style: italic;">forager</span> bees collect information about how profitable a particular nectar source and how much is the cost involved in collecting from that source (round trip time). Based on a composite score, they perform a <span style="font-style: italic;">waggle-dance</span> which essentially indicates what is the value of performing foraging where they have been. The inactive foragers can thereafter figure out where to go look for nectar.<br /><br />The researchers modeled it in the server space by having an <span style="font-style: italic;">advert-board</span>, where servers post profits from serving a request and the time required to serve it. Thereafter, the other servers can choose which <span style="font-style: italic;">colony</span> (or service) they wish to be a part of. Existing servers can also move to another colony based on a probability determined from a look-up table indexed by the ratio of their profits by the profits of their colony.<br /><br />Their results indicate that they do quite well compared to optimal-omniscient strategy (which knows the pattern of all future web requests) and better than existing greedy and static assignment strategy. Shows that we still have a lot to learn from nature!<br /><br />One thing that flummoxed me though was that the original paper seems to have been published way back in 2003 (see Tovey's <a href="http://www2.isye.gatech.edu/%7Ectovey/publications/">publication page</a>). I wonder why it got press publicity only now.<br /><br />[The paper also cites a Harvard Business Review paper titled <a href="http://www.antoptima.com/admin/pdfrassegna2/pdf028.pdf">Swarm Intelligence: A whole New Way to Think About Business</a>]kpowerinfinityhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08844550390473205890noreply@blogger.com44tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7049156441629234157.post-52975287605512428982007-12-19T20:07:00.001+05:302007-12-19T20:07:47.780+05:30Fran Allen and the evolution of HPC<p>I had the good fortune of being able to listen to Fran Allen (<a href="http://domino.watson.ibm.com/comm/pr.nsf/pages/bio.allen.html" target="_blank">IBM profile</a> and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frances_E._Allen" target="_blank">Wikipedia entry</a>) today. Fran pioneered a lot of work in compiler optimization and was awarded the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_Award" target="_blank">Turing Award</a> for her contribution to Computer Science in 2007. That makes her the first and only (till date) woman to have won the Turing Award, the highest honour in Computer Science.</p> <p>It was inspiring listening to her talk about her adventures. She almost described the evolution of high performance computing, with the earliest IBM systems starting from <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_7030" target="_blank">Stretch</a>, which was supposed to be 100X faster than the existing machines (but turned out to be only 50X faster) and was delivered to the National Security Agency. She also described some of failures she had been involved in (Stretch, since it was 2X slower than intended, and then the <a href="http://www.cs.clemson.edu/~mark/acs.html" target="_blank">ACS</a> project). What was interesting was that most of the basis of the pioneering work she described had its basis in the work she had done in these failed projects. The fact that failures are the foundations of mammoth successes is one message she clearly drove home with her optimistic outlook. She also described her work during the System 360 and the PowerPC projects.</p> <p>Her appeal to computer science researchers and students was mainly about the programming models and architecture decisions revolving around multi-core, a buzz word most of us have been left confused and wondering about. This new revolution that promises to change the way we write software and exploit parallelism in our programs, is the biggest opportunity, as Fran put it!</p> <p>What was also interesting was how we got to the lecture hall wading through mud in a construction site during the rain. Apparently, there are two conference halls at IISc -- one called JRD Tata and the other JN Tata. No wonder, we got to the wrong one and found that it as hosting a conference on Power Electronics. Note to self: make sure you always check the location properly before setting forth.</p> <p>Other than that, have been lately busy with hacking <a href="http://opensource.nokia.com/projects/pythonfors60/" target="_blank">Python for S60</a> (this is a brilliant idea-- having a platform agnostic scripting language!) to work on my phone and a Python based remote administration toolkit. Will post more about them soon!</p> <div class="wlWriterSmartContent" id="scid:0767317B-992E-4b12-91E0-4F059A8CECA8:ea7badb0-22b2-49b6-811c-19c774c06bb1" style="padding-right: 0px; display: inline; padding-left: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; margin: 0px; padding-top: 0px">Technorati Tags: <a href="http://technorati.com/tags/Fran%20Allen" rel="tag">Fran Allen</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tags/Frances%20Allen" rel="tag">Frances Allen</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tags/IBM" rel="tag">IBM</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tags/Turing" rel="tag">Turing</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tags/PyS60" rel="tag">PyS60</a></div> kpowerinfinityhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08844550390473205890noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7049156441629234157.post-58158284241087512632007-10-10T18:46:00.001+05:302007-10-10T18:46:55.569+05:30Some Observations on Social Networking<p>I took a rather long break from reading technology news while I was in <a href="http://kpowerinfinity.wordpress.com/2007/09/28/londonistani-my-london-diary/">London</a> and Abu Dhabi and just got back to reading some of the things I used to follow closely. While it seems to me that I didn't miss much (on looking at Techcrunch), I did find it extremely interesting to read the analysis presented on <a href="http://www.thelongtail.com/about.html">Chris Anderson's</a> blog.</p> <p>In <a href="http://www.thelongtail.com/the_long_tail/2007/09/social-networki.html">one of his posts</a>, he states in no unclear terms that social networking ought to be leveraged in innovative ways everywhere rather than have soc-nets which are for the sake of soc-nets themselves. <a href="http://howtosplitanatom.com/news/how-to-invent/">This post</a> also captures what is wrong with a new soc-net coming up everyday. There is great scope of using social-networking as a feature in your product, making it viral, making it authentic and useful. Unfortunately, a host of internet startups seem to only want to create social-nets without giving a thought to how it can be useful. Reminds me of the heydeys of the internet age, when it had become fashionable to start a new business that had a .com suffix even if all you did was just register a company. Something very similar seems to be happening to social-nets now -- people just want a social networking component to everything without giving a thought to how it is making sense in the context of the product. That is the point. If you want your product to be useful in the new world, you need to have a<em> clearly thought out</em> social component to it, because otherwise somebody else will add it and peddle your own product better.</p> <p><a href="http://www.thelongtail.com/the_long_tail/2007/10/are-facebook-ap.html">Another</a> <a href="http://www.thelongtail.com/the_long_tail/2007/10/answer-facebook.html">observation</a> which I found interesting was that facebook applications (which are a rage now-a-days) don't seem to exhibit the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_distribution">pareto distribution</a> characteristics which is what Anderson uses to explain the Long Tail. He attributes it mainly to the effects of viral social networking, and that most apps are pretty much useless. It might also be a case of "limited" shelf real estate. I agree with the first two points, but not so much with the third because that is also true of book in my personal bookshelf. The Long Tail is typically defined not at the end of the consumer but rather at the end of the producer/seller. Facebook as a marketplace is governed by the same arguments as Amazon because there are good search tools, and strong recommendation channels. Facebook has a strong collaborative filtering engine though which is stronger than Amazon's primarily because it is more explicit. I, personally, would believe that as a marketplace of Apps, facebook is fairly new in the game, and it may not be in the 'quiescent' state as yet, and starting to model based on the pre-mature data we already have might not give us correct indicators. Currently, it is just seeing a massive growth which is characterized by almost factory-produced similarity. The apps on everybody's profile are very similar. However, my guess is that as things start to settle down, we will start seeing a lot more differentiation (and usefulness!). </p> <p>To use a metaphor, currently, it is signing on children who are just discovering the ABCs of facebook apps, and hence the apps that have become very popular are like children's books which are characterized by sameness. However, as the books become more mature and deeper, people will resort to have things that are more tuned into what their personal interests are. Also, the people will demand books that are useful in their content and perhaps design. That is when we will start seeing the Long Tail effect kick in. In a similar fashion, the early days of the internet were dominated by technology centric pages and it was only much later in its evolution that the internet became the downtown for all kinds of information.</p> <p>However, the different dynamics of the Facebook social network will mean that the marketplace characteristics are never going to be identical to those of (say) Amazon. Since there is a far more stronger viral network, if we view the network as a graph, we will see a lot more cliques. Users would be far more tempted to install apps which are common to their friends networks. However, if we look at these graphs at a higher level of granularity, there might be less ineraction across cliques as compared to traditional retailers like Amazon -- we will see more isolated vertices if seen from far away. The fact that installing apps (for now) is free, will also alter dynamics considerably.</p> <p>It will be interesting to see how things pan out.</p> <div class="wlWriterSmartContent" id="scid:0767317B-992E-4b12-91E0-4F059A8CECA8:5311d121-7399-4f44-bc61-d1d0e1e66330" style="padding-right: 0px; display: inline; padding-left: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; margin: 0px; padding-top: 0px">Technorati Tags: <a href="http://technorati.com/tags/Facebook" rel="tag">Facebook</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tags/LongTail" rel="tag">LongTail</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tags/Long%20Tail" rel="tag">Long Tail</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tags/apps" rel="tag">apps</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tags/social-networking" rel="tag">social-networking</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tags/social%20networking" rel="tag">social networking</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tags/socnet" rel="tag">socnet</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tags/socialnet" rel="tag">socialnet</a></div> kpowerinfinityhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08844550390473205890noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7049156441629234157.post-50179720613649300332007-08-19T12:16:00.001+05:302007-08-19T13:36:38.247+05:30It all has to start with I, doesn't it?<p>It always has to start with the self. The self is the <a href="http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1569514,00.html">center of the world</a> in the brand new avatar of the Internet. While it feels gratifying to be acknowledged as The Master of the world, I would perhaps have been more comfortable just having the royal seal at my disposal. However, idempotent as we might be, we have to realize that in the increasingly fragmented world, we need better techniques of establishing ourselves. The self needs better means of self-expression and self-authority. And, thus, my first blog post in my new technical blog starts with a discussion of identity management systems on the Internet.</p> <p>A discussion of identity management systems has to start with the <a href="http://www.identityblog.com/?page_id=354">Laws of Identity</a>, penned by the grand daddy of all-things-identity at Microsoft, <a href="http://www.identityblog.com/">Kim Cameron</a>. Unlike what people would expect, the laws are not written in a technical language with complex cryptographic equations making them esoteric, but rather in a very accessible language because they talk more about the philosophical aspect of identity rather than the technical, a very important consideration in the design of a mature technical system. The seven laws (over-simplifying them) are:</p> <ol> <li><strong>User Control and Consent: </strong>The user is the King, the Queen and the Jack. The identity meta-system must recognize the user as being the final authority on whether he wants information to be disclosed, and ask him/her at every instance. It should also have means of protection against phishing and other attacks. <li><strong>Minimum Disclosure for a Constrained Use:</strong> Information disclosed should be the minimum required for the completion of the current task. Essentially, there should be no need of disclosing credit card information if you try to comment on this blog. Also, if a site just needs the single bit information whether a person is above 18 or not (as many do!), they should not ask for the date of birth, since that means divulging more information. <li><strong>Justifiable Parties:</strong> This is from the experience of the failure of the over-arching vision of the Microsoft Passport identity management system. The law states that there should be a justifiable need for an identity provider and its interactions to have identity information. Essentially, there is no need to unify my Social Security Number of Tax Identification Number with my MySpace account. Users may not be very comfortable having one identity system for all uses. I may not want to divulge my company identity when surfing objectionable material online. <li><strong>Directed Identity:</strong> This, to me, seems like a corollary to the laws 2 and 3 above. It says that there should be unidirectional identity handles which don't reveal more information about the identity than that required. For instance, if my employer allows me to <em>ex-officio</em> access IEEE Journals, IEEE should not be able to get my identity handle, except for the information that I work for a particular company which allows me access. Also, identity providers should be like 'beacons' emitting identity information as allowed by the users, but establishing an identity relationship with it should be a uni-directional identity relationship. This is essentially to prevent correlation of identity-handles. Cookies are an example -- while a cookie might authenticate a user in a widget, cookies cannot be shared across sites to avoid correlation. Of course, there can be ways to defeat this purpose and those are essentially the instances that are undesirable. <li><strong>Pluralism of Operators and Technologies:</strong> Cameron states that one single monolithic system can never be enough for all our identity needs. A person might definitely want to have separate providers (Windows Domain Authentication, <a href="http://www.openid.net">Open ID</a>, <a href="http://paypal.com">Paypal</a>) and technologies (Kerberos, Web Services) for different use-scenarios and may not want to correlate them for obvious reasons. <li><strong>Human Integration:</strong> Cameron makes the point that we need better design of UI to prevent identity theft and ensure privacy during the interaction of the human and the terminal on which they authenticate themselves. There can be many a slip between the cup and the lip, and this is becoming all the more apparent thanks to phishing and other kinds of attacks. We need better methods to prevent identity systems masquerading as others, and more secure means of communication between the user and his terminal for identity information exchange (biometrics?). <li><strong>Consistent Experience across Contexts:</strong> Cameron tries to make a point for a universal identity information entry interface across the various kinds of identities we might like to maintain (professional, personal, financial), but the point seems more for Windows Info Card (I'll talk about that later). It seems inspired by our carrying different kinds of identity cards in our wallets, such as the Driving License, employer ID card and so on each of which have the same experience (show the card and gain access).</li></ol> <p>It is great to have somebody's wisdom and experience captured so concisely in a set of seven rules. That is what lets us stand on the shoulder of giants and build bigger and better technologies.</p> <p>The laws seem simple, intuitive and practical, and are extremely general. I think that is its biggest undoing -- since they do not give formal semantics of the laws in a mathematical language, it is very easy to have ambiguity and doubt in terms of their interpretation. (A mathematical formulation of something as general as identity is not very easy either). Also, since they are written in such general language, there can be very loop holes and an actual identity system would have to do a lot of thinking to make them very robust, secure and private. I would only request Cameron to explore writing more formal means of expressing these laws and have extensive case-studies (I may not have looked very carefully for them) and have more extensive discussion about privacy, security and so on -- concepts that are becoming very pertinent by the day. I would also like to see more discussion from the perspective of the identity system -- things such as identifying bots, using captchas, and establishing authenticity of information a user enters (is the user really over 18?). He should perhaps consider writing a book!</p> <p>A theoretical discussion of identity systems is not of much use, so I would endeavor to discuss some systems in use today. The simplest by far is the <strong>simple login password form</strong> backed by a text file/database that you can implement in under an hour. My guess that is a pretty robust solution for most simple sites. The downside is a registration process and the need of remembering one more set of usernames and password. The fact that most of us practically use the same usernames and passwords for every site is a matter of convenience as well as a significant security threat. If any one of the sites of compromised (which is very much possible because such under-an-hour hacks can not possibly maintain the highest standards of software quality), the risk of all your accounts being compromised is quite high. Also, it is very difficult to ensure consistent interfaces, and security of transactions. Varying privacy policies might well mean that the user control on the information s/he has divulged to one party is rather suspect. However, they serve their own purpose. This method is quick and dirty -- and works well in a rather large number of scenarios.</p> <p>Of course, identity is very well understood in an <strong>enterprise setting</strong>. <a href="http://web.mit.edu/Kerberos/">Kerberos</a> and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightweight_Directory_Access_Protocol">Lightweight Directory Accesss Procotol (LDAP)</a> have been around for ages and have been the subject of a lot of research. There are standard implementations that can be used like a black box, and single sign-on within a single enterprise is probably a well-solved problem (that is a rather speculative statement). It is a much easier problem also because if we consider the scope of privacy and security etc. is a single enterprise intranet and the problem as well as their solutions are primarily technical. If, however, we consider a federated identity management system for the whole of internet, the scope is much larger, and the deliberations are not just technical, but philosophical as well, since it involves trust between parties who don't trust each other :)</p> <p>Another concept that tries to ensure convenience is <a href="http://www.openid.net"><strong>Open ID</strong></a> - a federated identity management system. The aim is simple -- to use identification information on one site to automatically establish it for some other sites. For instance, if you have <a href="http://www.wordpress.com">Wordpress</a> blog and you want to leave a comment at <a href="http://www.livejournal.com">LiveJournal</a>, you can provide your Wordpress blog URL and LJ automatically uses Web Services to establish identity. There is a user-consent phase and since it is not controlled by a single party, it is preferred by many (unlike Passport). The scheme works well for simple single sign-on areas which are public facing. This has recently been backed by AOL and Microsoft which has lent a lot of weight to the OpenID system. However, the system only establishes a basic protocol. The Open ID site unequivocally states that it is not a trust system and doesn't try to control spam. I would also be worried about using it in a general setting because if one site gets compromised the taint can spread across the federated system (this probably needs to be studied more). Another problem is that, since Open ID itself is rather vague about security and a number of other points, I very much envisage individual corporations coming up with their own standards (much like Javascript) which would yield a number of child-protocols perhaps not interoperable.</p> <p>Microsoft is promoting the <a href="http://www.identityblog.com/wp-content/homepage/nav/informationcards/chappell_on_cardspace"><strong>Windows CardSpace</strong></a> (nee Information Card and many other names). This follows the common practice of lifting paradigms from the real world into the virtual. A user can have a number of cards provided by various Identity Providers which Windows would save securely. When a website (Relying Party) wishes to establish the identity of a user, he would be presented with a secure dialog where he can choose which identity information to transmit, much like you looking into your wallet and taking out either your business card or your Driving License as required. Microsoft provides a number of cryptographic protocols which form the bedrock of secure transmission, and the initiative can not be successful without the participation of the other parties involved (one of the biggest problems due to intense competition). I am sure it would satisfy Cameron's laws since Cameron would have been obviously involved in the development process. However, I can very easily foresee myself lifting the problems from the real world as well -- what happens when my wallet gets lost (laptop stolen, or even virus infected), people cheating about credentials, Relying Parties passing information around (that could compromise the whole system!).</p> <p>On the Internet itself, identity for very specific applications has been worked out to a little extent. Paypal and Google Checkout establish your identity with respect to financial transactions, and have become hugely popular. One of the oldest technologies on the internet (email) still remains the most popular means for establishing your identity in the online realm. How much progress have we really made in the last decade or two?</p> <p>Considering that identity is a problem which is not well solved even in the real world completely, my guess the virtual world will only lag behind. There are a lot of new technologies, ideas and we have to wait and see which ones click. However, my humble guess would be that as Cameron himself proffers that there should be a pluralism of operators and technologies. The application and the usage scenario should be clearly delineated before starting to design any system (which is so true!) and it is easier and viable to solve specific needs (financial identity, enterprise setting). Scoping the usage always makes the problem tractable and leads to success (perhaps after a few iterations). My concern is that none of the current technologies clearly scope their work and that would be my biggest gripe.</p> <p>[Another review of identity related technologies at <a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/overview_identity_landscape.php">Read Write Web</a>. There is a conference <a href="http://iiw.windley.com/wiki/Workshop_2007">Internet Identity Workshop</a> as well. If you want a fleeting identity to login to sites which unnecessarily want login, you can check out <a href="http://www.bugmenot.com/">Bug Me Not</a>. Thanks to Mohit for some initial pointers.]</p> <div class="wlWriterSmartContent" id="0767317B-992E-4b12-91E0-4F059A8CECA8:707a785f-bc68-4fed-9c28-101ddd007d65" contenteditable="false" style="padding-right: 0px; display: inline; padding-left: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; margin: 0px; padding-top: 0px">Technorati Tags: <a href="http://technorati.com/tags/OpenID" rel="tag">OpenID</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tags/Windows%20CardSpace" rel="tag">Windows CardSpace</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tags/Info%20Card" rel="tag">Info Card</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tags/LiveID" rel="tag">LiveID</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tags/Paypal" rel="tag">Paypal</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tags/Google%20Checkout" rel="tag">Google Checkout</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tags/LDAP" rel="tag">LDAP</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tags/Wordpress" rel="tag">Wordpress</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tags/LiveJournal" rel="tag">LiveJournal</a></div>kpowerinfinityhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08844550390473205890noreply@blogger.com12