OS Market Share

Computer World has an article that illustrates the shift of clients moving away from the Microsoft Windows platform while Apple’s OS X has gained a considerable amount at %0.66 (8% total market share). And, ccoincidentally, I should be running OS X full-time before the end of today. Woohoo!

OS market share data is available at hitlink’s site.

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via All things Distributed

A few weeks ago computer science icon Jim Gray mysteriously disappeared after a solo trip to the Farallon Islands near San Francisco to scatter his mother’s ashes. The coast guard, unable to locate anything (not even debris), called off the search last week. Additionally last week 3 private planes searched through the coastal areas and they also returned unsuccessful.

Through a major effort by many people we were able to have the Digital Globe satellite make a run over the area on Thursday morning and have the data made available publicly. We have split these images into smaller tiles that can be easily scanned visually and stored into the Amazon S3 storage service. We then created tasks for reviewing these images and loaded then into the Amazon Mechanical Turk Service.

This is where you come in. We need your help in reviewing these images to see whether you can locate Jim’s boat in any of these images. Please go to the Amazon Mechanical Turk site and help us find Jim Gray.

The weather conditions were not ideal as some areas were cloudy, but we can still look for him in those places where there is a somewhat clear view. We hope to get more satellite data in the coming days of a wider area. The current images are panchromatic with a 0.82m, and Jim boat would be about 6 pixels in size. Please visit the Amazon Mechanical Turk site for more details.

I have to stress that many individuals and companies are to thank for making this possible; many academics friends relentlessly worked around the clock to get access to the data, many industry friends of Jim functioned as connectors to hook up officials and individuals, and people from NASA, Digital Globe, Microsoft, Google, Oracle, Amazon and others worked hard get to the data collected and available on a very short time scale. The Mechanical Turk team worked deep into the night to make this work.

Now it is your turn, go find Jim Gray.

Update 2/3: We have now added the data from yesterdays NASA ER-2 flight to system. They are in the same Mechanical Turk Group as the satellite images search. Please follow this link to work on these. More details here

Update 2/4: Over 100,000 assigments have been completed, and new high resolution images are coming online. More details here.

Even though it didn’t seem to pan out, it was a great use of technology and distributed processing, even if it was using humans mostly for the processing part. There were some reports on Monday about body that was found near Point Diablo but it turned out not to be Jim. I’m also curious if Jim had any safety equipment onboard, such as a Category I EPIRB which would deploy automatically in the event of a sinking, sent out a distress beacon and identify his vessel.

Jim Gray’s Wikipedia entry

Jim Gray’s Microsoft page

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I case you can’t figure it out, it’s the “A Microsoft Subsidiary” that made me die a little. There goes the best thing Microsoft had going for them, all the utilities and tools they didn’t deem necessary to make, someone took the ball and ran with it. Better download everything you can from Sysinternals now, who knows how long before all the good stuff is removed or trashed up. Here’s a link to their Aquisition FAQ which sounds suspiciously like F-U.

Of course, on the other hand this might be just what Microsoft needs to get their butts in gear. Check out Mark Russinovich’s blog entry dropping the bomb.

Update: I got this response from thier IIS server, haha:

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Scud writes “It appears that if you want to rise up in the rankings over at the MSN search engine you would do well to host your page on IIS. Ivor Hewitt has done a study and it appears that by using IIS, you are likely to increase your odds of a higher listing by several percent.“. My question is, is anyone surprised by this? I’m sure we’ll hear that it’s due to the fact that IIS is a superior web server and is able to respond to their crawler more efficently or something along those lines.

Save yourself some headache and just use Google.

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An anonymous reader writes: “According to ZDNet, Microsoft plans to add the software equivalent of a ‘black box’ flight recorder to Windows. According to the article, ‘The tool will build on the existing Watson error-reporting tool in Windows but will provide Microsoft with much deeper information, including what programs were running at the time of the error and even the contents of documents that were being created.‘” Commentary available via C|Net as well.

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