Micrsoft recently released a teaser video showing a future product called Surface. The estimated price will be $10,000 USD. Watch the teaser video and then watch the parody on it to see why this is kinda silly. Enjoy!!

(requires Adobe Flash plugin… click HERE to watch it on YouTube)

… and the parody (warning: mild language)

(requires Adobe Flash plugin… click HERE to watch it on YouTube)

(requires Adobe Flash plugin… click HERE to watch it on YouTube)

Lately, I’ve been reading some interesting papers from Google labs about their back-end file system, database, and algorithm framework. What I found most intriguing is the simplicity of their design. The software is highly specialized for their particular application… it follows the “do one thing and do it well” philosophy. It was nice to see that they correctly balanced simplicity against feature set.

Google File System

BigTable

Map-Reduce

Researchers at IBM and Aesec Corp released a paper looking at Multics Operating System security and the penetration analysis that was done by the Air Force in the 1970’s. Multics received a B2 security rating from the NSA (A1 being the highest rating), which is a rating far above todays operating systems commonly in use (Windows NT is rated as C2). What’s interesting to me is that Multics (even after its security enhancements) was deemed unacceptable for systems in an open environments (i.e. being connected to a network like the Internet).

Here’s a link to the paper (PDF)