The Weekly Round-Up: 29.02.08

Big, bad Microsoft has had a quite staggering change of heart. The Seattle software giant has announced it is opening its application code secrets to the world in one big source code love-in.

Now there's a statement you couldn't have predicted either side of 1 April.

Microsoft has waged a long and gruelling battle against having to reveal its source code to those profoundly irritating EC lawyers. It's also waged a long and gruelling campaign of fear, uncertainty and doubt against a certain group of technologists.

For the avoidance of doubt, this group of technologists are the ones who like their sandals open-toed, their beards bushy and their operating systems available under the GNU Open Public Licence. Astoundingly, Microsoft has opened its arms to embrace the open-source community.

As the news sent shockwaves across the globe, the Round-Up was delighted to note that at a press conference announcing the seismic shift, CEO Steve Ballmer and his co-joined executives decided they would eschew ties to adopt the relaxed, anti-corporate image.

Unfortunately, the effect was somewhat spoiled because they all wore exactly the same jacket and shirt combination creating the impression of some sort of uniform.

Who'd have thought it? Next, Microsoft will be saying it won't sue open-source developers who create non-commercial software based on its protocols. Lawks-a-lordy, it's only gone and done that too.

Kudos to Ballmer and his backroom boys but if Microsoft was trying to change its spots, or at least appear to change its spots to deflect the ire of the anti-monopoly lobbyists, it has wasted its time.

The European Commission has fined Microsoft a record €899m for defying sanctions imposed on the software giant for antitrust violations, far exceeding the original penalty.

In total, the EC has fined Microsoft €1.68bn for its original violation and for failing to comply with sanctions, more than any other firm. It said no other company has ever ignored sanctions, damn it.

This isn't likely to go down too well in Seattle as the company considers pushing ahead with its Yahoo! takeover bid. After all, it had already admitted it was having to borrow money for the first time in its history.

Another possible reason is that Microsoft no longer thinks the open source movement is anything to worry about and is therefore happy to share its toys.

After all, despite a recent admission by most of silicon.com's CIO Jury that they were employing open source software in the enterprise in various shapes and forms, it's not had the impact on the corporate world that many predicted.

Meanwhile, Geek Emperor Penguin Linus Torvalds was in jubilant and joking mood following the announcement.

The leader of the Linux kernel project, which is one of the chief open source threats to Windows, had words of praise for Microsoft.

Torvalds wrote in an email: "I may make fun of Microsoft occasionally, and yeah, I think they do stupid things at times but I think this one was a step in the right direction."

However, he added a wise note of caution: "Does it mean people should trust and love them? No."

Indeed, for as filmmaker, comic and open source evangelist Woody Allen once said: "The lion and the lamb shall lie down together, but the lamb won't get much sleep."

It's an interesting and brave move by Microsoft but the open source community probably shouldn't be too relaxed about the new sleeping arrangements just yet...

If you're a scientist then the Round-Up's guessing you got into it for the academic rigour, the voyage of empirical discovery and the bristling machismo… (Or perhaps to be part of this).

You almost certainly didn't undergo years of academic study to end up strapping RFID chips to the backs of bumblebees but that's exactly the fate of a group of boffins at a London university who are literally buzzing with excitement about the prospect of spreading the frontiers of human knowledge.

The Round-Up happily acknowledges that using the word 'boffin' to describe scientists is lazy and possibly derogatory. But let's face it: if you get your scientific kicks attaching RFID chips to the tiny but endearingly chubby bodies of live, flying insects - then you're a boffin. Deal with it or get out of the lab.

Anyway… the boffins have tagged hundreds of bees at their east London lab to track their movements, assuming that having a RFID chip on their backs doesn't hinder their aerial manoeuvrability.

The scientists hope to unlock the secrets of the insects' tiny brains - they have about 950,000 brain cells to a human's 100 billion - by analysing how they make complex choices about which routes to fly between flowers.

However, the scientific rigour of the results remain questionable as it turns out the scientists tracking the lumbered, buzzing insects aren't even using real flowers to attract the creatures - they're using artificial blooms.

The Round-Up likes to imagine the 'complex choices' of the bumblebees might be something along the lines of: "That one's plastic, that one's plastic, so is that one. Christ, I'm knackered I'll just rest on this one for a minute. What a surprise, this one's plastic, as well. Why bother?"

The Round-Up should point out that it is not a world-renowned expert on bumblebee psychology but you’d already guessed that, hadn't you?

If this isn't bonkers enough, the same scientists are also transporting the same tagged insects from their homes in English country gardens to the Arctic to observe their behaviour.

This is clearly great news for the bees that get to go on a Boeing 727, watch the onboard film - nothing from the Hollywood mainstream, just a B-movie - and drink G&Ts.

Great news up until they get to their freezing destination - and, let's face it, it's probably a one-way ticket.

There must be a reason for this lunacy and thankfully there is. What's more, it even has a bona fide technology angle and here it comes.

The scientists hope that the rules the bees use to calculate the most efficient flight path could be used to simplify and streamline the flow of data over a computer network.

Because as any passing-madman-with-trousers-filled-with-herring knows, a data packet on a network follows the same pattern as a chip-lumbered bumblebee buzzing off in search of plastic flowers while studiously avoiding polar bears.

So if your network performance is buggered, now you know who's to blame: bumblebees and boffins...

Happily for the Round-Up - and for the reader - just as it was struggling to work out how to get a few laughs out of a story about the imminent shortage of Oracle contractors up pops Professor Noel Sharkey to put in a welcome appearance. Hello, Noel.

And who is Professor Noel Sharkey? Glad you asked. He's a robotics expert who has warned that the robots of the future are likely to be psychopathic killing machines driven by the sole urge to rip, maim and destroy humans and nothing at all like R2-D2, which is a crying shame.

It must be a cheery thought for Sharkey as he turns up to work in the morning and continues with the advancement of robotics knowing he's laying the seeds for the doom of all humankind.

Terrorist robots and autonomous military machines wielding automatic weapons could soon be a reality, claims Sharkey.

From within an underground bunker deep beneath the surface of the University of Sheffield, he predicted that with the plummeting prices of robotic components the killer machines could replace the suicide bomber as the terrorist weapon of choice - saying a small GPS guided drone with autopilot can be made for around £250.

Possibly also employing some kind of Google Maps mash-up, too.

It's probably useful to note at this point that the good professor used to be a judge on the BBC2 geek fest Robot Wars.

If you missed Robot Wars, the programme involved lots of men - always men and either young and bespectacled or middle-aged, fat and bushy bearded and nothing else - attaching axes, drills and chainsaws to armoured, remote-controlled lawnmowers and going hell for leather against each other.

The stint as judge clearly had a deep psychological effect on our Noel. You can see where he's got his ideas of robot-induced annihilation from.

Sharkey is clearly an authority on the matter of robots, possessing a chair in robotics it goes without saying. But the Round-Up is willing to bet its bionic left arm that while Sharkey is also conversant with the three laws of robotics defined by sci-fi writer Isaac Asimov, he clearly doesn't subscribe to them. Sensibly too, for the robots in the stories often ended up going postal.

Not a cheering thought for a robotics expert with an unhealthy fixation with an apocalyptic future and his role in making it come to grisly fruition. Perhaps a change of career is in order, possibly strapping RFID chips to bumblebees or implanting GPS chips in squirrels. Anything, anything but robotics...

Until next week, the Round-Up would like to bid au revoir, or perhaps more appropriately: "I'll be back."

Yes, the Terminator was a cyborg not a robot, but the Round-Up's not going to let fictional fact get in the way of a cheap and easy punchline. Pedants.

Actually, just enough time for the Round-Up to mention the other big news stories of the week.

Boffins - more of them - have designed a CCTV system that counts people in cars by detecting human skin. The same boffins claim the London Congestion Charge could benefit from the technology. Jordan's in real trouble.

Business users are feeling the iPhone love. Hm, shiny and non-Exchange compliant.

Finally, understatement of the week: "This issue appears to have been related to an unexpected event which caused device overload and failure." Who, what, when, where, why…

Podcast? Yay!

Fancy a bottle of bubbly? Drink and be merry - as long as you get pithy first - with the caption competition.