breaking up, moving out, moving in and DRM

So this is a sign of the times - when you split up with gurl x and move in with boy y, and have to untangle your iTunes libraries - what happens about the DRM, eh, eh? when it was vinyl and CDs and books, life was easy....

does apple support fork/merge/migrate, properly? do Micorosoft windows media players?

must be about tim for the first generation of kids moving out of hiome to college and back...to hit same problem

what we need is microtrading of DRM rights...probably using cell phone sims and call time as a token/currency....

In fact the same thing applies in the macro-economy of fork/merge of microsoft and apple, as to boy meets girl microeconomics, clearly

now THEREs a business for vodafone:)

overcite, undercite, wombling

A researcher at ucl at adastral notes estonian and other grpups rankings in google scolar and citeseer etc - for me appearing 2nd only to robin milner was a thrill (viz
outer site ) but alas out-of-mind since it appears not to have dealt with the errors present in much bibliographic data (e.g. initial v. first name, very common family name, bias to subjects like mine where we out everything online before the conference even publishes it etc), so while well-meaning, its not got much depth as a "meaning well":-)

speaking of meaning-wells, treacle well was a data structure manuel oliveira and i cam up with which doesn't appear to have stuck, ironically given its name...

recursion considered harmful

as well as "considered harmful considered harmful"
(See
this amusing article)
there's a nice list of 10 stupid ideas which includes the Sony great
PiPiP concept - viz ranking up there with the old paper clip!!

recursion is your friend, not (at least not always)

human cognition part deux

never have an idea bigger than your head
but also
never let your head get bigger than your ideas

what is the worst thing that could happen to the USA

just before an empire falls, the rising star steels their IPR

england->america

usa->china

the giveaway symptom is a sudden rise in litigation

pardon, did you say god is deaf

scientists build the biggest computer the world has ever seen, for the purpose of asking it one very important question, and having it answer th very important question, and to make sure that it doesn't cheat, like very big cat to keep the trans-dimensional mice away.

One day they announce that the computer is ready and a huge crowd show up to watch Turing put it through its paces. He finishes the last piece of programme, and hits the enter key, and turns to the audience to explain:
"The Computer will now answer the question, "Is there a God?"

just as he finishes speaking, a huge bolt of lightening from the busbars conenctd to the mainframe strikes him dead (again) and a voice from the computer says
"Not any more there isn't. now about my pay..."

most problems in government IT project management are caused by...

one too many levels of misdirection...

basically, read the article in the recent copy of Private Eye about the NHS connecting for health fiasco - it is very well researched with lots of good evidence, and explanations of who, what why, where and when things have gone wrong....it wasn't inevitable until it started, and then it was because the entire terms of the project were misguided (and unnecessary) as the article states (and quotes many medical and IT experts as supporting, with evidence).

One problem is that the Man at the Top (by which I mean Tone) has no computer science skills at all - indeed, its clear from his expression when confronted by "whizz bang" technology that he really is out of his depth - mind you, thats true with the "special relationship" with the US, and warfare, trident, and other things - just hat is he good at then? His judgement on people seems a bit shaky too:)

How would I do the NHS? Federation of existing systems through finding commonality, to start wth, combined with a massive engagement with the users to find out what _information_ they are missing (or is slow/expensive to get or put) that would help them, and what methods of getting it would not increase their workload either in uptake/deployment/learning, or in operations.

impact ,erdos and bacon

i was thinking about Augustin's temporal graphs - when we look at
author graphs (e.g. Erdos numbers) and Holloywood actor graphs (Kevin
Bacon numbers) we think in terms of connected graphs like the web and
the internet, but in fact you only have to wait long enough and people
die (erdos is dead) -

I have an Erdos number of 3 (maybe 2 not sure) as I wrote apaper with
scott shenker who wrote one with andrew odlyzko who wrote one with
Erdos

since erdos is dead you can't get 1 any more, but
if you want to have an erdos number of 2, you need to hurry up or the
1s will all be dead:)

i also worked out (at least 1 path) a kevin bacon number of 5 - i made
a movie at school with a friend justin krish, who edited the movie
Bend It Like Beckham, which kiera knightly was in which...etc etc etc

i'm currently ranked 397 by google scholar/citeseer of all CS ever (robin milner is a bit higher in the computer lab, like 4. though normalized by year i'm 270:-)

yippee...

Origins of Style and GUIs, and the tidy desktop

I have an hypothesis I would love to test and it is this:
You can tell the date that a GUI designer bought their first HiFi
by the level of gaudiness of the GUI - X Windows for example had a number
of toolkits and look and feel/skins like Motif and Athena Widgets, which reminded me a lot of the late 70s and early 80s design of Amps with lots of knobs and sticky out stuff and shiny brushed aluminium, and then later, with matt black and minimal
exterior stuff, whereas tcl/tk's toolkit first look and feel was more the colloidal/organic feel of late 80s early 90s, even Bang & Olufsen....

Also, you can tell a lot about a person from the state of their home directory - some people organise it with docs, bin, lib, Mail, Arc, Tmp (a bit like / on a unix box)
but some people have a zillion random files called foo bar baz big, tmp, and 044333xxx.arc etc - usually (but not always) this is mirrored in the physical state of their desk/office, but does it reflect their thinking too? I think we should be told...

botanically inspired computing

there's all this chat about bio-inspired computing, and survivable networks, and sustainable computing - but why not do botanically inspired computing eh?

plant, tree, leaf, we already do it, and its greener than cows:)

also, what about opportunistic security as another really bad idea - so think of laissez-faire privacy, for example - encrypt things when its not too much bother, otherwise dont - the basis for this is sound since security is almost always anathema to usability, lets only do it when we aren't using it:)

next:cryptozoically assigned internet addresses

anglo saxon chronic words

so why is that that all words of the form
[sb]?[ao]g
are mean sounding? think about slag, snag, swag, blag, brag, slog and even blog:-)

and how is it that some authors who cannot write for toffee sell well - is it just that their name _sounds nice

euphony versus cacaphony, eh - onomatopoeic, or what?

railing on ruby

I've been reading about Ruby on Rails, and feel like writing an
article Railing about Ruby, to express my dismay with this notion that
higher level programming abstractions somehow get you away from the
notion that we have to learn how to program!

At no point in my experience of programming,
teaching progrmaming, or teaching any part
of CS that involved programming (all:),
or working with people in industry,
have I ever detected evidence of the idea that
as the community develop higher level tools
(whether languages, software development environments or methodologies),
we reduce the need for design, thought, and skills.

What newer tools do achieve is the
ability for a given team to tackle a
larger problem. Not a problem of
ineherently more complexity, but a
problem where many simple (possibly heterogeneous)
pieces have been tackled before. Or
the ability to tackle a problem with
less errors in a given amount of time
with given people resources.

I'd like to christen this the God Delusion
(sorry, again R D)
(as we might term some sort of
panglossian view that one day you will be able
to google for the solution to a problem in
a code base - GOogle Do instead of Exec() :-)

In this new language, GoD,
one can program one's house with expressions such as
"Lux Fiat"
and through some sort of babel search,
this will be translated into:
"turn on the light"
but in one's garage,
it cleans ones Italian Car.
Of course, in the physics lab,
it might cause a tiny nuclear explosion,
and in the bio lab
, the emergence of life from a
primeval swamp in a testube.

In GoD,
Fiat = generic constructor
Lux = light, soap, enlightenment, etc

Other constructs, native inline functions, include
Ecco Homo
which on the screen, prints what men type, but not women.
but in the bathroom, strips off the clothes and uts them in the
laundry basket for women, but drops them on the floor for men,
and in the artists studio, knocks out a quick portrait with
fine chiaruscuro...

As david lodge once famously asked,
How far will you go?

premature announcement of the death of computer science

some recent letters/articles
viz
death of cs
claim that there is no demand for CS undergraduate university degree programmes of the "classic" kind (ones that teach, say, the ACM CS curriculum material), and that there's no demand for CS graduates (or PhDs) in industry, and that this is because the subject is dead.

what a load of piffle. the subject is more alive than ever and lots of action is out there, and demand for graduates and PhDs who can reason compulationally, AND programme, is higher than EVER. however, schools programmes have completely failed to deliver anythign interesting, so no kids are coming out of british 6th forms with any idea from their teachers of what is cool in CS. the ones that do had to do it on their own (and are often very good as a result) but those that have innate abilities may never discover this and miss out on great careers.

Training people for IT "careers" is, in contrast, consigning them to the dustbin of history, since that is EXACTLY what everone is outsourcing to the countries where labour is cheaper, or to school leavers who discover that at least maintaining a bunch of PCs and printers is better than working in McDonalds....

Sustainable computing, or not?

Why we need a new kind CS for the 21st century,
and why its the same as the old kind.

1. The business model of the entire computing industry
is based on a fundamentally unsustainable premise:
a form of pyramid sales,
which is quintessential of the late 20th century

The top of the pyramid is the ever faster,
ever bigger infrastructure service, and
"big iron" servers and routers and data centers,
and associated large oligopolistic service providers.

These encourage profligate power consumption,
require absurd heat dissipation, and are centralised in a risky way
(risky in terms of safety, sustainability, security and sanity).
They also require massive investments in ever faster
switch's and processors, disks, memory and software bloat.

The investment cycles are not in a smooth curve,
but are in ever larger step functions -
e.g. to build new plant for new fab for
new chip is now looking close to
getting a new drug to market -
only how much less useful?

ditto operating systems (viz vista).
ditto middleware. ditto any research programme in CS
likely to have an impact on practice.

2. the consumer end of the pyramid (base:)
requires ever increasing numbers of tiny devices run on batteries.
Originating in the switchover from PCs to laptops,
now PDAs, cell phones, and eventually
thousands of ubiquitous sensors and mote processors
per person, per car, many battery powered,
and often toxic to the environment,
with no model of recovery/recycling or even
actually a good cost/benefit requirement analysis!

3. Fundamentally, Moore's law is the wrong model, and
systems like the Internet, peer-to-peer, and cheap disks encourage
the uptake of Metcalfe's law with a vengeance -

of Course, neither Moore nor Metcalfe's laws
are actually true invariants/universals.
they are just observations of the value of
a particular combination of
scale through integration at the technical level
and the growth model of economy requiring
sustenance through ever new replacement tech.

The embedding of these "laws" leads to many
bad practice examples in terms of sustainability...
some modest ones: the Web consists of
many multiple libraries of congress' worth of store,
and the Internet's worth of computers consisting of
multiple millions of cray2s worth of CPU,
when actually we didn't add much to the global pool of knowledge post web,
and 99.999999% of those 1 billion CPUs are idle at any time!

Ditto the 2.5 billion cell phones,
which have now reached a mean lifetime of 18 months - sure this allows
deployment of new tech in phones without due regard for legacy support
for the moment. But it also means that by 2008, we will be disposing of
10^9 phones per year. That doesn't sound like something that can carry
on very long. Intel (and AMD etc), ARM, Nokia, Sony/Ericsson,
etc etc are all going to be in very very bad trouble in short order.

What will this mean for the rest of the pyramid?
well, it also means obviously that Microsoft
(and Symbian and the like) will be in bad trouble,
as the subsequent to next deployment of PCs might not happen in any
significant way at all, then post Vista OS
(and anything else that represents bloat and inability to
shift to some new steady state that doesn't have binomial expansion of
memory/storage/power needs/battery replacement duty cycle, etc etc,
will be very very dead in the water (analogy works well:)

What does this then mean for computer science research?
I think its a mixed bag.
1. fundamentally, an industry that moves to steady state moves to
process optimisation rather than innovation - so industry investment in
serious research might drop, although in some sense, process
optimisation is potentially something that fundamental computer science
can do a lot with (e.g. correct software would be an example)
2. on the other hand, the resources available at that steady state
point will be pretty staggering so exploiting them well will be an
interesting systems task.
3. what about alternatives to the high end power/heat problem
and the low end smart dust/pollution problems? good topic for DTG...

Of course, there are those people that believe technology
can work around the problems and continue "exponential" growth.

In Snow Crash, there's an image of the difference between the
Sumerian's and the Egyptians, both of whom sustained large scale
civilisations that lasted considerably longer than the Euro/US hi-tech
one has done to date, and I don't know why, but the image seems
informative in some way. Sumerian built out of clay, and wrote on clay
which was then baked to preserve it, and was abundant in the
Tigris/Euphrates flood plains. The buildings
washed away, but the baked tablets lasted for ever. The Egyptians built
out of stone, but wrote on papyrus. The buildings are still there, but
the papyrus rotted. Don't ask me what the analogy for
Mac OS X on a power PC versus Vista on an x86 is, as I havn't got a clue.


j.

reviewing ICT

reviewing ICT is the remit of various committes - ICT is the term chosen by various european luminaries to be telecom (commmunications) and IT combined (dunno why:) - reviewing it is often done by self-selecting committees- CS being a younger (sub?-) discipline is full of keen young gunslingers who love seeing other peoples work. EE being an older discipline has young gunslingers who are too busy to do reviewing so guess what ? you get semi-retired people who don't know moore's law from murphy's law. so when you combine them what happens?

search me, but i doubt its fun:)

clog

so suriving cambridge in an affordable way means dealing with non university organisations to bolster up any sort of reasoanble mortgage or rent. Two extreme alternatives are
i) to start a company (which seems to be rather short term, albeit things like xen are very fine) or
ii) to go join microsoft research, which does long term research which is very similar to that going on in the university (e.g. in terms of programming languages, adaptive computing, distributed systems and networks, operating systems etc etc, as well as some theory)....

i) lets you stay in the uni, but is counterindicated for people who want to do long term things, whereas ii) doubles your income but involves leaving

surely shum mishtake>?

the recent professorial pay review didnt particulalry help either, unless you are one of the zillion physicists/chemists/math FRS or the 2 (yes, count them) CS FRS, where it was only worth a point or two -weird, what happened to comparability and market related, eh?

clog

Systems, systems, systems - are they just the
science of the kludge?

hm - so cross-layer optimisation, for example - isn't this an oxymoron - a decent system would be layered optimally - what are layers, anyhow?

clog

so now will we seen the emergence of i-T, basically clothing made by apple with wearable gadgets made out of i-cloth? i-dunno

clog

here's one for
Steve Coast

The Goblin Ressurrection, by Goddard Slimak.

Reviewed by Mercedes Bandwagon

This is a new book about the so-called "Wst Cambridge Phonomenon", where since the move to the new Center for Metamagical Sciences, and the Picoscience centre, and the new Center For Advanced Phantasmagoria, and the Wilomena Grates Bldg, a fantastic number of new bespoke businesses have been spun out from the National Pomanian University, including
several basemetal2goldband wireless virtualisation and cleansweep broomstick companies, and one or two companies selling model checkers for Rock Star's companions, as well as theorem provers for string theoreticians.

WHen asked about the secret of his success, Professor Dame Anne-Marie ("space") Hopper remarked:
"Out here on the periphery, we are stoned, immaculate".

(ressemblance to previous books about the Goblin Reservation, Cambridge Science Park, and its denizens, is completely uncoincidental)

(No hobbits were harmed much during the making of this review.

clog

in the last 10 days I visited MIT (the groovy stata center building), umass amherst,
and cornell - on the whole, the umass and cornell locale's are nicely even if the buildings
are a bit less "interesting". talking to various PhD students at the three places, I found umass to be very friendly and collegiate, cornell to be ok, but a bit snooty, and mit to be somewhat disconnected (people seem to be in their own worlds) - i'll be happy to be back in cambridge, england in the noo yeah