a recent publication in nature about human mobility caused a bit of a stir in the news
what surprised me was that apparently said paper passed the ethics committee in the authors' institution. the data was taken from a european cellular provider
1. the customers were'nt asked -t his makes it unethical
2. i asked uk and german and spanish legal folks they said this is also illegal in european law.
3. the data isnt avaialble to other people to validate, compare
4. not knowing which country it is make it petty hard to geenralise the mobility model (e.g. think greek islands versus spanish plains, versus alps:)
5. the paper appeared already in a slightly different form in the IOP Journal of Phys...
6 they dont seem to have done anythiong to control for factors that social scienctists would do like age group (think Virgin Mobile versus Vodafone - networks that cater mostly for kids or mostly for business users) people that turn off phones when traveling, or have 2 phones for home and work...
in general, I am a bit surprised at Nature for publishing the work - the math/analysis is cool, but the rest of it is doubtful, imho
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7433128.stm
Thursday, June 19, 2008
Wednesday, June 18, 2008
gravitational and inertial mass explained
so a puzzle slightly harder to explain than P=nP
to the no nscientist, and probably more important
is why gravitational and inertial mass are the same
so my theory is that mass is basically a concrete instantiation of information
(information, as it were, realized, or referent in the form of substance)
so the more information, the more mass (the more mass, the more information)
information breeds interpretation, and interpretation needs to "run"
and needs intelligence which runs on matter and is attracted to information
hence information (masses) attracts (and doesn't repel, whereas ignorance, or lack of information, does repel..)
so inertia is now easy to udnerstand - it is hard to change people's minds - the fact is that facts are things it is foolish to argue about. Hence facts have more inertia than opinions.
I.e. information not only has, but is, inertial and graviational mass.
QED.
to the no nscientist, and probably more important
is why gravitational and inertial mass are the same
so my theory is that mass is basically a concrete instantiation of information
(information, as it were, realized, or referent in the form of substance)
so the more information, the more mass (the more mass, the more information)
information breeds interpretation, and interpretation needs to "run"
and needs intelligence which runs on matter and is attracted to information
hence information (masses) attracts (and doesn't repel, whereas ignorance, or lack of information, does repel..)
so inertia is now easy to udnerstand - it is hard to change people's minds - the fact is that facts are things it is foolish to argue about. Hence facts have more inertia than opinions.
I.e. information not only has, but is, inertial and graviational mass.
QED.
Monday, June 09, 2008
tell me, how can a poor ISP stand such times, and live?
bbc says it will cost 16 billion quid to upgrade UK to 100Mbps (i assume FTTH) -
broadband snakeholders group comments
people are suing comcast for rate limiting stuff in a
class action
you can't win :-)
[ with apologies to Ry Cooder et al for misusing their fine toon title:)
new noos: slashdot lists an article which pretty much says what I said about
differentiation here,
but fails to distinguish as clearly as I would like
that this is not the same as arbitrary discrimination. Viz what I wrote in
CCR, but it does uphold the principle of transparency, which is fine, so I'm happy:)
broadband snakeholders group comments
people are suing comcast for rate limiting stuff in a
class action
you can't win :-)
[ with apologies to Ry Cooder et al for misusing their fine toon title:)
new noos: slashdot lists an article which pretty much says what I said about
differentiation here,
but fails to distinguish as clearly as I would like
that this is not the same as arbitrary discrimination. Viz what I wrote in
CCR, but it does uphold the principle of transparency, which is fine, so I'm happy:)
Friday, June 06, 2008
transformational government : where's the no leak model
so here's the thing - governments want to join-up-the-dots
for a variety of ostensibly ok reasons
1/ reduce costs (single database entry per citizen, keyed on biometric id)
2/ increase consistency (e.g. tax and rebate)
3/ tracking trends
4/ catching bad guys
5/ you name it...
6/ if they were really honest, one could make the system transparent
and probably remove most government (reduce the government to "codes"
this is all transformational government
the problem is that the more unified the databases, the higher the gain to bust it
and the higher the loss to people (in value and number of people) if the system is bust (whether deliberately by bad guys or accidentally by HMRC^H^H idiots).
so once you unify this thing how long does it last? how about forever, stupid?
so the probabilty of leaks might be some decreasing small number - e.g. the chance of leaking 1 record in a year might be 1 in a million. so what are the chances your record is leaked in your lifetime (say 75 years)? well, fairly close to 1 actually.
do the math
the only way to do things is to require that noone keeps data for very long at all. and noone has access across all databases - keep the databases seperate (as per the current data protection laws) and delete data permanently and properly as early as possible.
this needs to be done much more carefully than in the past
by the way, recent reports ont he bbc about the tracking of cell phone users
cite a paper in nature, which reveals that the 100k users were in a european country
firstly, while they claim that they've anonymized the data (and the country) It is fairly easy to deduce from the cell tower locations and population mobility (e.g. 3km mean levy walk, with a 1000km limit) which country, which provider, and therefore for authors (and one assumes, the Nature editors and reviewers , since they are supposed to require access to data to check an experiment is valid and reproduceable or falsifiable, even when the data is proprietarty -as in drug clinical trials))
so this paper is unethical and possibly illegal in european law.
oh well.
(see
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7433128.stm
and follow links to supplemntary data)
its a shame that Nature has lowered the bar for work like this as it should be possible to do this sort of thing in a way that is with consent (lets say you offer the users some useful service based on location !) and is done scientifically
in a verifiable way too...
nevertheless the results are useful (mind you, so were the nazis' medical work on hypothermia in concentration camps......careful...careful...dont lose your cool).
for a variety of ostensibly ok reasons
1/ reduce costs (single database entry per citizen, keyed on biometric id)
2/ increase consistency (e.g. tax and rebate)
3/ tracking trends
4/ catching bad guys
5/ you name it...
6/ if they were really honest, one could make the system transparent
and probably remove most government (reduce the government to "codes"
this is all transformational government
the problem is that the more unified the databases, the higher the gain to bust it
and the higher the loss to people (in value and number of people) if the system is bust (whether deliberately by bad guys or accidentally by HMRC^H^H idiots).
so once you unify this thing how long does it last? how about forever, stupid?
so the probabilty of leaks might be some decreasing small number - e.g. the chance of leaking 1 record in a year might be 1 in a million. so what are the chances your record is leaked in your lifetime (say 75 years)? well, fairly close to 1 actually.
do the math
the only way to do things is to require that noone keeps data for very long at all. and noone has access across all databases - keep the databases seperate (as per the current data protection laws) and delete data permanently and properly as early as possible.
this needs to be done much more carefully than in the past
by the way, recent reports ont he bbc about the tracking of cell phone users
cite a paper in nature, which reveals that the 100k users were in a european country
firstly, while they claim that they've anonymized the data (and the country) It is fairly easy to deduce from the cell tower locations and population mobility (e.g. 3km mean levy walk, with a 1000km limit) which country, which provider, and therefore for authors (and one assumes, the Nature editors and reviewers , since they are supposed to require access to data to check an experiment is valid and reproduceable or falsifiable, even when the data is proprietarty -as in drug clinical trials))
so this paper is unethical and possibly illegal in european law.
oh well.
(see
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7433128.stm
and follow links to supplemntary data)
its a shame that Nature has lowered the bar for work like this as it should be possible to do this sort of thing in a way that is with consent (lets say you offer the users some useful service based on location !) and is done scientifically
in a verifiable way too...
nevertheless the results are useful (mind you, so were the nazis' medical work on hypothermia in concentration camps......careful...careful...dont lose your cool).
Sunday, June 01, 2008
Control v. Data Plane Complexity & HCI
I was reading a bunch of HCI research recently and it struck me that the
really successful systems that people build (I realize HCI isn't about systems, but
often the really good HCI work builds systems to do experiments, so you get to see cool design artifacts as a side effect of their work - hey- the iPhone as a side effect is
no bad thing:) so anyhow te good systems have low complexity control planes and all the clever stuff is implicit in the work in the data plane (to use networking terminology)
this is a bit like IP v. ATM- IP has a rediculusly simple control plane (originally)
and so is easy to write many many applications to.
in HCI terms,. this is similar - we want systems with low cognitive overhead - i.e.
you want star trek communicators not things you have to click to unlock then 10 digits to dial/press to call. you want tivo boxes that just go ahead and record your favorite types of programs by default and use the actual broadcast events to trigger recording start/end, rather than VCRs with arcane yarrow-stick-casting interfaces where you type in immutable start and end times in odd formats and program/channel numbers that relate to local geo- and techno- specific assignment of program and station to some random number....
you want a net where you can just send a packet, rather than calling 11M lines of code to set up a virtual path and channel.
really successful systems that people build (I realize HCI isn't about systems, but
often the really good HCI work builds systems to do experiments, so you get to see cool design artifacts as a side effect of their work - hey- the iPhone as a side effect is
no bad thing:) so anyhow te good systems have low complexity control planes and all the clever stuff is implicit in the work in the data plane (to use networking terminology)
this is a bit like IP v. ATM- IP has a rediculusly simple control plane (originally)
and so is easy to write many many applications to.
in HCI terms,. this is similar - we want systems with low cognitive overhead - i.e.
you want star trek communicators not things you have to click to unlock then 10 digits to dial/press to call. you want tivo boxes that just go ahead and record your favorite types of programs by default and use the actual broadcast events to trigger recording start/end, rather than VCRs with arcane yarrow-stick-casting interfaces where you type in immutable start and end times in odd formats and program/channel numbers that relate to local geo- and techno- specific assignment of program and station to some random number....
you want a net where you can just send a packet, rather than calling 11M lines of code to set up a virtual path and channel.
Wednesday, May 28, 2008
making a multiple hash of it
so just re-reading this really nice classic paper
Probabilistic Counting Algorithms for Data Base Applications (1985)
Philippe Flajolet, G. N. Martin, and realized that one of the tricks they use
is to do multiple hashes of the key (they then count the occurrences of bits
in a neat way to get the cardinality - very cool - so how does this relate to
Bloom Filters which count the approximate set membership, and to CAN's, which use multiple hashes to distribute keys in a search space as uniformly as possible, or even to coordinate estimation systems? Seems like there's a small monograph in this...
Probabilistic Counting Algorithms for Data Base Applications (1985)
Philippe Flajolet, G. N. Martin, and realized that one of the tricks they use
is to do multiple hashes of the key (they then count the occurrences of bits
in a neat way to get the cardinality - very cool - so how does this relate to
Bloom Filters which count the approximate set membership, and to CAN's, which use multiple hashes to distribute keys in a search space as uniformly as possible, or even to coordinate estimation systems? Seems like there's a small monograph in this...
Monday, May 26, 2008
internet research for kids
I've been on sabbatical in the last year visiting lots of labs and
talking about research directions and one idea that came up is a
reaction to something I think and I believe you and dave clark have
also said in the last couple of years about academic CS research
(at least Internet related CS research) having gone awry.
The pressure to look at short term fast return has pushed many
academics into effectively competing with industry R&D - this means
that many papers are increasingly being produced that look like
startup white papers (often are) and do not have the depth of work
behind them that one might expect from a core CS conference (let
aloine journal) 15 or 20 years ago. This is not universally
true (self promotion - I believe we published first papers
on work on Xen after about 9PhDs and 3 years of faculty work,
and on Xorp and Metarouting work were both in similar ratios and have
strong underpinning ideas).
What my colleague Tim Griffin refers to as the Hotnetization of
communications research has happened.
Part of the problem is that really smart people get a big buzz out of
being creative, and only some buzz out of the sweat to really nail the
details. But the details matter. One solution to this would be a big
cultural shift back to long term funding and rewards to academics for
long term (not for short term) work - that isn't going to happen in a
hurry.
Another solution is to provide a competitor for short term idea
generation and demonstration to force academics out of the short term
space.
SO here's one idea:
build a system for kids to write new internet scale applications.
give them a sandbox (planetlab junior) to deploy these.
Think lego-mindstorms for the internet.
A whole bunch of things like facebook, myspace, skype, bebo, flicr,
IM,, are totally obvious to kids - 10 year olds would have built us
prototypes if they were given the simple tools to create
distributed applications with simple GUIs I think they would
create 1000s of them - it would take an organisatio nlike
Cisco (and/or microsoft) with a scools outreach programme,
and some resources (not a lot) - it would be nice to
incorporate cell phone handsets in some simple way.
There are some nice example languages (as above, lego
mindstorms, but also Alice (from CMU) which could be extended
easily to do this....
just a thought!
talking about research directions and one idea that came up is a
reaction to something I think and I believe you and dave clark have
also said in the last couple of years about academic CS research
(at least Internet related CS research) having gone awry.
The pressure to look at short term fast return has pushed many
academics into effectively competing with industry R&D - this means
that many papers are increasingly being produced that look like
startup white papers (often are) and do not have the depth of work
behind them that one might expect from a core CS conference (let
aloine journal) 15 or 20 years ago. This is not universally
true (self promotion - I believe we published first papers
on work on Xen after about 9PhDs and 3 years of faculty work,
and on Xorp and Metarouting work were both in similar ratios and have
strong underpinning ideas).
What my colleague Tim Griffin refers to as the Hotnetization of
communications research has happened.
Part of the problem is that really smart people get a big buzz out of
being creative, and only some buzz out of the sweat to really nail the
details. But the details matter. One solution to this would be a big
cultural shift back to long term funding and rewards to academics for
long term (not for short term) work - that isn't going to happen in a
hurry.
Another solution is to provide a competitor for short term idea
generation and demonstration to force academics out of the short term
space.
SO here's one idea:
build a system for kids to write new internet scale applications.
give them a sandbox (planetlab junior) to deploy these.
Think lego-mindstorms for the internet.
A whole bunch of things like facebook, myspace, skype, bebo, flicr,
IM,, are totally obvious to kids - 10 year olds would have built us
prototypes if they were given the simple tools to create
distributed applications with simple GUIs I think they would
create 1000s of them - it would take an organisatio nlike
Cisco (and/or microsoft) with a scools outreach programme,
and some resources (not a lot) - it would be nice to
incorporate cell phone handsets in some simple way.
There are some nice example languages (as above, lego
mindstorms, but also Alice (from CMU) which could be extended
easily to do this....
just a thought!
Thursday, May 22, 2008
biometric - dont let the tech speak bamboozle you
governments (well the british government) likes to pretend it is up-to-date and techie, when in fact we all know that thatcher, major, blair and brown are all pretty technophobe and so there's no real comprehension at the top of the food chain, and since most civil servants train at oxford doing PPE (politics philosophy and economics) rather than at Cambridge doing NatSci (natural sciences - or medicine - where people get jobs in the Real World), the mandarins of White Hall are pretty useless - this is why they keep proposing idiotic things like ID cards, the NHS IT programme, and biometric passports (and the reason the write such bad RFPs and get no-one bidding is that anyone with an ounce of real business skill can stand looking down the river east of the houses of parliament and see a 100 places where they can get a job with 10 times the power and 25 times the income.
so. biometrics. what's that about then?
well, a photo is a biometric. bio - life. metric - measure. so its like a piece of information gathered about you hopefully something a third party (not you or the person who made the passport) can study and compare with the True Life version they can get from you - this then means that they trust who you are because they trust the person issuing the passport checked who you are and only gave you the passport since the other info (birthday, place, citizenship etc) were entitled to, and that the passport cannot be fiddled with (affordably) and that you can't be fiddled with (affordably).
so. basically, voodoo then. I mean who really understands DNA or Iris scans or finger prints or retina scans ? who understands encryption? who understands challenge response protocols or redundent coding of information?
well, I suppose we do. But we don't work for the government, do we? so why do you believe they'd get it right?
but it is all voodoo, because basically the government likes things that sounds technical (remember ghost busters?: "back off: I'm a scientist", and "it's technical".
No, next time someone says we must have biometric NHS entitlement ID cards, point out
1/ bio-washing powerder has been shown to cause rashes in some people, so how do we know bio-metric cards wont casuse rashes? have they been tested? have the RFID readers been checked that they don't cause cancer?
2/ we havn't gone metric in the UK yet in all things (e.g. road distances, measures of beer) so why should we go metric in identity? We still have feet - we do not walk about on iambic pentameters. We have hands and measure horses with them - indeed, we have cars that are powered by horses too, even if the force is also measured in Newtons.
That will shut them up for a while.
so. biometrics. what's that about then?
well, a photo is a biometric. bio - life. metric - measure. so its like a piece of information gathered about you hopefully something a third party (not you or the person who made the passport) can study and compare with the True Life version they can get from you - this then means that they trust who you are because they trust the person issuing the passport checked who you are and only gave you the passport since the other info (birthday, place, citizenship etc) were entitled to, and that the passport cannot be fiddled with (affordably) and that you can't be fiddled with (affordably).
so. basically, voodoo then. I mean who really understands DNA or Iris scans or finger prints or retina scans ? who understands encryption? who understands challenge response protocols or redundent coding of information?
well, I suppose we do. But we don't work for the government, do we? so why do you believe they'd get it right?
but it is all voodoo, because basically the government likes things that sounds technical (remember ghost busters?: "back off: I'm a scientist", and "it's technical".
No, next time someone says we must have biometric NHS entitlement ID cards, point out
1/ bio-washing powerder has been shown to cause rashes in some people, so how do we know bio-metric cards wont casuse rashes? have they been tested? have the RFID readers been checked that they don't cause cancer?
2/ we havn't gone metric in the UK yet in all things (e.g. road distances, measures of beer) so why should we go metric in identity? We still have feet - we do not walk about on iambic pentameters. We have hands and measure horses with them - indeed, we have cars that are powered by horses too, even if the force is also measured in Newtons.
That will shut them up for a while.
Friday, May 16, 2008
laptop v. smartphone
so i've been traveling a lot recently and carry a v old (crusoe) based vaio small lapto p- it is about 7-8 years old and runs win ME or Linux 2.4.17:)
I also carry an HTC touch
the security folks in airports always ask me to take out the laptop - occasionalyl they dont notice it, but they never ask about the phone - the phone has a faster processor, 4 times as much memory and a faster wireless interface....and about 6 times the battery life..on the other hand it is 7 years newer (and 4 times cheaper)....
luckily, i only have to carry one charger for both:)
once again, the staff in the aircraft and airports annoyed the *** out of me by using phrases like "once again" when they havnt said anything before, and also "last remaining" when they mean "remaining" or "last"...
it took me 9 hours to get from stockholm to london last night due to the airtraffic control being down in amsterdam - distributed systems (what is the definition of a ...) hah!!!
I also carry an HTC touch
the security folks in airports always ask me to take out the laptop - occasionalyl they dont notice it, but they never ask about the phone - the phone has a faster processor, 4 times as much memory and a faster wireless interface....and about 6 times the battery life..on the other hand it is 7 years newer (and 4 times cheaper)....
luckily, i only have to carry one charger for both:)
once again, the staff in the aircraft and airports annoyed the *** out of me by using phrases like "once again" when they havnt said anything before, and also "last remaining" when they mean "remaining" or "last"...
it took me 9 hours to get from stockholm to london last night due to the airtraffic control being down in amsterdam - distributed systems (what is the definition of a ...) hah!!!
Monday, May 12, 2008
toposimilarity
Not many people know this, but if you run one of those visualisation tools
on the xen source tree, and on the AS topology of the internet,
at any point in time over the last 5 years,
the result is identical.
this forms one plank in my conclusive proof
of the non existence of Richard Dawkings
on the xen source tree, and on the AS topology of the internet,
at any point in time over the last 5 years,
the result is identical.
this forms one plank in my conclusive proof
of the non existence of Richard Dawkings
Saturday, May 10, 2008
energy saving gadgets
so i have a lot of legacy technoogy in the house which gets left on by certain small people - tvs, games consoles, hifi etc etc
so of course it'd be nice to have it all gracefully shutdown when people are not in the room - how cheaply could one combine motion sensors (say) with timers and mains adaptors that just did this?
so of course it'd be nice to have it all gracefully shutdown when people are not in the room - how cheaply could one combine motion sensors (say) with timers and mains adaptors that just did this?
physcally hierarchical/nested flash memory - matryoshka usb sticks?
so say i have a 5 year old 128M usb memory stick , and i have a 2 year old 1G and a 1 year old 8G - why can't i stack them? couldn't i "write thru" - so I plug the newsest biggest one into the USB slot and it has a microusb conenctor on the bac and i plug the middle one in there, and that has a nano-usb connector, and I plug the oldest smallest one in there:
laptop <=usb 2===>8G stick<===microusb===> 1G stick <=== nanousb===> 128M
why? trade off in write time v. capacity?
redundency and so on...
marketting - easy- just paint them with freiendly russian traditional scenes like the dolls
laptop <=usb 2===>8G stick<===microusb===> 1G stick <=== nanousb===> 128M
why? trade off in write time v. capacity?
redundency and so on...
marketting - easy- just paint them with freiendly russian traditional scenes like the dolls
Friday, May 09, 2008
shall i compare thee to a lewd cuckoo?
there i was cycling along the backs
composing a three part harmony round
with a libretto lavishly drawn from
shakespeare, anglo saxon folksong
and jazz (like to the lark,
at break of day arising
every day we sing cuckoo,
but how strange the change
from ursa major to minah-
bird brained we sing...)
and, it being a beatiful sunny may day
in fenland
I get a mouth full of greenfly...
arghhhhh...now i cannot remember
the tune
composing a three part harmony round
with a libretto lavishly drawn from
shakespeare, anglo saxon folksong
and jazz (like to the lark,
at break of day arising
every day we sing cuckoo,
but how strange the change
from ursa major to minah-
bird brained we sing...)
and, it being a beatiful sunny may day
in fenland
I get a mouth full of greenfly...
arghhhhh...now i cannot remember
the tune
Thursday, May 08, 2008
naming conventions (for research projects)
so i just posted an answer on the xen.org blog to where the name (abbreviation) xen came from - while we are there, metarouting (tim griffin's fine project to replace hand crufted routing protocol code was a local idea too...this project is not quite at the take-over-the-world stage, but it is getting there with recent heroic implementation work. A related work is mark handley (et al)'s XORP open source router project. Although the metarouting gang switched to using Quagga for some pragmatic reasons, other projects (e.g. with Lancaster) have combined xen and xorp for virtualisation of routers - indeed, many US people are trailing this work (for a change:)
also fun is david greaves' work on systems that are corect by design - see
his blog on current work on tools and methods
also fun is david greaves' work on systems that are corect by design - see
his blog on current work on tools and methods
Friday, April 25, 2008
names and power and magic, lack thereof
why is the nanoscience center on the edge of cambridge, not in the center, and why is it so big?
why does the Gates Building only have doors and windows and no white picket fence?
why is the CAPE building 40Km from the sea?
why does the Vet School no fish?
why does the Gates Building only have doors and windows and no white picket fence?
why is the CAPE building 40Km from the sea?
why does the Vet School no fish?
Tuesday, April 22, 2008
The Path to Software Adapation: Intelligent Design or Evolution, and also, Virtualiztupid
We know that there are many species of software - whenever a branch is made in the development, we get (eventually) specification (or is that a specious argument) - but the real question is: is this by design, or is it just random? Does the Xen Master play Dice? Is the Flying Spaghetti Monster Code better, or worse, than IBM's 10 lines a day of commands meant?
meanwhile, also, what is better or worse, intelligence (see the short story by Bruce Sterling about the short term survival value of intelligence) or stupidity?
virtualisation is a way to avoid making decisions (the ultimate random branch, if you like) since you just continue to run all old and new versions....however adapted they are (indeed, if enough of you do this, you effectively run all the eco-systems in history - i.e. world 0.1 alpha thru world 2.0 beta, in parallel universes (if oprah is anything to go by, at least as far as the Onion claimed today...)
so its clear that the virtualization thing is virtually stupid - it allows multiple isolated types of stupidity to co-exist, without learning from one another. This is a good thing (spreading stupidity is a Bad Idea) and a bad thing (clueful people would find easier to recognize all the stupidity if it was all isolated in one place rather than N places). Also, with remus, stupidity is now hilghly mobile and hard to eliminate with Denial of Stupidity attacks. Indeed, SANs (Stupidity Area Networks) with virtualisation mean that stupidity will come to dominate the cybersphere, if it hasn't done already. This, unfortunately is in line with many grand challenges such as Sustainable Stupidity, and Curatable Stupidity.
I am thinking of starting a project on CAS (no not compare-and-swap - Clutching At Straws) - campaign against stupidity
but I suspect I would just get stuck in dom0 an ignored by all the Guest Operating Stupids
meanwhile, also, what is better or worse, intelligence (see the short story by Bruce Sterling about the short term survival value of intelligence) or stupidity?
virtualisation is a way to avoid making decisions (the ultimate random branch, if you like) since you just continue to run all old and new versions....however adapted they are (indeed, if enough of you do this, you effectively run all the eco-systems in history - i.e. world 0.1 alpha thru world 2.0 beta, in parallel universes (if oprah is anything to go by, at least as far as the Onion claimed today...)
so its clear that the virtualization thing is virtually stupid - it allows multiple isolated types of stupidity to co-exist, without learning from one another. This is a good thing (spreading stupidity is a Bad Idea) and a bad thing (clueful people would find easier to recognize all the stupidity if it was all isolated in one place rather than N places). Also, with remus, stupidity is now hilghly mobile and hard to eliminate with Denial of Stupidity attacks. Indeed, SANs (Stupidity Area Networks) with virtualisation mean that stupidity will come to dominate the cybersphere, if it hasn't done already. This, unfortunately is in line with many grand challenges such as Sustainable Stupidity, and Curatable Stupidity.
I am thinking of starting a project on CAS (no not compare-and-swap - Clutching At Straws) - campaign against stupidity
but I suspect I would just get stuck in dom0 an ignored by all the Guest Operating Stupids
Tuesday, April 15, 2008
Virgin Neutrality is a Load of Pollocks
So the head of virgin media says net neutrality is
a load of thingummybobs
Good for him. So as anyone will say, if you run a zero sum game, you better come up trumps. So if he intends to give more to people that pay more no matter where they go to, he better be prepared to explain why he is giving less to others. An alternative model of the world is to simple give people what
their line rate indicates they should get as a proportion of any current bottleneck,
like you get (mostly) today with TCP and the current IP world. Then there is the server side - I suppose virgin (like AT&T threatened to ) are goign to ask Google and Yahoo and CNN and BBC to cough up lots otherwise they'll throttle their traffic, and oh dear, where did all their customers go....
Of course, if you want to grab headlines, then making claims based in fantasy is great, but why not have a modicum of basis for them?
How about: "Virgin will give discounts to customers whose traffic was treated worse today"...?
that might take some business off of other ISPs...
a load of thingummybobs
Good for him. So as anyone will say, if you run a zero sum game, you better come up trumps. So if he intends to give more to people that pay more no matter where they go to, he better be prepared to explain why he is giving less to others. An alternative model of the world is to simple give people what
their line rate indicates they should get as a proportion of any current bottleneck,
like you get (mostly) today with TCP and the current IP world. Then there is the server side - I suppose virgin (like AT&T threatened to ) are goign to ask Google and Yahoo and CNN and BBC to cough up lots otherwise they'll throttle their traffic, and oh dear, where did all their customers go....
Of course, if you want to grab headlines, then making claims based in fantasy is great, but why not have a modicum of basis for them?
How about: "Virgin will give discounts to customers whose traffic was treated worse today"...?
that might take some business off of other ISPs...
Tuesday, April 08, 2008
what is humanist for "thanks"?
traveling europe (as I am right now) i notice that most peole have a word for
"thanks" which derives from christian belief (thanks be to god, grazie/gracias/grace of god, or greek: EuXpharisto) - this begs the question: what did pagans and pre-christians
say? maybe nothing?
what would/should a humanist say (should they say anything?:-)
"thanks" which derives from christian belief (thanks be to god, grazie/gracias/grace of god, or greek: EuXpharisto) - this begs the question: what did pagans and pre-christians
say? maybe nothing?
what would/should a humanist say (should they say anything?:-)
Tuesday, April 01, 2008
10^10 arms, wow, thats entanglement!
so according to a recent article in memory of the BBC micro (which sold 1.5M, about 10,000 more than they expected), the ARM processor shipped its 10,000,000,000
sometime in 2008
thats pretty awesome for a small UK company...
sometime in 2008
thats pretty awesome for a small UK company...
Friday, March 28, 2008
things any good (CS) lab should do
1. encourage almost ALL phd students to go on internships to industry labs at least once and possibly twice
2. have a really wide net for visiting talks which is broad church (include industry and social aspects)
3. involve PhDs in teaching and paper reviewing
4. take students and post docs out for dinner from time to time, and to the pub a lot
5. teach phds about processes (papers, PCs, conference management systems, grant applications) viz
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~jac22/talks/jon-cfip.ppt
2. have a really wide net for visiting talks which is broad church (include industry and social aspects)
3. involve PhDs in teaching and paper reviewing
4. take students and post docs out for dinner from time to time, and to the pub a lot
5. teach phds about processes (papers, PCs, conference management systems, grant applications) viz
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~jac22/talks/jon-cfip.ppt
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