research is wasteful

reading about the government's reaction to the recession (well at least in its own (our) coffers), we can see that it is highly likely they will cut funding to research over the next year(s).

there are two ways to do this - both wrong - one is to spread the reduced funding thinner, the other is to concentrate funding in fewer (elite) places (actualyl 50% of the money goes to the top 5 institutes anyhow).

But what they should do is spend more. Research is wasteful, very very much like evolution - but necessity is the mother of invention and (just like in evolutonary systems) the impact of a big recession might make people more creative - more creativity does lead to more potential outputs, but it also leads to LESS predictability - we don't know what will fit the future landscape (i.e. what is "selected" as most fit, is not something you can do a priori, but a posteriori, only).

No doubt they will get this wrong, which is sad, as doubling the UK's governemt research funding would still leave it at under 2% of the bank bailout last year, and would be likely to yield more profit by about an order of magnitude.

Unfortunately, we are not ruled by people that have a clue.

clown computing

its so much more fun, and easier to market than the cloud

send in the clowns

i've looked at clowns from both sides now

clown atlas, using the Grimaldi internet coordination system based on
empirical data from Big Foot

CRU/Dr Phil Jones are a bigger pain than maybe they realize

I' reasonably well trained in natural sciences and computing. So I usually trust scientists to do their job as well as they can. In medicine, there's a whole bunch of due process before they loose a new procedure or drug on the world, and even if the big Pharma might be a bit dodgy (and most are fine), the process stops rediculous things happening too often (unless politicians get in the loop).

WHen I or a close family member or friend get ill, I do read the literature (the tech. literature, not just online freebie dodgy internet health sites) to figure out what is what - when i spent a week in hospital with metal in my leg, a couple of years after my father died in a hospital from an MRSA infection, I read all the latest papers on that - I didn't find it too hard to catch up and it mattered to me - but I assume, most of the time , that the latest practice is ok....so I don't have to read the 1 paper published per scientist per month in the world (it.d make me, on average, the 2nd reader only on average).

This is true in most areas where there's a large scale deployment of some piece of engineering (planes, trains, automobiles) too.

So even though I could get my head around a lot of the work, I assume I don't have to.

So the consensus on climate change has been fairly overwealmingly behind the anthropgenic global warming explanation, leading to many government initiatives and international schemes to try to get people, society, industry, nations etc to reduce carbon emmissions. Seemed ok to me - the bit I like was the sane stuff which looks at being, simply, more sustainable, anyhow, as that seems like a good way to conduct oneself - not having had a car for 45 years and having got 3 kids to/thru school on bikes- having an efficient house, etc - I feel ok - then I feel like I should carbon offset my flights (I used to do more, but I still, as an academic, go all over the place for project meetings, conferences, PC meetings etc etc etc)....

so now, because of the CRU fiasco (not their fault the email was leaked, but it is there fault the data isn't avaialble and in good clean shape) I now have to read through the mountains of literature on this topic to try to figure out what is sane and what isn't.

You know what is scary? In the 21st century, there is absolutely no way to tell what is authoritative .

I know what/who is serious in my own area. In biomedical area, I can usually guess to some extent. But in this area, it is completely impossible to determine

so not only do I have to read the literature, it looks like I might need to go out, and audit where the data comes from, then get ahold of some of the data, and then do my own analysis.

that is rediculous, but without doing it, I really don't see a way to have any confidence in the statements by AGW proponents, or by climate skeptics.
I am sure most of them are genunine. But none of them has a clue how to instill a sense of public understanding of why we should listen

this does not make me a climate skeptic (not at all) - it just means that for the first time, I'm looking at an entire body of so-called knowledge, and while I can grok the concepts, until I can grep the raw data files, I am basically saying that this is a complete crock!

mandy cuts his knows to spite his feys

1.
Mandelson said: "We know that universities have a vital contribution to our economic growth, so we are not going to undermine them. We are asking for savings of less than 5% and we expect universities to make these in a way that minimises the impact on teaching and students. I am confident they will."

2.
Mandelson said: "I am an arts graduate myself. We don't dictate to universities which courses they put on. They tailor courses to meet demand. We want universities to play to their strengths, but we also want to keep this country civilised."

since the universities contribute net profit to the UK, cutting them decreases the UKs GDP. so cutting them ANY percent will have an impact both on students and on everyone else.

of course, being an Arts graduate, Mandelson is probably not numerate to understand this.

doh

4 colour map problem solved....

...automatically -
turns out just to be a
bunch of
corner cases

:-)

now on to fermat's.................................................................................

Big Scary Software - python runtime, filesystems, etc

Mort (now at Nottingham) pointed us at some educational videos in the last couple of days

1.The Giant Interpreter Loop that python runtime uses is not really something that admits of concurrency, but also has a lot of weirdnes about it...
(sorry - as per comment - GIL = Global Interpreter Lock, not Giant Incense Lamp)

2. Making sure things really are written to stable storage or disk, as we used to call it, is really not quite as simple (or obvious) as you might think

3. not even on windows

I guess these should be like public health warnings, a bit like the German and French governments recent IE warnings

cloud computing is so noughties

now we are in the pre-teen era of the 21st century,
we should concentrate on Blue Sky research...

no more sensor nets (wastes batteries - very unsistainably)

no more MANETs (dont work)

no more opportunistic or p2p networks (capitalism is so much better than anarchy)

no more economics + computing (computing is dismal enough without addign an entire dismal other "science" to it)

no more green computing (the answer is 1 bit - turn it off:)

Digital Communications II Progress by 27.11.2009

QoS, Int-serv, Diff-serv, RSVP, and Traffic Engineering.
Last lecture, monday, 30 nov. wrapup.

trying to understand the world of 2009

just went through what I read in trying to get a handle on just what is going on in 2009 - see
my 2009 reading list - note this is not compelte - i've only listed things I liked:)

Friday, November 13, 2009 Digital Communications II Progress by 20.11.2009

Switching & Sharing done now

next week - intserv, diffser, traffic

Digital Communications II Progress by 13.11.200

Friday 13th - we havn't got quite as far as I thought - so we've done Scheduling (and Queue Management), and made a start on Switching.

Next week, must finish switching AND do contention networks.

Digital Communications II Progress by 6.11.2009

This week, should have finished
error control (sequence numbers, retransmit/rtt timer estimation)
and
flow control (at least intro to open&closed loop)

as with last week (routing)
these topics come up in exam questions frequently.

Digital Communications II Progress by 1.11.2009

This week I'm doing routing - I've updated the material so please check the new version of slides - DAR + DV/LS is a bit tidier (I hope) but if you spot errata, let me know!

lots of stuff for supervisions and exam questions now.

Digital Communications II Progress by 23.10.2009

We have now covered the material in Section Two of the course

Part 2 - Philosphy/Design

Systems, lecture 5
Layering, lecture 6
Implementation, lecture 7
Alphabet Soup, lecture 8

So I talked about user land and kernel implementations, concurrency and OS problems, and finally about what IP and TCP (and ICMP packets look like

A very nice reference for this last bit is W RIch Steven's fine books
TCP/IP Illustrated volumes 1 (operations of protocols) and 2 (walkthru of code!)

Digital Communications II Progress by 16.10.2009

By the end of this week, I will have covered the historical review of
telephone nets (circuit switched, voice networks), basic Internet technology (packet switched, datagram networks) reminders, and the comparison with B-ISDN and Asynchronous Transfer Mode (Cell Switched, virtual circuit) Networks.

From Monday 19th, til end of next week, I'll be covering
systems design in general, layered protocol designs, specifically, a quick
overview of different implementation strategies, and then a very quick tour through the immensely thick alphabet soup of protocols - all of Part II (hopefully!) on
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/teaching/0910/DigiCommII/slides/index.html

google wave

bbc article about google wave says "how e-mail would look if it were invented today" - actually it looks how Lotus Notes looked about 20 years ago.

what a lot of people using cr**ppy internet email today don't realize is that early systems for collaboration (Notes, but even Microsoft Exchange) started from a model of sharing documents and sharing editing of documents, and included facilities for managing groups, instant comment/annotation, privacy controls, and multimedia, and predate most of the internet wave of stuff - its amusing that google can rely on the lack of colective memory of the past, and claim they are inventing the future, when really all they've done is re-package an old old old idea (vanevar bush, rip, c.f.)

indeed, the backend for early systems like notes was a database, which meant search/index was optimised already so its even closer to google than you think...

foundational computer science research "at risk"

we had a visit from the EPSRC's ICT team last week - for those people who don't know, ICT is Information and Communications Technology, wherein CS (including theory and systems and HCI and all the rest) is lumped alongside radio and optical and other low level engineering things, and is a term favoured by eurocrats who don't see why silos are bad, and incorrectly labelled silos are even worse.

Anyhow during the conversation between computer lab academics and EPSRC it was fairly clear that they didn't think it was important that the top ranked computer science department in the UK (and equal top ranked deparment in cambridge, the top ranked university in europe) currently had no EPSRC (i.e. UK government basic research) funding for its theory faculty.

Someone in the EPSRC is either asleep at the wheel, or else they have become slaves to the blairite mantras of industrial relevance. what they don't seem to get is that if the EPSRC only funds short term "industrial relevant" work, why would we need the EPSRC? we could go to the EU.

What is depressing about their taking the moral low-ground like this is that we wil lstart to go to the European Research Council (ERC) to get money first (i.e. the better places will try that) and this wil lstart a vicious cycle of driving EPSRC funded projects ever more short term, making my projection ever more likely...

the rot must be stopped...

new job title for programmers..

I think we should call them
software artistes
and systems analysts could become
computational magicians

patents, monopolies and innovation

I'm just reading Heroes of Invention: Technology, Liberalism and British Identity, 1750-1914, by Christine McLeod (CUP), and was thinking about
why we have patents and market failureshttp://www.cipil.law.cam.ac.uk/

[aside: this was because I attended an excellent workshiop run by the
Centre for Intellectual Property and Information Lawin Cambridge earlier in the week, where we were discussing the nature of the invetor, the invention and the inventive step. ]

The market is supposed to deliver the best for consumer and producer (Adam Smith etc)
but it requires efficient (information rich) competition, Market failures are usually indicated by monopoly behaviour (price hiking) which can include cartels.
Markets are claimed to be good for social welfare...
Innovation is supposed to be protected by patents, and a large patent count is supposed to indicate innovation is happening.
Innovation is supposed to be good for social welfare..

What is happening these days (and was happening in the 1600-1700 period) was a lot of patents and a lot of monopolies or near monopolies. In the 17th century, this was regarded very badly and parliament put big changes in place....now, what is happening is big companies are smarter - by analogy with high functioning autistics, who can emulate empathy by running a purely cognitive model of how they should feel, rather than actually feeling it, large companies run a "model" of how a competing company in a market should behave (as close to the line as they can get away with, occasionally overstepping it) - the idea is exemplified by Cisco, whose CEO has allegedly said that they always want to own the middle 50% of the market - i.e. neither be an innovator, nor truly work in the purely marginal business (bottom feeding?) of cheap and cheerful devices - similar observations could probably be made of microsoft and intel - they
tolerate the existence of low end and very high end, but only when its a small part of the market -
they use this to price as high as possible without appearing to have market failure.

they engage in generating as many patents as possible, as close to the line of
obviousness or inaaplicability as can be allowed, to give the appearance of being innovative without the reality.

this also puts a chill on innovation.

innovation often happens in computing related areas in government sponsored labs (same is often true in bio-medical in fact) and then is "absorbed" magically into these large organisations....typically by hiring of PhDs -

what universities should do is charge a LARGE finders fee for PhDs placed in companies.
what patent offices should do is have a revocation on patents that are not exploited with a VERY large revocation fee. the revocation interval should be set according to aggressive norms of the sector. revoked patents are put in the public domain.

Where do you want your Go To to go to, today, sir?

maybe, we should ask what happened to the "Come From" idea? is this google?

why is #storm >> #planetlab

so if I wanted to develop an internet scale ap, why wouldn't I buy time on storm instead of Amazon EC2 or planetlab? eh? eh?