New languages

The idea of using existing languages (in particular C and C++) for massively parallel computing is doomed: These languages are inherently sequential and rely on a flat shared memory, which is very far from what massively parallel machines look like. Sure, you can use libraries called from C or C++, and you can even program these libraries in something that superficially resembles C, but the fact is that C and related languages are hopelessly inadequate for the task.

So we need languages that move away from languages with implicit sequential dependencies through updates to a shared state towards languages that do not have shared state and where the only sequential dependencies are producer-consumer dependencies. This means that you don't have traditional for-loops, as these over-specify a sequence on iterations of the loops. Instead, you have for-all constructs that allows the "iterations" to be done in any order or even at the same time. And to replace a for loop that, say, adds up elements in an array or other collection, you have "reduce" constructs that do this in parallel.

You might think of map-reduce, but it goes further than that. The proper reference is NESL.

Irfanview

This image viewer and editor is one of the first things I download when I or one in my family gets a Windows PC. Personally, I don't use Windows much myself anymore, but Irfanview is one of the few programs I miss.

Mutation

"Miscopied genes" is sort of the definition of mutation, so it should be no surprise that this is behind human evolution (including intelligence). The interesting bits are that plausible specific genes have been pin-pointed and approximate dates for the mutations found.

Abstractions

IMO, another problem with "traditional" ways to teach programming to kids is that the teachers want the programs to be about real-world problems. While this is realistic and can motivate some students, it also adds another layer of complexity: Abstracting a real-world problem to a level that allows solution on a computer. So I think the students should initially work on problems that do not require an abstraction step. This can either be by not pretending at all that the problems have anything to do with real life or by working in a domain that is already abstracted using an abstraction that the students know well already: Numbers. For example, the data domain can be simple integers and a grid of pixels that can be turned on and off individually and problems can be of the form: Make a program that makes checker-board pattern on the screen. Pixels should be big enough that you can see each individual pixel, so you can better see what goes wrong when something does. Also, make it easy to read the value of a pixel on the screen -- a feature that was found on most 80's home computers, but which is complicated or impossible to do in many modern graphics libraries.

How to teach programming to kids

Many of the efforts to teach programming to kids has suffered from the desire to allow the kids to make cool stuff (animations etc.) happen on their screens within a few minutes after teaching starts. This is supposedly to motivate the kids to go on exploring their tools.

But in order to get this stuff on the screen so quickly, the tools that are used do a lot of things under the hood that the kids have no control of or understanding of. It is a bit like thinking you can learn electronics by plugging together two black boxes to make a radio. The kids can see the cause and effect (if I put together these boxes, sound comes out of one of them), but they have no understanding of why this happens.

So, instead, the kids should use extremely simple languages where every minute step is explicit. It might take a while before they can make something "cool", but they will understand what happens when they do.

In Denmark ...

... we have towns called "Tarm" (intestine) and "Lem" (a slang word for penis). These have not considered changing their names. There is also "Kværkeby" (strangling town), "Mørke" (darkness) and "Ringe" (inferior). English-speakers might find "Middelfart" amusing.

Fond memories

I'm nowhere near London this weekend, otherwise I would have come. Had I known about it a few weeks ago, I might have arranged a trip. Oh, well.

I agree that the 6502 took a bit of getting used to, if you wanted to program in assembler. But the 6502 in the BBC was quite fast, so it was worth it. And the BASIC on the BBC was far ahead of BASICs on contemporary machines, both in terms of features and speed -- and that even though the BBC used 32-bit integers while the rest nearly all used 16-bit integers.

A few years ago, I had the students for my compiler class write a BASIC compiler. It targeted MIPS (as that is the architecture they were familiar with after the architecture course) and it didn't have nearly all the features of BBC BASIC. But the students thought it a fun exercise.

Not real steganography

"Real" steganography is hiding a message in an already constructed text or picture in a way that does not obviously change that text or picture. What is described is a form of cryptography.

Text steganography could, for example, be by varying the amount of space between words to encode a hidden message: On the surface, the text is unaltered and looks perfectly natural, but there is a message hidden. If you actually have to construct a message specifically to encode the message, it is not really steganography -- it is just low-density cryptography similar to texts where the initial letters of the words encode a message or texts where the length of the words encode digits (like "How I wish I could recollect pi. "Eureka!" cried the great inventor: Christmas pudding, Christmas pie, is the problem's very centre"). The challenge of these is to make the text seem natural, while it has to obey non-trivial constraints. Real steganography should have no such constraints, but be able to encode any text (or picture) to hide a message.

Species?

There have been a lot of controversy over whether Homo Sapiens and Neanderthals could (and did) interbreed or not. The opinions range from "not possible" over "sterile offspring (like mules)" to "Some European human characteristics are inherited from interbreeding with Neanderthals".

Which is true I can't say. I'm inclined towards the "sterile offspring" theory, since AFAIK genetic analysis of Sapiens and Neanderthal DNA have not shown any difference in European, African and Asian DNA that could be explained by genetic material inherited from Neanderthals.

But it is equally obvious that speciation is a gradual process, so there will in the past have been differently-looking hominids that could interbreed so hybrids appeared. It is only when groups have been isoated long enough that interbreeding stops being possible. There are theories that state that early Sapiens at some point got nearly extinct, which reduced the gene pool sufficiently to prevent viable interbreeding with other hominids and that all present humans are descendants of this small group (which may have numbered only a few hundred individuals).

How this affects the possibility of the skeletons in question being a separate species or not, I can't say.

Move to ARM

While I agree with the comments that say that you can't conclude anything from the student project, it makes very good sense for Apple to move to ARM for their laptops and desktop computers:

1. They can share low-level code with IOS.

2. They can reduce power-use, which was the main stated reason for the previous move (to x86).

3. They can run IOS applications natively on laptops and desktops.

4. They can make their own SoC, which prevents people from installing MacOS X on non-Apple machines.

I think reason 4 may be the most compelling for Apple, as they have (almost) always been unhappy about clones and about people running MacOS on their cheap PCs.

Games

I agree with David that a Minecraft-like game based on Lego would be an obvious step. Lego didn't have much success with its MMORPG, but something closer to Minecraft would have been both a lot closer to the original Lego philosophy and probably a bigger success. Now that Minecraft has that market more or less carved out, there may not be as much room for a Lego variant as would be the case if Lego had done something like it earlier. But it could still work.

Ho hum

The list is, indeed, not very exciting, and I agree with nearly every objection stated above. For example, TVs with built-in Internet technology sounds to me a lot like TVs with built-in VHS or DVD players. And while ultrabooks look nice, there is nothing much new here.

What I find more exciting in 2011 is the spread of non-Wintel technology to laptop, desktop and servers. We may finally see an end to the de-facto Wintel monopoly.

And the gradual replacement of LCD with newer screen technologies (LED, Mirasol, ...) is also a thing to look for.

Finally, the return of the hobby computer (in the form of Raspberry Pi) might be a more important thread than any of the above -- even if it didn't make CES.

iPhone and Android?

Surely these platforms should be considered as well? And what about browser games? Some of them actually cost money to play (in the full version), so you could calculate the sales of these too.

Or is it unfair to compare a game that you can buy on Android Market or App Store for $1 to a console or PC game that costs $20 or more?

What to teach?

No kids today need to learn how to _use_ a computer -- most do that even before they start school. So if ICT teaching has to make any sense, it should be about something else.

Programming is one such thing. But it should not be programming animations or games using some fancy GUI point-and-click interface. That may be a lot of fun, but they don't really learn much from that that they haven't already learned by playing Sims, Minecraft or other games. I agree with the Raspberry Pi people that you need to go down to a lower level where you essentially direct the flow of every bit rather than have most things happening under the hood: You don't learn to read a map by using a GPS navigator, and the same applied here: If the essentials are automated so you only have to select between a set of preprogrammed behaviours, you don't understand what goes on. Sure, the end results can be pretty convincing: With GPS navigation, you can get quickly and surely to your destination, and with Scratch and similar game-builders, you can quickly get coloured icons moving and interacting on the screen. But both decouples you from understanding what navigation or programming is really about.

Hardware-wise Raspberry Pi is much more than needed, and programming it on a low level only gets you so far: Graphics and sound are done by complex and opaque graphics and sound processors, and even Linux gets between you and the machine, so you are not really in touch with the hardware. So you really need to emulate a simpler machine and programming model if you want to teach programming at a level of understanding higher than cut-paste-modify.

So forget about graphics and sound to begin with and start with the basics: Bits and numbers. And then show how you can build more complex data from simpler components and how programming is very much a game of defining data structures and making decisions based on structured decomposition and inspection of data. Don't try to motivate by solving "real world" problems. That just adds the complication of abstracting concrete problems to abstract data, which, while an important issue, is something you should not learn until you are thoroughly familiar with manipulating abstract data. (Abstract in the sense of not having an inherent "meaning").

Programming isn't the only thing to teach in ICT. There are all the non-technical aspects such as ICT in society, ethics, law, and so on. But programming -- especially at a low level -- imparts systematic problem analysis and solving and how to work in uncompromising environments, which are skills that are useful even outside ICT.

Programming

As other people have mentioned, the BASIC in C64 was terrible -- no real support for graphics or sound except through PEEK and POKE. Also, the way the screen memory was organised also made use of colour a bitch: The colour attributes were for blocks of 8x8 or 4x8 pixels instead of individual pixels. In contrast, the BBC Micro had an excellent BASIC with full graphics and sound support and you could set the colour properties of individual pixels. The latter meant that colour modes required more memory for similar screen resolutions, but the freedom of controlling individual pixels was liberating. And when you wanted to use assembler, there was no need to POKE the instruction codes into memory -- you could write in textual assembler with names labels etc. There was even a Pascal compiler written in BASIC that used this to compile to machine language. And while the BBC didn't have hardware sprites (except the cursor, which was used in some games as a sprite), the 6502 in the BBC was clocked at twice the speed of the 6510 in the C64, so things were pretty smooth anyway.

C16 and Plus/4

The Plus/4 was not a cut-down C64. It was a more advanced machine with a much improved BASIC interpreter and better graphics (121 different colours, IIRC). A "smaller brother", the C16 was supposed to replace the Vic20. I won a C16 at a competition at a computer fair, but since I already had a BBC B, it saw little use and was loaned out to a cousin and eventually sold.

Neither were very successful, partly due to lack of software compared to C64 and partly because they did not represent sufficient advance over the C64. 121 colours is all very well, but not enough to compensate for the lack of software. It would take something like the Amiga to do so.

Phone?

Why doesn't Sony allow the 3G-enabled version to be used as a phone? It has all the required hardware (excepting, possibly, a microphone), so it should not be that hard to do. And it would avoid you having to carry two devices. It might not be as good a phone as a dedicated device, but not a terrible one either.

Air and Space Museum

I saw Enterprise at the Air and Space Museum near Dulles Airport in Washington this summer. But I guess they have been offered one of the shuttles that actually went to space (Atlantis, maybe), so they won't have room for Enterprise anymore.

3D printing?

I wonder if it would make sense to do 3D printing of aluminium: Sprinkle a thin layer of fine aluminium dust and melt the places that need to be joined, repeat. Then shake off excess dust and polish.

The melting point of aluminium is 660 degrees celcius, which is lower than most forms of glass, so it should not be considerably harder than 3D printing glass, which is done. A problem might be thermal conductivity (which may melt the surrounding aluminium dust), but if the heat is localised enough, it should be doable. It might be necessary to do several sweeps over the surface so neighbouring "dots" are not melted immediately after each other.

A aluminium 3D printer can easily be adjusted to make different case shapes. It might be slower than milling (though this may still take hours if the article is to be believed), but the increased flexibility might outweigh the disadvantages. I can also imagine a 3D printer being cheaper than a robot milling machine.

Another advantage of 3D printing is that you might use multiple materials: You can, for example, make sections of glass interspersed with aluminium (given their similar melting points). You would need a glass that bonds well to aluminium and which has similar thermal expansion properties, but such exist. The main problem with this is that the excess dust would have to be sorted if it is to be reused. Note that glass sintered from dust as described above will not be clear, though it may be translucent.

Obsession with thinness

I think the obsession to make tablets as thin as possible is a bit exaggerated: Once you get below 10-12mm, I see little need to reduce thickness further -- weight becomes more of an issue. Very thin cases make the devices less stiff (unless you use weight to reinforce them), so there will be a trade off when you get below a certain thickness.

That said, I agree that SSD drives seems like a better choice for mobile devices, especially since the prices are now comparable.

Intellectual rights

A problem might be that, unlike most other creative persons, programmers rarely keep the intellectual property rights to their work. I don't know British law, but in Danish law, programming is an explicit exception to the rule that creators automatically keep the rights to their work.

Another problem might be the success of free open-source software: If people give the software away, it surely can't be that hard to make it in the first place? Very few musicians or novelists give their work away fro free. An exception might be the increasing success of webcomics, which are often free to read online, but where the creators earn by selling printed books and merchandise (and a bit through banner ads).

360 degrees

I don't see this as waste, as most fittings for fluorescent tubes include mirrors to direct the light.

The main disadvantage is that you need larger fittings than for sources that are naturally directed. Conversely, you need larger fittings for directed sources if you want 360 degree illumination.

But I guess that it will be relatively easy to roll the plasma sheet into a tube to get 360 degree illumination. So there is no clear disadvantage unless you need a very focused spotlight, in which case you will need lenses.

Inevitable design?

I see the black-bezel rectangle as more or less the inevitable minimal design for a tablet computer: If all interaction is through a touch screen, you want the screen to take up as much of the front as you can, which inevitably leads to a thin bezel with little or no features. Black is the obvious colour, as it is darker than the screen (which is why most TVs use a black frame). And you want to keep the design thin for practical reasons, so this is obvious too. The rest are tiny details such as whether to surround the black bezel with a metal rim, how rounded the corners are and so on. The inevitability is clear from the future-vision designs both from 2001: A Space Odyssey and from the newspaper tablet video from the 1980s, which both use essentially the same design as the iPad.

So the question is really if it should be possible to claim rights on a design that follows the function so directly? I would agree that if you _added_ something significant to the inevitable minimal design, then you could claim rights to it. But can you claim rights to removing details? Apple could with good right say that the navigation wheel on the original iPad was a significant design invention. But a rectangle with a slightly rounded black bezel? Even the slate tablets used in schools prior to WW2 looked like that (though most used unpainted wooden frames). And before those, wax tablets had similar design (see, for example, http://www.lawrensnest.com/images/rac9005a.jpg).

Tablets?

One reason for the slow PC sales is that a lot of people have chosen to buy a tablet instead of upgrading their desktop or laptop PC.

Also, there is very little you can do on a new desktop/laptop that you can't do on a 2-year old ditto, so there is less incentive to upgrade every (other) year than there used to be.

Any Acorns left at ARM?

When Tudor leaves, are there any people left at ARM who worked at Acorn?

"Amazon quietly acquires voice capability"

There is nothing quiet about voice technology.

Pure speculation

I see little scientific value in such speculations, as the assumptions made are often rather arbitrary or chosen to support the desired conclusion. (If the calculations don't match expectations, change the assumptions until they do).

The only way the Fermi paradox can be resolved is if hard evidence of alien civilisations are found. Otherwise, there are all sorts of more or less plausible explanations why we haven't found any evidence and it doesn't get us anywhere calculating probabilities some of those -- there will always be other explanations.

First, we take Manhattan.

Then, we take Berlin!

Supply and demand

Expensive as Scandium is today, I can imagine it will increase in price if more companies use it. Especially in the quantities needed for aircraft. So now might be a time to buy as much as you can afford at present market prices and sell it later, when the price goes through the roof.

How much this will affect its viability for aircraft building is hard to say. Raw material cost is probably not the major cost of modern aircraft.

Cloud

In addition to web servers, cloud servers is also a possible application.

As I understand it ...

... there is a direct channel for transferring processor state from one to the other, so switching is pretty fast. As for knowing when to switch, I can imagine that the OS monitors processes: If a process running on the A15 spends most time being idle, the OS switches the task to the A7 and if there is little or no idle time while running on the A7, it switches the task to the A15.

Purer state?

The most likely transformation of himself into another state would be death. You can argue that this is, indeed, a purer state. It would also give him a good shot at earning a Darwin Award.

But, hey, if we don't call people silly for believing in one or several gods, why should we call them silly for believing they can turn crap into gold?

Machine learning

I agree that CSII in all likelyhood uses a predefined set of rules to solve the puzzle, but it shouldn't be that hard to use standard AI tricks like alpha-beta search or machine learning to do so.

There are six faces that can turn either clockwise or anticlockwise, which makes for 12 possible beginning moves and 11 possible moves for each move after that (since you don't want to reverse your previous move). Slightly less, actually, as you don't want to turn a face three times clockwise in a row and if you turn the opposite face, you don't want to go back to turning the front face (you might as well finish turning the front face first). So the branching factor is around 10. With 20 deep that is solveable with alpha-beta search in less than an hour. Less if you can find a good scoring function for move ordering.

Machine learning such as genetic programming could also work. This would in the beginning be really inefficient but may converge to a really fast solver later.

J. Doe?

How many John or Jane Does are there in the list?

Cause and effect

You should not be too quick to conclude that the repetitive nature of modern TV shows is a consequence of inattentive viewers. You could as well argue that inattentive viewers are a consequence of repetitive TV shows that do not require the full attention of the viewer.

As for TV ads, people have used the ad breaks for other things as long as they have existed: Going to the loo, fetching drinks and snacks, reading the paper, doing crosswords and all sorts of other things. Surfing the web is just one more thing to do while ignoring the ads. The main difference is that people are more likely to continue doing this after the ad break ends. But the blame for that can only be laid on the TV content producers: If it was interesting enough to watch, people would stop surfing when the show starts again.

Another problem is that ad breaks are too long. If they were shorter, people would be less likely to find something else to do while waiting for the ad breaks to end. The ad producers can also help: If ads are more entertaining, people wouldn't mind so much seeing them. And ads can be entertaining. Otherwise, we would not have TV shows like "commercial breakdown". And maybe it is time to move the ads away from the TV media. Newspapers these days have far fewer ads than they did earlier, because ads have moved to other media, mostly the Internet. Most newspaper publishers have accepted this and moved a lot of their ads to their online news services. TV companies can do that too: Make interesting web sites that supplement the TV channels and host most of the ads.

Secrets only work as long as they are ...

... secret.

That is the basic tenet in the idea that security by obscurity doesn't work. But one of the purposes of security is to keep secrets, so you can argue that if you can't keep your security measures secret, you can't keep any data secret. So in some sense security _is_ obscurity.

What you don't want is that leakage of one secret will reveal them all. If your sole defence is a secret (weak) encryption method, leakage of this _will_ reveal all your secrets. In the same way, leaking one encryption key (to a strong encryption) should not reveal all your secrets. So you need to make a diagram of dependencies: What information will reveal what other information. And if a small set of informations will reveal a large fraction of the remaining information, your security just isn't good enough.

It depends

A CS graduate may in some cases have no programming experience outside the mandatory homework and may even choose electives that has as little actual coding as possible. These will, in most cases, be terrible programmers and self-taught bedroom coders will be much better. But the majority of CS graduates either work as part-time programmers alongside their studies, have (often ambitious) hobby programming projects or contribute to open source. These will be excellent programmers having both practical experience and theory in place and for anything non-trivial, they can code circles around 99% of the self-taught programmers. The last 1% is really hard to find, though.

You can compare it to music students who only practice music enough to pass their courses. They will typically be worse performers than self-taught musicians who practice every day and play in clubs at night. But few self-taught musicians will be able to transpose a piece of music to a different key, follow the directions of a conductor and arrange orchestral works.

As for university fees, I think the UK is shooting itself in the foot with this. Students wishing a M.Sc. in CS can go to one of the many English-language CS degrees that are free to all EU citizens. For example, the one her at the University of Copenhagen.

I'll be impressed when ....

... they use the research to create a #1 hit song. Or, even better, one like Clarke described in "The Ultimate Melody" in "Tales from the White Hart". Until then, it is all so much hot air.

Wake-up call

Maybe when the US and Europe pay more for obvious patents to Asia than they get, companies will start lobbying for a revision of the international patent system.

But by that time it may be too late: The Asian economies might veto such changes when they are no longer in their favour.

So I would say: Do it now. You will regret it otherwise.

Rewinding

I think HP is trying to rewind all the major decisions made by Apotheker so a new CEO can make better decisions. The message seems to be "Forget what we said and did in the last year and listen to what we say and do from now on".

Probably not a bad move, but a lot of damage has already been done.

Being a CEO is a real treat: If the company goes well (no matter if it is to your credit or not), you get a huge bonus, and if you fuck up the company so badly that they fire you, you get an even huger severance pay. Basically, there is no way you can lose.

2010

Apart from Tatooine and Heliconia, 2010: The Odyssey Continues also shows planets in a binary system (after Jupiter is turned into a miniature star). Also "The World of Two Suns" in Elfquest and, to go further back, The King in Yellow from 1895:

Along the shore the cloud waves break,

The twin suns sink beneath the lake,

The shadows lengthen

In Carcosa.

Strange is the night where black stars rise,

And strange moons circle through the skies

But stranger still is

Lost Carcosa.

Some may recognize some of the lines from the Toyah song "The Packt". :-)

Emulation

There have been x86 emulators for ARM since the PC-emulator for the Acorn Archimedes, which came out around 1988 (+/- 1 year). On an 8MHz ARM2, the emulator could run DOS applications at around the same speed as a 4MHz 8086 PC -- some thing slower, some things faster.

I expect more or less the same to be true today -- on an X MHz ARM you can emulate an X/2 MHz x86 (32-bit) processor. A combination of running OS calls natively and JIT-compiling x86 code will allow this.

If MS won't make such an emulator, I'm sure third parties will.