Author: Lynne

ACM, Turing and the Internet

Vint Cerf and Bob Khan got a well-deserved dinner and party in San Francisco courtesy of the ACM. A collection of Internet “who’s whos”, lots of wine and speeches, and most importantly, their coveted Turing award. This award was announced several months ago. As Vint noted in an email reply to the Internet Society a month ago (try to take notes during an awards dinner – it can’t be done), “What is most satisfying about the Turing Award is that it is the first time this award has recognized contributions to computer networking. Bob and I hope that this will open the award to recognize many others who have contributed so much to the development and continued evolution and use of the Internet.”

So congratulations to Vint and Bob. I’m sure we are all very pleased that they have been honored with the Turing Award this year. They both deserve it – their work has changed our world!

Fun Friday – Daleks, Jedi, and Vultures, Oh My!

The very latest new and improved whiter than white venture capitalist trend is (drum roll) – “The Consumer Internet”! “Every other venture capitalist one encounters in Silicon Valley now seems eager to reinvent himself as an expert who can spot hot new consumer-driven Internet ventures” writes Gary Rivlin of the New York Times. “The problem is that you’ve got all these software V.C.’s, they don’t know what to do with themselves…They say, ‘These are deals that make people a lot of money, and enterprise software is largely dead.’ So now they’ve decided they’re consumer Internet venture capitalists.” (George Zachary, Partner at Charles River Ventures).

Now, I know that you’re reading this blog while shopping online, running your RSS feeds of the latest stock news, IM’ing to a friend, VOIP’ing on a conference call with a client, and secretly watching a movie you got from a p2p site. But did you know that you are a part of the consumer Internet and that there’s money to be made off of you? Are you surprised yet? Are you holding your wallet tighter?

Daleks are fearsome creatures, indistructable, flustered by stairs, and good dustbins in a pinch. Perhaps that’s why one disappeared from storage recently. “A spokesman said: ‘There may be a black market out there for Daleks – but it’s still a strange thing to steal’.” (BBC News). So if you see something with an odd British accent saying “Exterminate”, cheer up – it may be worth $500 pounds.

Finally, for the last word on the Apple-Intel alliance (a slashdot reader) :
“I felt something, a disturbance in the network, as if a million Mac zealots cried out in horror and were suddenly silenced.”

UCSC Chancellor on Academia, Women, and Technology

Dr. Denice Denton headlined a talk at Google last night on “Leadership and Strategies for Cultural Change in a High Tech Environment”. Ms. Denton, an accomplished engineering professor, was recently appointed Chancellor of UC Santa Cruz. Articulate and involved, she didn’t throw punches on the difficulty of integrating more women and minorities into an institution with very slow processes (tenure) and conservative personal networks in a fast-paced technologic world (see “Advocates Unlock the Clubhouse at Google”).

Given the recent Summers diatribe at Harvard and the propensity of jerks and bullies to get their way (see “Girls and Science – the Hard Costs of Pushback”, Dr. Denton did tackle the “why aren’t there women in the sciences?” question, and she wasn’t afraid to point out that a grave imbalance in gender didn’t imply ipso facto that those few women there would welcome more women, since the risk of becoming “just one of many” could erode the unique position such a woman might have. So while the “only woman” or “only minority” might chair a search committee, for example, with the charter of increasing “diversity”, there isn’t a lot of incentive to the lone representing person to personally risk a loss of position and also possibly antogonize her male colleagues by championing a woman. A man, in contrast, can do this without a loss of status, because he’s arguing against others in his somewhat homogeneous group the same as he might if he were debating fantasy football picks.

Yes, I know this is just common sense. To expect a lone woman to risk her career and position to help a stranger is not reasonable (although some still do). This fear of isolation and ridicule even impacts the mentoring of younger women – I’ve found very few established women willing to speak up for their younger female colleagues. In this case, it helps to be on the business side – see “Girls Can Do Calculus and Physics and Astronomy and Look Nice!”.

Often, to be honest, I find many of these women don’t have children of their own, having sacrificed motherhood for the brotherhood of university success. I do know women in academia who have sons and daughters and are motivated for their children to do the right thing. But then we run into the “can’t get tenure because of the babytrack” complaint (see “Why Women Don’t Like IT?“). Women in business run into this same problem – see “Mompreneurs and Tech”. I wish more women had the courage to do the right thing. But I understand in an area where the Dr. Summers of the world can rant about their peculiarly bigoted beliefs and still get raises, the likelihood of the few women in academia who have survived the gauntlet championing women, tenure notwithstanding, isn’t something I’d bet the farm on.

Apple, Intel and the Price of Obsolescence

Of course, the inevitable after-the-announcement hits, with Matt Marshall’s long-awaited arrival of a new Apple Powerbook a sobering event. “But we’re feeling a bit like a fool today. That’s because the laptop arrived on our doorstep about two hours after Steve Jobs announced Apple’s shift to Intel processors. Even before we cracked open the box, our shiny new Powerbook was a legacy machine”. Such is the price of processor envy.

Matt wonders if he had just waited off, if he could have gotten five years worth of work out of it, but instead “…will officially be obsolete in two, when the new Intel-powered Powerbooks land in Apple stores. Oh sure, the laptop itself will still work fine. But chances are, all the relevant software updates we need to keep the laptop current (from both Apple and independent developers) will begin to disappear, and our Apple flag will be firmly planted in the land of the old.” So true.

Of course, the wags always have the “you never owned the machine anyway, just the use of it, so what are you complaining about” (which is somewhat incorrect as you do own the tangible hardware, and by implication permanent access to low-level software like device drivers that allow replacements, upgrades and repairs, but ignorance is bliss). They also think that five years is bogus. Well, that’s not really right either, but again, most people are pretty ignorant of the difference between the hardware and the software, and even much of the software isn’t as convulsed as one might believe. Here’s Lynne’s take on this tech:

“Well, my kids have inherited a Symmetric 375 Berkeley Unix (Symmetrix) system that is turning 20 years old, and it runs great, has all the Unix utilities, and has the best version of rogue ever. Just a few bad blocks on the disk, but we mapped those out (yes, you can fix a disk drive!).

No, these machines don’t need to be obsolete so rapidly. The bit rot is intentional (as is the broken versioning and updates). Otherwise, folks wouldn’t migrate to new software. But the hardware is actually very reliable and remarkably easy to upgrade from when I started in workstations.

Can you imagine if people couldn’t fix their cars after 3 years? Wow, GM and Ford would love that, but you’d have a rebellion on your hands!

Of course, one could argue that we don’t live, we only buy the USE of life for a time. But I would hope that becoming obsolete according to a corporation’s best interests won’t mean we all end up on “Logans Run” soon after. :-)”

D-Day – Apple-IBM Axis Collapses

Well, I figured it was happening finally. The hint was there *if* you knew where to look. Looks like nobody else twigged to the firing of those Linux developers at Intel for timing – even though I had a thoughtful discussion with an analyst just last week over that very issue and asked whether that meant Jobs was going to Intel. He said “No way” but this time I wasn’t sure he was right – he went back to check things out one more time, was guaranteed it wouldn’t happen, and then “Voila”, it did. But his mistake was talking to Apple contacts. I didn’t bother. I looked at what Intel was doing. Since I’ve dealt with Intel on the silicon side over the years with SiliconTCP, it didn’t take a lot of digging to put the pieces together.

Markoff and Lohr (NYTimes) have one of the best articles on the topic today – less hand wringing and more substance than most. But they could add one more line that would tie it up, something like:
“The real story is Apple vs. Dell. High cost factor for Dell is Windows. Mac still sells at a premium above Wintel, and the OS & developer base is open source, so Jobs is out of the Mac developer debacle and cost leveraged. And he still has Microsoft Apps like Office in the stable … for now.”

Apple may be having the hissy fit, but IBM doesn’t care. IBM doesn’t even need Apple anymore to showcase their chips given all the game console manufacturers who are using them. Apple has always been high maintenance and low volume – the worse of all sins to a processor vendor – but IBM tolerated them because of their “Hollywood” artist image. But now it turns out gaming is even more “mogul” than Macs. Who wins? Intel for one, who’s been desperate to get some Hollywood patina for years, enterprise systems and desktops being so boring.

Customers and vendors will also win – in the short run. Prices will drop and applications development should broaden, especially in leveraging open source development for the X86 more effectively. But the long run remains bleak for Apple’s desktop and laptop division. It was the only decision possible for Apple if IBM wouldn’t give them the price breaks they needed for margin. But it probably wasn’t the best decision.

Fun Friday: You are a Fluke of the Universe, But Everyone Can Google It Now

The Internet as memory is a very peculiar wraith. Entire swaths of human history are virtually absent from the search pages, while recent people, places and things thrive in overabundance. Irrelevent items, like what someone wrote on a long-dead VAX system 20 years ago suddenly pop up in a name search, as if someone found some old backup tar tapes and actually offloaded the bits into the archival dustbin. Noxious potions, irrelevencies, lies and deceits abound unopposed, because this memory is so disorganized that few can find every relevent link – much less correct the errors masquerading as facts. And even small trite embarrassing episodes from the past can suddenly appear on your Google dossier – sometimes funny, and sometimes tragic.

Stephanie Rosenbloom of the New York Times prefers to laugh – but with a purpose. Her article discussing an unflattering picture that always seems to pop up whenever her name is searched is actually illustrative of the ubiquitous and uncontrolled grasp of random bits and pieces of our lives. “If it’s damaging but it’s accurate, it’s not actionable” said John Palfrey of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School. “What if it’s extraordinarily ugly?” she asked. “Extraordinarily ugly probably doesn’t get it there – with information that’s put on the Internet, you pretty much have to assume it will be around forever” he responded. Even if you’re unhappy, you’re probably out of luck.

But what about nasty and vicious things? Rosenbloom relates the recent headache of Cecilia Barnes, who’s ex-boyfriend decided to get back at her by posting nude photos, her work phone number, and her email address on Yahoo. Apparently, Yahoo hasn’t responded to demands it be taken down. A lawsuit is pending (and Yahoo isn’t talking).

Ms. Rosenbloom talks of possible solutions, from paying listing services to gaming Google. But the fact of the matter is, the more current and open you keep your information, the better you will appear.

Open Source and Russell’s Paradox – A New Commons?

Jesus Villasante, a senior official at the European Union Commission in charge of Software Technologies in a spontaneous panel discussion on open source decided to shine a light on the lack of coordination, the influence of commercial interests, and the inability to evolve beyond current corporate paradigms. “Companies are using the potential of communities as subcontractors–the open-source community today (is a) subcontractor of American multinationals.” Mr. Villasante is completely correct in his analysis, although I doubt he will find many who will agree in either the corporate camp or in the open source camps.

Well, I do have extensive experience in this area. I co-pioneered the first Berkeley open source operating system using our own personal resources and with the support of the editor and staff of one of the most popular American technical magazines at the time – Dr. Dobbs Journal. Along with doing a complete novel port to the X86 architecture and new architectural design, we documented the porting process, kernel and architecture. We did not believe that simply reading the source was sufficient to understanding, and it required extensive documentation and open design review to provide releases that were reliable enough for researchers (much less consumers). This was the Berkeley way, and we cleaved to it with the support of the technical press.

Even with many releases, there was extensive documentation and careful attention to design trade-offs and discussion – for example, “Is it better to commit time to a patch if the Berkeley architectural goals from 1982 from Dennis Ritchie et.al. intended a new subsystem?” and “Are artifacts such as brk() wise in perpetuating so that some legacy programs can be run while impeding evolution in modularity?”. We addressed these and many other issues.

However, what we found is that various interests in the open source and business communities did not wish any new paradigms or evolution of the operating system if it required any changes to legacy applications (some suspiciously acquired). And this was the beginnings of a lot a bad blood in the Unix community.

Roomba, We’ve Waited for You All Our Lives

CNN has a delightful profile of Helen Greiner, Roboticist and Roomba inventor that is a must-read for young women in technology. “I think in the old days, robots had a perception of being kind of scary, and more science fiction than science fact. These robots are on a mission, and so are we: to bring robots into the mainstream. … We can make robots do a better job than humans in some cases.”

An admirer as an 11 year old girl of R2D2 in Star Wars, her latest consumer product (IRobot also has substantial military applications, but that’s not “consumer”) is the Roomba robotic vacuum. Imagine never having to tote around a vacuum again. The little Roomba scouts around the room, scooping up the dust and dirt, so you never have to. It’s not surprising that has sold over 1 million in two years. I’ve watched the little critter skitter around at Frys.

Fun Friday: Buckets of Bandwidth, SciFi High, and Silly Searches

First of all, my favorite search of the week from Google (search terms: NS32000 data sheet):
Jolitz Heritage – [ Diese Seite übersetzen ]
… Based on the NS32000 microprocessor, it was a portable no wait state …
In its latest incarnation, its on a huge fork mount made of sheet metal. …
jolitz.telemuse.net/news – 177k – Im Cache – Ähnliche Seiten

Wow, those first processors sure were huge!

Second, courtesy of Tom Foremski of SiliconValleyWatcher, Verizon is introducing a new service with real bandwidth:
5 Mbps down /2 Mbps up = $39
15 Mbps down /2 Mbps up = $49
30 Mbps down /5 Mbps up = $199

Sure beats the 128kbps that most SBC DSL users get stuck with. Of course, is it available in the heart of Silicon Valley, the land of innovation? Of course not. But Tom hasn’t given up hope: “I’m still trying to figure out how to use my friend as my new ISP. He’s in a canyon about 10 miles from me, so wireless won’t work. Maybe he’ll let me put my servers in his tool shed…”

Finally, Edward Rothstein of the NYTimes wrote a very thorough article on the new Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame in Seattle. It even includes a display of robots from various science-fiction movies and television shows like “Lost in Space” and “Star Wars”. So if you couldn’t get all the robots in Bots (see Fun Friday: How Many Robots Can You Name?), visit the museum that Paul Allen’s money built – I’m sure you’ll spot a few familiar faces.

The Robots of Silicon Valley

There’s been such a nice response to the Bots video by Ben Jolitz and Rebecca Jolitz (see Fun Friday: How Many Robots Can You Name?). Some folks just like watching a little movie about robots made by two kids who love them. Others saw it as just one of the ways GenY’s can actualize their interests in an increasingly anti-science and anti-creative world. And finally, most folks recognized some robot or toy from their childhood or profession – we had a lot of NASA viewers who loved the “Mars with retractable lever arm” scene (hint why funny – did the little Mars rover have a lever arm?).

So in rereading East Coast, West Coast: Where Will We See the Future of “Robot Valley by Dr. Pete Markiewicz, where he argues (correctly) that a Hollywood styled “Matrix” is misleading to real robotics work, which relies on realtime systems programming and operation, I found his east coast argument well-honed, but missing the “big picture”, in both realtime design (and yes, we have a bit of that experience over the years) and current media trends.

Fortunately, realtime programming, board design, and minimalism in operating systems is still alive and kicking. Ben Jolitz is currently on the robotics team at his local high school, is knowledgeable in programming and systems, and has participated in a number of competitions. His younger sister Rebecca Jolitz has become accomplished in media production, and also has a serious science and astronomy interest. Finally, they both avail themselves of talks and information that abound here in Silicon Valley and from NASA. There are tremendous resources available to those who ask.

Pioneers are always few. Believe me – I know, given my involvement in doing the first open source Berkeley Unix operating system for the masses. When we started out at Berkeley so many years ago working on an X86 version *no one* believed in Unix except as an expensive customized solution, especially Intel. It is very different nowadays, isn’t it?

The fascination with massive multiplayer gaming and the Internet with the masses today stems from it becoming a mature market – it is no longer an emerging one. So look to the GenY’s of tomorrow – the ones who go to the talks and enter science fairs and even (yes, even) create stories and movies about robots as they dream of tomorrow. Like rare roses in a field of weeds, you might find them hard to spot, but they are definitely there. You just have to look harder, and believe.