Friday 4 July 2008, 12:42 PM
Do the maths: HAL 9000 by 2018?
There's a new science in town: connectomics. A specialised form of neuroanatomy, connectomics is in the business of mapping out the brain's networks – in particular, how the various functional modules already identified connect to each other. While this has always been of interest to brain researchers, it's only recently that the IT's been good enough to embark on seriously detailed mapping – and fascinating new results are already turning up.
For example, work at Indiana University, University of Lausanne, Switzerland, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland, and Harvard Medical School has uncovered a "superhub", a structure between the two halves of the brain where many networks converge, and that's active all the time. Exactly what it's doing and what happens when it goes wrong are two very interesting questions.
Connectomics has a higher aim, to produce a complete map of the brain's networks akin to the sequenced information from the human genome projects. That's ambitious, but by combining new extremely high resolution scanning technologies with computational analysis that pulls structures out of the data it seems entirely realisable.
Meanwhile, other intensive data crunching is cogitating away with IBM's Blue Brain project, where the team has built "a rat-scale cortical model (55 million neurons, 442 billion synapses) in 8TB memory of a 32,768-processor BlueGene/L" That's a long way from the ten billion or so neurons of the human brain – 180 times smaller, in fact – but in Moore's Law terms, that's around ten years. And the researchers are most definitely looking ahead: "Our long-term goals are to develop novel brain-like cortex size computing architectures along with appropriate programming paradigms, and to evolve C2 into a cortex-like universal computational platform that integrates and operationalizes existing quantitative neuroscientific data to build simulation of large networks of spiking neurons and a powerful learning machine: a cognitive computer" (from their report Anatomy of a Cortical Simulator - pdf).
You know what that means. Doesn't matter if you don't - it will know..
A lot of that work is going on in the same places as the connectomics research – so no prizes for guessing where that's all heading. We may have missed the starting gun, but the race to produce a full working model of the human brain has most certainly started.
Thursday 3 July 2008, 2:52 PM
The GoDaddy saga continues...
I've been trying to sort out an incident with registrar GoDaddy since last week. I blogged on Tuesday and Thursday about the situation, but in a nutshell I found out that I was registered as the owner of the travel-getaways.com site. This was news to me.
The owner of a legitimate domain contacted me to let me know that travel-getaways.com was pulling content from his site, and displaying it on travel-getaways.com. He did a WHOIS lookup, discovered I was registered as the site owner, and so got into contact writh me through the ZDNet.co.uk community email.
Since I found out that somebody used my name, with my altered work details, to register a dodgy site, I've been emailing and speaking on the phone with the registrar company GoDaddy almost daily.
The good news is that the owner of the website that travel-getaways.com was nicking content from managed to convince the hosting service, Host Gator, to pull the plug on travel-getaways.com. I am pleased about that. My feeling about content is that you should always attribute where you get information from.
Meanwhile, I've been bound up in red tape trying to convince GoDaddy firstly that the details they have for me are fake, and secondly that I am who I say I am.
More on this later...
Thursday 3 July 2008, 11:34 AM
Coming Soon: Dialogue Box Series 4
Believe it or not (and we have trouble believing it ourselves) Dialogue Box has been recommissioned for a fourth series — and we didn't have to resort to Alan Partridge-style babbling about 'Monkey tennis' to get the nod!
We filmed the first episode yesterday, and without giving too much away, I can reveal that we shed (rather bright and exciting) new light on a subject we covered in the first series last year. Check the site on Monday for the results, once our video chaps have worked their post-production magic.
What else is in store? Again, keeping the cards suitably close to the chest, we'll be looking at wireless networking, the latest mobile technology and remote system management, among other things — all with the usual DB mixture of tech savvy, dodgy humour and references to going down the pub.
Tuesday 1 July 2008, 4:23 PM
Microsoft's new licensing may not fly
Microsoft's new Select Plus licensing scheme is an intriguing modification to an increasingly problematic arrangement: the exchange of large amounts of enterprise money for the right to use software you've been paying for for years.
Setting a licensing scheme is like flying a plane. Too low a price for a fixed volume – Windows has saturated the market – and you lose money without gaining anything. That's like reducing your airspeed to a dangerously low level. Too high a price, and you drive users away: although Windows has a near-monopoly on the enterprise desktop, the environment around it is evolving rapidly and there are many more options this year than last. That's where your wings drop off.
Microsoft's great worry must be what pilots call coffin corner – a particular combination of speed and altitude where you can't speed up or slow down without dropping out of the sky. Too fast, and turbulence disrupts airflow over the wings, causing a catastrophic loss of lift. The nose goes down, control surfaces stop working and you're faced with an engaging set of problems. Too slow, and you stall: nose goes up, tail goes down, control surfaces stop working and you slide bottom-first towards the ground. Again, you're likely to spill your in-flight refreshment without having to worry about the dry cleaning bill afterwards.
So it is with Windows licensing. The one question Microsoft doesn't want anyone asking is “What are we getting for our money?”. The company is quite open about this – the Select Plus deal is designed around what's known as inertia marketing: sign someone up for a repeating deal and then hope they forget about it. It works in publishing and telecoms; why not for enterprise licensing? Microsoft even list this as a user benefit - “Perpetual agreement. Keep renewals at the IT budget level rather than the boardroom level.”
Inertia marketing rarely benefits the customer, and this is no exception. Microsoft benefits by having a constant fixed income that's high enough to keep the company in Xbox development funds but low enough that nobody spending the money will ask questions. The enterprise IT department's job in all this, thinks Microsoft, is to conspire in not rocking the boat. In cash-strapped times, this is not how any enterprise IT head is likely to think.
Don't take Microsoft's word for it. Plug the Select Plus into your spreadsheets and run through a few years – then ask whether you're getting the best deal in exchange for that bottom line. Then try some other numbers for some other ways of working, and see how happy you are to keep the Redmond Express in the air. A little turbulence may be good for their souls.
Tuesday 1 July 2008, 3:49 PM
IT guy busted over insider trading
An IT professional has been fined £85,000 for insider trading, Management Today reports.
The fine was imposed by the Financial Services Authority on John Shevlin, who used to work at the Body Shop. He was found to have used his position to log into private emails and access insider information.
The FSA said that it couldn't directly prove Shevlin was guilty, but that there was "compelling circumstantial evidence" to indicate he was.
Shevlin borrowed £29,000 to take a short position over 80,000 Body Shop shares, just before a profit warning was issued. Shevlin made just under £40,000 in a day.
In the words of Management Today:
"[Shevlin] claimed that he’d just made a savvy prediction based on the over-valued share price. But despite this expertise, he’d only ever made two trades before in his life – both in the Body Shop. And this was a huge bet: he borrowed more than his annual salary, took a position worth twice as much as his entire net assets, and accounted for a quarter of all the shares traded that day. Plus he did it all in his own name, in his own company, the day before a profit warning. Even the FSA couldn’t miss an open goal like that..."
Tuesday 1 July 2008, 3:42 PM
Netgear launches open-source Wi-Fi router
There's been a long history of unauthorised open source Wi-Fi on Linksys' WRT54G router. Now Netgear's jumping in with an official open source router.
There's nothing too unusual about Netgear's KWGR614 and WGR614L routers. They're 802.11g devices, and they are based on Linux, like a host of other routers based on the Broadcom chipset. That's the same as in Linksys's WRT54G - in 2003 activists spotted the use of Linux and demanded source code from Linksys, under the GPL licence. Linksys complied, which led to a lot of open source activity, described here and here .
But that was imposed on Linksys. Netgear seems to be getting proactive, setting up its own site, MyOpenRouter to encourage developers to work on the WGR614L. THere are already a couple of alternative firmware builds, including Tomato, DD-WRT and an independent build which adds WPA2 encryption and mulitple SSIDs for guest access.
Tuesday 1 July 2008, 10:46 AM
Microsoft blogger defends standards expertise
Attending a session at the Red Hat conference in Boston recently, I got to witness a Microsoft exec brave, or with enough front, to step into what can only be seen as enemy territory for any Redmondite.
Microsoft national technology officer Stuart McKee was there to take part in a panel a debate about OOXML – probably one of the most divisive issues his employer has been involved in a while – and it has been involved in a few.
During the panel debate McKee said:
"We don't have a standards office. We didn't have a standards department in the company. We found ourselves so far down the path of the standardisation process with no knowledge. We don't have a standards office. We didn't have a standards department in the company."
And:
"I think the one thing that we would acknowledge and that we were frustrated with is that, by the time we realised what was going on and the competitive environment that was underway, we were late and there was a lot of catch-up."
This kind of admission was surprising to hear in some ways but not in others. Microsoft doesn't exactly have a strong-pedigree of playing well with others, let alone the intricacies of standards processes.
Anyway – the idea that Microsoft was completely unprepared for the furore around OOXML was believable to a degree but not having any standards expertise didn't quite ring true – nevertheless that is what McKee said and our job is to report those kinds of comments.
However one of his colleagues at Microsoft – Jason Matusow - found the comments odd, obviously blaming inaccuracies in reporting, given that he actually works on standards and interoperability for the organisation.
He had this to say about the story:
"More than eight years ago, a corporate standards organization was formed in the company to help product teams be better participants in standards orgs, to make more strategic decisions about what and where to contribute specifications, and how to deal with the legal issues surrounding standards bodies (there is an entire specialization in the legal field for this kind of work believe it or not).
Currently, the standards organization at Microsoft has more than 25 full-time employees in it and is focused not only on standards, but how the company thinks about interoperability and standards as a whole. What's more, because we are active in more than 150 standards orgs at any one time, and more than 400 overall - we have more than 600 product team and field employees who have been internally certified for standards work (and most of them are active in some committee or other). Our products have supported literally more than 10,000 standards and we have contributed specifications in the areas of development languages, runtimes, networking protocols, systems management, hardware, mobility, document formats, security,...the list goes on. "
I think the thing to talk about here – is how much expertise did Microsoft have around standards pre-OOXML. I guess it doesn't make sense to think they were as bad at is as McKee claims – his excuse for why they played "catch-up" so hard and alienated so many standards bodies in the process around claims of vote-rigging – but although Microsoft has obviously been involved in standards processes for 20 years, that doesn't translate to them being expert in it or having a specific department.
At the end of the day, my role as a reporter is to report what was said – and a Microsoft spokesperson did say that the company "found ourselves so far down the path of the standardisation process with no knowledge." While this may not be an accurate reflection of the true-state of Microsoft – the comments were made.
Monday 30 June 2008, 12:55 PM
With Gates gone, will Microsoft open up?
Amongst the speculation about what Microsoft will be like after Bill Gates' final retirement, some are wondering whether the company might become more friendly to open source.
Of course, the question - like Bill's retirement - is overstated. He's still chairman of the board, and you can bet the board will listen to him.
In large part though, according to this ZDnet blog from Paula Rooney, the answer will be about personalities. Bill Gates built the company by harvesting license revenue, but open source proponents believe we are in a different world now, which will take different people to appreciate.
No one expects Steve Ballmer to suddenly "get" open source, but other Microsoft people have increasing influence.
Scott Guthrie seems more aware of the benefits - as you'd expect from the head of Microsoft's Developer Division. He's already shown some .NET source code, and helped enable Moonlight, the open source implementation of Microsoft's Silverlight.
However, the real key to Microsoft seeing the benefits of open source is probably Ray Ozzie, currently in Gates' old seat as chief architect.
What does Ozzie think? According to my colleage Mary Jo Foley, Ozzie says open source is a more serious competitor than Google, and "much more potentially disruptive” to Microsoft’s business.
Ozzie's response is to make Microsoft's closed-source products integrate better with open source products from elsewhere.
That shows a certain level of awareness, and the open source community isn't going to complain about that, but it doesn't look like any sudden U-turns are in the offing.
Friday 27 June 2008, 4:39 PM
ICANN sites hijacked?
Just a day after ICANN opened up domain rules, a Turkish group of hackers has messed with some of the Internet body's sites, according to a report on Zone-H.
The report says that the NetDevilz group redirected visitors to "icann.net" and other ICANN sites to a hosting space that carried the following message:
"You think that you control the domains but you don’t! Everybody knows wrong. We control the domains including ICANN! Don’t you believe us?"
In addition to targeting ICANN, which looks after administration of top-level domains, the hackers also went after sites belonging to IANA, which oversees IP addresses and DNS root management, Zone-H said.
But it doesn't look like the organisations' main URLS, &mdash: "icann.org" and "iana.org" — were affected, just less alternatives such as "icann.com" and "iana.com". Which makes you wonder: Once businesses are able to use any domain suffix, as approved yesterday, won't that give hackers even more scope for hijackers?
Friday 27 June 2008, 4:34 PM
Is Dell being paid to be green?
Following from an earlier post around Dell's claims this week that it had achieved 80 PLUS Gold power supply certification for a server product, I have done a bit more digging (well, reading really)
After learning on the 80 PLUS web site, that the efficiency certification organisation has provided around $5m of incentives to IT companies to help them "transition to 80 PluS certified power supplies", I was slightly confused as to why tech companies – usually not short of a few quid – might require this kind of financial backing.
Anyone who is familiar with the economics of the US power generation market will know the answer right away – but for everyone else, the answer boils down to the fact that US utility companies don't want their customers using any more power.
Yep, that might sound counterintuitive or even counter-capitalist, but the fact is that the massive costs involved in building new power plants in the US means that the utility companies are very concerned about keeping up with demand. The biggest threat to their business model is not failing to find future growth opportunities, like most of other markets, but failing to service existing customers and the power cuts and shortages which would result.
"Our goal is to avoid the capital cost of building new power plants," said Greg Whiting, manager for energy conservation talking to IDG News Service earlier this year. "Encouraging companies to conserve power makes more sense than for us to keep spending to add marginal capacity."
Whiting made the comments at a meeting that took place in San Francisco in March this year where 19 US utility companies met to explore ways of cutting US energy consumption. This IDG article gives an excellent overview of the issue and what was discussed at the conference.
Circling back to the initial release from Dell, I have to say that while any moves to make servers and datacentres more efficient is a good thing, making out as if something that you are more or less paid to do by another company, has been done out of sheer altruism is disingenuous.
Yes, its good that Dell has complied with the 80 PLUS scheme, but it, along with the likes of HP and others, should also be upfront about the fact that power companies are very keen for them to do this – and indeed are giving subsidies to make it happen – and not try and make out that it is done solely to benefit customers or save the planet.
I have approached Dell for comment on whether they actually received any "incentives" from the utility companies behind 80 PLUS and if so how much are we talking but so far I have received much in the way of an answer – apart from this statement which doesn't really say much at all:
"Right now, our focus is passing this value back to the customer through energy-efficient technology and innovation. We’re also exploring ways to drive additional awareness of energy efficiency through customer empowerment and engagement initiatives. Stay tuned."
And:
"We’re committed to designing the world’s most energy-efficient technology, which extends well beyond our participation in this programme. 80 PLUS is a very good yardstick, and helps customers and manufacturers We aren’t releasing specific amounts, but stay tuned for more details about ways we’re working with 80 PLUS to drive value and help customers achieve their environmental goals."
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