Category: News & Opinion

On Robotic Fish

~ rbonini

I was reading this weeks New Scientist ( the print edition, mind you) and this story  about what the US Navy’s Office of Naval Research is doing caught my eye:

AGILE robotic fish that look like the real thing are being developed to act as government spies.

The article goes onto say that the fish will have cameras and communicate with each other using sonar.

To anyone that has read Michael Crichton’s Prey, this sounds suspiciously like a multi-agent system, albeit one that uses physical agents rather than computer simulated ones.

Wikipeedia has this to say:

The exact nature of the agents is a matter of some controversy. They are sometimes claimed to be autonomous. For example a household floor cleaning robot can be autonomous in that it is dependent on a human operator only to start it up. On the other hand, in practice, all agents are under active human supervision. Furthermore, the more important the activities of the agent are to humans, the more supervision that they receive. In fact, autonomy is seldom desired. Instead interdependent systems are needed.

[…]

MAS systems are also referred to as “self-organized systems” as they tend to find the best solution for their problems “without intervention”.

[…]

The main feature which is achieved when developing MAS systems, if they work, is flexibility, since a MAS system can be added to, modified and reconstructed, without the need for detailed rewriting of the application. These systems also tend to be rapidly self-recovering and failure proof, usually due to the heavy redundancy of components and the self managed features, referred to, above.

Although we’re not likely to see these become evolving, man-eating piranhas, it is something to keep an eye on (if you’ve read the book, you’ll know where I’m coming from).

And it demonstrates a physical application of  this technology that, while the agents are not strictly independent, they are not exactly predictable either.

At least, that is the way I understand it.

Data: Mine or Theirs?

~ rbonini

Although I’m writing this under the fallout of  Scoble-Facebook, I don’t think the issue of who owns your data is either confined only to Digital identity or has been very well thought out.

First, a roundup of the various reactions:

It’s not about data portability. It’s about trust.

Offline, my friends and I share a mutual connection. Maybe it’s around work, maybe it’s around our kids or something in our past. Whatever it is, they’re my friend because they know something about me beyond what’s easily accessible to others. Keyword here is mutual. I know a bit about them too. Their relationship with me is unique as compared to their relationship with others.

…

Online, those lines are blurred. For what I would guess is at least 4,500 of the 5,000 “friends” Robert Scoble has on Facebook, he is the equivalent of a magazine publisher and you are his subscriber base/audience. He says it’s mutual and that’s the beauty of the social and connected web, but he only cares about you when you put something on the table that he’s interested in. It’s not about you. Yet, he’s “sitting” right next to your real friends, getting the same information about you that you’re sharing with them. If he takes that information and abuses it, however un- or good-intentioned, it serves you both right.

…

Robert Scoble valued his relationship with Plaxo more than he valued his relationship with his “friends,” otherwise he would have posted to them what he was doing with an experimental, alpha-quality and untested script before he did it…or he wouldn’t have done it at all.

Judi Sohn

I think there are two questions here. The first is whether users should be able to extract their data [including social graph data] from one service and import it into another. I personally believe the answer is Yes and this philosophy underlies what we’ve been working on at Windows Live and specifically the team I’m on which is responsible for the social graph contacts platform.

Dare Obasanjo

Then there is the oft-cited  post by Paul Buchheit (the guy who created Gmail).

Now I’m not on Facebook et al for a reason: data, in the case of a person,  is that person. Whereas data for iTunes is essentially  the signals sent to your sound card. Se the difference

Is it important to guard those things? Yes, or course. At the end of the day, its all you are left with if everything goes to hell: Your sense of self and identity, and your friends ( real friends, that is).

So we essentially have two options:

  1. Manage that data ourselves in a way that gives complete and utter control over every aspect of things
  2. Give our data over to a less than trustworthy service that essentially controls who you are, your identity ( on- and off-line) and who your freinds are and what your realtionship is with them

I’ll take option one any day of the week. Why? Becuase of control. It is all about control.

Plaxo may or may not keep your data after you opt-out ( i think its the former rather than the latter). Facebook has the awesome power of wiping out very single trace of you from its universe with a simple mouse-click. Add a hundred and one other web services that suck your data out of Google, Hotmail and the like.

There is a missing element in the above situations. Find it yet? And its not trust. Its control. And I mean, complete and utter control.

At least Twitter gives you more granular control( in terms of message recipients)  and has a proper API.

Better yet, Open ID, while somewhat flawed, is a brilliant idea insofar as you have a digital identity provided and vouchsafed by a trusted source ( AOL, for example). This blog is my digital identity ( since WP supports Open ID).  I can decide what to do with that identity, what to reveal, what to password protect. If I move on to from one blog to another, I can export all my posts and import them else where.

In short I have complete control of that Open ID identity (short of running my own webserver).

So because I have control I can never be in a Scoble snafu like that ( And I don’t care for the fact that Scoble was pressing FB’s buttons on purpose – he gave up his control over that data and he knew it).

In a  sense, its the MS DOS command line all over again. And  loss of control is like letting Vista hide the RUN command and the task manager and tickle itself silly with crashes.

iPhone Price Cut – Economics at Work

~ rbonini

I just stumbled upon this article in Reason Magazine ( be sure to read the rest of the article):

Sure, it’s good economics—even if it’s bad PR, Apple did manage to sell 1 million iPhones in 74 days-but is it fair? Is it just? To find out, we need look no farther than question posed by rubber bracelets everywhere: WWJD? Not What Would Jobs Do?, of course, since we already know: he’d give in to the whiners and offer $100 credits good for Apple products in the future.

The parable of the workers in the vineyard is the Bible’s final word on this point, and takes a much harder line than Steve Jobs. Jesus tells the story of a group of workers looking for employment. A few are hired in the morning for one denarius. As the day drags on, more and more workers were hired, with the last batch brought to the field only at the eleventh hour. Then it comes time to cash out:

The workers who were hired about the eleventh hour came and each received a denarius. So when those came who were hired first, they expected to receive more. But each one of them also received a denarius. When they received it, they began to grumble against the landowner. ‘These men who were hired last worked only one hour,’ they said, ‘and you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden of the work and the heat of the day.’

“But he answered one of them, ‘Friend, I am not being unfair to you. Didn’t you agree to work for a denarius? Take your pay and go. I want to give the man who was hired last the same as I gave you. Don’t I have the right to do what I want with my own money?”

As one writer put it: “if you’re still upset about ‘paying too much’ for your iPhone, take it up with the man upstairs.”

Or maybe this is all just an extraordinarily elaborate PR strategy after all. Consider a customer we’ll call “Katherine.” She would never wait in line for a gadget. She’s just not quite geeky/status-seeky enough. And she doesn’t track consumer electronics prices, nor does she browse in Best Buy or the Apple store for fun. But thanks to the hullabaloo about the price drop, she now knows that Apple phones are “cheap.” Hard to imagine the fact would have penetrated her consciousness so quickly or so thoroughly as it has without a controversy to reinforce the message.

Perhaps Steve Jobs did have the parable of the workers in the vineyard in mind after all. After all, the tale wraps up with that famous phrase, certainly applicable to iPhone prices today: “So the last will be first, and the first will be last.”

Subtle Hints

~ rbonini

BBC blogger Bill Thompson has just blasted electronic voting machines due to the inability of manufacturers to put adequate security on them. He titled his post “The Ghost in the Voting Machine”.

IF you remember correctly this is a paraphrasing of an expression used by Dr. Lanning in iRobot. He said that the Ghost in The Machine was/were random fragments of code that would allow machines to develop consciousness. Now how’s that thought: A voting machine with a conscience, or is that a contradiction in terms?

Subtle hint, or what?

Windows Home Server Updates

~ rbonini ~ 1 Comment

Well, here’s another update.

The extra  1GB RAM is in and is working its magic on server performance (2Gb in total) .

Next, I’ve got to choose a TV tuner card (details here). And then there is SageTv to install and configure.

I also hear that Diskeeper 2007 has a WHS edition.

Diskeeper automatically keeps all of the hard disks (both internal and external) on your home server defragmented to optimise the speed and performance of the server. Unlike the standard Disk Defragmenter application included in Windows Home Server (and other Windows SKUs), Diskeeper runs as a service in WHS, and continually works on defragmenting your disks whilst the server is idle. Access the server, Diskeeper stops. Server idle? Diskeeper gets back to work so there’s no noticable performance hit whilst it’s running. They call it Invisitaksing.

Sweet. I checked the disks yesterday and most had more than 30% file fragmentation.

 I wrote a quick Vb console app to defrag all the drives automatically (using defrag.exe and the task scheduler), but I’m still testing it and I’ll post the code when I’m done. (its a stop gap, I know 🙂 ). So I’m desperate for Diskeeper 2007 to be RTM’d ( that’s Released To Manufacturing).

The homeserver.com domains are being registered. I just checked and swapped my domain over ( thanks to this reminder ).

And we have estimate retail pricing for WHS. Its a rumor that has yet to be confirmed.

I’m not sure weather to belive the £150 price tag. On the one had its rather cheap given the fact that Vista Home Premium is going for £135 from amazon.co.uk ( Home Basic: £79). On the other hand, it makes perfect sense since this is a product targeted at home users and should be in the same price range. On second thoughts, it also makes sense since people who buy WHS off the shelf most likely have spend money already building their server and won’t baulk at the price tag.

Update to the Update: Philip Churchill of the Ms Home Server blog suggests that it’ll go for £88.74 here in the UK.

Cheeky question time: if you’ve built a home server either for yourself or someone else, does that make you eligible for OEM prices? 🙂

Twist and Turn

~ rbonini

I think I’ll point you to a BBC op-ed piece that talks about the new technology of spintronics (lo-and-behold, there is a Wikipedia article. Honestly, is there anything that is not in that wiki? But I digress).

Quote:

“If you think about the spin of a particle, such as an electron, it can point up or down or at any superposition of the two; partially up or partially down,” said Professor Awschalom.

Each of these different “superpositions” can represent an almost infinite number of combinations of ones and zeros.

“You can store an almost infinite number of bits of information in one particle space,” he added.

This almost limitless number of possibilities would also pave the way for advanced computer processing, such as is needed in quantum computing.

“The spin of a particle is a very natural particle for quantum information processing,” said Professor Awschalom.

 

I’m used to reading about major conflicts between classical and Quantum physics, but can anyone give me more info about the “superpositions” part of this theory – I’m having trouble getting my head around it?

This is the explanation from Wikipedia:

Spintronics is the ability to change or influence the rotation of an electron.

Electrons have the basic properties of spin, charge, and mass. That the electron has superposition (being everywhere) at the same time, where theory states you can only know certain values but not simultaneously, one pair is momentum and position, and the other is energy and time. Electrons have 2 spin states +spin up and -spin down which are usually found in paired electrons. No two electrons can occupy the same quantum state. Spin up and spin down states of fermions have different energies depending on whether or not the spin states are aligned with the magnetic field or not. Electrons absorb photons quantum energy to change valence orbits, and they lose spin coherence by colliding with mutually resonant photons frequencies causing the electron to spin flip by energy transfer through mutual spin-orbit coupling and photon emission.

 

I’m still having trouble getting this (the superposition article in Wikipedia isn’t much help either).

Open Source at Microsoft

~ rbonini

A contradiction in Terms? Well, no. But I can’t blame you for thinking it.

Port25, Microsoft’s open source blog, is worth subscribing to because of posts like this:

Today, Microsoft has published 175 projects on CodePlex, we have written a pair of open licenses that are under a page in length and over the 500-project mark in adoption as others in the community have decided to use them

As Microsoft’s engagement with open source grows, we have to move from being trailblazers to being road-builders. When you’re blazing a trail, organization, bureaucracy, and majority rule are a burden. In the beginning, a passionate group of people with strongly held beliefs and the will to persevere in the face of doubts and doubters is what it’s all about.

Never thought I’d see the day when this was corporate strategy at Microsoft.

In my view this about-face has come about because of a change in the environment that Microsoft operates in.

Think of it. Sun completely open sourced Solaris. The rise of the blog,  the wiki and the Twitter (perhaps not in that order, but humor me) has lead to an increasingly networked community where people’s calls for change can gain plenty of traction. And if Microsoft wasn’t going to do something about them, others would – and did. Think of Mozilla Firefox, Thunderbird and Open Office – or even Linux.

Secondly, Microsoft had a huge pool of untapped resources in the form of techies who had a great deal of experience in Microsoft products and blogged about it. I mean what better to find out what gripes (or ideas, for that matter) people had than by reading their blogs. And Microsoft could always hire the best ones.

And finally, the perception that Microsoft was opening up and actively engaging with the community has done wonders to its once-flagging reputation.

So while Microsoft may not be on the road to open sourcing its flagship products (Windows, office, Visual and Expression Studio), it is opening up.

PS3 Firmware Update

~ rbonini ~ 2 Comments

I’m not lucky enough to own a PS3 yet, but the Firmware updates are coming thick and fast. Version 1.9 has been released. it follows 1.81 and 1.82, both from last month. I’ve never seen updates come out so fast for such a “new” machine.

Sony has embraced the digital age and is racing to catch up with Microsoft and its Xbox Live service.

Not only that, but they are actively taking feedback from the public through Playstation.Blog.

All I can say is that this round of The Console Wars will be fought with Value Added Content over Networks, suggested  by Loyal Gamers intent on the world domination of their console.  And I don’t mean the Wii 🙂 .

Lets Face It

~ rbonini

Om Malik takes a look at Facebook histeria:

Take Bay Partners as an example. A sedate venture fund that typically invests in semiconductor companies and infrastructure start-ups has started a new effort that invests exclusively in Facebook applications. The right applicants can get anywhere from $25,000 to $250,000 as an investment for their applications.

The collateral of this project, imaginatively dubbed App Factory, is interesting, cringe-worthy reading filled with clichés like “application entrepreneurs” and “affect adoption, virality, and usage.” Here is just a nugget of wisdom from the press release announcing this new funding strategy. 

 A fully baked business model is also not a requirement, as long as there are reasonable theories and approaches that can be explored together.

Putting my newly acquired Hebrew Yiddish skills to use, I say, Oy-vey!

Are we looking at another dot com bubble?

Shel Isreal asks the same question, in connection to Ning:

But Michael Arrington says that it’s first external financing round was $44 million and that the company’s post-money value is $214  million. This scares me.  It scares me because I cannot conceive of any possible argument that this company is worth nearly a quarter billion dollars. Even considering the value of Marc’s personal brand, the upside expectation seems to me to defy reality.

I am a survivor of the Great Dotcom Bubble. I remember hearing company valuations that seemed silly or worse to me, and I recall being shouted at because “I just didn’t get it.” What I did get was bubble splatter all over my nice PR guy suit, and then a nice long rest from work.

The Ning valuation scares me. I just don’t get it. I hope someone else does

Well? Are We?

Update:  AppFactory Q&A here

My Take on DRM

~ rbonini

OK, DRM is the ugly duckling of technology. No one likes it. And the reason is that it comes between us and our media.

Now I don’t mean coming between you and sharing your library over the Internet. That’s clearly a violation of copyright, among rather a lot else.  For the uninitiated in this argument, Scott Adams explains:

But obviously there has to be a limit. After I published my first best-selling book, The Dilbert Principle, within days it had been illegally scanned and was widely available on the Internet for free. Technically speaking, it wasn’t theft. But I still lost something. I (and my publisher) lost the ability to decide if, when, and how to publish as an e-book. You can’t compete with “free and immediate.”

From a legal standpoint, taking a creator’s right to control distribution of his art is not “theft.” It’s just “taking something that used to legally belong to someone else and making it your own.”

 

Fair enough? Ok.

However when media is bought (DVD’s, CD’s) its ours to watch in any way we see fit. usually this means popping a DVD into the drive to watch, either on your PC or HDTV.

For music I generally rip all my CD’s the moment I get them and keep them on my server. that way I can listen to my tracks from any TV within my house. I don’t do sharing (Scott Adams and his theory of cognitive dissonance to the contrary).

My point is that we should be able to do the same with DVD’s. Let me rip my collection to my server and watch them on any network PC.

Ahh, I hear you say, there is no guarantee that said DVD’s and music won’t find their way on to the Internet. True. This gets to the meat of my argument ,err, post.

DRM is too restrictive in the sense that it prevents even legitimate use of DVD’s. Lets change DRM from a content-oriented perspective to a network- oriented perspective. DRM should be focused on ensuring that content that has been ripped for legitimate use does not find its way out the home network.

Content owners fail to distinguish between ripping for legitimate use and ripping with malicious intent.

To implement such a network-oriented DRM, an arbitrary standard is required. The standard cannot be biased to  individual Studio’s or Record Labels.

The standard should define

  • a technical means of ensuring that copyrighted data is identified as it travels through the network
  • a technical means of determining the ultimate destination of packets of copyrighted data as they are requested over a network
  • a technical means of ensuring that copyrighted data is stopped either at the gateway or at its source (see above)
  • a technical means of identifying data across the various formats in general use

As far as an actual implementation of such a system, the technology is already there. Microsoft’s WMA format already supports allowing media to play only when there is a license installed. The licensing system simply has to be extended to cover the whole network.

How about a licensing server, then? The receiving media player simply checks the the packets of data and queries the server to ensure that its allowed to play the file/packet.

I’m sure Linksys and the rest of the router manufacturers will get in on the game and build checking routines into their gateways and routers.

As far as determining the destination at the beginning of a file copy operation, its up to Microsoft and Apple to implement this at the OS level.

Once the means to ensure that the spirit of the law is enforced is in place, then we can think about a law change (even here in the UK DVD ripping is a bit of a gray area).