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Network neutrality: The cell network
From Newsforge, Today’s cell phone system argues for retaining network neutrality.
Consider the closed, anti-innovation system that is the cell phone network. Do you want the Internet to be like that? Is that best solution for the rest of the economy and society in general?
James Glass (not his real name) is the owner of a company currently trying to navigate the minefield of running a third-party service on the cell phone networks. He is writing the article pseudonymously because the cell phone companies have the power and freedom to crush his company by blocking it from their networks.
The Future of Computing
The Future of Computing: From mainframes to microblades, farewell to GHz CPUs provides a nice overview of trends in CPU and system design. I have a couple of comments to add.
When in late 1950s computers became fast enough to relieve some of the coding burden from the shoulders of programmers high level languages were developed such as Ada, Algol, Fortran and C. While sacrificing code efficiency big time these high level languages allowed us to write code faster and thus extract more productivity gains from computers.
As time passed we kept sacrificing software performance in favor of developer productivity gains first by adopting object-oriented languages and more recently settling with garbage-collected memory, runtime interpreted languages and ‘managed’ execution. It is these “developer productivity” gains that kept the pressure on hardware developers to come up with faster and faster performing processors. So one may say that part of the reason why we ended up with gigahertz-fast CPUs was “dumb” (lazy, uneducated, expensive — pick your favorite epithet) developers.
Although true in some sense, the term developer productivity is a bit of a misnomer here. High(er) level tools and design methodologies do not just save developer time they make modern software possible. I seriously doubt that creating a web browser or any of the other huge pieces of software that we use everyday in assembly language is a tractable problem. Even if the problem could be brute forced, the resulting software would likely have a far higher defect rate than current software.
In the long term it makes little sense to burden CPU with DVD playback or SSL encryption. These and similar tasks should and with time will be handled completely by dedicated hardware that is going to be far more efficient (power and performance-wise) than CPU.
This completely ignores one of the most important aspects of fast general purpose CPUs, flexibility. For instance, a computer which relies on a MPEG decoder for video playback becomes useless when content is provided in another format. Continuing with this example, innovation in the area of video codecs would also become very difficult.
Despite the nitpicks, there is lot of good information in the article.
Ottawa, OLS and the war museum
Arrived in Ottawa today for OLS. Managed to get in early enough to make it over to the new (2005?) Canadian War Museum. Unfortunately, there was only two hours left before close. Two hours was not nearly long enough to do the museum justice. Even if you have been to the previous war museum you should go again. The new building is gorgeous and there is lot more stuff to look at. If you like to read everything in a museum, you need to budget a LOT more than two hours.
For those new to Ottawa, walking to the war museum from OLS will take under 30 minutes.
Rocketboom on net neutrality
Today I decided to checkout Rocketboom for the first time. This site seems to get a lot of press so I figured I should at least take a look. Browsing the archives I found this piece on net neutrality. It is perhaps a bit over the top but it is interesting nonetheless.
Science funding in Canada
During the latest episode of CBC’s excellent national science program Quirks and Quarks (podcast) there was mention of www.sciencefunding.ca. There are some interesting documents available on that site which discuss how science is funded in Canada. The letter in this document (2005) gives some background.
Also, this week’s Quirks and Quarks is the 30th anniversary show. This would be a great show to listen to if you are new to Quirks and Quarks.
The copyright loby (more of the same)
Just before the last federal election the world found out how cozy some federal politicians involved in copyright reform were with special interest groups. Despite the change of government, it appears little has changed.
CRIA’s Lobby Effort: The Untold Story
Michael Geist deserves a lot of credit for not letting this drop.
Transcripts and audio versions of Geist’s Hart House 2006 lecture entitled Our own creative land: Cultural Monopoly and the Trouble with Copyright are available if you are interested in Canadian copyright reform.
Elephants Dream
Wow.
Elephants Dream is a short movie that was created using only free software. Even the models and textures produced for the movie have been made available. It is being called the first open-source movie.
I had no idea that animation of this quality was possible with open-source tools.
There is even a full HD (1920×1080) MPEG4 version available if you happen to have the processing power required to decode it in real time.
RedHat summit videos
Red Hat has posted videos of the keynotes from the Red Hat summit in Nashville. So far, I have only watched two of the three videos. Both were excellent.
Eben Moglen: Discusses the philosophical and political ideas behind free software. He argues that free software is about allowing individual creativity. If you don’t ‘get’ free software you need to watch this speech.
Cory Doctorow: Provides a bit of history on copyright change and how the incumbent industries always try to stop progress. Lots of good DRM discussion as well.
There is no future in which bits will be harder to copy than they are today … Any business model that based on the idea that bits will be harder to copy is doomed. [Cory Doctorow (2006 RedHat summit in Nashville)]
I found both of these speeches to be inspiring. Free software is the start of a wider revolution. As Moglen says in his keynote (paraphrasing), it is an incredible privilege to live through a revolution.
A Broadband Utopia
A Broadband Utopia from IEEE Spectrum describes how a few municipalities in Utah joined together to build the high speed Internet infrastructure that for-profit telecommunication companies were not willing to. This article is definitely worth the somewhat long read. Several good points are made. The physical network duplication between the phone and cable companies is very expensive. The analogy given in the article is that this duplication is similar to every airline building its own airport instead of sharing the costs. I also find the argument that public Internet infrastructure opens up the market to new entrants very compelling. Competition is a good thing. Customers using the public network described in this article have their choice of companies offering TV, Internet, phone and other network services.
Fishburn says that the Utopia design makes it easy for every high school to have, in effect, its own TV station. “And not just the school,” he says. “Why not every high school student?”