Microsoft have done two important things this year. The first, Windows 7, you will no doubt have heard all about. Indeed, judging by the number of TV adverts for the launch last week you may be starting to get heartily sick of hearing about it. The second, though, is less well known but much more controversial: they’ve recently committed some of their hand-crafted-in-Redmond code to GNU/Linux. I’ve been writing about different aspects of this for a few people, but the first to publish is Prospect magazine. It’s quite a short piece in terms of the complexity of the issues, but will give you a taster of what’s to come.
Microsoft tacks the winds of change
November 2, 2009A taste of the Sony e-reader
October 29, 2009We’ve had a Sony e-Reader around the office for a few months now and we’ve used it from time to time to read a few heavyweight pdf documents on long train journeys. But it is only in the last few days that I’ve really got my teeth into it and used it to read an entire book.
Firstly, on the positive side, there is no doubt that it has saved me lugging around seriously heavy chunks of paper on a number of trips. The e-ink screen is good and after years of squinting at laptop screens when I inadvertently end up in a sunny window seat on the train, this is a real joy to read in bright light. It’s also pretty readable in low light. The ability to be able to zoom in on a particular page is also excellent.
Less positively, the page refresh is on the slow side, maybe a second, and this has a noticeable affect on your reading. I also found that the inability to thumb through a book or flick easily from one chapter to another became annoying after a while. You can do these things with the device’s various buttons, but it’s just not as intuitive. I’d also like to be able to scribble notes on pages which is a feature that’s only just been added to the new version of Sony’s device. As a Mac user I was also a bit annoyed that it took several months before Sony had a Mac OS version of their eBook library software.
Sony, of course, are not alone. Indeed, the launch this month of an international version of the Amazon Kindle has generated a lot of newspaper reviews (including an unusually excoriating one by Lynne Truss in the Sunday Times). Some even think these devices will be this year’s Christmas hit. Booksellers Barnes and Noble have got in on the act with an exclusive device called The Nook, which has just launched in America.
More interestingly, Spring Design have announced a dual screen device that has an 6″ e-ink screen area for book reading and another, smaller, LCD screen for Web surfing. The idea is that as you come across hyperlinked items in the book or report you are reading you can click and be taken (on the second screen) to the item in question. This points towards making e-books a different, more interactive experience to the traditional book (which has been much discussed in publishing circles).
Looking at these devices though, I have to say, I think there’s a huge, crisp, perfectly formed piece of fruit about to drop on this market. At the moment it doesn’t officially exist. It’s the Apple tablet and I suspect that will be the Christmas hit. In 2010, that is.
Optical computing gets European size and power breakthrough
October 16, 2009For years there has been talk within the computer industry of optical computing being the next big thing. Replacing electronic components with light-bearing ones – think tiny fibre optic cables – promised startling breakthroughs in computational speed. But up until now there has always been a problem making the optical components small enough for computers.
A team of European researchers has just demonstrated ‘light on a wire’ technologies that could lead to computing systems that can combine electronics and optical communications in one system. They call it plasmonics and it makes use of a physical property called electron plasma oscillation to transmit both electronic and optical signals down the same wire. What’s exciting about this is that while the plasmonic technique has been demonstrated before, this team have managed to get the idea to work using existing commercial lithography chip-manufacturing techniques.
As Anatoly Zayats, a researcher who’s been working on the project on behalf of the EU, says: “For the last five years or so it has been possible to build an optical computer chip, but with all-optical components it would have to measure something like half a metre by half a metre and would consume enormous power. With plasmonics, we can make the circuitry small enough to fit in a normal PC while maintaining optical speeds.”
Zayats expects commercial results in five to ten years and a French chip manufacturer is drawing up plans. Looks like a good day for the European computer industry.
MyPud
October 14, 2009It has been some time, so I thought I would restart proceedings for the autumn with a quick link to Cambridge computing lab pioneer Quentin Stafford-Fraser. Here truly is a man after my own heart as in between blogging about 3G femtocells and recursion he’s found time to consider the future of puddings.
He proffers the idea of a social networking site for recipes as a means to further their evolution, although I have to say it’s not the first time I’ve come across this idea. When I first started working at Intelligent Content one of the development projects that (fortunately) never came to fruition was of a similar ilk – although the concept of social networks didn’t exist then, of course. Quentin has form in this area – he was one of the instigators of the Trojan Room coffee pot affair.
Turing’s Last Syllogism
September 11, 2009It is not often that computer scientists trouble the front pages, but today’s news of an apology by the PM for Alan Turing is long overdue. Much of what we take utterly for granted when sat in front of our PCs can be traced back to his work in the 1940s. The news prompted me to dust down my old copy of David Leavitt’s biography of Turing (“The Man Who Knew Too Much”). In one of his last letters to a friend he tells of his forthcoming prosecution for “sexual offences with a young man” and his disappointment following a lacklustre performance in a BBC radio broadcast. He concludes the letter with: “I’m rather afraid that the following syllogism may be used by some in the future:
Turing believes machines think
Turing lies with men
Therefore machines do not think.”
Pioneering a low carbon future with Enterprise Architecture
August 8, 2009It’s been a busy August so far, putting the finishing touches to a report on Enterprise Architecture (EA) which has just been published by JISC TechWatch.
EA is a strategic management technique which aims to align business strategies and goals with information systems. The process involves mapping out both the current situation within an organisation, what’s termed the ‘as is’ and then laying out a vision for the future, the ‘to be’.
It has been in use in the commercial world for a decade or so, although it is new to the education sector. The report synthesises the results of a year-long pilot project by a group of pioneers who looked into the day-to-day practicalities of introducing this technique into the higher education institutions. In particular they looked at the use of The Open Group’s TOGAF method for this kind of work.
The report comes to a number of conclusions, but I think the most interesting relates to the potential for the technique to be used to help the sector move to a low carbon future. As the report makes clear low carbon ICT is an area of activity that is strategically conducive to the EA approach as it needs long-term planning within, and possibly between, institutions. Work is already underway in the sector on the feasibility of shared data centres and the introduction of EA can only help these initiatives.
The report’s called Unleashing Enterprise Architecture and you can have a look at a PDF of the report on the JISC TechWatch website.
Silence of the Chips
July 9, 2009If you’re thinking deep-fried slithers of Maris Pipers and a monastic vow of silence, or a cheap re-make of the Anthony Hopkins/Jodie Foster blockbuster, then this piece is not for you.
The chips in question are RFID chips, which the EU wants to sprinkle liberally in our urban environment in order to kick-start a world-leading tech industry (a very rough summary). However, there’s been such a kafuffle over the potential for privacy invasion that the EU now wants to start a debate about whether or not people should have the right to ‘disconnect’ from this networked environment.
The problem is that in this vision of the future there will be perhaps 70 billion Internet-enabled, computer-like devices plus countless other everyday physical objects and consumables that have been tagged with RFID. In effect we will be surrounded by a kind of permanent, ‘always-on’ computational fabric woven into our physical surroundings. In a recently announced action plan, the EU poses the question of what rights we should have to be able to disconnect from this networked environment, which they call the ‘right to silence of the chips’.
The action plan is very sketchy on details of what such a right might consist of. Would it, for example, apply permanently or just for certain periods of time? How will we be reassured that we have genuinely been ‘disconnected’? When the chips are down, what do you think they’ll put first – big business or the right to privacy?
The Open Source revolution has only just begun
June 22, 2009A few months ago I interviewed Gianugo Rabellino, CEO of SourceSense, for a piece for Oxford University’s OSS Watch service. Gianugo is an engaging fellow and clearly passionate about open source software (OSS). For him we are in the midst of a revolution, and, as he told a workshop just before I interviewed him: “revolution is hard stuff. Heads get chopped off. There is violence. There is turmoil. But in the end you get to a new order of stability in which some new things are taken for granted.”
For him OSS is much more than a debate about who owns the code and what kind of licence it has. It is a revolutionary new way of working that is about the development of an open and collaborative community centred around that code. He sees this as the profound change that OSS has brought and argues that this way of working is widening rapidly beyond code to cover other information products (such as scientific research). The term Open Development Method has been coined for this and you can read more in the article “Avoiding abandon-ware: getting to grips with the open development method”
Scanatomy of a lunch
June 19, 2009Office parties have a reputation for being a time when the photocopier or scanner gets used for anatomical experiments. Jon Chonko, proprietor of the Scanwiches.com blog has gone one better.
Tagged as ‘scans of sandwiches for education and delight’ this seems to me to be an excellent juncture of technology and lunch. Whilst many of the scans are a little on the meaty for this poor veggie, I was particularly intrigued by 1st May’s entry. It was also good to see an ice cream sandwich making the grade (15th May) as this is a format that often gets overlooked.
Definitely one for the blogroll.
Tech Lunch 
Are e-readers too unemotional?
July 14, 2009We’ve been experimenting with a Sony e-book reader in the office for the last couple of months. So I was interested to read a comment piece by Peter Crawshaw in the Bookseller magazine about them as they finally seem to be taking off, especially in the States, following innumerable false starts over the years.
He refers to a piece of analysis from Entertainment Media Research which looks at how emotionally engaging books are compared to e-readers. In this context, emotional engagement is the process by which we get hooked into our reading material and swept away into another world. The research shows that while people view books as one of the most emotionally engaging entertainment vehicles, e-books are seen as the least.
Crawshaw suggests two issues with e-readers. One is simply that the technology gets in the way. There is something timelessly effortless about holding a book and automatically turning pages as you read. Somehow, the clicking of little buttons on the side of your Sony or Amazon Kindle doesn’t have this automatic quality. Personally, my experience is that the tiny delay while the page of text is redrawn by the reader does interrupt the flow. Of course this may change as we become use to such devices and they become slicker.
A more important point he makes, I think, is the tendency for e-books to be interactive, with added video snippets and links to click. All this he argues may be great for certain types of content (for example learning material), but is less so for the delicate flow of good story. Crawshaw wonders whether traditional publishers will begin to alter their content to fit the expectations of a more interactive way of reading, and thereby lose what he calls “the wonder of an unhurried story.”
Tags: e-book, e-reader, Kindle, Sony
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