TWO ALANS

Dick Pountain/PC Pro/(Idealog 223 - 06/02/2013)

Atari just filed for bankruptcy, which lead me toward a string of rather odd associations. I never was an Atari owner but the firm's demise jogged me into remembering that Alan Kay - that least-heralded inspirer of the personal computer revolution - worked for the firm immediately after leaving his epoch-making stint at Xerox PARC. While at PARC Kay's team pioneered just about everything we now take for granted including object-oriented programs, windowed graphical user interfaces and local area networks, although Xerox notoriously failed to capitalise on this work (as did Atari). It wasn't until Steven Jobs' equally notorious PARC visit that Apple picked up the baton, prompting Kay to move there straight from Atari and remain as a Research Fellow for the next 13 years.

My other Alan-named hero, "father of computing" Alan Turing may soon have a Hollywood film made of his life (as Steve Jobs has). Indeed, after being ignored in embarrassed silence for over 50 years, Turing now has three films: two for British TV, "Breaking the Code" with Derek Jacobi playing him and the rather better "Codebreaker" with Ed Stoppard, while the forthcoming Hollywood biopic "The Imitation Game" may star either Leonardo di Caprio or Benedict Cumberbatch. Alan Kay on the other hand is still alive, nowadays running his own non-profit institute that studies new ideas in educational computing, and what he'll eventually be remembered for (perhaps even with a biopic) is his dream of the Dynabook.

Conceived around 1968, this was to be a revolutionary keyboardless, wireless tablet computer permanently connected to an online library containing all the world's accumulated knowledge, and he wanted every child in the world to have access to one. Kay of course could never actually build a Dynabook because at the time PARC was developing graphical UIs there weren't even any microprocessors, let alone an internet. (His Xerox Star "personal" workstation was a fridge-sized minicomputer built with discrete logic chips). But the fact is that everything required hardwarewise to implement his idea now exists.

In fact my little Nexus 7 already comes pretty close to Kay's ideal, delivering information through Google search and Wikipedia, music and movies via Spotify, YouTube and other places. What it lacks is universality, and that's no longer a technical but a commercial problem, over ownership of both conduit and content and how much we're prepared to pay for them. A Dynabook was supposed to operate wirelessly from anywhere at all, which rules out my Nexus because it's Wi-Fi only - but even were I to buy a 3G tablet and SIM the cost of the data-plan might inhibit me from using it as freely as I do at home. Running a tablet off my home broadband is one thing, but I can't justify an extra account just for outside use. It's the same story with content: I already pay £10 per month to Spotify, justified because music is my main amusement, but similar subscriptions to Netflix or LoveFilm don't tempt me because they don't deal in films I want. If YouTube started charging (as it recently threatened) £5 a month for access I'd probably give that up too. For Kay's dream to finally come true we desperately need to rationalise both  conduit and content licensing to make ubiquitous data access affordable.

Even here, all the necessary hardware and software tricks are already well known. Mobile phone companies have invested mega-billions to cover much of the globe with masts, supporting networks which, unlike the internet, already have an ability to charge for traffic built right in. A global system that mimiced those hierarchical storage systems already employed in enterprise-level computing could be assembled, using the internet as the trunk of a global tree, switching down onto mobile networks for its branches and finally onto village/street level Wi-Fi for its twigs. The problems aren't technically insuperable but colossal efforts of business diplomacy would be required to negotiate equitable distribution of revenues to the owners of these various "wires". In fact the problem facing the ITU would resemble the problem the UN faces in trying to broker world peace, but we're talking dreams here and my point is that the obstacle is no longer hardware.

The same would be true for collecting royalties on content, though Spotify, Netflix and the rest show that this can be done (with difficulty). In fact there's a strong case for heavily subsidising the conduits and charging mostly for the content, along the same historical lines followed by roads and railways. I believe that both of my Alan heroes would agree that a species which can't provide affordable information to educate its offspring, while loudly fantasising about colonising Mars and mining diamonds from asteroids, has pretty weird priorities.

IDEALOG NOW AVAILABLE IN KINDLE FORMAT!

            

For truly dedicated fans of this column who find this scrolling blog format inconvenient, I've now made the  first 200 columns available on Amazon as Kindle books. Two volumes of 100 columns each are available here for a very reasonable £5/$7 each:

UK:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Compleat-Idealog-ebook/dp/B00DNI90KC/
http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Compleat-Idealog-ebook/dp/B00DP1P75Y/

USA:
http://www.amazon.com/The-Compleat-Idealog-ebook/dp/B00DNI90KC/
http://www.amazon.com/The-Compleat-Idealog-ebook/dp/B00DP1P75Y/

(I decided on two volumes because a single one made an unwieldy 1000+ pages, and set a price to match)

RIP PC?

Dick Pountain - Idealog 222: Jan 11th 2013

I'm currently conducting an experiment whose outcome will profoundly affect the way I work in future: I'm writing this column for the very first time on my Nexus 7  tablet rather than on my laptop, and I've actually typed these first few sentences on its tiny on-screen keyboard using Jelly Bean 4.2's 'gesture typing' feature, with which I've become rather proficient over the last few weeks. (I'll tell you further down whether I stuck with this resolution or chickened-out and fetched my Bluetooth keyboard). The location of my experiment is our beloved chairman's glorious house on Mustique: sure it's a tough assignment but someone has to do it, and I'm here toiling away in the Caribbean sun so that you don't have to. I deliberately left London without my laptop to see whether I could cope, and so far haven't missed it at all. The Nexus has provided all my Spotify tunes, my YouTube movies, email correspondence, and now text creation (in Word format) in faultless fashion.

Prophesying 'The Death of the PC' is liable to embroil me in a raging troll-fest nowadays, but I can't help it if the phrase just won't leave my head. Over the last couple of weeks I've been reading several insightful analyses of the future prospects for both Intel and Microsoft that leave me in no doubt that both firms are going to have to get used to reduced rations rather soon.

Intel has unquestionably missed the boat in the low-power processor sector: its strategic error in believing the x86 architecture to be invulnerable looks increasingly like a catastrophe that has granted ARM the same sort of six-year lead in the mobile arena that Intel itself enjoyed all those years ago when IBM adopted the 8086 for its first PC. Intel is finally taking low-power seriously with new Atom chipsets, but the sheer volume of Google's ARM-based Android may have shut that door. Ironically enough, Intel actually owned a viable ARM-architecture range in the shape of the xScale devices it inherited by the purchase of DEC, but it never took them seriously - thanks to big-corporation inertia and hubris - and its recently-departed CEO Paul Otellini sold them off to Marvell back in 2005 as one of his first acts.

Microsoft too has floundered in trying to come to terms with mobileworld. It's not that it hasn't tried hard enough: on top of various versions of Windows Mobile/Phone over the years it's tried Ultra-Mobile PCs and even half-decent touch-screen Windows 'slates' like those by Samsung, but none of them ever really took off (and the omens are not good for the Surface to do any better). The reason is fundamentally the same as for Intel: massive success imposes an absolute demand for compatibility which stifles certain vital synergies.

Apple on the other hand has always been ruthlessly pragmatic about  changing CPU vendors, first deserting Motorola for PowerPC, then moving on to Intel and lately ARM whenever the time was right. And it had the courage to innovate boldly in its user-interface design with iOS. Google meanwhile has combined an open-source software model with agnosticism about hardware, and none of the whingeing about Android fragmentation can diminish its big numbers.

The mobile market has become a dinosaur trap financially too because profit margins on both hardware and software sales are far, far shorter than the Wintel twins are used to, and need. The cost of building fabs for ever smaller feature sizes becomes prohibitive just as margins are shrinking, and Moore's Law is being revealed as an increasingly tired marketing strategy rather than a science, now most users demand more battery life rather than speed.

The ultimate demise of the PC won't be in favour of Apple or any other hardware standard but rather in favour of cloud vendors like Amazon, Google, eBay and the like, whose products and services can be reached from *anyone's* mobile device. It would be wise for me to cover my arse by pointing out there will always be a few PC niches left, but I'm not sure I actually believe it. The vast grazing herds will be of thin mobile clients, and generations will arise that never knew a mouse or keyboard - even for business, even for accounts receivable.

And no, in the end I didn't need to deploy my Bluetooth keyboard at all for this column. As any writer will tell you, thinking up the next word takes far longer than to type it, so absolute typing speed is not the critical step. (I'll confess that decades of scribbling Graffiti have honed my sliding skills way beyond the average though).

           

THE GOLDEN GEESE OF ALPHAVILLE

Dick Pountain/PC Pro/Idealog 221  04/12/2012

Once upon a time I used to travel to Las Vegas, Taipei, Hannover or Tel Aviv in pursuit of new technology, but these days I don't go to many press events at all. As befits my status as a non-decorated veteran of the OS, Browser and CPU wars, I prefer now to recline in a bath of warm asses' milk, nibbling bon-bons and trying to maximise my views-per-photo on Flickr. Nevertheless the other day I was tempted out to an event in the real world, to whit the finals of "Discovering Start-Ups 2012", held in the City. This was a competition - a sort of MasterChef for new tech ventures - organised by Cambridge Wireless and Silicon South West, and attended by high-powered potential backers from Google, RIM, Vodafone, Orange, Broadcom, Qualcomm and numerous venture caps.

The last time I'd been to a start-up presentation was a one-to-one meeting with engineers on the science park in Cambridge, but this was a quite different sort of affair. For a start there was the venue. I hopped off a 46 bus at Shoe Lane, walked down a small inconspicuous alley and emerged into Alphaville. I don't visit the City much but I was vaguely aware there's been a lot of building - the Gherkin, the Shard and so on - but this still gave me quite a shock. What once was a small Dickensian square was now bounded on all four sides by glittering, high-rise, all-glass offices, adorned below with swanky wine-bars and purveyors of fancy coffees, chocolates and superior sandwiches, but the narrowness of the adjoining streets more or less hid it from Shoe Lane. I managed to locate the competition despite it being in the only block *without* a 10-foot-high sans serif street number.

I got to see around half the twenty finalists' presentations and there were some pretty impressive ideas on show: personal devices for monitoring everything from carbon footprints to skin cancers; low-power tracking devices, smart 4G antennas; ebook streaming and shared shopping services; even one that measures your emotional state in real time and tells your therapist via your smartphone. The winners included Anvil Semiconductors (www.anvil-semi.co.uk) who've made silicon carbide power semiconductors as cheap as silicon that can improve the fuel efficiency of hybrid cars by 10%, and D-RisQ (www.drisq.com) from Malvern who employ formal software validation techniques to reduce development costs of complex systems by up to 80%, as successfully used on the Eurofighter control computer. But what struck me most forcibly was how far the world has changed since my heyday.

I'm pretty used to talking to engineers with eccentric hair-styles, woolly upper garments and a slight hint of Asperger's Syndrome (as we're no longer allowed to call it), and I used to enjoy the experience as they plunged deep into technical explanations, eyes burning with enthusiasm. Not of any more. This was wall-to-wall white shirts and shiny suits, with few technical explanations pitched any more difficult than a BBC Four documentary. The really deep discussion was instead about patents, Intellectual Property and exit strategies. Today's start-ups are nobody's patsies and go in with eyes wide open, the enthusiasm visible in their eyes being for a buy-out by Google, Qualcomm or whoever within five years, for a eight or nine-figure sum. I'm not saying this is a bad thing, and my nostalgia for those dodgy haircuts is strictly limited. For years we've been moaning about the way British inventors failed to exploit their discoveries - little stuff like the jet engine and television - and left it to the Americans to cash in, but that isn't going to happen any more. I've written here before about how it was ARM Ltd that really broke that bad habit, and this competition was, if you like, part of a search for the next few ARMs.

What does worry me is that this emphasis on moving fast and getting out rich might eventually erode the innovative impulse itself, and if you think that's misplaced, just check out the ridiculous Patent Troll wars currently raging between the world's mobile corporations. The Register recently ran an article by Matt Asay called "Apple's patent insanity infects Silicon Valley", which reprinted a mind-boggling chart of who's suing who for patent violations (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/08/22/patent_trolls/). It looks a bit like a poster of the Krebs Cycle that used to hang on our lab wall, only more complicated. Microsoft, RIM, Google, Samsung, Kodak, Oracle, LG, Huawei, HTC, ZTE and several more are all suing each other, and they're all suing and being sued by Apple. Even Business Week now proclaims that the start-ups' creed must be "patent first, prototype later". The idea is that you should fully exploit all the golden eggs you have in the fridge, but there's a danger that you may in so doing forget to feed the goose...

GRAND COMPLICATION

Dick Pountain/PC Pro/Idealog 220 08/11/2012

Last night I watched the latest addition to the dismal genre of populist TV science programming (from which I exclude Horizon as it does attempt to get serious). A not-all-that funny Irish comedian/gameshow host and a young journalist with a striking Bollywood coiffure were baiting one of Britain's most distinguished scientists, Sir John Sulston, because the human genome project has not yet delivered cures for cancer and the common cold, despite spending so much of "our taxpayers' money". Sir John grinned weakly and bore it, even admitting that scientists sometimes play on the ignorance of politicians to get funding, but his main rebuttal was that the way genes work is far, far more complicated than either the public or even geneticists yet understand. This "backlash" thinking - reminiscent of the way pop stars get built up and knocked down again - arises because we perhaps imagined the genome as a recipe book, where all you have to do is read off a recipe and cook it.

Our bodies contain several separate but cooperating information processing systems - the nervous (including the brain), immune, muscular, metabolic and skeletal systems, plus the DNA itself - which form a complex heterogeneous network, talking to each other via nerves, hormones and other chemical signals. Recently the ENCODE (ENCyclopedia Of Dna Elements) project has spotlighted just *how* complex: the sequence of base pairs in DNA encodes only a small fraction of the information required to run our bodies, and the huge stretches of what used to be called "junk DNA" are actually switches that modify the "run-time" course of the computations. We are mostly built of proteins and protein-based enzymes control almost all of our cellular chemistry. Genes are templates from which these proteins get fabricated, and though every cell in your body contains a full copy of your genome, most of its genes are turned off: otherwise every cell would be churning out every possible protein all of the time and you'd be a large (and very short-lived) sticky blob. Selectively turning genes on and off controls the activities of individual cells, which in turn determines how our bodies grow, survive and act upon the world.

The decade-long ENCODE project (funded by the National Human Genome Research Institute) identified the regions of the human genome where such controls operate, and in September 2012 published 30 seminal papers that assign functions to 80% of the genome. As this is a PC mag not a biochemistry journal I won't dwell on their details, beyond saying that control gets exerted mostly through big proteins called histones sticking to DNA sequences to mask them from being expressed, or by methyl groups being added as stoppers to certain bases. (The journal Nature has a brilliant interactive widget at http://www.nature.com/encode/#/threads/ if you do want to know more). The result is that genetics just became orders of magnitude more complex, which makes our impatience with the rate of medical spin-offs tragically misplaced.

We might once have pictured the genome as a computer program, which somehow "executed" its genes to build our bodies and make us do stuff. Now we know better: it's more like a database of blueprints for computer components, rather than program instructions. So where are the executable instructions? Well, they're proteins operating within particular cellular environments. But those proteins are still made by DNA? Yes they are, and where and when they get made depends on all those gene switches that ENCODE describes. Some of these instructions in turn control the way the DNA gets transcribed, so it's a dynamic, recursive, self-modifying program whose behaviour is generated on-the-fly rather than recorded in the DNA sequence (which is mostly static data, except occasionally when a mutation occurs or a virus inserts its own code).

Anyone who's written computer programs in anger will know that self-modifying programs are best avoided. Sure, when you're a cocky newbie it feels clever to write self-modifying code (for one thing it can be a tremendous memory saver) but you'll discover that it soon becomes impossible to debug or understand. Reading the source code of the program no longer tells you what it does, only executing it can do that. Microsoft once flirted with self-modifying code in early versions of Windows, for selecting different hardware options, but it now deprecates the practice and options are set by reading in external config files. So how does nature manage the dynamic, self-modifying computation system that is a living organism? The unsatisfying answer is same as always, through 3.5 billion years of evolution rather than studying algorithms. Snipping and inserting genes to cure some disease is not at all like editing program code - we've already seen one genetic medicine project halted because it gave the test subjects leukemia. When debugging a genetic program, execution can literally mean execution.

BACK TO THE FUTURE

Dick Pountain/PC Pro/Idealog 219  07/10/2012

A wave of nostalgia about old-school personal computing is going around the Web, with people restoring, emulating or reminiscing about Sinclair Spectrums, Jupiter Aces, Dragons, Orics and many more, wherever you look. I'm not too proud to jump on a passing bandwagon, so here's my own reminiscence. I bought my first "computer" - a Casio fx-201P, one of the very first programmable calculators - around 1977. It had a 10-digit green fluorescent display and 127 steps of program memory (no editor: make a mistake, enter them all again). I programmed it to check printers' invoices for magazines with varying numbers of pages, sections and amounts of colour, which impressed the printers who had no such assistance themselves, and when in 1979 Dennis Publishing acquired Personal Computer World, it earned me a column called "Calculator Corner" of which this column could be seen as a direct descendant.

That Casio was a fairly chunky beast at 7 x 4 x 1.5 inches and it weighed 13oz, which hardly mattered since it remained on my desk. By the oddest of coincidences my latest "computer", a Google Nexus 7, is around the same size at 7.8 x 4.7 x  0.4 inches and weighs 12oz, though it contains around 128 million times more memory and runs over 100,000 times faster. Oh, and instead of 10 green glowing digits its display shows streaming movies and TV. Had cars advanced at a similar rate then just one could carry the whole population of England to the moon in under two minutes. The German philosopher Hegel famously claimed that sufficient quantitative change leads eventually to qualitative change, and that's what I'm feeling right now about my Nexus, that tablet computers are poised to change the game.

During these years between the Casio and the Nexus I've spent a lot of energy pursuing a particular idea of computing, deeply influenced by Alan Kay's notion of the "Dynabook", his universal portable information store. I've tried and abandoned several drawers-ful of pocketable computing devices, looking for one that would sync transparently to a desktop computer. I've rejected a desktop altogether in favour of a powerful laptop. I'd reached the point, as described in last month's column, where I can use my Android smartphone to share files with my laptop via Dropbox, but it was all still a bit fiddly with data entry via the phone too slow and a screen rather too small for viewing complex websites. Of course I expected a tablet to improve things in both those respects, but I didn't anticipate by quite how much.

Being an Android device the Nexus immediately grabbed all my contacts, calendar and mail from Google's cloud with no effort, and I soon had all my preferred apps (in latest their Jelly Bean versions) installed. On installing File Manager HD I noticed a new menu option called LAN Connection, and despite my acute networkophobia I tapped the Scan icon to see what would happen. After an agonising delay it came back with a connection to "USER-PC", my laptop! It took me a further afternoon of wading through Microsoft's grim network model - what is a Homegroup and how is it different from a Workgroup? - but eventually I got everything I wanted shared. No need to duplicate any music, videos, documents to the tablet, just access them over Wi-Fi.

You have to understand that I work at home where I'm either sitting at my desk upstairs in front of my laptop, or on the sofa downstairs reading books and making notes - now I may have to adopt some vigorous exercise regime to replace all the stair-climbing I no longer need do. I rarely work away from home so the Nexus's lack of 3G isn't critical, and in any case I wouldn't want to pay for another SIM, but then I discovered that the "Tethering & Portable Hotspot" setting of my phone actually works. BT Fon already gives me free Wi-Fi throughout much of London, but where it doesn't I can Google and Wikipede via my phone's Wi-Fi. 

So far I've never been even slightly tempted by any of the Home Server or Media PC offerings, but now I'm beginning to see the possibility of a different sort of animal: a tiny Linux box containing a 1TB disk and a Wi-Fi router, with no display or keyboard. All it does is locally store data from PCs, tablets and phones over Wi-Fi, while continually backing itself up to Dropbox or some other cloud service. No shared media streaming, do all that at the client ends (I have Spotify even on my phone). And I've started to feel wallet palpitations of almost Honeyballian intensity whenever I see ads for the Asus Transformer...

NOTA BENE

Dick Pountain/PC Pro/Idealog 218  06/09/2012

It sometimes feels as though I've been taking notes all my life. Certainly I was already doing it in school, and in university lectures, when in combination with my photographic memory it was a great advantage in exams: I could just conjure up the page of my notebook where an answer lay. (That memory is now fading, but luckily for me computers are improving at more or less the same rate). Right from the start personal computing for me meant trying to find some practical way to take notes on the damned things. Of course for a writer finding a decent writing tool was the first priority, but that proved nowhere near so hard to fullfil. For each successive OS since CP/M 2.2, I quickly discovered a word-processor or editor that would serve me well for years - Wordstar, PC-Write, TextPad, Microsoft Word - but for each OS I also wasted hours trying and rejecting inadequate candidates for the role of note-taker. The top drawer of my grey filing cabinet testifies to my failure, because it's half full of spiral-bound reporter's pads containing 20-years-worth of pencil scribblings.

It wasn't until the first Palm Pilot came out in 1996 that things looked up a bit. A crucial attribute of any note-taking system is portability, because ideas pop into my head at all times and places, even in bed at night, and having to plod to a desktop computer to record them is a total no-no. Palm got me to a point where I could be sitting anywhere, perhaps reading a book, with a Pilot at my elbow to scribble notes using Graffiti handwriting, and have them transfer to my desktop PC whenever I synced. Soon I discovered Natara's Bonsai, a neat outliner that ran on both PC and Palm, and no less than 125 of these Idealog columns were planned in that program. That Bonsai lasted me ten-years proves it was workable, but it still wasn't ideal: it couldn't handle pictures or diagrams, and folding editors actually aren't, contrary to what you might expect, that much help on a tiny handheld screen. And Palm's syncing worked, but only so long as you remembered to do it...

After Palm went under I moved over to an Android phone, which opened up whole new cloudy vistas. Bonsai never made the leap and stuck with Windows Mobile, but there are dozens of Android outliner apps and I've tried most of them. Many of the free ones work well but have neither a Windows sync client nor cloud storage. Then there are big beasts like Zotero, Evernote and SimpleNote that offer both cloud service and PC sync. I decided to try the free version of Evernote and was very excited for a while. It's a whole ecosystem, with add-ons for drawing sketches and clipping web pages, and it has an attractive user interface. Notes handwritten on my phone (using the marvellous Graffiti Pro app) just appear on my laptop without effort. Until one day the Evernote Windows client just vanished from my PC, without a trace. I hasten to add that no notes were lost - they're all still there in my account on Evernote's website - but it  disconcerted me when the same happened again weeks after I reinstalled it. The cloud is mighty powerful, and this ability to remove things from my PC without asking has quite blunted my enthusiasm for the product.

It was around then PC Pro adopted DropBox to deliver Real World Computing copy, and the penny dropped that I can now roll my own cloudy note-taking solution using the excellent DropBox client for Android. Just create a directory tree called Notes in the Dropbox folder and bung all text, pictures, spreadsheets, whatever, relating to a project into the same subdirectory. Stick to a few file formats like text, JPG, docx and xlsx (I have Documents To Go on my phone). And TextPad lets me drag web URLs straight from Firefox into a note and access them by right-clicking. Sorted.

And what, I hear you mutter, about Microsoft's OneNote? Well, whenever Simon Jones has demonstrated it to me on his rarer-than-hens-teeth Samsung Slate PC I've been bowled over by its unique, industry-beating capabilities. But there's the rub: like almost everyone else I never bought a Windows Tablet or Slate PC, and Microsoft never provided me a copy with any version of Office I've had. In fact, so effectively have they've kept this killer app away from the public that they ought to be put in charge of Hantavirus quarantine. Now Redmond is betting the farm on Windows 8 and my advice would be, make your Surfaces (or whatever they're called this week) into dynamite OnceNote engines, and let them communicate easily with your competitors' devices: the iPad currently has nothing to touch it for note-taking.