apologize or else

apologize or else

silly of me, of course: B-Arkers, all of them...

apologize or else

apologize or else

blair, brown, bush, bagdad, basra, bah - what is it with B anyhow? behtlehem, brighton, baby, bathwater, blog, bulgaria, beirut.

boy am i glad i am in cambridge:-)

apologize or else

apologize or else
whenever anyone criticises another religion (including atheists), extreme members of said religion threaten the critic - whether it be a cartoonist or a pope quoting from 500 years ago.

I get very disappointed when the critic then apologises - the _point of both of these criticisms was that there are extremists in religions (and elsewhere), not that all members of said group are extremists - if you listen to the threats from the extremists, and respond, you are _appeasing_ extremists.

Do not appease people that use religion as a cover to threaten you - i dont care if its muslims or the israeli defense force, the pope or bush - if I say they did something wrong, and I believe I am right, then I don't see why I would change my view about a subset of them because of threats - seems like bordering on hypocrisy.

Of course, the Pope (and the catholic cheurch) have a history of apeasement (e.g. Nazis in second world war), so I guess one shouldnt be surprised:( Before anyone starts protesting in the UK (or most of europe) they ought to remember that most EU countries are secular, and the pope speaks for very few people - next time the muslims protest about something the pope says, do it in africa or south america where most of his followers are as it will have more effect -

of course, its hard for religious states (esp. extreme ones under sharia law) to understand that there are secular states, let alone states where any individual can say what she likes about stupid muslims, israelies, chrsitans, zoroastrians and agnostics, and not represent anyone else or any organisation or even any consensus - we are allowed to talk rubbish if we like - if you listen to it, and worse, react to it, it reflects more on you then on the speaker:)

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criticizing israel takes some Chutzpah, because the
only model that many of its citizens and friends have for
defense is attack. This starts with words, and slips rapidly
into actions, and shows an amazing lack of adaptability. While one understands
the historical reasons for dropping the fatal passivity that led many to the gas chambers
of the nazis, there are alternatives to simply assaulting the person who has another viewpoint
in this world - I wonder how long it will take for the culture, which has had several generations
now since the 2nd world war, to develop a bit more range of response.Of course, the large numbers of
people from other cultures without any real culture (viz escapees from the collapsing ussr)
that exploited the right of return don't help as their model of the world doesn't include any
idea of society let alone multi-cultural society. Tolerance, integration, cooperation, co-existence,
all sorts of ways for differing groups to live side by side have been tried succesfully (visit Toronto if you want to see one of the widest range of peacefullly co-existing groups - entire cities-worth of Chinese, Russiam, Italian and so on with many different styles of interaction).

In the long run, the survival of the once radical society in israel depends on the evolution towards some of these capabilities - but there's little signs of this - the current trend reminds me of Harry Harrison's
doomed inhabitants of the deadly planet in Deathworld...read it and weep...

Of course, I get shouted at by israelis every time I say this sort of thing, but I am used to this and have learned to ignore it - like many essentially arab socieities, the jews have only 1 volume setting: loud:-(

apologize or else

apologize or else
israel eyeless in gaza again - basically,
aside from all the usual rubbish talked by either side
about justifiable war, and disproproportiate responses,
with regard to the tanks rolling into gaza and
missiles falling on bridges and other infrastructure,
all to "rescue" one "kidnapped" israeli soldier
(kidnap? he aint a kid, he is a _prisoner_).

what amazes me, though. is
that a nation appears capable of the same pathological behaviour
as an individual human, viz:
victims of child abuse are most likely to become child abusers.

israel, a state (re-)made for explicitly for victims of attempted genocide,
appears to be embarking on the same doomed course itself to the palestinians.

this cycle is familiar too in other conflicts (balkans etc) and is generally solved
by long term concerted peaceful conciliatory action - nelson mandela's scheme in south africa
was a remarkable example of renouncing vengence, even when it mgiht be vaguely justified
simply because it is counter productive.

israel: you want long term security? you just threw it away for yet another generation.

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apologize or else

So the network broke in London on 7/7. Gosh, well TETRA Isn't going to help much is it - surely people have learned from this - you cannot expect the unexpected but the cell phone system really is a crock - the slotted aloha channel allocation would fail far less gracefully under high call arrival rate/attempt, and call gapping is TOO LATE - what you need is wideband cdma, but also what you need is diversity (wifi skype phones all over) AND whayt you need is delay tolerant networking.

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Apparently, Madonna's latest gig had her on a cross - apparently
this is offensive to chrstians. They seem to have missed her previous shows
and perhaps failed to spot the clue in her chosen stage name -they
are all meant to be fairly annoying to people who have no clue, no sense of humour
and probably are a bit wobbly in their faith.

Or perhaps the people compllaining have shares in her company, and are just boosting her publicity
(which of late was flagging a bit)

Perhaps Madonna could do a Da Vinci tour? Perhaps the people who spend so much time complaining about
troivia like movies and music could get a life and look at things that people of allegedly christian beliefs
are meant to like aid in darfour, or peace in the middle east or something that actually MATTERS for a change.

Jesus, these guys are hipocrites.

A True History of the Internet - Virtualising Handsets and cars

Xen is quite useful in providing
ways to dice and slice a server (farm) at different granularity from
processor, core, or thread, and for its isolation, migration, and
multi-OS support. To date, its targetted at Intel and the desk/server side.

What we desperately need is to virtualise handsets and also processors in cars.
Right now, the tussle between the various service providers to create walled gardens has led to a disaster which is that there are now far more OSs (and even just incompatible variants of OSs) in the handset/pda world than any other computign world - linux, symbianos, windows mobile smart phones, nokia, ericsoon and samsung ownbrand OS and re-badged symbian and java and other OS - despite ample resources (CPU and memory in a typical 2006 phone is more than an internet host or router of 1990), these folks produce bluetooth and wifi and camera APis that are stunted, they don't ship location services, or p2p/manet tools, and basically have NO clue- in the interest of short term profit, they misunderstand that the LONG term profit will be bigger if the service*network is bigger (see Metcalf's law, or dave reeds version of it) - killer apps wont "appear" for 3G or wifi enabled phones unless the community can program them. Frankly, its an embarassement.

Don' even get me started on in-car devices... ... ...

So if we para-virtualized them, we'd take these problems away -= application writers could write to a single platform, instead of 11, and know that that platform would work on the VM on any phone - since many phones use either ARM or (a few) xscale, the processor is pretty friendly, so the lower level of a "xen-like" system, would be not too bad - the page sharing stuff in Xen 3.0 would allow a lot of efficiecies too so the memory footprint of running n variants of Symbian OS and Linux and windows smart phone OSs, would not be n-times - it would be a fraction more...

show me the money:)

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Da Vinci, Da Vinci, we all fall down

protests from religious fundamentalists about the da vinci code movie and book, only made worse by the movie hype, are yet another symbol of the corruption of thought in reglious groups. A well trained jesuit would never misunderstand the difference between fictional entertainment, and blasphemy. Frankly, the christians are very very lucky that the dominant religion in the west is not (say) orthodox judaism where the portrayal of humans (since they are in the image of god) is forbidden.

More importantly, where to they get off objecting to a speculative, amusing, and quite well made movie (but terribly written book)? Look at the bible - its full of inaccuracies - for example, the commandment translated by Christians as "Thou shalt not kill" is an incorrect rendering of the Aramaic which meant "Thou shalt not murder" - I will defend my right to the death to _talk_ gibberesh, and christians have by the own rules, given up that right, so they can go away and sulk in the corner and turn the other bloody (==by my lady) cheek.

Gosh, they never complained about Dogma (very amusing film with Alanis morisette as god), or Time Bandits (very very amusing film with Ralph Richardson as God). What is wrong with a religion that has a terminal sense-of-humour failure? Read the Name of the Rose and weep:)

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apologize or else

So now it looks like Conencting for Health have put the ball back in the court of the academics and other signatories of the letter asking for a review of the
programme - viz
CFHfIT
say, ok so you want a review, please describe its terms of reference. Good call.

My take is that the review should be _by the people, of the people, for the people_ - i.e. it should be user centered. This means NHS employees and healthcare customers should define its contents, without fear (so some form of anonimity, which ought to be bread and butter to an NHS IT project should be assured for people who wish to be critical but are worried about their jobs- however, care should be taken that this doesn't lead to un-verifiiable whinges - this also, should not be beyong the wit of medical researchers to define:)

apologize or else

apologize or else

Why would anyone want to review the NPfIT ?
FAQ
1/ its just a waste of time
2/ its going fine (see the websites)
3/ if it doesn't deliver, we don't pay
4/ any other reasons?

1. having an independant review of a large project doesn't typically increase project times - actually ,its a chance to improve documentation, and to get low cost objective fedback so you can re-factorize and change priorities. Aside from any accountability questions (and if the project fails, and we don't pay, we are left with a god almighty mess AND waste of NHS resources - time of training of medical and admin staff to use a failed system wouyld represent a massive sink of effort - the project must not be allowed to fail unless there's somethign crucially wrong with it, but it must also be bought in reasonably close to budget - this is not impossible, but I don't believe a self-monitoring programme has ever done that.

2. the website and other data on the programme are extensive, but so is the NHS - 14,000 siginficant sized sites with 1M employees - The story of how well its going down to grass roots is not captures through a few case studies and glossy PDFs or even some (laudible) Best Common Practice material. An _evaluation_ of the programme progress, and SWOT analyiss mid point should be public (the last annual report is not deep.

3. If the project misses part of its deliverables, the affect on not only the NGS but the suppliers is going to be fairly bad (think share price, think sunk cost, think committed opex as well as capex) -

The negative response to what is essentially an offer of help is suspicious.
The public will respond with "so what have they got to hide". Thats not helpful.

On the other hand, it might be good if an industrial conortium did an independant review (on the other hand, several of the candidate companies didn't bid for the NPfIT because thye assessed it as infeasible.)

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apologize or else

So having spent some time to look through as much of the documentation on the NPfIT website as I could (most, exlcuding a few documents where links were broken) I Have to say that it is really impressive. I think there is ample evidence that the programme will deliver a lot of useful pieces (e.g. electronic presscriptins, picture arching and comms) and that is a fine thing - the pieces that look less likely to work for a while, to me, are the ones where policy is embedded in technology (.i.e. public facing systems), but they may yet work. The cradle to grave ambitions of the original NHS, translated into cyberspace, are clearly there, and the progress monitoring/reporting and visibility of a lot of the work is clearly also being carried out with the best intent. I wonder, just wonder, if this might not succeed? It would be very nice if the folks involved manage it (what would they do for an encore?).

A True History of the Internet

A True History of the Internet
Recent conversations about the
National Program for IT in the NHS or NPfIT, make it clear to me that the public understanding of academic computer science contributions to the world is sparse.

I've been an academic since 1981 (and even before that worked teaching remedial math in High Schools in Toronto, and spent 2 years as a systems/program advisor in North London Polytechnic. In all that time, I've observed that academics in CS like to build stuff. In fact, as part of both teaching and researching computing, one tries things out. Oftem the things one tries out are new (as thats more fun to teach and learn or because its research) - sometime later, you find lots of people using the thigns you built, often unaware of the origins of the stuff- the Net, the Web, lots of Unix stuff, sure, but what about more "commercial" systems? well, cisco, sun and google all started as stanford University EECS department internal projects. Microsoft's first TCP stack was done as a C port of a macro-11
stack that UCL worked on, and then handed via Spider Systems, Mentat and other companies to end up in Windows (since re-written, some of the re-write, e,.g the mobile IP code based on work by microsoft research with Lancaster University. There's a LOT of examples like this - it wouldn't surprise me if a significant fraction of software today didn't start out in a university lectuters spare time project. Some of the really "odd" theory things some folks in cambridge do like theorem proving are done using theorem proving programs. These programs turn out to be quite useful.

Some day, we'll do some cyber-archaeology and trace the family tree of software systems and discover whether my conjecture is even half way right. In the meantime, if you use ADSL to access the Internet, you have more than a 50% chance of using a modem with a chip in it designed by a colleague of mine here in the University. Oh, there's only about 6 million of you in the UK alone:)

Now, do we have the right to call into question whether the NPfIT programme should have due diligence (i.e. progress report/study, etc) done? Not only do we have the right, we have the duty AND the skills. One of the folks who signed the letter
asking for this to be done _invented_ software engineering.
Another, while he has written a quite good book, has also worked _in_ banks IT departments. Qualifications (real world or ivory tower)? well, it seems they wear them on their sleeves for all to judge, which is fine, so what is wrong with asking for another government group to do the same?

apologize or else

apologize or else

I wonder if it is Philip Gould who wrote some rather inaccurate
statements about my fellow academics on
Naughty Academics for daring to suggest the NFS National Program for IT might need to haev some transparency about its plans and progress, just like ANY well run project ought to

It has the same aggresive assertive style one associated with said person - see a response by a frend of mine,m which I thoroughly endorse - I don't know any academics in ivory towers any more, least of all in hothouises of technocracy such as Cambridge from where Ross ANderson hives, where most Computer Scientists have worked with industry and have to produce results to get funded, and have done more useful things for the world in their lunchbreak than any Government Department in a decade.

apologize or else

apologize or else

I wonder if it is Phillip Gould who wrote some rather inaccurate
statements about my fellow academics on


It has the same aggresive assertive (and factually wrong) style one associated with said person - see a response by a frend of mine,m which I thoroughly endorse - I don't know any academics in ivory towers any more, least of all in hothouises of technocracy such as Cambridge from where Ross ANderson hives, where most Computer Scientists have worked with industry and have to produce results to get funded, and have done more useful things for the world in their lunchbreak than any Government Department in a decade.

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apologize or else

now then now then whats all this about - so dan brown lifted the idea for the da vinci code from someone else? amazing- if I had been plagiarised by such a poor writer, i wouldn't be drawing attention to the fact:-)

Note, more importantly, the basis for the post-structuralist framing of such books is that they are "true" - so basing it on other works is STANDARD PRACTICE - people that do research and expect people not to use their results need to learn what their trade is about - i cannot believe how someone could be so transparently greedy as to claim they had really come up with something that dan brown used to make lots of money - if they had such a good idea, how come their book didn't sell so well, eh? probably because it wasn't as readable - so why is his book worth a lot and theirs not? because the public vote with their purses. that doesn't mean much...

A True History of the Internet

A True History of the Internet

I started this thing ages ago but only bloggized it recently - see:
the original equatorial gadget page for more info - the goal is
to be goalfree.

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apologize or else

According to the UK government, one has to make allowances for British Troops behaviour in Iraq, as they are under tremendous pressure.

Ha! They're soldiers - did they join the army to go collecting butterflies and make cucumber sandwiches on a spring day in the Loire Valley? I think not.

What kind of excuse can you make? they have permission to shoot people dead who shoot at them (something british police aren't allowed to do except to Brazillions). They routinely beat each other up in training - why do they need to beat up some random civilians as well? to chill out? Ha! I think not. Nope, its just plain sadism and racism,. same as always.

A True History of the Internet

A True History of the Internet

In the future, the Internet will be mainly hard to find. This is because instead of using expensive heavy electrons, the Internet will mostly be made of photons. These are hard to see as they are very fast, and also don't weigh anything (as far as anyone can tell) so they zip along in straight lines without falling to earth, and then they're gone - whereas electrons fall down any potential well they pass.

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apologize or else

Guantanamo Bay of Pigs...

So right wing (libertarians) often lsah out at liberals and say "How come you are always criticizing America - what about all those other bad people".

Well, what I say is they should take a look today (or ANY day) at
http://news.amnesty.org/
Where you find Sudan, Iran, Congo, Brazil, Nepal,
as well as the US and UK in the news for violation of human rights. The price of freedom is eternal vigilance - criticizing the US exclusively is dodgy, but those of us that care, care about injustice ANYWHERE, whether its Bush or Mugabe or whoever.