Dan Siemon

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: 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.

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.

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.

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.