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Monday, April 14, 2008

Les mots

A Baja beach, bay side, Copyright 1988-2008 A. Barake

I was asked by my son about the meaning of the word "load". The context was "load the car". As I explained, by giving an example ("load the bags in the car"), I realized that the example provided an instance that could be generalized, but that was inherently ambiguous outside the continuity of experience. One has to have loaded things to understand that bags are just things, and we can extend the concept, and then we can even go further and talk about "a load" as a thing that is "loaded", without ending up in an infinite recursion.

You know where this is going...

Machines need to have exact mappings of symbols to "actions". Actions are just other symbol manipulations. So we have mappings and more mappings and rules and context and all the fodder of Minsky-type AI. Not good enough it seems. Gelernter and others have realized that one must be embedded in experience to have "knowledge". Husserl and Heidegger said it much earlier, but disciplines rarely cross. So we are realizing now that cognition is a sort of misnomer, we need a word to talk about "knowing", or better still "questioning" to get to a model of reality that is useful.

All this can lead to better and more flexible interface design for a start. Imagine a handshake that allows systems to agree on field semantics and field syntax for data exchange without all that WSDL baggage. Give me a couple of ports and go for it. Virus and spyware writers are now writing the primordial soup that will lead to these higher organisms one day.

Sunday, April 13, 2008

Intel and MS

The Concorde parked on Manhattan's Intrepid Air, Space and Sea Museum.

I remember attending another launch, back in the early 1980's - it may have been 1983 - when Windows was just becoming real. It was in Seattle, and Bill Gates was talking to a relatively small audience. Many of the cooler attendees were typing on Tandy Model 100's and making annoying key clicks.

Bill said something that was surprising to me at the time, that he predicted that Intel and Microsoft would become the dominant presences on the desktop. You have to remember that back then there were lots of contenders, including the new Mac, the really advanced Amiga and many other smaller players, and Bill's statement seemed preposterous to me, since his DOS was so primitive and Intel's 8088 was nasty to program, slower than the 6502 (except in clock rate) and not at all like the PDP-11 (which was something the Motorola 6800 and later 68000's were aspiring to). Some of us were even aware of Unix and its possibilities on the desktop.

He was right of course, but I think that he made the prediction come true, rather than actually saying something that made sense. His tactics and acumen forced the issue, and the contenders mostly disappeared, except for Apple. Despite being technologically inferior both the CPU and the UI he promoted became dominant. He saw that business decisions were not made by techies, even in the emerging micro world, but by risk-averse non-techies who prefer a brand name to any technological advantage.

I guess that is why he then started to draw huge audiences.

The Guardian and Harry Potter

The Alps at New Year seen from the northwest Swiss side - Copyright 2003-2008 A. Barake

I wrote earlier about a Nick Lezard Guardian posting that strongly criticises JK Rowling's prose. Recently, there has been another Guardian article about the prevalence of Oxford and Cambridge graduates in English public life. There may be a link between the two. JK Rowling did not attend these prestigious schools, yet she writes about them in the Potter books - in fact King's College at Oxford was used as a setting in some of the earlier films. So is Lezard unconsciously chaffing at the gall of it all? She is successful, very successful, and yet she does not come from the rank of the elite, she did not attend Oxbridge.

I like the Guardian, I think they are very balanced and fair, but there is a snobbery factor there, which, I am guessing, comes from this elitist attitude that is probably part of the legacy of such a prestigious education. The few graduates (less than 10) of these schools that I have met have been overly dismissive and difficult when their opinions and statements have been challenged in a social context such as a meeting or workshop. A lot of clever sophistry has been put on display to discredit their interlocutors during such occasions. Debating skill is a good thing, but taken to excess can be quite offputting. So I will probably remain prejudiced until I gain further experience in the matter.

The Network is NOT the Computer?

A hurdy-gurdie at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

I’ve recently attended Microsoft's launch of their 2008 suite of products, including Visual Studio. It was held in a movie theatre where there were two presentation streams, one for IT Professionals and one for Developers. I attended the developer stream. Very little PowerPoint and lots of live demos with code snippets being included in the examples. Visual Studio now supports Javascript as a first class citizen. This drew applause. I guess it was a sorely needed gap in IDE’s. I wonder if Javascript will become (more) fragmented as a result.

The integration of desktop presentation with the network, with attendant DRM-enforcing security as well as extensions to browser functionality is overwhelming and integration of desktop with network apps is almost complete; they are ready to link their OS and .Net environments to Internet content in a seamless way - the network is NOT the computer was the loud subtext. In fact they have made it possible to decouple the presentation layer of an application from the server side so that it works either through a client-server virtual desktop (think Citrix-like), through a regular-looking window, or through a browser.

This is resistance to the Google model, where the client is as thin as possible and standards are used as they should be. The gamble with the MS approach is that users will be sufficiently attracted to the extra features of a tighter integration to the desktop to pay money for it. Makes sense given the business model.

There were also a few intro videos at the start of the various sessions, and the most humorous included a therapist and his patient discussing the relationship between a developer, his machine, the tools and the operating system. Here, the unstated subtext was that colourful computer cases, slick hardware design etc were no match for technical flexibility and ego-boosting developer learning curves (a jibe at Apple I guess). Shakespeare wrote that wisdom comes alone through suffering, which may explain why hazing works to bind a group, and may explain why people who adopt product lines like IBM’s and Microsoft’s end up defending them so strongly. I think it is a case of confusing the side effect with the cause.