graphicallyspeaking

True Story

2008-07-17T01:22:00.002-04:00

Until Facebook, I never realized how annoying something as mundane as my birthday could be. Thank you social networking overlords.

R.I.P: Finder/Explorer AKA "the Desktop", 1984-2007

2008-06-15T22:11:00.010-04:00

I'm calling it - time of death: June 2007. Its been a long time coming, but it seems clear that the Blackberry, the iPhone, Outlook, Picasa, and iTunes all herald the end of document-centric computing.

The iPhone really didn't create this trend, but I'll say that its certainly a very visible final nail, just as the Macintosh Finder was the "visible" start back in 1984. Today, you don't keep piles of stuff on your "desktop" and activate applications (or applets) against relevant document parts: the vast majority your content is organized against your applications, not the other way around - the iPhone is a computer that doesn't even have a desktop, in any traditional sense.

There was a brief resurgence of the idea that the document was the gateway to your applications in the early 90's with OpenDoc and OLE (Object Linking and Embedding).

Hah.

We're at the starting tip of an orgasmic diarrhea of content creation in the form of e-mail, blog posts, music, photos and videos. And every single one of those is organized against single media form computing - barely a compound document in sight... you go to custom applications to create, edit, organize, and consume all the vast amount of gigabytes and terabytes of data we all share.

Vista Search and Spotlight in OS X only demonstrate even further how increasingly irrelevant the Finder and Windows Explorer are for everyday users.

In a slightly related tangent: What's most shocking to me today is how right Unix got it in the 1970's. URL's and hierarchical file paths seemed like dinosaur concepts in the early 90's before roaring back.

Either that, or we just haven't had the imagination to organize our way out of a paper bag since 1977... there's a parallel here.

Another way of saying "cool idea - wrong problem".

1 year at Comcast

2008-05-28T14:42:00.009-04:00

I just completed my first year at Comcast. Its been a gratifying experience thus far, both personally and professionally. I've been having a blast living in downtown Philly - the lifestyle has been wonderful, and the 10 minute walk to work everyday has completely spoiled me for commuting in the future. And Comcast has been a great place to work: an interesting and challenging set of problems, and a good group of people to work with (and for). I'd be lying if I said it was moving as quickly as I'd like - although I think I've made some meaningful contributions throughout my time thus far, the bigger consumer impacting things I've been working on (tru2way and Project Infinity and the like) will only begin showing up in the back half of '08 and only really at significant scale and volume (from a consumption perspective) well into 2009.

That's a long time.

Still, its a complicated technology environment - its a heady mix of legacy technology infrastructures, permutations of configurations and network designs, and a significant scale of problem set and quality-of-service requirements - and just to help, we enjoy a... challenging regulatory environment. (Boy, Those sound like excuses, even as I type them)

In celebration of my year (sort of) I spent last week at NCTA's (National Cable and Telecommunications Association) "The Cable Show". I spoke on a number of panels at the show, which is always fun. The Q&A's are always a bit frustrating, as people come to the shows to get answers, which I have .... but usually can't give. We have enough problems internally distinguishing between *goals* ("we're committed to getting there") and *plans* ("we actually have a path to get there") - no good way to make that distinction clear externally - especially for a public company.

The only real drag has been my travel calendar - would like to slow that down a bit. All in all, though, feels like I'm just getting warmed up here, which is both exciting and depressing, on many levels :)

Apple: "Who needs Flash?"

2008-03-06T08:25:00.003-05:00

Ouch - from the grand poobah, Steve Jobs: "version of Flash formatted to personal computers is too slow on the iPhone"

Adobe's response notes the difference between "Flash lite" (for mobile) and "Flash" (the desktop version Jobs alluded to in his comments).

From a technology perspective, this hilights a subtlety Jobs implies that most (including Adobe's Ryan Stewart) either missed or mis-directed in their responses: Jobs doesn't want the half-assed version of the Web that most users experience on their handsets - he wants the real thing.

And that means, for the iPhone, Flash, not Flash Lite. The point being, the iPhone is a general purose computing device, and, though it may require interaction paradigm adjustments (form factor, input schema, etc.), it shouldn't have to compromise richness and robustness.

The current Flash Player really is optimized for the desktop (especially the Intel platform)- but, to be fair, that's an engineering deficiency, not a phyics problem; it is possible for the Flash platform to address...

Adobe: Engage and AIR

2008-02-25T13:27:00.005-05:00

I'm at the Adobe Engage event is SF today, for the launch of Adobe AIR. Its been a while coming (beginning with Adobe Apollo), with much written about it.

Interesting elements: desktop integration (peristent storage, UI touchpoints, etc.), full HTML(via WebKit) support, integrated PDF display, and an application packaging model for easy install and update (distribution).

The two most important pieces (IMHO) are the persistent storage model and application packaging model - these start to bring the benefits of "content" to executable applications... that its "Flash" underneath is interesting but not necessarily the important part. These technologies do provide a differentiated but overlapping feature set that I don't mean to downplay, but HTML, Flash, PDF, etc. are, I think, going to end up being more about onboarding developers.

Hard to appreciate how important distribution is as a part of application lifecycle management.

The natural comparison points are Silverlight and Prism, and as with those two, distribution will be less the issue than finding the compelling applications will be (although you should note that Silverlight, in particular, is more an answer to Flash than AIR).

Adobe is significantly advantaged in this regard because (a) they're cross-platform (by that I mean crossing OS, browser and Web/Desktop boundaries), and (b) they're committed to the platform - the biggest knock with Microsoft and the Mozilla Foundation is that its hard to tell how serious they really are. Remember when all of Vista was going to *require* .NET? Or remember ChromeEffects? Or Blackbird?

That said, I think one chink in the AIR platform (IMHO) is that it provides no way for third parties to natively extend the platform - Adobe still thinks about applications as B2C propositions. A second knock is that they still haven't gotten the "just in time" element of application and platform install quite right (I've written on this before) - it will limit (again IMHO) where users prefer websites to applications.

Still - there's a lot to like.

More shortly - Kevin Lynch is talking now...

Fun with Flash

2008-02-03T21:23:00.001-05:00

Amusing video :)

MacWorld 2008: Software Industry R.I.P.

2008-01-16T21:27:00.000-05:00

It's only fair, and certainly poetic, but the circle is now complete. As Apple, with the Apple II (and a little nudge from VisiCalc), heralded the beginning, so too did Steve Jobs (and Apple) herald the end (or at least, the end of the beginning) of the software industry.

No longer is a "what" (as in, "What do you?"), its now officially a "how". I'm calling it: Time of Death - January 15th, 2008, 9:48am PST (or thereabouts :))

What's am I going on and on about?

Steve Jobs made some cool announcements at the annual Apple-o-phile incest/love-fest: iPhone/iTouch upgrades, AppleTV stuff, MacBook Air, Time Capsule/Airport, and no mention of OS X...

(Tiger? Leopard? What's next? I dunno!! - some damn cat??)

Its not THAT wierd he didn't mention it - after all, Leopard just shipped, and I expect the OS enhancements will probably debut at the Apple Worldwide Developer's conference in June.

What was wierd was that nobody noticed... or cared.

It's a trend that's been developing for some time, but, these days, saying you do "software" is now as meaningful as saying you're in the "customer business" (or as insightful as having an "Audience business"? :P)...... just not that descriptive, dipsh!t.

And 2008 just made it official.

If you'll forgive the math mangling: It's only a hyperbole, if you can't see the asymptopes.

The Iowa Caucus

2008-01-06T11:36:00.000-05:00

Updated: Saw this after posting... Our Voting System is a Loser

Wow... already commente d to death, but the Iowa results were very surprising, especially on the democratic side. Few had predictated such a margin of victory for Obama, and certainly not with a third place finish for Clinton. Huckabee's victory over Romney was certainly not a foregone conclusion, but if it was an upset, it also certainly was not a surprise upset (if that's not too oxymoronically hair splitting of me to say).

Interestingly (and I use the term loosely :)), that Dem/Rep difference in expectation also plays out as you look back at the Iowa Caucuses. Excluding incumbent candidate years, since 1972, only once (1980) was winner in Iowa not the Republican nominee, yet on the Democratic side, only three times was the winner the eventual Democrat nominee (vs. 4 times not).

Why is that?

Certainly there's the much publicized Democratic caucus process itself. In a particular bit of difference, voters get the opportunity to "re-cast" their votes if their candidate is deemed to be not viable. This is kind of cool - it means that you don't have to feel like your vote gets "wasted" if your picking a "risky" candidate who best aligns with more of your views.

This is a brilliant innovation in Democracy that I think better captures the "will of the majority", as opposed to the usual "will of solidarity" embodied by special interest groups. I get the idea - people stick together even if they don't agree on everything just to make sure their voice and vote matters. But I think its this blind allegiance to collective relevance over individual desire that's removed the shades of grey from our hyper-partisan brand of modern politics.

That said, the core problem with the Iowa Democratic process, I believe, is that the viability adjustment (the vote re-cast) requires that your vote is not by secret ballot - that you sacrifice anonymity (think about it). And that means that peer pressure and public perception play a much larger role in the process. The secret ballot provides protective anonymity, and is a vital and important cornerstone of modern democracy. It means people can vote their mind withou fear of reprisal in defeat (as part of the possible minority).

And this delta - that of anonymity - is why I think the Iowa Democratic Caususes are not a very strong predictor of future performance. I'm not saying Obama won't win his party's nomination, but I am saying that he's a candidate that its publically easy to align with him.

I think the real solve for this is to let people pick alternatives (perhaps multiple) up front, in some rank order - a complete overhaul of the existing system.

There's an opportunity for the overhaul as we introduce digital election process - which can provide much greater turnout, as well as enable a whole new class of election "services". The security problem will get solved, though not necessarily in our parents lifetimes (sorry, old folks).

And when it does, (not to sound hokey, but) I think it creates an opportunity to better serve the spirit of the Constitution, and of Democracy, than our current process does.

We'll see what tomorrow brings.... as always :)

You can't make this stuff up...

2008-01-04T17:24:00.000-05:00

My blog is blocked by our corporate firewall... (and I quote):

Access to this page has been denied by web filtering.

If the site you are trying to access is critical to your job function, please open a support center ticket and provide the full address of the site that you were trying to access and the following message in its entirety:

Access to http://sree.kotay.com/ for user adapps.cable.comcast.com OU=Users - CHQ,OU=1500 Market,OU=Corporate,DC=cable,DC=comcast,DC=com\Rouleau-Hellhake\, Shari has been denied for the following reason:
The Websense category "Social Networking and Personal Sites" is filtered.

I guess my blog isn't work related... not really sure WHAT it's related to, come to think of it...

Best Deal of 2007: Microsoft-Facebook?

2007-12-20T10:14:00.000-05:00

Much has been written on the terms of the deal between Microsoft and Facebook. The gist of it is this: Microsoft paid Facebook $240M for 1.6% of the company, and the exclusive rights to sell online advertising for the site.

This being the year-end, all pundit types have got their best and worst lists coming out, and this deal seems omnipresent on worst deals of the year lists.

Its not hard to see why this argument is made: "worst" is really a proxy for "stupidly lopsided value creation", and is Facebook remotely worth that much (remember that MySpace went for $500M and YouTube for $1.6B)? It creates an implied valuation on their user base (figure 50M users or so) of, like, $300 a head... that's some big math... hard to see how Microsoft ever really recoups its investment.

But of course, that's to focus on the value with regard to public markets and value cap - the *wrong* metric here. That implied valuation of $15B, is pretty much (forgive my language) bull$#!t because this deal was, in reality, a barter deal.

Let's look at the deal another way, very simply, in terms of cash:

1) Facebook gets a $240M cash infusion while giving up very little control or equity,
2) Microsoft gets a significant destination outside its network in which to build the value of its recent, very large acquistion of aQuantive (4% of the $6B that's already "sunk"),
3) Microsoft has to generate incremental ARPU of only $5 a user *in total* to break even,
4) Facebook is valued at $15B, which means...
5) Facebook is either (depending on where you think this ends): (a) off the market for some time at that price (so no Google, Yahoo, et al spoilers), or (b) tied to Microsoft and hardening/creating value in their online ad platform

Win, win, win, win, win - at least for Microsoft and Facebook: you know, the parties actually doing the deal?

Isn't that the definition of "best"? Lopsided value creation for *both* sides?

Any "investment" dollar$ back from the deal is pure upside for Microsoft. That means that they, more or less, let Facebook fill in the denominator: $240M of $XX - Microsoft doesn''t/didn't *really* care what that number was...

I don't know about you, but it leaves me with a funny taste in my mouth... is this the "revenue exchange" program of the new bubble - a variation of the old: "I'll buy from you if you buy from me and both our revenues go up, but we're not spending any money trick?"

Dunno - but it also smells suspiciously similar to another "equity for exclusivity" deal...

My new favorite word

2007-12-13T08:58:00.000-05:00

w00t?

Not so much.... I like "backronym...." :)

(ok, maybe *favorite* is a strong word - but its funny... looks funny, sounds funny, is funny - try saying it aloud)

Urgh.

2007-12-05T08:21:00.000-05:00

Ok -so the only worse flight to take than a red-eye, is a red-eye with connections. Urgh... to quote the inimitable (all evidence to the contrary) Danny Glover: "I'm getting too old for this [expletive]..." :)

Touch UI and the Art of Intent

2007-11-29T08:01:00.000-05:00

Observation: One of the great things about the mouse as an input device is the idea of "intent" - that your cursor indicates your locus of attention when used for interaction (Roll-over states and tool-tips being trivial expressions of this).

You have a simpler model of this semantic with the Blackberry trackball (and the Blackberry jog wheel before that), and a crappier version with things like using your remote control with a TV EPG (guide) or the arrow keys on your cell phone to navigate menus.

Touch interaction systems, like the iPhone, lack that model completely - just like most older (read: HW only) Consumer Electronics UIs (think VCR or DVD player).

In some cases, that really doesn't matter much... and in other cases, the directness of interaction provides a far better paradigm.... but, it suggests the question: is "intent" a semantic that will disappear for Touch UI? Or is it a temporarily "lost" item, like tactile feedback - just a gap to be crossed?

Review: Beowulf (in 3D!)

2007-11-25T23:50:00.000-05:00

First, the short version: it was a fast paced, man-movie of an adventure (especially in 3D!). Not quite as testosterone-ly epicly big screen worthy as, say, 300, but still a movie well worth seeing in a theater (in 3D!). Really fun.

The longer version: It was good, but won't hold up - even for re-watching in the near term, and certainly not in the longer term as a "film".

Obviously, there's the whole 3D(!) -motion capture thing. Definitely a huge step forward here, especially as compared to Zemeckis' previous outing with this technology in The Polar Express. In particular, I thought they really nailed the close shots (especially the eyes), but in attempting to service the "real" left a lot of the motion looking very stiff. Ironically, it was the big motion action sequences and distance shots that looked the most fake - great effort, but still short of the "reality bar" and likely to look Dr. Who bad in a decade or so. Still - there are moments when you really, completely get drawn in (and then, *whack* get snapped out :P...)

Story-wise, the conceit of the movie (i.e. why the filmakers are "re-visiting" the well known story) is this: Imagine if everything in the original were literally true, but embellished by the narrator (Beowulf himself for much of the tale) and edited for "mature content" by the transcribers (likely cleric/priest scribes) of the epic Olde Englishe poeme. It definitely adds a layer of pathos to the story - filling in the missing "back story", but also afflicts the story with that Soap opera interconnectedness that's drowned action/adventure storytelling (especially sci-fi and fantasy) in the wake of the Empire Strikes Back.

Sometimes a dragon is just a big evil dragon , you know?
(apologies in advance for the politics of the previous link - but, whattya gonna do?)

Still - its was fun to watch, and fun to note where (and why) it diverged from its source. And it was co-written by Neil Gaiman, who, even when just off, is miles better than most...

The Great SetWorkingSetSize() Scam...

2007-11-21T09:10:00.000-05:00

I saw this post at ZDNet about Firefox 3 memory usage,. Setting aside for a second whether Firefox 3 is better than IE 7 or Firefox 2, this reminds me of one of the great cheats of "small applications" developers everywhere:

SetProcessWorkingSetSize(GetCurrentProcess(), -1, -1)

This Windows API makes your application look *very* efficient without actually doing anything, and has been employed by MANY a popularly considered"lightweight" application (and some, um, less light) - because the "Memory Size" column in Task Manager on Windows doesn't reflect memory usage.

"Hunh?!?!", you say?

That column actually reflects the working set of memory for your app - which is the amount of memory currently "realized" (in active use) by your process. Let's look at some use cases to illustrate what that actually means:

1) Allocate a bunch of memory and free it. Your app isn't reserving the memory space, but the working set may still be high - Windows will lazily reclaim if its needed by another application.
2) Minimize all your application windows. This does the equivalent of the Windows API call I listed above, and the memory working set for that application gets *totally* paged out. Then Windows will load back the memory pages as they're accessed - its the equivalent of clearing a cache.

This last is confusing (and illustrates the issue): after SetProcessWorkingSetSize(GetCurrentProcess(), -1, -1), "Memory Size" in Task Manager doesn't reflect what's been "reserved" (allocated) by an application, just what blocks of memory are being/have been actively "touched" since the working set was "cleared".

If all that's confusing, fortunately for you, its easy to boil down to a simple action: Use the "Virtual Memory Size" column in Task Manager instead to look at application memory usage. You can find under the "View... Select Columns..." menu. It reflects what the application has requested from the OS, but not yet released, i.e. the real memory consumed by the application!

More info here.

Android: Sound and Fury signifying... ?

2007-11-15T07:30:00.000-05:00

So... I've been looking at Android a little bit (what's actually available thus far is really the SDK, not the platform itself).

A few comments:
- Custome Java(-ish - more on this shortly)VM/bytecode engine
- Integrated Webkit for HTML/JavaScript authoring
- Fast, robust 2d graphics (native and software only) with a custom presentation engine
- OpenGL ES, with possibility of HW acceleration
- Rich storage semantics through SQLite
- Still a little fuzzy on the licensing terms: Google says (emphasis mine)"Over time, more of the code that makes up Android will be released..." - not sure what that means...

The SDK support Java application only at this stage (and the forseeable future?) - though, in theory, platform source code being available under "non-restrictive" terms creates the opportunity for other types of enhancements.

So - still early, but on the good side: LOTS of (welcome/needed) attention to the graphics and presentation layers.

On the bad: fracturing Java (which only recently has started to make progress on getting past the "build once/debug everywhere" problems). If Sun doesn't address this with Google, it'll be hard for them to maintain any credibility or cohesion with the Java Community Process for managing Java's roadmap.

Interestingly this hilights a truism of mine: for software, single implementation trumps single specification - more on this in a future post.

How this will work with open source and Android is unclear, because as Johnathon Schwartz (Sun's CEO) points out: "Companies compete, communities simply fracture".

In particular, it'll be interesting how Google rationalizes their rumoured "non-fragmentation" clause and the idea of "non-restrictive" licensing...

Watch this Space, pt 1 (AKA the Android cometh)

2007-11-12T07:21:00.000-05:00

Updated: Up and available around noon EST (someone sent me the link already! :)). Will look at it tonight... amusingly, win and mac tarballs downloading now, but consistently crapping out on linux set...

So, despite all the "news" last week (*cough* tease) - and all the subsequent pontificating - today (in theory) is when the Android SDK - the guts of the long rumoured Google "gPhone" - is actually released, and we get some real meat.

I have to hand it to the Symbian guys, though who take "quote of the week" for John Forsyth's likening of a Linux mobile initiative to the common cold: "It keeps coming round and then we go back to business."

Heh.

So... watch this space (I'll share some thoughts once I get an "open" look...)

Toddlers bond with Robot

2007-11-07T07:39:00.000-05:00

Pretty cool story in the New Scientist on Monday: Robot becomes one of the kids. Basically, researches found that, with the correct behaviour emulations, an advanced robot was able to integrate into a toddler group as a peer (as opposed to "as a toy", or "as a pet", even, based on touching clues and other interations).

Video below (link):

This has implications for group behaviour theory and social development (it hints at a lot about how we develop thinking about "us"). But mostly it speaks to the evolution of robotics assistance in the classroom, especially for young children.

There is clear evidence that the "uncanny valley" gets substantially farther and wider as we age - the question that this study ponders, but only partially answers, is: Why would we ever use/need *humanoid* robots?

Still: cool :)

ES4: The Javascript 2.0 Blaze

2007-11-01T08:58:00.000-04:00

Updated: Now on Slashdot.

A bit of a flame war going on in the ECMAScript working group (which spices up an otherwise reasonably boring mailing list).

This blog post (from Mozilla Foundation CTO and Javascript creator Brendan Eich) is really only tip of the iceberg - you should follow some of the links from his post, or check out the mailing list archive.

Javascript 2.0, or more formally ECMAScript Edition 4 (or simply ES4) has been in the works for a good, oh.... 8 years now. With the ES4-in-motion work from Adobe (nee Macromedia) in the form of ActionScript 3 (AS3), and the rise of Firefox, Safari, et al. its been getting a serious push to completion over the last year and a half, especially in the face of Microsoft's C#, Silverlight, and (though no one said it directly), I think even Adobe's Flex and AIR.

The battlelines are pretty clearly drawn, with Microsoft and Yahoo on one side, and the Mozilla team, Opera, Adobe (interesting, eh? "Enemy of my Enemy" anyone?), and oh, pretty much everybody else on the other side. Or, as you might first opine from that cast, Evil v. Good.

MS and Yahoo think the language is changing too much, whilst the others think that it needs to in order to be competitive for the larger scale programming projects the web is increasingly requiring.

My opinion? As is usually the case, they're both right - you only have to look at the Flash community's response to ActionScript 3 .

In short: They like it - a lot, but its very different than AS2 development.

And, oh, from an implementor's perspective, AVM1 and AVM2 (which, roughly, correspond to ES3/AS2 and ES4/AS3) are two completely different VMs. Is it possible to make one that does both? Sure... but there's no denying ES4 requires *substantially* more effort and complexity to implement (note I'm *not* making an argument about code size here....)

An so, in a deliciously Shakespearean turn, Doug Crockford ~~of Microsoft~~ of Yahoo asserts (correctly I think) that the issue is fundamentally one of nomenclature.

Of marketing.

If its not called Javascript, would anyone use it? And if it is, how similar should it be?

Quite frankly, Brendan's probably right in that, whatever justifications the opposition might even believe, there is a bias to keep Javascript "ghetto-ized" to a degree - because of existing investments and strategy considerations.

That doesn't, however, make it wrong to push in that direction.

Personally, I do wish there were less emphasis on the "compiler/VM" split that Java brought into vogue - it seems to be at the the heart of a lot of the design decisions that make AS3 and ES4 feel less "Javascript-y" to me.... but that's both good and bad - ECMAScript 3 is forgiving of errors well past the point of stupidity.

And so, lightweight stuff really is harder, but its also a lot easier to write stuff well...

Hi Hulu Hulu Nuku Nuku Wah Ha Hah...

2007-10-29T08:17:00.000-04:00

Updated: Hunh - they fixed the scaling :) Beta-in-motion... cool!

Hulu (the YouTube/iTunes clone from "Big Media") is now in beta (closed, but still)... see the embedded player below (link).

It looks pretty nice - nothing mind bogglingly interesting or anything, but somewhat well executed (annoyances already: can't invoke menu without sitting through the ad, scales size REALLY poorly - note that I'm not using the default "520 x 295" size... and permalink, wherefore art thou?). You can follow a "related content chain"to other assets by clicking on links when you invoke the "menu" - rollover the clip above to see what I mean.

I obtained this clip from from the Hulu blog (written by the CEO)- which has all of two entries since August.

CEO blogging is nice and Web 2.0h-ey - but only if you follow through, so minus style points for that. On the flipside, its an episode of the Office (full episode!) they use as a first example - which is frikkin' hilarious, so there's that.

I have to admit, as content providers increasingly push out the middle man, and offer the content directly... well - I'm not sure how many "pure" aggregators will be left standing.

Maybe this will be one. Or maybe not.

Steady Search Improvements

2007-10-24T22:43:00.000-04:00

I'm not sure when it started happening, but both Google and Live now display a simple "table of contents" (link) for the first entry (Yahoo doesn't currently, and Ask has its own variant)....

Its really quite handy.

Back when, I had proposed a similar feature for AOL Explorer, based on the idea that an auto-discoverable RSS feed (a simple feature all browsers now have) is more than just an "update feed" - its really also an alternative editorially managed table of contents for the site. The idea was that you'd visit the site (like ESPN or CNN), and perhaps a small toaster would appear in the lower right presenting the feed as a mini TOC for quick navigation.

In any case, no idea if that's how the search guys are doing it - but the idea that the RSS feeds are actively programmed means they present an alternative, intelligent view into the site clearly must feed relevancy (which is really another word for "recommended" if you think about it...).

And little features like this showing are going to be increasingly important - more content means more specialization (witness: search engine fatigue)- so nicely done.

Software the Ultimate

2007-10-17T19:50:00.000-04:00

If you're a language geek of any sort, you should really be regularly reading Lambda the Ultimate (er - "language geek" of the digital variety, that is - you freak-ish polyglots can go elsewhere). Of course, if you are one, you're likely already there, so the reference here is redundant.

That said, there was an excellent post from a few weeks ago that any futurist should embrace as a foundational principle (uh - IMHO :)). That principle, emodied in an argument about the base nature of programmable circuity, is that "Everything is software - the rest is just wiring". At some point, this will seem like a obvious thing - we'll wonder how anyone could have ever imagined it differently (and I'll bet some already do :)).

The most dramatic public demonstration of this is the iPhone, of course, where the "hardware" interface (input keys, etc.) is configured on-demand, programmatically (i.e. in "software"). But, the rise of the Programmable Processing Unit (the "PPU", whether called the CPU, GPU, Embedded processor, or whatever) has been underway for a long time - implicitly masked in the rise of "Edge Processing Capacity": smart devices of all sorts (phones, fridges, routers, blah blah ...), presaged by the Personal Computer itself.

Not there haven't been some promising mis-steps (Transmeta Crusoe comes to mind) - but it is the path. Most industries today, including Video, are full of single purpose, limited function ASICs, and that will change.

A few trends contribute directly to the idea, and value, of "Software-as-Hardware":

Specialization of function delivering a higher quality experience: think IMDb v. Yahoo Finance v. Google. And if you don't believe even Google believes this, ask yourselves why they have CodeSearch, Google Finance, and the like.
Aggregation of access points: think PDA/laptop/cell phone, or TV/Internet and Game console convergence - I don't mean "connectivity" here, but your physical access point to digital services.
This is driven by what I think of as "the Lazy IT" principle required for mass commoditization: You just don't want to manage - that is, administer, install, update, and (in the case of portable access points) carry - all these access points.
Sidenote: Mobility of access as a proxy for personalization will be an interesting trend to watch here.
The rise of what I call "Content Engineering": data driven design systems (think HTML, Flash, and to a lesser extent Java, .NET, etc.) enabling richer and more dynamically flexible relationships between content and services providers and their end users. The essence of this practice, on-demand delivery, is at the heart of what drives the move to progammability.

Another future wrinkle will be as our devices (access points in this context) become even more configurable. We see a *tiny* bit of this with some fun phone form factors (say THAT 5 times fast), but I think piezo-electric stuff (and/or some karmically related technologies like digital ink, or the like) will drive some dramatic application innovations that create significant behaviour shifts in next 8 years.

Imagine what it'll be like if your apps or content can change not just the surface, but the shape of your terminal.

Power consumption impedances (in the "laws of physics" sense), I think, are the only unknown blocker, versus greater programmability. Though perhaps there are creative ways to solve even that...

Of course, its not entirely impossible I'd feel differently if my title were "Chief Hardware Architect" :)

Flash rulez

2007-10-11T07:45:00.000-04:00

Courtesy of Corey.
Fairly impressive set of announcements from Adobe's MAX conference this year.

Most notably (for me):

Aformentioned Flash player support for H.264/MPEG-4 should be released in the next few weeks (though media streaming is still tied to their Media Server, which kinda sucks),
2D Shading language for Flash code-named Hydra; you can check out a HW accelerated only version here,
C/C++ compiler for Actionscript; not sure if this will be productized, but the demo of Quake I software rendering compiled to the AS3 VM is pretty cool (end of the second video, here),
Substantially expanded text control: flow, wrap-around, tables, etc.,
2.5 rendering, e.g. a perspective display system.

Get (slightly) more detailed info at Adobe Labs.

With some significant focus of the developer productivity/debugging chain, Adobe could make things very interesting for the current generation of incumbents (Sun, Microsoft, etc.).

Certainly it turns up the heat intensely for the Silverlight team... and even moreso for the future of Java on the desktop for RIA.

Secrets of the Cable Universe #2: Bandwidth, pt 2

2007-10-10T08:01:00.000-04:00

Continuing from Part 1.

To cut to the chase, your coaxial cable (and hence your cable company) is capable of delivering (roughly somewhat less than) 5Gbps into your house.

The math for that number is pretty simple. There's about 750mhz (or so) or RF spectrum avaible, divided into 6mhz "channels". Why 6mhz? Because that's about how much spectrum you need to deliver an uncompressed analog NTSC AV signal - in the digital world, that translates into (about) 40Mbps. So 40*125 = 5 (you know, adjusting for decimal places).

That sounds like a big number, and it is, but there are a few mitigating factors, as discussed last time.

First, it is a "shared" connection. There a certain number of households grouped into a "service group", usually between 200 to 2000 (very broadly), which connect to some physical networking gear at the cable plant (I use the term "plant" very loosely here). Within that service group, DOCSIS (the cable networking data interface protocol) basically works like a form of encrypted ethernet. Everybody in that service group sees all the packets, but cannot decode those packets.

So right off the bat, your effective sustained speed (more on this concept in a bit), is 5Gbps divided by [number of homes in your service group].

Additionally, some portion of that spectrum, those channels, is consumed by television - In fact, almost all of it. Today, only a single 6mhz channel is allocated to your High Speed Data (HSD) connection. That's a big part of what DOCSIS 3.0 promises - the ability to "bond" channels to effectively multiply the available bandwidth by N number of 6mhz channels.

Assuming there's channel spectrum to allocate...

In digital form, some 10 to 16 or so Standard-Def (SD) channels can fit in a single 6mhz channel (multiplexed into a single MPEG container over that channel, for those curious - this is also important because it has implications for compressions; specifically regarding CBR v. VBR). Two to maybe 3 or four High-Def (HD) channels can fit in the same 40Mbps. The range incidentally, is largely a function of compression quality per digital channel; this is probably worth a future post.

Short version: you get either 1 analog channel, 10 to 16 (or so) SD digital channels, or 2 to 4 (or so) HD digital channels.

Thr rub is this: most of the U.S. is still analog. Or at least, enough of it that most cable operators carry around 80 or so analog channels (out of a possible 110 or so). Then they consume another 6 to 8 or so "double carrying" the same channels in digital form, and the rest is allocated to HD channels (triple carrying many channels) and VOD (Video-On-Demand - more on how this works in a future post also).

Which doesn't leave a lot of room for your HSD connection.

Interesting, the core technology and bandwidth available compares reasonably favorably even with newer technologies like optical fiber (remember that we're talking about the connection to the home from the "edge" of the network - "inside" the cable network is often optical fiber, already; the challenge here is the "last mile"). Mostly the advantage of networks like FiOS is smaller service group sizes (owing to larger capital investments and other "late mover" advantages), and less legacy encumberances.

Vista: 1 year later

2007-10-02T07:37:00.000-04:00

Ok, it hasn't really been a year - the Vista launch was "officially" January 30, for consumers, with the actual release tepidly launching 60 days earliers to businesses and developers on November 30.

But its interesting to note the contrast betwixt Vista's reception and Halo 3 (which just launched September 25).

I don't think there's anything wrong, per se, with Vista (other than the ridiculously massive gap between it and the last major OS release from Microsoft) - and there's much to recommend - but, it reaffirms for me that OS'es increasingly won't matter. Note that although Vista projections are down from MS, XP projections are up - the message seemingly that one's just as good as the other.

I don't mean that snidely - as computing has moved from novelty to utility, consumer interest will be be driven by experience, not capability. That is, "What have you done for me lately?", not "What could you do for me lately?" - which explains Halo's, um, halo.

Natural enough, but it probably has some significant implications in how Microsoft will/should think about the future of its platform... generating infrastructure that creates platform lock-in will be increasingly difficult.