IMDEA Workshop on Internet Science
See here for titles/speakers and slides...
So far Pablo's talk had some v. interesting stuff about scaling the twitter service - clever work on solving hotspots andoverloads in memcache/mysql setup - reminded me of previous work on trying to get the IMDB system to scale - seems like these inverted databases are a pain in general, so a fundamental solution would be welcome...for those of you working on social net analysis, worry about (particularly un-self-declared) spambots in twitter - see Mowbray's talk - plus looking at Vattay'sstats talk is worthwhile
anyhow, I was reading this Future Internet Roadmap and decided that Private Green Clouds is defintely the way to go (andwe are there yet, so that is good:-)
here's the barking bit: why not put a data center in every car?
rationale:1. future cars will be electric.2. its proposed that future electricity generation will incorporate a lot of micro-generation(certainly solar here in spain, and wind in uk etc etc)3. the power distribution net is not fit for "uplink" electricity in large amount, so...4. micro-generation is largely intermittent (esp. wind, but obviously solar is at least on/off day/nite)5. hence we need to do local distribution of micro-generated power6. or else we need to store micro-generated electricty
power solution=> use electric cars as storage; to get an idea of scale, (see Mackay's book) cars could store about 30% of UK generated power -when we get to 100% of the carpool of the UK being electric...
so then where we plug cars in, why not also have a dataport too then instead of using meagre compute resource in someone's house, have a big-fat data center in the car(s) in a street - they can run off stored power when local production exceeds demand (or predicted (say nighttime) production/stored exceeds local and car demand...
the numbers should work very well...you can easily smooth day/night variation, but also short term wind variation...
before you all shout, one problem is that the batteries are really designed for a relatively small number of discharge cycles - however, some technologies (hydrogen fuel cell etc) would fixthat
so this needs 2 things.1 a smaller unit for data center2 a plan to do fiber-to-the-charging-point....
unseemly accessibility&mobility – be careful what you wish for
We're all getting older, curiously enough at exactly the same rate. My ancient mum tries to get on with technology, but its a constant struggle. As with about 1M other people in their 80s/90s in the UK, she has sight loss and hearing loss (sight loss is from macular degeneration, a common problem with age, although now it can be slowed with various treatment that reduce the rate the blood supply to retina dies off - hearing loss just from wear&tear).
So I have tried to setup computers and phones and TV in her house to be "accessible". Believe me, the "state of the art" in this stuff is appalling. It is truly shocking how bad support in terms of hardware and software is.Just think about default WiFi access control to start with. Most APs shipped by ISPs come with security default on. And you have to type in the SSID and Key to the computer - have you tried that with good eyesight. And you may have to do it within 30 seconds after hitting one of 3 buttons on the side of the AP. Doh.
Now try setting up accessibility options on a computer - e.g. screen magnification and voice/spoken menus etc. Firstly, on a windows box, the max magnification means menus go off the bottom of the screen (this is on a machine with a Very Big Screen indeed), and so you can't turn it off again (or reset it). Macs are not a lot better. Secondly, there's no tailoring of the speech stuff, so every screen event triggers an annoying voice (imagine that old paperclip, but with a stoopid accent - its worse, believe me).
Now on mobile phones. So find a touch screen fone which lets you setup accessibility - ought to be quite easy really. no it isn't. now look at wifi use in home (i.e. skype) so its free and you don't have to explain the way to use other phones. So now look at what happens when you move outside the home - skype will still work on 3G, but it could be ruinously expensive. Why can't one have a single voice API, which chooses a network stack (voice+gsm when out of wifi range, for example).
The only thing that was simple was the (cheapest big LCD screen) LG from Richer sounds. The UI is basically like any old TV, and the buttons on the screen are not too many or invisible.
The last straw was hearing aids. My mother has 3 (1 set of analog in the ear, 1 set of fairly good digitial behind the ear from NHS and one set of very fancy private digital ones) - these gizmos are all fairly amazing (they work very well when they work) - the digital ones do fancy filtering of background noise and attempt to compensate for differences in ears (matters for directional hearing and understanding speech in noisy settings like pubs/restaurants/shops) and are very cute until you get to
i) trrying to replace a battery
ii) trying to find a manual for them online
This whole world is astounding -all the websites one can find are ripoff merchants trying to make a buck, and nothing but vacuous generic advice - unlike any of the other tech stuff where (in my experience) you can get a professional engineers repair book for free for last weeks phone or last decades washing machine, and you can get useful tips from anything from photo guide how to, through to a youtube video - i've just fixed a fancy tent and last year fixed the jammed DVD drive on an old Macbook that way for free) - the world of accessiility is anything but accessible. So there's 3 buttons and a slideout battery draw on the (NHS provided) digital hearing aid. Can you find a website that says what the buttons do, or how long the batteries should last? nope. not at all. not even on RNID site (who do at least provide quite good generic advice). And remember a large fraction of the people using these gasdgets also have sight problems, so trying to see fiddly (stateful) buttons is really not a sane UI.
If I had any principles I'd start a company to fix all this...its quite shocking!
The Philosophy of Trust and Cloud Computing
The Philosophy of Trust and Cloud Computing
April 5/6, Corpus Christi, Cambridge
Sponsored by Microsoft Research
Richard Harper (MSR) and Alex Oliver (Cambridge) outlined
the goals of the meeting, and everyone introduced themselves - the
majority of attendees were either in Social Science/Anthropology or
Philosophy, with a few industrials and a couple of technical people
from Computing (networks&security).
The talks were mostly in the social science style
(people literally "read" papers, rather than powerpoint), so one had
to concentrate a bit more than usual, rather than looking at
bulletpoints and catching up on email/facebook.
End to end arguments in Virtualised System Design
We've come a long way in virtualisation (some would say around in a big circle, but that's a different blog entry). Now we have routine cloud services (commercial, public and private) based on VMs all over the place. We also have routine VPNs, at least in most layer 2 net setups, and (at much greater expense) as commercial offerings between large corporate sites.
What virtualisation does is combine two properties - statistical multiplexing (resource pooling) together with isolation (privacy). Some VMs and VPNs allow you to tune the amount of resource pooling (for a price) that you are prepared to tolerate.
What seems to be lacking is a seamless integration of VM and VPN, and it seems that it is not a trivial thing to solve in a clean way. Obviously, one can simply map a service (e.g. a large Skywriting app running on a set of data centers) to a VPN. But that isn't terribly useful in general. More typically if there are resource pooling design goals, they are more likely, in the network layer to lie in having a wide set of user demands from outside of the VPN (e.g. a hose or sink tree).
So what should virtualised host+net look like as a building block, and what should the tools be to "provision" such things in an expressive, checkable, and simple way?
Seems like this is a good current challenge... ...