July 22, 2008

Let's all crowdsource a product nobody really wants

Techcrunch's Michael Arrington wants a web tablet and, not only that, he believes it will only happen if the design is crowdsourced, claiming that the machine doesn't exist. Oh really? I've seen loads of them. It's just that they tend to be prototypes in places like the Philips HomeLab.

If you look at the Philips Research site and poke around a little, you will find pictures of a device not a million miles from the Techcrunch mock-up being used as an oversized remote control. You can see an example below. Philips Electronics has a heavily stripped-down screen-based remote that you can buy in the shops as a kind of souped-up OneForAll.

The problem is not making a web tablet. I don't think it's even a case of getting the price down. It's working out whether you have a big enough market for the device to ship in high enough volumes to justify the wafer-thin margins needed to justify a $200 price on a product that has something like a 10in colour screen, processor, WiFi and a few gigs of storage.

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July 21, 2008

How neutral is neutral?

Last week, Tom Watson, UK minister for transformational government – a title that makes you wonder if there will soon be a minister for leveraged e-government solutions – claimed Whitehall computers would be carbon neutral within four years. Apparently it would be achieved by switching them off more often. This must be some use of term 'carbon neutral' I haven't previously encountered.

Unless the plan is to run all of Whitehall's machines off solar panels, nuclear or wind energy alone, it's hard to see this plan being achievable without some serious massaging of the numbers. It's no bad thing that Watson wants to cuts the energy usage of government computers but does touting the target as being carbon neutral do anyone any favours. Because, all the Cabinet Office has to do in 2012 is buy enough offsets to make it happen no matter what the actual outcome is. All that happens in that case is that the public ends up forking out for a plan that it did not really want for the sake of a slogan.

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July 18, 2008

Progressive exaggeration

If you read the paper by Masahiko Inouye and colleagues at the University of Toyama on their production of the first lengthy chains of double-stranded artificial DNA you wonder how analyst Ruchi Mallya managed to come up with the idea that this stuff might be the future of green IT.

Mallya postulated "a biochip that will make standard computers faster and more energy efficient".

If you read the press release from the American Chemical Society, the publisher of Inouye et al's paper, you begin to see where that idea came from. However, there is a subtle difference in meaning:

"The finding could lead to improvements in gene therapy, futuristic nano-sized computers, and other high-tech advances, [the researchers] say."

The claim on the release is slightly more believable - we're not talking about trying to reinvent conventional computing here. But even that is a stretch from what the researchers themselves claim in the actual paper:

"The artificial DNA might be applied to a future extracellular genetic system with information storage and amplifiable abilities...This type of research is primarily motivated by pure scientific exploration and eventually directed toward biomedical applications."

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GATC: in computing, it spells slow

Datamonitor analyst Ruchi Mallya has taken a quick look at the production of the world's first strands of DNA of reasonable length that use artificial molecular groups in place of the guanine, adenine, thymine and cytosine groups found in the natural stuff. The piece asks: is artificial DNA the future of computers? Jack Schofield at the Guardian asks, naturally, is it going to be the case?

I have a short and simple answer. No. Not even close.

You can use DNA for computation but you wouldn't use it to replace any existing form of computer. It's just too darn slow. And there does not seem to be a realistic way of making logic circuits using DNA that even approach the complexity of today's silicon-based machines, let alone computers in 20 years' time.

The group that has arguably done the most work on DNA computing is at Caltech. I've seen Georg Seelig talk a couple of times on the topic and he is realistic about the potential uses for the technology.

"What is realistic is a few thousand components. We won't get to having millions of components in the same test tube," said Seelig at a recent meeting at the Royal Society.

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When memes attack

If you've seen a blog in the last week or so, you've probably noticed people going through a list of 100 books supposedly put together by the US National Endowment for the Arts' Big Read programme. I first came across it at the Diary of a Wordsmith, who has spotted two versions. One is the "US version" and one is the "UK version". But, there is no US version.

The blog meme has become the social networking equivalent of the chain letter and, often, contains about as much truth. The claim behind this top 100 list is that the NEA has put out this list to publicise a reading programme, claiming that the average American has read only six of the hundred titles the "NEA has printed".

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