The woes of the "One laptop per child" project

Ivan Krstić writes in Sic Transit Gloria Laptopi about the woes of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project.

The whole essay is a bit long, but definitely worth reading. It goes through the history of the OLPC project (including its roots in early experiments), through musings about the best choice of operating system, to suggestions on how to move the project forward successfully, after what appears to have been a severe crisis.

No matter what, Krstić is right that the whole experience will not have been in vain. But it's too bad that a project like this can die for purely political reasons. On one hand, OLPC could not have seen the light of day without the efficient support of someone like Nicholas Negroponte. On the other hand, if we are to trust Krstić earlier essay, Things to remember when reading news about OLPC, he's now almost a liability to the project:

To those on the outside and looking in: remember that, though he takes the liberty of speaking in its name, Nicholas is not OLPC. OLPC is Walter Bender, Scott Ananian, Chris Ball, Mitch Bradley, Mark Foster, Marco Pesenti Gritti, Mary Lou Jepsen, Andres Salomon, Richard Smith, Michael Stone, Tomeu Vizoso, John Watlington, Dan Williams, Dave Woodhouse, and the community, and the rest of the people who worked days, nights, and weekends without end, fighting like warrior poets to make this project work. Nicholas wasn’t the one who built the hardware, or wrote the software, or deployed the machines. Nicholas talks, but these people’s work walks.

Makes you wonder who really "invented" the OLPC... Two earlier posts may be relevant to this topic:

• Another earlier discussion of Group Dynamics, which seems to apply quite well here
• Maybe we should hear the other side of the story.

The Perimeter Institude hit by the Slashdot effect

The Slashdot effect is what happens to a web site when it is referenced on Slashdot. Many web sites are unable to handle the load correctly, as the very large readership of Slashdot tries to connect to the linked site.

I thought that the Slashdot effect was more or less a thing of the past, but this just happened to the Perimeter Institute (PI), following the publication of a post entitled "Lectures on the Frontier of Physics". Currently, the PI web site only displays the following:

Thank you for visiting Perimeter Institute.

The website is under heavy load at present due to the popularity of announcements regarding the appointment of Neil Turok as Executive Director of PI, as well as awareness of PI's online public lecture series - as reported on Slashdot and other sources.

Please visit again when traffic is back to normal.

Thank you.

Hopefully, traffic will soon return to normal, because the agenda looked quite promising. The Slashdot story cites:

Presentations include Neil Turok's 'What Banged?,' John Ellis with 'The Large Hadron Collider,' Nima Arkani-Hamed with 'Fundamental Physics in 2010,' Paul Steinhardt with 'Impossible Crystals,' Edward Witten with 'The Quest for Supersymmetry,' Seth Lloyd with 'Programming the Universe,' Anton Zeilinger with 'From Einstein to Quantum Information,' Raymond Laflamme with 'Harnessing the Quantum World,' and many other talks. The presentations feature a split-screen presentation with the guest speaker in one frame and their full-frame graphics in the other.

Can we improve HTTP?

This kind of experience is a reminder that HTTP is a really simple protocol, one where no attempt whatsoever is made to offer some kind of proximity caching. I wonder if it's possible to retrofit P2P proximity caching technologies into the more bare-bones HTTP? Does anybody know of any such research? The idea, obviously, would be to have nodes that are closer to the client act as content proxies, thereby offloading the original server.

The problem, of course, is that much of the content on the Internet is dynamic and hard to cache. That's the reason it's an interesting question :-)

Too much travel...

There is such a thing as too much travel, but I will certainly not complain about the sightseeing.

HP TechCon 2008

I just came back from HP TechCon 2008, Hewlett-Packard's internal conference for technologists, which was held in Boston this year.

HP TechCon is something serious. It works like a real conference: you have to submit papers to be invited, there is a formal selection process, and technologists end up presenting their work to a wide audience.

The two differences with other conferences are what makes it very interesting:

• it's internal to HP, so we get to see and talk about stuff that is confidential or really far out.
• It's all about HP, which is a big company, so there are a lot of different topics. Most conferences are really monolithic by comparison.

Meeting great people

Obviously, there is a lot I can't talk about. But I can at least say that it was the occasion for me to meet many amazing people. Below are some public links telling you more about some people I met there:

Phil McKinney is the VP and CTO of HP's Personal Systems Group. He has a blog, a Facebook profile, a Wikipedia entry, publishes podcasts, has more than 500 LinkedIn connections, and even a Google Phil entry on his web pages. Recommended reading.

Exploring the web around Phil's blog and comments, I discovered a number of things, like mscape and the HP Game On series of ads. And for serious gamers, the Blackbird 002 game system (adding "002" to the name is, by itself, a really cool piece of serious geekery.)

Duncan Stewart is a physics researcher at HP Labs. You need to add "memristor" to Google Duncan, because there are other people with the same name. Occasional readers of my blog may know that physics is a topic I'm quite interested in. He's one of the researchers behind the memristor, which I will talk about below.

There are a number of pages about Duncan Stewart, including this one on the HP Labs web site. I really enjoyed talking to him.

The memristor

In case you did not hear about it, the memristor is the fourth passive device, after the resistor, the capacitor and the inductor. But it would be surprising if you had not heard about it. The number of papers and articles on such a recent topic is really amazing. Here is a link at HP Labs, the article in Nature that I think started it all, or the Wikipedia entry.

To explain what the memristor is, a little hydraulic analogy is in order. As you know, a good way to think about electricity is to see "voltage" as the height of water (the pressure, really), and "current' as the flow of water.

• A resistor is like a grid or something that blocks the flow: to get more water to flow through (more current), you will need a higher level of water (more voltage). This is expressed as Ohm's law , .
• A capacitor is like a tank, where inbound current elevates the level of water, and outbound current depletes the contents of the tank and therefore the level of water. Therefore, it relates a change in voltage to a current, , which you can also write as
• An inductor is like a heavy paddle wheel in a current, which prevents it from changing quickly. In that case, changes in current are related to the height of water: if you try to reverse the current for example, water will accumulate until the paddle wheel changes direction. This is traditionally expressed as , but you can also write it as
• Finally, a memristor is like a gravel-filled pipe near a constriction. If flow brings the gravel towards the constriction, the gravel blocks the pipe and the resistance to flow will increase. On the other hand, if the flow brings the gravel away from the constriction, water can flow freely. This relates a change in current to a change in voltage, which you can write as .

The equations show why this is the "fourth passive element": if you consider current and voltage, and accumulated current and voltage, there are four ways to combine them.

Fine, so... what do you do with it?

So... why does it matter, what's the big deal? Well, very simply put, the memristor looks, among other things, like a very cheap and dense way to build memory devices. There are still a good number of questions to be addressed before this unseats Flash memory and other persistent storage, and to be honest, there is even a small chance that it never will (the hard disk is still with us, no matter how many times its death was predicted.)

There are many other applications as well. One of them, "artificial intelligence", looks a bit overhyped to me at the moment. What seems true, however, is that memristors might enable cheap neural-like circuits to be mass-produced efficiently.

Conclusion

This was overall a great TechCon. Still, I'm glad to be back, it was exhausting.

Added an Amstrad CPC-464 to my collection

My brother Matthieu just offered me an Amstrad CPC-464 for my computer collection.

Writing this, I realized that this may be the first time that I actually mention this collection on the blog. I have about 25 computers, and about the same number of calculators, the vast majority more or less in working order. I have to write more or less, unfortunately, because it's not infrequent for one of these old machines to break.

It works, but it's so slow

Anyway, the Amstrad is in perfect working order, as you can see on the picture above. I had forgotten just how fast these machines booted, and just how slow the BASIC was after that. Old memories kicked in, as I tried to practice the horrid program editor of these machines "EDIT 30" would bring a line editor for line 30. You could also move the cursor around, and it looked like you were editing, but you really weren't. You had to use the magic "COPY" key to copy one character at a time for editing. Totally idiotic if you look at it from today's perspective.

My kids were unimpressed. We tried to load a few games, but it was really boring, even to me. Load the cassette tape, wait 5 minutes for something to load, that asks you whether you want to play part 1 or part 2 or part 3 of the game, then load again for 5 minutes, and so on. Today's kids just have no idea how lucky they are to have instant access to a gigantic library of games from the Internet. But even if I grew up with this kind of boxes, I must admit that my memory of how bad this was had somewhat faded.

At some point, I tried to write a little program to draw a Lissajous curve. This was the kind of thing that we thought were cool at the time. Except that it took minutes to draw the curve! I simply had forgotten that. My oldest son, Tanguy, looked at this, and while the curve interested him, I can't say that the BASIC moved him a bit. We ended up discussing Lissajous curves on the remarkable Apple Grapher application. So much for old times...

On the lookout for other machines...

At some point, I have to spend a little time on e-Bay trying to look for the missing pieces in the collection, but for the moment, I'm simply looking at random, and picking up things when I think they are interesting. Right now, one of the few pieces left that I'd really like to have is a TI-99/4A. That's just because I spent so many hours programming it at a friend's house as a kid...

Antisocial punishment

A recent article in Science documents what the authors call "antisocial punishment". Specifically, they demonstrated that society punishes those who contribute the least or try to abuse the system, but also that there is a tendency to punish those who contribute the most.

This will not come as a surprise to anybody who remembers Honore de Balzac stating that Behind every great fortune, there is a crime. For the curious, the actual quotation in French is from Le Père Goriot:

Le secret des grandes fortunes sans cause apparente est un crime oublié, parce qu' il a été proprement fait.

which I could translate approximately into:

The secret of great fortunes without apparent cause is a forgotten crime, because it was nicely done

This reminds me of the debate about whether Poincaré or Einstein invented relativity. According to Jules Leveugle, this was nothing less than a "german conspiracy" to promote "german science" at the expense of Poincaré. I don't have enough data at that point. But even if Leveugle seems to have some information to back his claims, he asserts a number of things about the motivations of people a century ago that are quite hard to prove one way or another. Anyway, if the conspiracy theorists are right on this one, Poincaré would have been a victim of exactly the kind of antisocial punishment the Science article demonstrates...

As an aside, while everybody nowadays agrees that Poincaré published the core of special relativity and even invented the term "relativity" shortly before Einstein, Leveugle's assertions that Poincaré also invented general relativity before Einstein is much less widely believed. He mentions some document having been more or less willfully damaged by later scientists, this becomes a little bit harder to prove. In any case, I could not find references on the web.

André Vignon, beloved grandfather, passed away

My grandfather, André Vignon, passed away today, at the age of 96. This remarkable man had 13 children, more than 50 grandchildren, and currently just shy of 80 grand-grandchildren. He was awarded the Croix de Guerre 39-45, but he was so modest that almost nobody in the family can tell you why. For years, he was the CEO of Favrichon, a company specialized in healthy foods, particularly cereals. We grew up testing the prototypes of various cereal products, and I suppose that our enthusiasm for this or that new flavor decided its fate.

It's very hard to describe what a loss this is to the whole family. We all grew up among dozens of cousins. It always felt perfectly normal to me to go on vacation during summer time with half a dozen cousins my age to play with, until I realized much later in life just how exceptional this experience was. Love was completely central to this family, and years later, we still see each others regularly and with great pleasure.

Big families: recommended...