Month: August 2004

TECH TALK: Reinventing Computing: Kumbh Mela Cycle

Indias Kumbh Mela takes place once every twelve years. There is a fascinating legend about its origins, according to Malini Bhisen:

It is said about this mela that the earth was made sacred at four places by contact with the Kumbh- jar-filled with “amrit” nectar, the Elixir of Immortality.

It is believed that the gods became emaciated as a result of the curse by a saint and wanted to regain their old strength and vigour by drinking the nectar. But they knew that they would not be able to churn the ocean by themselves and bring up the Kumbh, filled with the nectar that was lying on the bed of the ocean. So they approached the Asuras – the demons who were their inveterate enemies, to join hands with them in churning the ocean. For that help, the gods promised the Asuras that they would be given a portion of the nectar when the pot of nectar is brought up from the depths of the ocean. The Asuras readily agreed.

Then the gods and the demons started churning the ocean with Mandar mountain as the rod for churning and Vasuki, the great Cobra serpent for the thick string. As the vigorous churning progressed the ocean began to yield its treasures one by one. In all thirteen precious things came out from the sea. Lastly the Sage Dhanwantri appeared with the coveted jar of nectar in his hands. The Asuras who were physically stronger than the gods seized the kumbh. At that moment Lord Indra’s son Jayant, assumed the form of a gregarious rook- a ferocious bird – whisked away the jar from the hands of the demons and flew high up in the sky. The bird on its way to heaven rested at Nasik, Ujjain, Prayag and Haradwar. He took twelve days to reach paradise from the ocean. As each divine day is reckoned to be equivalent to an earth year, the Kumbh Mela is celebrated once in twelve years at each of these four places.

Religion Samachar adds: The four locations are Prayag (near Allahabad in Uttar Pradesh) at the confluence of three rivers Ganga (Ganges), Yamuna and Saraswati Haridwar (in Uttar Pradesh) where the river Ganga enters the plains from Himalayas Ujjain (in Madhya Pradesh), on the banks of Ksipra river, and Nasik (in Maharashtra) on the banks of Godavari river. The pilgrimage occurs four times every 12 years, once at each of the four locations. Each 12-year cycle includes the Maha (great) Kumbha Mela at Prayag, attended by millions of people, making it the largest pilgrimage gathering around the world.

Twelve years or so is also the cycle for computing breakthroughs. 1945 saw the invention of the worlds first computer, the ENIAC. In the late 1950s, IBM switched from using vacuum tubes to using transistors, and also launched Fortran. In the early 1970s, we had the invention of the microprocessor, along with Unix and the relational database. In 1982-83, the personal computer was launched by IBM. In 1992-94, we had the Wintel come into being, with the launch of Microsoft Windows 3.1 and the Intel Pentium. It also saw the creation of Mosaic, the graphical web browser, and the start of the proliferation of the Internet.

So, the next big leap in computing should be just around the corner. What will it be? Google as the supercomputer? Longhorn? Cellphones as always-on, always-connected computers? Utility computing? Wearable computers? Something unseen as of today…?

This series is about my vision of the future of computing. I will argue that the success of computing has limited its prospects for targeting the mass-market users, and what is needed is nothing short of a reinvention of every aspect of the computing ecosystem. The next computing Kumbh Mela is just around the corner.

Tomorrow: Looking Ahead

Howard Rheingold’s Next

I have read all of Howard Rheingold’s books. Liked his last one – Smart Mobs – very much. So, like many others, I am eagerly awaiting his next. Business Week has more in an interview with him: “Now, he’s starting to take the leap beyond smart mobs, trying to weave some threads out of such seemingly disparate developments as Web logs, open-source software development, and Google.” The common thread, according to Howard Rheingold, is:

All these could dramatically transform not only the way people do business, but economic production altogether. We had markets, then we had capitalism, and socialism was a reaction to industrial-era capitalism. There’s been an assumption that since communism failed, capitalism is triumphant, therefore humans have stopped evolving new systems for economic production.

But I think we’re seeing hints, with all of these examples, that the technology of the Internet, reputation systems, online communities, mobile devices — these are all like those technologies…that made capitalism possible. These may make some new economic system possible.

Pricing Software

Eric Sink provides a primer: “Every small ISV wrestles with the question of how to set pricing for its software products…Product pricing is hard. There is no magic formula that will determine the best price for your product. I can’t provide any easy answers, but I can give you some things to think about as you make your pricing decisions. In the end, you will just have to make a decision using your own judgment. There will be times you will wonder if you made the right decision. You may never know for sure.”

The Most Successful Country in the World

[via Shrikant Patil] IHT writes about Sweden:

A recent report by the United Nations showed, that if you factor in not just national income, but the longevity of its people, low infant mortality and high levels of education, Sweden is probably the most successful country in the world.

Moreover, a new study by Professor Richard Florida, of Carnegie Mellon University, which measures the kind of creativity most useful to business – talent, technology and tolerance – puts Sweden at No. 1 in Europe and ahead of the United States. In the future, Florida argues, this means that Sweden will become a “talent magnet” for the world’s most purposeful workers.

Software Factories

MSDN writes: ” Software Factories provide a faster, less expensive and more reliable approach to application development by significantly increasing the level of automation in application development, applying the time tested pattern of using visual languages to enable rapid assembly and configuration of framework based components. Software Factories go beyond models as documentation, using highly tuned Domain Specific Languages (DSLs) and the Extensible Markup Language (XML) as source artifacts, to capture life cycle metadata, and to support high fidelity model transformation, code generation and other forms of automation.”

Intel making Cheaper Chips for Emerging Markets?

[via Jeff Nolan] ArsTechnica speculates:

The word on the street is that Intel is developing a low-cost CPU for emerging markets in Asia, and potentially elsewhere. Surely pitted against AMD’s Sempron, Shelton is a test product aimed at Vietnam and two other unnamed countries countries if this VNExpress article (in Vietnamese) is to be believed.

Shelton’s lone attractiveness will have to be rock-bottom prices, because Shelton redefines bargain basementparticularly the “basement” part. Shelton is rumored to have absolutely no L2 cache, and will be based on older Celeron architecture, fabbed at 90nm, and meant to run at a mere 1 GHz.

At this point, we don’t have much to go on, but one thing is clear: this, coupled with today’s earlier news and recent trends in the tech biz show us that while company’s may be outsourcing to boost profits, they’re also catering to smaller economies with unimpressive tech to squeeze money from rocks. Whether or not the extra effort is worth it remains to be seen.

Jeff provides the context: “Interesting, because just yesterday Rajesh Jain came by my office and explained to me about how entire sections of the market in India see nonconsumption as the only alternative to buying an expensive (by local standards) PC. When it comes to CPU manufacturing costs, Intel/AMD have pretty much hit a plateau with regard to actual mfg costs, it’s pretty much an issue of what they are going to take out in order to reduce the cost and cache memory is an obvious choice. I also read somewhere else that M$oft is looking at ways to dramatically reduce the cost of Windows and Office in India and Southeast Asia in order to combat piracy, the primary competitive choice in software for those countries.”

Spectrum Policy

The Economist writes that “governments and industries are bracing themselves for the possibility that radio interference will become a thing of the past.”

On one side, therefore, are notions of radio frequencies as scarce resources that can be used by only one transmitter at a time and are worth lobbying and paying billions for; on the other side is the idea that any number of transmitters and receivers can peacefully co-exist on the airwaves and that spectrum should therefore be open to allnot individual property, but rather a commons. To understand this debate, one must look back at history; to understand its importance, at economics.

The article discusses four technologies:
– spread spectrum or wideband
– smart antennae
– mesh networking
– cognitive radios

Web as Platform

Jason Kottke writes:

a distributed data storage system would take the place of a local storage system. And not just data storage, but data processing/filtering/formatting. Taking the weblog example to the extreme, you could use TypePad to write a weblog entry; Flickr to store your photos; store some mp3s (for an mp3 blog) on your ISP-hosted shell account; your events calendar on Upcoming; use iCal to update your personal calendar (which is then stored on your .Mac account); use GMail for email; use TypeKey or Flickr’s authentication system to handle identity; outsource your storage/backups to Google or Akamai; you let Feedburner “listen” for new content from all those sources, transform/aggregate/filter it all, and publish it to your Web space; and you manage all this on the Web at each individual Web site or with a Watson-ish desktop client.

Think of it like Unix…small pieces loosely joined. Each specific service handles what it’s good at. Gmail for mail, iCal for calendars, TypePad for short bits of text, etc. Web client, desktop client, it doesn’t much matter…whatever the user is most comfortable with. Then you just (just! ha!) pipe all these together however you want with services (or desktop apps) handling any filtering/processing that you need, and output it to the file/device/service of your choice. New services can be inserted into the process as they become available.

What you need is a “virtual desktop.”