Post-scarcity Software
For years we've said that our computers were Turing equivalent, equivalent to Turing's machine U. That they could compute any function which could be computed. They aren't, of course, and they can't, for one very important reason. U had infinite store, and our machines don't. We have always been store-poor. We've been mill-poor, too: our processors have been slow, running at hundreds, then a few thousands, of cycles per second. We haven't been able to afford the cycles to do any sophisticated munging of our data. What we stored — in the most store intensive format we had — was what we got, and what we delivered to our users. It was a compromise, but a compromise forced on us by the inadequacy of our machines.
The thing is, we've been programming for sixty years now. When I was learning my trade, I worked with a few people who'd worked on Baby — the Manchester Mark One — and even with two people who remembered Turing personally. They were old then, approaching retirement; great software people with great skills to pass on, the last of the first generation programmers. I'm a second generation programmer, and I'm fifty. Most people in software would reckon me too old now to cut code. The people cutting code in the front line now know the name Turing, of course, because they learned about U in their first year classes; but Turing as a person — as someone with a personality, quirks, foibles — is no more real to them than Christopher Columbus or Noah, and, indeed, much less real than Aragorn of the Dunedain.
CollabPRES: Local news for an Internet age
The slow death of newsprint
Local newspapers have always depended heavily on members of the community, largely unpaid, writing content. As advertising increasingly migrates to other media and the economic environment for local newspapers gets tighter, this dependency on volunteer contributors can only grow.
A Journey to the turning of the year
Have you ever considered how nice it must be to live in Iceland? I mean, apart from the spectacular scenery and the friendly people. Just think, if I lived in Iceland I could have lounged in bed this morning. I could have slept in till the back of eleven, got up, had a leisurely breakfast, cycled round the block, and come home for a well earned bath in free geothermal hot water with the satisfaction of something significant achieved.
Unfortunately I don't.
I mean, the idea of cycling from sunrise until sunset is the sort of thing which sounds like a cool idea in the balmy days of September. It was a cool idea. Indeed, in parts, it was a shockingly cold idea, but I get ahead of myself. Back in September I had the idea of cycling from sunrise to sunset, and if you're going to cycle from sunrise to sunset the sensible time to do it is on the shortest day of the year. OK, so today wasn't quite the shortest day of the year, but let's not sweat the small stuff.
Let's hear it for the Mullwarchar!
Radio 4's 'Today' programme has been asking for nominations for a 'listeners peer', and I've been listening with half an ear to the suggestions. And what I've been hearing is more of the same old same old; the soi disant great and good, and, more particularly, the metropolitan great and good. So I thought I'd make a nomination completely outside the London box.
The Mullwarchar, admittedly, doesn't say a lot. The Mullwarchar is notoriously neither clubbable nor friendly; not a particularly sociable being. But the Mullwarchar has made a great contribution to our public life, taking a leading role in the campaign against the dumping of nuclear materials and a number of other environmental campaigns. The Mullwarchar has also made a significant contribution to leisure activities and to appreciation of wilderness, and thus to the spiritual life of the nation.
But the most important reason for nominating the Mullwarchar is this: this mountain will not come to Mahomet. The House of Lords is comprised entirely of urban people, of people not merely prepared but happy to spend their working lives in the most crowded, the most polluted, the most unpleasant place on the island of Britain. Such people are by definition abnormal and unrepresentative. It would do our parliamentarians good once a year to go to the mountain: to lift up their collective eyes to the hills, to be in a place where man and all his works are utterly insignificant. To get some sense of scale.
Spectacle and courage
In trying to write a concise review of the extended edition of Peter Jackson's adaptation of The Return of the King, one is faced with three different topics each worthy of consideration. The first is this cut of The Return of the King as a movie; the second is the package with its appendices; the third is the total achievement of the whole project, which this set completes. It's going to be very hard to do justice to all three in just a thousand words.
The Movie
So firstly: The Return of the King, or more precisely this cut, as a movie. Consistently Peter Jackson's extended cuts have been, in my opinion, better movies as movies than the 'theatrical' cuts. There's a lot of new material here — not just extending scenes, but many scenes which were left out of the theatrical cut altogether, which add to characterisation, pacing and story telling.