A simpler approach to computers Entrepreneur takes father’s ideas, turns them into a business

Software entrepreneur Aza Raskin measures productivity improvements by theseconds.
Using Enso, his company’s new software, it takes just 3 seconds tocalculate, say, sales tax of 8.25 percent. That’s about one-tenth the time itwould take if a user was to call up the calculator that comes with Windowsusing the Start command, he said.
You might wonder what difference 27 seconds makes in the scheme of things,but Raskin is striving for the absence of interruptions with his new software,which is always at the ready on the desktop.
To fetch it a user simply holds down the Caps Lock key. For example, tolaunch Notepad, hold down Caps Lock, type open, then notepad. To get adefinition for a word, hold down Caps Lock, then type define and the word.Enso Words, which also includes spell-checker and a thesaurus, is designed towork on all applications, from Photoshop to various e-mail and instantmessaging systems, so users don’t have to stop and switch applications tocheck a word.
“One of the impediments to modern computers is they make you jump around somuch. They break your train of thought,” Raskin said. “If you lose what you’rethinking about, that’s going to cost you a lot more time.”
Raskin, the company’s 23-year-old president, is one of four University ofChicago alumni who are principals at Humanized, a Chicago-based softwarecompany promising to simplify the use of Windows-based PCs.
“By making computers easier to use and more humane, the productivity edgecan really help you out,” he said.
It’s not an original idea. In fact, Humanized stems from the work ofRaskin’s late father, Jef Raskin, who created the vision for the Macintoshcomputer and authored the book, “The Humane Interface.” Aza Raskin startedHumanized after his father died of pancreatic cancer in 2005 and has dedicatedEnso to his memory.
While Humanized’s software has received early accolades for its ease ofuse, ultimately the company will need more than cutting-edge technology to besuccessful, experts said.
“Most great technology companies succeed because of marketing, not becausetheir technology is great,” said Scott Meadow, professor of entrepreneurshipat the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business and a partner atEdgewater Funds, a Chicago private-equity firm. “The specialized knowledge inbeing able to market the technology is what separates the winners from thelosers normally.”

Price dropped
Just a week after it launched its first two software products, EnsoLauncher and Enso Words, on Jan. 24, Humanized slashed the price of the twoproducts, which are downloadable at www.humanized.com. Together, they sell for$35, down from $65 initially, and the company is refunding the difference forthose who purchased at the higher price, Raskin said.
“People really like Enso but said it was too expensive,” Raskin explained.”We decided we wanted to reach more people. We think we’re going to get moresales at a lower price.”
Still, the company might have hurt its image in the process.
“They couldn’t help but appear somewhat amateurish,” Meadow said. “Everyconstituency you deal with views you differently when you make changes early,whether investors, customers, suppliers or people you want to hire.
“To the extent you don’t seem organized and thoughtful about yourdecision-making process, it doesn’t create confidence in the underlyingproduct.”
Ideally, the company would have thoroughly tested the pricing beforerolling out the software, Meadow said. Such business missteps are common amongstartups founded with a great idea but lacking in business experience.
“It’s a question of recognizing what you’re good at and what you’re not,”Meadow said. When a company identifies a weakness, it needs to bridge the gapby bringing in an advisor or professional manager, he said.
Still, those familiar with Humanized see a promising future in Enso.
“The best way to get over obstacles is to have happy customers,” said DougMcKenna, president of Boulder, Colo.-based Mathemaesthetics Inc., who workedwith Raskin’s father and is an advisor to Humanized. “The best way to succeedis to prove you’ve got something people want and are willing to pay for.”
McKenna is hopeful, in part, because underlying the Enso software is aphilosophy of simplicity that many embrace, he said. Enso sets up “a means ofnavigating through stuff in our personal computers in a way that’s easy toaccomplish,” he said.
“If you have to [play around] with a file system or think aboutapplications, it gets in your way,” McKenna said.

A father’s influence
Aza Raskin grew up hearing his father talk about simplifying computers,said Linda Blum, his mother.
“Jef’s primary goal was to make the computer easier to use, so you wouldn’thave to think about how it worked–more like a toaster,” she said.
Jef Raskin encouraged his son to think about why things worked in a certainway, asking, “Is it good for humans or isn’t it?” Blum recalled. “They werequite close. Aza started programming with Jef when he was in 6th grade.”
Aza was home-schooled in 8th grade, with Jef Raskin teaching him algebraand pre-calculus, plus programming and shop, Blum said. When Aza was studyingmath and physics at the University of Chicago, his father was asked to teach acourse on the human interface. Aza became the teaching assistant, andHumanized principals Jono DiCarlo and Atul Varma were in the class.
Aza founded Humanized with DiCarlo, Varma and his U. of C. roommate AndrewWilson shortly after his father died, because he didn’t want the ideas tovanish. Within a few weeks, Humanized had a prototype of its software, thenspent about 18 months fine-tuning it, Aza Raskin said. The company decided todesign it for Windows-based computers, he said, “because Windows needs themost help.”
While Humanized plans to develop a Macintosh version of its Enso softwareat some point, first the company will add new offerings to the Windows line,including a more powerful calculator and a media player, Raskin said. All thesoftware will use the same unified framework, with most users accessing itthrough the Caps Lock key.
“Once you learn it, you don’t have to learn it again,” he said.
- - -
Humanizing PCs
- The software: The Enso programs aim to simplify the use of Windows-basedPCs
- Where to get them: Download from www.humanized.com
- Cost: $35 for both Enso Launcher and Enso Word

Web 2.0 Expo: Mozilla's UI designer talks shop

SAN FRANCISCO--Aza Raskin, head of user experience for Mozilla Labs, could be considered the Doogie Howser of the Web design world.

At the age of 25, he's heading up Ubiquity--one of Mozilla's most experimental projects, along with collaborating on Weave and the concept series. This was after Raskin--the son of the late Apple Macintosh designer Jef Raskin--discontinued his pursuit of a Ph.D. to found Humanized, the company that brought him to Mozilla.

However, at a talk about design at the Web 2.0 Expo, Raskin played down his work on some of Mozilla's latest projects, instead using it as a platform to showcase why the company needs more design help from those who can spare it. "For every one employee, we have 1.2 million users," he said. Of those, about 1,000 contribute to Firefox's code, with another 100,000 or so who do the heavy testing.

But of those large numbers, few have offered design help. And in Raskin's mind, design is something that will help drive Firefox's user interface, and the UIs of other Mozilla products, into new territories. "Right now, we have two designers, so if people want to get involved, there's an ample opportunity...the work we do here can affect one of every five people on the Web."

Raskin was referring to Firefox's install base, which continues to grow, despite new and aggressive browser releases from Google, Microsoft, and Apple, all within the past year. In fact, as of this week, Firefox 3 became the most popular browser in Europe, beating out the last three releases of Microsoft's Internet Explorer, which had previously dominated the region.

But what kinds of design is Mozilla looking to improve? Raskin highlighted tabs, which he says are fantastic when only a few are open. But they do a poor job of scaling, he said--especially once you reach the threshold of having close to a dozen tabs open in a single browser window. "I think we're going to see a lot of innovation there."

However, that innovation may not be coming from Mozilla Labs, which shuttered its Chromatabs project, focused on a browser add-on that would give each tab its own color, based on the site's identity.

Instead, the company has largely put the onus on third-party developers (or even competitors) to change the way we use them and build some of the best ideas into new releases.

The new page for frequently visited sites will show you which sites you tend to visit during various times of day. It also gives users the option to search and view content from each of those sites.

(Credit: Josh Lowensohn/CNET)

Raskin also highlighted advancements in improving the browser's memory of what you've been doing, making it easier to do simple tasks by using that information. To illustrate the point, he showed off Mozilla's latest efforts in enhancing what users see when firing up their browser or opening up a new tab. Users will soon have a page that remembers the last few sites you were using and pulls in the latest items from each RSS feed.

It's no Netvibes, though. Instead, it will remember when you use each site during the day, then custom-tailor that page to show only those sites. As Raskin described it, this will keep you from seeing some of the "late night" sites you visit when firing up your browser to read news stories and check e-mail in the morning.

So what about Firefox's next big redesign? It received a few subtle tweaks in version 3, but nothing groundbreaking outside of making the back button almost twice the size as the forward button.

With Raskin at the helm, many of the biggest UI changes could be simply embedding things that used to be buttons deeper within the application. The latest proof of that is one of Mozilla Labs' recent efforts, Ubiquity, which is effectively a command line interface that can learn new site-specific shortcuts. It can also be called up and dismissed in an instant.

Is this going to be the next way we navigate the Web, though? Probably not, but in Raskin's mind, it's a design trend to build more functionality around the sites we use every day.

Stream Computing on Graphics Hardware

 BY:Ian Buck, Tim Foley, Daniel Horn, Jeremy Sugerman, Kayvon Fatahalian, Mike Houston, and Pat Hanrahan
Computer Science Department
Stanford University

To appear at SIGGRAPH 2004

Abstract

In this paper, we present Brook for GPUs, a system for general-purpose computation on programmable graphics hardware. Brook extends C to include simple data-parallel constructs, enabling the use of the GPU as a streaming coprocessor. We present a compiler and runtime system that abstracts and virtualizes many aspects of graphics hardware. In addition, we present an analysis of the effectiveness of the GPU as a compute engine compared to the CPU, to determine when the GPU can outperform the CPU for a particular algorithm. We evaluate our system with five applications, the SAXPY and SGEMV BLAS operators, image segmentation, FFT, and ray tracing. For these applications, we demonstrate that our Brook implementations perform comparably to hand-written GPU code and up to seven times faster than their CPU counterparts.

Paper http://graphics.stanford.edu/papers/brookgpu/brookgpu.pdf

Presentation http://graphics.stanford.edu/papers/brookgpu/buck.Brook.pdf

 

 

Cisco’s Net Income Falls but Outlook Improves

The Cisco Systems data center in San Jose, Calif. The company says orders have started to arrive at a more consistent pace.

Stability has been an elusive concept for Cisco Systems over the last year. Sales have been on a jagged downward slope as the technology industry dealt with its worst downturn since the dot-com bust.

But now Cisco, the world’s largest maker of network technology, says business appears to have reached a “tipping point.”

In the last three months, orders have started to arrive at a more consistent pace when measured against historical trends, said John T. Chambers, the chief executive, in an interview on Wednesday after the company released its fiscal fourth-quarter results.

“The orders were very good,” Mr. Chambers said. “It was the first normal order rate we have seen sequentially in a year.”

Such optimism seemed to run counter to Cisco’s fourth-quarter results, which showed just how much business spending on networking equipment has slowed.

For the period ended July 25, Cisco reported a 46 percent plunge in net income to $1.1 billion, or 19 cents a share, from net income of $2 billion, or 33 cents a share, in the same period last year. Excluding charges for stock-option compensation, acquisitions and one-time items, Cisco earned 31 cents a share, beating the forecast of 29 cents a share by analysts surveyed by Thomson Reuters.

Revenue fell 18 percent year-over-year to $8.5 billion, meeting analysts’ expectations. Sales of Cisco’s flagship routing and switching products fell 27 percent and 20 percent, respectively.

Setting those bleak sales figures aside, Mr. Chambers focused on recent sales trends to support his hopes for better results ahead. The $8.5 billion in revenue, for example, was Cisco’s first quarter-to-quarter sales increase in a year. In addition, the increase in orders from the third quarter to the fourth quarter matched past trends, leading Mr. Chambers to characterize the business as more stable.

Looking ahead, Cisco expects its first-quarter revenue to come in 15 to 17 percent below the $10.3 billion it reported last year. But even with such declines, Cisco would report quarter-to-quarter growth once again.

“On a global basis, we are starting to see potential positive trends in Asia-Pacific, the U.S., emerging markets and Japan,” Mr. Chambers said. He added that selling equipment in Europe remained difficult.

Despite those positive signals, Mr. Chambers, known for his upbeat demeanor, cautioned that a recovery was not guaranteed. “No one knows for sure when the recovery will occur,” he said. “You would like to see a couple more quarters of the trends we saw before talking about that.”

Cisco has cut more than 2,000 jobs over the last year, but on Wednesday, the company declared an end to layoffs. Analysts saw this as a crucial indicator that Mr. Chambers thought Cisco had reached bottom.

“Effectively we have a new plateau, and moving forward, things appear to be behaving roughly the way they should,” said Sam Wilson, a communications analyst for JMP Securities.

In the midst of the economic downturn, Cisco has charged into several new markets, including computer servers for businesses and video recorders for consumers.

For the year, revenue fell 9 percent, to $36.1 billion, and profit dropped 24 percent, to $6.1 billion. Cisco finished with $35 billion in cash — one of the largest hoards in the technology industry.

5 Tips for Raising Your Girl Geek

As geek parents, we often have rosy colored notions about our children growing up. We actually want them to be geeks. From the earliest of ages we dress them in WoW gear, teach them to quote Star Wars and wonder when is too early to start reading The Hobbit. We nurture them in the way of the Geek, hoping that, when the time comes for them to choose their path, they won’t stray far.

But being a geek kid isn’t easy; and being a geek girl might even be harder. Here are some things to keep in mind if you are raising a geek girl that might help her–and you–get through the school years.

The Book Factor
Problem: My geekiness manifested, first and foremost, in books. At a very young age I had a proclivity for reading science-fiction and fantasy books. While most girls were reading the Babysitters Club books, I was devouring Madeleine L’Engle and C.S. Lewis, soon followed by a host of others. Geek girls often discover a great method escape in SF/F, mystery, horror, and other non-realist genres at early ages, which unfortunately, can make them stick out like a sore thumb during study hall. I remember getting teased for reading King Lear for fun, and seriously contemplated hiding the book under a cover, or not reading it at all. Which would have been a mighty shame.

Suggestion: Try to get involved in your daughter’s reading, if you’re not already. I was born to non-geeks, so my parents really had no interest in what I was reading. If you can’t be involved, look into reading clubs–or start one–that support the genres your daughter is into. Look to libraries and gaming stores if there’s nothing available at school. And above all, even if you don’t get the stuff she reads, reiterate that reading is awesome.

 

The Pop Culture Factor
Problem: Geek girls don’t watch the right shows. They don’t go to the right movies. They don’t listen to the right music. And unfortunately, pop culture provides the clues by which kids sort each other out; it’s almost as obvious as the clothes they wear. When I was younger, I loved “The X-Files”, Westerns and They Might Be Giants. I quoted Monty Python and the Holy Grail with my handful of guy friends, but certainly didn’t win points in the cool crowd. Often girl geeks fall into this odd no-man’s land. We are passionate about the things we like, but share them with very few. Especially in a high school or junior high-school setting. That can lead to teasing, isolation, and ultimately, depression.

Suggestion: If you are a geek, yourself, it’s fine for you to reach out. I mean, it is your fault she’s the way she is, right? But don’t be too pressing, because even if your geeklet gal speaks Klingon fluently, she needs to find her own brand of geek. If she’s into medieval stuff, consider the SCA. If she’s got a sci-fi lean, consider taking her to a convention. Maybe she’s a budding film-maker? Enroll her in film classes. Not to mention, there’s always the Internet. For me, that was my saving grace, discovering like-minded people, even if they were far away. And if teasing is a problem, help to equip her with witty ripostes and bolster her self esteem with praise.

The Boy Factor
Problem: There are more boy geeks than girl geeks. At least, that was my experience. And many geek girls discover more friends among guys than girls. This can lead to feeling of self-consciousness and a lack of connection with other girls. While this isn’t always a bad thing, I definitely had trouble making gal friends as I got older, and assumed there were so few geek girls that it wasn’t worth the trouble. Good, enduring relationships between girls are important, not just for your daughter’s social growth, but emotionally as well. Not to mention, having tons of guy friends can be an issue when dating starts…

Suggestion: Start with family. I had some great gal cousins growing up, and though they weren’t exactly geeks, our friendships were strong. If you’re daughter doesn’t have gal friends as school, you can encourage her to meet people at your church or other extended network. Also, teach her about all the wonderful girl geeks in history, like Ada Lovelace, Marie Curie and Felicia Day. Go fictional, too. There are plenty of geek gals in literature and movies, like Agatha Clay, Meg Murryand Kaylee Frye. Help make her proud to be a girl geek!

The Smart Factor
Problem: Many young geeklets tend to be smart. Whether it’s math, science, English or art (or all of the above), young girl geeks will excel in something. And coupled with the geeky tendencies and often bookish nature, this doesn’t exactly contribute to popularity (not that they want to be popular, but you know what I mean). Personally, I recall the utter mortification as my English teacher in ninth grade read aloud my essay to the whole class as an example of excellence. I melted down into my seat, withering from the stares and snickers.

Solution: You know you’re on shaky ground when your girl geek starts to be embarrassed of being smart. If grades and enthusiasm are waning, it’s time for parental intervention. But not too much. And not too little. Really, you know your daughter best, and it’s important to talk about what’s going on at school. While the “grades will help you in college” argument won’t always work, home incentives–like movies or gadgets–might. And nothing replaces flat-out support. If you sucked at a subject in school it might worth dragging out your report card to share, and let her know you wish you had worked harder. Either way, just continuing support and praise of her performance will help steer her in the right direction.

The Self-Image Factor
Problem: There wasn’t always a culture of geek girls. We didn’t always have pride, solidarity and ironic 16-bit graphic t-shirts. And even some girls don’t realize they’re geeks at all. As such, they feel like they never fit in. Even though they assert they don’t want to be the crowd, they can’t help but feel on the outskirts. This can lead to a poor self-image, which is never a good thing. While popularity isn’t important, self-worth always is.

Solution: Encourage your geek gal to get involved, even if the interests aren’t up her alley. You never know: she might love homecoming. She might take to soccer, or softball. I enjoyed being on the Yearbook committee when I was in high school, which had a great cross-section of folks, geek and non-geek. Geek doesn’t mean you have to shun what everyone else does; it just means that you have your own slant on it. And it also means you’re smart enough to think outside the social box. If anything, being a geek means the rules don’t apply!

No matter how geeky your daughter is, fostering her sense of self-worth is the most important thing. Every girl is different; every girl responds differently to parental intervention. But just being there, however corny that might seem, makes all the difference in the world. I know, even though my mom wasn’t a geek, she always took the time to talk to me when I was having a tough time at school. Even when I begged her to be homeschooled, she kept encouraging me to stick with public school. In the end, I wouldn’t change my school years for anything. Every step I made along the way made me who I am today, after all: a very proud geek gal.

Burning Question: How Do I Future-Proof My Digital Media?

You've spent years hoarding digital media, tossing aside those flimsy tape and plastic prisons after transmuting the information into its purer form. No outdated vessel is going to prevent your endless enjoyment of its contents, right?

Think again, Highlander.

Digital media is not immune to the winds of time. In many ways, it's even more ephemeral than the analog forms it's meant to usurp. Unlike, say, books or photographs—which can be placed on a shelf and enjoyed decades later—the binary codes of today's movie, photo, and music collections may not be decipherable on future machines.

"Most people still haven't realized that digital files require software to render them into forms that humans can perceive," says Jeff Rothenberg, a computer scientist at the Rand Corporation and an expert in digital preservation. Making matters worse, that rendering software often becomes obsolete as companies go belly-up or stop supporting file formats.

So how do you keep filling the bit bucket without spilling valuable 1s and 0s? It's rarely easy. There are already a bazillion methods of compressing and encrypting media, and the number is only increasing. The safe road sticks to open standards and popular formats, Rothenberg says.

For music, your choices are pretty well defined: If you're more concerned about space than fidelity, go with the ubiquitous MP3. If you need to hear every nuance and have the gigs to back your play, WAV (the CD's audio format) is a good bet for lossless audio.

When dealing with images, most archivists recommend a raw format (if you've got terabytes to spare) or TIFF. But both can be tricky. Raw files are the unmolested data captured by a camera's sensor. Each manufacturer has its own version, and you'll need special software to decode it. As long as you keep the program (there's also a Photoshop plug-in), you should be OK, and you'll benefit from the best possible image quality. TIFF, on the other hand, is a high-quality compression scheme that has remained mostly unchanged since 1992. But it's a proprietary Adobe format. If that makes you nervous, use common compressed standards like JPEG or PNG; they'll likely be readable for years, though they can't match raw or TIFF files for quality.

Unfortunately, movies are a bit dicier, as digital video is relatively new to the mix. The H.264 standard seems poised to emerge as a universal format, at least for HD video. But MPEG-2—the native language of DVDs—is the undisputed king of standard-def moving pictures. Either one should buy you peace of mind for a few years.

It's tempting to seek out a single magic format that preserves everything forever. You won't find it. The only surefire way to future-proof is to stay current. If that seems like too much work, there's another option: Keep your hard-copy photos, CDs, DVDs and Blu-rays (plus your old hardware). Have fun re-sorting them on the fly.

The Race For The Secret of The Universe

Physicist Jacobo Konigsberg in front of the collider detector at Fermilab. 
Last September at Fermilab—the legendary physics research facility just outside Chicago —s everal of the nation's top scientists gathered at 1:30 a.m. to hold a somewhat bittersweet all-nighter. They wanted to be together when they, and America, fell behind in what many consider the most important and resonant competition in science: the search for the elusive Higgs boson, also known as "the God particle." 

Physicists believe that this special subatomic particle allows all of the other particles in the universe to have mass and come together to form, well, basically everything that's around us. Without so-called God particles, one Fermilab theorist tells me, "atoms would have no integrity, so there would be no chemical bonding, no stable structures—no liquids or solids—and, of course, no physicists and no reporters." 

Our nation has traditionally been in the vanguard of this kind of physics research, and for years the Tevatron, the 4-mile-round particle accelerator at Fermilab, was the most powerful in the world. That title, however, would be relinquished at 2 a.m. Chicago time, when scientists in Switzerland were scheduled to switch on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the new $9 billion, 17-mile-round particle accelerator located near Geneva. Unlike the all-American Tevatron, which is run by the U.S. Department of Energy, the LHC is part of the European Organization for Nuclear 
Research and was funded by an international consortium of 60 countries, including the United States. 

In a Fermilab control room equipped with a satellite link to the LHC, the Americans watched together as science history was made half a world away. Eight days later, there was a very serious accident at the LHC. No one was hurt, but a catastrophic electrical failure led to a section of the underground ring being taken out, and pipes were vaporized by a lightning bolt of escaping energy. Repairing it would take at least a year and tens of millions of dollars. 

Given this reprieve, the physicists at Fermilab began smashing particles as never before—r evving up the Tevatron to more than 2000% of its original capacity and working around the clock. Five months later, in February, they stunned the scientific world by making the first major breakthrough in God-particle research in nearly a decade. They were able to set an upper boundary for its mass, which significantly narrows the search. Armed with this information and the world's best working accelerator, Fermilab researchers now believe, as do some of their frustrated colleagues in Switzerland, that the first sign of the particle could be found on U.S. soil within the coming year. 

"It's challenging but not impossible—and we are crazy enough to up the stakes," says a Fermilab spokesman, Jacobo Konigsberg, a physicist from the University of Florida. "My mother calls me all the time and asks, 'Have you found God yet?'" 

Actually, many physicists cringe at the highly charged nickname "the God particle." They prefer to call it "the Higgs" (after the Scottish theorist who first suggested its existence in 1964). But, whatever its name, all agree that this particular particle could answer the biggest question in science: How did the cosmic crash known as the Big Bang become the universe we live in today?   

To understand the process, researchers have attempted to deconstruct matter into its most basic components. As every high school student can tell you, matter is made up of elements, elements are made up of atoms, and atoms are made up of electrons, protons, and neutrons. In the 1960s and '70s, theorists developed a "standard model" of high-energy physics, which predicted what kind of particles come together to form electrons, protons, and neutrons. Since then, 12 major subatomic particles have been discovered: six uncharged particles called leptons and six charged particles called quarks. Physicists have also identified five particles that carry force, known as bosons. The evasive Higgs is the only boson that has never been observed. And scientists believe that it could contain the very essence—or at least the mechanism—of existence itself, a way to finally understand how matter becomes and remains matter.   

To "see" these particles, protons and anti-protons are smashed into one another in a process that tries to replicate the Big Bang. These crashes take place at Fermilab within long, sealed underground tunnels where electric fields accelerate the particles close to the speed of light. The collisions—imagine a microscopic version of an explosion at a fireworks factory, with rockets shooting in all directions at various angles, arcs, and velocities—are captured by huge banks of ultrasensitive electronic sensors several stories high. 

Two competing research teams are currently at work at Fermilab. Each one has its own football-field-size industrial building and its own sensor array located along the loop of the underground accelerator tunnel. All of the data from the collisions—more than 15 million of them occur per second—are transferred through jungles of thickly bundled colored wires to aisle after aisle of floor-to-ceiling computers. 

The entire process is monitored in two independent control rooms. Standing in the DZero control room, I watch collision after collision on 4-foot-tall monitors. On one screen, colored particles shoot out in different patterns; on another, the same collision is shown as more of a colorful three-dimensional graph. 

The Higgs has been so difficult to find because it decays incredibly quickly—in fireworks terms, it's like a dud rocket without an easily detectable trail. But thanks to the recent discoveries in these control rooms, physicists know better where to look. They're searching for a particle with a mass between 115 and 160 giga-electron volts, which is a little heavier than an atom of silver but lighter than an atom of gold. 

The data gathered today will take weeks to be digested by computers from trillions of collisions to a few thousand of the most intriguing. Those clashes are then analyzed by physicists. "The theory predicts that you'll produce one Higgs every trillion collisions," Konigsberg says. 

Some scientists at Fermilab, including its director, Pier Oddone, believe that they might find more than one Higgs—multiple particles that are responsible for the others having mass. Other researchers wonder what if they proved, instead, that there is no Higgs, which means they'd need to construct an entirely new explanation for how atoms congeal into matter. 

"We're trying to study nature at its most fundamental state and make a connection between the world of the very small and our world," Oddone says. "We're producing particles that have been here since the first trillionth of a second of the universe, but we still don't understand the most basic things." 

To those people who question why this search for matter matters, Oddone notes that along the way, particle-physics research has helped make possible such technologies as the Internet, MRI machines, radiation treatments for cancer, and superconductors. 

Scientists at Fermilab think they'll have until 2011 to be the first to locate the Higgs boson. Although the larger, faster LHC is scheduled to begin powering up in October, it could take a year or more before researchers there gather enough data to find the particle. 

Until then, "we'll scan the hell out of those guys," says Leon Lederman, the lab's 87-year-old genius emeritus, with a mischievous grin. "You know, we have a genetic disease here—c alled optimism."

by Stephen Fried

via: http://www.parade.com/news/2009/07/26-the-race-for-the-secret-of-the-universe.html?index=1

Load Balancers Are Dead: Time to Focus on Application Delivery

 

Why We Need More and Why Should Enterprises Care?

What Should Enterprises Do About This?

 

Just Don’t Call Them Private Clouds

To use the electric utility analogy popularized by Nick Carr and others, efficient power generation takes place at a centralized power plant, not at an individual factory of office building. There’s ongoing debate about just how important these scale effects areand what form exactly they take. However, if one accepts this fundamental premise of cloud computing, then the future of computing lies predominantly in multi-tenant shared facilities of massive size. (Size here referring not necessarily to a single physical facility but to a shared resource pool that may, and probably will, be geographically distributed.)

In other words, a “private cloud” lacks the economic model that makes cloud computing such an intriguing concept in the first place. Put another way, the whole utility metaphor breaks down.

This is not to say that all computing will take place off-premises through these large service providers. In fact, there are lots of reasons why a great deal of computing willcontinue to happen locally.

For example, Chuck Hollis, Global marketing CTO at EMC, writes in The Emergence Of Private Clouds:

IT organizations and service providers that use the same standards will eventually be able to dynamically share workloads, much the way that’s done in networks, power grids and distribution today.

Fully virtualizing traditional enterprise IT internal resources creates substantial advantages — that much is becoming clear.

And if you’re an outsourcer or other IT infrastructure service provider, the advantages of virtualizing your capabilities to do multi-tenancy better is probably clear as well.

And in The argument for private clouds James Urquhart of Cisco (and a fellow CNET Blog Network blogger) argues that:

Disruptive online technologies have almost always had an enterprise analog. The Internet itself had the intranet: the use of HTTP and TCP/IP protocols to deliver linked content to an audience through a browser. The result was a disruptive technology similar to its public counterpart but limited in scope to each individual enterprise.

Cloud computing itself may primarily represent the value derived from purchasing shared resources over the Internet, but again, there is an enterprise analog: the acquisition of shared resources within the confines of an enterprise network. This is a vast improvement over the highly siloed approach IT has taken with commodity server architectures to date.

The result is that much of the same disruptive economics and opportunity that exists in the “public cloud” can be derived at a much smaller scale [by which James later clarified he meant "scope"] from within an enterprise’s firewall. It is the same technology, the same economic model, and the same targeted benefits, but focused only on what can be squeezed out of on-premises equipment.

I do have a couple of quibbles:

• Datacenter architectures are indeed getting more modular and more dynamic. However, it seems an unreasonably large step to take this overall direction and lump it under the cloud computing banner. If any arbitrary datacenter environment is considered a “private cloud,” then the already fuzzy term surely loses all meaning.
• While there are cloud concepts that can be rolled into in-house operations, the fundamental model posited by cloud computing assumes a shared utility. Returning to the electric utility metaphor, individual companies can install their own electric generators that are compatible with and can interoperate with the public utility. Doing so takes advantage of the standards in the delivery and consumption of power. It also provides a backup in the event of power failures. But these smaller generators do notdeliver power as cost effectively as the utility can.

But I mostly agree with the overall sentiment of these posts.

Applications and services will continue to run both inside enterprise firewalls and in the cloud for reasons of technology, switching costs, and control.

On the technical front, many of today’s applications were written with a tightly-coupled system architecture in mind (for example, high performance fibre channel disk connected to large SMP servers) and can’t simply be moved to a more loosely-coupled cloud environment.

For existing (”legacy”) applications, there’s also the switching cost and time to move to a new software model. In fact, one of the big arguments for standardized, outsourced IT–allowing companies to focus on their competitive differentiators–can also argue against making investments to change functional software systems (and their associated business processes), especially if the financial benefits are long-term and somewhat amorphous.

Security and compliance are also major concerns today. We can argue about the degree to which they’re justified. But, ultimately, perception is reality.

And there is a certain convergence between how many applications run in the cloud and how they run in the enterprise. Web standards and virtualization are major drivers here and they certainly make a degree of interoperability and mobility between enterprise and service provider (over time) entirely thinkable.

Existing applications (and operational procedures associated with them) change slowly and many of them will continue to run inside corporate firewalls as a result. We’ll also start to see “federated” and “hybrid” architectures that bridge the enterprise datacenter and the shared service provider. Cloud computing will evolve in concert with enterprise applications, not in isolation from them.

But we shouldn’t lose track of the fact that cloud computing is posited to be a disruptive change to the computing landscape. If that is the case, then the “cloud” moniker shouldn’t be slapped onto evolutionary changes to the way we run applications.

 

In Search for Intelligence, a Silicon Brain Twitches

By Replicating a Rat's Gray Matter, Scientists Discover Simulated Cells That Self-Organize but Lack Certain Smarts

 

For the last four years, Henry Markram has been building a biologically accurate artificial brain. Powered by a supercomputer, his software model closely mimics the activity of a vital section of a rat's gray matter.

Dubbed Blue Brain, the simulation shows some strange behavior. The artificial "cells" respond to stimuli and suddenly pulse and flash in spooky unison, a pattern that isn't programmed but emerges spontaneously.

"It's the neuronal equivalent of a Mexican wave," says Dr. Markram, referring to what happens when successive clusters of stadium spectators briefly stand and raise their arms, creating a ripple effect. Such synchronized behavior is common in flesh-and-blood brains, where it's believed to be a basic step necessary for decision making. But when it arises in an artificial system, it's more surprising.

 

Blue Brain is based at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland. The project hopes to tackle one of the most perplexing mysteries of neuroscience: How does human intelligence emerge? The Blue Brain scientists hope their computer model can shed light on the puzzle, and possibly even replicate intelligence in some way.

"We're building the brain from the bottom up, but in silicon," says Dr. Markram, the leader of Blue Brain, which is powered by a supercomputer provided by International Business Machines Corp. "We want to understand how the brain learns, how it perceives things, how intelligence emerges."

Blue Brain is controversial, and its success is far from assured. Christof Koch of the California Institute of Technology, a scientist who studies consciousness, says the Swiss project provides vital data about how part of the brain works. But he says that Dr. Markram's approach is still missing algorithms, the biological programming that yields higher-level functions.

"You need to have a theory about how a particular circuit in the brain" can trigger complex, higher-order properties, Dr. Koch argues. "You can't assemble ever larger data fields and shake it and say, 'Ah, that's how consciousness emerges.'"

Despite the challenges, the push to understand, replicate and even re-enact higher behaviors in the brain has become one of the hottest areas of neuroscience. With the help of a $4.9 million grant from the U.S. Department of Defense, IBM is working on a separate project with five U.S. universities to build a tiny, low-power microchip that simulates the behavior of one million neurons and ten billion synapses. The goal, says IBM, is to develop brainy computers that can better predict the behavior of complex systems, such as weather or the financial markets.

The Chinese government has provided about $1.5 million to a team at Xiamen University to create artificial-brain robots with microcircuits that evolve, learn and adapt to real-world situations. Similarly, Jeff Krichmar and colleagues at the University of California, Irvine, Calif., have built an artificial-brain robot that learns to sharpen its visual perception when moving around in a lab environment, another form of emergent behavior, a form of spontaneous self-organization. And researchers at Sensopac, a project backed by a grant of €6.7 million ($9.3 million) from the European Union, have built part of an artificial mouse brain.

 

The scientists behind Blue Brain hope to have a virtual human brain functioning in ten years -- a lengthy time period that underscores the scientific challenge. The human brain has 100 billion neurons that send electrical signals to each other via a network of at least 100 trillion connections, or synapses. How could this dizzying complexity ever be recreated in a virtual model?

Dr. Markram has adopted a systematic, if painstaking approach. He decided to work out the blueprint of its wiring and then use that map to rebuild the brain in an artificial form. He focused on a rat's neocortical column, or NCC, an elementary building block of the brain's neocortex, which is responsible for higher functions and thought. In a rat's case, that includes planning to obtain food.

A rat's NCC, comprised of about 10,000 neurons and their 10 million connections, functions much like a computer microprocessor. All mammals have NCCs, and the ones in humans aren't all that different from the ones in rats. However, humans have far more NCCs, which means far greater brain power. Dr. Markram figured that if a rat simulation did a good job of correctly mimicking activity in a real rat's brain, he could use the same model as a road map for simulating the human brain.

Dr. Markram began by collecting detailed information about the rat's NCC, down to the level of genes, proteins, molecules and the electrical signals that connect one neuron to another. These complex relationships were then turned into millions of equations, written in software. He then recorded real-world data -- the strength and path of each electrical signal -- directly from rat brains to test the accuracy of the software.

At the Lausanne lab one recent afternoon, a pink sliver of rat brain sat in a beaker containing a colorless liquid. The neurons in the brain slice were still alive and actively communicating with each other. Nearby, a modified microscope recorded some of this inner activity in another brain slice. "We're intercepting the electro-chemical messages" in the cells, then testing the software against it for accuracy, said Dr. Markram.

The rat's NCC has 10,000 neurons, and it takes the power of one desktop computer to mimic the behavior of a single neuron. To model the entire NCC, Dr. Markram relies on an IBM computer that can perform 22.8 trillion operations a second. This enables the simulation to be rendered as a three-dimensional object. Thus, when Blue Brain is running, its deepest inner workings are seen in astonishing detail, in the form of a 3-D simulation that unfolds on a computer screen.

In a darkened room, Blue Brain displays a virtual NCC as a column-like structure, its blue color signifying a state of rest. When zapped by a simulated electrical current, the neurons start to signal to each other and their wiring progressively sparks to life different colors. Tests indicate the same areas light up in the model as do in a real rat's brain, suggesting that Blue Brain is accurate, says Dr. Markram.

More complex things start to happen. First there's a burst of red, then white, then red again, as the NCC's wiring fills up with a cascade of myriad signals. There are so many connections, the NCC looks like an incredibly dense tangle of undergrowth.

Then, two successive waves of yellow color suddenly race through Blue Brain. It's a sign that the neurons have synchronized their behavior on their own. "The cells start to take on a life of their own," says Dr. Markram. "That's what your brain is [and when such patterns become sophisticated] it becomes your personality."

If Blue Brain ever gets sophisticated enough to closely mimic the human brain, will it exhibit consciousness? Says Dr. Markram: "If it does emerge, we'll be able to tell you how it emerged. If it doesn't, we'll know that it's the result of more than just 100 billion neurons interacting."

Write to Gautam Naik at gautam.naik@wsj.com

Corrections & Amplifications: 
There are 10 million neuronal connections in the neocortical column of a rat brain. A previous version of this article incorrectly said there were 10 billion such connections.