The Turing Centenary

If you have an interest in Alan Turing you may be interested in The Turing Centenary blog, which is counting down to the centenary of Turing's birth next year. Lots of interesting information on it.

Rotors from an Enigma Machine

Dennis Ritchie pioneering programmer dies

Dennis Ritchie

Dennis Ritchie an American computer scientist notable for developing the programming language C and for having influenced other programming languages and operating systems including Multics and Unix has died. He received the Turing Award (computer science's Nobel Prize) in 1983 and the National Medal of Technology. Ritchie was the head of Lucent Technologies System Software Research Department when he retired in 2007. The Guardian newspaper has published an interesting obituary.

Leonardo DiCaprio tipped to play Alan Turing

Turing's Office at Bletchley Park

The Guardian newspaper reports that "Leonardo DiCaprio is the frontrunner to play Alan Turing in a forthcoming biopic of the British mathematics genius and codebreaker, reports Deadline. On Tuesday, Warner Bros bought a script by first-time screenwriter Graham Moore that centres on the second world war hero."  This is interesting news and the article goes on to criticize the 2001 movie Enigma for basically writing Turing out of the story.
Read the Guardian story here.

The History of Hacking - documentary

During research for my chapter on hacking I came across an interesting old Discovery Channel documentary called "The History of Hacking." It features, Captain Crunch, Steve Wozniak, and Kevin Mitnick.

Robot to carry 2012 Olympic torch

The iCub Robot

A robot has been nominated to carry the 2012 London Olympic torch to commemorate the centenary of Alan Turing's birth. It's not certain if the robot, called iCub, will actually carry the Olympic flame, but there's no reason why it couldn't. The Next Web has an article on this. 

Review: The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World

The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World by David Kirkpatrick

My rating: 0 of 5 stars



Reading this as research for my book (http://universal-machine.blogspot.com/) - quite detailed so far and presents Zuckerberg in a favorable light .



View all my reviews

Open vs. closed

There's a piece in Slate magazine by Esther Dyson that puts forward the idea that Steve Jobs didn't like open systems because he knew that Apple could do better.

"Openness is great, and a strategy I normally applaud: No single vendor is likely to be the best, so openness allows a broad range of suppliers to compete and differentiate so the best can emerge. The closed strategy makes sense only if you are the best. That is what Steve was."

    To an extent I agree but I think Apple was perceived as being closed for very different reasons. First, although Apple is not known for championing open systems it did develop WebKit and make it open source. WebKit is the core of Apple's Safari browser, Google's Chrome, the browser on the Kindle and Android. So that's quite a major contribution to the open source movement I'd say. I'm not sure if Apple is closed in the same sense as the opposite of open source. I see Apple's so called "walled garden" as being a way of ensuring that users don't get really crappy apps on their devices. Apple is vetting them for quality and since that costs $$s it takes a proportion of the apps sale price (zero if the app is free). 
    I think Jobs was all to well aware of the chaos that an unregulated market in software had caused in the Windows ecosystem and did not want that repeated on iOS devices. It's particularly important that your cell phone doesn't crash or contain spyware. I'm sorry but as more naive users buy computers they do need protecting from some fairly unpleasant people out there on the internet and that doesn't just mean anti-virus software. Somebody has to vet the applications people may be trying to install on their machines. Apple have taken it upon themselves to do that and it's not unreasonable that they get paid to do so. Remember that walled gardens were made to create a better micro-climate inside the garden than out.