http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/index.cfm?forumid=19 en-US FuseTalk Standard Edition 3.2 Build 80405 James Hayes http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=370&threadid=51042 2013-02-22T09:06:21 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=370&threadid=51042#comments 0
Specialised radiation-hardened components can allow conventional satellites to operate for years without problems; but they are expensive, which adds significantly to the overall cost of development. A further expense comes from the need to ensure that circuits have back-ups if one is unfortunate enough to be damaged by radiation.

Many of the circuits that function happily at ground level are much more likely to fail, sometimes irreversibly, when flung into orbit and exposed to the harmful phenomena there to be found. Dealing with these damaging emanations have posed major challenges for satellite engineers.
One approach to ameliorating the effects of radiation is to use triple modular redundancy (TMR). Three sets of electronic circuits are used for each function, and vote on the output to weed out errors caused by stray alpha particles that may flip a control or memory bit.

This is expensive to do across the board; but as Chris Edwards reports in the current issue of E&T, Cubesats such as UKube-1 project - developed, built and tested for the UK Space Agency by Clyde Space of Glasgow - employ limited amounts of TMR to ensure critical subsystems, such as the Mission Interface Computer (MIC), can function after a failure.

Radiation may also have its practical uses up there. An EADS Astrium experiment to fly aboard UKube-1 will use the properties of radiation strikes to create random numbers for cryptographic applications. It is difficult to generate random numbers with sufficiently high entropy to defeat codebreakers. Spaceborne random number generators may provide an answer.'

Read more on this topic - 'The future of the satellite is cubed: meet the Jack-in-the-box that can carry your experiment into orbit on a realistic budget']]> James Hayes http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=370&threadid=49334 2012-11-21T11:05:05 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=370&threadid=49334#comments 0 factory sensors, trading systems, and call detail records compiled by telecoms companies; a big multinational enterprise soon faces its own 'Big Data Andes' range to conquer.

One often overlooked area of Big Data management that developers are under increasing pressure to minimise is data trafficking. Because the processing of large data sets is often performed in a different location to where the information itself resides, it first has to be transmitted over a network connection. Bandwidth fluctuation can affect both application availability and performance - especially true in environments where privacy and data sovereignty concerns demand that sensitive data does not leave on-premise servers, and where many users at multiple sites collaborate to submit, process, or analyse big data sets or reports.

And where information cannot be readily fed into the various different Big Data system elements because the sheer volume of information involved swamps one or more of them, further bottlenecks on the ingress or processing side can bring the flow to a halt. It's a scenario that will be familiar to any old school network manager from the 1990s, a decade when data traffic volumes first started to outstrip infrastructural capacity in open-build premises LAN backbones.

Back in those days it was a matter of introducing bigger, more capacious intelligent hubs and using network management tools to better segregate traffic flows before evaluating the necessity to build-out more cabling infrastructure, preferably fibre-based.

Nowadays most organisations will probably not want to spend more ICT budget on installing supplementary premises cabling just for the periodical Big Data 'shunts' - building a sort of 'Big Data bypass', as it were - especially at a time when strategists are claiming that the compelling appeal of IP-based networking is that you can constrain costs by running multiple traffic stream types over the same hardwired infrastructure.

But this additional physical demand incursion is another factor in the Big Data challenge, and one that has particular poignancy for organisations who, for whatever reason, are not allowed to outsource their data centre operations.

Meanwhile, anyone with an interest in Big Data should attend the 'Big Data - Turning Big Challenges into Big Opportunities' Seminar, taking place on Wednesday 5 December at the Lion Court Conference Centre (just off Holbern) in central London (WC1V 6NY). This case-study driven seminar day - chaired by yours truly - will equip delegates with insider know-how as to how to implement big data strategies, and furnish you with contacts from across the big data industry to support your work going forward. Full details at
www.theiet.org/big-data]]> James Hayes http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=370&threadid=48436 2012-09-18T13:12:57 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=370&threadid=48436#comments 0 Jonathan Hunt, business development director at desktop and virtualisation firm Point to Point, about 'bring your own device' (BYOD), an ideology that could be transitioning from wishful thinking to market orthodoxy.

Generally-speaking, BYOD is a business policy of allowing/encouraging employees bringing personally- owned mobile devices such as laptops and smartphones to their place of work, and use them to access company resources including email, intranet, and company applications, alongside their personal data and applications. That the BYOD ethos can also have 'disruptive' impact on enterprise digital communications should not be overlooked.

Yet BYOD might also uncover pointers toward changes in the way people need to use information technology in mobile-connected working environments. The lowering price-tag of sophisticated mobile devices, plus the growing ubiquity of free, reliable public Wi-Fi connectivity, are also highly influential factors in encouraging the phenomenon. People no longer have to rely on their employer to meet the cost of a baseline-specification system that costs thousands. Corporate equipment refresh cycle lags sometimes meant that office workers had more sophisticated PCs at home than they did at work; but even so, some predict that BYOD will cause a bunch of operational issues that many boardrooms will find discomforting.

Such concerns will have to be allayed if pro-BYOD sloganising about capital expenditure reductions and staff training budget savings, as well as how staff are more likely to take care of devices containing sensitive data if the device is a personal possession rather than belonging to an employer, is to be taken seriously.

More productive staff might mean higher salary bills, and budget saved on buying new PCs over standard product refresh cycles is likely to be offset by a requirement to invest in new BYOD management tools - a growing market sector.

Although BYOD is partly about decentralisation and the freeing-up of choice, it still has to be managed under a policy-based regime. This presents fresh challenges for ICT policy makers. BYOD advocates could yet find that newfound flexibility comes with quite stringent obligations and even a renewed requirement to stick to agreed guidelines, such as acceptable usage policies - employers will be concerned about corporate data sharing a hard disk with potentially inappropriate personal content, say. There is also the possibility that career penalties will apply even when individuals are careless with hardware that belongs to them, and they are liable for replacements should it get lost during work hours.

But the BYOD ethos is pervasive enough to cause IT strategists to consider if it might usefully inform new thinking about future developments in enterprise IT planning. For instance, if fewer enterprise staff are working from hardwired computers, are 'traditional' local-area network infrastructure still needed as much? One scenario along these lines is in smart buildings where more of the available Ethernet communications capacity might be deemed by premises technology managers as better used by other applications as there is less fixed-device information systems data running over it, and more of what remains can be transferred onto internal Wi-Fi connections, where procedures allow.

BYOD could also prompt changes in conventional enterprise voice communications. Email and text messaging are increasingly the primary media for business communications, making the necessity to pick-up first time less necessary. Voice messaging is not commonly regarded as efficient a business tool as it used to be.

A related factor at play here is the fact that VPNs allied to cloud-based software as a service (SaaS) and data as a service (DaaS) options - possibly bundled as virtual private clouds (VPCs) - should mean that less, if any, sensitive employer data will actually be stored on any portable devices. It is also important to bear in mind that the BYOD phenomenon can been seen to some extent as part of a general trend toward 'thin client' style endpoint devices - both fixed and mobile - where very little actual enterprise data actually held on the device itself.

Another factor on the security side is the fact that BYOD-minded organisations are realising the necessity of new approaches to overall risk-assessment that include classifying their data and applying an IT-scale value to it, so that each user data access privileges are better aligned. This seems another factor in support of BYOD, but one that could entail cost implications in a business environment where enterprises are generating data at such rates that the monitoring and classification is a full-time tasks which would require additional IS staff, tools, and the support of third-party services.

A extended version of this 'The Device Divide' post appears in the October 2012 issue of 'E&T' magazine.]]> James Hayes http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=370&threadid=46806 2012-05-30T17:11:41 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=370&threadid=46806#comments 0
Organised by the National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park, 'Turing and his Times' featured a talk by computer historian Professor Simon Lavington on 'Turing and his Contemporaries', a simulation of the Pilot ACE computer by TNMOC trustee Kevin Murrell, and the first formal public showing of a video commissioned by the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) of the recollections of two of Alan Turing's colleagues.
The three-part videoconsists of:
Part 1 Introduction and NPL video featuring two of Turing's colleagues: Part 2 Prof Simon Lavington talks about Turing's ideas post-1945.
Part 3 Kevin Murrell demonstrates a simulation of the Pilot ACE followed by a Q&A session (includes an unexpected appearance from an audience member who had programmed the Pilot ACE computer!

'Turing and his Times' was the second of three Turing-themed events linking three of the top computing museums in the world. At The Computer History Museum in California on 7 March, historian George Dyson (author of 'Turing's Cathedral') was in conservation with Museum President and CEO John Hollar about the influence of Alan Turing on John von Neumann (and vice-versa) as the digital universe was taking its present form. A video of that encounter is also available.

And in Germany, on 26 May, the Heinz Nixdorf Museum in Paderborn, Germany, hosts an event featuring two short lectures: Professor Dr Horst Zuse talking about his father Konrad Zuse and his computers, Professor Dr Paul Rojas comparing Turing and Zuse, plus videos of their Turing exhibition and the Heinz Nixdorf Museum's working mechanical Turing machine.

And there's information about the forthcoming Alan Turing Centenary Conference - and other Turing content - in this recent E&T news update - 'Turing conference promises unique meeting of minds'.]]> James Hayes http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=370&threadid=46614 2012-05-17T15:00:03 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=370&threadid=46614#comments 0 beginning tomorrow, Friday 18 May) will know that even a relatively straightforward mechanism as the Strowger system system - prototyped using pins and collar boxes, legend has it - soon developed into a highly sophisticated piece of electromechanical apparatus.

Interested students of telecommunications history should check-out this 8.5 minute 1951 instructional film, made available online courtesy of the AT&T Tech Channel - 'The Step-By-Step Switch'.

As the accompanying web text explains, the purpose of this film was to show Bell employees how calls were automatically switched through an SxS office, and gives a general appreciation of the importance, complexity, and cost of switching equipment in an average 1950s telephone office. The path of a call is shown as it runs through a demonstration unit. "Careful adherance to Bell System maintenance practices" is stressed.]]> James Hayes http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=370&threadid=46564 2012-05-14T09:06:50 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=370&threadid=46564#comments 0 make the correct connections between caller 'end device' and receiver 'end devices'.

American Strowger first conceived his invention in 1888, and patented the automatic telephone exchange three years later. Some reports suggest that he constructed an initial model of his invention from a round collar box and some straight pins.

The centenary will be marked in a three-day celebration beginning on Friday 18 May at the Avoncroft Museum, home of the National Telephone Kiosk Collection. Avoncroft Museum (near Bromsgrove, Worcestershire) is a 15-acre open-air site of historic buildings. The Kiosk Collection opened in 1994, with the support of BT's Connected Earth heritage initiative, and contains examples of all BT kiosks down the decades. The Museum is open from 10.30am to 5.00pm during the Strowger Centenary Event (18-20 May 2012). More details at http://www.avoncroft.org.uk.

Mr Strowger, BTW, was not a technologist by trade, but a funeral director from Kansas City. Legend has it that Strowger's undertaking business was losing custom to a rival whose telephone-operator wife was intercepting and redirecting callers to Strowger to her hubby's parlour.

Alas Strowger himself didn't live long enough to see his brainchild flourish: he died in 1902, a decade before the opening of the Epsom exchange. He was survived by his widow Susan: after her death in 1921, an obituary claimed that she had been sitting on additional 'revolutionary' Strowger designs, but 'had refused to make them public while she was alive because only others would profit from her husband's designs'.]]> James Hayes http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=370&threadid=46325 2012-04-27T18:20:40 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=370&threadid=46325#comments 0 Deutschland's Schlechteste Über-Daten-Hamsterers!, (trans: Germany's Worst Super Data Hoarders) the reality show which features 'ordinary' (but bonkers) people who cannot face-up to discarding redundant computer data.

Host Mitzi Meyers' subject this time was Steffi, a 36-year-old biochemist and part-time webmeistress from a Berlin suburb who obsessively retains all her PC log files: she has millions of such sets going back to her time at university, including all of those from various websites she has administered over the last 15 years. Unlike her fellow data hoarder Günther featured in Tuesday's show (see Buzzsore's 25 April 2012 post), Steffi has the wherewithal to migrate her data onto successively more up-to-date storage media, and has reached the stage where she keeps RAID devices under the floorboards of her small terraced haus.

Also unlike Günther, Steffi remained for most of the programme in staunch denial that she had any kind of problem - "It is not so much that I want to keep all my data, it is just that I do not want to delete any of it," she explained tearfully into the camera. To help Steffi come to terms with her data-doting psychosis Mitzi took her to a data de-duplication consultant in Stuttgart who helped take the first painful steps on the road to recovery: excising all the third and fourth copies of files alone slimmed-down her data sets by several gigabytes, and alles war gut for Steffi; but not for your blogger, who channel-hopped to a Spanish TV documentary about a tribe of Intellectual Pygmies who, a bearded anthropologist explained, worship Melvyn Bragg's BBC Radio 4 programme 'In Our Time', which they listen to every week on an ancient crystal set that was salvaged from a crashed biplane sometime in the 1940s.]]> James Hayes http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=370&threadid=46304 2012-04-26T13:33:59 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=370&threadid=46304#comments 0 Gilberto) attracted a lot of visitor attention as it
trundled around the smooth-floor circuit bordering the company's stand.

This year Bluebotics has been joined by more service robot makers, and there is clear evidence that this technology is moving from clever novelty to commercially-viable application.

Take for instance the showcased products from German firm MetraLabs, its SCITOS G6 Transporter and its SCITOS G3 home-care model. The former resembles an item of cafeteria furniture most people are familiar with: the open-stack cabinet for leaving your tray and used tableware, etc., in. G6 is a robotised version of this eatery staple, programmed to autonomously take the dirties back to the kitchen when all its slots become filled, then return empty to its designated post.

MetraLabs has stuck a bug-eyed little 'head' on the top of the unit, and at first I thought, "Oh, not another daft attempt to make a robot look like a toy human"; but it actually has a practical purpose: it prevents people from overloading the unit by placing items on its top, and also provides a branding opportunity for restaurant chains or their suppliers.

SCITOS G3 is designed to support persons in home environments,nursing homes, and even hospitals. It trundles about displaying an interactive touch screen that can be used for, say, displaying medication schedules. Future possibilities include integrating this with mobile phone-based telehealthcare apps, or even full M2M functionality.

One other point about the mobile service robots at Hannover Messe worth noting: unlike last year, when they were kept corralled within the confines of each exhibitors' stand, this week they have been allowed to wander - autonomously in some cases - around the aisles, so that visitors can inspect them up close, touch and prod them, put their arms round them and have their photograph taken, etc.

This mularkey will in due course present something of an issue for exhibition organisers, one suspects, when their clients want to use mobile robots to distribute marketing collateral (flyers, freebies) to visitor throngs. And how belong before the dreaded health & safety issue crops up, with the first legal action for an injury caused by somebody colliding with an autonomous service robot?

You can't help wondering how many of the past's key breakthrough innovations would have been stymied by H&S if it had been around at the time. Just think of Stephenson's Rocket, for instance ("Sorry Mr S., we can't have the crew setting off in an open-top plate without protective headgear and safety harnesses"); mind you, a bit of 19th century H&S might have saved William Huskisson MP from being knocked down and killed by the steamy locomotive at the opening of the Liverpool & Manchester Railway in September 1830, thus becoming the first victim of a train accident.]]> James Hayes http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=370&threadid=46296 2012-04-25T17:10:05 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=370&threadid=46296#comments 0 Deutschland's Schlechteste Über-Daten-Hamsterers!, (trans: Germany's Worst Super Data Hoarders) a reality show which features
'ordinary' (but bonkers) people who cannot face-up to discarding redundant computer data. During the course of each episode they are coaxed into junking stuff that they have been hanging-on to for years, sometimes decades, because they they have a pathological inability to get rid of it.

Hosted by genial self-styled self-help guru & lifestyle enabler Mitzi Meyers, the show at first confronts its subjects with the extent of their obsessive retentiveness, with lots of hand-held camera tours of the extent of the problem, dramatic zoom-ins and soundtrack chord changes.

Yesterday evening's Über-Daten-Hamsterers! featured 48-year-old Günther, a freelance governance officer from Frankfurt, who has kept copies (and copies of copies, and copies of copies of copies - you get the point) of every file he has ever created since he first started using a PC in the late 1980s. The spare room of Günther's family flat was stacked with storage media - 5.25 inch disks and 3.5 inch diskettes, tape cartridge and external hard disc drives - I even spotted an old Syquest unit among the chaos.

Mitzi pulled out some discs at random and made Günther view their contents: acknowledgement letters, old invoices, drafts of letters to travel agencies regarding forgotten package holidays, and thousands of photo files of family pets long since deceased and disposed-of. There was gigabytes of downloaded PDFs containing information that Günther still believes "may come in handy at some day".

When confronted by stern but understanding Mitzi into accepting that he has a problem, and that this problem is having repercussions on the psychological well-being of his family (the youngest child has to sleep in the garage because Günther refuses to remove his hoard of ancient, rotting data from the spare bedroom), he broke down in tears and agreed to tackle his problem. Mitzi gave him a big hug, and told him soothingly that "es ist OKAY"...

After the commercial break a crew of burly blokes wearing protective clothing arrived in a rather cool-looking Mercedes truck, and spent the morning chucking the bags and boxes of old disks etc. into waste disposal crates. The disgusting archive was covered in dust and grime, and several cockroaches came scurrying out as stacks of lockable plastic storage cases of disks were disinterred.

Poor old Günther was led away sobbing to stay with some IT clinicians while the spare room was gutted and redecorated by another burly crew of 'fresh-start décor counsellors'. The show ended with Günther being led back into the room blindfolded to find a surprise party held in his honour. Everyone was having a lovely time until Günther's wife discovered a secret hoard of novelty USB memory sticks that he'd been hiding at the back of the cutlery drawer.

Ja, you can bet that I'll be one of the many millions of German viewers who'll be tuning into the next heart-rending episode of Deutschland's Schlechteste Super Daten-Hamsterers!]]> James Hayes http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=370&threadid=46290 2012-04-25T14:29:06 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=370&threadid=46290#comments 0 - a sector not normally associated with its heartland mainstream business computing; but Cisco has big plans not only for the smart technology that's coming into factories and assembly lines around the world, but also for the next-generation of technologists who'll be tasked with making it all work - and in manufacturing that means manufacturing engineers, rather than conventional ICT techies who provide CCNP rankers.

In respect to the first, Cisco 'reinforced its commitment to the industrialisation of the Internet' with the launch at Hannover of the Cisco IE 2000 industrial switch series. This class of devices is designed specifically for the build-out of intelligent networks for industrial automation that link the plant floor to enterprise networks.

This glib phrase belies the fact that managing datacommunications within manufacturing plants or assembly lines is not only hugely different to running business applications in offices, but it also requires competent personnel who can work the kit, and integrate it with strong-arm robotics and big metal that stamps and molds and hisses. To this end company has revealed that it is "looking at the possibility of Cisco training and certification for manufacturing professionals", according the Maciej Kranz, VP/GM of Cisco's newly-established Connected Industries Business Unit, speaking exclusively to E&T.

Cisco regards manufacturing - smart manufacturing, more specifically - as a major new potential market for its solutions, and that potential seems so evident that it is surprising that some of its erstwhile competitors haven't grasped the possible benefits of strutting their stuff in front of procurers visiting the world's biggest industrial fair.

An important driver of change here are sensors, Kranz points out: "The growth of sensor-based data is just unprecedented," he says. "They are now being installed in many industrial environments where they haven't been before, or certainly not in such a sophisticated way. Oil rigs, for instance, fitted with sensors for various applications, generate terabytes of data. And as that data builds-up organisations need to traffic it and analyse it. In some ways this is not so much different from the datacommunications that Cisco has been doing for years - the same issues like security and resilience still apply, of course - except that the units have to be much more robust." Kranz's unit's engineers have been busy finding ways to make Cisco kit ready (think ruggedised routers) for these tough environments.

"Barriers between the IT and OT [operational technology] worlds are just breaking down," Kranz avers, as the latter increasing calls for "levels of sophistication that have up till now been the preserve of enterprise IT".

The time has only just become right for Cisco's move. Up until quite recently industrial computing platforms had to have very high levels of reliability and robustness because they were so often operating alongside safety critical systems. Another point not to be overlooked is Cisco's reputation for the build-quality of its existing product lines, and the fact that as a company that has been closely involved in the manufacture of product hardware for over 20 years, it's had plenty of experience of life on the factory floor.]]> James Hayes http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=370&threadid=46255 2012-04-23T11:17:47 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=370&threadid=46255#comments 0 which are leveraging the attention around the event to publicise their respective agendas; but the extent to which Chinese showings at the event could also serve as counterpoints to criticisms of the country's ecological reputation should not be overlooked.

The presence of no less a personage than Chinese premier Wen Jiabao, who opened the event yesterday (Sunday) with German chancellor Angela Merkel, was a high-profile coup for Hannover Messe, to be sure, but one that also brought added impetus to his government's critics. This blogger wasn't present, but Yahoo News reports that a crowd of some 200 demonstrated outside during the ceremony.

At Kröpcke, the Stadtbahn station closest to the hotel where Wen Jiabao met with various civic dignitaries, Amnesty International has taken out a series of large advertisements on the Messe-bound platforms, highlighting 'Human rights made in China'. And as delegates and exhibitors in their thousands step-off the trains at Messe-Nord station they are greeted by at least two bannered protest groups camped outside the entrance distributing flyers.

At the same time it's worth noting that while the partnership with Hannover Messe 2012 is principally about generating commercial/cultural opportunities, it is also couched in the context of change: China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, for instance, has announced plans to increase R&D investment for 'enabling technologies for eco-friendly vehicles' geared toward a commitment toward the production of mass-market electric vehicles.

Of course anyone cognisant of declarations of environmental protection will be aware that promises and deliverables in this thorny area are prone to disparities the world over. But it's reasonable also to recognise also that Chinese exhibitors are not in Hannover without bona fide 'green' technology on their stands (no pejoratives meant by those inverted commas, BTW - no technology is ever 100 per cent environmentally clean).

Even legitimate criticisms of China's environmental record should not discount the possibility that the sustainable technologies being showcased at Hannover Messe are aiming to find solutions to the problems - both in the People's Republic and anywhere else in the world where sustainability abuse is evident. High-attendance and open events like Hannover Messe provide visitors an opportunity now to examine the technological claims at close quarters.]]> James Hayes http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=370&threadid=45552 2012-03-06T16:15:35 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=370&threadid=45552#comments 0
In the enterprise space eye tracking interfaces will change the nature of how we work, but may also change the ways in which we contrive to avoid it - for short 'allowable' periods, that is. A consideration of the history of our relationship with typewriting is instructive here. In the old days professional typists rarely hammered away at their keyboards for recreational purposes, or because they were drafting a message to their social network confreres. Back then, productivity was pretty easy to gauge: it started and stopped when typing was heard and not heard.

PCs changed all that: now who can actually tell why you're tapping away at that computer: is it really work, or is it 'non-work-related'? Are you applying yourself diligently to the 'agreed' employment tasks you've been set - or catching-up on advances in latest personal social media tools? Even when an inquisitive manager looms Blakey*-like behind you you just toggle the work spreadsheet to full-screen to effect a decoying manouver.

Such subterfuge at least gives the impression of busyness, and most bosses are happy to overlook cyber-skivers so long as the work of the day gets done (it's not fair: if an employee decided to simply sit gazing into space in lieu of cyber-skiving they'd be down to HR on a fizzer pronto).

Enter eye tracking: using image sensors and image processing to convey commands and instructions to the computer using movements of the operator's eyes. Technology being showcased at CeBIT this week by one of the market leaders, Swedish firm Tobii aims to take eye tracking beyond niche use, and put it to broader use, and that includes finding ways to converge it with conventional applications such as process control and even surgery.

It is in the area of standard office applications that eye tracking perhaps faces its biggest challenges, especially when it comes to monitoring individuals' productivity. When gaze interfaces come in manager will know even less about when their staff are really engaged in: responding to a sales inquiry or watching YouTube?

And what will be the implications for the hard-won human skill of multi-tasking? I'm drafting this blog entry in the CeBIT press centre while concurrently engaged in glancing at emails, search engine results, and my netbook's remaining power, while also acknowledging a passing hack who I haven't seen in donkeys, and glaring at the fatuous blogger who is loudly recording his podcast at the desk next to me instead of doing it in an empty room (one that's about 10km away, ideally). Will, come the era of eye tracking, such visual flittery be recalled with the same nostalgia as the typewriter generation now look back on the mixed aroma of new ribbons, carbon copies, and Tipp-Ex paper?
*That's Blakey the lurking Inspector of TV's On the Buses, BTW, not the Jazz drummer.]]> James Hayes http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=370&threadid=42751 2011-09-06T16:53:41 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=370&threadid=42751#comments 0 BBC News reports that group of scientists and engineers is working to revive a UK satellite that's been in orbit since 1971.
Prospero was the first UK satellite to be sent up on a UK launch vehicle - a Black Arrow rocket; it would also be the last.
Having now discovered the codes to contact the satellite, engineers say that they still have to build equipment to 'talk' to the satellite, and then must win approval from the broadcast regulator Ofcom to use Prospero's radio frequencies - these days being used by other satellite operators.]]> James Hayes http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=370&threadid=42136 2011-07-22T16:35:16 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=370&threadid=42136#comments 0 Welcome to the age of the splinternet' in the current 'New Scientist' touches on some stimulating points for debate about future directions for the Internet, but makes some curious misapprehensions about the advent of
cloud computing, which Ananthaswamy (perversely) refers to as "one of the biggest Internet innovations of the past few years", whereas as anyone involved with public-facing ICT likes to remind the laity, is in fact a long-established model that's been adroitly redressed by commercial imperatives.

Ananthaswamy further adds that "Some companies have moved their entire IT departments into the cloud... [But] the cloud could generate exactly the single points of failure that the internet's robust architecture was supposed to prevent": this again is somewhat wide of the mark in that unless it is being missold and/or done on the cheap, the whole point of cloud is that it should not constitute a single point of failure - all the key data sets should be virtualised around the Web in various locations. Multiple points of failure - well, that's a different matter...]]> James Hayes http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=370&threadid=41020 2011-05-06T15:05:58 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=370&threadid=41020#comments 0 Some commentators suspect that the two entities have already become inextricable linked - but are we heading toward a case of tail wagging dog, where cloud diktats lure data centre science off in a wayward 'direction of travel'?
In seeking an answer to that question it is important, some aver, not to over-estimate the nebulous nature of the cloud construct.
Colt's executive vice president of infrastructure services unit Mark Leonard's view is that cloud computing is actually "an IT operating model - it is having an impact on data centre design," he says, although any perceived associations between cloud and consumer confidence should not be over-rated, Leonard adds: with the fundamental abstraction of cloud services from the underlying infrastructure, it is "more likely to weaken any perceived linkage between cloud service and data centre - especially in the consumer context".
It's a fair point: cloud computing in its essentials is not much more than an operating model (not unlike the OSI's multi-coloured Seven Layer Model, say) with a fluffy name that at the same time lends itself too-readily to marketing. There's where the OSI missed a trick - had it've been more marketing savvy, could the 1990s have now been known as the era of 'Rainbow Computing'?]]> James Hayes http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=370&threadid=41018 2011-05-06T10:46:29 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=370&threadid=41018#comments 0 The line-up featured a sextet of stalwarts and fund managers from the banking and capital markets world; money men less interested in hot aisles than hot investments. While acknowledging that the business models deployed by data centre operators varied, and that only a small proportion of such players are publicly-quoted companies, how do investors see data centres as money-making propositions?
The panel's take on technological advances was predicated on one concern: will this improve the value of my data centres sector stock, or it devalue my holdings? Sounds dullish, but actually the capitalists provided some refreshing insight on talked-up trends.
One point that brought forth consensus was that, no matter how healthy prospects appeared - demand on the up, existing data centres being expanded, innovations appearing to address energy consumption, IT efficiency, cooling and ventilation, etc - it only takes one mass-market scare story to create a worrying wobble (although chances of a dot-com bubble 2.0 are minimal). We're talking 'bout the recent Sony and Amazon mishaps, of course. Global CTO at Devonshire Investors Frank Lukas highlighted the fact that reports of the Amazon outage had given impression that they occurred as a result of data centre problems: "In fact, as we know, it wasn't a facilities-based outage, [but] the knee-jerk reaction was that it was facilities-based," he said. "In fact it was the software that broke"; but popular perception among so-called 'technoramuses' is that service failures are caused by hardware failures, rather than soft system errors.
This was not good news for data centre operators, but added Jonathan Atkin, MD of RBC Capital Markets, the adverse publicity may have its positive side: "It might cause customers to spend more with their data centre service provider, and pay for extra resilience" - something which in 2011's penny-pinching economic climate, many have shied away from, he believes.
Agreement came from Jules Delahaije, CEO of Linxdatacenter: "These type of disasters help a lot. They challenge any notion that you can do these things on the cheap." They also help displace business away from the big, mega-centralised data center operators to the more decentralised players who can provide help to smaller customers when hiccups occur.
So according to the financial observers, Amazon's cloud burst may have a silver lining after all...]]> James Hayes http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=370&threadid=41006 2011-05-05T15:14:08 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=370&threadid=41006#comments 0 It's a minor conspiracy theory, but one that has excited some debate at the first day of the Data Centres Europe 2011 conference, both in the open plenary debates and among the networking break coffee congregations.
More pessimistic opiners have gone so far as to suggest that any further such mishaps involving 'cloud' will cause the technology to have to change its name in an effort distance itself from lasting negative associations, and then pursue a 'new life' under a different market identity. Others are not so sure that the 'cloud computing' term was ever properly suitable as a generic label.
"Cloud computing used to be called 'utility computing'," says Gregor Petri, who enjoys the job title of 'Advisor, Lean IT & Cloud Computing' at CA Technologies, speaking at a midday panel debate billed as 'Which cloud to follow?'.
Making utility computing sexier and more mass-market-friendly, by renaming it 'cloud', was an agreeable side effect of the reinvention, to be sure; but if the moniker becomes synonymous with risk, then the industry would have to consider another name change. "That's why they [the IT sector at large] is not talking about it [the Sony breach]," he suggests; besides which the IT industry has never been entirely comfortable with 'cloud computing' as a generic technology descriptor, adds Petri: "Cloud is not an acronym - and the IT industry lives by acronyms".
So what should cloud computing be rechristened as? Your suggestions invited below, please...]]> James Hayes http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=370&threadid=40999 2011-05-05T11:33:11 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=370&threadid=40999#comments 0 du premier jour à Data Centres Europe 2011 conference: it's not yet déjeuner time, and it's cropped up at least half a dozen times in the morning's leading presentations and plenary sessions.

In his impressive early morning keynote Aaron Davis, chief marketing officer at Schneider Electric, told delegates that the biggest challenge facing the data centre industry is perhaps the need to break the link between its role in underpinning national economies, from the fact that this imperative is shackling its ability to control its own costs and its reputation for effective carbon management.

The global data centres sector famously consumes as much energy as the airlines business; but whereas people understand why airlines are culpable because they travel and/or see airplanes roaring overhead, most purchasers on online products and services have no clue as to the massive amounts of power-ravenous IT that enable the e-economy to thrive.

The extant data centres industry model allies economic growth with energy consumption, Davis points out; the snag is that because consumers are at several removes from the vendors of the actual Internet products and services that they consume - data centres are not able to scale up their prices in line with their escalating costs. The result: more and more financial costs and legislative pressures on data centres that cannot be passed on to end-users.

Because this model cannot now be reversed, to survive "the data centre industry has to decouple economic growth from issues of energy consumption," Davis believes: "And the data centre industry is the only body that can do this". Not only can do, but must do, Davis adds, because if it has only a five-to fifteen year window to reduce consumption in a self-regulated way before governments will be forced into greater legislation to mitigate the effects of global warming, and find ways to tax for 10 per cent of GDP that will be required to fund building seawalls on an industrial scale.

Davis called for greater investment in a new generation of data centre professionals qualified in energy efficiency skills to and beyond degree level.]]> James Hayes http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=370&threadid=40960 2011-04-28T15:39:14 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=370&threadid=40960#comments 1 Forum of Private Business (Ltd, of course) is urging revellers to use the festivities to help their local small businesses through the 'current economic uncertainties' by providing independent traders with a 'much-needed boost' by 'spending their money at privately-owned shops, pubs and restaurants'.
However, the lobby group is anxious to allay any impression that it is calling for consumers to boycott big businesses, says its head of campaigns Jane Bennett: "We're not calling for people to boycott big businesses," she insists.
Never shy of courting controversy, the Forum believes that the 'mood of national celebration surrounding the wedding, coupled with the recent spell of good weather, should create a welcome upsurge in trade for smaller businesses in the tourism, hospitality, leisure, and retail industries'. Not 'will create', mind, but 'should create'.
Bennett adds: "Many small firms in the leisure, retail, and hospitality sectors stand to benefit from the mood of national celebration surrounding the Royal Wedding. They don't need to be anywhere near Westminster Abbey to benefit - people are planning celebrations up and down the UK".]]> James Hayes http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=370&threadid=40634 2011-04-05T09:42:07 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=370&threadid=40634#comments 0 GEKKO makes its way up, down, and along via an array of a vacuum feet which rotate on dual trapezoid-shaped geared belt drives. As equipped with a rotating brush, GEKKO was designed for the cleaning of large glass facades; its maker - Serbot, another Swiss robotics outfit - reckon that it can also turn its little suckers to functional tests of solar panels, and construction inspection using an on-board video cam.
The unit on display here seemed to make rather slow progress as it hissed and plopped its way across the demonstration surface on the Serbot stand, yet the potential for use in risky environments was evident. But what about its longer-term potential potential for replacing human window cleaners, say?
Heading home I happened to pass a window cleaner up a ladder who was squeegeeing away at a second story skylight, so I took the opportunity to ask him whether he thought a robot could do that job as well as he could.
"Können saubere fenster eines roboters besser, als ich können sie? Nie!" he called down. "Und was geschieht, wenn der roboter weg von der strichleiter fällt? Tausenden Euro vergeudet!" (Can a robot clean windows better than I can? Never! What happens if the robot falls off the ladder? Thousands of euros wasted!)
Unfortunately turning round to answer me then caused the window cleaner to loose his footing, and the poor bloke slid several rungs down the ladder, giving his shins a nasty scrape. I helped him to a nearby branch of Das Boots (the German retail chemist chain) to get patched up, then fled in the direction of my hotel.]]> James Hayes http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=370&threadid=40620 2011-04-04T15:03:48 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=370&threadid=40620#comments 0 Hannover Messe 2011 opening, rather than one of its hugely functional relatives from the worlds of control engineering and precision manufacturing, also exhibited.
An iCub is of course a humanoid robot for research into human cognition and AI, designed by a consortium of European universities, and fully open-source, with the hardware design, software and documentation released under the GPL license. That all notwithstanding, robots of all varieties are a big part of what Hannover Messe has to offer, with a special area - Mobile Robots and Autonomous Systems (Hall 15) - devoted to showcasing the technology's progress. One stand drawing much attention was BlueBotics: 'Mobile robots at your service' is the Swiss company's motto, and there to help was Gilberto, the entertainment robot who 'speaks' four languages, and also interacts with a touchscreen, as well as being able to provide Web information.
Useful as he may be Gilberto doesn't look likely to entirely replace a fully-functional human playmate, but his BlueBotics relative Atom just might. Designed for home assistance', home security, and tour guide, it can also double as a portable floor lamp, and even an occasional table; BuzzSore wouldn't be surprised to see it harnessed to a Hoover and pressed into service as an autonomous domestic help. But the good burghers of Hannover at least are unconcerned that such cutting-edge technology could be hedging humans' employment prospects. "Gnädige Frau, sorgt es sich sie, dass roboter ihren job nehmen können?" I asked a domestic cleaner I got chatting to at the Stadtbahn stop.
No, she replied, shaking her head: "I verstehen nicht die gesellschaftlichen auswirkungen solcher auftauchenden technologie" (I understand not the societal impacts of such emerging technology).
I tried to explain at length that this area of study itself was an emerging discipline, and that in a very real sense society was empowering itself to challenge technological impositions; unfortunately, while doing I so distracted her that she missed her homeward train. "Ich bin spät, mein husband' erhalten; s-Abendessen!" (Now I will be late getting my husband's dinner), she exclaimed. Just then my own train arrived, and I got on; she glowered at me through the glass as it pulled away from the station.]]> James Hayes http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=370&threadid=40513 2011-03-28T17:42:58 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=370&threadid=40513#comments 0 business meeting sandwich quality.

Now he is concerned about a new Maris Interiors survey that finds 74 per cent of UK workplaces restrict their employees' access to the Internet; most revealing, perhaps, only 71 per cent of those surveyed have a filter for blocking pornographic websites from their staffs' view.

"It's a difficult decision about blocking websites in the workplace - by doing so you have to balance employees' productivity against their morale," Howard believes. "At Maris Interiors we restrict access to pornographic sites: hopefully this doesn't affect our morale too much."

Unwittingly, perhaps, Howard broaches the possibility that future business managers could face a tricky trade-off if the notion that porn-boosted morale could lead to quantifiable business benefits and productivity gains was ever tested under clinical conditions.]]> James Hayes http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=370&threadid=40242 2011-03-16T12:45:01 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=370&threadid=40242#comments 0 The BBC has confirmed that it has issued no such flash, and that the message is bogus.
Reports say that the message has been circulating around Asian countries since 14 March, two days after the Japan earthquake struck.]]> James Hayes http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=370&threadid=40206 2011-03-14T17:28:15 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=370&threadid=40206#comments 0 Data centre design and build is governed (and usually regulated) by an awareness of the likelihood of adverse natural phenomena, such as earth tremours and flooding. Initial reports suggest that Japan's data centres seem not to have been directly affected by Friday's shocks; however, the disruption that they have on transport systems, and therefore data centre engineers' ability to travel to and from their place of work, is concomitant issue that can affect operational efficiency.
But data centres themselves might also play a part in early detection of impending seismic activity. Less than five months ago E&T reported how IBM technologists patented a natural disaster warning system which would use analytics based on data from hard disk accelerometers to provide post-event assessments of seismic events to help improve rescue operations.
MEMs (microelectromechanical systems) accelerometers - vibration sensors that measure acceleration experienced relative to freefall - are equipped to every PC hard disk, initially there to detect sudden gravitational shifts so that drives of dropped PCs can be secured before they hit the ground. However, the devices can now also detect large accelerations in any direction. Where drives are rack-mounted in fixed locations, they are well place to pick-up 'significant acceleration' that may be caused by seismic waves. Information can then be relayed to emergency response agencies to help inform strategic actions.]]> James Hayes http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=370&threadid=40024 2011-03-02T13:18:08 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=370&threadid=40024#comments 0
Buzzsore was going to pass-off this story as its own, but BBC News is claiming true authorship at www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-12613617http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-12613617]]> James Hayes http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=370&threadid=39919 2011-02-23T15:12:17 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=370&threadid=39919#comments 0
According to a survey by market-watcher DataGeist, outbreaks of a new strain of so-called 'mobile phone rage' will turn the capital's subterranean transit system into a battleground, with some passengers reacting violently when phone conversations are conducted at high volume - shouted to be heard over the noise of the train - during the rush-hour crush.

"Tube users can be amazingly tolerant when it comes to intrusive behaviour by their fellow passengers in an over-crowded carriage," says Claudia Skiez, senior analyst at DataGeist Group. "But there's a difference between being jabbed in the face by a newspaper or magazine or water bottle, and having someone else's inane, gobby phone conversation blasted into one's ear."

Skiez adds: "Retaliatory slaps and punches will have a direct effect on the human brain metabolism."]]> James Hayes http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=370&threadid=39891 2011-02-22T16:08:52 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=370&threadid=39891#comments 0
Indeed, the Museum houses the largest collection of functional historic computers in Europe, including a rebuilt Colossus, the world's first electronic programmable computer, which complements the Bletchley Park Trust's story of code breaking housed next door. A new video made by TVUK gives the world a chance to take a ten-minute tour and is definitely worth a click:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...ure=player_profilepage
New working exhibits are regularly unveiled; already on view are the rebuilt and fully operational Colossus, the under-restoration Harwell / WITCH computer, and an ICL 2966, one of the workhorse mainframes computers of the 1980s; plus many of the earliest desktops of the 1980s and 1990s, plus the NPL Technology of the Internet Gallery.]]> James Hayes http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=370&threadid=39755 2011-02-15T17:00:25 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=370&threadid=39755#comments 0 Exactly what the KPIs involved here were (filling, bread type, low-fat spread vrs butter, etc.) is not disclosed. This may seem like a slice of pre-packed PR puffery, but Maris has some hard-hitting economic facts underpinning its research: the average cost of sandwiches per person at meetings stands a £3.80, whereas when the survey was first conducted in 2006, the average cost was just under £6 per person. Most popular sandwiches five years ago included 'crayfish and avocado' and 'chicken teriyaki' - but now 'cheese and pickle' and 'tuna and sweet corn' featured more in the survey (but of course, if you're not being offered a choice, they would be, wouldn't they?).
"It's a sign of these austere times that companies are spending much less on sandwiches in the boardroom," says Maris Interiors' Chairman Michael Howard, who believes that sandwich budget slashing is "certainly a sensible way to cut costs"; but, he warns, we must be careful not to overdo it: "You won't impress a client with jam sandwiches!" The voice of experience speaking? Crumbs, no wonder Maris managed to find the five working days it took to conduct the survey.]]>