Kim Bach . Org

Welcome to ICT Mythbusters Episode One – who needs prequels, start your numbering scheme at one!

ICT Mythbusters is inspired by the great Discovery show Mythbusters

It’s also premiering a new concept in advertising that will revolutionise it:

Commercials that the host – in this case me – don’t make any money from, so click the banner and support the REAL Mythbusters, if you want to me support, send me some money .

Was Bill Gates wrong?

A very famous quote from Bill Gates is:

640KB of RAM should be enough for everyone

Everybody has been laughing at that statement, but was he actually right?

I can access the web in high-fidelity from my Nintendo DS, and any modern phone with Java ME can run the Opera mini browser, and these phones rarely have more than 1MB of RAM. I’d say that approximately 4MB should be enough for everyone.

So Bill Gates was right, or? Why is it that he wasn’t? It’s of course because we’ve moved our storage to the server, as a college of mine was so friendly to point out – actually I think he was quite annoyed with me – but that’s only because he didn’t understand what I meant.

The desktop and portable computer is an anachronism, as I’ve written before, and we need to move ALL the storage to the server – where it belongs, and run only thin clients. VERY thin clients would actually suffice for something like 90+ percent of the worlds business users.

So yes my college is right, yes 640K isn’t enough for everyone, neither is 4MB, but how much is then?

And we’re talking server storage, to cater to the computing needs of the entire world, at the time, not considering the more than exponential growth we’re likely to se in the future.

Help me do the math, or should I just submit it to Jamie, Adam, Toby, Grant and the red-hot Kari.

So you thought you could build an economy on other peoples work, and even have the audacity to charge them (that is us) for it!!!

Well! You have your “Pyramid” – and it’s beautiful – unfortunately for you we‘ve just invented the “Arch”.

So Google will remain a fantastic monument, but we‘re building the Aqueducts, Viaducts and last but not least the beautiful temples.

And how come Google and all the other search engines, seems to ignore the copyright all together? No let’s boycott Google, and ask to be delisted, or have them block commericals.

So let’s put Google and all the SEO “creeps” out of business, and get rid of the commercial search engine, “itsy bitsy spider, walk along the web” – it’s not that hard to build a better google than google. Where we’re going we don’t need Google.

Civilisation has just gone out of beta!

Jens Martin Knudsens Rosenkjær-foredrag – dr.dk/P1/Rosenkjær/Jens Martin Knudsen

Jens Martin Knudsen var Danmarks bedste formidler af videnskab. Her er et foredrag han gav i forbindelse med at han modtog Rosenkjær prisen

Han døde i Februar 2005, og kort før det meldte han sig frivilligt til at rejse til Mars, mon han er nået frem?

Æret være JMKs minde.

Rækken af Rosenkjær-foredrag findes som Podcasts, du kan finde dem her.

This is part of a lecture by Richard Dawkins, all seven episodes are GREAT, but this segment really drives his points home.

Dawkins is a fantastic lecturer, and it’s tough to find Danish equivalents, the only one I can think of is Jens Martin Knudsen (R.I.P. I’m SO sorry he didn’t get to go to Mars, or see people walking there).

In the 80ies Jens Martin Knudsen did a series of lectures that were broadcast on Danish National Television (DR), I have to go find them.

HAVE FAITH (in scientific method)!

Are you evolved yet?

JPL.NASA.GOV: News Releases

NASA has just issued a press release regarding a new discovery. What the Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes have discovered are small, dense galaxies in the distant universe (meaning we’re looking WAY back in time), that are considered to be building blocks of the Universe, and it contributes to, and confirms, our understanding of the evolution of the Universe.

This press release caught my interest, in part, due to the mentioning of ‘Lego’ the BEST toy EVER, but behind the headline lies yet another important discovery, that, to me, really demonstrates why we need to invest in Space Telescopes, there’s so much to learn.

“OH MY GOD! IT’S FULL OF STARS!”.

This is a quote from the NASA press release:

A NASA’s Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes have joined forces to discover nine of the smallest, faintest, most compact galaxies ever observed in the distant universe. Blazing with the brilliance of millions of stars, each of the newly discovered galaxies is 100 to 1,000 times smaller than our Milky Way galaxy.

“These are among the lowest mass galaxies ever directly observed in the early universe,” said Nor Pirzkal of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Md.

The conventional model for galaxy evolution predicts that small galaxies in the early universe evolved into the massive galaxies of today by coalescing. These nine Lego-like “building block” galaxies initially detected by Hubble likely contributed to the construction of the universe as we know it.

JPL is the NASA body that manages the majority of the robotic missions to the planets and the solar system, this includes the highly successful Mars Rovers, Voyager, Cassini. You can subscribe to the NASA JPL newsletter by visiting this link

Speeding-Bullet Star Leaves Enormous Streak Across Sky

NASA has just released this amazing picture of the star Mira, taken by NASA’s Galaxy Evolution Explorer space telescope. Mira is a red giant, that is travelling fast through space, the surprising new discovery is that Mira has a comet like tail, that stretches for 13 light years.

From NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) press release:

NASA’s Galaxy Evolution Explorer has spotted an amazingly long
comet-like tail behind a star streaking through space at
supersonic speeds. The star, named Mira after the Latin word for
“wonderful,” has been a favorite of astronomers for about 400 years.
It is a fast-moving, older star called a red giant that sheds massive
amounts of surface material.

From the NASA Main Website:

Mira appears as a small white dot in the bulb-shaped structure at right, and is moving from left to right in this view. The shed material can be seen in light blue. The dots in the picture are stars and distant galaxies. The large blue dot at left is a star that is closer to us than Mira.

The Galaxy Evolution Explorer discovered Mira’s strange comet-like tail during part of its routine survey of the entire sky at ultraviolet wavelengths. When astronomers first saw the picture, they were shocked because Mira has been studied for over 400 years yet nothing like this has ever been documented before.

Mira’s comet-like tail stretches a startling 13 light-years across the sky. For comparison, the nearest star to our sun, Proxima Centauri, is only about 4 light-years away. Mira’s tail also tells a tale of its history – the material making it up has been slowly blown off over time, with the oldest material at the end of the tail having been released about 30,000 years ago.

JPL is the NASA body that manages the majority of the robotic missions to the planets and the solar system, this includes the highly successful Mars Rovers, Voyager, Cassini. You can subscribe to the NASA JPL newsletter by visiting this link.

I just discovered that Apple has launched a new section of the iTunes Store, called iTunes U – the U must be short for University.

Promising and FREE

My first impression is that iTunes U looks very, very promising.

iTunes U features video and audio lectures, lecture notes etc. from major US universities, like MIT; for instance an entire course on “Electromagnetism” from MIT with titles like “What holds our world together?…”, all organised in the familiar iTunes Store.

And the best is that the content is FREE – yes FREE.

Where are the Danish Us?

So when will we get content from Danish Universities on iTunes U? I’m not optimistic!

The reason I’m pessimistic, is the ongoing debate over “e-Learning” in Denmark. As usually, when it comes to anything remotely related to ICT, the debate is mostly about technology and ICT-skills.

STOP TALKING! Get producing!

I say: STOP TALKING: Get the infrastructure in place, and you can immediately begin producing and distributing lecture notes, audio and video content. It requires almost no ICT-skills to use an application like iTunes – all students has the skills to do so today.

Later on, more advanced e-Learning applications could be made, even though I doubt that they’ll ever work – I’m a firm believer in the fact that you’ll never be able to replace the teacher, and with the infrastructure in place, we can all become teachers as well as students.

Benefits of partnering with a commercial infrastructure provider

A major benefit of partnering with a commercial infrastructure provider like iTunes Store, is that it removes the hassles of making the technology work from the institutions, leaving them to worry about what they do best, producing content.

I’m sure that the content offered on iTunes U is available elsewhere, and that there are downsides to trust Apple with distributing the content, most likely in their proprietary formats, but the convenience of having it all show up in iTunes, which makes it so easy to access the content, and have it synced to the iPod, means that I can live with it – for now.

Despite concerns iTunes U is a wake-up call

I realise that Apple also is doing this to draw traffic to the iTunes Store, and to sell more iPods, Macs and Apple TVs, iTunes U is actually one of the biggest selling points for Apple TV I’ve seen so far.

Despite my concerns over iTunes U, it remains a great initiative – they’re getting so many things right – and it’s my hope that it will serve as an inspiration to the Danish Educational System: WAKE UP!

As you might have noticed, I attended the reboot “(un)conference” in Copenhagen last week, and it was great.

I’d like to draw your attention to the feature “Rebooting the Web 2.0 age” on reboot 9 that BBC ran during the “(un)conference”.

Here’s a quote from the article:

The future of the web is being debated at Reboot 9.0, a leading European grassroots technology and design conference in Copenhagen.

But…”oh-my-two-dot-oh-NO” they’re using the “two-dot-O-M-G” dreaded “two-dot-oh-YEAH” word…

The big question here for the start-ups and opinion formers is how to use Web 2.0’s focus on community to build the next generation of web tools and become Europe’s Web 2.0 poster child.

I guess I can forgive the BBC, since the feature is “more than decent” , and they capture some of the spirit of reboot in this quote:

This year’s conference theme is Human? with many speakers grappling with such deep philosophical queries as what it means to be human. One session was called Humanism 101.

Understanding human behaviour and how to adapt those behaviours to technology and the web rather than the reverse is rare for technology devotees.

And Last.fm deserves all the love in the world, iTunes might never know what hit them.

However, it is no surprise as the big subject in the bars and on the grass outside was this week’s sale of London social software music service Last.fm.

Its creator Martin Stiskel, explaining why US broadcaster CBS would want to buy a music preference tool said: “They want to move from a content company to an audience company, giving the audiences control and learning from this and that’s why Last.fm was their choice.”

I’m nominating Last.fm for the price of being the “greatest service on the planet”, even though it makes it look like I have absolutely no taste in music – is it about time to get more discriminating, and start “acting my age, not my shoesize” – nah some people have actually expressed love for my personal radiostation , and I get shouts like this:

Du er på alder med min far, men jeres musiksmag ligger usandsynligt langt fra hinanden. Det er meget godt klaret! Respekt herfra

(translation from Danish: You’re the age of my father, but your taste in music is unbelievably far from each others. That’s well done! Respect ).

I just joined the new google groups (e.g. mailinglist), called rebooters.

The purpose of the group, is to have a “permanent backchannel” for the reboot (un)conference, since backchannels, like the Jaiku backchannel from reboot9, has a tendency to “die”.

The mailing list has the following description:

Missing the brainshift experienced from talking to all the brilliant rebooters? Keep the conversation going between reboots here…

It’s a good idea – that would have been even better, if it was set up, officially, through the reboot website, but because website technologies change all the time, the use of a relatively low-tech solution, like a mailing-list, is a not as bad an idea as it sounds – e-mail still is “the lowest common denominator”.

This might help to avoid the frustrations I experienced, when I learned that the “reboot 8” site had it’s URLs changed, making it appear that a lot of information from 2006, had either been lost, or, at best, made (too) difficult to locate.

“I want my Permalinks”, and I’m looking forward to the continued discussions and next year, where I suggest that the organisers make away with the “Wired style dot-oh-NO” numbering scheme, and just calls the event “reboot”!

Some background

“Reboot” is, according to the website:

[...]a community event for the practical visionaries who are at the intersection of digital technology and change all around us[...]

Reboot usually takes place end May/start June, in Copenhagen Denmark.

Charles Simonyi is now in space…

It’s almost like a Dane is going to space, since Charles Simonyi lived and worked in Denmark before being hired by Microsoft. He frequently visits Denmark in his Yacht Skat, and it’s impressive. I’ve seen Skat – docked at The Copenhagen Royal Castle – Amalienborg, like pictured in the link above. Skat is Danish for “treasure”, but “Skat” is normally used to express affection for your significant other, and it roughly translates to “darling” – it’s also a play on words, since “Skat” also means “Tax”.

Simonyi is best known – at least by g33k5 like me – for inventing the Hungarian notation – a special style of coding, where you indicate the datatype by prefixing the variable name with a type indicator, eg. nCount and intCount to indicate that Count is a variable that is declared as a number or an integer, szTitle to indicate that the variable szTitle is a zero-terminated string.

I’ve been using Hungarian notation since 1987, I believe that the Hungarian notation actually made C a usable language, and it has saved us from many bugs.

These days I still use Hungarian notation, even though it should not be nescessary in object oriented languages, and even Microsoft, that was instrumental in the spread of Hungarian notation, now discourages it’s use.

It’s an inspiration that someone working in my field can do these things, Charles Simonyi seems to be living my dream.

Godspeed Charles.