"65,049,600" - the number of tons of copper wire supporting the communication of America.

"Regulators, politicians, and litigators always imagine that they can promote various high-minded goals, such as universal service, by offering monopoly privileges to companies for providing it. But the result, as Peter Huber and his associates show in their text, Federal Broadband Law, is mostly to promote monopoly at the expense of real universal services, which ultimately depends not on law but on innovation"

[from Telecosm by George Gilder, 2000]

Started last ETConn2002 session, Rethinking the Modern OS presented by Richard Rashid @ Microsoft. Part of the session discuss ideas for modelling user behaviour by defining what is important to a user based on past behaviour.

An example is assigning priority to incoming messages from email, instant messaging, etc. Priority could be determined from the message structure (header/body), the communication history with the sender, the company structure, linguistic analysis, etc. This is what I need for my incoming email :) The idea was extended to encompass your machine monitoring your behaviour, e.g. knowing when you are in a conversation and hence not interrupting you, or determining how long you would be away to inform others of expected solution times to a problem.

Finished Autonomic Computing talk. Morris defines an interesting concept of 'IT resources on demand', and sets a challenge to software/hardware developrs to create management systems across hetrogenius systems from many vendors. StorageTank, in development by IBM, will allow an IT manager to define the required availability, security, performance and backup for a storage array via metadata management. A uniform name space is then presented to all clients, and the system manages the resources to satisify the stated goals automatically.

There was also mention of building a goal orientated recovery systems, instead of bespoke scripts, in the case of failure. It would use a finite-state machine (auto-generated) to define a path from the system's present state to a final state in a number of steps. This is non-trivial to implement.

Started to listen to another mp3-encoded session from ETCon2002. This one is Autonomic Computing by Robert Morris @ IBM. It highlights the problem on growing complexity in computer systems and details his idea to make computing devices for like the human body, e.g. self protecting, self optimising, self healing

I listened to three mp3-encoded sessions from O'Reilly Emerging Technologies Conference 2002 over the weekend. Very interesting and thought provoking content