Some of my research is done “Just In Time”. I think of something I want to refer to, then I hit up IEEE Xplore and the ACM Digital Library to find conference papers or journal articles about it. A surprising amount of the time, I come up empty-handed, leaving me to rely on web pages for my citations.

For example, at the moment I want to refer to the 90s dot-bomb duo Beenz and Flooz. These two sites each have writeups on Wikipedia, but as far as the IEEE and ACM literature is concerned, they’re ghosts. Flooz appears in neither; the ACM has 4 articles which mention Beenz only in passing, not usable as a citation for the mere existence of these two firms.

I am not sure what to make of this. What our field needs is some historians to dig this stuff out before it’s gone forever. The IEEE had a journal for this — Annals of the History of Computing, but irony of ironies, it stopped publishing in 1991. The ACM have some conference proceedings on particular slices of history — programming languages and early PCs, for example — but nothing in general.

It’s a shame, but also very annoying. Against my own better judgement I am facing the possibility of having to cite Wikipedia in an honours dissertation.

Secondly, they’re not going to introduce software patents.

NZ: 2. Australia: Sux.

Google don’t think that the accounts were compromised but can’t be sure.

In response Google have said that they are considering pulling out of China entirely — shutting down the self-censored Google.cn website and closing their China office.

It’s about bloody time they realised they’re dealing with gangsters and thugs.

Update: Google arch-rival Microsoft have said that the attack may have exploited a hitherto unknown flaw in Internet Explorer. They’ve been working with Google on the whole situation. It’s heartening.

Based on current feedback, I’d say paying a lawyer to talk about software patents at this point would be like setting money on fire.

– Ryan Gordon

Based on current feedback, I’d say paying a lawyer to talk about software patents at this point would be like setting money on fire.

– Ryan Gordon

A lazy student can easily find ‘revolutionary’ projects by simply fiddling with this accepted order.

For example, take the modern imperative/object-oriented paradigm for software languages. Subtract some feature, and explore the consequences. What happens when, for instance, you cannot use getters/setters/properties? I’m not sure, but it’d be interesting to know. What happens if you subtract assignment? And so on. In a way some functional languages changed thinking by subtracting changes in state.

Another thing you can try is to move something from one phase of program life to another, or to collapse phases. Lisp, for instance, allows the programmer to have instructions run at compile-time (ie, macros), rather than simply at runtime. What else can you move out of its natural phase? Take CPU scheduling. Currently this always happens during the runtime phase, but could it be moved? Can there be load time scheduling? Compile time scheduling?

I’m sure that you can think of many other such examples.

Seems that for a crime to count, it first has to hit the high and mighty.

Robert Merkel points out at LP that there is an almost universal condemnation of the latter idea by IT security professionals. Probably because creating a system that satisfies security, integrity and the secrecy of the ballot is impossible.

By “impossible” we don’t mean “expensive” or “highly impractical”. We mean impossible. It simply cannot be done. The requirements are mutually exclusive.

Of course the green paper covers much more than wishful thinking from non-security professionals, including voting systems, legal arrangements, AEC structure, enrolment arrangements and so forth. They’re asking for submissions up until 27 November. Here’s mine (PDF).

In the USA US$20 billion dollars of Obama’s stimulus package has been allocated to encouraging practitioners and hospitals to introduce electronic medical record systems. Each recipient will source and install their own systems.

Much as it pains me to say it, this is a job that cries out for consolidation. Medical records work best when they are universal and portable. The approach taken in the US stimulus bill won’t achieve that. And even if it did aim at a central records service, the history of large IT projects is one of nearly universal failure.

One software package that might be a candidate for such a system is the USA Veteran Health Administration’s system VistA (not to be confused with Windows). The VHA has the lowest cost and the highest safety of any part of the US health system; the stable, mature, universal and user-friendly nature of the VistA system seems to have had a very large role in providing these outcomes. However it looks as though VistA will not even get a look-in as part of the US$20 billion allocated for healthcare IT reform.