The Power Of Software

Software has become the soul of our civilization. Hardware is its heart, but indeed, what is a piece of hardware worth without software? The days of hard wired logic gates are long gone. The only piece of "working hardware" among my collectibles from the past is a Pong game based on the AY-3-8500 chip. Everything else after the Pong needs some kind of software to run.

Software has also become a nightmare of our civilization. Every child knows software has bugs. And we are so used to "turning off and turning on again" when things do not work, that nobody even thinks this is crazy. It is just the world works, period. Some people think it is absolutely unprofessional an even unethical to ship software with bugs (but hey, everybody does that...).
But software bugs are just a part of our life, as software itself is and we are simply learning to live with them. The same way we learn to live with harsh winters and cold rainy summers (who likes them, after all?). The world is not ideal. By the way, recently I have come across a wonderful article (even a book) that explains why software has bugs and why we cannot afford to get rid of them. If you want to now why, then go and read it, or buy the book (Eric will be happy).

But the real power of software, that many of us simply forget, is the upgradeability. Once invested in a particular hardware, we can keep on improving it, making more productive or more fun. Examples? Thousands... everything basically. An iPOD that can play longer on a charge, thanks to a better caching algorithm in the new software release. A PSP, that suddenly can browse the Web when not playing games. A Subaru, that cleverly shifts gears down when you suddenly take the foot from the accelerator (the original version was not that clever). OK, in all abovementioned cases we could finally change the hardware after all. But imagine the spacecraft just passing Jupiter. It was launched long time ago, and represented state-of-the-art at that time. But as years passed on its journey through Space, here on Earth we were making progress in many areas. So why not use an opportunity to upgrade it remotely and empower with the latest algorithms? It happened to the Cassini on July 28th, 2000 and has just happened to the Mars Rovers.

Software. The new life in the old hardware. Funny this is just an opposite of what humans would like to do with themselves. Don't we all want to change our hardware after several years?

Headworx In Your Language

I have been playing with Google Language Tools recently. Yeah, I know they have been sitting there for a while but as they are burried deep down the Google Labs area, they never attracted my attention. Google Translator is probably the most interesting technology. Yes, I know there are many web page translation services on the Internet, but the Google one seems to be well ahead of the crowd (surprise, surprise!). English is not my native language and I know just a little German and Spanish, so it is rather hard for me to judge the output. But when I tried to translate several German or French or Spanish pages to English the output was surprisingly good. When reading such translation, you can still feel it is rather machine than human behind, but the overall quality seems to be far better than, say, the Babelfish.

Anyway, I decided to bring my blog to eight new languages. Now it is up to the readers to judge the quality. I would be very interested in your feedback. Rolling on my Google conspiracy theory, I can just say Google learns new languages to learn more about our world. I am sure it is not just a simple translation service. There has to be serious Artificial Intelligence behind. And the more it understands (yes, understands, not just indexes and searches), the smarter it becomes.


So give it a try. Today's menu is:

• Arabic
  
• Chinese
  
• French
  
• German
  
• Italian
  
• Japanese
  
• Korean
  
• Portuguese
  

Have fun!

Wireless Home

When I was building my first home in the 1990's, I wanted it to be fully wired. Music and telephones in every room, centralized control center and media distribution. I used several miles of various cables, shielded for analog signals, thick, copper, unshielded for loudspeakers, and (luckily) Cat5 UTP (unshielded twisted pair with RJ-45 jacks) for control equipment. And today most of the cables in the walls are not in use anymore. Cat5 and power is what I plug into and it looks like every month I use less and less RJ-45 sockets to connect. Electricity becomes the only wired thing. Almost everything else runs WiFi. Here on the left is a sketch of the devices currently in use.

The flow starts from the telco line ADSL modem, currently running at 4Mbps downstream and 512Kbps upstream. It used to be 1Mbps service, but after bringing home the Internet Radio, I found out it has to be upgraded. Fortunately, due to the falling prices, the upgrade took the monthly bill down and the speed up (isn't it the way we want all this to be?). The modem is then connected to a Linksys WRT-54GC wireless router. Over several years I have gone through several wireless routers, and Cisco was right, the Linksys seems to be the best in terms of reliability, price and performance. I still have not decided to go for pre-802.11n MIMO hardware, as it requires the other end to support it as well, and I do not have any client 802.11n device.

A Devolo ethernet-over-powerline plug and a Dreambox satellite TV tuner remain the only two wired devices. Both are connected to the Linksys router. The Devolo is a very clever piece of hardware. Based on the HomePlug standard, it injects ethernet signals via the power socket to the power network and delivers networking anywhere within quite a large area. I use a pair of Devolo plugs (the other one with a WiFi card in it) to extend my Internet connection to the garden patio (of course when building the garden patio nobody thought about bringing the Internet there, so now the signals have to travel over the power line).

Dreambox is a Linux-based satellite tuner. Something similar to TiVo, probably more open architecture (thousands of programs for dreamboxes can be found on the Net, even things like an Exchange client, that displays new mail notifications on your TV). In my case it is used as a standalone TV programming "injector” that feeds whatever comes from a satellite dish over to the home ethernet network. The Dreambox has its own hard drive, so is being used as a media storage and a local backup device. Any PC can connect do the Dreambox over WiFi and act as a TV.

Following the media path we may find the SlimDevices music streamer. Mostly being used for playing Pandora radio stations, but this can play music stored on one of the PCs as well (over WiFi of course). On the PC side of the wireless home network there is a wonderful Canon IP5200R printer. Not only it prints gorgeous photos, but does that over WiFi, so any computer in the house can access it. WiFi printer is really something clever. You rarely need more than one printer at home, but if you have a wired one, you have to reconnect it frequently between computers (assuming you have more than one computer, which is very common these days...).

And the story ends with traditional PCs, laptops and tablets. WiFi has taken digital homes by storm and the number of non-PC WiFi-enabled devices is growing - I have yet to buy a WiFi digital camera :)

Windows Codename Scorpion

Well... may be not exactly like the title says, but the announcement about Qualcomm and Microsoft joining forces to port Windows Mobile to MSM chipsets is huge. It may be not that huge for Qualcomm, who enjoys 3G mobile phones dominance similar to what Microsoft has with Windows on desktop PCs, but for Microsoft it is a really strong move towards gaining market share in mobile phones. Especially against Symbian, that clearly crystallizes around the last two phone manufacturers not using Qualcomm MSM 3G chipsets (Nokia and SonyEricsson).

Since Palm went with Windows last year, the mobile phone operating system battlefield has been clearly divided between Symbian and Windows Mobile. There is a number of other proprietary OSes for phones, but as phones become more and more smartphones, more resembling computing powerhouses than dial - and talk devices, there is a growing need for a full blown operating system to manage the environment and applications. So it will be very likely the world will divide into two camps. The Symbian camp, supported by Nokia and SonyEricsson, the companies who do not use Qualcomm's chips (SonyEricsson have their own 3G chip platform and Nokia has its own too). The rest of the world (Motorola, Siemens BenQ, Samsung, HTC and others) has just realized it pays to go with Qualcomm, as nobody else has anything even close to them, HSDPA being the crown example of their leadership.

This brings us to the Scorpion. Announced at the end of 2005, Scorpion is the new application processor from Qualcomm. Here is a quote form Qualcomm's press release "The Scorpion microprocessor provides a superior power-to-performance ratio, enabling next-generation mobile handsets to deliver processing power comparable to many of today's personal computers. Possessing up to 1 GHz of processing speed, the Scorpion core provides up to eight times the performance of existing MSM solutions. The microprocessor features a sophisticated micro-architecture and advanced power management and circuit design techniques. The companion multimedia coprocessor to Scorpion implements ARM NEON™ technology to provide an additional 8 billion operations per second for added multimedia capabilities, a key requirement for next-generation advanced mobile devices."

The Scorpion announcement stirred quite a lot of interest in the industry. Scorpion itself is based on the ArmV7 instruction set, but what is interesting, Qualcomm somehow managed to design a better Arm than Arm itself. The original Arm Cortex v8 core has been designed into three runners up in the field - Texas Instruments (OMAP), Freescale and Samsung. However Scorpion, that is based on Arm's architecture license (to ensure software compatibility), but the design of its core is done by Qualcomm itself, will run faster than the Arm's Cortex A8 core, at 1GHz, and will consume half as much power at that faster speed. This is how Qualcomm excels again. What is more important today, than speed and power consumption granted software compatibility? This is what differs today's Qualcomm chipsets from the rest of the crowd. The performance in the details. After opening a huge gap to its followers in communications chipsets, Qualcomm has just fired up its boosters to secure pole position in mobile application processors. And Microsoft has placed the bets on the very winning horse. I just can't wait for a new Scorpion - based, Windows Mobile powered superphone to arrive.