Michael is editor-at-large for DDJ. He can be contacted at [email protected].
Since this issue should be getting into your hands somewhere between St. Patrick's Day and April Fool's Day, and since I am half-Irish and half-fool, the following items, some full of blarney and some only half-full, seem appropriate.
Topics to be covered in today's lecture include: Y2K insight from the I Ching, the Blarney algorithm, a trip into Steve Jobs' Reality Distortion Field, and rumors from beyond Transmetareality.
Let's dispose of the pesky Y2K crisis right away. Lest you begin to doubt that I am ever-vigilant for fresh perspectives on Y2Kgate, I pass along for your edification the following observation, which has been taking up space in my e-mail inbox since last March:
The Chinese undoubtedly have the longest experience with the Millennium bug. The I Ching was worked out 5000 years ago, it has a 6-bit word and the carry bit was never invented.
-- Pushkar Piggott
Mr. (Ms.?) Piggott doesn't report what the I Ching has to say about the Millennium bug, but the fact that it has continued to operate through 50 century-counter rollovers is encouraging.
Perhaps the I Ching can help with a particular Y2K problem that I just read about.
Apparently you can save yourself money by buying your tombstone before you actually need it, on the assumption that stone will appreciate in value faster than your programming skills. It's also just more convenient to make purchases while you're still alive.
And apparently you can save even more if you get as much of the carving as possible done ahead of time. This requires that you make certain assumptions, such as that you will remain the beloved father of etc. You can see where this is leading. A lot of people took this stone-carving cost-cutting advice to such an extreme that they had "19" carved into stone as the first two years of their death date. Now, unless they really luck out and die in the next eight months, they face having to change the carving. And it's really hard to erase in this medium. Kudos to the programmer who first comes up with a software patch for this one.
Only Half Blarney
It's a great story. Even if it isn't entirely true.
Only once in a blue moon do the dead-tree news sources give front-page treatment to the development of a new algorithm. It's not as easy a subject to cover in journalese as, say, candy-colored computers. So it's particularly entertaining that when the Times of London and various other newspapers decided to play up a new algorithm, it was an encryption algorithm.
Here's what I mean: With enough time and patience, you could probably explain a sort routine to any reasonably bright person. You could also probably get across the gist of a graphics compression algorithm to most of a class of tenth-graders, if they'd sit still for it. But encryption is something else; if you start trying to explain what's going on in a public-key encryption algorithm, you could easily find yourself bogged down in linear algebra, number theory, combinatorial mathematics, Fourier analysis, coding theory, complexity theory, statistics, or probability theory. I suppose that inspired explainers can get the basic concepts across to a broad audience, but it ain't easy. Encryption is obscure. Which is perhaps why they got the story wrong.
"An Irish teenager has developed a fast security-encryption mechanism for e-mail that has the potential to replace the 22-year-old system in use today," says TechWeb News.
"Making your e-mail secret is now 30 times faster, but the innovation has come not from a multinational computer but a schoolgirl from Blarney, Ireland," said the BBC.
"A 16-year-old Irish schoolgirl is being hailed as a genius for developing a way of encoding data on the Internet 10 times faster than systems used globally now," said Reuters.
Most of what they report is true. Sarah Flannery is 16, or was at the time of the stories, and she is Irish, from Blarney, in County Cork. She is also very bright. She has won more than one award in prestigious international science fairs, one of them landing her a trip to Texas and a handshake from semiconductor legend Gordon Moore last year.
And she did come up with a public-key encryption algorithm that is faster than RSA. But it appears that the newspapers (but not Flannery) may have exaggerated a little about how original the work is and how useful it is.
Flannery began the work on the algorithm while working at Baltimore Technologies in Dublin on a student work placement in March, 1998. (Baltimore, a major name in encryption, merged in January 1999 with the British encryption company Zergo.) According to William Whyte, Senior Cryptographer at Baltimore, the company gave Flannery the problem to work on. "We've been looking at algorithms based on 2×2 matrices for a while," he said "and gave her the idea to see what she could do with it." What she did, apparently, was to work out a public-key algorithm that is considerably faster than RSA, and equally secure.
This is impressive, and she no doubt deserves all the scholarship and job offers she's been getting. And I applaud her decision not to try to patent her algorithm. But it may be no more than cryptographers at Baltimore had already achieved, and it may have drawbacks that make it impractical as an alternative to RSA. As the Baltimore cryptographers worked it out, "both the key and the ciphertext are about eight times the length of the modulus, rather than more-or-less the length of the modulus as with RSA," Whyte said.
Her father, a mathematics instructor at the Cork Institute of Technology, has tried to place the achievement in some perspective. "Sarah has a very good understanding of the mathematical principles involved," he said, "but to call her a genius or a prodigy is overstated..."
The algorithm is called the Cayley-Purser algorithm, after Arthur Cayley, a 19th century British expert on matrices, and Michael Purser, a cryptographer from Trinity College, Dublin. Since the algorithm is based on matrices, the tribute to Cayley is understandable. He developed the algebra of matrices, published the first English contribution to the theory of determinants, and invented the notation of two vertical lines on either side of the array to denote the determinant. Purser is a modern mathematician, whose best-known work may be his book Secure Data Networking (Artech House, 1993; ISBN 0-890-06692-2).
The algorithm uses 2×2 matrices, where each entry is an RSA number. Because of this, the level of security it offers is exactly the same as that of an RSA key with the same modulus. But the algorithm substitutes a small number of matrix multiplications for the modular exponentiation required by RSA, which is where it gets its speed. The trade-off, though, is a considerably longer key and ciphertext. At least that's what the Baltimore cryptographers found. Maybe Flannery has improved on their work, but we won't know until she publishes.
Five Fruit Flavors...
I went to MacWorld Expo in January and subjected myself to the emanations from the best salesman in the industry. Here's what I found in my notebook when I came out from under the influence:
Wasn't that the Woz who cut across in front of me a few minutes ago while I was waiting in the Press/VIP line? Anyway, that's Dan Gillmor of the San Jose Mercury News two seats down from me, so I've got the same perspective as the Merc on this dog-and-pony show. Gillmor says something about the keynote not starting on time and I make some lame joke about all our watches automagically resetting themselves when Steve Jobs walks on stage. His legendary Reality Distortion Field, you know...
The show starts with a commercial, as Apple conferences often do. Hal 9000 blaming Y2K on people who didn't buy Macintosh. Jobs comes onstage to the same music that introduced the monolith in 2001. He lays out the specs for the new Yosemite line of G3 Macs. Up to 400-MHz processors; the first copper semiconductor technology in a commercial computer; built-in ATI Rage 128 graphics accelerator; 16-MB graphics memory; OpenGL library; up to a Gig of RAM; up to three hard-disk drives inside the case for 100 GB of internal storage; four slots of which three are 64-bit PCI; 100 megabit Ethernet with 1-GB optional; USB and Firewire...
Then he shows the machine. It's beautiful. iMac colors, but a more sophisticated, professional look. A door that makes access remarkably easy. Three really attractive monitors. Systems starting at $1599 and available today. The colors and design are, I suspect, way more important than most people in the industry realize...
The big system software news is the general release of MacOS X Server. This is the server version of OS X, the client release being slated for later this year. It's what's left of Rhapsody, and it's a snapshot of where Apple's at in terms of slipping NeXT's UNIX kernel and other technology in under the Mac GUI to bring the MacOS up to date. It looks like MacOS and seems to do things you wouldn't expect from MacOS. Included: the NeXT Mach kernel, Apache, WebObjects, BSD 4.4, Java. $995 server license, shipping in February (didn't quite make the Expo ship target). Bundling WebObjects is a big concession for Jobs, since this web app development software sells well now for thousands of dollars a pop. But is it the full WebObject? Skeptical minds want to know...
From the darkness at the back of the stage a huge rack rolls out with seven rows of seven iMacs. The 50th is on the podium in front of Jobs, and all 50 are running software disklessly from a single new Yosemite machine running MacOS X Server. Jobs fires up a different full-screen video on each machine, and it is very impressive. Perhaps the most interesting point in the demo, though, is not the power of MacOS X Server, but the fact that all iMacs run a tweaked version of the Mac-OS that allows them to boot from the network. Every iMac today has a hard disk, but all the technology for a diskless iMac is apparently in place. Thin clients at a lower price are only a decision away. The thumbprint of Apple board member Larry Ellison is evident here...
Okay, the color iMacs. The iMac, Jobs reminds the crowd, is the best-selling computer in America. 800,000 sold between August 15 and December 31. According to Apple's December sales stats, about a third of those buying iMacs are first-time computer buyers, "the most coveted customers in the industry." About three quarters of the iMac buyers are not replacing another Mac. That means that Apple: 1. has made very credible inroads into the consumer market; and, 2. has pushed beyond its installed base...
The colors, the colors! Right. Five colors, all cool, all named for fruits. Available right now. Provocative new TV ads. Other iMac news or the lack of same pales in comparison. A price drop to $1199, 50 percent more disk storage, a faster processor. Yadda yadda...No, it's the color. Or the colors.
What's the big deal about color computers? Jobs gets fairly silly raving about the colors. But I really think the iMac and Yosemite designs and colors mark something new for the computer industry. A fundamental shift in the nature of the business. I wish I knew just what it was; I'd invest, but I have a theory...
The rest of the keynote was about third-party software. Or what Apple is doing to support same. Getting John Carmack, founder of Id Software and God of Games, onstage to say that the Mac now had everything a game designer or player needed wasn't a bad move. Ditto licensing OpenGL, a move urged by game developers. And Connectix has a Sony Playstation emulator for the Mac. I sense a theme here...
The big hardware news, in terms of third-party opportunities, is that Apple is embracing standards and changing protocols. PCI, USB, Ethernet, and Firewire device makers will benefit...
Color Reflections
After the Expo, I saw a few cracks in the image. Firewire, hot technology though it may be, ran into immediate trouble when it became clear that Apple wanted to charge a pretty hefty licensing fee for it. If Apple doesn't back off, the technology may not take off as quickly as Apple hopes -- or needs it to.
And I confess embarrassment at treating color as more significant than technology, but I don't recant. That is, I think that the color and design decisions that Apple has made are potentially more significant for Apple and perhaps for the industry than any technical advance Apple could have made.
Turning color and design into significant considerations in buying a computer takes the industry a step further in the direction of commoditization of the box. Commoditization is usually understood to mean interchangeable gray boxes distinguished only by price. But that's not how people buy commodities; they do care about design and color, even -- perhaps especially -- in big-ticket items, like cars. Design matters in commodities. Color matters.
Jobs is taking this fact seriously. No one has really done this before. There have been color computers before, and there will be attempts to imitate the Apple colorization, but no one has set out as deliberately to transform the public perception of what a computer is since -- well, since the last two times Jobs did it.
This oughta be interesting.
Transmeta Blarney
There was some amusing disinformation on the Web not long ago suggesting that Silicon Valley's most mysterious startup was going to apply its hot new technology to -- which platform? Windows 2000? Linux? MacOS X? No, to the Amiga. At the risk of offending the Amiga community again, it was a pretty entertaining story, but apparently entirely untrue. No disinformation here, I hope, just a frank admission of a lack of information. Like most everybody in Silicon Valley, I don't know what Transmeta is up to.
Several facts are known about the hush-hush startup. Its address: 3940 Freedom Circle, Santa Clara. Its telephone number: 408-327-9830. Its tantalizingly mute web site: http://www.transmeta.com/. And the fact that it has hired Linus Torvalds, creator of the Linux operating system.
Okay, so maybe it's not so mysterious. The story is that they make VLSI chips for the multimedia market. Really hot chips. IBM Microelectronics will be building chips for them in IBM's state-of-the-art silicon facilities. Fine. But why, then, is Transmeta hiring engineers skilled in kernel development and compilers? And what's Torvalds doing there, anyway? And Bill Rodriguez of the MIT AI Lab's Project MAC?
One person who probably knows all the answers is Microsoft cofounder and high-tech angel Paul Allen, who has invested heavily in the company. But I have a hunch he's not talking.
Next Month
Come May, I'll be on special assignment and, for the first time in a decade, this column will be absent. I will, however, return in June.
DDJ
Copyright © 1999, Dr. Dobb's Journal
