Music cloud

With its deal this month to buy the Web music service Lala, Apple may be pointing the way to the future of music. In this future, the digital music files on people’s computers could join vinyl records, cassette tapes and CDs in the dusty vault of fading music formats.

I have all three formats.

Instead, music fans will use their always-online computers and smartphones to visit a vast Internet jukebox, where Gregorian chants, Lady Gaga tracks and the several centuries of music in between are instantly available.

For a fee.

The idea of a limitless jukebox in the sky — or in tech-speak, “in the cloud” — has been around for some time, but it is consuming music executives who now associate the word “funk” with more than just a musical genre. The recording industry, which had $40 billion in annual sales a decade ago, is now bringing in half that. More ominously, the growth of revenue from digital downloads, still only a fifth of the total sales pie, is slowing.

New business model to capture greater revenues.

With an estimated $2 billion in annual revenue from iTunes, Apple is in a good position to guide consumers through the process of storing their music collections on Web servers and listening to them in new ways. It can also tightly integrate such a music service into the iPhone, the iPod Touch and all other existing and future Apple gadgets that connect to the Internet.

And all the music that has been downloaded? Such is progress.

David Pakman, a partner at the venture capital firm Venrock and the former chief executive of the download service eMusic, said that Apple “could accelerate the move to media in the cloud more quickly than any other company can.” The acquisition of Lala, he said, “tells us they’re doing it.”

Meanwhile, MySpace, owned by the News Corporation, has acquired two cloud music services in the last month, iLike and Imeem. People briefed on discussions inside MySpace say it is developing a subscription music service to complement its free, ad-supported MySpace Music, a joint venture with the four major music labels.

Cryptologist Cracks a Presidential Code

Robert Patterson

For more than 200 years, buried deep within Thomas Jefferson's correspondence and papers, there lay a mysterious cipher -- a coded message that appears to have remained unsolved. Until now.

The cryptic message was sent to President Jefferson in December 1801 by his friend and frequent correspondent, Robert Patterson, a mathematics professor at the University of Pennsylvania. President Jefferson and Mr. Patterson were both officials at the American Philosophical Society -- a group that promoted scholarly research in the sciences and humanities -- and were enthusiasts of ciphers and other codes, regularly exchanging letters about them.

The 1801 letter from Robert Patterson to Thomas Jefferson

To Mr. Patterson's view, a perfect code had four properties: It should be adaptable to all languages; it should be simple to learn and memorize; it should be easy to write and to read; and most important of all, "it should be absolutely inscrutable to all unacquainted with the particular key or secret for decyphering."

Mr. Patterson then included in the letter an example of a message in his cipher, one that would be so difficult to decode that it would "defy the united ingenuity of the whole human race," he wrote.



The cipher finally met its match in Lawren Smithline, a 36-year-old mathematician. Dr. Smithline has a Ph.D. in mathematics and now works professionally with cryptology, or code-breaking, at the Center for Communications Research in Princeton, N.J., a division of the Institute for Defense Analyses.



The code, Mr. Patterson made clear in his letter, was not a simple substitution cipher. That's when you replace one letter of the alphabet with another. The problem with substitution ciphers is that they can be cracked by using what's termed frequency analysis, or studying the number of times that a particular letter occurs in a message. For instance, the letter "e" is the most common letter in English, so if a code is sufficiently long, whatever letter appears most often is likely a substitute for "e." Because frequency analysis was already well known in the 19th century, cryptographers of the time turned to other techniques. One was called the nomenclator: a catalog of numbers, each standing for a word, syllable, phrase or letter.

But Mr. Patterson had a few more tricks up his sleeve. He wrote the message text vertically, in columns from left to right, using no capital letters or spaces. The writing formed a grid, in this case of about 40 lines of some 60 letters each.

Then, Mr. Patterson broke the grid into sections of up to nine lines, numbering each line in the section from one to nine. In the next step, Mr. Patterson transcribed each numbered line to form a new grid, scrambling the order of the numbered lines within each section. Every section, however, repeated the same jumbled order of lines.

The trick to solving the puzzle, as Mr. Patterson explained in his letter, meant knowing the following: the number of lines in each section, the order in which those lines were transcribed and the number of random letters added to each line.

view interactive

The key to the code consisted of a series of two-digit pairs. The first digit indicated the line number within a section, while the second was the number of letters added to the beginning of that row. For instance, if the key was 58, 71, 33, that meant that Mr. Patterson moved row five to the first line of a section and added eight random letters; then moved row seven to the second line and added one letter, and then moved row three to the third line and added three random letters. Mr. Patterson estimated that the potential combinations to solve the puzzle was "upwards of ninety millions of millions."

Undaunted, Dr. Smithline decided to tackle the cipher by analyzing the probability of digraphs, or pairs of letters. Certain pairs of letters, such as "dx," don't exist in English, while some letters almost always appear next to a certain other letter, such as "u" after "q".

To get a sense of language patterns of the era, Dr. Smithline studied the 80,000 letter-characters contained in Jefferson's State of the Union addresses, and counted the frequency of occurrences of "aa," "ab," "ac," through "zz."

Dr. Smithline then made a series of educated guesses, such as the number of rows per section, which two rows belong next to each other, and the number of random letters inserted into a line.

To help vet his guesses, he turned to a tool not available during the 19th century: a computer algorithm. He used what's called "dynamic programming," which solves large problems by breaking puzzles down into smaller pieces and linking together the solutions.

The overall calculations necessary to solve the puzzle were fewer than 100,000, which Dr. Smithline says would be "tedious in the 19th century, but doable."

After about a week of working on the puzzle, the numerical key to Mr. Patterson's cipher emerged -- 13, 34, 57, 65, 22, 78, 49. Using that digital key, he was able to unfurl the cipher's text:

"In Congress, July Fourth, one thousand seven hundred and seventy six. A declaration by the Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled. When in the course of human events..."

That, of course, is the beginning -- with a few liberties taken -- to the Declaration of Independence, written at least in part by Jefferson himself. "Patterson played this little joke on Thomas Jefferson," says Dr. Smithline. "And nobody knew until now."

Google's energy ideas

This company is amazing. Makes sense, of course, that it has an interest in energy, considering how much energy it must use in its server farms.

October 28, 2008, 7:44 am

Google’s Energy Ideas Might Emerge Under Open Source Licenses — Or Not

By Miguel Helft

Bill Weil (left), Google’s “Green Energy Czar,” and Dan Reicher, the company’s Director for Climate Change and Energy Initiatives, straddle the solar-panel-covered roof at Google headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., last week. The company has big energy plans. (Photo: Peter DaSilva/The New York Times)

Much of what Google is planning as it considers forays into the energy business is a tightly guarded secret. True to form, the company likes to reveal little about its future products until they are ready to be unveiled.

So the task of understanding exactly what the company is up to involves a bit of reading between the lines.

“We can’t really talk too openly about what we are doing just yet,” said Ed Lu, who works in advanced projects at Google. Mr. Lu, a former NASA astronaut, said he could only talk in general terms. “The big area that we are looking at is energy information,” he said.

At Google, Mr. Lu is often referred to as “Ed the astronaut.” He has flown two Space Shuttle missions, spent six months on the International Space Station and orbited the earth about 3,300 times.

He chose to explain Google’s thinking with an analogy. Buying electricity today, he said, is a bit like going to a grocery store where the items have no prices and where you get billed a month later for your purchases. Some engineers in Mr. Lu’s team, are working on tools to turn energy buyers into more informed consumers, he said.

“We see that there is a need here that isn’t being met,” Mr. Lu said. As often is the case with Google, the company plans to introduce a product first and figure out how to profit from it later. Asked when the first Google energy information product would be ready, he said: “We are pretty close. It’s pretty exciting.”

Meanwhile, William E. Weihl, green energy czar at Google, said engineers on his team are doing research and development work in solar, wind and geothermal energy technologies. He described the work, in part, as a hedge against the possible failure of outside companies in those fields that Google has invested in.

As to how Google would commercialize its own energy research — and the intellectual property that rises from it, Mr. Weihl said, “We could potentially start a company to commercialize the IP technology we develop.” Or, he said, Google could also take another approach: Offering up the technology under an open source license, so that others could benefit from it –- and so that Google could benefit in the from of cheaper energy.

He later added: “If there seems that there is a good bet to place by doing it internally, we might do that.”

Randy Pausch (1960 - 2008)

This article that appeared in the Wall Street Journal on Saturday 26 July 2008 is worth reproducin gin its entirety. Randy Pausch was an exceptional human being, and Jeff Zaslow wrote magnificently about the Professor. They collaborated on a book based on his final lecture.


Professor Aimed 'Last Lecture' At His Children ... and Inspired Millions
by Jeffrey Zaslow July 26, 2008; Page A5

In his final months, while millions of people world-wide were watching his inspirational last lecture, Randy Pausch was cocooned at home in Virginia with his wife and three young children.

"Every time I'm with the kids now, there's this total sense of urgency that I try not to let them pick up on," he told me. "I can't say things and reinforce them in four years. My time is now."

The computer-science professor from Carnegie Mellon University died at home Friday morning at age 47 of pancreatic cancer.

I first met him when I attended his lecture last September and wrote a column about it for The Wall Street Journal. Weeks earlier, doctors had told him he had just months to live, but he didn't want to dwell on dying. Instead, he decided to give a humorous and life-affirming final lecture to 400 students and colleagues. The talk was videotaped -- WSJ.com posted highlights -- and footage began spreading across thousands of Web sites. (The full talk can now be seen at thelastlecture.com.) In the months afterward, I co-authored a book with Randy titled "The Last Lecture."

MORE

• A collection of Randy Pausch videos

Randy had always said that his talk was in large measure meant to be a "message in a bottle that would one day wash up on the beach for my children," now ages six, three and two. The fact that tens of millions of other people ended up watching it was thrilling for him, but he was most excited that his kids would one day see it. His last months were part of his continuing process of sharing lessons with them, and finding ways to build memories and show his love. In a sense, every day, he was continuing the lecture he began on stage.

He saw the book, also, as a gift mainly for his children. "How do you get 30 years of parenting into three months?" he asked me. "You write it down is what you do. That's all you can do." He approached his illness as an optimist, a scientist, but also as a realist.

We collaborated on the book while he rode his bike for exercise around his neighborhood in southeastern Virginia. That way he didn't take any time away from his family. While he spoke into a cellphone headset, I listened and tapped away on my office computer. We did this an hour a day for 53 days over the winter, and the book grew out of those conversations.

Randy Pausch, in 2007, holding his children Logan and Chloe, with Dylan on his shoulders.

I got to see his love of life from a front-row seat. Long before he was famous, Randy was celebrated in his field for creating the innovative educational software tool known as "Alice," and for pioneering the Entertainment Technology Center, a master's degree program that trains artists, actors, engineers and computer scientists to collaborate. He had earlier been a professor at the University of Virginia. In a statement Friday, the Association for Computer Machinery said Randy "reformed the art of teaching and mentoring in the computing field."

Randy spent his final months being lauded in arenas far beyond his specialty. ABC News declared him one of its three "Persons of the Year" for 2007. TIME magazine named him to its list of the 100 most influential people in the world. On thousands of Web sites, people wrote essays about what they had learned from him. As a book, "The Last Lecture" became a #1 bestseller internationally, translated into 30 languages.

In a letter Randy received last month, President George W. Bush wrote: "Your extraordinary story has helped to uplift the hearts of millions of Americans… Your love of family, dedication in the classroom, and passion for teaching will stand as a lasting legacy, and I am grateful for your willingness to serve. Your efforts reflect the best of the American spirit."

After Randy's death on Friday, his wife, Jai, said, "Randy was so happy and proud that the lecture and book inspired parents to revisit their priorities, particularly their relationships with their children." His friend Steve Seabolt, who was with him when he died at about 4 a.m. Friday morning, said Randy was still making a few wry jokes even at the end. He died "with his trademark intellect and quick wit intact," Mr. Seabolt said.

Last September, Carnegie Mellon announced a plan to honor the memory of its professor. As a scientist with the heart of a performer, Randy was always a link between the arts and sciences on campus. The Gates Center for Computer Science is now being built, and a footbridge will connect it to the nearby arts building. The bridge will be named the Randy Pausch Memorial Footbridge.

Previously

• Professor Delivers Lecture of a Lifetime
09/20/07

• The Professor's Manifesto: Readers Respond
09/27/07

• A Final Farewell
05/03/08

Write to Jeffrey Zaslow at jeffrey.zaslow@wsj.com

Down on the server farm

Found this fascinating item through Google reader. It discusses servers, Internet computing. These two sentences jumped out at me:

Google is said to operate a global network of about three dozen data centres with, according to some estimates, more than 1m servers. To catch up, Microsoft is investing billions of dollars and adding up to 20,000 servers a month.

Microsoft catch up? Legacy of the decision of years back, I think Bill Gates's view, that Internet computing would not catch on.

As servers become more numerous, powerful and densely packed, more energy is needed to keep the data centres at room temperature. Often just as much power is needed for cooling as for computing. The largest data centres now rival aluminium smelters in the energy they consume.

That shows how computing is equal to industrial activity, as I see it.

Microsoft is looking for a site in Siberia where its data can chill. Iceland has begun to market itself as a prime location for data centres, again for the cool climate, but also because of its abundant geothermal energy. Hitachi Data Systems and Data Islandia, a local company, are planning to build a huge data-storage facility (pictured at top of article). It will be underground, for security and to protect the natural landscape.