The presentation was "The State of Computing" by Peter Coffee, Technological Editor for eWeek magazine. This was a joint meeting of the Los Angeles Chapter of ACM and the Los Angeles Chapter of the Association for Information Technology Professionals (AITP).

Peter Coffee started out with his round table presentation before dinner. He said he would have things as question driven as possible. Someone mentioned he heard Peter was not using XP at home and he answered "true". He said he was running a mixture of Window 2K, 98 and the Macintosh. He had said "Thank god 98 is gone" but he still has machines configured for 98 and doesn't plan to change them. In the morning he sits down in front of a computer, brings it up and runs the Mozilla browser. He uses the HTML word processor Composer in Mozilla rather than a word processor ever since the catastrophic vulnerability of the Word .. format was disclosed where even if you had never enabled macros on your machine a properly malformed Word document could run macros merely by being opened. He said he treats .. files as viruses and files his copy as RTF or HTML form. More specifically .. files should be treated as malware. Peter says he spends much more time than the average literate user responding to alerts from his firewall because in his case it is research. He can spend an entire day figuring out why he can't do anything and it is really productive because he can write about it.

We need to change "normal" behavior and not send people Word and Excel files. He believes people should use HTML and send it in a form that can be opened and read by anyone, possibly encrypted for privacy. Phil Zimmerman said if the postal norm was postcards then using an envelope would lead people to wonder what you were hiding. A different attitude should be taken to using personal encryption in order to maintain personal security of documents. Peter is against incurring the costs to give the ability to the government to intercept VOIT (Voice over Internet). He thinks that is a terrible precedent and opens the door to rebuilding the Internet in the name of interceptability, which is a complex and expensive process.

XP-SP2 is finally out and it is eminently hackable. There are too many weaknesses. Windows was designed for single users and assumes that if something is there it is there because you wanted it there. The API’s can be spoofed.

Apple produced a book called "Inside MacIntosh" telling things that work that shouldn’t be used because they might change it someday and it wouldn't work anymore. Apple has managed to maintain continuity by being this open. Microsoft determines how they want things to work in the long run only in the long run.

XP-SP2 is the bravest thing they have ever done because it will break things. These are things that are really already broken but SP2 just brought it to light. XP-SP2 is still not very good, even though it is a great improvement over anything they have done previously. Peter is still running Windows 2000-SP3 that he calls the best operating system Microsoft has ever shipped. Dell will still send you a machine with Windows 2000 installed.

Microsoft filed a 10K with the SEC that said they think their situation is in extreme threat and acknowledges that continuing success with their current business plan is risky. Peter won't point to Apple as someone who is doing things right because they are making most of their money with ipods. Apple has been good at determining what people will want before they see it. They have been good about predicting digital life styles. Also, Apple's OS-10 is very good.

He discussed Microsoft's stance on licensing of its intellectual property on Sender ID where you authenticate the sender and therefore it is harder to spoof originator IP addresses the way that can be done now. Microsoft says no one needs to sign a license to use Sender ID. They apparently want to get Sender ID out there. Peter says a change from IP4 to IP6 is necessary for real improvement and nothing else very much matters. DOD says that by 2008 you must be on IPV6 to do network business with them.

Peter was asked if DOD would have the same success they had with Ada. Peter said Ada is a wonderful language but you have to go to Europe and Japan where reliable software is more important than time to market. C++ will blow up eventually, it is unmaintainable. Probably it will be replaced by Java, not Ada. That doesn't matter because you can write code in Ada and compile it to Java if you want to. Java is doing things very well. The Java cell phone exceeds the number of other Internet connections. The growth rate exceeds that of the PC in every country. Teen-age Japanese schoolgirls provide the fastest technical innovation in the world and provide the world standards. They want Java games. You can give away the cell phones to make money by getting service fees. How much revenue do you have to get so you can give away the whole car that includes a cell phone Internet connection? Premium services can run up the costs and it is just a matter of ratios. It isn't a huge leap in concept although it is a different environment.

Peter Coffee's son was lost in Boston and looking for the place to take a GRE exam. Peter was able to figure out where he was by getting information from him and give him correct instruction to find his way on his cell phone. This was done at very low cost to both of them because of the available technology.

Peter was asked to talk about AMD & Intel. Intel is having a tough year and AMD is doing well. Apple is using a G5 processor that is a 64-bit processor. The next step in home entertainment is that everything comes in through one box and gets broadcast around the house. It is very straightforward to do this. Peter listens to the radio at his computer over his high bandwidth Internet connection. You can interconnect from your computer to your stereo and use the higher quality speakers you probably have installed there. There may be a problem interacting with Sony equipment because one part of Sony sells hardware and another side sells content. They try to limit things to their own hardware and software by using their own digital rights management infrastructure that is different from other companies and not compatible with them. Sony is having trouble selling this concept.

Microsoft is not doing well in cell phones and cell phones have a much higher growth pattern than PCs. Their business plan is somewhat scary and their unexercised options could drastically change their financial operating results.

This was the end of the before dinner "Round Table" and the next part of Peter's talk occurred at the main presentation after dinner. Roger Lux introduced Peter Coffee as a man who needs no introduction. This was quite true for this audience.

Peter said the theme he wants to build on tonight is the emergent behavior of changes in systems over the past year. Things have been interacting in interesting ways. People are beginning to understand that complexity is its own reward or punishment depending on the way you look at it. Some things are gelling. Last year there was a major power failure. A lot of predictable one-year later stories came out. The actual mechanism of the power failure was everything doing exactly what it was supposed to do. The zoned systems protected individual pieces of hardware superbly, but dropped the service. The time responses were

• Zone 1 - instrumented to 1/60 of a second,
  
• Zone 2 - 1/3 - 1/2 seconds, &
  
• Zone 3 - Zone 3 found that it was difficult to set a response time that would avoid failure.
  

There was a systemic failure where localized optimality of services was not globally optimum. Looking below the service much faster response times are required to avoid failure. The power grid has a known configuration and the grids are supposed to be stable.

Web Services in simplest terms comes from a headless website. It is a bundle of services that can be accessed by other things and is composed of simple, non-proprietary technology services. The current standards are

1. TCP/IP - The fundamental transport mode of the Internet,
   
2. HTTP - For interaction across that transport layer, &
   
3. XML - A syntax for expressing the meaning of the interactions across the layers.
   

This three-legged tripod is generally agreed upon.

Interaction between sites is by exchanging messages. You can ask for some site that can do something for you. Now if you go into a store you want to go to one person who can do everything for you and then have all things come to you. In computer networks a standard called WS addressing has been agreed upon by several major players to accomplish this. It gives you a way of describing the location and nature of a web service request in a way that is not tied to one transport mechanism. This is a neutral way of saying this is where the request is coming from, this is what it wants, can you take care of this? You can build compound applications. The good news is you can write very complex applications that were difficult to do before in a controlled and local situation and now you can get to do it in a dispersed heterogeneous network.

The message of these emergent behaviors is that where there were systems we couldn't characterize before, we can now identify our problems. Peter is happy to see people are facing the complexity head on, thinking about the way things can fail and confronting these problems.

For example, we have had large screens to work with. Now we have very small screens on Java enabled cell phones or we have automotive telephonic devices. We either have a small visual interface or none. We are talking about radical escalation of the programming task with substantially more aggressive requirements. There is a great opportunity because someone has to write the code that does this. In the new world everything around you has a processor and is wireless connected. Think about the opportunity for adding values in entertainment, safety, and other applications.

There is a large RFID investment and software is needed to make use of it. There are problems; the new infrastructures have interesting interactions. For example, some cell phones have GPS built in. At the end of July many Motorola phones lost their GPS capability. No one has identified why this happened but there is the interesting coincidence that it happened the day after the 8-bit counter fields in the cell phone rolled over from eight ones to eight zeroes. This rolls over only on rare occasions. Last Nov. 27 a family of Motorola GPS receivers went from midnight Nov. 27 to one minute after midnight on Nov. 29. After 1000 milsec the software figured out what happened and went back to the correct date and time. GPS, which has been used for some time, can still surprise us. We have to know implementation details, not just treat it as a black box. Failure modes have to be explored, considered, analyzed and their effects anticipated. Things are much more complicated now than what has ever been done before. We want the computing grid to be as reliable as the electrical power grid. Computer capacity can become a commodity that can be sold to anyone else in any part of the world.

Windows XP–SP2 breaks code while making processing more secure. The end user is not a Microsoft customer. PC makers and interactive software makers are their customers and Microsoft irritated both sets of these customers. SP2 is hackable and there is still a lot of work to do to get it right. Microsoft is trying to do the right thing even though it caused problems with their main customers. They are now acknowledging open source software such as Linux and Open Office is a grave threat to their business plan.

We are now looking at the next major version of Windows. In the fall of 2003 at the Professional Developers conference they were rolling out Longhorn. The basis is Windows 2000, good basic code. They are adding to that a very powerful graphical user interface layer comparable to the MacIntosh. They were going to put in Indigo, a messaging framework that is very productive in writing network interface. They wrote an application that takes a photo from a cell phone, looks at a GPS module to determine the location, finds the weather at that time and then makes an accident report to an insurance company. Peter gave an example where after detecting an arrhythmia a cell phone alert was sent to the cardiologist and the EKG was streamed to a buffer. When his cardiologist logged in he got the entire set of data. Indigo is fabulous.

The most important change was to be WINFS, a meta-data oriented file system that could find all your email file attachments to an individual in a time period. Microsoft said they decided to speed up delivery of Longhorn by freeing it from its dependency on the file system so Longhorn won't ship with WINFS. They will add WINFS later. Peter has heard it all before. In 1997 something called Cairo, an object oriented unified file system, was withdrawn from NT5 that never shipped and was called Windows 2000 instead. Peter Coffee said he recycled eight columns of the article he had written about Cairo to his article on the removal of WINFS.

Why is this important? What is the balance in your PC? Everyone use megahertz to measure speed because even though it isn't a very good measure there isn't a better one available. The amount of memory that determines how much you can work on at one time and mass storage measures what you can accumulate and network connection bandwidths. Processor speed increased from 4.77 megahz to 2-8 gigahz. This provides a compound growth rate of 30% per year. However connection speed has been growing at 40% per year, so we already have problems. System memory has increased 50% per year. Mass Storage has increased from 160k up to 80 gigabytes or a 55-80% growth per year. Processing speed has been outclassed by other system growth. No wonder the DOS machines seemed so fast. Processing speed has grown 600 times while the amount of data you are working on has grown by a factor of 12,000. Systems are increasingly being overloaded. So what gets taken out of the next processor? The improved file system that was supposed to address the major problem, the growth of data. Indexability of documents is getting harder.

Peter said that at his publication they ask "How are we not going to talk about Microsoft this week?" It is hard not to talk about Microsoft systems and how they apply to the latest problem in the computer world.

Intel is having problems and AMD is shipping 64 bit chips. Intel has provided a structure based on virtual processors that won't have to be changed when they have multiple real processors. Intel is admitting they need an extension to a 64-bit processor, but Intel can't ship it till the 4th. quarter. On some jobs the Pentium 4 underperformed a Pentium 3. Intel increased the clock speed of the Pentium 4 to avoid this. So many changes have been made that it is not really a Pentium architecture any more. Intel has had to admit that maybe gigahertz isn't everything, maybe performance needs to consider how fast the output work is done. Peter Coffee said he has been wrong everytime he predicted Microsoft and Intel would have to face the market music so don't make any investments based on his comments.

Another company named Transmeta has done amazing things on cycle by cycle power optimization. You can now buy a super computer from Orion shipping on October 1, 2004. The little one is a 12-processor unit with up to 24 gigabytes of memory and up to 1.4 terabytes of storage for under $10,000. Available in the 4th quarter are 96 processors, up to 192 gigabytes of ram and up to 9.6 terabytes of storage for under $100,000. You can plug it into a regular power outlet as it draws 1500 watts, about the same as a microwave oven. This could change the economics of certain simulations and analyses. This is happening because as the processor shrinks there are new chips with much higher performance. We are now talking nanometers on chip sizes.

Technology development proceeds apace. Everything you know is wrong. Open source is becoming more competitive. Apple is getting better and more powerful using more powerful processors. Apple is putting out high powered, less expensive hardware, but Dell is still cheaper. Sony is doing well because they know they are selling entertainment and lifestyle. Microsoft would love to get into the entertainment business and they are trying very hard. Enterprise users might feel ignored as Microsoft concentrates on other areas. IBM may be becoming the way IBM used to be. Suddenly Sun and IBM may get a chance at new life because they know how to market to enterprise systems.

Peter Coffee said he had covered what he had been asked to cover and it was now time for questions.

He was asked to discuss disruptive technologies. Microsoft is getting out of touch with the market place. Intel has been trying to be in markets outside of processors. Microsoft is trying to get into business providing services where they collect fees instead of delivering software. AT&T doesn't want to connect to customers but wants to market services and convenience.

Peter was asked if he were providing services what platform he would use and he replied J2EE. He would not buy into .NET because he thinks it is too limiting. Other companies have chosen .NET because they will settle for the market of 96% of the desktops provided by Microsoft. Peter said he won't say they are doing the wrong thing, but that isn't what he would do. He likes what Sun is doing with Java.

Microsoft had a campaign to provide certified engineers. ACM (certification is not ready) and IEEE (yes we should) seem on opposite sides. Peter Coffee said you can't build a building, or aircraft either, without a software quality standard. It may not be possible for the software to be signed off separately. It may be too late for software certification by a software engineer for the software as a separate unit.

What about automobile software failures? Peter likes the predictability of mechanical systems. Computerized systems provide strange stick shifts that don't operate like the old ones. People who shift from the mechanical to the computerized systems have to make certain that their old habits don't mislead them about the performance and result in an accident.

Peter doesn't believe the Blaster worm caused the power grid failure. He thinks that the later analysis of the failure indicated it was a coincidence. Peter said we get dismayed when several states lose power, but we don't consider loss of millions of hours of productive PC time to be remarkable. Gross and pervasive unreliability of software is taken for granted.

What is the next level of DVD technology? The Blue Ray DVD is going to put 50 gigabytes on a single sided disk and will start out extremely expensive. You need this to put an HDTV movie on a disk. It probably won't sell too well initially, but the cost will come down fast.

What do you suggest for COMDEX orphans? COMDEX is gone and Peter will miss it. He recommended the Computer electronics show, vendor sites and a number of other lesser possibilities. You were there during the golden age that is now gone.

This was another of the superb presentations by Peter Coffee that he has provided to us year after year. This write-up is nowhere near like "being there" and getting his witty and highly informative take on the computing world of today and where he expects it to be in the future. The write-up had to leave out some very good anecdotes and detailed comments or this report would be much longer.

This was first meeting of the LA Chapter year and was attended by about 70 persons.
Mike Walsh, LA ACM Secretary