It isn’t often you get the chance to meet a real revolutionary. It is a term cheapened by misuse, but Khaled el Mufti is a revolutionary. It is no exaggeration to say that the role he played in the Libyan uprising last year was crucial; had he and his telecoms team failed, it isn’t hard to think that Col. Muammar Gadhafi might still be in power.
Today, Mr. Mufti is a telecoms adviser to the interim government and heads the e-Libya initiative, a bold plan to use the transformative powers of technology to modernize the Libyan state, overturning 40 years of corruption and misrule under Gadhafi.
Mr. Mufti is an unlikely revolutionary, a softly spoken network-security engineer with a degree from Imperial College in London. Almost by chance he was in his native Libya when the revolution took place, working on a project with BT in the capital, Tripoli.
To mark the start of a plan to make the U.K.’s Cambridge University Library into a world digital library it has put 4,000 pages of Sir Isaac Newton’s scientific papers online where they can be viewed, read and downloaded for free by anybody.
Of particular interest to most will be Newton’s own annotated copy of Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, considered by many to be one of the greatest published works by any scientist ever. For those looking for a little behind the scenes work, the University has also published Newton’s so-called “Waste Book,” a diary of sorts that Newton inherited from his step-father which he took along with him and used for jotting notes about such things as his ideas on calculus while away from school due to the Great Plague in 1665.
Looking now at a computer monitor filled with varied fonts and familiar hieroglyphics, it is hard to imagine that screens before 1984 were generally uniform text, often green on black, with no icons or pointers. Everything had to be invented for that year’s launch of the Apple Macintosh.
PLoS Blogs NeuroTribes carries a fascinating portrait by Steve Silberman of the artist Susan Kare who was responsible for a remarkable proportion of the technological symbols that have become so much part of our lives that they are almost invisible. And she invented the smiling Mac.
Of course, back then there was no application for designing fonts and symbols. It had to be done on paper. The article shows pages from her $2.50 squared notepad of pointing hands, paint brushes, and scissors which are now so familiar. It also reveals a few ideas which never quite saw the light of day such as the overly-literal “auto indent” icon of a car hitting a tree.
If you are going to build a start-up, you might as well build a big one. It is going to cost you the same in blood sweat and tears so why not?
Reid Hoffman, CEO of LinkedIn which IPO’d in May in the biggest tech float since Google, told the would-be entrepreneurs at the Silicon Valley Comes to Cambridge event: “If you don’t go for a big idea then the likelihood is that you will end up with something small.”
One of the classic mistakes entrepreneurs make, he said, is to keep their idea to themselves. “Talk to as many people as you can,” he told his captivated audience made up mainly of undergraduates. “What you want are the people who will tell you what’s wrong with your idea. They are the ones you can learn from.”
Hard to imagine, but there was a time when there were no cellphones, no personal computers and no Internet. But a large proportion who made those technologies possible are still working at creating the future.
Silicon.com has pulled together an impressive array of modern IT’s founders to discuss their earliest memories of technology and what excited them about it. To many people of a similar vintage their recollections may be refreshingly familiar.
Vint Cerf, who co-invented the TCP/IP protocols on which the Internet runs, recounts an experience which used to take hours.
In the early days, we had to use punched cards and submit our ‘decks’ to the high priest of the computer centre (uh, the computer operator, actually) and hope that the one or two runs we could get in a day would produce results as opposed to annoying syntax error messages. Having a computer at your disposal 24 hours a day would have been fabulous!
There is a tendency to think that with technology everything old is swept aside by the new. But behind every shiny toy is one of the most powerful axioms of engineering: “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”
Once established, computer languages tend to fit that model. It is not simply that they have been used to create applications which continue to work, the software engineers’ coding skills do not disappear instantly either. Although there cannot be many around who were in at the genesis of Cobol in 1959.
eWeek Europe has an interesting article about the survival and indeed growth of Cobol, the COmmon Business Oriented Language. Although, it should perhaps be noted that the author Ed Airey is COBOL product marketing director at the large business software house, Micro Focus.
As riots erupted in city centers across Britain in August there was a widespread belief that they were being spread and sometimes co-ordinated through Facebook, Twitter and BlackBerry Messenger. At the time U.K. prime minister David Cameron suggested closing down these services during times of civil unrest might be an option. It is an idea that appears to have public support, according to ZDNet.
Security firm Unisys surveyed 973 adults. 70 percent of all respondents, including those who “completely” agree or “somewhat” agree, that during outbreaks of civil unrest, social media sites — including BlackBerry services – should be temporarily shut down to prevent coordinated criminal activity.
46 percent agreed that governments should have ‘open access’ to data on social network users, to prevent organised and co-ordinated crime, with slightly less at 42 percent believing that sites like Facebook and Twitter should know more information about users’ before allowing them to join.
When technology meets archeology it is usually to apply something very modern to something very ancient: non-invasively imaging mummies, spotting historic sites from outer space or carbon-dating artifacts.
We do not think of archeologists investigating microprocessors. But that is what some are doing.
Archaeology magazine reports on a team that are investigating the MOS 6502, a chip developed in 1974 that was key to the development of modern technology.
Those units (or minor variations of it) eventually found their way into several classic computers, many of which were the first to appear in homes in both the U.S. and the U.K. in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
They could be found in Apple Is and IIs, Commodore PETs and 64s, BBC Micros, Atari 2600s, and Nintendo Entertainment Systems.
The chip’s influence also enabled the mobile computing of today—the British company ARM makes microprocessors inspired by the simple elegance of the 6502 for devices such as the iPhone, Blackberry, and Android smartphones.
The schematic for the processor was sketched by hand, not computer, and the document has been lost.
It’s probably not surprising that Linux has such a techie reputation.
It is an operating system created co-operatively and available to be used without charge, the darling of the open source movement.
But despite Linux’s appearance of having been created by geeks and for geeks, it has found its way into quite a few mainstream applications, according to Mashable.
“The Linux kernel 2.6.35 contains more than 13.5 million lines of code, and controls gadgets, devices and instruments you might never have expected.”
Mashable’s top ten devices running Linux:
1. TiVo digital video recorder
2. Android smartphone operating system
3. MiFi mobile access points
4. Large Hadron Collider particle acclerator
[More over the jump]
Should entrepreneurs plough their lonely path with a near maniacal belief that they, and they alone, know what their customers want, even if their customers don’t know themselves, or should they listen to their customers and bend their product to meet their demands?
Steve Jobs was famous as a CEO for pursing his vision, and was successful in selling customers devices they didn’t even know they wanted. And the most famous of all entrepreneurs for the “my way or the highway” approach was Henry (“any color as long as it is black”) Ford.
But a characteristically intelligent post in The Harvard Business Review looks at Mr. Ford’s approach to his customers and suggests that far from helping Ford, his tone deafness to the needs of his customers hindered the company.
Tech Europe covers Europe’s technology leaders, their companies, and the people and industries that support them — and their ideas. The blog is edited by Ben Rooney, with contributions from The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones Newswires.