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My Top 10 things I like about the US/Washington:

1	Cheap Internet access from hotel rooms.
2	Good service. The service in the US is always good, and polite.
3	Weather. I left London and it was only about 5 degrees C, but over here the temperatures are now in the mid 70s Farenhient.
4	Food. The other day I had an excellent Chinese fast-food meal for a very reasonable price.
5	AOL access. It was so nice to find-out that I could setup my AOL account to connect to a local ISP.
6	Lack of litter/clean environment appreciate that this would vary across the US, but in Washington there is very little sign of any litter, and the whole place seems very clean.
7	Museums. The great thing about the museums in Washington is that they're all free. My favouriate one in Washington is the Aerospace and Flight museum.
8	Washington city location. All the main tourists sites in Washington are within easy walking distance of each other.
9	Washington metro system. I was so impressed with the metro system around Washington. It's very clean, safe and fast.
10	Aerospace and flight museum. I've been writing about the history of computer, and a key element of this is the development of the supercomputer. I was so pleased at the aerospace museums to find an original Cray-1 computer.

Other things I like include: the luxurious taxis/courtesy buses; 7-11 stores and extensive listening stations in music shops. Oh, and I eventually found a telephone card that allowed my to phone the UK for 1 cent per minute. Before I found this I was using a card that gave me $10 for 10 minutes. Quite a difference! If you going to the US, try and get one of the local access telephone cards, they are much cheaper for international calls. The only problem that you have is trying to use up all your credit.

Some of the not-so-good things include:

1	Colour of money. All the money is the same colour, so it's difficult to know if you've got a $50 bill than a $1 bill.
2	Crossing the road. In many places it is virtually impossible to cross the road, unless you can do 100 metres in 10 seconds.
3	Don't walk! There's very few pavements in many places, so it's difficult to walk anywhere.
4	TV. In general the quality of the TV is poor, unless you like baseball, American football, ice hockey or basketball, which aren't really sports that are covered in the UK. Although I felt quite a home with UK programmes such as Who Wants To Be a Millionaire, and the Weakest Link.

"It would appear that we have reached the limits of what it is possible to achieve with computer technology, although one should be careful with such statements, as they tend to sound pretty silly in 5 years"

John Von Neumann, 1949.

19 April 2001

My week

IEEE Conference in Washington, DC
Ooops. I haven't been updating this page over the last few weeks. I'll try from now on to keep updating it. Just now I'm in Washington DC to present a paper at an IEEE Conference. I'm in the 24th floor of the Sheraton hotel [Map]. Below are a few photographs from my hotel room.

"There will be no software in this man's army!"

General Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1947.

A particular problem when you're away from home is not have good communications. Thus I was so pleased when I found out that it was only 80 cents to access the Internet from my hotel room (it costs 10 cents per minute after that, but you just disconnect and reconnect to get another hour). Thus I didn't feel as isolated as I could still access my e-mail, and send messages to my family. The other thing I was pleased about was that AOL provides for easy access, as it finds all the local AOL server telephone numbers. I actually think that the access was faster to access servers in Edinburgh from the US, as it is from my home.

IEEE Presentation
The title of the paper that we were presenting is An Agent-based Bayesian Forecasting Model for Enhanced Network Security. I've outlined the slides for the presentation below [HTML][PPT].

I chaired the research presentations on agents, and was impressed by paper presented by Wilhelm Rossak on mobile agents. If you interested in mobile agents, you should access the page:

http://tracy.informatik.uni-jena.de

I loved his discussion of mobile agents, especially in the creation of market places for mobile agents where they could meet, and exchange information. In fact it may be possible to give agents cultural identifies, such as giving them language attributes. The research team at Fredrich Schiller University have developed a middleware environment for their mobile agents.Wilhelm explained at the end of the presentation that it is named TRACY, after the women who James Bond married in one of his films. This is because Peter Braun, who is one of the leading motivators behind the project, is a great fan of James Bond. Obviously the next step is to fit a name to the acronym.

Washington, DC
The temperatures when I arrived here were similar to the UK (about 8 deg C), but they're rising everyday, and today (Saturday) they're in the high 70's F, and tomorrow (the day I leave) they should be in the high 80s. It's going to be difficult to go back to temperatures in the 60s.

If you're interested, here's my pictures from Washington (20 April 2001):

Capitol Hill (in the distance)
The Washington Monument
The White House (in the distance)
The reflection pool, and the Lincoln Memorial.
The Lincoln Memorial
The great man himself.
... and some of the things he said.
Views from the Lincoln Monument.
War Monument.
A view of the Jefferson Memorial from the Krutz Bridge.
The FDR Memorial.
... and again ...
and again.
View of Jefferson Memorial again.
Jefferson Memorial.
Jefferson
View from Jefferson Memorial.
Hollocost Museum. I didn't visit this museum, as I think it would be too sad.
Dept. of Archiculture.


Air and Space Museum, which is first class.
Rockets. To the left there is a V-2 rocket which was used in the second World War, especially in raids by the Germans on London. To the right of this is part of one of the Apollo rockets.
Memory core. This is from a computer that was used in early missions to the moon. The values allow access to the memory core, which is made up of small torroid rings.
Cray-1. The highlight of my day: a Cray-1 Supercomputer. Wow! I've never seem one of these before, but I writen about them in my History of the PC book.
A 4Kbit memory. Another highlight, as it helps with my research on the history of the computer: A 4Kbit magnetic memory array. It uses small magnetic torroids to stored data, arranged in 32-bit words. It was used up to 1982, which is three years after the IBM was first introduced.
A stored program. A magetic memory which stored the program for an early Apollo mission. It's difficult to see from the picture, but there are long runs of wires which loop through the magnetic torriods. These days a single transistor takes-up less than a micron.
?. By this time I was getting a bit tired, as I can't remember what this build it called.

Oh, an exhibition model that I did not get a picture of was one which had one million discrete transistors. Wow. It took up a lot of space, especially when compared with a modern chip, which was only 2mm by 2mm. Another good one was a therate which played films which related to fact and fiction in Science Fiction movies. The best one had Albert Eistein presenting it. Some of the fiction elements included:

	No atmosphere. There's no atmosphere in space, so there can be no sound transmission, and laser beams would not show as there are no dust particles to spread the light. It showed a battle in space, and it looked very boring without the sound effects, and the laser beams.
	Massive accelleration. The accelleration speeds in space would be enormous, but we never seem anyone being moved by changes in accelleration. For this they showed clips from Star Wars and Star Trek, where the ships were accellerating at massive speeds (Warp Factor 6, Scotty). It's true when you think about it, that even the forces in accellerting a fast car is enough to force you back in your seat, for just image accellerating at many thousands of miles per hour.
	No weightlessness. In many of the movies, people just walked around normally, but this would be very difficult, as there is no concept of up and down in space.
	Speed of light travel. As Scotty in Star Trek would say: "Ya canna beat the lawze of physics, Cap'tin", and old Albert knows these as well as anyone has, ever. Also, Scotty seems to defeat the law of the Scottish accent, but never mind he's probably one of the best known Scotsman's in the world (even though he's an American, and has only been to Scotland a few times). I think they choose a Scotsman to be the Chief Engineer as there are so many great Scottish engineers (Watt, John Logie Baird, and so on).

Current Favs.

Book:

Bill Gates Speaks, Janet Lowe. This book sounds a bit boring, but it's actually quite a good read, as it is a compilation of articles, interviews, and so, about Microsoft and Bill Gates. I've been doing quite a bit of research on the history of computers, so I'm interested in these development, especially after the IBM PC was released. The story of Microsoft is an amazing one, and is lesson for any software business. Here's a few of the best quotes:

	Think about Borland, Lotus, WordPerfect, and Novell. Each was mighty in its day, but they were hobbled after Microsoft set its sights on them.
	Sun Microsystems and Microsoft had an agreement allowing Microsoft to adapt the Java language for Windows and NT platforms. However, when Microsoft's NT product was released, it was not compatible with Sun's versions of Java. In other words, NT's Java did not allow programmers to "write once - run anywhere" as the language was intended to do. Sun sued, claiming that Microsoft had violated its licensing agreement.
	Joke: Bill Gates testifed before the Senate that Microsoft did not have a monopoly. He then jumped into a giant shoe and drove it to his red hotel on Baltic Avenue (in the UK this would be something like Mayfair or Park Lane).
	Statement which did the rounds for a while: Subject: Microsoft announces Major Acquisition Redmond, Washington. In direct response to accusations made by the Department of Justice, Microsoft Corporation announced today that it will acquire the federal government of the United States of America for an undisclosed sum. "Its actually a logical extension of our growth," said Microsoft chairman and CEO Bill Gates. "It's a positive arrangement for everyone." ... The United States will be managed as a wholly-owned subsidiary of Microsoft Corp. ... Gates said that US citizens can expect lower taxes, increased govenment services, discounts on all Microsoft products, and the immediate arrest of all executives of Sun Microsystems and Netscape Communications. ...
	Bill Gates reckons that the biggest mistakes that Microsoft made were: letting Novell capture the networking market, and getting into the Internet market late. Both of which they have eventually overturned.
	Around 1986, to improve relations between IBM and Microsoft, Bill Gates offered a 10% share in Microsoft for $100 million. They turned it down. Within ten years this share was worth $10 billion, a one-hundred fold increase.

Music CD:

I'm in Washington just now, and when I left the radio stations where playing the new REM single. Over here they're also playing, and even time I hear it I like it better. I don't actually know what it's called.

Song:

See above.

Favouriate quotes-of-the-week

I've moved these into the text, so see here.

We all know that this is now wrong (and right, at the same time), as it's been shown that the power of computers double approximately every 18 months.