Mixed Signals

Over in San Francisco yesterday, the brand-new NoSQL movement held its first public meeting. 150 bitwranglers from outfits large and small absorbed ten presentations about how to handle data in the new online world. (Disclosure: the meeting was hosted by CBSi, ZDNet UK's own mothership, and organised by Johan Oskarsson from our sister company last.fm.)

The NoSQL movement – if it's ready to be promoted from notion – is one of those regular reactions to the status quo that make life worth living. Very smart people with big ideas are keen to find ways to store and manipulate data that don't rely on the old relational database ideas, or challenge those ideas in ways that aren't appropriate to the standard methods.

There are many overt motivations behind this. Lots of important database applications have arrived with the Web revolution, and many of those have particular size, scaling, performance and reliability needs that might have optimal solutions outside the mainstream. To take the most extreme case – could Google have prospered, or even worked, had it been designed to run on top of Oracle? But that's just Google, right? The NASA of online commerce? You don't get much insight by noting that you can't get to the Moon on a Boeing 737: it doesn't make much difference to the plane you catch to Alicante.

The difference here is that everyone wants to go to the Moon. To be more precise, they want to be NASA – able to pull off the biggest projects at the same time as doing fantastic things with cheap little robots sent all over the place. If your big idea doesn't work on a tiny phone as well as scaling to the point where everyone on the planet can use it, then you're missing out. And "work" isn't just a question of technicalities, it's as much about economic engineering.

That's particularly interesting, because the mountain of maximum economic pain is nowhere near the canyon of maximum technical difficulty – and it's the technical stuff that tends to attract the attention of the young punks of NoSQL. If you're a very small outfit with big ideas, you evolve something very clever because you've got no choice. If you're a big enterprise, you can use your chequebook to beat your suppliers into compliance. It's the guys in the middle who get shafted. You've got mainstream needs but are too small to make waves: the suppliers are much bigger than you, so you take what they give.

Which is why SME problems with database tech – and technology in general – are centred around getting a fair deal. About not being forced to pay too much on very bad terms. About not ceding control over the company DNA to people whose business objectives are not your business objectives. It's a classic balance of power problem, one illustrated by comparing the balance sheets and profit margins of those very large software companies who supply corporate IT with those of the SMEs who consume it.

For NoSQL to properly change the world, it has to be fit to climb that particular mountain of pain. Like the open source movement from which it comes, it will find this the very hardest task. This particular Everest is frustratingly immune to the weaponry of innovation, lateral thinking, energy and idealism unless harnessed to a focussed, patient, strategic assault. And focus, patience and strategy are not attributes commonly found among bright young punks.

Movements do throw up monsters, though, and its the monsters who devastate. So enjoy NoSQL for the thinking, the arguments, the technology, but watch it closely for its very own Gates, Jobs or Ellison. Sometimes, only a monster will do.

Researchers from the University of Surrey, the London Centre for Nanotechnology and Peking University's Institute of MIcroelectronics have been awarded a £430,000 grant to get busy devloping silicon structures for use in spintronic devices. It's a three year project funded jointly by UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council and the National Science Foundation of China.

The UK is bringing its chops in watching and fixing the way electrons spin, while the Chinese are particularly good at building silicon nanotech. The aim is to investigate and build a silicon device where the electron spins are controlled by laser beams, which sounds as cool a 21st century job as exists on the planet.

Not that I wish to express any doubts about the Chinese nano-fabrication skills, but they'll have to go some to beat the London Centre's latest news announcement - a sculpture of a trumpeter only 100 nanometres tall.

The world of European mobile communications was not rocked to its very foundations this week, as 3 announced a £1.25/MB data roaming deal followed by Vodafone offering up £5 per diem/25MB max.

Moble data roaming charges are fantastic. Truly. They're like a pub that changes the cost of the beer depending on where you live. And not by a crafty fifty pence neither.

That £5/day/25MB limit? If you're a Voda customer at home, you get a month for £5 and a 500MB limit - which is at least twenty times the value. Imagine trying to buy a three euro beer in Paris, only to have your passport checked and told that it was going to cost you sixty euro. Then, if you complain, being told that this is a brand new and very competitive rate, and in any case the pubs in London charged fifty quid per pint to any visiting Parisian.

That's exactly what the mobile phone companies are doing to us, every time we use data abroad. A sixty euro beer. The same rapacious markup applies across Europe and across mobile phone companies. Yay for free markets, and thank goodness the companies aren't operating an illegal cartel. We can have all the sixty euro beer we can drink.

Only, of course, we don't drink sixty euro beer, and we don't use data roaming. Because we can't afford to. Even though mobile data is at its most useful when we're travelling.

So why does mobile data from the mast in the corner of a foreign field cost so much? Because the networks are operating in collusion to keep the price sky-high, and there's a chance you'll desperately need it. There is no technical reason.

The network you're using abroad will be making a profit selling its local internet access on something along the lines of your domestic deal: it costs no more to serve you beer - or data -- than to serve Helga. I don't know how much it costs the mobile phone companies to reconcile roaming charges: I do know that it can't be very much.

I particularly like the excuses given when regulators rattle their sabres. If we didn't charge our users twenty times as much as we need to, the argument goes, we'd have to charge them more for other stuff. Try applying that to the sixty euro beer, and see how much sense it makes.

So: thanks for nothing, guys. Come back to us when you've worked out that caring for your customers means not ripping them off in a fashion unseen since the days of Vikings and papal indulgences. Come back to us when you've joined the modern world.

While looking around in the strange and interesting world of Microsoft and the NHS, I found this; a page offering NHS employees in England and Scotland (sorry, Wales and Norn) downloadable MS Office for £9. Which is near as damnit free, even in these straitened times.

But hold on. Isn't the NHS the largest employer in the world, after the People's Liberation Army, the Indian railways and the H1N1 virus? It is. Some 1.5 million UK workers are held tight to its matronly bosom. Which means that roughly five percent of the UK's working stiffs are eligable for Microsoft productivity nearlyfreeware - through that one scheme alone.

That's an awful lot, even before you consider how many other companies may be doing something similar. And I thought MS had a principled objection to making software available at low prices? Doesn't paying less cost you more, in the MS world? And what does this do to the rest of the market - can a company with such an overwhelming presence in office productivity software push discount product like that, under the NHS logo? (Yes, clearly it can. But should it?).

The more I look at large software companies and their licensing schemes, the more curious I become about what would happen if a lot more transparency was imposed. It's not a simple thing to do - if you ever feel the need to talk to yourself, try asking Microsoft or Oracle or SAP or IBM about SME licensing rates. And if that's not silent enough, try asking Microsoft about who owns the IP in the stuff it's doing for the NHS.

And finally, for bonus points, take a look at this, one of the most bizarrely dysfunctional flow charts I've seen in a long time. See if you can find five things wrong with it - and then, for a gold star, work out what it's actually telling us about the relationship between the NHS, your money, and Microsoft.

More on this later. Oh yes.

Bismuth telluride. That’s the latest material to spark interest among the physicists in their search for exciting new things to do with electrons. Recent investigations using high energy X-rays at Stanford have shown that the substance is a topological insulator – a class of material within which electrons can, under certain circumstances, move without resistance. That’s similar to superconductivity and ballistic conduction, although each has its own characteristics.

This behaviour happens when the quantum spin of each electron is aligned with its motion – the quantum spin Hall effect – which means, as far as I can make out, it becomes impossible for the electron to bounce back along its own path. And if it can’t bounce, it can’t meet with resistance, so on it flows. Although the mechanism can’t carry very high currents, it does open up a whole new area of electron behaviour that may work particularly well with spintronics.

And that could be a whole new world of low power, high density, super-performing devices. Maybe.

Importantly, this effect happens with bismuth telluride at room temperature. Most of the interesting spintronic physics we know about wimps out at around 180 kelvin or -90 celsius, which is generally speaking incompatible with laptops.

(Tellurium, by the way, is one of the rarest elements on earth and if you're exposed to even tiny amounts, it will make your breath smell of garlic.)