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Bletchley Park Finds a Saviour In Google
hypnosec noted that Google has stepped up to try to help fundraising for Bletchley Park. From TFA: "The point is that all of us have heroes. At Google our heroes are Alan Turing and the people who worked on breaking the codes at Bletchley Park. It was probably the most inspiring and uplifting achievement in scientific technology over the last hundred years. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that without Alan Turing, Google as we know it wouldn't exist."
It's great that they started a fundraiser effort, but couldn't they just open their wallet and be done with it?
Benevolent.
Yours In Osh,
K. T.
The British Army should never be referred to as the "Royal Army" - it's the only one of the three armed forces in the UK *not* to have "royal in its title.
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/British_Army (5th paragraph)
England hasn't had one of those since Charles lost his head.
Royal Army? It's the Royal Air Force, Royal Navy but the British Army I'm afraid. Besides which Bletchley was actually home to the "Government Code and Cypher School" which by this time was not under armed forces but part of the Foreign Office.
Would that be the internet search behemoth, whose best days are behind it? http://tech.slashdot.org/story/11/08/08/1415203/Are-Googles-Best-Days-Behind-It
There are legitimate questions to be asked about how many resources we should spend commemorating/preserving the past, vs. letting the past be past and spending forward; but to the degree that comemmoration/celebration/recognition of the past is a worthwhile enterprise, Bletchley park has always seemed mysteriously neglected.
The work done there was extraordinarily vital in terms of signals intelligence and cryptography, and not having that done would have hampered the Allied war effort significantly. The fact that that work also included some groundbreaking CS and early computing machine work is just icing on the cake. There are other WWII sites with many more casualties; but the only other WWII R&D developments that can even fall in the same order of magnitude are the Manhattan Project, Penicillin mass-production, and possibly Radar(The cavity magnetron: defeated Hitler and produces delicious popcorn in minutes!).
Letting the past keep to itself is a self-consistent position, albeit not one I endorse; but any sort of historical preservation of WWII stuff that doesn't have Bletchley park well up there seems downright ill-formed...
Bletchley Park is getting more attention in recent years. I've been there, but before the restored Colossus or replica bombe was working. All we saw were static exhibits, plus a working Enigma, something I'd seen before. There were few visitors.
Now they have funding from the UK national lottery, "Family Fun Wednesdays", a conference center, a giant chessboard, a model railway (with a "Thomas the Tank Engine layout), a mini cinema, an auto museum, model boats, and swans in the lake.
That is great. What I feel sad about is that the US didn't perserve the most important ship of WWII which was the USS Enterprise. We kept of bunch of old battleships from that time like the Texas and Alabama but we scrapped the Enterprise.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Beltchy? What a horrible name for a park.
Those aren't necessarily incompatible. For example, lots of people think Microsoft's best days are behind it, but it still has loads of cash and publicity, so "Microsoft supports charity X" can be useful for charity X.
But probably true that the other story is a bit overplaying it.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I don't understand why there are so many geeks that don't like this company. A small minority, but still. How can you not?? =)
There's a bit of difference though. As far as I can tell, Microsoft mainly "donates" to charity when it's their software and training that is being given to help further their brand. I may be incorrect in this, but Google isn't donating time and mandating/installing Chrome/ChromeOS on all the PCs in the place or training people how to search efficiently.
IE:
Microsoft Donates $344 Million in Software To Worldwide Initiative to Train 400,000 Teachers (...to train their students in Microsoft software)
Microsoft donates cash, software to help military vets get IT skills (... to use their software to encourage businesses to buy more)
Microsoft Donates $250,000 of Software to Create IT Jobs for Youth in Kenya (... again, for Microsoft's overall benefit)
Heck, software is still a cheap donation. They can put any self-assessed value on it and print off a new copy for a dime a dozen to inflate their charitable donation amount.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
Station X at Bletchley Park is an important part of our shared history... It marks the beginning of the all electronic digital computing and also of distributed computing (they had up to 10 Collosus working across different locations, by the end of the war). Much groundwork theory was built in that era by people working at that place, including the ideas behind of packet switched data networks and routed networks.
I visited back in 2005 and I hope to go again someday (when I am in the UK).
No sig. Move along - nothing to see here.
Microsoft has a matching program for employee donation. It matches dollar by dollar and even donates $17 per hour if you do volunteer work. Microsoft also have the Giving Campaign (October in the US). Here different groups compete about raising the most donations (cash). There are fund raising events like breakfast with your Senior VP being your server, or auctions (dinner at home with Bill Gates is typical a top draw ~$50,000). In 2009 the Giving Campaign raised $70 million (cash) in the US. That is $35 millions from employees (about $500 per employee) and $35 millions from MS.
Read Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon for some fun fictional Turing action.
Why do you think their so eager to throw money into Bletchley Park? They worried you'll start encrypting your e-mail and cut into their ad revenue. That Collosus ain't gonna be a mock-up.
I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that without Alan Turing, Europe as we know it might not exist.
Ftfy.
Cracking the Enigma code was a huge deal, and may have made the difference between the outcome seen in history (a terrible war, but one that Nazis eventually lost) and a horrific alternative with a crippling invasion of England and failure of many of the Allied powers' anti-Nazi offensives. Even a delay in the cracking could have been disastrous. It's possible that the Bletchley team would have cracked Enigma without Turing, but that delay might well have lost the war. Huzzah! Geeks save the world! (And then, in Turing's case, are hounded to chemical castration and suicide for being gay. Thanks, man!)
I went to Bletchley Park for the first time during the Vintage Computing Festival last year (Which was totally awesome incidentally!), but discovered that the funding for TNMOC is separate from Bletchley Park proper, despite them sharing a site.
I do recommend a visit to both places tho'; It's not a flashy show of stuff, and the fact that it's underfunded and mostly run by volunteers does show, but it has a nice understated and close knit feel to it.
I really hope they hold another VCF there tho'!
And...where did the money go to?
Sure, Google has some cool research projects and occasionally donates to good causes (as do all big companies) but when it comes to how the company deals with customers/clients, they suck more than most companies around. They can't be held accountable for anything at all! If they close your Google AdSense account, when you haven't withdrawn the money you've earned, say goodbye to the money and don't expect any sort of an explanation. If your website suddenly gains some unwarranted spam filter on Google Search (e.g., all ranking drop by 10 pages), don't expect any sort of explanation or help troubleshooting the problem. If you are locked out of all Google services after you violate Google+ EULA/TOS, tough luck.... etc.
In other words, Google seems like a good company until there comes a time that you encounter any sort of trouble with any of their services, in which case you're just screwed. If you don't sue them, they don't give a shit about how much trouble they cause you... That said, I still use Google products (from cellphones to e-mail to Google Charts) but after I have had to interact with them a few times, I certainly don't feel that they care about their customers in the slightest.
For a reality check:
$35 Million cash from Microsoft vs $344 Million in software
And to release that $35 Million in cash, their employees had to raise the money themselves to get the match.
Google is doing it because they want to honor their Heros. Microsoft does it because they want to line their pockets.
The men that served on the ships saved them. The government had nothing to do with it. And maybe that is how it should be. We preserve the things we hold dear, the things we don't care enough about to preserve need to fall away......
It's really a hard call, I know people that keep every paper from 40 years ago, even though they haven't seen them in 40 years. When they die, it all goes away because no one else cares about it.