Posts Tagged computing
Freedom or Stability?
Windows and Mac users can download and install the newest Firefox version with a couple of mouse clicks. With Ubuntu Linux, however, no Firefox 3.6 is available in the Canonical package repository. Even worse, none of the developers plan to add any new Firefox versions to the repository until the next Ubuntu release. So, I attempted to install precompiled versions from the Mozilla website and the Ubuntu Firefox development build repository, but both installs really messed up the fonts, making them blurry and hard to read.
I tried desperately to fix the fonts, summoning the help of the Ubuntu forums. I tried editing font rendering settings in my local .fonts.conf. I deleted the font cache and reconfigured fontconfig. I tried adjusting a font quality parameter in Firefox’s about:config. For some forums posters, these solutions worked. For me, nothing seemed to help. Finally, I was able to get Firefox 3.6 installed with normal fonts by downloading and compiling the source code and installing the binaries compiled on my own system.
I’m not the only one who is frustrated by this. This was probably the first time I’ve resorted to compiling a third party application from source since first using Ubuntu and Debian in 2006. Normally, it’s just apt-get install whatever program you want. The package manager automatically updates everything and keeps out of my way, rarely nagging to reboot unless the kernel was updated. The package repository was one of the main reasons I switched to Linux in the first place: an easy, single step way to install anything and keep it up to date. No hunting for a download website somewhere on the internet or clicking through a bunch of dialogs in an install wizard.
With such lag before new third party applications get added to the Ubuntu software repository, plenty argue that Linux isn’t ready for the mainstream. I agree completely. Most people will have to go through similar steps as I to get many of the latest third party applications installed, and it can be a real pain. However, in Linux, I am free (as in speech) to customize or rewrite any part of the operating system and share my changes with others. It also gives me a free (as in beer), top notch development environment for my work. The problem is that such freedom comes at a cost: tinkering to get everything to work correctly. Every time I’ve upgraded to the latest Ubuntu version, something doesn’t work and has to be fixed. In another example, I recently installed the netbook remix version on my netbook and was rewarded by a flickering screen, which was fixed with a BIOS update.
Mainstream users just don’t want to be faced with flickering screens and BIOS updates, they want something that just works. Consequently, they are willing to give up some of that freedom (as in speech and beer) to have a device that boots normally and doesn’t have font rendering issues when they install the latest version of a program. Such users are better off with an Apple, and indeed Apple charges them a price in terms of money and control.
The iPad has launched a storm of controversy over its lack of user control. Essentially, the device is a large iPhone, except there is no phone. All applications must be purchased from the Apple-controlled App Store. The real question is: do mainstream users really need fine-grained control over their devices? One comment on a Slashdot post really makes an interesting argument:
What has choice done? It’s given us the chaos of spam, malware, worms etc… The average consumer should get a locked down device such as what Apple are proposing, a limited device with a closed market. And you do realise this is really no different to a games console. Full blown computers should be reserved for those of us who know how to manage them responsibly…Computers as they are today are simply too complex and difficult to manage for the average consumer, so you either give them something simple or you take the management out of their hands.
Combined with the “Linux is not for mainstream” argument, this really makes the case that perhaps devices that work well but allow little user freedom may be the best for most people. Most of the time, it’s the best choice for me. I’ve got a phone, media player, GPS device, and others that I want to just work and perform a very specific function. In these cases, I would rather they perform their jobs reliably than be extensively customizable. However, I do think that the option to exercise greater control should be there for those who want it, no matter how few. In the case of PCs, I’ll take that option, stick to Linux, and keep compiling from source when I have to.
Quotes of the week…
Instead of picking a topic and writing a lengthy thesis, here are three quotes/stories that really got me going in the past week:
Windows Bug Discovered
A Slashdot thread discussed a security bug that affects all Windows versions released within the past 17 years. One of the commenters really cracked me up:
Every time I read about one of these long-undiscovered instant pwn bugs, I always have to wonder if there’s someone sitting deep underground in an NSA computer center saying “Well shit, looks like we’ll not be using that exploit anymore.”
Is this a hole nobody knew about or a hole nobody but the people who knew about it knew about, and those people weren’t talking?
Obama on Scott Brown election
The election of Scott Brown really caused a stir in political circles, prompting a comment from Obama:
The same thing that swept Scott Brown into office swept me into office. People are angry, and they’re frustrated. Not just because of what’s happened in the last year or two years, but what’s happened over the last eight years.
Accountability much? Whatever happened to “The buck stops here?” I’m sure there will be more blaming Bush in tonight’s State of the Union. If more people took responsibility for their own actions, including the president, maybe the current political and economic climate wouldn’t be such a mess.
Budget Proposal Halts Return to the Moon
A White House budget request effectively axes the Constellation program, with a Slashdot commenter reacting:
So unless Congress steps in (which isn’t unlikely), Obama will be the President that ended America as a space-faring nation.
This comes on the heels of India’s announcement proposing a manned space mission in 2016. Instead, the Obama administration wishes to focus on terrestrial science. Yet another step backwards.
Going Mobile: Network Neutrality
The traditional approach for implementing solutions in wireless sensor networks is to use academically designed sensor motes, which provide an open hardware and software platform. Such devices have been good for addressing fundamental problems, like radio irregularity, routing, data aggregation, and power savings, all of which require fine-grained control (open source) over the software and hardware. While sensor motes provide a good proof of concept solution to some problems, more practical solutions are needed that are more attention-grabbing than a collection of weak, low power devices with limited sensing capabilities. Basically, there aren’t a whole lot of applications for sensor motes that would be useful to most people. A more recent approach is to use cell phones, which are increasingly becoming equipped with GPS, accelerometers, and microphones, providing a platform for interesting and practical wireless sensor solutions. However, the hardware and software of most cell phones are extremely restrictive, clamped down by manufacturers and wireless providers, effectively limiting the research possibilities. For example, one can’t just perform a clear channel assessment using a cell phone’s WiFi radio without less restrictive or open source drivers (even with Android). Such restrictiveness is hindering improvements in mobile devices and many of these improvements would be welcomed by everyday consumers.
Like landline phones, Internet users will eventually drop wired ISP connections in favor of wireless. This shift towards mobile and ubiquitous computing emphasizes that wireless infrastructure and usage policies will be critical in the coming years. With few exceptions, ISPs have followed the principles of network neutrality with respect to wired networks, permitting wired customers to use any device with any software using any communication protocol. However, such openness is not reflected in wireless networks with ISPs placing heavy restrictions on devices, software, and means of communication. To ensure competitive pricing, hardware innovations, exciting software applications, and available bandwidth for the surge in wireless traffic, wireless providers must follow the principles of network neutrality. Since wireless providers are hesitant do do so, the FCC’s decision to enforce network neutrality is a step in the right direction. The enforcement of the FCC’s network neutrality principles will allow researchers to push mobile computing to new and exciting levels and will allow consumers to get more functionality at lower prices.
The openness of the wired Internet has seldom been encroached upon by ISPs and rarely regulated by government, making the Internet the world that it is today. This freedom has been defined by the FCC’s four principles of network neutrality:
- A user can access any content over the network. All who access the Internet are provided access to everything on the Internet, whether it be an AP news report or the Unabomber Manifesto. No ISP restricts content: everything is available, even if it may be morally objectionable or illegal.
- A user can run any application or use any service over the network. Anyone can use any web service or application (Google, Mapquest, Facebook) without restriction from an ISP. No ISP prevents users from making Skype calls even if that ISP also sells landline telephone service.
- A user can connect any device to the network, given it does no harm. An Internet user can connect with any hardware, whether it be with a ten year old piece of junk running Linux or with a $10,000 top-of-the-line quad core processor running the latest Windows 7 beta. No ISP restricts a user’s Internet access because his or her computer is a piece of junk. Nor do ISPs force users to connect only with proprietary computers sold by the ISP.
- Competition among network, content, and application providers. A user is open to choose from one of several ISPs (if more than one are even available), and also has choice over competing web services and content providers.
This freedom has not always been maintained, even with the wired Internet. Two years ago, Comcast deliberately throttled the bandwidth of peer-to-peer protocols, limiting the upload and download speed of file sharing applications. With peer-to-peer using customers enraged over this finding, the FCC forced Comcast to abandon this policy. Other than this incident and a few others, the Internet has always been delivered equally to all who have access.
Unfortunately, such open policies of the wired Internet are not followed by wireless providers. From the very birth of cell phones, wireless providers have controlled everything:
- Unrestricted content. Wireless providers block (through restricted software) bandwidth-heavy content, such as streaming videos, voice/video communication, as well as file sharing. Such restrictions are in place to limit or prevent wireless network congestion. Improvements in wireless infrastructure could alleviate such congestion, but wireless providers have decided to restrict, rather than improve.
- Use of any application or service. Nearly all providers restrict the operating system and applications available on connecting mobile devices. Apple blocks the use of Skype when the phone is not connected to a WiFi network. Similarly, the Google Voice application was also removed by Apple and AT&T. Both applications provide features that could be seen as subversive to standard cellular voice calls. Instead of providing competing applications (maybe with better features), the ISP and application providers just block any competition.
- Connection of any device. Verizon’s network may be good, but their phones are terrible. A customer cannot just build their own tricked out phone and connect it to Verizon’s network. Instead, users are forced to choose from a handful of phones with menial features (only sold by Verizon, of course).
- Competition. Since content, applications, and hardware are restricted on most wireless networks, competition is limited. Only a handful of wireless providers offer large coverage areas, especially for data communication. Since the United States pays more for wireless than any other western country, it is clear that less restriction would provide more options and more competition for consumers.
Despite the crackdown on allowable hardware, software, and access, wireless executives somehow manage to argue that their industry is “perhaps the most competitive consumer market in America.” While unregulated competition would be great for consumers in terms of increasing wireless freedom, there simply isn’t enough competition to go around. There are only four major carriers in the United States, effectively forming a cartel that can set prices artificially high and extensively limit consumer freedom. With barriers to entry so high (infrastructure), few new carriers are likely to emerge. In cases like these, government intervention is the only solution. Fortunately, the FCC is investigating the lack of competition in the wireless market with respect to insane billing rules and lack of consumer freedom in comparison to the wired Internet. Of course, their latest decision to enforce network neutrality will also provide a strong push.
The end result should allow anyone to build their own phone, install a custom operating system, and connect it to the wireless provider of their choice without issue. Such a user should be allowed unrestricted access to the entire Internet without throttling or restriction of streaming video, large file downloads, or VoIP calls. Ultimately, text messaging and voice calls will be merged into wireless data plans, removing such unreal and confusing costs like $.25 to send a 160 byte message or “anytime” minutes, which are anything but anytime. Unrestricted hardware, software, and access will bring increased competition among existing wireless providers, fostering the development of better mobile hardware and cool applications.
Fixing the frustrations of the digital nomad
Current computing technology consists of a mishmash of devices, ranging in size, portability, usability, and design lifetime. Users are tied to their desks no longer: the future lies in mobile devices, and improvements to increase mobility and usability are key in the coming years. Without the following improvements, I think most users’ computing experience will become very frustrating. I’m hoping we’ll see:
A holistic computing solution
Everyone splits their computing time between a whole pile of devices: cell phones, media players, laptops, netbooks, desktops, and gaming consoles. Even typical cable TV boxes have a hard drive and user interface. The purposes and capabilities of such devices is becoming increasingly diverse and will probably continue to do so in the short term. However, it’s becoming a real pain to use a standalone device for a different task. Carry a cell phone for voice and text messages. Carry a laptop or netbook for working on the go. Carry a media player to listen to music. When at home, many people switch from a laptop to a separate desktop PC. It would be great to see some consolidation in order to reduce frustration with dragging around multiple devices and learning the quirks of each.
Since most people aren’t running weather prediction simulations, a single small mobile device would be sufficient for most people’s computing needs. Ideally, something the size of a cell phone would combine the functionalities of a phone, camera, media player, laptop/netbook PC, and even desktop PC. No longer would people with multiple devices need to synchronize information or become familiar with multiple interfaces. A single device would provide a user with most of the computing power and capability that he or she would need without the hassle of dragging around a separate phone, media player, and laptop. The device would be designed such that it could easily support and interface with different user input and output methods.
Improved user interfaces
Improved interfaces in mobile devices would make for a better user experience and improve productivity. With multiple gadgets to haul around, each comes with a different interface with varying levels of usability. For the most part, the smaller the device, the worse the user experience becomes. A desktop computer with a keyboard, mouse, and giant monitor provides a solid experience for most, with both ease of input and output. A netbook, however, may satisfy a user’s computing needs, but may cramp usability and productivity with its tiny screen and uncomfortable keyboard. Even worse, web browsing and writing emails or text messages on some cell phones can be nearly impossible. Personally, my experience with multi-touch phones has been horrible, since most of the time the phone selects something other than what I intended. Rethinking and improving the physical and software interfaces would permit a shift to a cell phone-sized holistic computing device.
Improvements to both physical and software interfaces would provide huge benefits for the end user. With respect to physical interfaces, improving multi-touch surfaces would be a big step in the right direction. Input methods that are simple and accurate would make phone calls, text messaging, and web browsing on mobile devices much more enjoyable. Output methods should extend beyond a tiny three inch screen, such as a wearable HUD or projector similar to that used in MIT’s SixthSense. With regards to software interfaces, most cell phone operating systems provide horrible user interfaces which make the simplest tasks a real pain. Most of these software designs inherit from heavyweight PC interfaces where input is made easy with keyboard and mouse. Mobile developers should focus on increasing usability by making tasks require the fewest amount of user inputs possible.
Behavior and activity recognition
Computing systems of tomorrow could predict a user’s intentions and act upon these predictions. With the introduction of accelerometers, GPS receivers, light sensors, cameras, and microphones in cell phones, plenty of research has provided ways to recognize user behavior and activities. Such research can help provide an augmented reality for users, pointing out suggestions as to what a user could do based on his or her surroundings, current activity and learned preferences and behavior. For example, a user traveling in an unfamiliar city could get instant suggestions as to where to eat when he or she normally takes a meal, with a mobile device providing directions to restaraunts that match the kinds of foods the user normally eats. A HUD would allow the device to paint a path directly on the streets to take without the user staring down at his or her phone. A device could automatically perform Internet searches and return data relevant to what a user is doing, whether it be retrieving a weather report before a user heads to the beach or providing real-time flight delay information as a user drives to the airport. Such intelligent systems could interact with the physical world and turn on the lights or adjust the temperature at a user’s home before he or she arrives. Also, behavioral and activity recognition would eliminate the need for user-generated Twitter and Facebook posts, performing automatic updates whenever a user changes activities or does something unusual.
Better inter-device collaboration
Figuring out how to get cell phone pictures off the phone and onto a computer can be a monumental task. It’s even more enjoyable to get a projector to correctly display a presentation on a laptop. Nearly every slideshow presentation I’ve witnessed, in classes and in conferences requires each presenter to wage war with his or her laptop and the projector to get the presentation to display properly. Improving inter-device communication would make everyday computing more seamless and a lot less frustrating. For example, a slideshow presentation could be loaded on a mobile device and a user could walk into a room with a projector, with the mobile device automatically connecting wirelessly to the projector and displaying the presentation. There would be no cables to plug in, no display settings to modify, and no buttons and inputs to fidget with on the projector. Synchronizing and moving data between different devices stands to gain significant improvement, for people are constantly upgrading their cell phones and laptops as well as sharing their data with others.
Longer design lifetimes
I’m guessing I’m not the only one with a pile of old hardware that’s worn out from too much use or discarded due to obsolescence. More robust devices with longer expected lifetimes would reduce the pile of useless junk in the closet. This would be especially helpful for mobile devices, which often wind up in mud puddles, toilets, or under someone’s steel-toed boot. Modular construction would allow for periodic upgrades without throwing away the whole device. An effort towards longer lifetimes and upgradeability would also significantly cut down on the amount of toxic e-waste.
Longer battery life
Most cell phones don’t last past a couple days of standby or two hours of talk time. Most laptops don’t make it past three or four hours. With an increased focus towards mobile and ubiquitous computing, improvements in battery technology, power savings, and battery recharging would do wonders. Apple has a new battery design in its latest laptops that double battery life, but more strides in this direction are needed. Efforts on power-conscious radio communication and CPU utilization will contribute to power savings through better software. Lastly, harnessing available energy sources such as motion, body heat, and the sun will also allow mobile devices to run unplugged for longer periods.
In general, these issues are what I think mobile computing needs in order to really take off. The current experience is haphazard and lacking, requiring a mobile user to carry multiple devices with poor interfaces and short battery life. With future applications, mobile devices will do a lot more than allow phone calls, web browsing, and text messaging. They will further the integration of the cyber and the physical world, helping a user interact with the environment and the Internet in ways currently unimaginable.
Rise of the Machines? I think not.
Using machine learning in the realm of wireless sensor networks, I have been able to improve sensor node localization and provide event detection. Since I found the concepts of machine learning interesting, my adviser provided me with a book to get an overview: Machine Learning, written by Tom Mitchell of Carnegie Mellon. Most machine learning techniques are equivalent to function approximation and most also require a significant amount of human intervention to work properly. A machine learning model can be trained to take a set of inputs (such as sensor readings) and provide an output (a tank is hauling butt towards my base). However, the model has to be trained to know what the correct outputs are (tank is present or not present), so a human must provide a limited set of training data where the correct output is known.
Given the state of the art in machine learning, there is no way for an AI to learn on its own. There is reinforcement learning, but even in this case a human must decide the conditions and the amount of a reward or penalty for each AI decision or output. This is why AI in games is terrible: when there are a large number of non-deterministic game states and a large number of non-deterministic actions to take, it is almost impossible to determine the correct action to take at every decision point. This means that it is difficult or impossible to provide the AI with labeled ground truth or a reward for training. More to the point, labeling each output with the correct value would be a real headache. Instead, game developers resort to a rule-based system that still has trouble covering every possible scenario. As a result, NPC characters still wind up doing something weird, like running into walls.
I’ve been working with this stuff for awhile, realizing its capabilities and especially its limitations. Then, this weekend I see a headline reading: “Scientists Worry Machines May Outsmart Man.” Overblown media hype at its best. The article concerns a conference on machine learning attended by the aforementioned Tom Mitchell and futurist Ray Kurzweil. From what I gather, the conference dealt with mostly philosophical issues with respect to advancing technology and its integration with everyday life. There wasn’t much about strong AI taking over the world, yet it was plastered all over the news that a Skynet-esque entity would rise from the Internet and doom us all. In some ways, simpler systems have already taken over our lives: GPS tells us where to drive, automated tools read MRI scans and provide diagnoses, and viruses wreak havoc on our personal computers. However, strong AI has quite a ways to go, with most machine learning research peaking decades ago. As one Slashdot commenter on the NYT article writes:
Any computer scientist who is worried about AI taking over no longer deserves to be referred to as a computer scientist. The state of “artifiical intelligence” can be best described as “a pipe dream.”
All of this comes on the heels of a TED talk on the development of a brain simulator. The speaker indicates his current brain “implementation” is running on a 10,000 core Blue Gene system. The article gives few details, but it sounds like a large scale artificial neural network, which still needs supervised training data to learn properly. 10,000 nodes is still way too small, since the average human brain has 100 billion neurons with 7,000 connections each. Maybe in ten years the requisite computing horsepower will be in place, but I’m guessing the algorithms and the intelligence will not.
In a similar light, a team of scientists recently used DNA computing to solve the NP-Complete Hamiltonian Path problem. Instead of using some artificial construct or model, billions of DNA sequences, each representing a possible path, were randomly constructed such that those having a correct solution would glow a different color. While massive parallelism makes this a relatively fast solution to an NP-Complete problem, this approach really isn’t a doomsday AI either.
While specific solutions continue to be discovered for our technological problems, development of strong AI (and the development of Skynet) will sit on the back burner. Until then (and it’ll be awhile), everyone can take off their tinfoil hats.
Equipment Failure
My aging desktop PC is starting to come apart: today is the first time I have ever heard the click of death. I had always imagined it would sound like the disengaging of the head whenever I shut down the computer. In the middle of reading a research paper, I was interrupted by a violent, pounding racket that came screaming from the case. It was so loud that for a few seconds, I was actually afraid my computer would explode or catch fire.
Fortunately, the drive was mostly unused and had nothing really useful in it, while most everything remained safe on the primary WD Raptor. The really important stuff is already backed up on my network drive or on my department disk space, so if anything else blows up I’ll still be okay. When I removed the offending drive and tried to boot, only the power supply and CPU fans started spinning, leaving me with only a blank screen. Somehow I managed to have unseated the video card from its connection to the motherboard and after I reseated it, everything returned to normal.
Quite a few people try to salvage failing computer components, but I don’t think it’s worth it. The main idea is to patch stuff up just enough to transfer off any important data. There’s the legend of sticking the drive in the freezer overnight to get it working again. Someone even got their video card working by baking it in the oven. The fear of losing data is so great to some that there even exists a sound library of hard drive failures.
I don’t think my computer has much life left in it. I don’t want to switch to my laptop for everything since it only has a VGA output and no digital connection, rendering my monitor useless. I suppose I could get a docking station, but I can’t believe that Lenovo still makes laptops without digital outputs for external monitors. Despite buying it last year, it even came with a pile of serial ports, a dial-up modem, and a PCMCIA slot that nobody would ever use. A new desktop would be good for games but that was the purpose of buying an Xbox, and besides, high end desktops are still pretty expensive. Of course something beefy would also be good for my schoolwork, since the last two projects had implementations that were extremely CPU intensive.
Regardless, I think I’m running on borrowed time.
Removing Ubuntu annoyances
Here are a few Ubuntu 9.04 annoyances that I finally got around to addressing:
Constant “routine” disk checks on boot
Ubuntu 9.04 is lauded by critics for its improved boot times, and in most cases my machines running it boot to the login screen in less than 45 seconds. This is a solid improvement and it’s supposed to be under 10 seconds by the release of 10.04. The improved boot time in 9.04 is great: when I turn my computer on, I want to use it, not wait for an hour while the hard drive clicks and groans and the mouse cursor spins endlessly. It’s all well and good except that about every tenth boot takes forever thanks to an annoying disk checking routine. Are drive failures really that common that my drive has to be picked over by a fine-toothed comb every week? If so, a new storage technology is desperately needed. In the past 20 years or so, I’ve only had one memorable drive failure.
So, to fix the irritating disk checks on boot:
sudo tune2fs -c 0 /dev/s
-c specifies the rate at which your disk is checked on boot and /dev/sda1 is your boot partition.
PC Speaker
Aside from the Caps Lock key, the PC speaker is an extremely annoying and useless “feature” of nearly every PC. Depending on your configuration, quite a few things can cause the PC speaker to beep, such as hitting backspace in a console when you haven’t typed anything. For some reason, when I shut down the computer using the Gnome shut down menu, I get several beeps from the PC speaker. This appears to be a bug. The best solution appears to be preventing the PC speaker module from loading at all. Create a blacklist file in /etc/modprobe.d called blacklist-custom.conf:
sudo gedit /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-custom.conf
Then, add the following line to blacklist-custom.conf, save the file, and exit:
blacklist pcspkr
This will cause the “pcspkr” module not to load on boot. You can unload the module without rebooting by running the following in a terminal window:
sudo modprobe -r pcspkr
Update Manager Pop-under
Update nags are one of the worst “features” of many current operating systems. On Windows XP, I am spammed by a torrent of nag balloons forcing me to install updates and restart when the installation is complete. In OS X, a similar update manager jumps out at me in the dock until I deal with it. Until 9.04, Ubuntu had it right. In previous versions of Ubuntu, a small notification balloon would appear once and go away when new updates were available to install. I could either click on it to install the updates, or ignore it if I was in the middle of something. Now, what happens is about ten minutes after turning on my computer, which is right about the time I really get to working on something, the whole system grinds to a halt with the hard drive going nuts. Then, the Update Manager window opens underneath all the windows I have running, blinking and nagging at me to install whatever it found.
To go back to the original notification window functionality, run the following in a terminal window:
gconftool -s --type bool /apps/update-notifier/auto_launch false
Force Shutdown
When I click the “Shut Down” button to turn off my computer, I want it to turn off. No exceptions. Instead, if Firefox takes its merry time to save its session or something is running in the background (mounted drive through nfs or samba that won’t unmount), I get a nice “x is not responding. Logout anyway?” prompt. I don’t care if something isn’t responding: kill everything and shut down. To force shutdowns, edit your menu.lst:
sudo gedit /boot/grub/menu.lst
Scroll down and add “acpi=force noapic” to the kernel line of the default boot option:
title Ubuntu 9.04, kernel 2.6.28-11-generic
uuid f9d46e73-4aae-4203-ad97-93df87196054
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.28-11-generic root=UUID=... ro quiet splash acpi=force noapic
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.28-11-generic
quiet
Rising from the failure of bad business models
Newspapers are suffering from declining readership and decreased revenue from classified ads. Media companies are furious about revenue loss due to the outbreak of free online services such as Hulu. ISPs are complaining that they can’t make money with monthly fees for unlimited internet access. All of these industries are stuck in the past and must now face the reality of today.
Newspapers
Since several newspapers have folded, executives in this industry are now hocking paywalls as the solution to their revenue problem. The real question here is to ask why newspapers are failing. The rise of free and instantaneous internet news has driven down the number of subscribers. Furthermore, online marketplaces such as Craigslist, and to a lesser extent, social networking sites, have siphoned off classified ad revenue. As I see it, the current system will only get worse. As newspapers are driven farther into the red by those switching to the internet, more and more quality journalists will be laid off. With neither solid writers nor the funding for interesting and comprehensive stories, the quality of newspapers will degrade at a quickening pace, fueling their demise. Is there a solution to keep the local paper afloat? I think so. National and international news is readily available everywhere on the internet: Reuters, AP, MSNBC, and CNN all provide coverage in this area. Newspapers should focus on something that only they can do best: local coverage. The local coverage for The Virginian Pilot is terrible. The staff has been drastically reduced and the paper thinned. The sports section writes about the Redskins as if they were a home team, while plenty of local minor league, college, and high school games are ignored. If newspapers were to drop national coverage entirely and focus solely on local news, business, and sports, they could bring themselves back into the game. There are plenty of stories to tell about what is going in any local area and plenty of people willing to hear about them, but these stories are displaced by some far away event that is already well covered on the internet. I admire the Virginia Gazette for following this approach. I have no doubt that paid subscriptions would rise if newspapers focused on improving local coverage.
Good stories would be worth paying for. However, as newspapers continue to crash and burn, the quality of their stories has suffered and the demand has gone down along with it. Nobody wants to pay for a newspaper article that could have been written by a blogger on the internet. Newspapers complain that their demise would lead to the end of investigative journalism and educating the public on current events. They argue that no blogger has the resources to provide the quality and detail of coverage that newspaper journalists provide. This may have been true in the past, but is no longer. Again, reinforcement of local coverage would really help turn things around.
Online Media
This reality shock extends from newspapers to media corporations of all kinds. Those in the TV and movie industries are upset at the rise of freely available internet media, ranging from cable and broadcast content on Hulu, to user content on YouTube, and to plain old bootlegging. The CEO of Sony Pictures, Michael Lynton, complains that “nothing good has come from the internet,” and that “anyone can have whatever they want at any given time.” Lynton goes on to argue that the internet should have rules as well as “guardrails” to keep people following these rules. Whose rules should the people of the internet follow, you might ask? Lynton’s rules.
As the old phrase goes, “I can’t change the direction of the wind, but I can adjust the sails.” Lynton has it backwards: Sony should adapt to the reality of the current world, not the other way around. He argues that his company is trying to make money, and thus, people should pay for the content his company produces. Wrong. For any rational individual, it should be: “I want quality content, therefore I am willing to pay for it.” Nobody will pay someone for a piece of junk just because the seller wants to make money. If someone produces something that is subpar, nobody is going to be willing to pay for it, and if they want it at all it will probably be bootlegged. Like newspapers, TV, cable, and other media companies put profit first and quality products second. If this were reversed, I imagine things would change. TV shows should be kept in production based on reviews, not based on viewership, which is really an ad revenue metric. Sequels to movies shouldn’t just be made because the previous installment was profitable. I can think of no unplanned movie sequel that was as good or better than the original. Furthermore, consumers should be given more options to purchase content. For example, all previous episodes of any currently airing series should be available for purchase instead of just the last n, as is done with Hulu. As with newspapers, an emphasis on quality and availability would more than likely support the media industry in the age of the internet.
Internet Connectivity
As bandwidth usage has increased due to increased consumption of online media sites, ISPs feel they’ve got to get their piece of the pie. Recently, Time Warner experimented with tiered internet pricing. This is a step backwards to the days of dial up where nearly everyone paid by the hour. Fortunately, enough people complained that Time Warner reverted to the current unlimited monthly scheme. While tiered pricing has been held off for now with respect to wired broadband, it’s a mess when it comes to wireless. As it stands, a cell phone owner is charged separate fees for telephone usage, text messaging, and wireless data, and all three use pricing tiers. Cellular telephone billing is the most convoluted of the three, with bizarre rules on who and when you can call with or without incurring some kind of penalty. Text messages are by far the most profitable: receiving 160 bytes costs around twenty cents — this works out to $1.5 million per gigabyte — that’s only for the size of a compressed HD movie! With the advent of data plans, many cell users dream of circumventing weird telephone talk rules and expensive text messaging by purchasing an unlimited data plan. A data plan could replace text messaging with instant messaging and telephone calls with Skype, but Apple is struggling to change the direction of the wind by restricting Skype use to areas of WiFi connectivity.
The role of the ISP is changing and providers are doing their best to prevent this change. As landline telephones have been replaced by cell phones, landline internet will be marginalized with respect to mobile internet. As the PC market has shifted from desktops to laptops over the past ten years, the next ten years will see a shift to small mobile devices. The role of the internet will have increasing importance on cell phones, ultimately replacing cell telephone and text messaging. ISPs do not want this, instead restricting the type of phones you can buy and the applications you run on them. Google’s Android is a step in the right direction, and with more effort it won’t be long before an enthusiast can piece together a phone from custom hardware, install an embedded version of Linux, and connect to the internet from anywhere using software of his choice or creation. Of course, no traditional-minded ISP would let anyone connect to their cell network with a custom-built phone, a custom OS, running custom software. But the future will most likely be an internet of ad hoc wireless networks, making use of such custom mobile solutions. Driven by the desire for constant connectivity and mobility, users will connect to their family, friends, and coworkers with one or two hops (and bypassing ISPs). A significant portion of the internet could be accessed in this fashion, requesting data held by peers and forwarding it back to a user over multiple hops. Using technologies with high bandwidth and long range, such as WiMax, a mobile ad hoc network would even be feasible in less populated areas. Some of each user’s bandwith would be reserved for forwarding others’ requests and responses. Data could be routed to peers with the least load (shameless plug for the paper I’m presenting at WASA 2009.)
The internet of the future will be mobile and more dynamic, but there is still a place for the ISP. Unavoidably, there will be connectivity gaps and bottlenecks in an ad hoc wireless network, and a landline ISP will take care of this. Also, most data will still be stored in fixed, physical locations with landline connections. Internet users will still have to pay monthly fees to a service provider to handle gaps in coverage, but no longer will there be separate charges for landline phone, internet, TV, cell phone, text messaging, and data. It will all be data, and it will be a big relief from the obtuse system that is in place today.
Conclusion
Those who are stuck in the system of the past are hindering the development of the future. Today’s leaders must understand it is they that must adapt to the changing world. The world cannot and will not shift to accomodate those who wish the world to adapt to them. Viable business models for the internet exist and more are developing, even those with a “free” component. Continuing adoption of a less than optimal strategy will only lead to a poor outcome for those that refuse to adapt.
Who pays for the Internet?
This was the question presented by the professor of my undergraduate networking class. As far as I can tell, the answer is: you do. And you’ll pay increasingly more for it if some people have their way.
Unless you live in an area with subsidized broadband and/or wifi, you’ve got to pay an access fee to an ISP. At this point, dial-up is more or less useless, so you’ve got to fork over $40 every month just to get online. Like most people, your ISP is probably a large telecom, like Verizon, Comcast, or AT&T, so the true cost is probably a lot more than that since it’s almost impossible to buy internet access by itself. You’re forced into signing up for a “bundle” which is some combination of land line phone, cell phone, TV, and internet all provided by the same company. A lot of the junk (and added cost) that comes along with the bundle is probably unwanted, like bizarre foreign language TV channels, call waiting, and hardware rental fees since the option isn’t often given to buy your own modem or cable boxes. By purchasing a bundle from an ISP, you’re subsidizing the weirdos who actually watch some of those high-numbered TV stations, listen music on their TV, or enjoy being nagged by call waiting that can’t be turned off. Since the number of providers available for a given location are usually pretty limited, you’re forced into paying monopolistic prices as well as paying for services that you don’t even want.
It’s bad enough that you’ve got to fork over the dough for services that you don’t even want in order to get internet access, but in truth, it’s a lot worse. Access is merely a base cost for using the internet. In nearly all cases, there’s also a cost for accessing content. Somebody has to pay for hosting and generation of that website you frequent or the videos you watch, and again, it’s going to be you. Advertising is one commonly used method to shift the cost onto consumers. Nearly every website has it. Until around five years ago with the advent of pop-up blockers, Javascript removal tools, and ad-blocking tools, every website I visited spammed me with a torrent of flashing banner ads, pop-ups, and keyword advertising. Somehow, the notion goes, enough people would actually click on that crap and buy whatever it was that was being advertised. The advertising revenue would keep the servers running and provide the blog/newspaper authors with a small paycheck.
Personally, I can’t stand advertising in general. It gets in the way of whatever it is I’m trying to do, whether it be searching or browsing the internet, reading a print newspaper, or watching TV. Reading the paper or watching TV probably adds about fifteen minutes of sifting through all the ads or waiting through commercials to get to the rest of the TV show I want to watch or the newspaper article I want to read. I’ve never clicked on a banner ad, much less even bought something that was advertised in this manner. On the internet, it’s hard to manually filter out all the crap to get to what you want. Fortunately, current ad-blocking tools do a pretty good job. I’ve even forgotten how good a job they really do, for when I sit down in front of a computer without any ad-blocking software, the harassment of flashing banners and keyword ads drive me up the wall.
Though internet advertising revenue has increased in the last year, it is predicted to fall in 2009. Everyone is finally getting sick of all the junk constantly being pushed at them as advertising approaches levels seen in “Idiocracy” and methods used in “Minority Report.” A great argument against internet advertising states that it is “not trusted, not wanted, and not needed.” While print newspapers are folding due to declining subscriptions, content providers on the internet are worried about a similar fate due to declining ad revenue. Ironically, the print newspapers mainly blame their plight on the shift to electronic media. To that end, content providers are considering increasing their usage of a second tool to provide revenue: yet another access cost.
Most online newspaper websites and online offerings of network TV shows do so with fairly low restrictions on who accesses their content. The front page stories for nearly every newspaper are available online as well as last night’s Lost episode. This freedom of access is what makes the internet so great: once you get in, there are few barriers to access anything. However, the same people that brought you bundled internet access want to change that. One media executive says, “We want to change consumer behavior somewhat, so the expectation that everything online is free has to change.” If this expectation changes, the internet as we know it is finished. It is the freedom and openness of the internet that makes it as valuable as it is. You can find anything or anyone and learn about nearly any topic available. On the internet, you can collaborate with people half a world away. The introduction of a second access cost for some internet content will most likely remove that openness. The effort to preserve network neutrality has been in place for several years, but now it may be coming to an end. Several ISPs are currently proposing pay access for channels and TV shows online. The movement of this business model may force providers of other media to do the same. Original sources will become locked down, leaving open and collaborative efforts to rot without them, such as Wikipedia, or IMDB. Someone may want you to look at a video posted to YouTube, but you can’t look at it because you don’t have the money to pay the access fee.
Nobody really wants to pay a pile of access fees to get the latest news, or even to watch videos on the internet, especially when an ISP is charging a significant monthly fee just to get online (though some say they are). The problem is that the annoyance and unprofitability of internet advertising is forcing a shift to another solution to prop up content providers. If the shift to selling access to content goes too far, the internet may become segmented into a large number of tiers, causing the digital divide to span both the physical and electronic worlds.
Linux and SSH Filesystem permissions
I find the SSH Filesystem to be a huge help when working with several computers at the same time. I access my department’s storage as well as my network hard drive from anywhere. Until today, sometimes I was unable to overwrite or delete files mounted by sshfs. I realized that this was because by default, an sshfs mounted filesystem retains the userid and groupid of the remote owner. So, if I have userid and groupid 1000 on my local filesystem but userid 1024 and groupid 2048 on the remote filesystem, I may have trouble writing stuff on the remote filesystem. Linux sees that the userid and groupid are not my own, so I’m in trouble if the file I want to write to doesn’t allow others to write.
Looking here and here I found that you can mount a remote filesystem as a particular local user and/or group. I modified my /etc/fstab accordingly so that all users of the “fuse” group can correctly mount my remote filesystem:
sshfs#username@remotehost:/remotedir /path/to/mountpoint fuse user,noauto 0 0
You can also specify a user or group id by replacing user with uid=xxxx,gid=xxxx.
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