In the book, Kurzweil says that soon computers will be everywhere, even in the walls.  Within the sensor network community, I’ve heard similar arguments dozens of times.  The real question is: why do we need computers in the walls?  What is the underlying motivation for having computing intelligence in your clothes, in your desk, or in your dishwasher?  What can sensor networks do to improve your life?  Right now, it’s really hard to say.

Another researcher in the sensor network community likened sensor network research ideas as “hammers looking for nails.”  That is, solutions are invented before the problems are defined.  With emerging technologies, its hard to say immediately what their benefits are.  An interesting quote from a guy in the augmented reality community depicts how a new technology can sound cool but has little practical value:

“The first movies that ran could show anything, like an elephant in the zoo,” Meier said. “100 years ago it wasn’t about the elephant, it was ‘that thing is moving!’ Eventually it became more about the content…”

I would say that the current state of sensor networks is much like the above movie analogy.  Computing in the walls sounds cool, but what can small, networked devices in your walls do that really matters?  Few research papers offer any practical applications, since most sensor network papers focus on small fundamental problems: radio interference and MAC protocols, routing issues, and primitive event detection with sensors.  The few applications that exist in research papers aren’t exciting: activity recognition with body sensor networks (e.g. sitting, standing, walking), vehicle detection and tracking, and human health monitoring.

A few of these sensor network applications have made it into the mainstream media.  Lightweight health monitoring sensors may sound boring, but could provide motivation to stay in shape when your daily living habits are compared online with your peers.  Another project aims to put health monitoring sensors in soldiers’ underwear, with the aim that the underwear can release drugs and treat wounds.  One idea from IBM promises to have a computer at road intersections notify cars to turn off their engines and save fuel at lights.  Lastly, the smart home concept promises to network household appliances together to notify users of energy usage and to reduce energy consumption during peak time periods.

Whether the above ideas are really exciting or constitute the limits of sensor network capability is another matter.  I’m hoping that some really cool stuff will emerge in the future.  My bet is on participatory sensing and peer to peer collaboration with mobile phone-based systems, but like most people, I don’t have any specifics.

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.

The most visible privacy issues have been raised with the introduction of social networking: Facebook’s Beacon being one of the most infamous, with Facebook secretly collecting your online activities to generate targeted advertisements.  More recently, software designed to control and monitor children’s internet usage was revealed to actually transmit all internet activity, including instant messages, back to the companies that designed the programs.  The list of abuses and potential abuses goes on and on and will only get worse.  The introduction of cloud computing and the shift to thin clients mean that third parties are handling more and more personal data. The more opportunities others are given to handle our personal information, preferences, photos, browsing habits, and documents, the more opportunities exist for the abuse of that control.

Social networking and the monitoring of internet habits is only the tip of the iceberg.  The social networking concept is quickly moving beyond the confines of the Internet and integrating itself with the physical world.  The concepts of participatory sensing, body sensor networks, and smart homes/offices will see the introduction of internet-linked sensors placed everywhere.  Cameras and microphones will soon be on every street corner.  Temperature, humidity, and other energy monitoring sensors will be commonplace in every home, all linked to the internet.  Even now, most cell phones come equipped with GPS, accelerometers, and microphones, allowing for activity recognition and localization.  This “information saturation” will allow any developer to design an application that makes all kinds of weird discoveries: with body sensor networks and smart phones, rush hour traffic can be monitored in real time, local nightlife hotspots can be easily discovered, and suggestions can be made on how to save energy based on water and electricity usage in your home.

While the integration of the internet into the real world sounds cool, imagine what someone could do if your sensing information got into the wrong hands.  Would you really want your health insurance company to know your heart rate or blood pressure at any time of day?  Would you really want everyone to know that you waste the most water out of everyone who lives on your block?  Would you want a crazed stalker to know where you were at any moment or to learn your daily activities or routines?

Privacy and security is going to be an increasing concern as sensor networks become more commonplace and integrated with the internet.  While I was at UVA two weeks ago, Prof. John Stankovic mentioned that security and privacy in sensor networks is a huge problem and unfortunately, little is being done in this area.

A recent article by a UCLA student illustrated some of the problems with participatory sensing and presented some general solutions.  Disclaimer:  as part of the lead-in on her article, she says: “the developers I work with might say [my research area] is about telling them what they should be doing—which I must admit is the goal of this article.”  When someone says they know better than you, it’s time to run, not walk, to the nearest exit.  That said, I do agree with some of the things she says.  The author argues that a general framework should be designed for all participatory sensing applications that allow for user privacy management.  The frameworks should allow a user to easily understand how the systems work and how to control the release to the outside world of personal sensor data and inferences.  Ultimately, the author argues that data generated by a sensor network that you own is yours to control and distribute.  Third parties must respect the wishes of the content generators.

The author doesn’t go into fine-grained detail about how to ensure the preservation of an end user’s privacy wishes.  I could imagine some kind of CA could help verify that those third parties which access a user’s content/sensor data are who they say they are.  Some kind of feedback mechanism could allow a user to see where his or her sensor data went and how it was used.  If a third party abused a user’s data, the CA certificate could be revoked, effectively tarnishing the reputation of that third party.  Most likely, encryption would have to be introduced to ensure nobody but the permitted third parties could access a user’s data.  Unfortunately, encryption is very energy and bandwidth heavy for low power wireless sensors.

We all know the wrong way to go about privacy with the experiences of Facebook and its tacked-on privacy measures.  Initially, Facebook provided little privacy controls with no framework at all to allow a user to control access to his or her information.  Even now, the privacy controls for Facebook are hard to access and even harder to understand what they do.  A user has no fine-grained control over adjust who can access what content and exactly how your information is being shared with third party applications and advertisers.  A comprehensive and user-oriented privacy framework installed from the ground up would help stop the mishaps that are common with social networking.  Such a framework would come into its own with the increase in participatory sensing.

On that note, it’s time to get a few cell phones and start a participatory sensing application of my own to provide motivation for some research problems.  The possibilities are limitless and I can throw privacy to the wind (for now).  Unfortunately, as the author of the ACM article mentioned: researchers and developers don’t think about privacy, they think about research problems and cool applications.  In a small-scale research environment, the information is mine to control since I control the sensors, the application, and the release of any data or inferences from the data.  But, if anything were to be released into the wild and become popular, a framework for end user privacy control would be indispensable.  I certainly don’t want some nutcase knowing when and where I’m sleeping.

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.

As I see it, the ultimate goal in the computer science community is to provide systems that improve our lives without us even being aware of it. Stuff should just happen in the background that we don’t even know about to provide drastic improvements in general areas like productivity, entertainment, and communication. All the background noise should be filtered out by these hidden systems so that we only see things that are important to us. For now, it seems, nothing is being filtered out and we are subjected to an increasing amount of information, almost all of which we really don’t care about. For example, this morning I searched Google for “mp3 players” (as in the physical devices) and only got hits for software programs. Problems like this shouldn’t happen, and I shouldn’t have to type in some weird query to specifically exclude certain results from my search. Some serious work has to be done to limit the scope of what we see to only the things that matter, and do it in such a way that isn’t annoying. Basically, operating systems and software should just work and not require any hacks to get solutions we want.

The first issue that comes to mind is with today’s operating systems. Gigabytes of patches and updates are released each month and harass the living daylights out of the end users to install them. This is one of the best examples of the Nag Factor. An operating system should not endlessly nag the user about installing updates and allowing administrative privileges. Ideally, the user shouldn’t even be aware that he or she is using a computer at all. Updates should be automatic and occur in the background without the user even knowing. Nothing is more annoying than to be deep into writing a paper or watching a movie when up comes a nag balloon demanding that some updates be installed and the machine rebooted.

Windows is far and away the worst when it comes to the nag factor. I’m almost completely off Windows at this point, with the exception that I use a partition on my laptop for my USB TV tuner, which unfortunately doesn’t have Linux drivers. It seems every time I start up the machine, about five nag balloons pop up telling me what wireless network I’ve connected to. About once a week another torrent of nag balloons pop up telling me to install software updates. When I finally install the updates, Windows forcefully reboots my machine. Nothing, I mean absolutely nothing, should ever forcefully reboot your machine. It’s a complete disruption of anything resembling the mantra of ubiquitous computing. A professor I had for a software engineering class once told me that it takes about eight minutes for someone to become completely engaged in a task. When some moron at Microsoft thinks it’s a good time to make your machine reboot, that’s about five minutes of lost productivity due to the reboot, and another eight to get back to where you were. Even Bill Gates complains about the forced reboots in Windows. Since I’ve never used Vista, I’ve heard another annoying “feature” is the User Account Control system, which ceaselessly has you type in your administrative password for stuff as simple as connecting to a wireless network.

Next up is OS X. Two years ago, I started the shift away from Windows with a Macbook. My Windows desktop began rusting from disuse almost immediately. Unfortunately, OS X suffers from the update nag almost as badly as Windows. Nearly every update is hundreds of megabytes and requires a reboot. iTunes updates even require reboots — what were they thinking? And when you install the stuff, it takes forever. Sometimes on an OS X update, my machine has rebooted two or three times over about ten minutes before the login screen comes up again. The updates first make their way to you through the extremely aggravating dock icon jumping out at you. While the dock is a good feature, the jumping icons are not. I can’t describe how irritating it is to be doing something and have a dock icon start leaping out into the center of my vision, ceaselessly pushing my buttons until I deal with it. There is probably a way to disable the icon jumping, but I’ve moved on from OS X, so it doesn’t matter at this point. UAC is also present in OS X but the designers did a decent job of only prompting you when changing administrative settings or installing software.

For the past year, I’ve almost exclusively used Ubuntu Linux for all of my computing. Finally, a group of developers has the right idea. It works almost seamlessly. An operating system should do its best to get out of the way and let the user do what he or she wants. Ubuntu is really close to doing this. The package manager is excellent — you can install anything under the sun (for free) and it updates automatically. You can’t even do this with the Mac by default, unless you install something like DarwinPorts, and even that is a real hassle to set up. The downside is that since every program you install is controlled by the package manager, there are frequent updates that require your authorization to install. Nearly every day something has a patch, but the package manager does its best to be minimally invasive. Nag balloons are infrequent, and a small icon appears in the task bar indicating that an update is available. Reboots are almost never required except for things that affect the kernel and nothing is ever forced on you. For now, I’m extremely satisfied with my Linux experience and will probably not switch back to Windows or Mac unless some serious revamping occurs.

The nag factor isn’t present in operating systems alone. The devices that are beginning to make ubiquitous computing a reality are providing irritations of their own. Whenever I miss a call, get a voicemail, or receive a text message, my cell phone beeps and hums to no end until I touch the screen acknowledging its nags. I’ve had two phones, and they both did this. Neither has the option to turn it off. I can check manually to see if anything came in while I was away from my phone and would prefer to do so instead of being constantly annoyed. I’ve also noticed that late model cars now beep at you if you start the engine and have your seatbelt off. Apparently, this is mandated by the federal government, but it’s just another irritating nag. Some cars will nag at you after the mileage counter gets beyond a certain amount since your last service.

It isn’t just the nagging that’s a problem, though. Some poor design decisions really limit the usability of computing systems and ubiquitous computing devices. The worst of this is proprietary software and hardware, with Apple really standing out as the worst culprit. The iPod that’s starting to die on me has a proprietary USB jack to plug it into my computer. What makes me mad is that it didn’t come with a wall plug to charge it — I’ve got to use the proprietary adapter to charge it via USB or for over $40 for a wall adapter. Since I don’t need to sync my iPod every day and would like to be able to travel with it without bringing my computer, a wall plug would be great. Thanks to the wall plug adapter scam, I don’t think I’ll be getting another iPod if I can help it. Apple’s computers also make use of proprietary headphone jacks and video outputs such as mini-DVI and mini-DisplayPort. I had to fork over $20 to get a mini-DVI to DVI adapter so I could use an external monitor with my Macbook. Universal hardware standards would make ubiquitous computing much more of a reality, with devices seamlessly integrating with each other and providing minimal headaches to the end user.

With respect to proprietary software, the iPod/iTunes combination also takes the cake. When I first got my iPod, I was using Windows, and installed iTunes on Windows to keep my music and iPod in order. After I got my Mac, I tried plugging the iPod into the Mac and using the Mac to keep everything synced. Did this work? Of course not. iTunes on the Mac whined that my iPod was formatted for Windows and that it couldn’t write anything to it unless it was reformatted. I don’t see why the geniuses at Apple could have written some drivers so that the iPod’s file system could be accessed from any operating system. It all seems to be about control. Downloading songs from iTunes only allows you to have those songs installed on three machines simultaneously and you can only load them onto an iPod in a proprietary format.

Cell phones are another example of this walled garden approach. You not only pay for the access to a cell network, but you have to get a proprietary operating system running on a proprietary phone to go along with it. You can’t just build your own cell phone out of spare parts, install your own operating system, and expect to connect to Verizon’s network even if you’ve paid for it. Google’s Android seems to be a step forward to breaking down this situation by permitting custom applications, but there’s a long way to go. Without all this proprietary junk to get in the way, you could see some seriously interesting applications, such as P2P file sharing on cell networks, refinement of video and text messaging, and the eventual integration of portable gaming, media, and communication into one device (the iPhone still sucks). For now, I’ve got to carry around my laptop for web browsing and programming, my cell phone for telephone calls, my iPod for music, and my PSP for gaming. Oh, and maybe a watch to tell time.

Finally, coming back to my dying iPod, battery technology needs significant improvements in order to further the goals of ubiquitous computing. Reducing I/O and computational complexity on the software side can only help but so much. The typical Ni-Cd battery, regardless of the device, lasts about two to three years and only runs for a few hours under full load. This is crap. Until batteries last for a week under full load and hold a full charge for nearly ten years, we’re just going to be throwing away perfectly good equipment. My iPod, which is perfectly fine with the exception of the battery, could last an indefinite amount of time. It seems really wasteful to toss cell phones and other mobile devices every few years just because a battery died. Reduced reliance on proprietary hardware and software could help this problem as well, for parts could be easily interchanged or upgraded if new features become available.

If the tech industry would focus on reducing the nag factor and increasing the openness of design standards, the shift to ubiquitous computing could be faster and more seamless. Until then, we’ve got to deal with the endless OS nag balloons, proprietary devices, and terrible battery life.