Zark's

Does the Death of the PC Imply More Than Technical Progress?

The chorus is getting louder, "The PC is Dead".  So it must be true.

Dell outlines the death of the PC and Why Windows Blue heralds the death of the desktop are examples of what technologists are predicting.

A strong argument is that software developers, especially the big ones, do not want to have multiple products.  Since everyone on the planet seems destined for a smartphone, the user interface for mobile devices will be the standard in the very near future.  Never mind that it isn't particularly productive for someone with multiple displays and separate keyboard and mouse. 

Electronic manufacturers are generally going to build what customers are purchasing and that appears to be products like tablets.  Yet even sitting in front of the television, I prefer a laptop to tablet.  When I type, I want to be efficient - I don't like the inefficiency of touchscreen keyboards.  A good friend of mine declares "tablets are great for an internet snack". 

I think he is right.  The mobile devices allow seamless communication, but they are asymmetrical - they are terrific at consuming information, but not producing content.  That gives me pause.  Has our culture changed to where we no longer desire to be inventive or productive?  Do we just want to consume content and never create it ourselves? 

Science fiction aficiondos remember this was a theme in Isaac Asimov's Foundation trilogy.  The empire began declining when its population ceased to be inventive or productive, essentially consumers of content.  Has more changed than just the computing devices we use?  Which happened first?  The iPhone/iPad or the shift to content consumers?

 

 

 

Amazon's Silk

Perhaps you can remember the days of dialup internet connection.  I can still remember the very first webpage on Roadrunner.  'Whoa!' I exclaimed.  It was fast.  Over the last two or three years, internet browsing has become slower and slower.  Part of the reason is when you browse to say, CNN, it has to make about 200 server connections for all the different ads and content.  For each one of them, my faithful Norton Internet Security Service examines each one of them at a time, making sure there is no malware hidden inside the data or conections. 

As you know, Amazon announced a new product line this week of Kindles and the new Fire.  Better than any of those, is the browser bundled with the Fire, called Silk.  Explaining Silk tells it is called silk for the strength of a single silk thread connecting two points.  The idea is that when you browse to CNN using the Silk browser, the Amazon cloud server puts the webpage together for you before transmitting it.  Your computer doesn't have 200 connections to all the different servers.  Since a lot of people browse to CNN, chances are the page doesn't have to pulled together - it is already cached and can be downloaded fast. 

If you like the idea, you can download an alternative browser to Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Chrome, called Opera.  Like the Amazon Silk, Opera does much of the web page preparation on their servers and the increased download speed is pretty amazing.  Since I use my laptop with either a Wifi or aircard connection frequently, it speeds my mobile browsing substantially. The interface is not as smooth as Firefox, (although I think Firefox took a step backward in their latest release) but it downloads much faster.

You can download Opera from their website.  Happy browsing!

Mmm.  Maybe there is something else.  I found this while researching mercy for my current writing project - Funk legend Sly Stone homeless, but hopeful.  This is a guy who had a string of hits including Dance to the Music, Everyday People, and Family Affair, among others.  His problem - drugs.  He tells of one Christmas having $2500 to spend on his son for gifts.  But he spent it all on dope before buying a single gift.  Homeless, he now lives out of his van.

It wasn't or isn't that he didn't know better.  Once hooked, some people cannot control themselves, even though they know a decision is going to spiral them downward. Recall Apostle Paul's lament, "I do not understand what I do." 

I'm not smart enough.

Man in the Mailbox Attack

Image Credit: U.S. Air Force

You know about phishing and social attacks, but now we have to be concerned about fingers that are too big.  Trade secrets exposed by 'stealthy' email typo attack tells that researchers have shown how much data can be captured from misspelled email addresses.

The researchers purchased 30 domain names which were misspelled variants of the largest corporations.  They captured 120,000 emails and many of those contained trade secrets, insider marketing information, and other messages that would trouble corporate security managers.

The first error is human - someone types in goagle.com as the email address instead of google.com.  Then technology compounds the error, because email programs such as Outlook 2010 will automatically fill in the erroneous email address.  If you have a smart phone with a touch screen display, the probability of errors is even greater.

So how can you avoid the man-in-the mailbox?  Purchase the domains for misspelled variants of the company's email address.  Of course, that doesn't help if the email is going to another company - they would have to purchase that domain name.  Perhaps white-listing of email addresses within a company.  It would not be possible to send an email that is not registered with the corporate server.

Yet another method is to use email certificates that encrypt the message so that only the intended recipient can read the email.  It requires discipline and coordination, but is probably the best solution.

 

 

 

Forget the One You're With

A friend was musing today why we have such a lack of neutrality and even civility, in newscasts.  The immediate answer is because it is profitable.  Fox News became a network giant with their right-leaning interpretation of the news.  Of course, what enabled Fox News was the left-leaning interpretation of other news networks.  By catering to a niche market, today's newscasters provide exactly what their viewers want to see/hear. 

But what enabled opinionated journalism was technology.  Before cable news networks, U.S. viewers were content with the presentations by anchors such as Peter Jennings, Tom Brokaw, and Walter Cronkite.  Technology allows a gazillion channels on your cable set-top, and we are increasingly only surfing to the channels we agree with. 

While disconcerting, it is not opinonated journalism that endangers our culture.  It is the simultaneous isolation/connection afforded by our mobile electronic gadgets.  In the 60s, Stephen Stills alarmed the establishment with his message, "Love the One You're With".  It encouraged a generation to learn about and accept those around us. 

Today with our iPods, iPhones, (the letter, 'i', is almost Freudian), we isolate ourselves and listen to exactly what we want to hear, either from music or people.  We don't talk to the ones around us, much less love them.  We are becoming less and less open to new ideas and other people. 

The danger to society is that without trust and empathy, we construct personal defenses to protect the fragile individual cocooned in iGadgets.  This reduces the efficiency and progress of society because of the wasted energy.  The danger to ourselves is that our lives are boxed into whomever we were once upon a time.

What We can Learn from Blackberry's Fall

The story of the Blackberry is informative for investors, entrepreneurs, and product designers.  Investors riding high on Apple should be very conscious the same thing can happen to Steve Job's empire.  Once upon a time, stock value was directly related to the assets of the company.  Today - it is only perspective.  Despite its valuation, I don't believe that Apple comes close to the true intellectual and capital ownership of some scorned companies like General Motors, Honda, and Ford.

So what happened to Blackberry?  It is hard to determine from the outside why the company hasn't produced more innovative products.  I understand engineers, and believe me, I know they have been proposing new features and designs to Research In Motion's management.

Part of the failure can be attributed to: a) management unwilling to take on the risk of something completely new and b) inability to deliver a new product.  Americans know frequently what happens when a football team is winning and goes into a 'prevent defense' in order to protect the lead.  (No risk taking.)  The strategy frequently fails, even though almost everyone in the stadium except the coaching staff can foresee the victory slipping away.

The inability to deliver a product is more difficult to explain.  Today's consumer products are incredibly complex and everyone (including product designers) have been seduced by the large feature set of PCs and cellphones.  We look at what a cellphone or PC can do, and think - this should not be difficult to add to the product, subconsciously underestimating the effort required to make the feature work.

Herding several million lines of software into submission is no easy feat and failure is more frequent than success.  A handful of the right (or wrong) people determine the outcome.  Talent matters and companies must effectively assemble the best team for the new product.  I used the word team purposely because the world is too complex for a single individual contributor anymore.  I want a brilliant collaborator on my product team instead of a shooting star that cannot work with others.

A third disease is hubris.  I think Wikipedia has it right - "Hubris often indicates a loss of contact with reality and an overestimation of one's own competence or capabilities, especially when the person exhibiting it is in a position of power."  Most of us can ruefully add from personal experience that arrogance is self-correcting.  

Watching from the outside, I believe the Blackberry has fallen to all of these diseases.  For years they were integrating 2M pixel cameras on even their flagship products.  That just sounds like management playing 'prevent defense' and also hubris - people don't need 8M pixel cameras.  The customer has an interesting way of selecting what she wants.  In response to the iPhone and Android, RIM has offered the Storm and Torch with touch-screen products, but their product teams frankly, did not deliver. 

Perhaps more frightening to everyone is how quickly they have fallen.  Remember several years ago, Motorola owned the cellphone world with its Razr products.  But their fall was not as fast as what RIM has experienced.  RIM unexpectedly faced risk-taking investment by Apple and Google.  The two of them cleaned RIM's clock, or Blackberry, to be more accurate. 

Is this the end for RIM?  It depends.  Over a decade ago, Apple really, really, tanked.  Now they are the premier consumer product company.  It takes both talent and luck.  We wish RIM the best.

Will History Repeat Itself With the Keyboard?

Dali Wantabe

I had written previously that I did not like my netbook.  It is slow, and the battery life is terrible.  Curiously, I have dragged it off the shelf and begun using it again.  It only took shopping for a tablet to convince me that it was not so bad.

I replaced my Blackberry several months ago with an Android, primarily so that I could play around with writing some Android apps.  While I love the mobile browsing experience with the Android, I detest the keyboard.  It takes four times as long to take notes or type an email message with the touchscreen keypad.  And if you are on a rental car bus - you wait until you get off.

Nonetheless, I had a hankering for a tablet that I could use comfortably on a plane or even while watching television.  My laptop takes too long to boot and is too large for coach seats on most planes.  So I went shopping. 

The iPad2 is well-designed, but I desired no participation in the Apple eco-system.  I had researched Android tablets and the 10 inch Acer iconia seemed to have some of the better reviews.  Yet as I experimented with it at my local Best Buy, the user interface with the touchscreen seemed inadequate to prepare a blog entry, much less a novel, or anything else that I write.  With surprise, I drove home without purchasing a tablet, and pulled out my netbook.

Mmm.  It wasn't any faster, but there were some tweaks I made to improve the response a bit.  On my next trip, I lugged both my laptop and netbook, using my netbook on the plane.  Although the battery life is much poorer than today's tablets. it lasted for a coast-to-coast trip.  I suppose I had bought into the hype of tablet computers without really thinking about the total package.  Despite the grousing about my netbook, I will not be replacing it with a tablet.

About the photograph - it isn't exactly Salvador Dali's The Persistence of Memory, but it reminds us that once everyone believed digital displays on watches would make conventional dials obsolete.  And for a while, everything was a digital display.  Today though, your wristwatch most likely has a conventional, or analog display.  So we have seen newer interfaces like the touch displays bloom and wane.  I wouldn't write off keyboards, just yet.  Meantime, I wish the computer manufacturers would invest in some additional technology for netbooks.

Intel Introduces the Three-Dimensional Transistor

Intel 22 nm Transistor
Image Credit: Intel

Once upon a time, radios were advertised by the number of transistors.  A Super-Six was a six transistor radio and allowed teenagers to take their Top-40 radio stations with them everywhere.  Families would take along a transistor radio on picnics to hear the local baseball team's play-by-play.

A simple analogy to a transistor is water faucet that can be controlled remotely.  The signal input is the control and the output is amplified.  A transistor operating in the linear region is a very simple amplifier.  In computers, we typically desire binary behavior from the transistors, so we simply turn them on or off, much like flipping a light switch. 

Today's integrated circuits have millions of transistors interconnected to form a microprocessor, camera, or even radio.  Transistors in an integrated circut are so inexpensive that they are used to form resistors, capacitors, and other electronic components instead of simply being used as a transistor.  But there has been a looming problem - they are already so small it is difficult to make them smaller. But everytime some declares we have reached the limit, the wizards of semiconductors announce a new generation of transistors.

Intel Reinvents Transistors Using New 3-D Structure tells that we indeed, have a new generation.  In the past, transistors have been chiefly two-dimensional, using width and length to compose the devices.  The new 3-D structure permits the 22 nm transistors to have a 37 percent performance improvement (usually frequency, although they don't specify it in the press release) over the 37 nm transistors at low voltage.  Or the circuits can be constructed to use half the battery power of the older generation.

For any techies - Intel describes this as a tri-gate because it uses a large planar surface like traditional transistors for the gate, and then two sides of a cube-like structure to generate the gate for the transistor.  Hence, a tri-gate.  The gate is like the twisting handle of a faucet - it determines how much current it pushed by the transistor. 

Products will be in mass production by the end of the year.

What Will the Web Look Like in 2011?

Image Credit: Photo Courtesy of U.S. Army

Mmm.  We can attempt to look at the clouds in our coffee or we can try to piece together some of the latest news about the web and web content.

FCC Lacks Authority to Enforce Net Neutrality; Appeals Court Says surprised me.  The decision says that the FCC did not have authority to order Comcast to carry all web content, and not discriminate.  Because of this decision, cable owners will be able to make deals with content owners on what is and isn't transported on their systems. 

This is in the hard category because it goes back to the time of regulated monopolies.  The government tolerated monopolies in telephones, power utilities, and cable television because companies needed economy of scale, and in return for public service, the government would set user rates for a fair return to the companies.  After the breakup of AT&T, the concept of regulated monopolies became forgotten, even though the infrastructure and right-of-ways for wired telecommunications had already been established. 

With the desire to release even more of public television frequency spectrum for smart phones, freedom of speech could be limited simply because there will be no way to reach people if cable operators decide against it.  This is why the FCC had been engaging in the so-called net neutrality.  It was an easier decision with public broadcasters, because they were using so-called public airwaves.  With cable companies owning their own fiber optic backbones and distribution, it becomes a murkier decision, because a few do have the ability to silence even a majority.

We are also seeing a dramatic cutback in free web content as more and more websites attempt a paywall, providing content only to subscribers.  British Times papers to charge for web content tells that in June, Rubert Murdoch's papers in London will begin charging for access to general news stories. For beleaguered media companies, iPad 'magic' looks a lot like a tollbooth tells that another Murdoch paper, the Wall Street Journal is greeting iPad downloaders of a $3.99 weekly subscription.  While we are on the thread of monopolies, check out List of Assets Owned by the News Corporation.  (Murdoch's corporation.)

Mmm.  So what will the web be like in 2011?  I think we will see more and more paywalls, but that will only continue for a while.  Every newspaper and magazine currently believes that its readers will accept a $200 a year subscriptions.  But I don't envision most people subscribing and don't think that people will purchase more than one or two subscriptions.  That limited number of subscriptions is not going to save today's media companies.  (And with the limited clicks, the online advertising will switch to the high-volume social websites.)

Wouldn't it be sad, if the web became nothing but a social space?

The Web Is a Dangerous Place

It happened again this morning.  I visited an infected website.  Ironically, the website was an internet security site - I sent an an email to the company, advising they had been hacked.  (They have not responded.)

Gumblar Botnet Ramps Up Activity explains that the malware is being distributed on thousands of domains.

Credit: U.S. Air Force

Wiki tells that visitors to an infected site are redirected to an alternative site.  An infected pdf file is downloaded to the user's computer.  If the reader has not been patched recently, or it is a zero-day attack, the flaw permits access to the user's computer.

Wiki explains that the websites are infected by hacking into the site's ftp connection and downloading the site's files.  Malicious code is added to the files and they replace the original copies.  Then to be infected, a user merely has to visit the website until the malicious files are replaced by the webmaster. 

Gumblar Strikes Again to Dominate the Online Threat Landscape Throughout February tells that over 40,000 websites had been infected during February 2010.

Fortunately, this time, Norton 360 blocked the attack and prevented my computer from being infected.  (I was not so fortunate, on Christmas Eve, of all times.)  The screenshot below shows the Norton 360 notification.  As you can read, my browser had been silently diverted from the desired website.

In the attack that my security software did not block, the malware infected the taskmanager and my computer was ready for a guest interview on 'wild kingdom'.  It continuously generated bogus "Windows" security warnings and instructions to turn on an anti-virus application.)  I had to completely restore the system.  Sheesh.

So what can you do?  Make certain you have really, really, up-to-date security software.  Firewalls don't seem to help, since the malicious code is embedded within http instructions to your browser.  Lest you think that it only happens to those looking for trouble, Gumblar botnet builder resurfaces with a vengeance.  The mxlogic article tells that Fox Sports' website was hit with Gumblar.

The government has a new speed test - for the internet.  Go to broadband.gov to test the speed and latency of your internet connection.

Who Is Zynga?

A shower of shooting stars is something to behold.  In early autumn I was driving in Nebraska when all of a sudden the sky had bright streaks across it.  With far more detail and contrast than a fireworks display, the meteor shower was breathtaking.

New phenomena, whether a consumer hit like the Cabbage Patch Kids, Wii, or a budding rockstar are frequently described as a shooting star.  In their initial appearance, it is difficult to guess whether they will just brighten up the sky momentarily or whether they are a culture changer. 

Zynga is a video game developer in San Francisco.  In contrast to traditional gaming, Zynga produces games for social networking sites.  Well-crafted for the current social networking craze, games such as FarmVille allow you to farm with your friends.  DragonWars is where you create an army and fight others.  These and others are executed as widgets within a social networking site such as FaceBook.

Zynga is Suddenly Everywhere.  What Gives? notes that the company is currently lighting up the sky with coverage in many of the major magazines such as BusinessWeek and the Economist.  Zynga may be valued at $1B on Facebook Craze suggests Bloomberg.  The company is cleverly advertising for new employees in Silicon Valley with animated billboards.

There are some clouds in the bright streaks, as detailed by Zynga Faces Class Action Suit Over Misleading Advertising.  GamesIndustryBiz tells that Zynga may earn a third of its revenues through cost-per-action advertising.   The suit alleges that gamers were mislead into unauthorized phone charges or other misleading special offers.  Facebook's FarmVille Loses Its Country Glow explains the game has over 60 million players worldwide, but some have complained about unauthorized charges to their credit cards.  Zynga defends the integrity of their games, saying that these charges are from partners, not Zynga itself.  The company founder wrote in his blog that Zynga was removing such linkages from the games until adequate controls were provided.