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Posts in Misc. Tech
Online TV Sites Charging Premium for Ads
With websites like Hulu taking off, old school TV companies have frequently complained that they don’t make as much money online as they do on standard TV. Apparently, though, this is changing.
Hulu and NBC.com are reportedly both charging a significantly higher CPM (cost per 1,000 views of an ad) than network TV, at least on some shows. It is important to note that this does not mean that TV makes for money online, since the bandwidth and infrastructure costs are not factored into this, however it indicates that making money with sites like Hulu should be possible in the near future, if it isn’t now.
The advantages of online TV distribution will not stay the same, though. I suspect, for exmaple, that someone will make a DVR for Hulu, making it easier to skip ads. At the same time, though, other advantages can be quickly added, since the web is a highly flexible medium.
This is definelty good news for everyone, since it means that we are more likely to see more content in more places.
Virtualization has certainly changed a lot in the past few years. Not many years ago, virtualization was only used on servers to get maximum performance. Today, is a a fairly common consumer technology with support for advanced graphics. The big difference between server virtualization and desktop virtualization, though, is that the virtualized OS is the secondary OS on the desktop and the primary one(s) on the server. This will not necessarily remain true, though.
In a few years, I expect that we may seen the beginning of desktop OSs that only provide a thin shell upon which to run the user’s real OS. In the past, this hasn’t been realistic due to speed and graphics requirements, but those limitations are fading quickly.
With a virtualized primary OS, many possibilities would be opened up. For example, virtual machine snapshots could be used to create an undo/redo function for the entire OS, making the removal of a virus or recovery of deleted items easy. In addition, the virtual machine could fairly easily be synced across machines (if the rest of the world’s tubes every catch up to Japan), allowing you to have the exact same OS on many machines.
It’s hard to predict what the future of desktop computing will be, but virtualization taking a more prominent role seems highly likely.
Google Squared vs. Wolfram Alpha
First WolframAlpha, which tells me that this Saturday is 157th day of 2009, arrives and now we have Google Squared, which tells me that the most important operating system is Linux, which is the same as Ubuntu. They both are headed towards the same goal, but in different directions. Google^2’s result is more useful (and wrong), while Wolfram’s result is actually correct, though useless to 99% of us. How, then, are they heading for the same goal?
Both services fundamentally aim to organize and structure the current information chaos. WolframAlpha works on facts, ignoring anything that it cannot mathematically calculate or analyze. If you ask it something and it answers, you can be pretty sure it’s right, but it can’t answer most of your questions right now. Google^2, on the other hand, will happily answer just about anything you ask (ask being used figuratively, since neither service takes questions), it just might not be correct or relevant.
ReadWriteWeb mentions in an article about Google^2 that the descriptions of each item would be more useful if they just quoted from Wikipedia, but that’s not what Google^2 is for. WolframAlpha might pull a specific piece of information from a specific source, but Google^2 is just looking for any match to the relevant topic, not a verified one.
In their current forms, both services have only limited uses. Wolfram is an excellent calculator and source of statistics/trivia. Google^2 is a good starting point if you know knothing about a topic. Eventually, though, both services should become a full-featured, accurate, non-picky engine to extract structured information from chaos. The question is: who gets there first?
The size of removable storage is shrinking extremely quickly. Not long ago, removable storage meant CDs or a big external hard drive. Now, though, you can get a memory card the size of your fingernail and thinner than a penny that stores 16GB of data.
When it comes to external storage size (not capacity) most people agree smaller is better, but up to what point? Today’s storage devices are already easily losable and even more easily snapped. In a couple of years, the devices will be even smaller. When is small just too small?
It seems that we are reaching the physical limits of how small our data storage devices can be. The next step, then, has to be to eliminate the device alltogether. That’s where we are headed with the cloud.
We are beginning to see two interesting and related trends: quick-boot second computers within laptops and wall-wart sized, very inexpensive, Linux-based computers.
The overall trend across both of these are cheap, small Linux computers built in to various other devices. How will this go, though? If the additional cost is small enough, why not put them right in monitors (not as a replacement for the main computer, but as an additional option) or even keyboards.
It seems likely that, in the future, we will not have “a computer,” but rather all of our devices will have computers in them. Today this would seem very inconvenient, since your files would be spread all over the place (“whoops, I left that report on the toaster”), but cloud computing will have solved that problem by the time this all arrives.
When Will The Instant-On Standard Emerge?
Since Splashtop first arrived, instant-on operating systems have been a big deal. The idea is that when you don’t want to deal with waiting for your computer to boot, you can simply enter the quick boot mode and be up and running in a few seconds with a basic Linux desktop. At this point though, every manufacturer that has joined in has created or licensed their own software. This is a natural thing to happen in happen in the beginning, but I expect that it will soon change.
As these technologies are first developed, it makes sense that each one is a little different from the others. After all, the software is usually dependent on specific hardware. Now that this instant-on technology has begun to mature and it is becoming a more common feature, the natural tendency should be towards a standard piece of software. This standard instant-on environment would, of course, have to support different hardware, but there is no reason that couldn’t happen.
With a standard instant-on OS, users would also not have to relearn it every time they get a new computer.
Similar to the way there were a large number of competeing operating systems early on and now there are only a few, I suspect that we will soon begin to see one vendor’s instant-on software spread and become the universal choice. Perhaps it will be Splashtop or perhaps it will be someone else, but it will almost certainly be someone.
Pixel Density on Netbooks Compared to Other Screens
Manufacturers like to advertise something like this: 1024×600 8.9″ Screen. What does that tell you? The number of pixels is irrelevant on its own; you need to know what the pixel density is (or how many pixels there are in a square inch). The screen size is important, but not the diagonal size. Theoretically, an 8.9″ screen could range from practically zero square inches to over 35 square inches. Luckily, it is possible to use the given information to get a rough (but decent) estimate of the number of pixels per square inch. Check out the comparison below: (Pixel densities are in thousands of pixels per square inch, i.e. TPPSI.)
Laptop: Dell Inspiron 15 (1366×768 15.6″) – 10 TPPSI
Netbook: HP Mini 1035, Asus Eee PC 1000 (1024×600 10″) – 14.1 TPPSI
Netbook: HP Mini 1010, Dell Inspiron Mini 9, Asus Eee PC 900 (1024×600 8.9″) – 17.8 TPPSI
Laptop: Dell XPS M1530 (1920×1200 15.4″) – 21.6 TPPSI
Netbook: HP MiniNote 2133 (old model) (1280×768 8.9″) – 28 TPPSI
Interpret this as you will, it is very interesting to see that the pixel density usually has nothing to do with the size.
Copyright Holders Fail to Claim Public Support in Pirate Bay Trial
It’s the big copyright holders versus a site called “The Pirate Bay.” Even if you had never heard of the site before, you can easily tell that they are involved in the promotion of piracy. It seems that the copyright holders should overwhelmingly take the public support, since it is so clear that The Pirate Bay is involved in piracy, yet this is not the case.
In fact, The Pirate Bay has done a far better job of capturing the attention and the support from the public. Is this because all these people support piracy? No.
The problem is that the copyright holders involved have given themselves such a bad name through their refusal to understand the flaws of DRM and their general clueless attitude toward the internet and the future..
Legal arguments aside, the copyright holders have made a big mistake in destroying their image so much that, when up against a website named “The Pirate Bay,” the public support is largely against them.
The iPhone Is Now Doomed
I cannot claim to be a developer, but I have been watching the whole iPhone application development issues with interest. As of today’s news, it appears that the iPhone development process is like this:
- Ask Apple for permission to make an application.
- Sign a non-disclosure agreement.
- Invest time and money into an iPhone application.
- Ask Apple for permission to sell or give away your application.
- If Apple says YES: start making money and hope Apple does not change their minds.
If Apple says NO: shut up and deal with it. If you say anything, Apple can sue you, further raising the wasted investment money.
It just makes no sense.
For months now, Apple, the company known for being good at generating a lot of good free PR, has received an almost continuous stream of negative press, first over MobileMe, then the 2.0 software, then over iPhone applications being semi-arbitrarily not approved, and now Apple has extended the NDA so developers cannot say why their applications were not approved. Essentially, Apple has responded to push back over a too tightly controlled system by controlling it even tighter. Worse, Apple managed to time this perfectly with the release of Android, a completely open platform.
Apple has not shot itself in the foot. They shot themselves in the leg or heart. If Apple does not loosen up on their NDA policies soon, developers may leave the iPhone for the much more open Android platform or another more open platform. If the developers leave, Apple has suddenly doomed a potentially promising and incredibly successful platform. The only question that remains to be seen is how far iPhone developers are willing to be pushed? My guess: not much more.
Google's Chrome: What is it for?
Today, Google announced a new project – a web browser called “Chrome.” (A Windows-only beta will be launched on Tuesday.) This could be a major transition for Google, taking them right into the desktop space and fighting Microsoft head on where Microsoft reigns. It could be, but I don’t think it is.
Instead, I suspect that, at least for now, Chrome will serve as something of a reference design for other browsers. Google has a vested interest in technically solid browsers that people want to use. Until browsers have minimal overhead, almost never crash, and are made incredibly speedy, web applications, such as Google’s Docs or GMail, can never take off.
What this means is that even if Google is not really interested in dominating the web browser market, it still makes sense for them to have their own browser. This browser can simply serve as a way for Google to introduce and demo new features they would like to see in every browser. Plus, by making it open-source and saying that “We hope to collaborate with the entire community to help drive the web forward,” they are just inviting people to take their work and add it to every browser.
This theory also explains their heavy emphasis on technical details of the browser, rather than user features. If you want to win the average user’s desktop space, you focus on cool features, not stability. If, instead, you want to push underlying technologies into other browsers, you focus on technical details.
It still remains to be seen if the open-source license they choose will be one that enforces copy left or not, but I think it is safe to say, if this theory is correct, that as much of it as possible will be released under a license that does not enforce copy left, meaning that Google’s code could be made part of closed-source code.
We will not know Google’s true intentions with Chrome for some time, but I am inclined to believe this is not about dominating the browser market, but, rather, about pushing all web browsers forward and making them work better with web applications – particularly Google’s.