Blog Moved

I combined my blog with my website. You can find it now here.

4chan: Defenders of the Internet?

4chan is at it again, bless their little trollish hearts. They've taken up the role of vigilante force for the media pirates on the Internet. I pointed out at some point in the past that the evolution of the Internet would include a de-facto police force, since meat space jurisprudence can't work at cyber speed. I think we are starting to see that take place.

The current tactics, however, will probably not make much of an impact. The sites being targeted are of very little economic importance. If you take down the web site for a bunch of lawyers, you are really aren't affecting their ability to do their job. However, if they start to wise up and focus their efforts on better targets, they could have a significant impact.

For example, if one were to properly approach the problem, then the impact to commerce must be maximized. There are a number of weak spots they could focus on. I wonder the effect of DDOS'ing a major motion picture studio's web site for a new movie, right before the big release. If it could have an impact on the opening weekend numbers, then you might have something. Particularly, if the studio blamed the failure of their movie on 4chan. Now that would make CNN and the other studios would sit up and take notice. They also might think really hard about their participation in the RIAA campaigns.

Of course it could stir up the Obama justice squad, too.

Antibiotics, Sewage and Superbugs

Do you know where the next plague will come from? Neither do I, but the smart money might be on the sewage treatment plant around the corner from your house. The medical establishment has known for a while that the over prescribing of common antibiotics has created a series of newly resistant bacteria. I submit that the sludge slithering under your street may be a bigger problem in the long run.

Very few antibiotics are fully metabolized. You excrete some amount whenever you use the toilet. When you are sick, you excrete some of the bacteria as well. Plus, there are many types of moderately harmful bacteria that exist in even the cleanest bathrooms such as Staphylococcus, Streptococcus, E-coli, Salmonella and Campylobactor. All this is floating around in raw sewage, which is a fantastically rich growth medium.

So what you have here is a large, open air petri dish. Bacteria are free to grow, divide and mutate at will. Combine multiple strains of bacteria competing within this medium and you have a little evolutionary microcosm, with weaker strains dying and the stronger flourishing. Just wait until one of the winners hitches a ride out of the plant and makes its way to the general population.

Is the risk small? Certainly. Is it zero? You wish.

Android and the Linux Desktop

I'm going to break one of my own rules by making a prediction. The year of the Linux desktop will be in 2014. Now, let's talk about how I've arrived at this conclusion.

Android is picking up steam, and from what I've seen, I don't think there will be anything to stop it. Apple currently owns more market share and the iPad will give Mr. Jobs a momentary boost, but the problem is this; Apple controls the hardware and the software. There is no room for any other company to make money. And companies love money.

In the past, this would have meant that Motorola, Samsung, et al would have gone it alone to attempt to control a piece of the market. But, with android they can join forces to an extent and take advantage of a huge development community. This "friendly" competition will push prices down and keep android more affordable than the iPhone. Also, this results in Apple vs. the world, AND Apple doesn't have significant vendor lock in. Additional factors are: AT&T's quality of service, and the Google factor. There should be a strong and steady migration to the android smartphone platform with a strongly superior market share by mid 2011.

The Ipad may revolutionize computing, but my bet is more like a solid selling niche product. However, android is hot on it's heels in this market as well, with a number of tablets soon to be released at significantly lower price points. Based on early price projections, the rest of the market is aiming to undercut the iPad significantly. At the current estimates, I would expect for android to surpass the iPad's market share by late 2012.

With one or two important computing platforms invading people lives, it will eventual become necessary to get more serious with some of the data and applications. While touch interfaces are a leap forward in usability in the mobile arena, they aren't very information dense compared to a keyboard. Imagine writing a book using gestures. Therefore, there will be a natural progression toward systems that allow the user to more fully utilize the android environment.

This may come in the form of an android based netbooks or a full linux distro. I'm expecting android netbooks to hit the market around mid 2012. If the price point stays in line with the currnet android tablet projections, there should be significant market share by early 2014.

Thus, we have the year of the Linux Desktop (er, netbook)

Ubuntu usabilty is going downhill

I have a serious usability issue with the MI at a corporate installation.

When a new instant message is received with the chat window closed, we have to navigate a menu to interact with it. Click-Navigate-click. Before, we simply double-clicked the flashing icon and the window appeared. This might not seem like much to many of you, but they have to deal with 100-150 email/IM interactions a day. This is a major PITA.

I've deployed Lucid on about 6 desktops with individuals all expressing the same problem. I've delayed the roll-out on the additional machines until I could determine the suitability for deployment for the rest of the organization.

The general perception is that NotifyOSD is taunting them with the message without an immediate solution. This isn't a fair characterization, but it persists. People are a little frustrated. I'm going to have to pull the MI at this location if I'm going to continue to deploy Lucid.

They've been running lucid since beta1. That's about two months. With the current rate of interactivity, if they haven't learned it by now, they aren't going to.

Is this a corner case? I'll leave it for you to decide.

Celebrity Muses

After the Quail Hollow golf tournament was over and Tiger failed to qualify, I started wondering about the reasons for his failure. Most of sport writers assumed that it was the recent public revelations of his infidelity and the distractions associated with it.

However, what if the issue is a little deeper. One could argue that as a professional athlete, Tiger knew exactly what he needed to be at the best in the his game. And perhaps the quenching of his libido with a harem of trashy chicks might have had medicial purposes. Medical science has established the people will subconsciously self-medicate. Perhaps these dalliances are necessary to perform at his level?

Another related example is that of Aaron Sorkin, the writer for "The West Wing", "Sport Night" and few other well known TV shows and films. He had a rather public arrest at an airport with marijuana, mushrooms and other assorted mind altering substances. At first, he stated that he used them for the creative process. But then the PC police cracked down and he "admitted" he had a problem. Went through rehab and everything. Hasn't written a descent script since.

In the PC world, Tiger was probably just a skirt chaser. But in the UW world, maybe not...

Android is more than a phone

Google is a self described information company, so why would they enter into the phone market? One obvious answer is that they see mobile as a major advertising platform and wanted to capture the market. While this is true, it's not the full story.

Google's thing is information and this has to be captured in some fashion. We all know that Google makes use of the data we submit in searches, gmail and gtalk. They have even sent around street view vehicles to take pictures of our houses and streets. But with android, they no longer have to do this. We are doing a lot for them. Through use of android, we are a mass of mobile information gathering nodes for the Google collective.

For example, Google would be very interested in the locations of the wireless hotspots you've run into today. You can also correct navigation data on the fly and crowd-source traffic information. You already upload pictures to picasa with geotag information. And the GPS records your coming and goings while driving, working and shopping. All valuable information to marketers and this information is silently recorded by your android handset.

In many ways this is a little creepy. Big brother and all that. But in others, this is a great experiment in digitizing the human experience. We just need to be vigilant that our rights are not trampled along the way.