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The Living Room Convergence
Posted by: | CommentsBack in 2004, we started hearing the words “Living Room Convergence.” This was a marvelous idea that one day all of our data would be easily accessible through a computer, Laptop, etc. This would replace our pile of DVDs and CDs along with our cable boxes and home phone service. As the words started dying out, the reality began to hit us. Here, in 2011, we have certainly hit the critical “Living Room Convergence.” Let’s take a tour of this phenomenon, shall we?
Life Has Become Wireless
Over the last few years, we have seen a proliferation of things going wireless, from phones to computers and even our digital displays. More and more of our lives are hosted “in the cloud” than ever before. What this brings us is the ability to have all of our media and computing needs met with a minimum of wires stringing along our homes, turning our living spaces back into beautiful designs with fewer tripping hazards.
Our video game consoles also offer wireless connections, now. This means that we can access downloadable content for our games as well as having streaming devices for video services, such as Netflix. Never before in our lives have we known such understated arrangements when our electronic devices were installed.
WiDi: True couch computing
In 2010, those geeks who knew the pains of standing beside their HDMI screens and awkwardly handling laptop, cords and managing to advance through photographs stored on that laptop from their latest vacation, have finally received the answer to their prayers. WiDi allows the user to connect their HDMI television or monitor to a small box that is much like a router and experience the web on their television sets! No 30 foot cables stringing across the room; just a wireless signal that brings the presentation to your choice of living room TV.
Of course, you must have a laptop that is compatible and you must have the device itself. Any laptop with the Intel Core i7 models or higher will do the trick. Netgear has cornered the market on WiDi boxes for home use, and one can be had easily through their website. This technology has truly revolutionized how we see home computing and entertainment.
Streaming Video, Music and Photographs
Thanks to the development of streaming system replay devices like the Roku, Apple TV and the WD TV Live Plus, users with subscriptions to Netflix, BlockBuster, iTunes and other streaming video sites as well as YouTube users, can stream their favorite movies and TV shows directly to their Television sets. This adds to the truth of the living room convergence by bringing us services that once were the sole function of our computers. Some features of these devices include being able to listen to Pandora music stations as well as viewing YouTube videos from your TV.
Many of these devices also allow themselves to be hooked up to external hard drives so that movies that may be stored there can also be played. Music and photographs can also be shared through the set top box. In most cases, the boxes weigh slightly less than a pound and are smaller than a paperback novel, making sure that they are smooth and classy, fitting in with your television and not looking at all clunky.
Tablets
Slightly larger than your cell phone, and only a little heavier, the tablet computer has become one of those items that “all the cool kids have”, so to speak. The iPad has become the ultimate in portable computing, as well as in business management connecting to cloud services in order to maximize the availability of applications while saving much coveted hard drive space. Thanks to the larger screen, movies, television shows, books, music and photographs and any other form of media you can imagine, can be easily shared.
Of course, the iPad also makes available games and other forms of entertainment while working side by side with your business applications, offering a well-rounded and well-developed option for the consumer on the go.
Home Automation
Last, but certainly not least…and definitely taking it one big step further, is the concept of home automation. So, you have your media center based in your living room and you can control everything there with either your laptop, phone or tablet computer. What about the rest of your home? Of course, there are places that will allow you to wire your home entirely so that you can control everything, from the lights to your air conditioner and home alarm system (with all this technology in there, you have one, right?) through your mobile phone or through your laptop. It can even be set up that there are cameras within your home that you can operate and look in on through a secure website giving you the peace of mind that your home is safe while you are away.
There are many people who have found this type of home automation to be of great benefit, and it is one more step on the ladder to becoming technology-ruled people. The ease of turning those lights off in your living room so that you may save energy through your laptop has proven to be essential to some people. Automation is very popular with high level executives who are single and who choose to not place an assistant who remains at home to help them in keeping track of such things.
Where does this all lead?
It seems that, the further along the way we go, the more automated and more technology that becomes involved with our lives. Some people feel that this is a good thing and others are frightened of it. Some fear for our children becoming addicted to new technology and not being able to live without it. Some people just fear technology, period. As with all things, a manner of moderation will do you the best when dealing with our ever increasing world of tech. Take it slowly and learn about your options, and only use which technology you want to use and are comfortable with. As always, enjoy yourself!
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Geek Science: Guest Blogging FAQ
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Technology Looking Forward: Smart Phones, Smart Cars, Smart…Cities?!
Posted by: | CommentsIt has been seen in countless science fiction: a city where the LCD advertisements target themselves to your interests, where everything is wireless and automated, and knows your name, birthday, and pet’s favorite dog food. Computers run the show and our existences have become, if not entirely digital, then at least inseparably so. Thanks to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s new Smart Cities Lab, this may not be a far off reality for the world.
What makes a city a smart city?
As defined by them, a “smart city” is dependent upon six areas of development:
- smart economy
- smart environment
- smart governance
- smart lifestyle
- smart transportation
- smart community
The idea is to create a base grid that would operate via a set of programming and hardware that would remind you eerily of being physically inside an operating system. This “SmartCityOS”, we might call it, would plug into that city’s grid, affecting each area of daily city living in order to automate processes and make more streamlined the experience of 21st century living. This grid would control large-scale items such as traffic flow, and more specific processes such as air conditioning and heating.
How far into the future are we talking here?
Smart city technology is already being implemented in various areas across the globe. The highest concentration of work is currently in Asia, with a heavy focus on Hong Kong and Tokyo. There’s also, naturally, lots of work being done in MIT’s home turf of Massachusetts. We have already taken the first steps towards accomplishing this vision by beginning to embed intelligence into our day to day devices.
You go to a website and the ads that support that website seem to be tailored expressly for you. They are. Through your browsing habits and purchasing habits, the technology on these websites is able to bring you advertisements that are more statistically likely to encourage you to click on them, look at the advertiser’s web page and, if the final goal is successful, get you to purchase a product or service from them.
Smart city technology has also been starting to pop up in the area of the cars we drive. A small chip embedded in the key of our cars stores all of our preferences, so that when you put the key into the ignition, the car automatically adjusts so that the seat is exactly how you prefer it, the heat or air conditioning is correct and all the mirrors are adjusted to just your height and position. There’s no word yet on whether or not it will make your morning coffee for you exactly how you like it, but it’s a good bet that someone is working on it somewhere. In any event, the potential for this technology might be highlighted by how much we already take for granted examples like these.
Looking into the future, then, imagine, entering a department store and the small chip in your store card that was read by the RFID scanner when you entered the door allows a recorded but realistic voice to greet you, “Good morning Miss Smith!” If you more cringe when you hear that than leap for joy, it’s OK. We’ll get to that below.
Why is this direction the one researchers are choosing?
A big reason for this is ecological concerns. While so much in this field remains hotly debated, there are few at this point who don’t agree that there are at least some resources that we are going to start running out of soon. Although significant effort is being put into moving us over to renewable energies, smart city technology lets us buy some more time by making more intelligent, efficient use of our current energy consumption. The more lifestyle functions that we can automate, the less raw material and manpower we wind up using.
At the same time, let’s be honest and point out that a lot of it is also just good business sense, for all of the same reasons as listed above. While these are options being pursued by cities and other governmental structures, these bodies routinely contract out their services to private companies. These companies will get their bids more or less based on the types of efficiencies they can offer. Plus, remember that there are large-scale private institutions, such as malls and skyscrapers, which are so massive in their scope that they become miniature cities in themselves. They have the same incentive to penny-pinch, and the tiny benefits from this technology can add up quickly.
The uncertainty principle
This is, naturally, something of a seismic societal shift. With it come the equally seismic societal problems.
Focusing first on logistics, the biggest of these is the fact that while this promises to save money, this is, to varying degrees, theoretical. The upgrade costs are not. There are going to be a lot of people and places that are going to need to see solid evidence that this is worth the investment before jumping in. This wouldn’t be the first technology that promised to change the world. If it failed, it wouldn’t be the first one of those to do that, either.
Related to that, then, is the fact that the upper limits of this technology’s usefulness are unknown. We are familiar with seeing ads on web pages that attempt to market to us. We are also familiar with how laughably bad these can be. All forms of artificial intelligence have always had to wrestle against the fact that reality doesn’t always lend itself well to being boxed into a set of numbers. Your car’s settings may know what radio stations you prefer, but it’s not going to necessarily be able to read your mind and know that just today you’re really sick of Pearl Jam. It’s unclear just how effective we can hope for this technology to get.
Then there is always the persistent problem of privacy and security. More data and more data systems means more opportunities for infiltration, with all of the crimes that come along with it. While this was a problem before, exactly how secure would you feel about the possibility of a city’s electrical grid being in the hands of a fired city employee with a strong set of hacking skills and a grudge to bear? A less extreme example is the sharing of personal information to companies trying to market you to death. By the time that the 50th billboard you pass blasts your name on it, you just might prefer that someone shut off all the lights.
Future, ho!
All of these problems notwithstanding, it is beginning to look like the smart city might be the way of the future. There may simply be too much momentum to stop this technology from finding its way into all aspects of our daily lives.
Some will react to this with the excitement that comes from years of anticipating it. Others will start to look for tents and teach themselves how to make fire with sticks. If there’s one bit of advice we can issue to all parties, it’s this: wait and see. This future may be close by, but it is still not yet written.
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Future Uses and Growth of Cloud Computing
Posted by: | CommentsWe live in a day and age where technology is advancing so fast that just ten years ago we could not have foreseen the technological advances that we enjoy today. Certainly we have seen plenty of retina scanning and fingerprint scanners in the movies and in science fiction books. Now, however, we see fingerprint security on personal laptops and just about everyone knows what encryption is and uses some form of it. So, when this strange phenomenon called “Cloud Computing” came into the public eye, it set imaginations running and people began asking questions about what it was and what is it capable of.
A large part of the problem in accurately describing cloud computing is that there are many different definitions that are all technically correct. It is application deployment, decentralized office applications, customer service management solutions, storage and much more. Today, I want to focus on the three most popular uses of cloud computing: Cloud Storage, Cloud Hosting, and Software as a Service.
Cloud Storage
This is really a simple idea that can be made complex when you put too much thought into it. At the end of the day, cloud storage is off site backups and storage that can be accessed from any computer or cellular with an Internet connection. It lets the user share large multimedia files across several locations with several people at the same time, all without needing a laptop or a flash drive. Most cloud storage services also allow for multiple users to access the account, such as in cloud services like AVG’s LiveKive which assigns a separate file sharing link to whomever you wish to share with. The link accesses only the files that the administrator designates. Some of the most popular cloud storage services are:
Amazon Cloud | http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/
This Amazon product allows you to store your documents and applications as well as e-books bought in Kindle format. It also allows you to upload your music to their service and no matter how much music there is, you have unlimited space that does not go against your quota for photos, movies, documents and other file types.
DropBox | http://www.dropbox.com/
DropBox allows you to upload your files to their service through a downloaded client that will allow you to simply drop files into a folder that it then synchronizes with your files online. It also allows for sharing by creating folders that get shared with specified users through their email.
AVG LiveKive | http://www.avg.com/us-en/avg-livekive
AVG is well known for their virus and firewall software, and now they’ve entered the cloud storage game by offering their service as a backup solution. LiveKive also allows you to have your backed-up data shared between authorized users and devices.
Having an off-site non-physical backup location is an attractive option for those who worry about their external drives falling to their death when a cat runs across their desk. In order to make the most use of cloud storage and be certain of your backup integrity, a recommendation of on and off site storage and redundancy is recommenced by experts.
Cloud Hosting
Cloud hosting is fast becoming the web hosting solution of choice, especially with e-commerce merchants. Instead of being limited by the space and utilities of a physical web server, those who use the cloud to host their shops and take payments and orders through it find that they can scale their server space to meet their needs without paying for unnecessary utilities or running out of space and having to make the hard decision of which items and services need to be cut from their enterprise.
Cloud hosting can save businesses the expense of not having to negotiate higher bandwidth caps or purchasing new software and hardware in order to keep up with the flow of traffic that their site produces, since most pricing schemes are per-use. More and more hosting companies are moving towards this form of hosting in order to expand upon their current infrastructures and to offer their clients more competitive pricing.
Software as a Service
Here we come to one of the newest but most well known implementations of cloud computing. Software as a Service (SaaS) is an invaluable service for companies who have employees who need their information at a moment’s notice and on the go. SaaS involves the access of applications by users at any time from any location.
One excellent example of SaaS is Salesforce, the ever popular customer management program. It keeps track of all contacts and sales pipelines as well as customer service inquiries so that, no matter where you are, you can reach the information at your fingertips through laptop, desktop, tablet or cell phone. The information is kept in an organized fashion and each installation of Salesforce is customized to the client’s needs so there is very little bloating that makes similar traditional programs so annoying to use and complex to understand. It also allows for far better oversight for employees who spend a lot of time away from the office.
Other similar software would include the Google Docs suit and Microsoft Office 365 where individuals can create accounts and store their documents, spreadsheets, .pdf files and more on the cloud and edit them whenever they desire, from any location. Also, these services offer options for collaboration and sharing at different levels of security. A document can either be only visible to others or they can have read/write access. At the top of the access list, the user can read and write as well as delete and invite others to share and assign privileges. These types of software are becoming more popular as more companies and other organizations take their enterprises to the cloud, working with a population that is spread out all over the city, if not the world.
The Future of Cloud Computing
These are only some of the uses that cloud technology currently supports. When it comes to the future, it is obvious that this will become the way of life for those who rely on vast amounts of data and require portability across systems and devices. Cloud services offer a less expensive and far more versatile experience for users to work with their information and to provide services for others on short notice. Also, it decentralizes data storage which will assist the users in feeling far more secure about their data and give one more tool against corrupted hard drives and other accidents of nature. As time goes on, it is certain that the cloud will become integrated with just about every type of activity that takes place on the Internet.
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Relax. It’s only a Splinter.
Posted by: | CommentsIn its short life, the internet has gone through a number of geological ages. Terms like “Net 2.0” have been coined to place markers on these transition points. Another one is starting to make its rounds, and unlike most of its predecessors it is coined more from a sense of foreboding than hope. The new term is “splinternet.”
The concern expressed by the term is this: that the internet’s development is so multi-directional, not only in terms of the types of software and coding standards used, but in the development of physical technologies that interface with them, that the internet is going to essentially “break apart.” Instead of being a cohesive whole, the internet is going to “splinter” into small islands that can only easily communicate with each other, goes the theory.
Sounds like scary stuff, doesn’t it? It might be if it were grounded in a rational worry. It is not.
Break the word down
One way to make the case that this isn’t a problem is to look at the word itself. “Splinternet” is actually a generalized term to refer to a number of changes that affect only part of the internet. This may make them seem similar enough to describe with a single term, but like the word “sanction,” which has come to mean essentially opposite things (to allow and to penalize), these changes actually cancel each other out. In doing so, they reveal the concept’s underlying contradiction.
The first of these changes we’ve discussed here at length: that is the proliferation of different, for lack of a better term, “speakers” and “listeners” (broader, a bit than “output” and “input”). The “speakers” can be referred to as anything which is part of the process of creating and transmitting the data. This would include operating systems at all levels, data encoders and anything which sends this data out, like a video camera. “Listeners” would include anything which accepts the data and does something with it. This would include web browsers or any similar data translating environment, and just about all hardware. Most software would probably fit into both categories.
The fear, in a nutshell, is that companies are moving towards making speakers and listeners that only understand each other, forcing customers into little pocket islands of communication. The response, in a nutshell, is that this is an absurd worry.
There will never be a single standard. And that’s good.
This fear is refuted by the fact that this worry has existed already for decades and has never come to fruition. Apple and Microsoft, two of the biggest offenders in this category, are famous for trotting out new standards that don’t play well with others. Sometimes these developments do successfully push users to them. Other times they push users to create things like Linux. Still other times, they push users to create things on Linux that work with Windows. No company has ever had success at making the entire internet bend exactly to their will on a whim.
Furthermore, the very problem that we are complaining about we are also helping to create. If you create “standards,” then by their nature you run the risk of giving inordinate power to whoever is responsible for maintaining them. One commentator addressing this problem noted that “Google works because it is standardized.” Well, not everyone wants Google to find them, something we’ll discuss more in a second.
You can’t complain on one hand that companies like Microsoft have too much power, and then on the other that Google doesn’t have enough. Insisting on standards means that you are eventually going to have a single authority in control of them. Single authorities are not what the internet is about.
This brings us to the second definition of the word.
More than one way to skin a Splinter
The other definition of the term refers to a more traditional problem: that of countries imposing their own restrictions on the internet, usually to keep out disallowed content. As an example, Wikipedia reports that “digital content available to U.K. citizens via the BBC’s iPlayer is ‘increasingly unavailable to Germans.’” I’ll pause for a second to give you a moment to discover the flaw you get when you put this problem together with the previous one.
Answer: make another player. If you are in Germany, and you want something that you can’t get through iPlayer, there are other media streamers. The web has “splintered”, you see. In fact, Wikipedia also reports that “many people outside the UK circumvent that rule by buying a virtual private network account with an IP address located in the UK.” I have a friend who moved to China who said that he’s able to regularly jump over the Great Firewall.
There’s also a flip side to this that if we thought for a second about, we would quietly cheer. One of the “problems” that has been mentioned in association with this splintering is that marketers are going to have a much harder time figuring out how to play the system to get maximum bang for their buck. As one who remembers the internet pre-advertising, I have to ask how bad this is. For those of you small businesses out there, it doesn’t mean that advertising will become impossible. It will just mean that you’ll have to put thought into who you reach, and how. Again, this is a bad thing?
We choose standards. They don’t choose us.
The premises behind the worries about the “splinternet” are simply flawed. The inability of the internet to come up with a single set of rules that every last person plays by is its beauty. No one ever guaranteed that everything on the internet would be equally available and equally accessible to all people at all times by all methods. In fact, by definition of the internet’s construct, it’s impossible.
Ways of being on the internet have come and gone, and will continue to do so. A long view of it has shown that every problem spawned a solution, even if sometimes it took all of a year or two. The strength of the internet isn’t that we’re all the same. It is that we’re all different, but we’re all connected by a web, which we can come and go from as we please
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A Comparison of the Most Popular Linux Distributions
Posted by: | CommentsIf you are considering the mighty migration from Windows to try out Linux that you hear is so popular, you might expect there to be a few types to choose from. You might not quite expect that “a few” numbers in the hundreds! Linux’s open source nature has made it a serious programmer’s playground.
With such a large number we obviously cannot go into all of them. What we will do instead is to focus on a few of the biggest ones. In doing so, it’s important to remember that for this type of operating system (ie, open-source), users are building on each other’s work. This creates a tree of variants, some of which are major branching points. The Linux Tree has three major nodes that most of the rest of the distributions branch out from. Let’s look at each of them.
Linux as an operating system is based on ideas ported over from UNIX. Different Linux distributions vary from their UNIX origins by different degrees. Of the three major Linux nodes, Slackware is the variant that aims to be the most UNIX-like. Relatedly, it attempts to emulate UNIX’s goals of simplicity.
Note that for this case, though “simplicity” refers to simplicity of design, not necessarily of use. This means that unless you have some UNIX experience or understand the general approach of command line interfaces, this may not be the best starting point for Linux beginners. If you do, you might sink right into this one.
Note also that the word “Slackware” was not a joke. Or rather, it was one: it was meant to refer to the fact that this was originally a side project not intended to go anywhere. As a result, it is the most decentralized of all of the three major branches, with only a loose “team” associated with it. This means that you’re not going to have much of any official project to go to for information, though there are still large user communities that can help you. Don’t misconstrue all of these warnings though: it is still a popular Linux variant with many loyal adherents.
There aren’t many very popular Slackware children (there’s a joke in there somewhere), but there are a few minor deviations to mention:
- Slax – This is an operating system recommended to only be run externally. It is known for being easily customizable.
- SUSE Linux – Developed in Europe and still popular there, this is a desktop-oriented operating system with a few sub-branches of its own.
Debian is also heavily UNIX based, and is designed around the philosophies of open-source, collaborative design and testing. It also aims to be a secure, stable system, and as such is the basis for more Linux variants than either of the other two major branches listed here. In fact, one of its sub-branches, Ubuntu, has about as many children variants as does all of Slackware.
Debian’s construct is about half-way between the chaotic approach of Slackware and the business model of Red Hat below. It is still open-source, but has a well organized community supporting it. When Debian was initially released, it was built around a set of core principles: the “Debian Social Contract”. From that the Debian Project was formed with its own constitution and organizational structure.
No list of sub-branches of Debian could start with anything but:
- Ubuntu – In 2007 Ubuntu ranked as the most popular Linux variant; more popular, even, than the Debian system it is derived from. It is estimated that more servers use Ubuntu than all other Linux variants combined. Is it really that good? Most users of it say yes. It is frequently described as easy to use. With 12 million computers running it, it is quickly becoming a common home for software ports of all kinds. In short, this might be the best choice of all variants for new users.
- Knoppix – While not nearly as popular, Knoppix deserves mention for being another OS designed to be externally bootable. Unlike Slax permanent installation is possible, or at least not discouraged. It itself spawned the interesting children Music/GNU Linux, a multimedia-friendly OS, and Damn Small Linux, a version designed to work well on older systems with fewer resources.
Linux is an open-source operating system on the whole, but that doesn’t mean that all of its development is non-profit. Red Hat represents the business model wing of the Linux family.
That doesn’t mean that they’ve taken this work and gone proprietary. Red Hat operates on the “professional open-source” model. This means that the code itself remains free and alterable, but the company offers paid services of various kinds related to it, such as training and support. So far this has worked for them, as this year they look to be hitting $1 billion in revenue for the first time.
The point of this isn’t to discuss economics, though, but technology, so we mention this to point out that the company is putting out a quality product that, from all we can tell, remains popular in the Linux community. Thus, Red Hat might be a good start for the user who can probably handle most of the technical side themselves, but would like a professional set of hands to fall back on when they need it.
Red Hat Linux itself is no longer supported, but has instead been split into the following two sub-branches:
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux – This is the most commercial of all of the major Linux distributions, though that doesn’t seem to have significantly impaired its quality. It is commonly sold both to customers and IT firms. There are also “Academic” versions of the software.
- Fedora – The Fedora Project is open-source, but is sponsored by Red Hat. This gives it the positive combination of being both openly developed and quickly developed. The downside is that new versions come out frequently. If you like being on the cutting edge of OS technology this is good. If you like long-term familiarity, it’s not so good.
More even than most of our articles, this is one that you are definitely going to want to get community feedback on. There is way too much about even one operating system to squeeze into an article of this size. Use this as a guide, and then ask around for opinions from people who have used them. There are enough people who have put a lot of time into their use for you to get the solid information you need to join the world of Linux.