Computers – Page 13 – Auxiliary Memory

Mathematica versus Sage

Quick version: If you want to learn math get Mathematica. If you have access to Mathematica use it. If you have the money, buy it. If you want to study mathematics, pray that your school provides it for free. It’s wonderful. If you don’t believe me watch these videos or look at the Wolfram Demonstrations Project. I believe if every K-12 kid or college student was taught math with Mathematica far more of them would becomes scientists and engineers. Unfortunately, Mathematica costs a lot of money. If you don’t have the dough, consider Sage, the open source alternative. But if there’s any way to get Mathematica, go that route. If you can’t, let me tell you about Sage in a roundabout way.

When I was a kid I wanted to be an astronomer. I even took astronomy and physics courses when I started college, but I hit a math wall – I finished Calculus I, but then stayed out several semesters. When I returned to Calculus II, my math knowledge was gone. This was partly due the distraction of girls and getting high, but I mostly blame myself for being lazy. I didn’t have whatever it took to focus and work hard. I’ve always wondered how my life would have been different if I had taken school more seriously when I was young, and applied myself.

Now forty years later I fantasize about testing my aging brain by studying math again. Could I go back and relearn math, catch up to what I had learned, and go further? It’s the old question: Can an old dog learn new tricks? My regrets about life involve two kinds. First, all the real jobs I wanted, astronomer, computer scientist, robot engineer, etc. involved mastering math. Second, my fantasy ambitions were about writing science fiction or popular science, and those involved intense verbal skills. I think I failed at both because I’m lazy or I can’t focus deeply enough. Now that I’m older, with fewer distractions in my life, I wonder if I could break through those barriers.

Kids today should have a better time of it because of technology. If young grade school kids could start out learning with Mathematica it could give them a tremendous edge. It might make the abstract and boring subject of mathematics real and alive.

One test of my old brain would be to study math again. I eventually finished college and went into computer programming, but with office applications and databases, not with computer science concepts. I’ve wondered if I could take my computer programming skills and apply them to learning math. Could programming a math problem teach me to understand how math works?

Searching the web, I looked for people who had already tried this, but what I thought of as an obvious match made in heaven doesn’t bring up many hits. Then I found “Mathematical Software and Me: A Very Personal Recollection” by William Stein. Sage is system for using dozens of mathematical programs that have evolved on Unix/Linux OS over the years and tying them together with a Web 2.0 front end and using the programming language Python as the underlying user input language. It’s a free, open source alternative to Mathematica and similar expensive commercial programs. From reading many blogs I had already decided that Python was probably the best programming language to use with learning math, so Sage intrigued me.

When I started out on this project I imagined myself finding a beginning math book, maybe just a 7th grade algebra book and seeing if I could write Python programs to do the problems. But there’s another kind of problem – math has its own language and character set of symbols. Programs like Sage and Mathematica have to create a way to enter formulas without using the traditional symbols of math. Imagine putting this formula into code:

If I just used plain Python I’d have to develop my own subroutines of conversion and I didn’t want to do that. Also, there is the problem of binary to decimal accuracy. Often computer programs will produce 3.99999999 when I need 4.000. Programs like Sage and Mathematic have already solved those problems with custom formula editors and built in subroutines that are time tested. They created programming conventions for entering mathematical formula and subprograms to show that code with standard mathematical symbols. Think of word processing for mathematicians.

What’s the difference between Mathematica and Sage? For some people it’s thousands of dollars. Sage has the goal of providing a free and open source alternative to the commercial Mathematica. Since I work at a university I have access to Mathematica, and thus I’m offered a choice. It’s an odd choice too! Mathematica is gorgeous, elegant, refined and advanced. Mathematica is like being at NASA with state of the art tools. Sage is like a poor garage inventor who has to buy their own.

If I would retire from the university I would no longer have access to Mathematica. Also, if I develop something cool and wanted to share it, with Sage I could, but if I used Mathematica, I could only share notebooks with other Mathematica users. Mathematica is a black box, users don’t know how the results are calculated. With Sage you can look at the source code.

Sage seems like an obvious choice, doesn’t it. Well, there’s one huge stumbling block, you need Unix/Linux to run it – there’s no native Windows application.

Now anybody can go to the free online version of Sage called The Sage Notebook, create an account and start using it for free. A lot of people do, and that’s the problem, sometimes processing is iffy because of demand. Next in ease of use, is to get a Live boot CD with Sage installed on it. Just put it in a PC, reboot and make sure the CD is the first drive to boot – this bypasses Windows on your hard drive and boots Linux instead, leaving Windows untouched. This is a great solution so long as you don’t really get into Sage heavily.

If you happen to already use Linux or Mac OS X, you can get binaries to install on your machine, but that still leaves out all those Windows users. The way to actually run Sage in Windows is to install a virtual machine on your Windows PC. Currently the Sage docs recommend VirtualBox, but that solution seems to be on the way out, and you need to use the free VMWare Player because at the Sage mirrors all they offer is the sage-vmware distributions.

Sage constructed a VMware distribution that you can load directly and run – no installing Ubuntu and Sage in steps. The VMware distro has been pre-customized with all the Sage utilities. This works very slick. You can run Sage from within the virtual machine, or get it running as a server app, minimize the VMware window and call Sage from your Windows browser (the Sage notebook is just a Web 2.0 app.).

I’ve used all four different methods, online, LiveCD, Linux box, and Windows with VMWare. All work. Depending on how heavy duty your math processing needs are, will determine which version you want. However, you have to get used to using a program that’s running other programs under Linux, and that can be tricky. If you are a math teacher and want to use Sage with your students you’ll want to set up a Linux box that has some horsepower and then run Sage as a server app to Windows and Mac machines in your lab.

If Mathematica was free like Sage, I’d just recommend everyone use it. It’s much easier to set up and far more consistent in its use. It’s a shame that Mathematica isn’t given to every K-12 and college kid in the world. Mathematica would be a fantastic teaching platform, but it’s just so damn expensive. But if little kids were taught to use Mathematica (or Sage) when they got their first math lessons a far greater percentage of the population would think mathematically.

What William Stein offers is a free alternative to Mathematica. It requires a bit more work and knowledge to set up and use. In fact, its Unix/Linux origins will turn off most users, so I’d recommend to math teachers to set up a Sage server and just get the kids used to Sage Notebook online.

Sage doesn’t teach math. Mathematica and Sage are like the ultimate graphing math calculator, but with the notebook feature, it can record and animate math and statistics. To see the potential of Sage see “Exploring Mathematics with Sage” by P. Lutus, especially the pages that start with “Trapezoidal Storage Tanks.” This is fairly advanced math, but it illustrates what math teachers could require of their students. Set up a problem, illustrate how to break it down mathematically, and then show the formula working with Sage.

You can visit the Sage Notebook site where users have saved and posted their notebooks online for all to see. Studying these notebooks show the diverse way mathematics is applied to many problems. This is the language of math, science and engineering. I’d like to think if I had access to Sage when I was in grade school my life would have been significantly different.

Like I said, it would be best if Mathematica was given to all kids. If that isn’t practical, I would recommend trying Sage.

JWH – 8/1/10

Little Brother by Cory Doctorow

Little Brother is often categorized as science fiction, like 1984, the book that inspired it, but I think that’s wrong. Neither are science fiction. Both books are political philosophy, and even though both books are set slightly in the future, they are about today’s politics. Little Brother is an exciting story, well told, vividly detailed, full of technological ideas, excellently plotted, with engaging characterization of a Wi-Fi generation – a real page turner. I highly recommend reading Little Brother. But it’s also as serious as a terrorist attack.

Cory Doctorow campaigns hard for his beliefs, standing on Little Brother like a soapbox. I’m sorry Little Brother didn’t get more widespread public attention, because it deserves it, but I’m guessing that outside of the ghetto of science fiction and the geek world of Slashdot, it’s was pretty much ignored. This is unfortunate, because the ideas it brings up for debate need universal attention.

Now, that’s not to say I completely agree with Doctorow. I have some fundamental differences in philosophy. Marcus Yallow, the seventeen year old hero of this novel, and his three friends have a nightmare encounter with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and from then on the story diverges philosophically with my thinking. Doctorow believes in fighting fire with fire, and Marcus and his friends use high tech to battle the high tech of the DHS.

If we lived in Iran I would agree with that, but we don’t. We live in an open society, and if we want to keep it free and open, we need to fight for civil liberties on a battlefield where everyone can watch. Doctorow invents a special distribution of Linux called Paranoid Linux which allows for an underground youth rebellion to assemble in privacy. And he compares this new revolution to the radical yippies of the 1960s.

But there’s a huge difference. Back then the rallying cry was “The Whole World is Watching.” The way to fight big brother oppression is to make everything public. Doctorow has his revolutionaries encrypt everything. That’s bad.

I want to live in a society where I can write anything I want in this blog. I don’t want to live in a society where I must encrypt my thoughts and secretly share them with my friends with public and private keys.

More than that I want the government to use all the technology in its power to find the enemies of society, but I also want our government to prosecute terrorists in the full light of day, and not hide them in secret prisons around the world. None of this bullshit about civil rights being different in war times.

Doctorow is right, innocent people do suffer when fighting terrorism, but turning them into underground freedom fighters isn’t the answer. The book eventually does come to my way of thinking and investigative reporting saves the day. But there are many smaller issues that need to be discussed by a wider audience.

For example, should there be video cameras in classrooms, and do our children need 24×7 surveillance. I grew up in the 1950s and 1960s where I ran wild and unobserved. I loved that freedom and I’d hate to think the kids today don’t have it. But we live in a much different world.

Education is failing many children. The failure of education is creating a widening class divide. Education is the tax straw that’s breaking many a local and state financial back. There is a tremendous sense of failure regarding education. If we applied the “Whole World is Watching” to the K-12 landscape, where anyone could tune into any classroom and see what’s going on for themselves, would that revolutionize the problem? Would people really claim urban schools get equal quality education as suburban schools?

Doctorow had a classroom scene which caused a teacher to be fired. If it had been on video would that have happened? Would kids act up or tune out if they knew their parents were watching? I’d vote for more cameras in the school, but also want to find ways to give kids more privacy from adults after school. We live in the era of watching video cameras, and we’ve yet to explore the impact of that philosophically.

We also live in a world of too many secrets. I don’t want or need Paranoid Linux. If parents could observe their darling young ones in their classes would it help education in our nation? If parents had to spend one day a month going to school with their children, would our educational system get the improvements it needed? That would mean on average there would always be one parent observer in every classroom every day.

In Little Brother the DHS conduct very secret processing of suspects. Would not cameras or citizen observers have solved the central problems of this story?

Doctorow tries to make it clear that he thinks the computer techniques the DHS and other police systems use to sift out the bad guys are silly because they produce too many false positives, and that might be true, but we’re fighting a war on individuals, not nations, and we have to use such statistical techniques. When a few people can kill thousands, we have to find new criminal detection tools.

Little Brother is a novel about privacy, civil liberty and freedom during an era when people are willing to sacrifice all of those rights for more security. I’m surprised that rabid conservatives haven’t made a call to ban Little Brother because the Department of Homeland Security is the villain of the story. But they haven’t because we live in America, not North Korea.

While reading Little Brother, I often felt on the side of the bad guys (the government), but then, in this story the rallying cry of the young is, “Don’t trust anyone over 25” and I’m 58. It also makes me wonder how I would react if I could meet my younger self who used to believe “don’t trust anyone over thirty.”

Little Brother does more to capture the feeling of the radical sixties than any book I’ve ever read set in the sixties. But I’m not sure if Doctorow isn’t idolizing the wrong people. Abbie Hoffman was an asshole. The yippies were a joke.

It’s very hard to be anti-government and not sound anti-American, but I think this book pulls it off. Everyone wants to be free and secure, but some people are willing to give up a lot of freedoms to feel more secure. What Doctorow illustrates is sometimes that’s an illusion, but what he doesn’t explore is the real value of security. Freedom and security are entwined like Yin and Yang.

A society of billions is unbelievably complex and there are no easy answers. Most of us want to live our lives in peace and pursue happiness. There are a few, and by population standards, an extremely tiny portion, who want to hurt other people, or bring down society. It would be great if we could put all of these people on an island and let them have the freedom to hurt each other, but that’s not possible. We have to find these few and neutralize them. That will require police techniques that might hurt or inconvenience the normal citizen. I don’t see any way out of that, but Doctorow brings up the topic for debate.

JWH – 7/17/10

Best Buy Lying

I was helping a lady friend of mine, J, buy a computer yesterday from Best Buy. She took a long time to test a lot of laptops and finally settled on a Samsung NP-R580-JSB1US. She told the salesman which one she wanted.

“That one there is the last one we have,” he told us.

“Do you really want to get the floor model,” I asked J. She looked at me puzzled, and I said, “I wouldn’t.”

“I just got this one out of the box. It’s brand new,” assured the salesman.

“What do you think?” I asked. J isn’t very good at buying computers and was scared of the whole process.

“I just put it out,” he promised us again.

I turned to J and asked her quietly if she had seen him put it out. She whispered back that she saw him put another computer out, but not this one. She wasn’t sure, but he could have.

“Well, do you want to take a chance?” I asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Since it’s a floor model I can ask if they will give you more off,” said the salesman.

“How much?” she replied, J was anxious to save money.

The salesman went off and brought back a saleswoman and she said they could let that machine go for $699, down for $746, which was a clearance price, even though it was a new Intel i5 machine.

J agreed to this and they started taking the display table apart to get to the power cords and the cable lock. It was a fair bit of work. I asked, “And you have the box and all the contents that go with this laptop?”

“Oh yes.”

When they got the computer out they took us to a sales station next to where people were bringing in machines to be fixed. The salesman told a young guy at the counter that the saleswoman said the machine would be $699. The young guy said that was more than what they normally took off for floor models and they’d need to get another person to approve it. We waited. When the other people did show up I asked about the box and was told they didn’t keep the boxes on the floor model.

“The salesman told us he just took it out of the box, so look around, it should be nearby,” I said.

Buy then we had three people helping us, discussing the discount for floor model and I could tell they didn’t have the box, and that machine wasn’t just put out. One of the new comers said something about the machine being out since the store was open three weeks ago not knowing we were told something different. Then another girl came up said the same thing.

“We were told this laptop was brand new.” I said. J was dazed by the whole process. The last three people finally admitted they had no box and they were sure the machine had been out on the floor since the store opened.

“Do you have a new one in the box at another store?”

“I’ll check.”

I turned to J, “Do you want to drive to another store to get a new one?” She said she would if it was the same price on the sale sign by the computer which advertised a clearance price. I was starting to wonder if they had a batch of refurbished machines they were passing off at new. However, the sales lady assured us the other store had 5 new ones in the box. J agreed.

They rang up the computer and added $2.99 for something and $17.00 for anti-spyware, and I told the salesclerk we didn’t want those things. She assured us they were free. The ticket had a lower price for the computer, so when it was totaled it came to $746. It made me wonder if this was another lie.

J paid and headed off to the other store.

I told her I would meet her at her house and help her set up the new laptop later that night. When I got there the first thing I noticed was the Samsung seal was broken and a clear tape covered the Samsung seal with a noticed that it had been inspected by the Geek Squad.

“This machine has been opened.” I couldn’t believe she’d drive all the way to another story and not inspected the box.

“What!” she explained both puzzled and surprised.

“Yes. Now that doesn’t mean anything is wrong with it, and it might not even be a floor model, but companies like Apple and Dell will inspect and put returned machines back in new packaging so it looks completely new and call them refurbished, or something like that. They are completely upfront about selling you a returned machine. Best Buy isn’t doing that. This machine is probably one that’s been returned, and maybe not a floor model.”

“What should I do?”

“It’s up to you, but they lied to you again. I’d take it back, complain that you were lied to and either get your money back or a new machine in the box.” She said she would the next day.

J called me back tonight and told me she had called Best Buy and they had given her some line about Geek Squad opening the machines, removing the crapware, optimizing them, and then resealing the box. “Is that possible?”

“That might be a service they offer, but I would think they would only do it on a machine someone had just bought. I doubt they would open all their new machines. That would make all their computers look like used machines. I think they are lying to you yet again. I think someone brought this machine back. That doesn’t mean it’s bad, but they were lying to you.”

“Who can I trust?”

“I always ask for new in the box when I buy anything, and I’ve had other stores pass returned merchandise as new. It pisses me off. But I also know people feel they can take anything back. And I’ve often seen people write on the net about intentionally buying three different models of something and taking two back.

“This is your Karma,” I told her. “You’re always taking stuff back.”

“What should I do?”

“Me, I take it back and get my money back. But if you really like this machine, then take it back and get one new in the box. They shouldn’t lie. Best Buy should tell people up front they are selling them a returned machine and reduce the price.”

She went on for a bit about how frustrating all this was.

“You could keep this machine and it might work for years and you’ll never know anything different from one that was completely new. But you don’t know what people might have installed on it before they took it back.”

She finally decided to return it. I don’t know how long this story will take to finish, but I’ll submit a sequel if anything exciting happens. And I haven’t even gone into the lies they told J trying to sell her an extended warranty. They essentially said the manufacturer warranty did very little and offered no support.

I still buy lots of stuff from Best Buy, even after all their shenanigans, but I’m a wary consumer.

I remember once me and a friend each taking a laptop up to the checkout to buy and the Best Buy people given us such a hard sell on the extended warranty that I turned to Mike and said, “You ready to go?” and he said “Yes” and we walked out leaving the computers on the counter. We went immediately to Circuit City and bought two laptops. They asked once if we wanted the extended warranty and when we said no, they never said another word.

When I bought my netbook at Office Depot and they got it from the back I asked the guy if it was new in the box and he assured me with an honest face that it was. I got home and it wasn’t. Everything was open and all the parts were just thrown back in the box not even pretending to wrap things up neatly. I went back and told the manager that his salesman had lied to me. I don’t think he cared, but he politely got me another machine new in the box and apologized.

I actually feel sorry for these retail places because people are too quick to return stuff. They think nothing about the merchandise having to be sold again. I only take things back when merchandise is broken or when I’ve been lied to and sold something as new in the box. Makes me want to mail order everything from NewEgg or Amazon.
JWH 6/21/10

Netbooks: Windows 7 versus Linux

I’ve been playing with Linux since 1994, but it always disappoints me in use, even though I love the concept of Linux. Recently, I thought Linux for the desktop was going to make it on netbooks. My Toshiba netbook came with XP, and it was okay. Because I didn’t depend on my netbook I felt like experimenting, and tried several netbook specific versions of Linux, including Ubuntu Netbook Remix, Jolicloud and Moblin.

They were cool, especially Jolicloud which tries to control it’s environment like the iPhone/iPad with HTML5 apps, but ultimately I discovered that Windows 7 was by far the best netbook OS for me. I’m sure the Linux people will have technical reasons to argue that I’m wrong, but for me the aesthetics of how Windows 7 looked on the small screen, it’s speed of booting up, running and shutting down, and it’s battery life just seemed overwhelmingly obvious. It’s a shame that XP still comes on some netbooks.

However, I’d gladly trade my Toshiba netbook for an iPad. The small size of the netbook makes it useful for on-the-go computing, but ultimately, various needs will determine whether or not a user wants a netbook or tablet. If I was a student taking a computer to class, I’d probably want a netbook, but I’m not a student. Nor a traveling salesman. I now wished I hadn’t bought a netbook because I think a iPad would better suit my portable at home needs. And I might even be wrong about that too. I might be better served by a smartphone, like an iPhone or Android.

I’ve read that Windows 7 is too big and power hungry to run on tablet computers and compete with the iPad, and that’s a shame. I’m very happy with Windows 7. If I could afford to own a Mac OS machine it might compete, but I’m so happy with Windows 7 that I’m not sure I’d switch if the prices came down on Macs. Having Windows 7 on my desktop, HTPC and netbook works so well it makes me not want more. I’m OS satisfied with Windows 7.

After having Jolicloud and Windows 7 on the same machine for awhile, I realized that Windows 7 has won the OS war for me. I removed Jolicloud, and I gave my second desktop I kept for Ubuntu away. I now just have three machines: desktop, HTPC, netbook. All run Windows 7 and they all talk to each other easily.

JWH – 5/14/10

Your Life in the Cloud

Cloud computing is a hot topic in the computer world, but if you’re not a tech geek you may be wondering about the term. In the early days of networking, when system administrators drew diagrams of their local networks they’d have little symbols for their computers, printers, hubs, wiring, but when it came to picturing the connection to the outer world, they’d draw a cloud. Eventually, they’d draw a cloud and write Internet over it.

The cloud was just a mysterious place at the edge of their map. Back in the old days, they’d describe two networks, the LAN (local area network) and the WAN (wide area network), but the WAN just meant all the branch offices. The Internet tied all the LANs and WANs into one big world wide network. Any computer equipment you don’t manage is part of the cloud.

The shift to cloud computing means trusting other people with your data, programs, and even CPU processing. Picture this. The old way was taking photos, processing them with Picasa, and keeping your snaps on your laptop. The new way is taking photos, uploading them to Picnik, crop and process them in your browser, and then creating a Show to send your friends to view online. Nothing really happens on your computer. You use your computer to manipulate photos at a distance. It doesn’t even matter what kind of computer you have, Mac, PC or Linux.

Now, there are pros and cons to cloud computing. If your computer is stolen, you don’t lose your photos. But if Picnik goes out of business, you do. But Picnik was just bought by Google, so hint, hint, see the direction of things? Google already has Picasa, so why would they want Picnik?

Well, a little story might explain that. In the fabled old days of writing computer programs, a programmer would develop and test a program, and then take it to each computer in the building and install it, and then wait for the users to find more bugs. If your business had PCs and Macs, you’d have to write two versions of the program. If the OSes were upgraded, you’d sometimes have to rewrite your programs. It was a pain. If the boss wanted a new feature, you’d rewrite the program, and then walk around and reinstall the program on all the machines again. A bigger pain. Then came web based programs. You write one program that runs on a web server that worked with PCs, Macs, and Linux machines. No more going around installing on individual computers.

Right now when Google updates Picasa everyone has to download and install the upgrade. If Google switches everyone to Picnik, all that goes away. They no longer have to worry about supporting millions of users, or maintaining PC and Mac versions of their programs. But it does mean they need to offer users a lot more disk space to upload their photos to. Instead of keeping your photos just on your computer, you can also put them on Google’s computers, in the cloud. If you are trusting, you could even delete the photos off your camera and computer. In other words, you are letting Google be your hard drive, at least for photos. And if you use Google Docs, you are letting them be your hard drive for word processing and spreadsheet documents.

Cloud computing has tremendous ramifications. Can you trust the cloud? Actually, can you trust the companies that maintain a cloud presence? Many people aren’t trusting by nature. I assume they might use the cloud, but keep copies of everything they own on their PC and backup drives. But what if there were more security features to the cloud? What if you could back up your stuff on Google to SkyDrive, Microsoft’s cloud storage? Or what if something like databanks emerged, that offered the same security for your data as they do for your money? What if there were governmental regulations and safeguards to data stored in the cloud?

Let me assure you of something, you will want the cloud to work and be safe because it will make your computing life infinitely easier. It would mean the end of viruses, and new computers that run slower and slower, and computers that start acting weird in ways you can’t understand. Computers could become solid-state devices with no moving parts, and the OS could be burned in ROM, so they can’t be changed, or infected, and your machine could become instant on, like a TV. And the OS wars will be over too, no more I’m a Mac, I’m a PC commercials, even though they were cute.

This is explained in “The real reason why Steve Jobs hates Flash” by Charlie Stross, the cutting edge science fiction writer, and over at TechCrunch in “Apple’s Secret Cloud Strategy and Why Lala is Critical” by Michael Robertson. It’s why the iPad and iPhone are more important now to Apple than the Mac. It’s why Intel is worried about its dominance of Intel Inside chips. It’s why Google is trying to take over the world with Android. It’s why Netflix can get almost any kind of device to stream videos directly to your TV. It’s why the iPad can run blazingly fast on a 1Ghz processor.

When everything is moved into the cloud, computers can become very simple. Steve Jobs knows that in the future no one will pay extra bucks to own a Mac. It’s why the iPad started out so cheap that HP and Microsoft cancelled their tablets. Computers will go through a paradigm change like when they morphed from mainframes/minis into microcomputers, that caused the personal computer revolution. For decades the network computer has been predicted, but it’s taking a while to emerge. Network computers can only succeed if everyone has fast broadband.

You are already living in the cloud if you use Netflix to stream movies. You are already living in the cloud if you do your banking online. Most people who did their taxes this year used cloud programs rather than installing TurboTax on their machine. Most people store their photos in the cloud. Soon you’ll store your music in the cloud. Eventually they will make video cameras that have WiFi and your video will be saved immediately to the cloud. If you watch Hulu, you are getting your TV from the cloud. When you put your medical records online, they will be filed in the cloud.

I use Safari Books Online, and so I read computer books from the cloud. Kindles and Nooks could just as easily display pages of books from the cloud instead of downloading whole books. I read my newspaper on the cloud. I’m starting to read magazines on the cloud.

Now I’m sure some of you are wondering why invent a new word for the Internet. Or we could simplify everything by just calling it the net. Everything will be on the net. The distinction is that your old computer and hard drive are on the net now. They are a node on the Internet. Using the term cloud implies the that node is different. It should eventually do away with hard drives, and seldom mentioned, but also do away with printers. If you combined tablet computers with cloud computing you can do away with paper.

One of my tasks at work is to monitor the helpdesk tickets for my college, so I know what kind of problems pester users every day. Cloud computing will make most of the problems I see now disappear. Sadly, it will put a lot of tech support guys out of work. If one geek guru can support a hundred users now, he or she will be able to support five hundred in the future. But this won’t happen overnight.

Most businesses will not let their workers put business documents in the cloud any time soon, but I expect most students to start saving their work to the cloud now. Why spend big bucks for Microsoft Office when you can use Google Docs or Windows Live for free? Poor OpenOffice should just fade away. All the free cloud computing services will convince home users and students to switch pretty quick. Business will install SitePoint and create their own private cloud services for awhile, but when security and privacy get better, I bet they will move to paid cloud services.

Using the cloud will cost money. We see a lot of free services now, but it will be tiered, so if you want more or better functions, you will pay. Picnik is a good example. I’m expecting iTunes 10 to incorporate Lala technology in a way that puts personally owned songs into the cloud. Whether Apple sells us the space or gives it to us is another issue. I’m thinking as long as you’re a loyal iTunes shopper, Apple might give their customers lifetime space, but we’ll see.

I’m anxious to see what Steve Jobs announces in June. Apple has leaped into the forefront of the cloud computing revolution with the iPad and iPhone. By fiercely controlling its App Store, it controls the quality of its cloud experience. That was a brilliant move on Apple’s part. I would expect further control in the future. It’s great to say you have over a 100,000 apps, but it’s another thing to say you have 10,000 A+ quality apps. I see the iPad as the model of future computers. Personal computing wild west days are over.

Right now computer users can muck up their machines by installing anything they want, or carelessly allow hackers to install dangerous programs on their machines. If all applications came from a tightly control app store, then things will be different. I expect the replacement for Windows to be an OS tied to an app store, so Microsoft can control the entire experience. I’m not sure what the Open Source crowd will think.

Right now the iPad represents a hybrid of cloud computing. It still downloads apps. A true network computer won’t. HTML 5 will go a long way towards making everything a web application. Most iPhone/iPad apps are really just hybrid web apps. This is a murky area for my crystal ball. A totally streamlined OS for a net computer will be little more than a HTML 5 browser. It should also mean the end of the app store. If you play a game, the game will run at the game server, not on your device. Your scores and saved games should be saved on the server. Anyone who is really into thinking about cloud computing will see this as a conundrum for the phasing out of dedicated computers. Games require the most local hardware, so they will be phased out last.

Other people will say that’s what the Xbox and PS3 have been doing for years, phasing out PC gaming. Will cloud computing ever have the power to compete with gaming consoles?

JWH – 5/2/10