Internet – Page 20 – Auxiliary Memory

Web Sites I Want – Best Essays from Printed Magazines

Even with the social bookmarking sites, reading from the internet is like drinking from a fire hose. What I’d like to see is highly selective bookmarking site, and in particular, the one I’d love to have most would be Best Essays From Printed Magazines. The top writing on the net is usually reprinted from the major print magazines, but those essays are overshadowed by the gigantic volume of web journalism. Hey, I’m a blogger and love getting readers, and I love reading blogs, but the heaviest of the heavy duty essays are still from print magazines. The cutthroat survival of the fittest in the print magazine industry by its very nature acquires the best writing.

That’s why I’d like a site that helps me find the best essays over 1,000 words. Adding the length requirement is important because too many magazines have gone to filling up their pages with short web level writing. Social bookmarking sites like delicious and StumbleUpon are great for snacking on popcorn and candy level reads, but not so yummy if you’re looking for literary steak. Yes, they will link to long quality essays from printed magazines, but you have to wade through zillions of peanut size stories of questionable value, more akin to Television’s funniest videos in informational nutrition.

No, I want a site that’s very specific and limited. I’d like an editorial board that selects the Top 100 magazines that publishes their content on the web, and offers a system that lets users bookmark and vote on the best essays they are reading. Hell, I’d even pay to subscribe to such a site if they got permission to reprint articles that don’t get reprinted on the web.

The web has gotten too big and mangy, so when I want to know something I go to a specific site, mainly Wikipedia. I’ve given up subscribing to magazines, mainly because I’m against paper for environmental reasons, but also because when I was subscribing to dozens of magazines, all too often I’d only find a good article here and there. Most of the content was filler, like the web. I guess I’ve gotten spoiled by the iTunes model – who wants to buy an album when it’s the hit song you want. This is why I prefer Netflix to cable TV. We need more ways to cut out the noise.

Here’s are examples of the kind of long essays I’d like to read:

Publish or Perish (The New Yorker)
How to Save the News (The Atlantic)
Geek Power: Steven Levy Revisits Tech Titans, Hackers, Idealists (Wired)
A Draft Sequence of the Neandertal Genome (Science)
Yes, Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare (Times Literary Supplement)
L.A.’s Pot Revolution (Reason)
Green Giant (The New Yorker)

I guess what I really want is a web version of the Best American Series to be published monthly, instead of the yearly printed volumes they have now. And if they wanted to make extra money, reprint the monthly web site editions as ebooks for $9.99 for Kindles, Nooks, iPads, etc.

JWH – 5/12/10

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

Will Internet TV Make Cable and Satellite TV Extinct?

There are two kinds of TV, live and recorded. Internet TV sites like Hulu have already proven how well they can handle recorded TV shows. Internet TV even does away with the need for a digital video recorder (DVR). Think of a show, find it, watch it. Internet TV like Hulu is even better than broadcast, cable or satellite for sponsors because viewers are required to watch the commercials. And as long as they have such limited commercials as they do now, I don’t mind watching them. Otherwise I’ll pay for streaming services like Netflix to be commercial free.

Where Internet TV is weak is for live broadcasts, like for sports and 24/7 news. The infrastructure of cable and satellite systems have far more bandwidth for handling live television. That won’t always be so, because I’m sure some kind of broadcast Internet technology will emerge to solve that problem and people will be watching live TV on their iPhones, iPads, netbooks, notebooks, desktops, HTPCs and Internet TV sets.

Digital technology ate the music industry, and is about to eat the book, newspaper, magazine and television industries. I gave up cable TV months ago and for recorded shows I’m in hog heaven by using the Internet TV, which includes streaming Netflix. I also supplement by viewing diet with snail-mail Netflix discs, but I see where that habit could be phased out too. The only reason to get a disc now is for the picture quality of Bluray. Future bandwidth will wipe out that technology too.

Owning music CDs and video DVDs seem so pointless now. I wonder how that’s going to impact the economy and effect the entertainment business. It also makes me wonder about my efforts of building an easy to use HTPC. I’m struggling to get perfect Bluray playback through my HTPC computer, wondering if I should spend $80 for better software, knowing full well in the not too distance future I’ll phase out Bluray too. The HTPC has phased out the LG BD390 Bluray player I bought just last year, and an Internet TV set could phase out my HTPC.

Last night my friend Janis had us watch Bigger Than Life on Bluray because NPR had praised this old James Mason movie so highly. The flick wasn’t very entertaining, but it was fascinating. The Bluray presentation of this 1956 CinemaScope production was stunning in 1080p high definition, showing intricate shadows and vivid colors. Internet TV and streaming Netflix can’t provide that kind of resolution right now, but I imagine it will before 2015.

Technology is moving so fast that we buy devices we want to throw away in a year or two. Growing up my folks wanted appliances and TVs that would last 15 years. I remember Ma Bell phones lasting over twenty years. I’ve had my 52” inch high definition TV for only three years and I’m already lusting for a new set. Will technology ever settle down again so we can buy something that will last a generation? I think it might. Of course it will be terrible for the economy, but I can imagine TV technology that would satisfy me and take the ants out of my pants to have something better.

My perfect TV will still be a 1080p HDTV like we have today. I’m pretty sure we can go decades without changing the broadcast standards again. It will have a digital tuner to handle over-the-air broadcasts (in case the net goes down) and an Ethernet jack and WiFi for Internet TV. It will have two removable bays. One for a computer brain that can be upgraded, and another for a SSD hard drive. As Internet TV is perfected the need for a local DVR will be diminished. That will also be true for an upgradable CPU. There will be no cable or satellite TV. Everything will come to us by TCP/IP. Broadcast will remain for the poor and for when the Internet fails. Cable and satellite TV will go the way of the record store. I also assume all Internet access will be wireless, but it will take 5-10 years to phase out wires. Now that doesn’t mean cable and satellite companies will go under. I expect them to buy into the Internet TV revolution. I do get my internet access from Comcast.

Most people will think I’m crazy by predicting the extinction of cable and satellite TV. They can’t picture living without all that choice. That’s because of the channel switching mindset. We have always thought of what’s on TV by flipping through the channels, even though very little TV is live. Most of TV is recorded, and we fake immediate diversity by offering 200 concurrent channels to watch. Eventually the only channels to watch will be live, because other technology makes it easier to find recorded shows ourselves.

Live TV will go through a renaissance. Cable and satellite TV systems are still the best technology for live TV, and they will hang on to their audiences for another ten or twenty years as Internet broadcast TV is perfected. However, guerrilla TV is emerging on the net, and micro audiences are evolving. For the big networks, how many Today like morning shows will we need for live TV? How many channels to promote sports? How many to 24/7 talking head news and reality shows do we need? How many live PBS networks will we need? Will audience gather around central networks or seek out specialized Internet broadcasters catering to their personal interests?

Ultimately, how much TV really needs to be live? Even 24/7 news shows spend a lot of time repeating themselves. Live TV is leisurely. The hours of the Today show are filled with just minutes of quality content, most of the time is fluff and commercials. And if an opera is filmed live for PBS does it really need to be seen live? Survivor and Amazing Race would be tedious if live.

When the flipping the channels metaphor dies out, and library checkout metaphor gains popularity, TV viewing will change. People love football, war and car chases live, but will even that change too? If you were sitting with you iPad killing some time, will you think, “Hey let’s watch the game in Miami,” or will you want to play a game or watch something recorded? I can easily imagine sites of “WHAT’S HAPPENING NOW!” start showing up, listing thousands of events going on around the world. TCP/IP technology will work better to provide that kind of service than cable or satellite.

Until you play with Internet TV you won’t understand what I’m saying. You’ve got to sleep with the pods or drink the Kool-Aid to buy in. Start with streaming Netflix and Hulu.

And if people love cell phones, Facebook and Twitter to stay in constant contact won’t they love live TV from their friends. Instead of watching the crew of the Today show have fun, why not video link all your friends and create your own morning show? And the emergence of spy networks will also change viewing habits. If every daycare and classroom had web cams, wouldn’t parents spend more time watching them? Won’t all the web cams in the world grabbing eyeballs destroy the audiences of the 200 channels of national networks?

We can’t predict the future. Growing up in the 1960s I never imagined anything like the Internet. All I can predict is change and more of it. But I’m also going to predict that once the Internet and digital upheaval is over, we might settle down to a slower pace of change. Well, until artificial intelligence arrives or we make SETI contact with distant civilizations.

Living in the Hive Mind

Our minds are created out of billions of interconnected brain cells. And we’re billions of people living in an interconnected world of television and computer networks. Is our world becoming the science fictional hive mind? Personal computers have gone to parallel processing with ever growing number of CPU cores. Is something like Wikipedia the result of thousands of human minds working in parallel?

For most of Earth’s biological history, individual life forms competed with others for survival. Eventually organizations like social insects and herd animals developed, but what can we call the Internet in relation to biological cooperation? Is it a hive mind?

How much of my thinking dwells on my immediate life of breathing, eating, drinking, sleeping and earning dollars to make my living, and how much is spent on data from the gigantic sensory network of the Internet? And wasn’t books really just an earlier form of networking? And then newspapers, radio and television more advanced forms?

I just finished reading Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D. H. Lawrence which most people think is about sex, but it’s also about the transformation of society by industrialization. Last night I watched Bright Star, about John Keats and Fanny Brawne in England 1818-1821, about one hundred years before Lady Chatterley’s Lover. I’m also reading Darwin’s Origin of the Species by Janet Browne, about how Charles Darwin came to write his famous book. All three of these stories illustrate the transformation of society over the past two hundred years. I think the romantic poets might have been canaries in the mine.

In Bright Star, people lived in houses with no electricity, and light and heat came from fire. Their only connection with the world beyond their vision was through letters and books. People led lives very close to other people, as nearly all work and play involved direct social involvement. Much of our time is spent communicating with people indirectly though computers and television screens. We spend far more of our time connected with the world beyond our vision. Facebook is considered socializing by many people.

The gamekeeper of Lady’s Chatterley’s Lover, Oliver Mellors knows what it’s like to be an individual and understands how industrialization was destroying individuality. One of the reasons the novel is so much about sex is because Lawrence believes the physical contact between individuals is more important than intellectual communication. Was Lawrence right? Is the hive mind bad?

Could we ever go back? What if we turned off the hive mind? It would involve shutting down the computer and television networks. What would society be like if the fastest form of communication was books and letters? I’d be out of a profession, since most of my life has been working with computers. When I was young I worked in libraries, so I could go back to that. Oliver Mellors couldn’t stop industrialization so he and Lady Chatterley had to retreat from the world to a farm. During the 1960s the final path of hippies was back to the land too. In fact, for thousands of years, all revolts against socialization has been back to nature movements.

Through the Internet I am in communication with people from all over the world. Could I return to a life of working in my yard and hanging out with a few people I know physically? For most people it’s not an either or consideration, they blend in both worlds, but if you look at the young they are spending more and more time in the hive mind. The mobile phone will probably become the closest thing we’ll ever have to telepathy.

I spend a lot of my time being lonely for physical interaction with other people. And even though I find great intellectual satisfaction from the Internet it never eases that physical loneliness.

Farmville, the Facebook game, has over 82 million active players, and represents over 1% of the world’s population. What does that say? Is it a virtual return to the land, or is it a new hive mind form of socializing, or is it a sad escape from physical loneliness? I say that as I write this for my hive mind friends to read while my wife is out in the den tending to her virtual farm.

JWH – 3/27/10

LibraryThing, Goodreads, Shelfari, Google Books, Anobii, WeRead

I’ve been a bookworm my whole life, and for as long as I can remember I’ve wished I had a list of all the books I own. I’d also love to have a list of all the books I’ve read. I think it would be impossible to create the second list, but the first list would only be a matter of typing. And now with the Internet and the ISBN book number, it’s even less typing than before. I could even buy a barcode reader that looks up information automatically online without typing at all. My first consideration was to buy a standalone computer program like Book Collector from Collectorz.com, or even design my own database or spreadsheet with Access and Excel, but I decided the fun solution is to use a Web 2.0 online book cataloging site.

The Internet has added an extra twist to this list making activity, called social cataloging. By entering your books into an online database it allows social network programs to compare your list to lists created by millions of other bookworms. The synergy of doing this offers endless social networking possibilities. The obvious one is to find other readers who have similar reading tastes to yours that will help you find great books to read that you’ve missed. For people trying to build big personal libraries, it’s fascinating to know the size of other collector’s collections. The largest on LibraryThing is 43,061 books. Also on LibraryThing, the most reviewed book is Twilight (1,386 reviews), the most owned book, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (47,598 people out of 1,035,403 members), or that my favorite science fiction writer, Robert A. Heinlein has 72,427 books in those collections, as compared to my second favorite science fiction writer Philip K. Dick who has 46,991 books in LibraryThing user’s homes. That’s out of 48,365,418 total books catalogued.

The trouble is there are many wonderful book cataloging sites to choose from, each with their own plus and minuses. Luckily, all are free except LibraryThing, and it’s free for your first 200 books, so you can try them all. The sites I’ve found so far are (there may be more):

Each of the sites try to make it easy to enter books, but they all do it differently. They each have millions of books already catalogued, so the quickest way to add a book to your list is to find it first on their list by searching on the ISBN and then hitting the add button. This can be made even faster with a barcode reader, but I don’t have one. I’d say it’s taken me a couple hours to enter in 58 books at LibraryThing. This is slow because I like selecting the right cover photo to match the cover of the book I own, and I started with a shelf of old books without ISBN numbers. That means searching by author or title, or even entering in all the book info myself. I could probably do 60 books in 20 minutes if they were all recent and I only needed to use ISBN. Usually when you get a book with ISBN, the cover and all the other information is already there.

I’ve taken to LibraryThing, but when I finished building my list I could export my library to another site to see if I like their social networking features better. Or I’ve thought about using one site for listing books I own, and another for books I can remember reading. Or use another site for just my non-fiction science and history books to see if I can find readers with my exact interests. The different cataloging sites have discussion groups for books, or linking systems to Facebook and blogging sites, so if you like to discuss and review books, these systems connect you to other people who are looking to read reviews or talk about books too.

On one blog I read a post by a woman who said her family paid for three separate $25 lifetime subscriptions to LibraryThing, for herself, her husband and her kid, so I’m assuming there’s long term rewards for doing the work of entering a book collection into the system. I won’t know for awhile. I’ve got 18 more shelves of books to enter, and then I’ve got to try all the different features, but I’ll get back to you with more info.

I’ve added books with all of these systems and I find it easiest to add books to LibraryThing, especially when dealing with manual adds. LibraryThing was the only site to have any books by Lady Dorothy Mills, an author I collect. Her books are very rare, and they only had 3 of 15 I own. These systems are far from perfect, and the quality of the data is imperfect. It would be great if everyone catalog the precise edition they owned, but that doesn’t happen.

Anobii, Shelfari and WeRead are probably best for people with newer books and people looking for more social interaction since they have the largest number of members. They are slicker sites with more glitz than LibraryThing. GoodReads is in the middle. Google Books merely lets you tag books without any reporting features or social networking. It is good for links to the web, and if you’re a complete Google user in general.

One of the fun things about adding books to LibraryThing is it tells me how many other members own the book when I add it to my collection. For books by Lady Dorothy Mills, out of over a million users, I’m the only one that has any of her books. I really like it when I find just a few people who also own the same book, like the 2 other people that own In Search of Paradise a biography of Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall, the guys who co-wrote Mutiny on the Bounty. Are those two people much like me?

JWH – 2/7/10

I finished my data entry and my library can be seen here. To me, the fun way to view is by cover art. Open your browser to fill the screen and then click the Covers button. I have 706 books. I learned a lot by creating this catalog. For one thing, I have too many books, and I plan to thin my collection when I get a chance. The largest portion of this collection is unread by me. My bookstore roaming eyes are far bigger than my reading stomach. I really wish I had more time to read.

JWH 2/16/10