Computing: The next big thing
I like to have a bit of a speculate every so often as to where the computing industry is going, so today I thought I’d put my ideas down in a blog post as a record and maybe see if what I predict ends up happening over the next 2-3 years.
We are currently at a point where mobile devices are getting more and more powerful and we are seeing phones and tablets and low level laptop style devices all starting to run the same operating systems and applications, in the future I can see the lines between these devices being blurred even more.
The main difference I see at the moment between all these devices is the screen size. They are all essentially as powerful as each other and they all run the same applications, apart from when screen size is the defining factor. In the not so distant future I see this distinguishing feature of screen size disappearing and instead we will have devices with resizeable or stretchable screens.
I believe being able to dynamically change the size of the screen on a device will be the next big computing revolution. Taking a device that is the size of a current phone and being able to stretch the screen to make it act more like a tablet and then even being able to stretch it larger than that to make it act like a desktop PC while all the time the software dynamically re-flowing the layout of applications and enabling and disabling functionality as the user changes the size of the screen. This is what I believe the next big leap will be.
This revolution could take the currently well defined categories of devices and essentially meld them into one single device.
High performance low power consumption CPUs are becoming more and more common to the point where they are beginning to step on the toes of desktop processors performance wise. We will soon be able to have as much processing power in a mobile device as we can on a traditional desktop machine and this combined with resizeable screens could be all that is required for us to only ever need a single device for all our computing needs.
Just the idea of a resizeable screen excites me. I will definitely be keeping an eye out for any developments in this area.
Computing: Prevention vs Cure
Prevention is better than cure is one of those age old sayings mostly linked with medicine, well I think it also needs to be applied more in computing.
At current the computing industry thrives on cure, entire industries have been built on cure. In this case the cure Im referring to is applications that compensate for the inefficiencies or inadequacies in other software or areas of computing.
The problem I have with cure is much like in medicine the cure can often have undesired affects and only partially resolve the issue. Prevention is better because it stops the problem in its tracks and never lets it occur in the first place. The problem with prevention though is its hard to implement and often has no commercial or financial benefit when compared to cure.
A good example of cure is virus scanners. Here we have a world wide industry employing tens of thousands of people and making millions of pounds a year protecting us from inefficiencies in operating systems; They are providing the cure for a problem that would be much better served if it was prevented. Prevention in this case is a much more difficult problem to solve and even the current cures don’t always resolve the issue fully. Like cures virus scanners often have undesirable affects like slowing down computers or making a false positive for an important application or part of the operating system.
The prevention solution to replace virus scanners is a hard problem to crack. Many people argue that operating systems like Linux and OSX don’t suffer from viruses which isn’t entirely true and there is the argument that because of their relatively low market share compared to Windows that virus writers are less likely to target them in the first place.
I wrote an article a while back about the Mac app store and in that I put forward the idea that Apple could potentially lock down the OS in such a way that a virus would not be able to run at all. I then became aware some time after the initial announcement of the mac app store sandboxing which will be a further attempt to stop malware and viruses from running on the system. I see this as Apples attempt at creating a prevention rather than relying on the cure of virus scanners.
Behind all of this we also have a moral dilemma. If a company can modify their software to provide a prevention rather than relying on a third party cure should they do it and more importantly should they be allowed to do it? For example, say that tomorrow Microsoft announce that Windows 8 will be using some new revolutionary technique that means that viruses and malware could no longer exist on their systems should they be allowed to ship it? Now you may think I’ve gone mad here and you might be saying to yourself of course they should ship it who wants viruses and malware on their systems and who wants virus scanners slowing things down? Well removing the need for that virus scanner removes the need for that world wide industry employing tens of thousands of people and making millions of pounds every year; with the way the global economy currently is the last thing we really want to be doing is destroying industries over night. Don’t get me wrong I’m all for change and I think as technology progresses we will see a lot of changes in the world like this, but it doesn’t mean that the question shouldn’t be asked.
Another case of prevention vs cure can be seen from the recent articles going around the internet about turning comments off on blogs. I posted a reply to these articles in general, and it highlights to a degree what I’ve been talking about here, in this case using spam filters and moderation as the cure to a problem that needs a prevention (The article outlines a potential prevention).
There is of course the commercial argument for cure over prevention. There is more money to be made from cure than prevention. Making an OS that is already market leader no longer require a virus scanner is probably not likely to make that market share any greater, it might make the customer more happy with the product but it’s not likely to make any more money where as a virus scanner can have reoccurring revenue charging a customer a monthly fee to get the latest virus definitions to keep their systems safe. So this begs the question of is there any real motivation to do the hard thing of implementing prevention?
While I’ve only listed virus scanners as the main culprit here there are many other examples throughout computing, email spam filters, firewalls, tools to detect memory leaks in software, the list goes on and on.
I’m sure as time goes by more and more problems will move from cure to prevention as generally speaking prevention gives the user a better experience and creates a better more efficient system.
While the problem of prevention is a hard one I think it also creates more interesting and unique solutions and a certain level of elegance and efficiency that interests me greatly.
Re: Comments off
Over the past week or so there has been a lot of tweets and blog posts on the subject of turning off comments on blogs and with the reasons why. Below is a bullet point list of the main reasons that appeared.
- Spam
- Time spent moderating
- Unconsidered responses
- Anonymity
- Don’t contribute to the content
- New comments on an article may be irrelevant based on new articles
Personally I don’t really have an opinion on comments being on or off. I imagine though if I was dealing with comments on the same scale as a lot of the guys who have turned them off then I could well turn them off too.
This article is going to be more about looking at the problems and proposing solutions. I see the solutions being broken down into the following:
- Identity
- Relevance (both to the content and time based)
Identity attempts to solve the issue of “spam” and “anonymity” directly and “time spent moderating”, “unconsidered responses” and “don’t contribute to the content” indirectly.
A lot of spam comments are either bots posting advertising or people creating random use once accounts or posting anonymously to try and get a link or promote some spam based web site. I propose an identity based system where users have to do a certain amount to prove who they are and at the same time provide information that would give an indication to whether they are a reliable source of information.
In much the same way as Google has a page rank algorithm that attempts to rank a web site based on popularity and reliability of information, this system would do a similar thing but on a persons identity on the web. For example when the user signed up for an account on the commenting system they could provide their Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, Google+ account details along or any other social media. Using the relevant APIs data could be gathered about their connections to other people, their likes and dislikes, information from tweets and status updates and potential information about what their skills and specialities are. It would also be possible to provide links to web sites they own or contribute to that can be verified using a system similar to how Google webmaster tools works to verify web sites you own. The content on these sites could be used to determine specialities and skills. The web pages could be checked on the various search engines to see how they rank and where incoming links are coming from and domains could be checked to see how long they had been registered.
All of this information could be combined to give the user an identity rank, a value that indicates how likely it is that the user is who they say they are. It also allows a category rank to be created based on what is known about the person. For example most of my information on the web would indicate that I’m a software engineer so I would rank higher in that category than I would for example in flower arranging.
This identity and rank system could be used by blog owners to set a minimum level to participate on their blog or set a minimum level before moderation is required. It could also be possible for blog owners to black list people or mark people who don’t need to be moderated.
This deals with “Unconsidered responses”, “Don’t contribute to the content” and “New comments on an article may be irrelevant based on new articles”.
As well as identity rank a user could also have a relevance rank. This would work in a similar fashion to the vote system on Stack Overflow. The blog owner and other users would be able to vote up or down comments allowing users to gain ranking points for overall quality of comments and quality of comments in a particular category. Voting would be restricted to users who already had a good identity and relevance rank in that category.
The blog owner could decide to hide by default all comments below a certain vote or rank threshold or delete them completely.
This would in theory reduce “unconsidered responses” and “don’t contribute to the content” issues as irrelevant comments would either be removed or voted to the bottom of a pile so no one saw them. Having your comments down voted continuously would end up effecting your various rankings to the point where it would become very difficult to comment any more at all, thus also potentially reducing spam.
“unconsidered responses” could be reduced further by adding a cooling off period to every comment, a small amount of time before the comment is actually posted where the user can decide to remove it. This probably wouldn’t make a difference to the majority of people who are quick off the mark with making harsh responses to articles but for some people it would be useful.
“New comments on an article may be irrelevant based on new articles” could be managed by allowing the blog owner to expire comments based on articles being superseded, they could still be read and a link could be provided to indicate the location of new up to date information but no more comments could be made on that thread.
Well that’s a run down of how I think comments systems could be improved, whether or not it would work and solve the problems listed or make people feel they don’t have to turn off comments I don’t know but I do think it’s useful to think about these kinds of problems and raise discussions about them.
New years resolutions
It’s that time of year again, new years resolution time. Generally speaking I’m not a fan of new years resolutions mainly because I don’t think that any point in time is anymore important than any other when it comes to making decisions about your life, people shouldn’t need an arbitrary point in time to change their lives, if they need to do it then they should when they realise they need to.
Now rather ironically I’m going to make a kind of resolution. I actually decided this around Christmas when I was sat with my wife watching our kids play with their Christmas gifts. I should be spending more time concentrating on the things I have and a little less time worrying about the things I don’t have. This isn’t to say I’m giving up on goals and dreams but I’m going to try to stop them consuming me and dragging me away from what I have. I never want to be one of those people who say “You never know what you have till it’s gone”.
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