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.
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”.
Goals
It’s nice to have goals in life, something to aim for. I’ve been noting down various things I want to do for some time now but have never really got around to doing any of them, so I decided to pick 3-4 goals off my list and see if I can achieve them this year. So without further a do in no particular order here are the goals I’ve picked for myself.
- Write a game for the iOS platform and get it into the app store before I’m 30.
- Create a website from scratch using some new and up to date web technologies.
- Climb a V5 before the end of June and climb a V7 before the end of the year.
So there are the goals, now I’ve just got to achieve them.
The big 30 seems to be my scary age and for whatever reason I felt I needed to have some kind of personal achievement under my belt before I get there. I love games and I also love my iPhone so I thought what better way to achieve a goal then to make a game for my iPhone and most importantly get it onto the app store. While it would be great for it to become an over night success and allow me to retire on a desert island somewhere I very much doubt that will happen and have my mind firmly in reality, a few sales would be good enough for me, just to know that some people out there have bought and enjoy something that is 100% mine is good enough. I’ve already started writing the game and so far it’s actually starting to come together OK, I’ve still got lots to do but I feel I’ve managed to learn enough Objective-C and Cocos2D to be able to get past that beginning stage when you’re learning a new language or framework, less time looking at documentation and more time creating. Once I have anything even slightly impressive to show I’ll get it posted on here for all to see.
Before I went to University I used to do a bit of web design here and there for local companies, it was just as the Internet was becoming more widely available in homes across the UK (good old 28.8) and web pages were mainly HTML and some images. Well since then the Internet has become a different place and I’ve become out of touch with the languages and techniques used to make web sites. While I don’t really need to learn any of these for the job I do, I feel that I’m ignoring a huge amazingly interesting media. Therefore I decided some time back that I wanted to get back in touch with some web goodness. I already have an idea for a site I’m going to make, it won’t be huge but it will allow me to experiment with a whole lot of front end web technologies as well as having a play with some cloud based services. I will be doing the back end for the site using the Python API for google app engine, I’ve never written anything in Python before so I thought it would be a fun experience and opportunity to learn something new. At the moment I believe the front end will be a combo of HTML, CSS and JQuery/Javascript with some form of AJAX to get the data from the back end. The domain name and everything else is sorted and now I’ve just got to get coding. I’ll probably be keeping this one under wraps until it’s ready to launch with maybe some progress updates as I go. Might even do a retrospective post once I’ve finished.
I’ve been rock climbing (bouldering to be more precise) since late October last year and it has become somewhat of an addiction and obsession. For those who know anything about bouldering I’m currently climbing at around V2 with a few V3 climbs under my belt. I would like to be climbing V5 by the end of June, no particular reason for the end of June just a time I chose to give me a target. I’m not currently sure if I’ll get this one as I’ve got to gain a lot of strength and technique to be able to achieve it but it’s always good to have something to work towards. I’m going to be changing my training from two days a week to three and I’ve purchased a recommended book on technique and training, so hopefully all those things combined will bring me towards my goal. If I managed to achieve V5 by the end of June then the next target is V7 by the end of the year, this will be a hard one as from seeing other people climb and generally looking at the routes I’d say there are some reasonable steps in ability between certain grades, V3 seems to be the first step (at least for me) then V5 then V7, so I’ll have to really push myself to get there by the end of the year, we’ll just have to see how it goes.
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