The Google Machine

The slapstick comedy Blades of Glory, starring Will Ferrell and Jon Heder as a dynamic men’s figure skating duo, may have received its fair share of bad press when it was released in 2007, but they sure got one thing right –well kind of.  After Will Ferrell, playing as Chazz Michael Michaels, gets quoted referring to his teammate as a lifeless robot, he confidently responds,

“Alright, Mr. Smart Reporter, showing off.  Figured out how to work the Google on the internet machine.  Well, here’s a new quote for you, alright?  Chazz Michaels and Jimmy MacElroy are figure skating. Boom!”

What I found funny was not only Michaels’ announcement of his new men’s figure skating partner, but also his fumbled allusion to Google and its obvious equivalency with the internet in his mind.  Understandably Michaels—and surely many other technologically naïve users—see the internet as the right and realm of Google—and why not?

There is no doubt of Google’s prominence on the web and one doesn’t need to know google.com is the most frequented site on the internet to appreciate that.  Google has accomplished this feat by providing us with accessible search results that are clear and nicely sorted and that match—almost always—what we are looking for.  Precision, relevance, speed and simplicity are all Google’s game, which it plays it quite well.  Whether you are looking for recommendations on a new piece of technology or searching for how to prepare a Thanksgiving feast made entirely from fast-food: Google has got it.

At my full-time job teaching English, we are all Google fiends.  I cannot imagine being without Google to find and access English teaching resources spread across the net.  What’s more is that I quite commonly find faults in my English grammar and vocabulary (yikes!) and have no other choice than to google it.  Sure we have dictionaries and grammar reference books sitting on the shelves above us, and of course the indispensible Teacher James, who writes English grammar articles for Apartment Living’s sister publication Education, but these are finite resources and they can only provide me with so much:  Google, on the other hand, is seemingly infinite.

No doubt the creators of Google, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, saw this themselves when, in 1997, they gave their search engine the name: Google.  Termed after the word googol, the equivalent to 10¹⁰⁰ or the number one followed by one hundred zeroes (no, I’m not going to write it here), it’s clear that they wanted to express how large the web could be, and that they were on a mission to organize it.  In reality, a googol is a slight overestimation of the web’s breadth, as the real size of Google’s index is around 21.67 billion pages—a fraction of a googol so small that I don’t care to express it here.  Let’s just say we’ve still got a lot of room before Google hits the googol mark.

Mathematics aside, Google’s rise to ubiquity and its maintaining of that top-tier position has a lot more to do with its ability to diversify than with its ability to provide search results.  I’m not saying that search queries like: ‘difference between jam jello jelly’ or ‘top speed of camel’ then cross-referencing that with ‘top speed of buffalo’ are not important or uncommon—especially in my office; I work with Brits, what can I say?—but rather searching is just one facet in Google’s arsenal.

Since 2000, Google has either developed technologies in-house or bought them outright to supplement its search engine and to extrapolate off of it.  Today additions include, Google: Images, Groups, News, Books, Blogger, Maps, Earth, Desktop, Scholar, Reader, Docs, Finance, Calendar, Checkout, Code, Sites, Apps, Chrome, Picasa and, of course, Gmail, to name a few.  While new features are added all the time to these services in Google Labs, the biggest changes have come in the form of acquisitions.  Over the course of a four-year period from Oct. 2003- Oct. 2007, Google acquired 43 different companies, including one big-boy you might have heard of:  YouTube.  All in all, Google has spent billions on acquisitions, which it then rebrands into Google products.

You might be asking:  Where does Google get all this money to finance these acquisitions?  And how can Google afford to give away all of their services for free? Excellent question; simple answer.  Contrary to what you may think, Google is not in the business of search; you aren’t paying a nickel every time you google something.  Certainly enterprise products don’t account for all of it, so where does the revenue come from?  Oh yeah, what about advertising.  You’ve got it; 99% of Google’s revenue comes from advertising.  Google is an advertising company and a mighty successful one at that, raking in $22 billion just last year.  So it seems that they develop great software—then just give it away.  In return, they gain people’s trust and reputation, and presumably their clicks.

When Google expands its software base or improves upon existing modules, advertising must concurrently be expanded to maintain this juggernaut growth.  Ads on YouTube videos are slowly becoming more invasive; your Gmail is scanned for keywords to display more relevant ads; and Google’s largest acquisition at $3.1 billion, DoubleClick, is devoted to studying your every move on the net.  What you search for, what you click on and where you go—it’s all tracked and leveraged to improve Google’s advertising ability.

The point is, when it comes down to it, Google has to make money—that’s the bottom line.  Similar to how we have given our trust and the management of our countries’ lifeblood to banks, which provide a service and turn a profit without actually creating anything of value; Google can be thought of as an overpaid nanny, whose ability to organize the web in a clean and tidy manner has encouraged us to perpetuate its dominance and its growth.  Opponents of big-business argue that Google’s massive accumulation of digital information—and hence control—may prove to be disastrous.  This is especially worrisome if you consider that Google’s heavy-hitters:  Google Search, YouTube and Picasa don’t really create anything of value: we do.  The only thing Google is doing is exhibiting documents, videos and pictures that we the users have produced!

Luckily though, Google does seem to have, at its heart, a streak of altruism—its corporate motto simply states: “Don’t be evil.”  We can only hope this holds true as Google is slated to deliver its Chrome OS next year and has already entered the mobile phone market with its Android OS; two more vital additions to the ever-growing Google Machine—and if you don’t believe anything that I’ve said: just google it.

The Netbook: The Swiss Army Knife of Computers

The Swiss Army knife, first introduced in 1897 by the Swiss innovator Karl Elsener, was a tool born out of the need to be smaller and sleeker than current design without compromising functionality.  Karl found that the original knife –imported from Germany and being quite robust –was just too heavy.  He decided to form the Swiss Cutlery Guild and in turn produced a lighter and more elegant knife, which featured two blades (one small, one large), an awl, a can-opener, screwdriver and corkscrew.  When it hit the market it was an instant success and with its popularity booming in Switzerland, other countries caught wind of the new device and sent in orders to have them shipped abroad.  With new finances, came new features.  Successive iterations of the device introduced new tools like the wood-saw, scissors and bottle-opener.  Eventually, both a toothpick and tweezers were added, along with a metal-saw and metal-file, Phillips screwdriver, and such important features as a fish-scaler with hook-disgorger.

During the Second World War, large quantities of these tools were sold to the US Army, Navy and Air Force, under the brand name “Offiziersmesser”, which due largely to fact that American soldiers couldn’t speak Swiss-German, was promptly coined with the nickname Swiss Army knife.  Hence the legend was born.

Now, you may be asking me why I am giving you a history lesson about the Swiss Army knife or introducing words like Offiziersmesser, so let me give you a word you probably do know:  netbook.  For those who are scratching their head trying to figure out if a netbook is either a book about nets, or another sort of Swiss contrived device for amplifying one’s yodeling –think again.

The netbook, brought to the masses in 2007 with the announcement of the Asus Eee PC, was a tool born out of the need to be smaller and sleeker than current design without compromising functionality.  Sound familiar?  Well, in-fact there are plenty of connections to be drawn between netbooks and the Swiss Army knife.  This is what happened:

The long dominant position of desktop computers, as stated in last month’s article, is essentially fading out.  There are still necessities for desktop use, like multimedia editing, bleeding-edge gaming and other processor-heavy applications, but the large majority of people are taking their presence online or on the road –and why wouldn’t they?  As we become more linked with –and hence dependent on– technology, we need to stay connected when we leave our homes.  Laptops had filled this roll and still do, but tend to gravitate to one end of the spectrum; either being too heavy or too expensive.  So, there was a gap to be filled, not by something more robust, but by something more portable (smaller, sleeker, lighter) and more practical (cheaper, more integrated features, longer lasting).

Enter: netbooks.  Not only do they fulfill all of the requirements as stated above and being more affordable at the same time, but they also, due to their booming popularity (35 million units are expected to be sold in 2009) have many new features in the works.  While these new features probably won’t exist in the form of a bottle-opener, toothpick or hook-disgorger; you can expect to see features like instant-on based on ARM technology, which allow your computer to boot in a few seconds; detachable screens that allow for easy reading of things like e-books; and of course, ever-increasing battery life, ever-decreasing size and a large selection of open-source operating systems to connect to the cloud.

Fortunately, you don’t need to look into the future to discover a wealth of uses for your condensed little computer now.  A netbook’s biggest strength –potential for practical uses –can be leveraged to improve your digital life.  Even if you don’t have an Eee PC like I do, most of these recommendations can still be applied.

#1 Read it like a newspaper (or novel):
Reading anything on netbooks due to their extremely small screens, is not an easy task.  After an extended session of surfing the net or reading some blogs, my eyes hurt from trying to focus on the miniscule type size and my hand hurts from constantly clicking down to fill the page.  That is until I discovered a couple of handy little tools called EeeRotate (http://tinyurl.com/eeerotate) and Readability (http://tinyurl.com/read-eee).  EeeRotate does exactly what it says: it rotates the screen, as well as the touchpad, 90 degrees so that you are in portrait mode.  That’s great and all, but now you have to scroll horizontally more often than vertically –this is where Readability comes in.  Acting as a bookmark, when clicked it enlarges and reformats the main text of the website (what you’re reading) to become more readable by removing all the excess junk cluttering the screen (ads, links, images, etc.).  With these two tools combined, you are left with a narrow, highly-readable column of the content that is vertically aligned, which can easily be scrolled with the rotated touchpad.  For an even further distraction-free reading environment, you can press F11 in your browser for full-screen.  The effects of the Readability bookmark are awesome for any computer, but combined with EeeRotate on a netbook and you’ll be devouring the web in no time!

Talk on it like a phone (with video!):
While this one is probably better known than the previous recommendation, it’s still worth saying.  With a netbook’s built-in camera and microphones, there is no reason why you shouldn’t be using it as a phone.  Programs like Skype (http://www.skype.com/) allow you to make free video calls to anyone in the world who uses Skype as well.  You can even have Skype give you a local phone number, which routes to your computer or voicemail; or call any landline or mobile phone on the cheap.  The handiest feature I have found is the ability to freely call any toll-free number in the world, like 1-800-Can-You-Unlock-My-Debit-Card-So-I-Can-Buy-Pad-Thai.

Play it like a jukebox (without the coin!):
You probably won’t sync your entire music library to your netbook and with Wi-Fi, you don’t need to.  You can stream your music through iTunes from another PC or listen to music online with The Hype Machine (http://hypem.com/). Connect your netbook to your stereo or speakers and you’ll be rockin’ like it’s the 50’s!

Netbooks are amazing machines for all kinds of practical uses.  For more absurd uses look here: http://tinyurl.com/robot-eee

Questions

After writing this post I realized it’s probably necessary to give it a setting and context.  This was an entry in my journal that I wrote partly while on the crater of Rinjani Volcano, Lombok and partly while touring Jakarta on the island of Java.  This trip to Indonesia was my first extended trip outside of Thailand since I had arrived the previous August.  I hope that’s clear, but yes, please read on or check out the pictures by clicking on the My Pictures link to the right.  =)

It’s been almost six months since I’ve written in this journal; six months since the connection of pen to paper, and as the powerful, glaring sun beats down around me, so too, do some powerful questions of my own.  As I lay here, scrambled away from the scorched earth at a height of nearly 3,000 meters –a full 2,000 meters above the peaceful mountain town of Senaru where our journey began this morning –I can’t help but think: Where do I start? And I have to ask myself: How did I get here? Well, that’s a very long story, so let’s start with today.

Rinjani Volcano, Lombok, Indonesia – August 18^th, 2009
(Google maps link:  http://tinyurl.com/rinjani-mitch)

The alarm sounded at 6 AM, unceremoniously tearing me from my warm dream world to the harsh cool dawn.  After a short check and tally of my bags followed by a banana pancake and a tea, we (the four of us, plus a guide and two porters) were shuttled up the road to the entrance to Rinjani National Park.

We began our gentle march through rows of broad-leafed banana trees as monkeys screeched and played overhead, and cows mingled with chickens in their early morning routine.  Flowering and lightly-scented coffee plants grew happily along the edge of the path.  Soon the dutifully tended farmland gave way to the wildly tangled, dark green canopy of the jungle.  Giant overgrown plants stretched their fat leaves in every direction, encroaching on our narrowing path, bent with knotted roots of age-old trees.  Our witty travel banter soon faded as well, as our previously gentle march took an upward slant and we began to climb steadily.  Accompanied by the buzz of the jungle, the chirps of the birds ands the always screeching and bad (“black monkey very bad”) monkeys, we made our ascent.

Position 1 / Hour 1 – 1000 meters above sea level (MASL)
Position Extra / Hour 2 – 1300 MASL
Position 2 / Hour 3 – 1500 MASL: snacks were snacked on.
Position 3 / Hour 5 – 2000 MASL: lunch devoured.
Position Lima / Hour 6.5 – 2400 MASL: dusty, hot and legs burning (good burn). Picked up firewood and an additional 5 liters of water for the final leg.
Rim Position / Hour 8 – 2800 MASL: thoroughly exhausted, but utterly amazed.

Above the clouds where the world exists above itself, we laid. Treeless, –except for a few stragglers and straw-dry shrubbery –soundless –as the mighty wind swallowed up every tone –and cloudless –save the roiling trough of cottonball-white that obscured the world below us –was the rim of the crater; a mountain with its top missing.  In its place, nearly 800 meters below, stretched a turquoise-blue lake, lapping up against the sheer rock walls.  Its beauty only disturbed by the protruded smoking cone of gray brown earth, having been expelled from the bowels of Rinjani.  The rim’s east face rose almost 2000 meters straight up to its peak.  The exterior of the crater, while looking like rolling velvet from a distance, existed of loose volcanic stone and clumped shrubbery; perfect for carving out a camp-spot for the night.  We did just that, and as the sun sank into the sea of clouds around us, illuminating Rinjani’s sister volcano, Agung in Bali, I knew this hike was going down in the books.

Now (safe and sound in lower altitudes), looking back on the descent following the grueling climb to the rim, a thousand pictures, feelings and thoughts come flooding to mind.  Pictures of the silhouetted peak of Agung against the glowing horizon; Feelings of awe and amazement upon seeing the fiery-orange flow of magma coursing down the side of the inner cone; Thoughts of our connectedness with the stars, as clouds of them blended with the hundreds of star-like fires scattered around the walls of the crater.  Also, of the return of the buzz in the air, as we descended from the harsh alien landscape of the rim to the wispy-green growth on ever-increasing trees and plants.  Of the verdant green ferns and the winding, creeping vines that snaked their way from tree to tree.  Of finally, the explosion of growth, which signaled our return to the jungle, lower altitudes, and to respite.

Other fragments from my trip rush back to mind as well.  Fragments of drowsy afternoons in the Gilis when time seemed to stop in the shade of a tree on the beach.  Fragments of an urge to eat up the candy-colored waters, tiger-striped with turquoise and pockmarked with dark-blue reefs.  Of drinking black wine (a fermented blend of grapes, ginseng and ginger) with travel buddies on my birthday. And, of course, the initial loss of gravity; like a rug being pulled out from underneath you or a chair slid away as you attempt to sit down, a sort of growing pain that comes with living out of your backpack again, but which has now given way to its comforting but sometimes fleeting embrace.

With only a few short days left on my three-week hiatus from Bangkok, I guess the question shouldn’t be:  How did I get here? But rather, Where am I going? I can only hope it’ll be something like this.

Peace, Love and Waves———-Adam

As a side note and somewhat of an honorable mention, I must say a few words about Jakarta –yes, the aptly names ‘Big Durian’, and the very same Jakarta that gets Jakar-bombed (read: car-bombed –credit goes to my infinitely creative college drinking buddies for that gem) on an occasional basis.  I feel obligated to do so, not because I feel that I like the city or would care to live here (can I say that about Bangkok even?), but rather, because beneath the purple haze –a heady and surely carcinogenic concoction of exhaled clove smoke, pluming exhaust fumes, the sour smoke of grilling sate, along with other various forms of pollution –there exists, I believe, a certain quality or third-world charm (if you will) that only ten million people, in a city on the most densely packed island in the world could exude.

If only I’d had the will-power to see through it and to struggle on, just as the sun was struggling to pierce the inky veil (end being reduced to a silver moon), I might have reveled in that subtle charm that exists somewhere between the mosques warbling loudspeakers and the Jakartans’ calm during the Ramadan fast, but definitely not the bloated Wafflehouse-esque Blueberry Pancake House or the decrepit and tasteless Romance Café.  I possibly could have seen it on the zippy Bajaj, which I will always remember as the most ridiculous road vehicle I’ve ever seen (Picture this (or just look at my pictures): three 8-inch wheels, lawnmower engine, beetle-like exterior, 1-inch exhaust pipe, and seats five –uncomfortably), kind of like a runt Tuk-Tuk, or maybe in the offering of –in all seriousness –the Obama Discount.  It is certainly with these thoughts in mind, together with my curiosity and hopeless optimism that I am driven to travel.

Cloud Computing and You

Music, the topic of last month’s article is something that I hold very close to my heart.  From the grinding rhythms of Nine Inch Nails, to the fast-paced lyrics of Gangstarr, and the soothing melodies of As Tall As Lions; each and every song in my library of music strums a familiar tune.  While you may not have the same intrinsic value attachment to music as I do, surely you have at least accumulated an assortment of other forms of art: pictures of friends and family, or you last vacation; possibly some videos from your best friend’s wedding; some ‘backed-up’ copies from your roommates DVD collection; or at the bare minimum some word documents for work or term-papers for school, which all hold a good deal of value –and why not?

Computers and technology are essentially tools for creation, hence the storage necessary for what we create and, most importantly, a medium for sharing it.  Over time these arrays of files grow larger and larger, as we import, copy (‘back-up’) and otherwise create more music, movies and documents.  Ultimately, we end up accumulating vast amounts of data stored on these handy little machines.  That’s all fine and dandy though because it’s safe on my computer and I dust it off every morning and keep it out of direct sunlight, so everything will be fine, right? Well, –hopefully.

The fact of the matter is that computers are notoriously fragile and will –whether you run a comprehensive antivirus suite that costs $19.95 a month and always unplug it during lightning storms, while decorating in prayer beads and numerous small deities– in the end, terminally break down and your precious and valued data will be lost.  Now you have to ask yourself:  What if it happened to me? Don’t worry, I’m not going to try to sell you some new all-encompassing backup solution that will, with only one click, safely secure your precious data to DVD or an external hard-drive and keep it as a timeless copy for the rest of eternity.  These are, in truth, marketing scams; for the same problems and technological obsolescence that afflict your local machine are inherently problems for any backup solution: it’s still a local copy.

But, what if… stop.  Before you go off needlessly fretting about whether the video you took of your baby niece blowing her first spit bubble or the evidence of your neighbor’s dog using your lawn as a toilet –stop.  Let us take a step back and evaluate the problem a bit more in-depth before we discuss the answer.

Computers, in their conception, were tools created out of the need for raw computational power.  ENIAC, the world’s first electronic digital computer, was developed to compute World War 2 ballistic firing tables –its first use was in calculations for the hydrogen bomb.  Over time though, computers became adapted for educational use in universities and the classroom, and inevitably for use at home.  Rather than just a processing data, they allowed people to create, to print, and to share.  Long-term storage emerged as a necessity in the form of disks; hard-disks for internal storage and revelations like the floppy-disk for external storage.  The idea of the desktop emerged: a place where everything you needed was available at your fingertips in a localized, albeit fragile, form.  You could have all the programs you wanted and all your personal data kept, cleanly and orderly, in your own sorts of home-base.  It was a natural progression that has persisted and perpetuated itself to this day.  But, along with most things, the internet changed everything –donning a social revolution on the age of computers.  Being decentralized at its core, composed of billions (if not trillions) of interconnected and multi-dimensional computers, the internet has allowed for interaction to move from a local environment, like the desktop, to a global one.

The simplest and most pervasive example of this is email.  You would never install email, you would never backup your email to DVD, and you don’t ever need to be worried that an electrical storm will wipe-out your email; this is all because email is based on the internet.  Simply put, you don’t load the internet, you access the internet. To draw a comparison let’s look at what ATMs did for banks, or more closely, for the piggy-bank.  Back in the good old days (sorry to use the phrase), people would save and store their money at home in curiously unsafe places like a jar in the cupboard, a shoebox in the closet or tucked away under the mattress.  Not only was this approach prone to theft, damage and loss, but it was also inaccessible when away from home.  Whether people trusted (or approved of) banks or not, the advent of the ATM ensured a safe, globally accessible network of machines to get at their money.  For a traveler like myself, both the internet and the ATM are two of the most important and functional components I require.

But anyways, let’s get back to the question of, What if…? Well, I hate to say it, but I have taken you on a long, roundabout journey to render that question of no consequence.  The question of What if…? will soon be (and, in many ways, is already) irrelevant thanks to what we call cloud computing.  Remember that mass of possibly trillions of interconnected, multi-dimensional computers that collectively call themselves the internet?  That is the cloud of cloud computing: a realm that is always on, which is globally accessible, entirely crash-proof and is continually improved and upgraded.  While many people think of the internet as no more than a source of viruses and distracting games; a deluge of spam and porn, it is in-fact our future and our liberator from the bonds of desktop computing.  As broadband access, storage sizes and computational power increase exponentially, so do the possibilities of the cloud.

Email, chat rooms and simple text-based news were the norm in the infantile days of the internet, while today we enjoy a wealth of streaming music, movies and TV shows.  Now, instead of streaming someone else’s content, imagine streaming your own.  Your music, your movies, your home videos, all exist, safely and securely, in the cloud –which you share at your discretion.  Websites like tunesBag (tunesbag.com) already offer the ability to upload and stream your entire music collection; functioning as a backup at the same time.  YouTube and Picasa already offer possibilities for storing and sharing videos and pictures as well.

The real paradigm shift, though, is occurring at a slower pace as the traditional processes of creating, processing, and storing are continually being moved into the cloud.  Long dominant programs like Photoshop are being replicated into cloud-based programs like Pixlr (pixlr.com/editor).  Don’t be mistaken; design professionals will be using Photoshop into the foreseeable future, but for the amateur user (nearly everyone) Pixlr works just fine.  Recently, Google unveiled their own cloud-based office suite, labeled Google Docs (docs.google.com), which intended or not, is a direct competitor for Microsoft Office.  Appropriately, almost amazingly, Microsoft plans to offer a cloud-based version of Office 2010.  Even resource intensive computer games like Quake 3 are getting their online equivalent with Quake Live (quakelive.com).  It’s clearly evident that our dated view of what a computer should be and what a computer could be, are in large disparity.  The transition is clearly upon us, as the demand for netbooks –lightweight, low-storage and built solely for internet usage (hence the ‘net’ in netbook) –is spreading like wildfire.

With Google releasing its own operating system next year, which promises to embrace cloud computing; the question shouldn’t be What if?, but rather, What’s next?

The Internet and the Evolution of Music

I look back on my thirteenth birthday and remember, not only the overly indulgent consumption of chocolate cake and ice cream followed shortly by an intense water fight and possibly someone vomiting, but also because it was the first time I had ever received the gift of music.  My good friend at the time, Jason, was always one step ahead of the curve: the first one with Airwalk sneakers, the first to wear a black hoodie, and the first to have sleepovers (with girls).  On that warm and windy afternoon as Jason handed me his thin rectangular present, I knew it was going to be good.  I tore it open to reveal a plastic case of a burnt orange color; across the top in accented lettering was the word, ‘Bush’, and in a smaller typeset near the bottom, ‘Sixteen Stone’.  I had heard of the band, but was unfamiliar with their soon to become mega-hits like “Comedown”, “Glycerine” and “Machinehead”.  Jason told me that if I didn’t have a CD player he could exchange it for the tape version.  Sure enough, I didn’t have a CD player, but that didn’t matter because this was my first CD; I wasn’t about to give back my shiny new toy.

Over the course of the next ten years, the curiously fragile yet sometimes stunningly-cool packaging of CDs fulfilled people’s musical desires to own a piece of the artist’s renown.  Friends of mine would have huge CD booklets, organized chronologically by artist and genre to show off their vast musical wealth.  From that windy day on my thirteenth birthday, I even started to collect my own musical treasures and amassed a modest-sized collection.  Sure, I sometimes only liked a handful of tracks on any given CD but at that point there was no other option.  It was an all-of-nothing sort of deal.

Then everything changed.

First of all, it was the CD-burning craze, incited by optical disc drive companies, which touted that with their CD-burning drive you could back-up all of your music from your CDs straight to your computer.  While the idea of backing-up, or essentially duplicating, all of your copyrighted CDs to your computer was technically legal, the widespread habits of such were not quite the same.  Many people would use the drives to copy the CDs to MP3 and create exact replicas of CDs, which would then be able to play in 99% of all CD players.  It was a revolutionary concept and still plagues the music industry today.  The ability to back-up your legally purchased, copyrighted media is not what’s in debate, but rather the societal implications of allowing people to freely duplicate and distribute this stored media.

CD-burning was just the beginning though.  As I stated in last month’s article, the Internet has opened up so many avenues for richer communication, collaboration and education.  Maybe the best example of connecting people to people, rather than people to corporations is the massive circulation of media over the Internet.

This was all too evident as not long after CD-burners basically became pervasive among young adults, did the advent of such a tool that was supremely hated by the music industry and yet tremendously loved by consumers, come to fruition.  It was called Napster.  Napster, created in June 1999 by a university student at Northeastern University in Boston (the same as me), was a tremendously popular revelation among music lovers, the likes of which the Internet had never seen.

Once people downloaded the client, installed it like a breeze, and fired it up, they were instantly exposed to millions of songs that were just a click away.  People downloaded music furiously and shared their own libraries generously; all of which was compounded and accelerated by the use of CD-burners.  While a large number of small-time bands enjoyed and certainly benefited from the increased exposure, the music industry and various established artists didn’t like that their music was being distributed for free.  Understandably, due to Napster’s central servers, which hosted users’ information and shared media, the music industry got their way and by court order was forced to shutdown in July 2001.

In the short two years that Napster was online; people accumulated enormous libraries of music and were able to see the power of connectedness that the Internet offered.  Soon, true peer-to-peer (P2P) applications were popping up all over the place offering a decentralized alternative to the central servers that Napster had been shutdown for.  On university campuses media sharing ran rampant with help from P2P applications allowing students to download entire albums in seconds.  The digital piracy of music was spreading like wild-fire, so the music industry started to crackdown.  University students began being charged for sharing even small amounts of copyrighted music with, according to the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), damages reaching as high as $150,000 per song.  The most recent case was thought to be lenient, charging a Boston University student $675,000 in damages for illegally downloading 30 songs and sharing them online.

Today, digital piracy is still a problem for the music industry.  Technologies like BitTorrent have pushed media sharing even further underground and as decentralized as to allow people to download bits of a song from thousands of people at once.  The technology is essentially untraceable, but still the music industries are working on a solution.  The proposed savior for the music industry: Digital Rights Management (DRM) has flopped completely; infuriating consumers and driving these free technologies like BitTorrent.  As for CDs, sales have steadily dropped since 1999 (you guessed it:  the year Napster was introduced), as music inhabits the Internet rather than music stores, with services like iTunes, Rhapsody and Amazon.

People are also taking advantage of streaming music through the Internet, where they can freely listen to their favorite music, create and share playlists and also discover new music.  Websites like: The Sixty One (thesixtyone.com), Musicovery (musicovery.com) and The Hype Machine (hypem.com), offer innovative ways for people to discover music socially.

Daniel Ek, the co-founder of Spotify an ad-supported streaming music website, said, “Piracy is essentially the consumer’s wish to have everything on demand. It’s not like people want to necessarily have it for free.”  The problem is that, until now, there haven’t been music industry backed services “that allowed people to discover new music and easily share music with friends,” he said.  It seems that if the music industry wants to survive, they should start looking at services like Spotify and Pandora, which advantageously embrace the virtues of the Internet – or, they could simply keep suing university students for millions of dollars.  I think the former might be a better approach, but hey, that’s just me.

Open Source

As many people strive for freedom in life, whether it is freedom from tyranny, freedom from oppression, or freedom of creativity; we all are looking for that one thing: choice.

When it comes to your operating system, the same values hold true.

In years past, the technology giant and pervasive source for nearly all things technology, Microsoft had dominated the area of operating systems, word processors, Internet browsers and even game consoles.  Microsoft Windows has long been the definitive choice for customers’ operating systems, while Microsoft Word and Internet Explorer have reaped the benefits of being the default applications within the Windows environment.  Truth be told, Microsoft even beat out the previous champion, Sony and their precious Playstation 3, with the release of their next generation Xbox 360 game console.  It seemed that Microsoft was unstoppable and showed no signs of slowing down.

That’s not to say Microsoft is without its problems.  Having faced multiple anti-trust suits for their pairing of Internet Explorer and Windows, Microsoft was forced to scale back its iron grip on the browser.  Around the same time, the open-source foundation, Mozilla released their new browser: Firefox.  Full of new features, ideas and innovations, it has steadily gained market share since its inception.

Browser wars aside, it would be a lofty claim to say that Microsoft is suffering.  I must admit that I am writing this from within Microsoft Windows on their very own word processor, Microsoft Word.  But then again, I have been using Windows for as long as I can remember working with computers.

My first experience with a PC was back in the early 90’s, when Microsoft first released Windows 3.0.  It was a clunky, gray-scale interface that featured such innovations as a graphical file manager, helpful utilities and accessories, and even minesweeper.  As basic as it was, for the time, it was revolutionary and catapulted Microsoft to the front after selling 10 million copies.  Successive iterations including, Windows 3.1, Windows NT and Windows 95; led to the launch of Windows 98 and the birth of many ubiquitous features, such as the Start Menu, My Computer and, the aforementioned, Internet Explorer.  Windows 98 was again a major success, and virtually set the scale to what an operating system should be.  With little competition, besides the niche market of Mac users, Windows enjoyed a time of unparalleled success and profit, catapulting their chief executive officer, Bill Gates, to wealth of immense levels.  Despite having stepped down from CEO at Microsoft in 2000, he is still officially the richest person in the world as of 2009, with a net-worth of over 40 billion dollars.

Today, it is hard to imagine a computer without a Start Menu, a taskbar and familiar blue ‘e’ for Internet Explorer.  Even I, when using an operating system that doesn’t have something as simple as a Start Menu, fling the mouse around the screen in search of where to, for lack of a better word: Start.  There’s a certain sense of comfortableness when using a Windows environment that comes with 15+ years of usage.  The problem is that Microsoft knows this; they understand that they have this control over the market and consumers, and thus have the ability to set standards and procedures that aren’t necessarily in the best interest of the stakeholders.

Windows XP is tantamount to being the king of the mountain for operating systems.  Chances are that if you work with computers, whether at home or on the job, it is likely that 95% of the time you are using Microsoft products.  This is despite their sometimes buggy behavior and being the target of nearly all viruses, Trojan horses, malware, spyware, spamming, hacking, and sensitive information stealing attacks, which seem to stem from endless security holes, which are then patched with dozens of updates.  The cycle continues: clean, patch and repeat as many times as necessary.  Furthermore, our applications that run on the operating system, whether used for education, entertainment or business, are in many cases coupled directly with the operating system.  Having only one operating system deployed on more than 90% of all desktop computers in the world, and it being a closed-source operating system, will certainly limit creativity and innovation and curb the efficient use computers in society.

Now, enter open-source.

“What is open-source?” you might ask.  The ‘source’ part of open-source is defined as the internal workings of computer programs, named the source-code.  The source-code holds the commands necessary for running the application or, in our case, the operating system. Thus, open-source means that anyone can freely study, change or improve how it works.  To draw a comparison, it’s like opening up the hood of your Ferrari to expose the engine –allowing you to freely enhance, modify or simply understand how it works.  Closed-source products, like Microsoft Windows, would mean that the hood is welded shut.  What’s more is this Ferrari engine can be “transplanted” into other cars and run without any hitches.  We call this cross-platform, meaning a browser like Firefox can be run within multiple operating systems.

The Internet, in itself, is an open-source venture where people from across the world can collaborate and communicate across physical and cultural boundaries.  Originally started as a way for researchers to easily share, convey and peer-review papers, it has developed into a global network, which is accessible from nearly any platform or device and is consistently being enhanced to build a better Internet.  The most important part is that the changes come from the people who use it, and the businesses that depend upon it; spurring innovative and useful ideas everyday.

You may have heard of a thing called Linux, known mainly by computer geeks and technology enthusiasts, but not typically by the population at large.  It is in fact an open-source operating system, but until now it has been marginally more complex to use.  That being said, a new incarnation of Linux, named Ubuntu (pronounced “oo-BOON-too”) has stirred the market with its easy-to-use interface.  I recently got my techno-phobic mother to start using it, as it offers a simple, stable and safe alternative to Windows.  It’s not for everybody, but at least it introduces choice!

Check it out at www.ubuntu.com –it’s free, just like all open-source software!  I also recommend using the Internet browser Firefox (www.firefox.com), and if you don’t want to shell out the cash for Microsoft Office, check out Open Office (www.openoffice.org).

Songkran in Phayam

What else can I say besides the fact that, well, it was exactly what I wanted/hoped for/dreamed of/needed!

Check out the pics!
http://picasaweb.google.com/mitch.ad (or click on the link to the right)

Life Lessons of the Day

Well, just as the cold-season in Bangkok has been swept away by the mounting humidity; my momma, too, has come and gone as if she was riding the cool currents back to India.  I surely can testify though, that we enjoyed our time sharing stories of Thailand and India alike, having numerous mouth-watering meals and getting to enjoy the holidays together.  Thanks for everything momma!  I’m looking forward to next year!  =)

But, as always in life, I am both being taught and am learning many lessons, big and small, everyday.  And this one in particular, I would like to share with you all…so please read on:

 

Do:  take your Mother and friends out for an evening of food, drinks and music, especially when it’s all-you-can-eat for $3.

Do:  enjoy watching the pot-bellied lady-boy dance around the stage and sing popular Thai songs strikingly well.

Do:  gorge on copious amounts of meat, vegetables and ice-cream.

Do not:  stare at the lady-boy too long, or he might start staring back (the least of your worries).

Do not:  rush the cooking process with said, copious amounts of meat, as you will most likely regret it the next morning (and the following). 

Do not:  wait until after the meal to ask (if ever) what meats you had sizzling on the burner in front of you, or else you might be informed you were just eating pig testicles!  YUMMY!

Lesson learned folks!

 

Once again, check the Home Away From Home album for a few more snaps!

Peace, love and waves to all!
-ASM

 

PS-  I am teaching English now at a, (hold your breath) full-time, language center.  Dare I say it, but it has been going surprisingly well…lets hope my good luck continues!

Pictures Speak a Thousand Words…

…Especially these select pictures that have been stored on my Momma’s camera for the last three years!

Featured are mostly shots of my sweet beard progressing over the years, as well as shots all the way back to Christmas ‘06, my graduation and even this Christmas in Bangkok!

Check ‘em out!

The Long Lost Pictures

Peace, Love and Waves!
-ASM

PS- Also added more pictures to the never-ending Home away from Home album!

The little kitty that was.

Not a whole lot to say here, other than this was an extremely cute little kitty that seemed to materialize out of the bushes in my favorite park.  Got a quick pet from us then vanished after we didn’t give him a piece of Dentyne Ice.  See below.

Also see the updated Home away from Home album, as I have added more photos to the end.

And as always…

 

Peace, Love and Waves,
-Adam