The Death of the Internet…

Yesterday, the House of Representatives voted against an amendment that would make Net Neutrality forceable. Many people don't know what Net Neutrality is — yet in the future, it will affect us all. If we didn't have Net Neutrality, there would be lots.. and lots.. of problems. Imagine not being able to access your Yahoo mail account because it's infinitely slow. Or trying to access your Yahoo mail account, only being told that you can't – but you can access AT&T's special mail service. Net Neutrality is what keeps the internet running. It basically means that you can access the largest corporate website as easily as the smallest personal blog.

The nation's largest telecommunications companies — AT&T, Verizon, Comcast and Time Warner — have banded together to decide which websites will load fast, slow, or not at all. "They want to tax content providers to guarantee speedy delivery of their data. They want to discriminate in favor of their own search engines, Internet phone services, and streaming video — while slowing down or blocking their competitors." [Savetheinternet.com].

Google, Craigslist, eBay, Yahoo — all of these services would grind to a halt. Since they would have to pay these greedy telcos, it would be impossible to keep their sites running. As Craig from Craigslist explains it, this whole thing is ridiculously wrong. Imagine the sidewalk as the pipes and wires of the internet. According to the telecommunication companies, if you're walking down the sidewalk and having a conversation with someone, the sidewalk is going to get a cut of the value of your conversations.

This whole concept isn't fair. It's not right. Net Neutrality should exist to keep the internet running — the internet itself has been driven by innovation. The smallest mom-and-pop stores can put up websites and the biggest companies can roll out amazing new features, all for the public to use. Net neutrality is about the people. Anything else is for the profit of corporations.

In an effort to twist the public's view of what's best, the telcos have set up an incredibly stupid site called "Hands off the Internet" — itself, a fake grassroots site that isn't even set up by the public. The real site to go to, set up by the public, promoted by some of the greatest founders of the internet and the most notable people in science, entertainment, and politics, is Save the Internet.com. If you truly want to be able to use the internet as it is and be able to take advantage of the amazing technology that exists and will exist in the future, write to congress.

 

Project Orange

There is some amazing work going on at Microsoft. Recently I heard about a project that would bring WinFS — Windows' next generation filesystem — to a completely new world of applications. It's called Project Orange. Nothing much is being said about it, but there is one little tidbit on WinFS's Team Blog:

"Project Orange is a brand new team tasked with building a next-generation Information Explorer based on WinFS and WPF (AKA Avalon) to help users finally get organized."

So imagine the traditional way of finding what you want in Windows. Windows Explorer: you go to My Computer, C:, all in one folder (or multiple if you want), navigate through the folders in a tree-like algorithm. WinFS is based on an entirely new paradigm — a single file could be in multiple "folders". When you start to visualize how this is possible on a desktop, you'll start to realize the crazy possibilities. Here's a video to help you (WinFS's iWish video)

 

Office 2007 Beta 2

I’ll do a larger update on Microsoft later. In the meantime though — download Office 2007 Beta 2. Completely new interface, completely new functionality. I’ve been using it for a while and it just went public. It rocks.

 

The New Smartphone

After a week of dealing with my super static Sony Ericsson T637 (and having to deal with my girlfriend being incredibly annoyed) I figured I'd head over to CTC and get it checked out. Replacing the SIM card didn't do anything, so I went for an upgrade and decided to spend a little more money and get a Smartphone:

Cingular 2125:

• Windows Mobile 5.0
• Quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE Worldphone
• 1.3 Megapixel Camera and Camcorder
• MS Outlook Mobile email, contacts, calendar
• Windows Media Player 10
• MSN Hotmail/Live and Messenger
• SD Card Slot
• Speakerphone
• Bluetooth / Infrared / Mini-USB
• Java Support
• And most importantly: no static.

 

Our Software Engineering Project: Success!

This entire semester two other developers and I have been working on a web queuing project for submitting protein folding requests. About an hour and a half ago, we completed our final presentation. We have a little more documentation to do and some more tasks to flush out, but other than that, we've written a complete end-to-end system that allows you to submit tasks, see them in a queue, distribute them to a possibly clustered compute environment, and get your selected outputs (movie files, graphs, whatever you want) back.

This has been probably the coolest, and most fun, project I've ever worked on. Not to mention that it's the most successful project I've worked on. Our client presented the project at a DARPA (DARPA = government branch that researched and developed the internet) conference two weeks ago. We're in the process of working with our client to write a paper on it, and our client is in talks with other universities around the nation to distribute the web application to their servers.

In four months, we've developed the world's first protein folding simulation on the web. How frickin cool is that.

Here's a screenshot of the main page, after you login:

 

OS X + Redhat Linux + WinXP. At the Same Time.

As an update to the last post about Parallels Workstation, here's a crazy demo video of someone switching between all three operating systems, running on x86 architecture. What gets me is that it's so fast.. it's perfect. The cube effect from Virtue Desktop is really nice too.

 

You Read Web Pages in an “F” Shape

It's true. Jakob Nielsen, the usability god, and Kara Coyne just published the results of their eyetracking study here:

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/reading_pattern.html

One of the most enlightening usability articles I've read…

 

Boot Camp vs. Virtual PC…

This title is misleading, since Virtual PC doesn't even run on the new Intel-based MacBooks, but what i'm wondering about is the comparison in functionality. Virtual PC allowed users to switch back and forth instantly (albeit slowly) from Windows to Mac and vice versa, but Boot Camp does no virtualization at all and simply makes a dual-boot, so you have to reboot to get into whatever OS you want. Virtual PC also allowed people to transfer files back and forth between operating systems.. that's pretty slick. (Of course i'm sure you can accomplish the same thing with Boot Camp's dual-boot setup, but again.. you'd have to reboot)

Boot Camp's idea of simplifying the dual-boot process is cool, but the idea of virtualization is awesome. I'm curious to see how some new hypervisor solutions are going to fare against Boot Camp. The best virtualization setup would be something like running Windows inside a Mac session. There's at least one company out there that's making some good progress with that idea — the company is called Parallels and their product, which is in beta testing right now, is called the Parallels Workstation 2.1. The software is amazing — you can run pretty much any operating system inside another one — everything from Windows 3.1 to XP, all the major Linux distros, and even old school OS's like OS/2 and MS-DOS.

 

Slow Down Firefox’s Memory Leak

I got about 10 extensions installed in Firefox, and if I leave it on for about three hours with a couple tabs open, the thing takes up about 500 megs of memory. It sucks.. probably the only major downfall to Firefox that I can see. This could be happening because of bad coding in the extensions.. hopefully later on Mozilla could release some kind of extension profiler to see how it holds up against boundary conditions and stuff. Meanwhile, lots of people have been finding some cool little hacks to decrease the memory. The best one I've seen is this:

http://tech.cybernetnews.com/2006/03/26/this-may-help-your-firefox-memory-leak/

It went from 40 megs to 900 KILOBYTES. Heh… Pretty nice.

 

Facebook, Going for $2 Billion

Yeah, Facebook is on the selling block, supposedly. Mark Zuckerberg and the group of sophomores that built the site turned down an initial offer of $750 million, in the hopes of $2 billion (although I thought I read somewhere that Zuckerberg "never wanted to sell the company"). That's a huge success, considering it started two years ago. Facebook is now the seventh most-trafficked site on the Internet. The article I read said that Viacom would be a good candidate to buy the company — they own all the MTV, VH1, and Comedy Central networks. I guess that would be beneficial to Viacom so they could somehow know what the latest trends and stuff are, and I'm sure they could deliver better targeted advertising on the site (but hopefully not *more*). From a business point of view, Facebook is like the jackpot of marketing information about the youth in general. A company could make billions by simply parsing the information on the site — what students like, what they like to do, etc. — and deliver targeted advertising.