“Cloud computing is Internet-based computing, whereby shared resources, software and information, are provided to computers and other devices on-demand, like the electricity grid.” (Wikipedia)

I’m a geek and the above, although well intentioned is about as easy to understand as the other buzzy language I hear on the topic.  Let’s write our own definition (in a few parts):

1.  The “cloud” is the internet – the mass of computers connected together all over the world.

2.  Often we use software on our computers (Microsoft Word, Internet Explorer, ITunes, etc).  We have seen the disks to “install” these things.

3.  Sometimes, we use software on the internet (Gmail, Google Calendar, Twitter, etc).  This software is not on our computers as it’s “on the internet”.

4.  ”On the internet” means that internet applications are really on someone else’s computer (according to our definition of the internet – point 1).

Therefore, in super, super simple terms:

Cloud Computing = Making someone else’s computer do the work.

Soooooo – if cloud computing is just making someone else’s computer do the work, I try to make my computer do the minimum amount of work possible (it’s only fair).

A great example of this concept is the Chromium OS – Google’s attempt to make an operating system that’s based on “cloud software” (this would be in place of Windows or Mac OS that may be on your computer now).

Here’s a quick video to learn more…

So now you know what cloud computing is, but you might be wondering “what’s the big fuss???”  Imagine this futuristic world:

You no longer need a computer.  Everything around you has an internet connection and you can login to your website from everything (even the toaster). On your website, you have your documents, which you can edit with Microsoft Office.  However, the software for Microsoft office is also online, so there’s nothing to install… You can just open a document and start typing.  When you’re done, you click email and your email opens.  Your photos from your camera have uploaded to the site and are available to email to your friends (remember everything is connected).  You write yourself a few reminders in your task application and head off to work.  All this information is available via your phone if you need it (or the next toaster you come across).  In fact, no one cares what program you have or device you carry, because it’s all instantly and universally available.

Thus ends my reverie…  Maybe I’m biased, but to me, cloud computing is the amazing attempt to simplify our lives into a single internet presence.  It’s not going to happen tomorrow, but the steady shift of our software from our computers to the internet is the first phase. Buzz word it may be, but it’s still an awesome concept.

Not much else I can add…  Hope this has been a fun post.  Ping me with questions – ab@justansterisk.com.

Enjoy,

~ab

It has barely been a week and the hubbub online about the hardware, software, features, design, upgrades, and potential yadda yadda is (almost) enough to make me revert to paper news.  The use of the phrase paradigm shift has hit an all time high… (sigh)

However, a friend asked me when I was going to write about the iPressrelease and casually added “isn’t it about exactly what you preach to your readers?  The ultimate goal isn’t the technology?”

Damn.  Touché.

Moreover, it hurts to admit that there is another layer to the shame – this is just the beginning.  Just an asterisk will probably become a thing of the past.  Sure the new iPad may not be perfect at first.  Heck, the entire line of iPads may not amount to anything (unlikely).  However, what really matters here is that someone has finally admitted that the computer, as we now know and love (hate), may not be for everyone.   In fact, in a statistical sense, it may be for no one.  I mean, how many geeks are there really?  I bet if we took the percentage of geeks in the general population, we’d end up with 0.0.  Why has the computer industry marketed to us for so long???

Think of it in terms of the car.  My father once told me that everyone should rebuild a car engine.  Why didn’t I ever need to learn this?  Maybe it was crap (sorry dad), cooked up by the automotive industry to sell cars, in an age before soccer moms and mini-vans.  I bet you can’t tell me the horsepower of a minivan… The car industry figured it out first – the majority of buyers don’t care.  They just want it simple, reliable and efficient.  Are you going to race in the Indy 500? Drive across the Sahara? Go off-roading in the mountains?

Preeeeeetty unlikely…

Are you going to become a programmer?  Render Pixar’s next movie?  Create computational models?

Again, probably not.

Apple has figured you out and my blog will one day go the way of the dodo…

Awesome.

~ab

Recently, I’ve read  several articles on the brilliance of Wolfram Alpha, a new search tool from the computational giant Wolfram (makers of Mathematica).  The trend is obvious – we are aiming for natural language search that combines data from many sources into one view.  What does this mean?  Let’s do an example to explore a bit.

Tylenol vs. Aspirin vs. Ibuprofen

Here is the test: I simply type Tylenol vs. Aspirin vs. Ibuprofen into several search engines and record the result as of 8/8/2009.

Let’s start with plain Google.   Here is the result.  I received 715,000 hits.

The top 3 results from Google (for me) are these:

Not particularly enlightening – it does seem like result number 3 is pretty good, but I’d have to go somewhere else (away from Google) to know for sure.

Now let’s try the exact same search in Wolfram Alpha (don’t worry, we’ll give Google another chance in a bit).  Here is the result.

This is looking a bit better.  It figured out that I’m not a doctor and translated Tylenol to acetaminophen.  It is also showing data side by side, providing comparison – albeit of data that I’m probably not interested in if I’m just trying to figure out what to take for my hangover.  What is missing here is a filter, some sort of way to go a chemical/medical direction, as shown above or to go a average Joe direction, as in the (partly) fictional case of a hangover.

Now let’s try a new product that (despite claims of Google to the contrary) is supposed to be a rival to Wolfram Alpha.  It’s called Google Squared.  I put the same search in and here is the result.

Not super inspiring but there is hope.  I now spend a few seconds putting my queries into the separate boxes and hitting “square it”.  Here is the improved result.  What is cool here is that we’ve got a variety of results.

And now things get interesting, because you can add and delete columns on the fly.  After another minute of playing, I get the exact comparison that I want:

That’s all I really wanted – the dosage, a bare bones description and a picture.  It’s still not perfect.  I would love to type “hangover” in as a new column and get a recommendation (yes, yes, no) on which one to take.  You can also click on any result to see Google’s confidence in the result (it always seems to be low…).

Now that we’ve gone through all that – what worked and what didn’t?

Limiting results – I don’t need to see 715,000 hits.  I was really just looking for 3, with some data on each.  Traditional Google fails because it’s overload.  Even if the best results are on top, I still have to comb through other websites (which takes me away from their advertising and loses them money, as a side note).  Wolfram Alpha goes in the other direction, limiting results to the point of mere scientific curiosity.  Google squared limited results but allowed me to add more data to my view and I think this is why I was happiest with the result.

Categorizing data – Plain Google didn’t categorize my results.  Wolfram Alpha chose the categories for me.  Google Squared let me attempt to categorize data as needed.  Again, this flexibility was what provided the best view of results for my query.

Magical data categorization, based on the information gleaned by watching me over the past year, could easily have been included in my search results for Google.  Although you can read my bio (AB), none of these sites knew of my background in Chemistry, and the the result sets were primarily scientific in nature.  The reason for this is quite obvious, data is easier to manage than opinion (the foundation of probably 99% of the web).  Chemical data is the easiest thing grab when someone searches for a chemical, but where was the insight into me?  I would have loved a scientific paper on my search or a list of hangover remedies (although I would have been ashamed if the hangover remedies were proposed first).  Admittedly, it didn’t take much more Googling to find these results, but I wish that categories were proposed based on me.  It would make me feel like all this information on my habits was worth having in the cloud, rather than a concern for my privacy.

It seems like my wish for a mind-reading search tool is still nowhere close to being granted.  Given that so much of my data is publically (and frighteningly) accessible, this is disappointing.  However, the future is bright –new tools like Wolfram Alpha and Google Squared are going in the right direction – they just aren’t there yet…  Certainly, these tools are making search easier, but there is room for a brilliant product, that uses your history in a positive way to make accurate suggestions, categorized by relevant categories and easily adaptable to the whim of the user.  When this arrives and once the privacy concerns have been answered, everyone is going to take notice. However until that day, these incremental improvements are not going to make waves.

~ab

While ChildAge < 20 do

     Child.Knowledge.Add( BasicCodingSkills )

     Child.Experience.Add( ProgrammingConcepts)

End While

When computers became common place, there was a sharp divide between the people involved.  The largest group were the coders (although they may have thought of themselves as chemists, engineers, biologists, physicists, etc.)  These early users knew that the power of computing was ripe for their chosen professions.  However, rather than shop for software, they wrote their own.  They had to do so, as simple applications, of the type on which we’ve become so reliant over the past 20 years, did not yet provide enough variety for scientific fields. 

In these early days, it was hard, if not impossible, to distinguish between the computer scientists (those involved with the noble goal of improving computing for all) and the rest of the scientific community, who just needed to get their work done.  For the latter group, innovation was born from necessity.  For the former, necessity was born from innovation.  I’m borrowing this idea from Jared Diamond’s oft-quoted work “Guns Germs and Steel” – a highly recommended read.  This isn’t to say that computer scientists were not trying to satisfy a necessity.  Instead, I’m trying to emphasize that in other fields, innovation occurred with specific applications in mind, rather than for the general improvement of existing technology (keep this in mind – it’s an important point).

As computers became more common-place, the field of computer science received more dedicated minds, full-time innovators for a rapidly growing industry.  At the same time, many more users entered the picture.  The software industry shifted as the larger population became the end-users, who expected software to be available for their own diverse fields.

At this point, you may wonder what happened to the coders of the previous era who were not computer scientists?  Did they just fade away unemployed and without useful skills in this new and exciting time?  Of course not!  They became the vendors of their old innovations.  Now few people needed to delve into the details of the code as those who already done the heavy lifting were selling their solutions!  (One example is Gaussian – an application that I used in college that was developed out of necessity by some physicists and chemists during the 80’s and now retails for a pretty impressive price tag)  The important point here is that no one was out of work – there was just a shift in titles and the need moved from one group to another.

So what is my point?  Why does my kid need to learn to program?  The balance has obviously shifted away from programming… Hasn’t it? I would argue not… keep reading.

In the 90’s, we had achieved a certain comfort level with our machines and we could now buckle down and create real content… There was no need to be a coder, as standard tools requiring no code had sprouted for almost everything and the combination of Windows & Mac OS made it all look pretty.  Unfortunately, there was a problem – our content needed to be formatted and edited in new and inventive ways.  It turns out that the prepackaged stuff just wasn’t cutting it, so we came up with formats for the web and for print to improve things (see my article on PDFs for another example). 

You see the cycle here?  The people who took us to the next step were the graphic designers and artists of the world who found the web created by computer scientists to be ugly and boring.  It didn’t do what they wanted it to do.  Those who could do their own jobs (for example graphic design) AND write code worked on a  solution (or at least in close partnership with traditional coders).  Knowing how to write or even just understand code put these people at the forefront of their industries and created some very exciting steps forward for the web and print.

The same is true in the new millennium.  CSS is a new(ish) way of coding websites that was designed with tons of input from graphic designers.  Moreover, it’s improvements since it’s inception have been suggested by the people using it.  You want to make a stunning website?  You have to know how to use CSS.  CSS is code – there is no way around it. 

Here, at the entirely the wrong place in this article, is my thesis:  Your kids, no matter what they do, will do it better if they can understand a bit of code.  They don’t have to be computer scientists – we have those – but they do have be logical and practical problem solvers who understand today’s tools.  Kids who learn to code are going to rule the future and I can’t even tell you what the next innovative step will be.

~ab

Links for your kiddies…

Microsoft Small Basic

Microsoft Popfly

Kaboose Kids Domain

Kids Can Program too!

What’s the point of having a blog if you can’t get on your soapbox once in a while and talk about your passions?  I’ve decided to add a segment called future post – the things that I’d love to see as upgrades to existing products or as a new trend/device of the future.

The device that has occupied my daydreams for the last two months is my Kindle2.  As I’ve already posted, it has become my travel companion and to have my personal library instantly accessible is a luxury that I’m not sure I could give up.  Here are six things that I’d like to see on the Kindle in future:

1. Comic books – The watchmen was a great book and a fantastic film (it’s not for children). There are a large number of graphic novels out there that deserve a better distribution model.  If someone could just come up with a standard for resizing images like they have for text, I’d appreciate it.
2. Sheet music with a metronome that turns the page – This one may be a bit fanciful, but the screen is perfect for music (perhaps a touch small) and I’d love to have my sheet music available on my Kindle.  An even better idea?  Add a metronome that turns the page for you at a set beats per minute (BPM).  If I’m jamming to Mozart (wow that makes me chuckle) at 120 BPM, I’d hate to have to stop to turn the page…
3. Book of the month clubs – They sell subscriptions to magazines and to newspapers, but I’d love to get a selection of really good books chosen and sent to my kindle each month.  The next step: an online kindle book club social network might be nice too…
4. Better integration of pictures in books.  This is related to 1 and 2, but I’d like to see better image and text combinations.  If there were one thing that I could change immediately about the Kindle, it would be to make graphics a. appear with text wrapping the image and b. without a single link to another page.  Although the pictures are pretty, some kindle editions require that you switch back and forth between pages with links.  This is convenient (you always have a link to the image being discussed) but it’s slower than a paper book, where you can glance between the image and the text as necessary to understand the passage.
5. Make the keyboard better so that I can type long notes on my reading.  Amazon learned so many lessons from other ebook manufactures, but why didn’t they learn anything from the cell phone industry?  Why is the keyboard annoyingly small with wasted space on the perimeter?  I love the idea that I can annotate sections, but I don’t think the kindle will break into the college text book market until they can make a better keyboard.
6. And finally, my favorite one – flip the pages by twisting the device right for forward and left for back.  The iphone does it and it’s cool.  It’s totally pointless, but very cool.

As I said, the Kindle is a superb little device.  However, nothing is perfect and this is my two cents…  Shout out any innovations that you’d like to see in the comments…

 

~ab