Cheerful Curmudgeon

Back when I administered VAXen running BSD UNIX at FileNet, “just” 25 years ago or so, we didn’t have a high speed internet connection to use in transferring files between computers. I used a bank of Racal-Vadic 2400 baud modems to run UUCP and shuffle email and usenet articles around. With five modems in the bank, felix the VAX 750 grew to be a modest UUCP hub in SoCal. Today we measure our internet connections in megabits or Mbps, millions of bits per second, instead of baud. I am typing this on a cable modem connection that just achieved 11.4 Mbps downloading data and 1.7 Mbps uploading data. By comparison, felix the VAX had about 0.0024 Mbps of bandwidth, and downloading did not go any faster than uploading.

10.5" magnetic tape

We used to say, never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of magnetic tapes. With just 0.0024 Mbps of bandwidth available, it was completely impractical to transfer large files across “the net.” Instead, we would write the files to 10.5″ reels of magnetic tapes and drive them to their destination by car.

DEC RM03 disk drive

It would take several tapes, and several hours, to “back up” a single 67 MB, washing machine sized, RM03 disk drive. Once the  tapes were written, we would bundle them into  the nearest car and take a road trip across town to where they needed to be. Then would begin the (usually slower) process of reading the tapes into the new computer. It was way faster to move data by “station wagon” than pretty much anything else.

Flash forward to 2010. On Tuesday, I had 62,000 MB of files on a computer in a datacenter in Houston that had to be moved to a new computer in a datacenter on the east coast. I live in the middle of the country (St. Louis) and do not have ready access to either datacenter. Through the miracles of the internet, I logged into the Houston computer and typed one command:

rsync -az /backup/htn/ root@newmachine.com:/backup/htn

About eight hours later, with no intervention from me, all of the files had been replicated onto the new machine. I had just moved 1,000 times as much data as one of felix’s entire disk drives in a fraction of the time and with virtually no effort.

Yup… life is good.

As I predicted in Google Chrome to Replace Microsoft Windows, Apple OSX, and Linux (September 2008) and again in Step 2: Google Chrome to Replace Microsoft Windows, Apple OSX, and Linux (December 2008), Google is moving to replace the operating system, not just the browser. What changed two days ago is that Google is finally being up-front about it, instead of masquerading their plans as “only” a browser.

In Introducing the Google Chrome OS on the Official Google Blog, Google writes,

We designed Google Chrome for people who live on the web — searching for information, checking email, catching up on the news, shopping or just staying in touch with friends….

Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks. Later this year we will open-source its code, and netbooks running Google Chrome OS will be available for consumers in the second half of 2010….

Speed, simplicity and security are the key aspects of Google Chrome OS. We’re designing the OS to be fast and lightweight, to start up and get you onto the web in a few seconds. The user interface is minimal to stay out of your way, and most of the user experience takes place on the web….

Google Chrome OS will run on both x86 as well as ARM chips and we are working with multiple OEMs to bring a number of netbooks to market next year….

What does this mean to you? Several things, all good if you a) use your computer mostly for stuff on the web, and b) like to save money, and c) don’t mind that virtually all of your files will be “elsewhere” instead of stored on your own computer.

1. Turn on your Google Chrome OS based computer and, within a very few seconds, you will be up and running on the web (using Google Chrome, of course).
2. No (or at least few) worries about viruses and Trojans which exploit Microsoft Windows, Internet Explorer, Microsoft Outlook, or Microsoft Office. You will have the security of Linux without the geeky requirements that you actually understand Linux.
3. You will be able to run this on existing hardware, which ought to breathe new life into old machines.

The kicker is that, in Google’s grand vision, all of your email, letters, documents, spreadsheets, databases, etc., will be stored on Google’s servers. You will use GMail for your mail and Google Apps instead of Microsoft Office or OpenOffice.org. If you are big, you will use the paid versions of these apps. If you are small, ads might be in your face all the time. It is not coincidence that GMail and Google Apps came out of “beta” the same day that Google introduced Google Chrome OS.

Is this good for you? How much do you trust Google? It is certainly cool technology, certainly priced right, and certainly convenient.

Researchers have found a strong correlation between newborn feeding patterns and the seemingly immutable “night person” or “morning person”  patterns which govern our adult lives. Dr. Emily Erudita of the Hatch Institute of Mamalian Studies reports in today’s issue of Pan Generational Physiology,

In a study of 1,063 adults, 97.2% of the “night people” had been fed in the evening as newborns. Furthermore, 97.6% of the “morning people” had been fed in the morning as newborns. The remaining approximately 2.5% may have been fed during those periods but conclusive evidence was not available due to failing memories on the parts of the only living adult relatives and a lack of timestamped photographic records.

Dr. Erudita has announced her imminent departure from the Hatch Institute and will be founding a company to provide infant betrothal services, guaranteeing that no married couple need ever be mismatched again.

I am fed up with wasting clients’ dollars “fixing” web sites so that they look good in Internet Explorer 6. IE7 has been out for 2 1/2 years. IE8 is available as a free beta. There are lots of other browsers available for free. All of these browsers work better than IE6. If you still use IE6, it’s time to get over it and move on. Upgrade for free to something better.

This web site, and the others for which I am responsible, now display a warning similar to this when visited with IE6:

Sample IE6 warning message

For more information, see Moving Past Internet Explorer 6.

Do you remember when I predicted that Google Chrome would take over the world replace Microsoft Windows, Apple OSX, and Linux? Here is the next step, to be released for CES which begins January 8, 2009.

If all you want from your computer is to read your email (Gmail) and surf the web and use the other applications that Google provides, it is just seven seconds away. No, that is not a typo. In less time than you have spent reading this article, you will be able to boot your computer and be doing useful stuff.

Of course, you could use this system for web-based applications other than Google’s, but how many people will bother. I wonder how long it will be until you can get a free, ad-supported computer with this operating system pre-installed.

I published my family tree on-line so that other family members and genealogists would have easy access. I never imagined that it would turn into a way to find long lost friends. I just received this email message:

A friend of mine from college was looking for me.  So, he googled my family name and saw me on your family tree.  So he got my married name and saw me on my work site and then he sent an email to them and they forwarded it to me.  It is truly amazing how the internet works….

Too fun!

Cross browser testing is always a pain to coordinate but at least it just got a lot less expensive. Amazon Web Services just released AMIs running Windows which means that you can now get Windows virtual machines for as little as $0.125 per hour. These beasties make great platforms for doing cross browser testing. The only hassle was that the default AMI only had IE7 installed on it.

I said “was” because I have created a new, public AMI with six browsers installed on it: IE7, IE6, Firefox 2, Firefox 3, Opera 9, Safari 3.1, and Google Chrome 0.3. You are welcome to use it for free (well… you do have to pay Amazon their whopping 12.5 cents per hour). I hope it makes your web site testing life a bit easier.

Details at my Hen’s Teeth Network web site.

Internet TV—broadcasting live television over the internet instead of using radio broadcasts or the cable television infrastruction. Almost everybody has heard of it. Some people talk about it as the Next Big Thing in television. Many people figure that it will not happen for a long time for a wide range of business and technical reasons. Did you notice that a new player quietly entered the internet TV market this week?

Netflix posted New content to watch instantly on Wednesday,

Today we announced an agreement with Starz Play that adds around 1,000 choices that you can watch instantly today, and will add another 1,500 by the end of the year. Movies include “No Country for Old Men”, “Ratatouille,” “Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End,” “Superbad,” and more. You can see all the newly available choices here.

If you click the “here” link, and look near the top, right corner, you will find “Live Starz TV Channel” quietly nestled in there. (Click on the images to see full-sized versions.)

Click the “Live Starz TV Channel” link and, without any fanfare, you are watching a live Starz movie channel.

How long until Netflix offers more of the Starz, Encore and MoviePlex channels? How quickly will HBO, Showtime and the rest want pieces of the action? We have always known that Netflix was positioning itself to deliver movies over the internet. Now we can see that its goal is to deliver all TV content, not just movies. Netflix already has a solid subscriber base and delivery infrastructure. It looks like we consumers will soon have a third alternative to cable and satellite providers.

EepyBird is back… with sticky notes this time. And to enhance your viewing pleasure, click the “HD is off” button in the right side of the video when it starts playing. Assuming you have a high speed internet connection, you will see a video which is much higher quality than what you are accustomed to seeing from YouTube.

EepyBird’s Sticky Note experiment from Eepybird on Vimeo.

As reported this morning in Slashdot, you should read and carefully consider Google Chrome’s end user license agreement (EULA) before using Chrome. It’s hard to read in the teeny tiny box that Google provides so I am reproducing the entire text below the break. I am certainly not a lawyer but I am a paranoid, grumpy old man so here is my take on some of the things in the EULA:

• In sections 4.3 through 4.5, you agree that Google can “without prior notice to you” make Chrome stop working, deny you access to your files, and even put an upper limit on how much you use Chrome.
• In section 5.1, you agree to truthfully tell Google who you are and to keep that data up to date. Sure, Chrome has its “incognito mode” which hides your browsing habits from members of your family but Google will always know who you are what what you are doing.
• In sections 6.2 and 6.3, you agree to take full responsibility for everything done under your account, even if your account was broken into by a third party. Furthermore, you agree to notify Google by visiting an obscure web page if you become aware of any unauthorized use of your account. You’ll remember that, right?
• In section 17, you agree to let Google display advertisements anywhere it wants to, not just on Google’s web pages.

Edited 9/3/2008 10:20pm: As Ars Technica points out, the problem highlighted in the following two paragraphs is not a problem. Google is amending the EULA for Chrome and the change will be retroactive to cover all of us who have already downloaded and installed Chrome.

Those are only obnoxious. It gets worse. If you use Chrome to “submit, post or display” anything you create then section 11, Content license from you, should be particularly interesting.

• In section 11.1 and 11.2, “you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services” and “You agree that this license includes a right for Google to make such Content available to other companies, organizations or individuals with whom Google has relationships.” You just wrote the next great novel using Google Chrome and Google Docs? Guess who can publish it at will: Google. Worse, if you use Chrome to display some confidential information, even if those data were password protected on an SSL encrypted internal web site and labeled “Company Confidential,” Google has the right to “publicly display and distribute” that content.

You also give Google free reign to install software on your computer.

• In section 12.1, you agree that, “The Software which you use may automatically download and install updates from time to time from Google.” You trust them to always distribute software which is which is good for you, don’t you?

This is not necessarily bad. By using Google Chrome, you are using some very costly and valuable services. Something has to pay for that software and, in this case, that something is advertisers.

When you deal with a company, you should always remember that company’s core business. For instance, Microsoft is in the business of selling software licenses so it should be no surprise when it tries to sell you new operating systems and new versions of Outlook and Office. Google is in the business of selling advertisements so you should fully expect that it will do everything in its power to collect data from you which will let Google bring more, and more effective, advertisements to your computer screen.

(As promised the Google Chrome Terms of Service follows.)

Read the rest of this entry »