“Unauthorized charger” and other device restrictions

One of the common complaints about electronic gadgets is that nearly each one requires a different power adapter. The diversity can not be explained by the difference in power consumption; a laptop that burns 90W could just easily be powered by an adapter that is rated to 100W. The price would at best go up increase very slightly with maximum rating and this difference would be likely compensated for by the economy of scales from standardizing on a small number of models. Yet manufacturers continue to insist on not standardizing their adapters in the hopes of generating additional revenue.

Mobile phones are an interesting case. As smart-phones proliferate they require both power and data connectivity. The other end of the data connection is likely going to be USB. A sufficiently arrogant company could insist on their own Firewire (or is that IEEE1394?) technology in left field as the original iPods were but most consumer electronics have settled on USB2.0 fortunately. Speaking of the iPod it was one of the first that combined data and power into a single cable. Mobile phones are following suit now.

So it is something of surprise to see the Razor V3m display “unauthorized charger” when connected to a MacBook Pro. It is not a smart-phone so there is hardly any data to synchronize but USB is still good as a power source. There is no good reason for the phone to reject it. If this is by design and not just flakiness on the part of the handset, it is yet another pointless attempt to go against the current of interoperability in order to lock in consumers into a single brand of peripherals.

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Macbook Pro frustrations

1. Unreliable coming out of hibernation: occasionally a blank black screen after opening the laptop. Power button has no effect, as does the rest of the keyboard. Closing the lid, re-opening and then hitting power button brings back the unlock screen.
2. It gets worse from there: occasionally the password prompt never appears, instead there is the endless spinning cursor suggesting the UI is blocked on something. The first attempt to unlock the screen by typing enter after the password has no effect: the dialog box remains, with the password highlighted this time. Pressing enter again– on the exact same masked password– unlocks the screen.
3. Problems associating to draft 802.11N networks. There are general usability problems in connecting to any wireless network: the wireless icon that lists available networks is very slow to respond, has difficulty locating networks etc. Draft-N appears to pose particular problems because it will not automatically re-associate after coming out of hibernation– something it has no problem doing on ordinary B/G networks. Instead it prompts with the same question about joining a random open network because no trusted networks could be found. Maybe try harder next  time?
4. For that matter the entire user-experience around wireless needs tweaking. The top right-hand corner icon which opens the menu listing all detected access points is very slow. Occasionally the menu freezes, again suggesting that the code is getting stuck somewhere in the depths of the 802.11 stack.
5. FileVault prompt during restart: informs the user each time that FileVault, the file-system encryption feature on OS-X, is taking up too much space, some of this can be reclaimed, proceed/cancel etc. “Reboot” means reboot without lame questions.

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Choosing the wrong side in a format war

MSFT finds itself in this situation after the HD-DVD format it backed was finally consigned to the dustbin of history after Toshiba announced that it will stop producing the players. This was a domino effect, starting with the studious announcing Blu-Ray exclusive production, Netflix switching and finally WalMart saying the last word.

That leaves the question of what to do with all those XBox 360s with HD-DVD drives which are going to be about as useful as a brick in a few years. In fact the decisive and abrupt BluRay victory has just created a large collection of expensive and useless gadgetry overnight. Consider the dual-mode Samsung players that could play both HD-DVD and BluRay, in an uneasy truce to allow customers to hedge their bets on the war. With a clear winner emerging from the format war, all of the effort goes out the door. On the bright side Samsung will fare better than the HD-DVD camp because the company itself hedged its bets.

There is going to be frustration among the early adopters who guessed wrong– but that’s the cost of doing business on the leading edge. Just ask the initial round of iPhone buyers after the price drop. Long term consumers are probably better off because standardization will increase sales of players by removing the cloud of uncertainty. More players will drive down costs, and increase availability of content. It may also cement Sony as the new hegemon unseating the reigning oligarchy of the DVD Forum, depending on how the licensing around patents and royalties for use of BluRay technology are structured.

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Email storage and a lump of coal

TreeHugger is not the first to notice that computing technology can have environmental impact and different “systems” can be greener than others. In an invited talk at Microsoft Research in 2004, Andrew Shapiro from the Berkman Center and author of The Control Revolution raised the question of whether Linux could be deemed more environmentally friendly because it ran on lower-end hardware that would not meet the base requirements for modern Windows SKUs. (He was polite enough not to answer this question given the audience.) Similarly it is widely acknowledged that data centers today are gated by cooling and power consumption– air conditioning being one of the prime resource hogs– and availability of power generation is a significant factor in selecting “hot-spot” locations for building them.

TreeHugger post frets over the cost of email storage and wonders whether deleting email will curb carbon emissions. Good intentions for sure but the calculation may have been slightly off base for several reasons. First the bad news: storage in large-scale services like the one cites in the article are replicated. There can’t be just one copy of the message sitting around. Try explaining to a user that you lost all of their vacation pictures because drive #3385 failed– the so-called “we blame Seagate” approach.  That implies the figures are underestimating the true impact. That would be true only in a simplistic model where  power consumption scales with amount of data stored. Transaction capacity is often the determining factor for data center design. If one million people are checking email at the same time, enough servers have to be up and running to process those requests with tolerable latency. That’s true even if everyone keeps an empty inbox.

Similarly different storage architectures can lead to very different resource consumption patterns. If drives are directly attached to server, then more storage means more servers even if the servers sit idle CPU-wise. If the service uses a storage array network (SAN) then only drives are being powered and not all the extra baggage that would come with a full-fledged server. This is similar to the difference between using a networked drive at home verses another general purpose PC for handling backups. Finally there is the storage corollary to Moore’s law: disk sizes increase, price drops and so does power consumption per GB. (Unfortunately there is also a storage corollary to Peterson’s principle which states that data expands so as to fill the drive available.) It’s true that less storage will achieve some reduction but the Treehugger article probably overestimates this by several orders of magnitude. And if hosted cloud service were comapred to storing the same amount of data at home, there would be no contest: those massive data-centers achieve economies of scale and corresponding eco-efficiency not available to the average consumer not living off-the-grid with solar panels.

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Blogging from an XO

The machine had arrived unceremoniously after New Year’s– it was sitting there in a box when we came back from vacation. Intended as a gift for my better half that arrived just a few days too late for the holidays, it was in time for all the controversy surrounding Intel parting ways with the OLPC group.

After installing the battery and charging for the first time, we had a chance to experiment briefly. Her initial impressions were that it was surprisingly unintuitive as far as user interface goes. This blogger agrees: after being used to a standard Windows/OS-X/Ubuntu system, the XO involves a steep learning curve. And that may be perfectly reasonable beause the true target audience for this laptop will be coming to the table with no pre-conceived notions of what a personal computer ought to look like. In that sense the XO is that rare opportunity for system designers: a chance to start with a clean slate, no backwards compatibility, not even the faintest worry about “sideways compatibility” to interop with the applications rest of the world is using, except for the ubiquitious web itself. Perhaps the only familiar moment aside from a stripped down web-browser was launching a command line shell to see which standard utilities were available. Python, ssh, grep: check. ifconfig, emacs, gcc: no dice.

One big problem initially was getting wireless networking. The graphical “neighborhood view” is a great way to visualize other peers and infrastructure access points but the XO could not associate with our DLink draft-N router. A quick Google search revealed that the particular build that ships with this version does not support WPA out of the box. Luckily a work-around was available in the form of a shell script that manually adds the information to config files.

After getting net access and trying out the other included applications, the XO sat on the shelf for a while until the blogger decided to borrow it for a test-drive today. Writing this post can be described in one word as frustrating. The keyboard is dimunitive, which is understandable considering it is designed for children. But it also lacks feedback because of the water-proofing  covering the entire layout in an uninterrupted sheet of plastic.  Biggest challenge to text-editing is that the system is awfully slow: it makes Vista feel like a streamlined catamaran by comparion. Of all things simple UI tasks such as typing and clicking should be the times when CPU speed does not matter. After all a user can’t “outclick” or “outtype” a modern CPU running at hundreds of megahertz. Apparently on the XO they can: there is noticeable delay between typing and having the words  appear in the WordPress edit box. (A problem aggravated by the fact that on an unfamiliar keyboard  half the time the first attempt at typing contains a typo.)

There is a lot more to write about the XO but it is clear that these future posts are best not authored on the XO itself.

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MSFT and One-Laptop-Per-Child

OLPC project is showing a pattern of tumultuous relationships with leading IT companies. In the wake of a widely publicized fall-out with Intel comes a disagreement with Microsoft over the meaning of “dual-boot laptops.” To recap:  news reports suggested that OLPC and MSFT were working on models of the XO that could run both the custom Linux operating system and garden-variety Windows. Later Microsoft firmly denied these rumors and suggested the company had a different vision than Negroponte for integrating the Windows platform into the XO system.

Hardly any surprises here because XO laptop and Windows are ultimately irreconcilable concepts. There is no question that earning the loyalty of future PC users in emerging markets is critical for the long-term success in the platform battle. It is important enough to justify giving away copies of an operating system at a loss or trying to co-exist in an open-source ecosystem. But this is going to be a difficult balancing act.

One-Laptop-Per-Child project started out with the goal of producing $100 devices at scale. Some SKUs of Vista cost more than that already. This is a glimpse into the  impending reality check for Windows: as the price of hardware drops and the licensing costs for the operating system begin to constitute ever increasing shares of that price, vendors and customers are increasingly motivated to search for alternatives. Cost is a huge factor for OLPC but so is energy consumption and CPU/memory resources– two things that Vista has a voracious appetite for. That’s good news for Intel, AMD and for that matter any company supplying PC components: as long as the software continues to peg capabilities of the hardware, improvements in hardware can make a meaningful impact on the overall user experience and justify the investment.  But the target audience for OLPC is not subject to the standard hardware upgrade cycles, nor expected to meet the minimum recommended specs for Vista.

Even if copies of a highly stripped down version of Windows could be made to run efficiently in the highly minimalist specs of the XO and given away for free (similar to the Starter Edition sold at a significant discount at emerging markets where even the basic SKUs are very expensive compared to standard earnings) it will not create a sustainable advantage. Converting those free copies into full-paying licenses down the road will be a challenge to the extent that the premium for a Windows PC over an open-source one is appreciable– exactly the situation guaranteed by Moore’s law and dropping hardware prices.

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Bandwidth asymmetry in the US broadband market (1/2)

Back in the 1990s pundits speaking of the “information super-highway” liked to contrast its interactive nature with TV, emphasizing how much better of we were going to be because the new medium works two ways. TV was old-school, making us passive recipients of content expressive powers limited to choosing one pre-packaged experienced over the other. On the Internet everybody was going to be a participant, creating content.

The prediction proved correct to some extent, as evidence by the popularity of user-supplied content in Web 2.0 whether it takes the form of rambling blogs, blurry photographs names DSC001 on Flickr and more recently the fifteen-minutes-of-fame video on YouTube. But in this world contributing to the proliferation of content noise out there still requires help from another well-financed entity: the blogging site, photo-sharing website etc.

For the most part users are not running their own servers at home.  There is technology available for this, often open-source/free and to varying degrees usable by novice end-users. But there are good reasons for using a professional hosting service: it benefits from economy of scales, ease of management and gives users a host of features– including 24/7 reliability, backups etc.– that would be difficult to implement at home. For one-to-many sharing where the user is publishing “public” content intended for large number of people to access, it makes sense to upload it to a central distribution point. For private content, it is not as clear-cut. If  your tax returns are stored on a home PC and the goal is to work on them from a different location, a direct connection to the machine would be the straight-forward solution. The popular GoToMyPC app is one of the commercial solutions that has emerged in response to the demand. In principle the file access scenario has an equivalent hosted solution, where you can upload your files to a service in the cloud such as Windows Live Drive. But it’s easy to craft scenarios where that is not true: if the home PC had an expensive application such as PhotoShop installed locally, the only way to use that software is remote-access. Similarly the disruptive technology in SlingBox which streams cable/TV/DVR content over the Internet requires direct connectivity, in this case to the appliance and using it as server hosted at home. Last year Maxtor debuted the Fusion, a new external drive with networking support and built-in capability for sharing files over the Internet using links in email messages.

This is where the triad of OS developers, networking equipment vendors and ISP business models conspire to make life very difficult for consumers.

(continued)

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