Computed·Blg

Via The Atlantic

By Alexis Madrigal

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Pshhhkkkkkkrrrrkakingkakingkakingtshchchchchchchchcch*ding*ding*ding"

Modem dialup by John Pemberton

Of all the noises that my children will not understand, the one that is nearest to my heart is not from a song or a television show or a jingle. It's the sound of a modem connecting with another modem across the repurposed telephone infrastructure. It was the noise of being part of the beginning of the Internet.

I heard that sound again this week on Brendan Chillcut's simple and wondrous site: The Museum of Endangered Sounds. It takes technological objects and lets you relive the noises they made: Tetris, the Windows 95 startup chime, that Nokia ringtone, television static. The site archives not just the intentional sounds -- ringtones, etc -- but the incidental ones, like the mechanical noise a VHS tape made when it entered the VCR or the way a portable CD player sounded when it skipped. If you grew up at a certain time, these sounds are like technoaural nostalgia whippets. One minute, you're browsing the Internet in 2012, the next you're on a bus headed up I-5 to an 8th grade football game against Castle Rock in 1995.

The noises our technologies make, as much as any music, are the soundtrack to an era. Soundscapes are not static; completely new sets of frequencies arrive, old things go. Locomotives rumbled their way through the landscapes of 19th century New England, interrupting Nathaniel Hawthorne-types' reveries in Sleepy Hollows. A city used to be synonymous with the sound of horse hooves and the clatter of carriages on the stone streets. Imagine the people who first heard the clicks of a bike wheel or the vroom of a car engine. It's no accident that early films featuring industrial work often include shots of steam whistles, even though in many (say, Metropolis) we can't hear that whistle.

When I think of 2012, I will think of the overworked fan of my laptop and the ding of getting a text message on my iPhone. I will think of the beep of the FastTrak in my car as it debits my credit card so I can pass through a toll onto the Golden Gate Bridge. I will think of Siri's uncanny valley voice.

But to me, all of those sounds -- as symbols of the era in which I've come up -- remain secondary to the hissing and crackling of the modem handshake. I first heard that sound as a nine-year-old. To this day, I can't remember how I figured out how to dial the modem of our old Zenith. Even more mysterious is how I found the BBS number to call or even knew what a BBS was. But I did. BBS were dial-in communities, kind of like a local AOL. You could post messages and play games, even chat with people on the bigger BBSs. It was personal: sometimes, you'd be the only person connected to that community. Other times, there'd be one other person, who was almost definitely within your local prefix.

When we moved to Ridgefield, which sits outside Portland, Oregon, I had a summer with no friends and no school: The telephone wire became a lifeline. I discovered Country Computing, a BBS I've eulogized before, located in a town a few miles from mine. The rural Washington BBS world was weird and fun, filled with old ham-radio operators and computer nerds.  After my parents' closed up shop for the work day, their "fax line" became my modem line, and I called across the I-5 to play games and then, slowly, to participate in the nascent community.

In the beginning of those sessions, there was the sound, and the sound was data.

Fascinatingly, there's no good guide to the what the beeps and hisses represent that I could find on the Internet. For one, few people care about the technical details of 1997's hottest 56k modems. And for another, whatever good information exists out there predates the popular explosion of the web and the all-knowing Google.

So, I asked on Twitter and was rewarded with an accessible and elegant explanation from another user whose nom-de-plume is Miso Susanowa. (Susanowa used to run a BBS.) I transformed it into the annotated graphic below, which explains the modem sound part-by-part. (You can click it to make it bigger.)

This is a choreographed sequence that allowed these digital devices to piggyback on an analog telephone network. "A phone line carries only the small range of frequencies in which most human conversation takes place: about 300 to 3,300 hertz," Glenn Fleishman explained in the Times back in 1998. "The modem works within these limits in creating sound waves to carry data across phone lines." What you're hearing is the way 20th century technology tunneled through a 19th century network; what you're hearing is how a network designed to send the noises made by your muscles as they pushed around air came to transmit anything, or the almost-anything that can be coded in 0s and 1s.

The frequencies of the modem's sounds represent parameters for further communication. In the early going, for example, the modem that's been dialed up will play a note that says, "I can go this fast." As a wonderful old 1997 website explained, "Depending on the speed the modem is trying to talk at, this tone will have a different pitch."

That is to say, the sounds weren't a sign that data was being transferred: they were the data being transferred. This noise was the analog world being bridged by the digital. If you are old enough to remember it, you still knew a world that was analog-first.

Long before I actually had this answer in hand, I could sense that the patterns of the beats and noise meant something. The sound would move me, my head nodding to the beeps that followed the initial connection. You could feel two things trying to come into sync: Were they computers or me and my version of the world?

Via Slash Gear

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Microsoft has let it be known that their final release of the Internet Explorer 10 web browser software will have “Do Not Track” activated right out of the box. This information has upset advertisers across the board as web ad targeting – based on your online activities – is one of the current mainstays of big-time advertiser profits. What Do Not Track, or DNT does is to send out signal from your web browser, Internet Explorer 10 in this case, to websites letting them know that the user refuses to be seen in such a way.

A very similar Do Not Track feature currently exists on Mozilla’s Firefox browser and is swiftly becoming ubiquitous around the web as a must-have feature for web privacy. This will very likely bring about a large change in the world of online advertising specifically as, again, advertisers rely on invisible tracking methods so heavily. Tracking in place today also exists on sites such as Google where your search history will inform Google on what you’d like to see for search results, News posts, and advertisement content.

The Digital Advertising Aliance, or DAA, has countered Microsoft’s announcement saying that the IE10 browser release would oppose Microsoft’s agreement with the White House earlier this year. This agreement had the DAA agreeing to recognize and obey the Do Not Track signals from IE10 just so long as the option to have DNT activated was not turned on by default. Microsoft Chief Privacy Officer Brendan Lynch spoke up this week on the situation this week as well.

“In a world where consumers live a large part of their lives online, it is critical that we build trust that their personal information will be treated with respect, and that they will be given a choice to have their information used for unexpected purposes.

While there is still work to do in agreeing on an industry-wide definition of DNT, we believe turning on Do Not Track by default in IE10 on Windows 8 is an important step in this process of establishing privacy by default, putting consumers in control and building trust online.” – Lynch

Personal Comment:

Do Not Track

Via LinuxInsider

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Bigger may be better if you're from Texas, but it's becoming increasingly clear to the rest of us that it really is a small world after all.

Case in point? None other than what one might reasonably call the invasion of tiny Linux PCs going on all around us.

We've got the Raspberry Pi, we've got the Cotton Candy. Add to those the Mele A1000, the VIA APC, the MK802 and more, and it's becoming increasingly difficult not to compute like a Lilliputian.

Where's it all going? That's what Linux bloggers have been pondering in recent days. Down at the seedy Broken Windows Lounge the other night, Linux Girl got an earful.

It's 'Fantastic'

"Linux has been heading towards one place for many years now: complete and total world domination!" quipped Thoughts on Technology blogger and Bodhi Linux lead developer Jeff Hoogland.

"All joking aside, these new devices simply further showcase Linux's unmatched ability to be flexible across an array of different devices of all sizes and power," Hoogland added.

"Having a slew of devices that are powerful enough for users to browse the web -- which, let's be honest, is all a good deal of people do these days -- for under 100 USD is fantastic," he concluded.

'It Only Gets More Exciting'

Similarly, "I believe that the medley of tiny Linux PCs we're seeing hitting the market lately is the true sign of the Post PC Era," suggested Google+ blogger Linux Rants.

"The smartphone started it, but the Post PC Era will begin in earnest when the functionality that we currently see in the home computer is replaced by numerous small appliance-type devices," Linux Rants explained. "These tiny Linux PCs are the harbinger of those appliances -- small, low-cost, programmable devices that can be made into virtually anything the owner desires."

Other devices we're already seeing include "the oven that you can turn on with a text message, the espresso machine that you can control with a text message, home security systems and cars that can be controlled from your smartphone," he added. "This is where the Post PC Era begins, and it only gets more exciting from here."

'There Is No Reason Not to Do It'

This is "definitely the wave of the future," agreed Google+ blogger Kevin O'Brien.

"Devices of all kinds are getting smaller and smaller, while simultaneously increasing their power," O'Brien explained. "Exponential growth does that over time.

"My phone in my pocket right now has more computing power than the rockets that went to the moon," he added. "And if you look ahead, a few more turns of exponential growth means we'll have the equivalent of a full desktop computer the size of an SD card within a few years."

At that point, "everything starts to be computerized, because adding a little intelligence is so cheap there is no reason not to do it," O'Brien concluded.

'We're Approaching That Future'

Indeed, "many including myself have long been harping on the fact that today's computers are orders of magnitude faster than early systems on which we ran graphic interfaces and got work done, and yet are dismissed as toys," Hyperlogos blogger Martin Espinoza told Linux Girl.

"A friend suggested to me once that eventually microwave ovens would contain little Unix servers 'on a chip' because that would be basically all you could get, because it would actually be cheaperto use such a system when given the cost of developing an alternative," he said. "Seeing the cost of these new products it looks to me like we're approaching that future rapidly.

"There has always been demand for low-cost computers, and the massive proliferation of low-cost, low-power cores has pushed their price down to the point where we can finally have them," Espinoza concluded.

"Even adjusted for inflation," he said, "many of these computers are an order of magnitude cheaper than the cheapest useful home computers from the time when personal computing began to gain popularity, and yet they are certainly powerful enough to serve many roles including many people's main or even only 'computer.'"

'It Gives Me Hope'

Consultant and Slashdot blogger Gerhard Mack was similarly enthusiastic.

"I love it," Mack told Linux Girl.

"When I was a child, my parents brought home all sorts of fun things to tinker with, and I learned while doing it," he explained. "But these last few years it seems like the learning electronics and their equivalents have disappeared into a mass of products that are only for what the manufacturer designed them for and nothing else.

"I am loving the return of my ability to tinker," Mack concluded. "It gives me hope that there can be a next generation of kids who can love the enjoyment of simply creating things."

'They Look a Bit Expensive'

Not everyone was thrilled, however.

"Okay, I am not all that excited about the invasion of the tiny PC," admitted Roberto Lim, a lawyer and blogger on Mobile Raptor.

"With 7-inch Android tablets with capacitive displays, running Android 4.0 and with access to Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) Play's Android app market, 8 GB or storage expandable via a Micro SD card, 1080p video playback, a USB port and HDMI out and 3000 to 4000 mAh batteries starting at US$90, it is a bit hard to get excited about these tiny PCs," Lim explained.

"Despite the low prices of the tiny PCs, they all look a bit expensive when compared to what is already in the market," he opined.

'These Devices Have a Niche'

The category really isn't even all that new, Slashdot blogger hairyfeet opined.

"There have been mini ARM-based Linux boxes for several years now," he explained. "From portable media players to routers to set-top boxes, there are a ton of little bitty boxes running embedded Linux."

It's not even quite right to call such devices PCs "because PC has an already well-defined meaning: it was originally 'IBM PC compatible,'" hairyfeet added. "Even if you give them the benefit of the doubt, PCs have always been general use computers, and these things are FAR from general use."

Rather, "they are designed with a very specific and narrow job in mind," he said. "Trying to use them as general computers would just be painful."

So, "in the end these devices have a niche, just as routers and beagleboards and the pi does, but that niche is NOT general purpose in any way, shape, or form," hairyfeet concluded.

'Opportunities for Specialists'

Chris Travers, a Slashdot blogger who works on the Ledger SMB project, considered the question through the lens of evolutionary ecology.

"In any ecological system an expanding niche allows for differentiation, and a contracting niche requires specialization," Travers pointed out. 'So, for example, if a species of moth undergoes a population explosion, predators of that moth will often specialize and be more picky as to what prey they go after."

The same thing happens with markets, Travers suggested.

"When a market expands, it provides opportunities for specialists, but when it contracts, only the generalists can survive," he told Linux Girl.

'Niche Environments'

The tiny new devices are "replacements for desktop and laptop systems in niche environments," Travers opined.

"In many environments these may be far more capable than traditional systems," he added.

The bottom line, though, "is that the Linux market is growing at a healthy rate," Travers concluded.

'The Right Way to Do IT'

"Moore's Law allows the world to do more with less hardware and so does FLOSS," blogger Robert Pogson told Linux Girl. "It's the right way to do IT rather than paying a bunch for the privilege of running the hardware we own."

Last year was a turning point, Pogson added.

"More people bought small, cheap computers running Linux than that other OS, and the world saw that things were fine without Wintel," he explained. "2012 will bring more of the same." By the end of this year, in fact, "the use of GNU/Linux on small cheap computers doing what we used to do with huge hair-drying Wintel PCs will be mainstream in many places on Earth," Pogson predicted. "In 2012 we will see a major decline in the number of PCs running that other OS. We will see major shelf-space given to Linux PCs at retail."