kplaxmaster is a good friend and a bit of a rival blogger in the technology space. He wrote an article expanding his position from a recent argument on Twitter. I encourage you to go read it and formulate your own opinions before reading my response. Did you go? Great. So can you agree with me that the article starts with “cloud sucks” and ends with “WHERE ARE MY ELECTRIC CARS?!?”, effectively emulating the maniacal rantings of a backwater technomage stuck on dial-up. Just teasing, of course.

Lets start with the definition, which I believe hits the core of my disagreement. It seems that accuracy gets lost in reducing the cloud offering to “multiple computers act as one“. I’d much prefer that the community agrees to “cloud computing means (1)accessing/consuming/manipulating data on (2)any device (3)regardless of origin“. And I can provide examples of these interactions:

(1)I access my email through Gmail, I consume films from Netflix, and I make changes to documents in Google Docs.
(2) I do all of these things from my Android phone as I ride to work on the train for mobility. I do all of these things from either of my two personal laptops or my work pc (except Netflix) if I’m on the road or in the office. I do all of these things from my 8-Core, 3 Monitor home computer to get high-speed and simultaneous processing. I consume data on my Roku (connected to my TV).
(3)I can create a document and type an outline on my phone, when I get home I finish typing each of the devices. When I start watching an episode of Star Trek TNG on my PC and have to jump on the train to see friends I just open Netflix on my way out of the door and resume playing the same episode right where Q left off.

I think his statment about computation power costing more is extremely dubious: “This will drive down cost of PCs, yes, but also put even more trust into the cloud—and most likely raise the price of computers with actual CPU power such as a quad core 3.0 GHz computer as demand will go down.” This assumes that entire swaths of the CPU market is content to slow their inventive nature in favor of ‘churning out’ CPUs with minor improvements. It also assumes that server-side CPU developments will not impact costs to the end user. The market can centralize CPU processing, but that doesn’t reduce peak-performance requirements as processing is still taking place. I would even hypothesize that centralization drives computing requirements UP as server owners will be looking for any efficiencies they can find to reduce server footprint and compute costs during computation cycles that surpass.

I completely agree with the assessment that processing and bandwidth should be considered like natural resources just like electricity. I argue that such pricing has been grossly absent from the entire discussion, just look at the fact that American consumer pays for “bandwidth” instead of “throughput”. Even though I hate to say it, the wireless market is on the right track…just with the wrong pricing models in mind. They view 1GB of data as a fixed price when the reality is far more like the electricity delivery model: peak usage translates to peak pricing. If I’m trying to download a video in the evenings, during peak hours, it should cost more and I (and the service provider) should make decisions based on hard figures.  Fixed lines (e.g. FIOS) have high up-front costs and limited channel sharing so consumers get truly dedicated lines, but we all dump into the same “distribution system”, to borrow a power term. Unfortunately, the similarities only go so-far as throughput isn’t something you can save up like electricity to be expended by another consumer. Regardless, we need to decide what we’re selling to users.

Now, your guess is as good as mine about why he starts freaking out about not having MS Kinect hooked to traffic lights or computers in refridgerators. But the question about why we need everything connected to te cloud is easy: because machine-to-machine management is hard. The average end user doesn’t want to have to understand client-server architectures, install UPSs in their homes for server PCs and reset devices to get them to resync. They also don’t want to debug misconfigurations, diagnose problems, or defend the contents of their refridgerator against cyber attacks from the server they forgot to power cycle after the last Microsoft patch.

But back to the core idea of trade off’s, it’s important to remember that a technology user is balancing three costs:

• [re]education – How do I do this again? I’ve never heard of that before!
• time – After I brush my teeth, it’s going to take me 5 minutes to hook my device to my PC and find the album I wanted to download before I hop on the bus.
• stress – The service is down?! Do I have to reset the server in the basement? Am I going to miss that call with Jane tonight because of some problem with MY stuff?
• money – Derived from the North American ‘evilroot’

The fact is that cloud offerings (right now), offer about as close to an “on-off” switch as you can get for education, 6 second buffering times for Netflix on 3G, no system maintenence stress, and for a price that’s well below most of the traditional service offerings (often free, once you assume connectivity). Now, you can claim that connectivity has to factor into the pricing, which I’m okay with. I personally pay $70 a month for connectivity ($30 cell data + $40 home internet). Add $17 for media and now I’m streaming years of content (video and music), communicating on every social network and through commercial channels for $97 dollars per month.

You can argue that those 6 seconds of buffering and $30 dollars per month would be justified by having to sync all my devices at home on my PC before I leave for work, but the time to download ALL of my media plus not having the ability to choose on the fly means I’m not ever going that way. And neither are the data providers: it’s simply TOO HARD to manage DRM in a distributed computing system. So if I don’t want to move and they don’t want to move…why resist?

In honor of mother’s day, I’d like to share a recent story of tech-love.

Like most mother’s, mine is behind my generation’s tech-curve; but there is a certain power she finds in being significantly ahead of hers. Her most recent technological conquest, Google Reader, has become an excellent chance for me to see what she finds interesting without getting a email with a subject line that reads “FW: Fw: FW: FW: Fw: It’s funny how you…” In fact, she often shares things from my own feeds that I miss or to which I didn’t pay close enough attention.

Not even a week ago I witnessed a moment akin to watching a child pedal a bicycle for the first time without assistance of training wheels or a hand holding firmly to the seat. I had just finished watching a video on a feed we both read, and I shared it to my followers with a comment to the effect of “wow.” Thirty-minutes and four seconds later I get a response from my mother stating: “I almost shared this one myself. It is fascinating to watch!”

Allow me an interlude here for those of you unfamiliar with the online community, or really any community based around information sharing. There’s an odd trend in how, as membership lengthens, there comes a certain joy in being ahead of the consumption curve. “I can’t believe you haven’t seen the game yet!!” or “How could you not have heard about the breakup??” and “You just heard about this now? I listened to them a year ago.” I do this all the time despite often thinking otherwise, and I usually wind up sounding like a royal jackass. I firmly believe that coming off “coolly“- all the while ensuring maximum credit for your diligence-is something of an art. Ralphie said it best when discussing the contemporary arts: “My father worked in profanity the way other artists might work in oils or clay. It was his true medium, a master.”

So on this Mother’s Day I’d like to point to the Picasso from the macaroni artist, the motocross champion fresh out of training wheels. My mother, a woman who has been a mother for at least as long as I can remember her being a mother at all, comes off as smooth as glass as she slides in the “oh, I to-oh-tally read that before you” bit. She’s a fast learner all right; two months on the RSS job and she’s pulling off moves like a pro.

Happy Mother’s Day, Mom. I welcome you to the cool kids table. Try the Sunny D…it’s pretty boss.

I was sitting at a bus stop yesterday and a guy with a Droid X asked me how I liked the phone. He was much older and said he was reticent to start, but bought one a few weeks ago because he was impressed with the amount he could do. He commented on how people on the metro stare at their devices the whole trip, and he hasn’t yet figured out how/why. I gave him my guess: the Kindle App.

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I opened a ticket with @VerizonSupport this morning via their help form:

I experienced significant problems all of last night and this morning. While my router was connected to the internet and some traffic could go out, there was almost no response coming back to the box. So websites would say “connected” and “waiting”, but content would never arrive. I could perform traceroutes and get responses all the way to the endpoint devices, but the content simply wouldn’t come back. I didn’t have Wireshark installed on any of my PCs so I couldn’t check my local network traffic, but it’s definitely a problem with the service.

This was tested with multiple configurations with wireless (phone and PC) and wired (pc) configurations (4 devices total tested). All were working fine recently, but last night and this morning they were not. In addition, it was taking 10-20 minutes for my Verizon FIOS modem to lease an IP address from the WAN.

Please check if there was an outage in my area or what is going on.I wasted my entire night trying to fix the issue and I’m very, very displeased with the quality of the service I am seeing thusfar. I don’t know who to blame right now, but so far FIOS seems to be the only untested piece of the equation. (EDIT: Not true, see below)

Update and Closure:

When I came home last night (Day 2), the problem was still happening. I did a little more testing and swapped some more cables. In my previous testing I hadn’t tested the WAN cable from the company. It turned out that their outbound cable had a minor disconnection in it and packets were getting lost like crazy. Once I put a new cable of mine in there was no issue. I guess Verizon wasn’t [really] to blame since the problem was a cable that had come with the network setup in my new place.

Verizon never got back to me through the form I submitted. I didn’t include my account information, but I would have liked a phone call. I will say that @VerizonSupport was persistent in getting me to fill out a whole different form. I don’t know why there are two, but this new one has social account info which is really fun! I now have to get back to @VerizonSupport and close the loop. Thanks for following up, Verizon!! I’m still on your team.

For those of you who haven’t heard, the Atrix 4G just came out and it’s theoretically revolutionizing the world of mobile computing.

The new Motorola Atrix 4G smartphone promises to “redefine the line between a phone and a laptop.” Motorola appears to be setting its sights on the smartphone, tablet, and netbook markets all at once as the Atrix 4G combines the features of all there products into one device.

I believe this WOULD in fact revolutionize the world, if AT&T realized how this technology is supposed to work. The problem is that with the AT&T bandwidth caps in place, there’s just no way this device is going to be useful and affordable. It’s way too much for just mobile data, and the bandwidth caps prevent any serious user from switching to this device exclusively. Here’s the pertinent excerpt from their website:

Just plug the ATRIX 4G into the MOTOROLA LAPDOCK™ for MOTOROLA ATRIX 4G to unleash a connected experience via the built-in webtop application.

Wait for it:

‡Requires 2-year voice plan & $45/mo. DataPro 4GB Personal plan, Card valid for 120 days wherever major credit cards accepted. May be used to pay wireless bill…MOTOROLA LAPDOCK sold separately. Full Firefox® browser use with AT&T Mobile Broadband requires DataPro 4GB Personal plan

As usual, AT&T has offered new technology at a foolishly prohibitive cost to the end user. Their hope? They want you to think that this is the new norm; they want you to think that spending $45 a month for 4GB of data per month is acceptable. $10.12 per gigabyte!!! Compared to the 5 cents per gigabyte provided at the host company level. Are you telling me it costs AT&T 200x the cost of a data center to provide connectivity to their end users?? Idiocy, especially since the AT&T networks aren’t worth the packets they don’t mind letting fall into the void.

Do yourself a favor, talk to Verizon or Sprint or any other carrier that offers unlimited bandwidth before you start barking up this tired old tree. What a pitiful excuse for a communications company. I hate to be so negative, but as an ex-AT&T customer I’ve been there too long and for too much money.

It’s not JUST AT&T, any company that puts additional tethering costs on restrictive bandwidth cap is stupid. It’s not going to increase the load on your network unless you figure that you’re selling bandwidth to people that they just aren’t going to use. If that’s the case, your offers are almost maliciously misleading.  Either it’s a tethering cost OR it’s a bandwidth cap, take your pick. And I don’t buy the “bandwidth” vs. “throughput” argument for one moment, not with iPhones streaming Netflix as it is.

I’ve never been a Kevin Rose mega-fan, but I do find him fairly interesting and able to try new projects. His newest is Foundation, a subscription based mailing list.  Essentially, they pre-release all content to subscribers($3.99 per month) 7 days prior to the free release.

The first talk (below) is with Twitter inventor and Square founder, Jack Dorsey. I had never seen an interview with him before, but through watching it seems that I get to know his passions and major life threads fairly intimately. If this video is any indication of the upcoming content then I am extremely excited. I would probably pay for the content if I weren’t miles behind my other subscription services.

This interview has also gotten me reinvigorated in Square; I think it has the potential to revolutionize small businesses and vendors.

As readers may know, I had but one love in my life. It was a strong, loving relationship. Perhaps we were both too young to appreciate each other as we should have, but such passion you have never seen in all your years. When the relationship ended [her choice], I was completely devastated. She went off in search of better pastures but I’ve not heard from her since so I have no idea what has become of her.

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MG Seigler writes in “Android Is As Open As The Clenched Fist I’d Like To Punch The Carriers With“:

Nearly 1,000 people responded, and a large percentage focused on the same idea: the idea of “openness.”

You’ll forgive me, but I have to say it: what a load of crap.

In theory, I’m right there with you. The thought of a truly open mobile operating system is very appealing. The problem is that in practice, that’s just simply not the reality of the situation. Maybe if Google had their way, the system would be truly open. But they don’t. Sadly, they have to deal with a very big roadblock: the carriers.

This guy then, essentially, argues that Android IS open, but he doesn’t like that carriers mess with it. What do you want Google to do? They DID create an open phone, now just push the carriers to stop screwing around. This new market of iPhone-alternatives is solely because of Google and now he’s saying that it isn’t open enough? The phone provider has the right to say “you can’t do that here”, and you have a right to try somewhere else. They’re trying to maintain an international service.

I realize this probably seems crazy to iPhone users who have a phone that’s so locked down you can’t even load your applications on it. Check out Apple’s new guidelines for app development. This same guy actually wrote that post. It’s funny because he hardly bats an eyes to see the phone manufacturer set these ridiculous standards, but when a carrier steps in and takes away the tethering feature (also not an iPhone strength) he calls it foul play.

I’ve heard this before, and I thought it was dumb then too. It’s clear this guy’s beef with Google is as valid as getting called a “jackass” on the street and yelling at Thomas Jefferson for the First Amendment.

*Clearly I love Google, and fight for Android like a knight fights for a beautiful damsel. I encourage others to admit their own allegiances.

**Great, now I’m late for work because someone is wrong on the Internet.

Steve Rubel made it on Techmeme today with his article “Google Instant Makes SEO Irrelevant“ saying that “Google today launched an ambitious effort to speed up searching. But what they really did is kill SEO.” My favorite paragraph seems to always be the last in articles:

Google Instant means no one will see the same web anymore, making optimizing it virtually impossible. Real-time feedback will change and personalize people’s search behaviors.

What the heck does that even mean?!? Google made their searches run as you type; it’s not like they shot a cybernetic monkey into the sun. This is a stupid article and Steve Rubel probably needs help turning on his computer. My biggest clue? His bio on the side of his blog: “[Steve] is charged with helping clients identify emerging technologies and trends that can be applied in marketing communications programs.” And his name is Steve, this seems like a foolish combination.*

Google Instant does not kill SEO. Feedback changes aspects of the search [moreover the advertising] game…yes. But you’re still typing in words….it’s still the same queries. If suddenly we started being sent to random web pages based on biometrics, radiation from our cell phones, or by selecting a series of colors to represent our mood then THAT would kill SEO. The fact that Google is using the same exact algorithms on the back end that they always have (well, sort of….[isn't that image goofy?]) only shows you how preposterous the idea is. They’re still returning the exact same results! The only argument he could possibly have is that it’s guessing the remainder of the word you’re trying to type. Watch out people! Start keeping your pets indoors because SEO is about to fly off the rails and through your backyard.  It doesn’t matter how many times I

*I’m sure Steve Rubel is a very nice man with immense talent and a nice car to match. I don’t mean to criticize. It’s just that when some guy says idiotic things about the internet in an idiotic way to get his idiotic blog to the top of Google’s idiotic Instant Search it makes me think that he may, in fact, be…well, you get my point. Please don’t take offense, sir, I think it had to be said. I’m almost proud that you said it first. You’re kind of like the first guy who said “cigarettes are good for the lungs!”

EDIT: This guy didn’t come through Techmeme until later, but much more thorough. Go read a real journalist’s opinion.

I highly recommend reading the following bit of spam I received from “bbenjiluin@hotmail.com” (Note how it doesn’t match the email in the email). The best quote is “I want  to initiate dating with you”.

Hi!

I received a letter from dating site. And they informed me about your email.  They also tagged that you are looking for a partner. I was fond of your character so I want  to initiate dating with you and learn you more bettterr. We could send photos each other. How do you consider this?

My email is h_zdenek@yahoo.com .

and I will respond you gladly and I will send some photos too.

My name is Helen and i am from Turkey.