Are Dumb Terminals Getting Repackaged?

Back in the mid 90's I remember that there was plenty of debate at organizations as to whether it was better to deploy fully functional PC's, or those invariably beige dumb terminals. IT types argued that the dumb terminals were cheaper to deploy, easier to upgrade, and posed less of a security risk (maybe virtually none). Yeah, nobody was plugging in their USB key or iPod to any of those beige screens.

Around the same time, I was employed intermittently at a not so secret governmental facility. Throughout the place, they had terminals like you see pictured above and to the right. They consisted of a keyboard, which plugged into the monitor. Mouse? We didn't need no stinkin' mouse! The monitor (ours were orange monochromatic models) then plugged into the wall outlet for power, and into an Ethernet connection for data. It was a model of simplicity. These boxes, ugly and dumb as all heck, were quite simple to support centrally, for as far as I could tell, they had no internal processing power. Everything was done at the server level, and we had access to email, word processing, and data based applications- but not the World Wide Web. With no way to plug in a peripheral, this network was locked down tighter than a drum, and it was absolutely secure, even from the floppy discs that were popular back then. I had heard that they had six servers running all of this, and it never went down, but it did slow down significantly a few times as they had to take some of them offline. At the time, I also thought that it was pretty dumb that these appliances couldn't do anything on their own.

Enough with the history, let's fast forward several years to the here and now. In the great dumb terminal vs. PC war, the clear winner was the PC. As a matter of fact, as I was leaving the facility in the new millenium, they were replacing the dumb beige boxes with Windows based PC's (which a bunch of us promptly added some networked games to, but alas I digress). The power of the WWW was simply too much to resist, and as the applications got more and more complex, it was too much for the servers to handle, and it was better to offload some of the processing to the desktop.

However, now I see the trend reversing. Desktop pc's currently have tons of computing power. However, over 90% of users hardly use it for anything beyond email, word processing and the web. All of these pedestrian applications worked fine on 486 chips, and hardly take advantage of multicore processors that we've all flocked to. More and more, the internet hosts and runs the application. Many users use online document editors such as Zoho and Google Documents. Even more resource intensive tasks like file conversion are now easily done online with tools such as Zamzar. Finally, there are even plenty of sites that can do online video editing, a typically resource heavy task, and let's not forget about online photo editing as well. With all of this at our disposal, for the affordable price of free, installing software becomes much less of an issue, and is easier to justify for frequently used tasks.

With so much of this going on online, and not using the clock cycles of your PC, the network connection becomes far more important than the processor speed. Hence why users are gobbling up the faster speed connections as fast as fiber can get run to their home. In a way, the speed of the network can be as important a determinant of overall performance as is the speed of the computer. Needless to say, dialup is about as useful as that 386 desktop that was long ago placed curbside.

The current trend in phones is to shift the broadband network from a wired affair to a wireless one. This is the so called "third generation" network that gets discussed, and is becoming more commonplace here in America. Other initiatives include WiMax, and the recent wireless auction that may even provide a third pathway to the home for internet access over these potentially robust wireless networks. Finally, the groundwork is being laid for affordable access everywhere, all the time, and a move beyond WiFi with its purposely limited range that was never really designed for anything beyond a home router.

With these wireless broadband networks, the other half of the equation becomes the smartphone. Users are moving beyond moving their phone as only a voice communication device. Beyond even a dedicated text messaging platform, the possibilities are opening to have internet access everywhere, in a useful format. Sure, my Palm T/X could access the internet over WiFi, but the Blazer browser is quite limiting. With the option to have iPhone apps written by 3rd parties, expect to see some innovation there in the months ahead. With the network assuming greater importance, suddenly that underpowered smartphone, with a flash memory card for storage, is more than adequate as everything is really online anyway, and not local.

If things continue in the trend that many are guessing, than the next generation of smartphones, could very well be the seriously attractive reincarnation of those beige dumb terminals. Now if only they could make the data plans more affordable I'd be willing to jump on board. How many months on my T-Mobile contract again?

Jonas

Hard To Beat POTS

In case you're wondering, POTS refers to "plain old telephone service." You know, the copper wires that we all used for communication for a century or so. Alexander Graham Bell definitely knew what he was doing, and it has become hard to improve upon the simplicity of a direct copper connection.

What gets all the attention these days is VoIP. This is "voice over internet protocol" that chops up the stream of your voice and then sends the packets over the internet to be reassembled at the destination. This is the digital telephone service that is sold by companies such as Vonage and AT&T CallVantage. It also is the basis of voice chat over IM protocols like Google Talk and Skype. While these are affordable options, and they get the extras right, such as CallerID and call forwarding, they tend to miss on the basics. More specifically, voice quality can suffer because of network traffic congestion (locally because of what else your internet connection is doing), and also 911 location services probably won't be able to find you (e911 attempts to fix this but it has mixed results and shouldn't be trusted when you're choking and can't talk).

Aside from the problem with 911, VoIP often falls short on voice quality. This is because the packets of voice may not arrive at the destination in the correct order. Think about when you watch a video on the internet; there are often stutters and buffering issues. Well, the same thing can happen with VoIP, but when you're trying to have a conversation it gets real old, real fast. While it may be fine for talking to a relative on the other side of the country, it's probably not the best way to seal the big deal for your business as your voice drops out. Your neighbors running a BitTorrent server can definitely screw up your phone call, especially if you both have your internet from your cable company.

By me, there are two other options. These are Optimum Online phone service, and Verizon Fios phone. While not as affordable as Vonage, they both do provide one advantage to a pure VoIP service (I was gonna say connection, but service is more accurate due to the nature of packets wandering around the internet). In both cases they are digital phone services. What you're getting is that unlike VoIP, some priority is given to the voice communication, so that a steady stream of data can be exchanged with no dropouts. In the case of Fios, reportedly voice gets its own frequency of light in the fiber cable so that it doesn't compete with the rest of the data to get to its destination.

I often hear the phrase "cell phone quality," to describe these new digital phone services. I've had a cell phone for almost a decade now, and it's definitely been varying quality. I remember my first cell phone, with AT&T service (way before it was Cingular), and it would wander connections between analog and digital towers. While the digital sounded clearer, the analog got dropped less and sounded more realistic so I can't say which was really better. Due to increasing numbers of users on a limited number of towers, cell phones are all digital now, but the signal dropouts remain.

I see a parallel to our home phone service. While we move from analog (POTS) to newer digital VoIP systems, while we gain capabilities, and in some cases affordability, I'm not sure that the core service, namely voice transmission, is really improving. At any rate, it probably won't matter because over the next decade the future of the telephone is clearly on the internet.

Jonas

NudgeCast 2/25/08

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Everything you need to know about watching your favorite TV shows on the internet! Hear all about services such as Fancast, Miro, Hulu (and OpenHulu), a shortcut to to the networks current offerings, and an update on Joost.

TechNudge Live

The Last Ten Feet

For years, the recurring statement has been "the last mile," referring to when the faster fiber optic connection would reach the house directly as the slower copper cable bottlenecked home users bandwidth. In urban areas that has become less of an issue with offerings such as Fios. However, as many users have enough bandwidth to download DVD quality full length movies, the question becomes if they will do it. In my mind, it's the issue of the last ten feet.

These feet I'm referring to are the distance between the television set, and the computer. Let's face it, most of us want to watch our movies on our TV set, and not on our desktop. Sure, we've all watched a movie on a computer once in a while. I generally don't mind if I'm watching alone. But would I want to watch all my movies that way? Definitely not.

Where is this video coming from? There are several possibilities for watching movies on your computer. They include NetFlix with their new unlimited movie watching, and dedicated services like Vongo. However, both of these services keep the content on the computer as streamed media, so good luck on watching it on the TV set.

One way around this is the dedicated media center PC. With offerings such as this, at least there is now reason to justify the expense of such a device. However, in most cases, it won't pass what many call WAF- the wife acceptance factor. No, that desktop box is fine for the basement, but won't pass muster for the living room.

This is why there has been a slow but steady push to bridge this gap. Two products that attempt this are AppleTV and Sandisk's TakeTV. I can tell you about both in the nutshell. Apple's product is overpriced, both in hardware, and in rental fees. They're going to have to get their rental fees down so that they're significantly less than Blockbuster, and I can watch the flick for more than 24 hours. The TakeTV works well enough, but there is simply not enough content out there for it yet.

What we are left with to solve the problem are the devices that we keep hearing about. Which of these that will bridge these last ten feet is anyone's guess. Will it be a media center extender? Will the XBox get the job done? How about an Apple or Zune dock that can do HDTV quality? What about a dedicated NetFlix box? Perhaps all of the previous will only be transitional technologies as we progress to a networked TV. As more of our content to be viewed ends up online, this trend seems rather inevitable.

In the meantime, as we continue to watch our DVD's, and cheer Blu-Ray or HD DVD in the next generation disc battle, just realize that it's all about getting the internet hooked up to our television set. You know, that last ten feet.

Jonas

NudgeCast 10/23/07

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Dictionary 2.0 + 1.0 - 0.7

Just the other day, I was thinking about how I really haven't opened a dictionary in quite a few years. As I do most of my writing on a word processor, the veritable Webster's just sits on the shelf as the spell checker catches the typos, (a term that really applied to a typewriter, and probably doesn't even apply here in the strictest sense).


There are times that I need a definition of a word. A few years back, I would turn to the Microsoft Bookshelf CD that came with my first computer, and outlived it by a healthy margin. On it, there were several reference books, and the most utilized one was by far the dictionary. Who needed to page through the heavy tome when the CD worked so much more efficiently? Not me, for sure. This is the Dictionary 2.0 in the article's title.


After a while, loading up the CD even became too much effort. When I need a definition these days, it's even easier to turn to the site Dictionary.com. After all, it's constantly updated, and even a student friendly price of free for the basic edition which is all I've ever used. It also has a thesaurus as well that works quite well. As long as I'm connected to the internet, then Dictionary.com (I wonder how much they paid for that domain, but it was worth it), is clearly the way to go. This is the Dictionary 3.0 in the article's title.

In case you don't like Dictionary.com, there are plenty of other free online dictionaries as well that are within the budget of every starving student. For a fast and streamlined approach, give Ninjawords a try. At the other end of the spectrum, Merriam-Webster has a full featured site that includes a separate medical dictionary, and a Spanish/English one as well.

I recently noted this product over at OhGizmo!:

My first split second impression was, that was an intriguing application for a flash drive. Then, I got completely unenthused to see that this product is going for $43 to $63 dollars (2 or 4 GB version). Why would I pay that kind of money when I can just use Dictionary.com for free? Are there that many times that the user is offline, like on a train, is using their word processor, and has no online access, and needs a dictionary? This would have been a great application about five years ago, but is simply not needed today. This is the kind of product that some unsavvy parent would buy for their child which would promptly get lost in the bottom of their sock drawer never to be actually used.

Seriously, where do they come up with this stuff? This is the Dictionary 2.3 in the article's title. Save your money for something else as this is a step backwards as far as I can tell.

--Jonas

New Sites, The Visual Way

Veteran internet users will realize that often the challenge is finding out about new content on the internet. while there are no shortage of ways, ranging from search engines, to RSS feeds, to aggregation sites, those clever "do no evil" folks, better known as Google just came up with yet another way. It's called Blogger Play, and the idea is that we get a front row seat on a slide show composed of new images being uploaded to any Blogger site. When we see an image we want to know more about, clicking on it takes us to the site where the image resides.

I can tell you that's it's simple, engaging and works quite well. In our visual society, this is a painless way to stumble around the web and turn up something entirely new.

--Jonas

Guitar 2.0

I'm always intrigued to look at how profoundly the internet is changing so many aspects of our society. Here's a personal example of how it's changing the way I interact with my music.

Back in "the day," (late high school and college), I got into playing the guitar. After learning some fingerings from a few books, I was rockin' along to some favorite tracks. Actually, it was a labor intensive process. You see, there wasn't much sheet music out there for the latest albums I wanted to play. Also, what was out there was rather expensive. Not only was the sheet music expensive when you could find it, but they often included it in a songbook by the artist so to get the one song you needed to purchase the entire anthology of music by a particular band. This got real old, real fast for a starving student (ok, ok, I never went hungry, but that's another story...).

The least expensive way to be able to play the song was to listen to it, and by trial and error we'd grab the chords. I say we because it was tons easier when this process was done with another person to help refine the chords. The problem was that much of the music was still on tape, and fast forwarding to find that particular track, and then replaying the same spot took too much work as well. All in all, if I got to play more than one or two songs a week, I was doing really well.

I hadn't picked up a guitar in far too long. However, I realized that with the internet and my computer, this had gotten far easier. For the first step, getting some music notation, there are tons of sites where users publish the chords for a particular song. This week I've been playing with guitaretab.com. Looking on Google, it's easy to see that there are tons of sites that do this, and I won't be running out of things to play anytime soon.

The other key step is that now I don't have to deal with the cassette tapes anymore. With mp3's it's a lot easier to find a song and click play than to rummage through cases of tape, to then find that the tape wasn't rewound, and then to have to find song 3 of 6 on that side which could easily take a couple of minutes for each track selected, or even longer when I'd realize the missing tape was out in the car. No, this is now push button simple, and even more convenient. Of course, putting the tracks on an iPod would also be another simple option, and plugging it into a set of speakers, but I've been doing it from the desktop so far.

About the only thing that hasn't gotten easier is the actual playing. Does anyone know how to do an Am9 chord?

--Jonas