Auntie Beeb reports that the loos at Heathrow Terminal 2 are being fitted with sensors to detect how many people are using particular toilets, and when.
Feel free to snicker or chortle right about now.
OK, so what does this mean? The overly harsh take would be "Yeah, that's about all this whole 'internet of things' things is going to amount to." A more optimistic take would be "Heathrow is one of the world's busiest airports. If they see a benefit to this, there must be something to it." While I've seen any number of "there must be something to it" endorsements fail to pan out -- too much of this is a good sign of an impending bubble -- I tend to lean toward the second opinion.
Yes, I'm not thrilled with the term "Internet of Things", but I think that this is more because what we're seeing is a gradual trend of (some) ordinary things being put on the internet, and not a brand new phase or some sort of new internet. Lots of things have been on the internet, some for longer than others. Weather sensors. Webcams. Taxi cabs. Temperature and voltage sensors for computers in datacenters. As time goes on, the portion of internet data generated via human intervention will probably decrease, and the amount generated by various ... things ... will probably increase.
This isn't the hardcore IoT vision, though. All the examples I gave are things that naturally actively generate data. Even Taxi Cabs have always needed to communicate their location and status. Fitting them with GPS and putting them on the net just makes that process more accurate and efficient.
The full IoT vision involves tagging everything with some sort of net-friendly identifying device, say an RFID, which can then be scanned. If every book on your bookcase, every fork in your silverware drawer, every pair of pants in your closet and so on is tagged, then you just need to wave a scanner around in order to upload an exact inventory.
Perhaps more realistically, if newly manufactured objects carry RFIDs -- and some do -- then gradually people will come to have more and more net-visible things around them. What we choose to do with that data is another matter, as are a number of privacy concerns (what's to keep someone from walking by your house with a scanner and seeing what's in it?).
In that sense, the Heathrow loos are more like weather sensors and taxi cabs and less in line with the "tag ALL the things" concept. Interesting though they may be, they don't say much one way or the other about how the larger IoT vision will play out.
Thursday, June 19, 2014
Sunday, June 1, 2014
And the winner is ... text. Huh.
There are a gazillion ways we can send messages to each other these days: email, chat, your favorite social medium, send a postcard, make a phone call, walk over and say hi, etc., etc.. Some of these were the stuff of science fiction when I was a kid. In particular, I think it's finally time to say that videophones are commonplace. Most smartphones can handle it, and the bandwidth is there in many places, though certainly not everywhere. Even so, millions of people have the ability to make a video call should they so choose. Probably more like hundreds of millions. And many do.
And yet ... if you have a video-capable smartphone and you want to send someone a quick message, or you're a celebrity and you want to let your fans know when your next appearance is, or you're a bank and you want to send your client a security code for logging in, or you're a wireless carrier and you want to send your customer a balance update, or even in some cases a spammer who wants to tell someone they may already have won a fabulous prize, or for any other number of reasons, what medium do you choose? You send a text message.
This is really not all that new an idea. In the 1800s, for example, people would send telegrams and cables, or -- in densely populated areas, at least -- dash off short notes for messengers to carry. The diction is even strikingly similar to the modern equivalent, and it's even more striking given that there is massively more bandwidth available these days. Clearly the problem is not that you have to crowd everything into a 160-character SMS message. There are any number of ways around that. Nor are you paying by the word, as in the old days. With all the ways that one could send a message, right up to a high-bandwidth video connection, people are choosing to text.
What parameters might determine this?
Text has about the lowest bandwidth of anything that's in regular use for communication. If you've ever heard anyone try ... to ... repeat ... what ... they ... were ... texting ... as ... they ... typed ... it ... in, you were probably gritting your teeth. Even if you can text as fast as you can talk, with liberal use of abbreviations like OMG and U, it's still much more mental effort than just, y'know, talking.
As a side-effect of the low bandwidth, text is notoriously bad for conveying inflection and other nuances. Emoticons only help so much. Was that smiley sarcastic? Is that frowny because of what they're telling me, or because they're telling it to me? I texted them five minutes ago and they haven't replied. Are they busy or do they hate me? And so forth.
Text is so-so for latency and reliability. Messages get dropped form time to time, or hung up in the ether for minutes or hours with no indication of whether they've been delivered or not. Even under ideal conditions, you have to wait for the other party to type in their entire message before you get to see any of it.
Where text wins, I think, is setup time, which is as minimal as can be.
There are two main types of protocol: Packet-switched and circuit switched. In a packet-switched protocol, the sender constructs self-contained packets and sends them to the receiver. Since each packet is self-contained, individual packets may get lost or misdirected, and there is no guarantee that just because one arrived, any other will as well. The prototypical packet-switched system is the mail, and to this day internet protocol documents speak of "envelopes" and "addresses".
In a circuit-switched protocol, the two parties first establish a connection (as we tend to call it these days), and then communicate over it. Once the connection is established, messages flow over it in either direction (though in some cases they must take turns), until the connection is closed, either deliberately by the participants or by some sort of external disruption. In general, you have some indication that this has happened, and if you do have a connection established, it's quick and easy to say "did you hear that?" or whatever if there's any doubt.
The prototypical circuit-switched protocol is the telephone. When you place a call, you are establishing a connection. Originally, the operator would use a patch board to set up an actual electrical circuit. Thence the name.
Connections take a while to set up. When you call someone, you put in their number, their phone rings, they stop what they're doing and answer it, and generally say "hello" or something to make sure you know the connection is established. And then you talk. A video call works much the same way, and for the same reason. It's establishing a connection.
There are currently two widely-established packet-switched media: email and text. I say "media" here because I'm talking about how things look to the people using them, as opposed to network protocols like TCP, UDP, ICMP and so forth, and I'm leaving aside services like Snapchat, which go beyond text, because it's early days yet.
Of email and text, text is much lighter weight. Email more or less requires a subject line, and if a simple email evolves into a conversation, each piece of the conversation general contains everything previous. It's possible to have a rapid-fire email conversation, but it's a bit awkward. It's also considerably more likely that the recipient of your email isn't going to look at it for an indefinite amount of time. For better or worse, if you're carrying your phone, you're likely to know immediately if someone has texted you.
Put all that together, and text wins, easily, on setup time. If you already have a window open for your recipient (a sort of mini-connection, but without the overhead of setting up both ends), you just type. And that's it. Even if you don't, it's generally easy to pick a recipient from your contacts. And then you just type. And that's it.
Because the setup is so easy, a text can easily turn into a conversation. If the conversation gets involved, you can always text "call me" or whatever and get the benefits of a real, higher-bandwidth connection but, crucially, this is opt-in. You only pay that price if it turns out to be worth it.
It's now been almost twenty years since Kurt Dahl predicted that in the year 2020 -- then still comfortably far in the future -- there would be no need for kids to learn to read (See the Field Notes take on it here). Instead, "text" became a verb, one used most by the very kids who would have seemed not to need it. As always, it's easy, and pointless, to criticize in hindsight, though it might have been a clue that the prediction itself was conveyed via text. Certainly there are many reasons why text should still be around, and texting is probably not a particularly big one. Nonetheless, it's interesting that a medium that would seem to have so little going for it would win out, and that this could be due not so much to the virtues of text itself, as to the economics of communication protocols.
And yet ... if you have a video-capable smartphone and you want to send someone a quick message, or you're a celebrity and you want to let your fans know when your next appearance is, or you're a bank and you want to send your client a security code for logging in, or you're a wireless carrier and you want to send your customer a balance update, or even in some cases a spammer who wants to tell someone they may already have won a fabulous prize, or for any other number of reasons, what medium do you choose? You send a text message.
This is really not all that new an idea. In the 1800s, for example, people would send telegrams and cables, or -- in densely populated areas, at least -- dash off short notes for messengers to carry. The diction is even strikingly similar to the modern equivalent, and it's even more striking given that there is massively more bandwidth available these days. Clearly the problem is not that you have to crowd everything into a 160-character SMS message. There are any number of ways around that. Nor are you paying by the word, as in the old days. With all the ways that one could send a message, right up to a high-bandwidth video connection, people are choosing to text.
What parameters might determine this?
Text has about the lowest bandwidth of anything that's in regular use for communication. If you've ever heard anyone try ... to ... repeat ... what ... they ... were ... texting ... as ... they ... typed ... it ... in, you were probably gritting your teeth. Even if you can text as fast as you can talk, with liberal use of abbreviations like OMG and U, it's still much more mental effort than just, y'know, talking.
As a side-effect of the low bandwidth, text is notoriously bad for conveying inflection and other nuances. Emoticons only help so much. Was that smiley sarcastic? Is that frowny because of what they're telling me, or because they're telling it to me? I texted them five minutes ago and they haven't replied. Are they busy or do they hate me? And so forth.
Text is so-so for latency and reliability. Messages get dropped form time to time, or hung up in the ether for minutes or hours with no indication of whether they've been delivered or not. Even under ideal conditions, you have to wait for the other party to type in their entire message before you get to see any of it.
Where text wins, I think, is setup time, which is as minimal as can be.
There are two main types of protocol: Packet-switched and circuit switched. In a packet-switched protocol, the sender constructs self-contained packets and sends them to the receiver. Since each packet is self-contained, individual packets may get lost or misdirected, and there is no guarantee that just because one arrived, any other will as well. The prototypical packet-switched system is the mail, and to this day internet protocol documents speak of "envelopes" and "addresses".
In a circuit-switched protocol, the two parties first establish a connection (as we tend to call it these days), and then communicate over it. Once the connection is established, messages flow over it in either direction (though in some cases they must take turns), until the connection is closed, either deliberately by the participants or by some sort of external disruption. In general, you have some indication that this has happened, and if you do have a connection established, it's quick and easy to say "did you hear that?" or whatever if there's any doubt.
The prototypical circuit-switched protocol is the telephone. When you place a call, you are establishing a connection. Originally, the operator would use a patch board to set up an actual electrical circuit. Thence the name.
Connections take a while to set up. When you call someone, you put in their number, their phone rings, they stop what they're doing and answer it, and generally say "hello" or something to make sure you know the connection is established. And then you talk. A video call works much the same way, and for the same reason. It's establishing a connection.
There are currently two widely-established packet-switched media: email and text. I say "media" here because I'm talking about how things look to the people using them, as opposed to network protocols like TCP, UDP, ICMP and so forth, and I'm leaving aside services like Snapchat, which go beyond text, because it's early days yet.
Of email and text, text is much lighter weight. Email more or less requires a subject line, and if a simple email evolves into a conversation, each piece of the conversation general contains everything previous. It's possible to have a rapid-fire email conversation, but it's a bit awkward. It's also considerably more likely that the recipient of your email isn't going to look at it for an indefinite amount of time. For better or worse, if you're carrying your phone, you're likely to know immediately if someone has texted you.
Put all that together, and text wins, easily, on setup time. If you already have a window open for your recipient (a sort of mini-connection, but without the overhead of setting up both ends), you just type. And that's it. Even if you don't, it's generally easy to pick a recipient from your contacts. And then you just type. And that's it.
Because the setup is so easy, a text can easily turn into a conversation. If the conversation gets involved, you can always text "call me" or whatever and get the benefits of a real, higher-bandwidth connection but, crucially, this is opt-in. You only pay that price if it turns out to be worth it.
It's now been almost twenty years since Kurt Dahl predicted that in the year 2020 -- then still comfortably far in the future -- there would be no need for kids to learn to read (See the Field Notes take on it here). Instead, "text" became a verb, one used most by the very kids who would have seemed not to need it. As always, it's easy, and pointless, to criticize in hindsight, though it might have been a clue that the prediction itself was conveyed via text. Certainly there are many reasons why text should still be around, and texting is probably not a particularly big one. Nonetheless, it's interesting that a medium that would seem to have so little going for it would win out, and that this could be due not so much to the virtues of text itself, as to the economics of communication protocols.
Friday, May 16, 2014
Is the Internet of Things still a thing?
Traveling in the Valley, I drove past a billboard from a company boasting of its role in helping build the Internet of Things. That made me pause for a second. I hadn't really heard the term in a while, and this isn't one of those cases where the Valley is ahead of the tech trend. Not so long ago, I seem to recall, the Internet of Things was getting quite a bit of hype in the world at large.
What is this IoT, by the way? It's the idea that all the things in your life, or at least way more of them than now, are connected to the Net and in some cases happily talking to each other. So, say, when your toaster pops up a slice of toast you can get a text on your phone that you can't read because you're driving to work and forgot you'd even put anything in the toaster to begin with. Or if all your clothes have RFIDs sewn in, you can easily track what's in your closet and what's in the wash (or what you're wearing, but you may already know that).
OK, that's a bit glib. There are some interesting applications. I'm pretty sure.
There are a couple of kinds of hype terms, I think. Some are just pure hype. You'll hear them for a while, then it will turn out that there wasn't any there there, and they quietly go away. There was a lot of this flying around in the dot com days, of course.
Some hype terms, however, have an actual useful idea behind them. The internet and the Web, for example. That doesn't necessarily mean that the particular hype term will survive -- remember the Information Superhighway? We call it the internet now, but the concept behind it hasn't gone away and will continue to develop.
Some of these kinds of terms will fade in and out as the underlying concept goes through cycles of hype, backlash, rehabilitation and possibly hype again. AI is one. E-commerce would be another.
I suspect that the IoT is one of these. We can expect surges in hype, followed by periods of "meh", and maybe a name change or two, but over time more and more things with computing power or computer friendly id tags in them will get connected to the world at large -- thermostats, TVs, cars, security systems, stoplights, dishwashers, consumer goods ... maybe even toasters. Possibly things that don't have significant computing power will get enough to get on the net, too. Maybe roads and bridges get large numbers of sensors that can communicate conditions back to some control center.
So, even if the billboard is a bit jarring to someone not immersed in the Valley's particular media bath, the company behind it is probably engaged in something significant, and maybe even useful.
What is this IoT, by the way? It's the idea that all the things in your life, or at least way more of them than now, are connected to the Net and in some cases happily talking to each other. So, say, when your toaster pops up a slice of toast you can get a text on your phone that you can't read because you're driving to work and forgot you'd even put anything in the toaster to begin with. Or if all your clothes have RFIDs sewn in, you can easily track what's in your closet and what's in the wash (or what you're wearing, but you may already know that).
OK, that's a bit glib. There are some interesting applications. I'm pretty sure.
There are a couple of kinds of hype terms, I think. Some are just pure hype. You'll hear them for a while, then it will turn out that there wasn't any there there, and they quietly go away. There was a lot of this flying around in the dot com days, of course.
Some hype terms, however, have an actual useful idea behind them. The internet and the Web, for example. That doesn't necessarily mean that the particular hype term will survive -- remember the Information Superhighway? We call it the internet now, but the concept behind it hasn't gone away and will continue to develop.
Some of these kinds of terms will fade in and out as the underlying concept goes through cycles of hype, backlash, rehabilitation and possibly hype again. AI is one. E-commerce would be another.
I suspect that the IoT is one of these. We can expect surges in hype, followed by periods of "meh", and maybe a name change or two, but over time more and more things with computing power or computer friendly id tags in them will get connected to the world at large -- thermostats, TVs, cars, security systems, stoplights, dishwashers, consumer goods ... maybe even toasters. Possibly things that don't have significant computing power will get enough to get on the net, too. Maybe roads and bridges get large numbers of sensors that can communicate conditions back to some control center.
So, even if the billboard is a bit jarring to someone not immersed in the Valley's particular media bath, the company behind it is probably engaged in something significant, and maybe even useful.
Web sites ... Y U NO UNDERSTAND DATA?
I'm a web site. I would like your phone number. Please type it in. No, not your real phone number. Let's say it's +1 800 555 1212, or as we used to stay in the States, 1-800-555-1212, or even (800) 555-1212. But not KLondike5-1212. No one says that anymore.
Right. Let's go ahead:
+
Whoa, wait a minute. What's this 'plus sign' thing? I am a simple American web site. Your "country codes" frighten and confuse me. Just give me the area code, prefix and number. Go ahead, please.
(
What? A parenthesis? Dude. It's a phone number. What's with all the special characters? Try again.
800
Cool. Now we're getting somewhere.
5
Stop right there! Anyone can see there are spaces between the parts of a phone number. Why didn't you type a space?
[space]555[space]1212
See? That wasn't so hard, was it? Notice how I split the number up into little boxes, and jumped from box to box when you hit space? Wasn't that just slick? This is what you can do with modern technology.
Phone number widgets, I think, are the web site UX equivalent of silly password "strengthening" rules. No two are alike, and almost all of them get in the way for no good reason. Social Security number widgets are pretty dicey, too, but you don't run into those so much (even in the States).
Credit card numbers, on the other hand, those are generally pretty easy to put in. I can't imagine why.
Right. Let's go ahead:
+
Whoa, wait a minute. What's this 'plus sign' thing? I am a simple American web site. Your "country codes" frighten and confuse me. Just give me the area code, prefix and number. Go ahead, please.
(
What? A parenthesis? Dude. It's a phone number. What's with all the special characters? Try again.
800
Cool. Now we're getting somewhere.
5
Stop right there! Anyone can see there are spaces between the parts of a phone number. Why didn't you type a space?
See? That wasn't so hard, was it? Notice how I split the number up into little boxes, and jumped from box to box when you hit space? Wasn't that just slick? This is what you can do with modern technology.
Phone number widgets, I think, are the web site UX equivalent of silly password "strengthening" rules. No two are alike, and almost all of them get in the way for no good reason. Social Security number widgets are pretty dicey, too, but you don't run into those so much (even in the States).
Credit card numbers, on the other hand, those are generally pretty easy to put in. I can't imagine why.
Thursday, April 24, 2014
Print ... still not dead
Way back in the late sixties and early seventies, a bunch of people in Northern California put out The Whole Earth Catalog. Several of them, actually. There were one or two lying around the house when I was growing up, and I would often browse through them. I can't say I remember any particular content, but I do remember the vibrantly busy layout and, of course, the iconic photos of the Earth on the cover, including William Anders' famous shot of the Earth from the surface of the moon on this edition.
Print catalogs have a long and influential history. The Sears Catalog, for example, had a huge influence on the rural United States in the early 20th century, offering as it did everything from pins and nails to tools to toys and games, clothing, fishing and hunting equipment, bicycles, automobiles and even a house to put it all in. As I understand it, the arrival of the latest Sears Catalog in the mail was a noteworthy event in many communities.
In these days of the web, of course, there's little need for a mail order catalog. A good commercial web site is more up to date, a good deal easier to search and not so bad to idly browse. Some will not only show you detailed pictures of the goods, but let you customize and see the results. Why kill trees to send something static that will be obsolete by the time it arrives?
And yet ...
Kevin Kelly, one of the original editors of The Whole Earth Catalog, has been running or co-editing the site Cool Tools since its origins as a mailing list in 2000. It's now settled into a blogish form, but last year Kelly decided to collect the best bits from the site and publish them, as a book. In print. In 472 pages of print, to be exact.
There's at least one webby twist, though: Each item has a QR code which you can scan with your smartphone to get a link to the seller's site. That makes perfect sense, really. While the contents of the sites may change, the sites themselves will be much more stable (particularly if the book does a good job of driving business to them).
It's an interesting hybrid. A physical book that you can leaf through will provide a nice overview -- nicer than scrolling through screen after screen, unless your screen is pretty big -- and you still have the links. Granted, the links are a bit more cumbersome to chase, but if you're mostly browsing and only occasionally visiting the linked sites, that's probably not too bad.
Even if it just ends up being an interesting conversation piece, Cool Tools is only the latest in a line of blogs and other web sites spinning off books. Randall Munroe of xkcd fame, for example, is publishing his What If series in book form. Just to emphasize how not-real-time an enterprise book publishing is, even with today's technology, the book won't actually be available until September.
It's one thing if publishers are still putting out genre fiction paperbacks or coffee table photo books. The paperback as a tradition will probably be around for a while yet, and you don't have to buy a fancy reader to enjoy it. The coffee table book is the canonical example of something that print can still deliver better.
But a catalog and a web comic would seem to be two of the least print-friendly formats that could feasibly be printed. And yet they are. I have no idea why this should be, but I don't mind.
Print catalogs have a long and influential history. The Sears Catalog, for example, had a huge influence on the rural United States in the early 20th century, offering as it did everything from pins and nails to tools to toys and games, clothing, fishing and hunting equipment, bicycles, automobiles and even a house to put it all in. As I understand it, the arrival of the latest Sears Catalog in the mail was a noteworthy event in many communities.
In these days of the web, of course, there's little need for a mail order catalog. A good commercial web site is more up to date, a good deal easier to search and not so bad to idly browse. Some will not only show you detailed pictures of the goods, but let you customize and see the results. Why kill trees to send something static that will be obsolete by the time it arrives?
And yet ...
Kevin Kelly, one of the original editors of The Whole Earth Catalog, has been running or co-editing the site Cool Tools since its origins as a mailing list in 2000. It's now settled into a blogish form, but last year Kelly decided to collect the best bits from the site and publish them, as a book. In print. In 472 pages of print, to be exact.
There's at least one webby twist, though: Each item has a QR code which you can scan with your smartphone to get a link to the seller's site. That makes perfect sense, really. While the contents of the sites may change, the sites themselves will be much more stable (particularly if the book does a good job of driving business to them).
It's an interesting hybrid. A physical book that you can leaf through will provide a nice overview -- nicer than scrolling through screen after screen, unless your screen is pretty big -- and you still have the links. Granted, the links are a bit more cumbersome to chase, but if you're mostly browsing and only occasionally visiting the linked sites, that's probably not too bad.
Even if it just ends up being an interesting conversation piece, Cool Tools is only the latest in a line of blogs and other web sites spinning off books. Randall Munroe of xkcd fame, for example, is publishing his What If series in book form. Just to emphasize how not-real-time an enterprise book publishing is, even with today's technology, the book won't actually be available until September.
It's one thing if publishers are still putting out genre fiction paperbacks or coffee table photo books. The paperback as a tradition will probably be around for a while yet, and you don't have to buy a fancy reader to enjoy it. The coffee table book is the canonical example of something that print can still deliver better.
But a catalog and a web comic would seem to be two of the least print-friendly formats that could feasibly be printed. And yet they are. I have no idea why this should be, but I don't mind.
Saturday, January 4, 2014
All your IRQ are belong to us
I did some of my first real professional programming on an early IBM PC running MS-DOS. Back then "DOS" stood for "Disk Operating System", as opposed to "Denial Of Service" and in the literal sense of "something that will operate a disk drive", that was accurate. In other respects that "Operating System" implied, even at the time -- things like multitasking, so more than one program could run at once, or memory protection, so that a running program couldn't read or (worse) scribble on memory that didn't belong to it -- well, "Denial Of Service" might have been just as good a description.
Under MS-DOS's BIOS (Basic Input-Output System), applications talked to the system, and the hardware talked to the system, through "Interrupt Requests" or IRQs. These were basically entries in a table of the form "When this happens, run the code at this address". The entries in the table were called "vectors", and any particular IRQ had the address of a particular chunk of code, called an interrupt handler or interrupt routine. For example, the IRQ for key clicks would be vectored to the code for dealing with a key click event.
Dealing with a key click event is not quite as simple as it sounds. You had to do several things:
Under MS-DOS's BIOS (Basic Input-Output System), applications talked to the system, and the hardware talked to the system, through "Interrupt Requests" or IRQs. These were basically entries in a table of the form "When this happens, run the code at this address". The entries in the table were called "vectors", and any particular IRQ had the address of a particular chunk of code, called an interrupt handler or interrupt routine. For example, the IRQ for key clicks would be vectored to the code for dealing with a key click event.
Dealing with a key click event is not quite as simple as it sounds. You had to do several things:
- "Debounce" the key click -- I forget whether the PC did this in hardware or software, but a when a human presses a key on a keyboard, the corresponding circuit doesn't just close, at least not on those early keyboards. It would go through a period of milliseconds in which the circuit would bounce back and forth between open and closed. Even to an early PC a millisecond is a fair bit of time, and you wouldn't want to interpret that bouncing as someone typing really fast.
- Keep track of which shift keys were pressed at the time. You would do this by keeping a few bits around like "left shift key is up/down", "control key is up/down", etc. The caps lock key acts differently from the other keys, of course. Miss an event and you could get CAPITAL LETTERS when you wanted lowercase, or worse, control characters which could cause all kinds of fun.
- Buffer up key presses in a block of memory so that if the user typed several keys while the main program was thinking, they would still be there to read when it got done thinking. Actual applications would read characters from a buffer, as 'H', 'e', 'l', 'l', 'o',
rather than catching a series of events like left-shift-key-down, h-key-down, h-key-up, shift-key-up, l-key-down ... directly from the keyboard IRQ. - Check for magic key sequences like "print screen" or the famous "ctrl-alt-del"
and this is not to mention things like actually displaying the typed character somewhere, or changing the state of a document being edited. That was all done by the application code.
Keep in mind that the keyboard IRQ was just one IRQ. There were IRQs for the system's internal timer, for communicating with the disk drive and the modem and printer ports, for applications to talk to the BIOS, and so forth, so imagine the discussion here multiplied by a dozen or so important IRQs.
I mentioned that most applications would be fine with just reading characters from the system's buffer, but some, for example many games, really were interested in the raw events. There were also utilities you could buy that would allow you to do things like scroll back to text that had scrolled off the screen, or display a clock or check the spelling of what you'd just typed, if you hit a magic sequence of keys. Because the DOS code sitting on top of the BIOS didn't directly support such things, such programs would "hook" the BIOS's IRQs by changing the IRQ to vector to their code. Since DOS didn't do memory protection, anyone could Just Do That, and many did.
There are a couple of hazards to this approach. For one, you didn't necessarily want to completely take over handling of the keyboard. Many utilities just wanted to hook one magic key sequence to trigger what they did and pass the rest through untouched. The usual approach to this was to "chain" -- the last thing that a newly-installed interrupt handler would do was to call the handler that had been there before it. That means you don't care what happens down the line and you don't have to try to replicate what everything else was doing, but it leads to the second hazard.
Suppose I've written a nifty utility that pops up a calendar whenever the user presses ctrl-alt-C, and you've written a nifty utility that pops up a calculator whenever the user presses ctrl-alt-C. Several things can happen if both of our utilities are installed:
- Maybe mine was installed last, so that the IRQ is vectored to my handler. You'll see a calendar when you hit ctrl-alt-C, and you may or may not see anything else
- Most likely my handler will "eat" the magic keypress by only popping up the calendar,
- but it might choose to go ahead and chain to whatever handler was there before. In that case, your handler could also get called, depending on whether any other handlers were installed between ours, and what they do.
- And likewise, of course, the other way around.
In other words, we have what is technically called "a mess" (or several other things you might imagine). If your handler is installed last, it owns the world -- or at least the IRQ it handles. If not, well, all kinds of things could happen, but a likely one is customers calling up saying "I installed your lousy utility and it doesn't work!"
The inevitable consequence: Every utility you bought would implore you to please, pretty please make sure that it's the last one in the AUTOEXEC.BAT script called at startup. Or, more conveniently but also worse if you're trying to rein in this chaos, its handy installation script would edit AUTOEXEC.BAT to make sure it was the last one to run -- until the next utility with such an install script came along, or until you hand-edited AUTOEXEC.BAT to try to fix some conflict by moving some other utility to the bottom.
Ah, those wacky, wild and carefree days of the PC revolution. Good thing this sort of thing doesn't happen any more in our modern, wonderful web.world.
Now where was I before this trip down memory lane? Ah, right. Cleaning up someone's system after a couple of shiny-looking downloaded "utilities" reset the default browser, hijacked the search bar to point at a different search engine and left droppings in the startup folder offering to re-install something almost but not quite deleted. Oh ... and fixing a driver that wasn't up to date.
Ah, progress.
Saturday, November 30, 2013
"What was that bright light in the sky last night?"
While looking for information on comet ISON, I ran across an interesting project by NASA: the All Sky Fireball Network, a network of (currently) 12 black-and-white video cameras able to image the whole night sky. The images from these cameras are processed by ASGARD (All Sky and Guided Automatic Realtime Detection), developed for a similar effort in Canada. These astro folks sure love their acronyms.
A "fireball" is any meteor brighter than venus. These are not rare events. There are several on most nights, and nights with a dozen or two are not uncommon. As there is deliberately quite a bit of overlap in the cameras' fields of view, most fireballs are caught on multiple cameras, making it possible to calculate the three-dimensional trajectory of the meteor, and from that determine its orbit. Spaceweather.com posts a graphic of the night's calculated orbits. I believe they produce that themselves from the raw data on the NASA site, which just seems to show the orbital elements as text.
It's pretty easy to see why this data is of interest to NASA. Not only does it provide information about the composition of the Solar System, it's of practical use in designing satellites. But even without that, it's a just plain neat hack.
A "fireball" is any meteor brighter than venus. These are not rare events. There are several on most nights, and nights with a dozen or two are not uncommon. As there is deliberately quite a bit of overlap in the cameras' fields of view, most fireballs are caught on multiple cameras, making it possible to calculate the three-dimensional trajectory of the meteor, and from that determine its orbit. Spaceweather.com posts a graphic of the night's calculated orbits. I believe they produce that themselves from the raw data on the NASA site, which just seems to show the orbital elements as text.
It's pretty easy to see why this data is of interest to NASA. Not only does it provide information about the composition of the Solar System, it's of practical use in designing satellites. But even without that, it's a just plain neat hack.
Wednesday, November 20, 2013
Straight dope on Comet ISON
In a few days, a highly unusual comet will pass within a million miles or so of the Sun's surface. That in itself is not unusual. Comets pass that closely reasonably often and thousands such are known. However, this comet is a "dynamically new" comet, meaning it has never been close to the Sun before, and no dynamically new comet has come so close to the Sun in at least 200 years.
This rare combination offers an unprecedented chance for astronomers to observe an object which has basically been sitting in a deep freeze since the formation of the Solar System react to close contact with the heat of the Sun. That in turn will reveal much about what the comet is made of and thus offer clues about how the Solar System itself was formed. Dozens of major observatories, on Earth and in space, will be watching.
As I write, the comet is visible to the naked eye in the pre-dawn sky, but only if you're in a dark place and know just where to look. It's a little point of light, not your classic image of a comet. At least not yet.
While ISON's orbit is known quite precisely, it's not at all clear what happens next. On November 28th it will reach perihelion, its closest point to the Sun's center. It will be moving at about 400 km/s, or about 900,000 mph, and experiencing intense heat and significant tidal stress that may or may not destroy it. If it survives, it may reappear as anything from a point of light to a real spectacle.
If you've seen reports of a "comet of the century" likely to be "brighter than the full moon", this would be it. The press has a habit of taking the "this could maybe happen if we're really lucky" scenario and running with it. If you prefer to know what actual astronomers are saying and seeing and what the comet is up to, along with informative discussions of why we don't really know what the comet will do, you'll want to check out CIOC, NASA's Comet ISON Observing Campaign.
CIOC is a coordinating group. It's not performing the actual observations, but it is a serious scientific collaboration, promoting research and gathering results for all the net.world to see. This is classic Web, the kind of thing TimBL had in mind, I have to think, when putting up the first HTTP server way back when.
You may be wondering: What kind of a name is Comet ISON anyway? It's named after the International Scientific Optical Network, a collection of 30 or so telescopes in about 20 countries that has been used in quite a bit of research, including but definitely not limited to detecting the comet in the subject line, formally known as C/2012 S1 (ISON).
UPDATE: Comet ISON appeared to disintegrate just before perihelion, and when it dropped behind the occluding discs of the SOHO (SOlar and Heliospheric Observatory) cameras that have been the main source of images for it in the past few days, the consensus was that there was a good chance that nothing would come out the other side. When the SDO (Solar Dynamics Observatory) and PROBA (PRoject for On Board Autonomy) scopes that had been pointed at what should have been ISON's path failed to detect anything, the folks at CIOC did the only reasonable thing and declared it dead, vaporized in the heat of the sun (around 2800℃/5000℉). And then it re-appeared. At this writing, it is a fuzzy blob headed away from the sun, nowhere near as bright as it had been, but possibly bright enough to be seen with the naked eye when it gets far enough away from the sun. We shall see.
UPDATE: ... and it's gone. On December 18th, the Hubble telescope was pointed at where Comet ISON ought to have been. We can be quite sure of the location since anything solid remaining would have continued to follow the original orbit -- a solid object moving that fast is not going to be affected significantly by outgassing, the solar wind or other such effects. The HubbleSite ISON blog has the full details, including photographs annotated to point out things you might think could be comet remains but definitely aren't. Cosmic rays, stars streaking because the telescope is moving to follow the orbit of the comet, reflections on the lens and so forth. Plenty of that, no comet.
This rare combination offers an unprecedented chance for astronomers to observe an object which has basically been sitting in a deep freeze since the formation of the Solar System react to close contact with the heat of the Sun. That in turn will reveal much about what the comet is made of and thus offer clues about how the Solar System itself was formed. Dozens of major observatories, on Earth and in space, will be watching.
As I write, the comet is visible to the naked eye in the pre-dawn sky, but only if you're in a dark place and know just where to look. It's a little point of light, not your classic image of a comet. At least not yet.
While ISON's orbit is known quite precisely, it's not at all clear what happens next. On November 28th it will reach perihelion, its closest point to the Sun's center. It will be moving at about 400 km/s, or about 900,000 mph, and experiencing intense heat and significant tidal stress that may or may not destroy it. If it survives, it may reappear as anything from a point of light to a real spectacle.
If you've seen reports of a "comet of the century" likely to be "brighter than the full moon", this would be it. The press has a habit of taking the "this could maybe happen if we're really lucky" scenario and running with it. If you prefer to know what actual astronomers are saying and seeing and what the comet is up to, along with informative discussions of why we don't really know what the comet will do, you'll want to check out CIOC, NASA's Comet ISON Observing Campaign.
CIOC is a coordinating group. It's not performing the actual observations, but it is a serious scientific collaboration, promoting research and gathering results for all the net.world to see. This is classic Web, the kind of thing TimBL had in mind, I have to think, when putting up the first HTTP server way back when.
You may be wondering: What kind of a name is Comet ISON anyway? It's named after the International Scientific Optical Network, a collection of 30 or so telescopes in about 20 countries that has been used in quite a bit of research, including but definitely not limited to detecting the comet in the subject line, formally known as C/2012 S1 (ISON).
UPDATE: Comet ISON appeared to disintegrate just before perihelion, and when it dropped behind the occluding discs of the SOHO (SOlar and Heliospheric Observatory) cameras that have been the main source of images for it in the past few days, the consensus was that there was a good chance that nothing would come out the other side. When the SDO (Solar Dynamics Observatory) and PROBA (PRoject for On Board Autonomy) scopes that had been pointed at what should have been ISON's path failed to detect anything, the folks at CIOC did the only reasonable thing and declared it dead, vaporized in the heat of the sun (around 2800℃/5000℉). And then it re-appeared. At this writing, it is a fuzzy blob headed away from the sun, nowhere near as bright as it had been, but possibly bright enough to be seen with the naked eye when it gets far enough away from the sun. We shall see.
UPDATE: ... and it's gone. On December 18th, the Hubble telescope was pointed at where Comet ISON ought to have been. We can be quite sure of the location since anything solid remaining would have continued to follow the original orbit -- a solid object moving that fast is not going to be affected significantly by outgassing, the solar wind or other such effects. The HubbleSite ISON blog has the full details, including photographs annotated to point out things you might think could be comet remains but definitely aren't. Cosmic rays, stars streaking because the telescope is moving to follow the orbit of the comet, reflections on the lens and so forth. Plenty of that, no comet.
Two ways to value Bitcoin
I really should find something to write about besides Bitcoin, but while I'm figuring that out …
Timothy B. Lee of the Washington Post has an interesting take on Bitcoin (now trading around $370 as I write this, off its all-time high of $395 -- and now more like $325 as I proofread), modestly entitled Everything you need to know about the Bitcoin "Bubble". The gist appears to be, "No, Bitcoin is not and will never be a reserve currency, but that doesn't matter. It can still be intrinsically worth something."
The basis of this is an analogy with the internet. Like Bitcoin, the internet was once the province of cutting-edge technophiles and other such. Like the early internet, Bitcoin has a few adventurous players trying to build commercial applications on it. And, Lee argues, like the early internet, Bitcoin is an open platform. Specifically, Bitcoin is a payments platform, and companies like Bitpay and Coinbase are working to build payment applications on top of that.
Because Bitcoin isn't really acting as a currency -- but rather, businesses using Bitcoin price in other currencies and convert back and forth to Bitcoin -- the usual arguments against Bitcoin as a currency don't really matter. The deflationary aspect of a fixed money supply doesn't matter because no one's savings or salary are denominated in Bitcoin.
The price volatility doesn't matter greatly because Bitcoin transactions are ephemeral. As the payments systems become more mature, the amount of time between the money -> Bitcoin transaction and the Bitcoin -> money transaction should become shorter, and if volume is decent, there are ways of netting out most transactions and minimizing one's exposure to swings in the price.
That's fine, but it says little or nothing about what the actual price of Bitcoin should be. As long as there are enough Bitcoin in circulation, keeping in mind that there is good incentive for parties using Bitcoin in payment to minimize the amount they keep on hand, it hardly matters whether a Bitcoin is worth $1 million or a penny. This makes me particularly skeptical about Lee's assertion that "[I]f Bitcoin becomes an important part of the global financial system, its value would need to go a lot higher to accommodate the millions or billions of Bitcoin-based transactions that might occur in the future."
The current dollar value of all Bitcoin is around $325 * 12 million, or just under $4 billion. By comparison, MasterCard moves about $1 trillion per year, or around $3 billion per day. Since the same Bitcoin can be re-used over and over again in different transactions, it seems very likely we have well more than enough dollars worth of Bitcoin in circulation right now to last for a very long time, even assuming it becomes a major factor ["same Bitcoin" is not quite accurate, but I believe the point still holds -- we care about the maximum amount in a payment handler's account, and that will deliberately be kept low]. By comparison the current background level of Bitcoin trading, when it's not in a speculative froth, is a small number of millions of dollars.
In any case, how much is a platform worth? If the analogy is to the internet and the web, how much is HTTP worth? I'd argue it doesn't have a value, per se. People make money writing applications that use it, and producing better implementations of it and other protocols, by providing bandwidth for it to run on and so forth, but you can't buy or sell HTTP. Even if it were patented -- in which case it would almost certainly not be the universal standard it is today -- the value of the patent would only be indirectly related to the value of the business being done on it.
Likewise, just as you can put a value on a company like Bitpay or Coinbase, by looking at how much actual money they bring in, you can't really put a value on Bitcoin as a platform.
Which brings us back to the same two ways to value Bitcoin:
Timothy B. Lee of the Washington Post has an interesting take on Bitcoin (now trading around $370 as I write this, off its all-time high of $395 -- and now more like $325 as I proofread), modestly entitled Everything you need to know about the Bitcoin "Bubble". The gist appears to be, "No, Bitcoin is not and will never be a reserve currency, but that doesn't matter. It can still be intrinsically worth something."
The basis of this is an analogy with the internet. Like Bitcoin, the internet was once the province of cutting-edge technophiles and other such. Like the early internet, Bitcoin has a few adventurous players trying to build commercial applications on it. And, Lee argues, like the early internet, Bitcoin is an open platform. Specifically, Bitcoin is a payments platform, and companies like Bitpay and Coinbase are working to build payment applications on top of that.
Because Bitcoin isn't really acting as a currency -- but rather, businesses using Bitcoin price in other currencies and convert back and forth to Bitcoin -- the usual arguments against Bitcoin as a currency don't really matter. The deflationary aspect of a fixed money supply doesn't matter because no one's savings or salary are denominated in Bitcoin.
The price volatility doesn't matter greatly because Bitcoin transactions are ephemeral. As the payments systems become more mature, the amount of time between the money -> Bitcoin transaction and the Bitcoin -> money transaction should become shorter, and if volume is decent, there are ways of netting out most transactions and minimizing one's exposure to swings in the price.
That's fine, but it says little or nothing about what the actual price of Bitcoin should be. As long as there are enough Bitcoin in circulation, keeping in mind that there is good incentive for parties using Bitcoin in payment to minimize the amount they keep on hand, it hardly matters whether a Bitcoin is worth $1 million or a penny. This makes me particularly skeptical about Lee's assertion that "[I]f Bitcoin becomes an important part of the global financial system, its value would need to go a lot higher to accommodate the millions or billions of Bitcoin-based transactions that might occur in the future."
The current dollar value of all Bitcoin is around $325 * 12 million, or just under $4 billion. By comparison, MasterCard moves about $1 trillion per year, or around $3 billion per day. Since the same Bitcoin can be re-used over and over again in different transactions, it seems very likely we have well more than enough dollars worth of Bitcoin in circulation right now to last for a very long time, even assuming it becomes a major factor ["same Bitcoin" is not quite accurate, but I believe the point still holds -- we care about the maximum amount in a payment handler's account, and that will deliberately be kept low]. By comparison the current background level of Bitcoin trading, when it's not in a speculative froth, is a small number of millions of dollars.
In any case, how much is a platform worth? If the analogy is to the internet and the web, how much is HTTP worth? I'd argue it doesn't have a value, per se. People make money writing applications that use it, and producing better implementations of it and other protocols, by providing bandwidth for it to run on and so forth, but you can't buy or sell HTTP. Even if it were patented -- in which case it would almost certainly not be the universal standard it is today -- the value of the patent would only be indirectly related to the value of the business being done on it.
Likewise, just as you can put a value on a company like Bitpay or Coinbase, by looking at how much actual money they bring in, you can't really put a value on Bitcoin as a platform.
Which brings us back to the same two ways to value Bitcoin:
- How much dollar value needs to be in circulation for it to work as a payments platform -- something
- How much speculators are willing to pay for it -- a lot
It's not that Bitcoin can't have intrinsic value. It does, just not very much compared to its current speculative value. Who knows what that value will be tomorrow, or a year from now? Could be in the thousands, could be next to nothing.
Friday, October 25, 2013
The still-curious case of Bitcoin
Bitcoin appears to be on another run, though it's hard to tell because it's also become considerably more volatile over the past couple of days. Volume overall is thinner than it was in the last major run-up, which means even more likelihood of funny business in the price -- by which I mean behavior you wouldn't expect to see in something like a Dow or S&P 500 stock, not necessarily outright manipulation, though that's certainly not out of the question.
Clearly Bitcoin is something of value to at least some people, but what kind of something?
First, let's dispense with what Bitcoin is often claimed to be: an alternate reserve currency that could come to supplant "fiat" currencies like the dollar, euro, pound or yen. Not only is its price hair-raisingly volatile and its money supply tiny, so far as I can tell no one actually prices in Bitcoin. People who sell things for Bitcoin figure out a price in a reserve currency and then convert to BTC at the going rate. For example bitcoinstore.com prominently displays its dollar-to-bitcoin exchange rate, generally substantially below MtGox's quoted price, and shows the dollar cost of every item below the BTC cost. The dollar prices tend to be stable. The BTC prices, therefore, not so much.
By the way, what is the Bitcoin money supply? According to bitcoincharts.com, there are currently about 12M Bitcoin in existence, which currently equates to around $2B. That's a lot of dosh to you or me, but far smaller than the smallest measure of the dollar supply. There are currently about 1.2 trillion dollars in circulation, and several times that not in circulation, stowed in checking and savings accounts and such.
It really only makes sense to measure the supply of a currency in that currency, so the BTC supply is currently about 12M BTC. But which USD supply would that equate to? I can buy stuff with money in my checking account without ever pulling out paper dollars, and conversely most Bitcoins in existence are not in active circulation, even if there's no formal notion of a Bitcoin money market account. So probably we want to compare with the M3 money supply, basically anything that's in some account somewhere redeemable for dollars. M3 is around $10T, or about 5000 times the supply of BTC at the current price.
It's actually pretty remarkable that something someone wove out of pure crypto could have that much value -- 0.02% of a major economy, but it's not really meaningful to multiply the current price by the number of Bitcoin in existence. If, for example, someone tried to convert all 12M BTC to dollars in short order, that is, sell them, it's highly unlikely that the dollar price of Bitcoin would stay at its current levels. On its most active days, MtGox was handling about 1% of that. Flood the market with a hundred times peak volume and it's not gonna be pretty. So who knows what those 12M Bitcoin really equate to.
The same issue applies, in theory, to reserve currencies. What would it mean to try to convert the entire US money supply to Euros? Nothing good, certainly. But there's a difference. Reserve currencies are regularly converted, directly, to real goods and services. We can therefore compare, say, the price of an hour of labor in the US to an hour of the equivalent labor in the Eurozone and get at least a rough cross-check on the relative value of the two money supplies.
But enough amateur economics. What is Bitcoin?
There would seem to be two major possibilities:
Clearly Bitcoin is something of value to at least some people, but what kind of something?
First, let's dispense with what Bitcoin is often claimed to be: an alternate reserve currency that could come to supplant "fiat" currencies like the dollar, euro, pound or yen. Not only is its price hair-raisingly volatile and its money supply tiny, so far as I can tell no one actually prices in Bitcoin. People who sell things for Bitcoin figure out a price in a reserve currency and then convert to BTC at the going rate. For example bitcoinstore.com prominently displays its dollar-to-bitcoin exchange rate, generally substantially below MtGox's quoted price, and shows the dollar cost of every item below the BTC cost. The dollar prices tend to be stable. The BTC prices, therefore, not so much.
By the way, what is the Bitcoin money supply? According to bitcoincharts.com, there are currently about 12M Bitcoin in existence, which currently equates to around $2B. That's a lot of dosh to you or me, but far smaller than the smallest measure of the dollar supply. There are currently about 1.2 trillion dollars in circulation, and several times that not in circulation, stowed in checking and savings accounts and such.
It really only makes sense to measure the supply of a currency in that currency, so the BTC supply is currently about 12M BTC. But which USD supply would that equate to? I can buy stuff with money in my checking account without ever pulling out paper dollars, and conversely most Bitcoins in existence are not in active circulation, even if there's no formal notion of a Bitcoin money market account. So probably we want to compare with the M3 money supply, basically anything that's in some account somewhere redeemable for dollars. M3 is around $10T, or about 5000 times the supply of BTC at the current price.
It's actually pretty remarkable that something someone wove out of pure crypto could have that much value -- 0.02% of a major economy, but it's not really meaningful to multiply the current price by the number of Bitcoin in existence. If, for example, someone tried to convert all 12M BTC to dollars in short order, that is, sell them, it's highly unlikely that the dollar price of Bitcoin would stay at its current levels. On its most active days, MtGox was handling about 1% of that. Flood the market with a hundred times peak volume and it's not gonna be pretty. So who knows what those 12M Bitcoin really equate to.
The same issue applies, in theory, to reserve currencies. What would it mean to try to convert the entire US money supply to Euros? Nothing good, certainly. But there's a difference. Reserve currencies are regularly converted, directly, to real goods and services. We can therefore compare, say, the price of an hour of labor in the US to an hour of the equivalent labor in the Eurozone and get at least a rough cross-check on the relative value of the two money supplies.
But enough amateur economics. What is Bitcoin?
There would seem to be two major possibilities:
- An anonymous online payment system. If I want to buy something online anonymously, I can convert money to Bitcoin and send it to the seller, who then converts it back to money. Though each Bitcoin transaction, by design, is public knowledge, only the exchanges know which real money accounts are involved, so as long as they're not paying attention, or hacked, or subpoenaed or such, there is no way for the seller to know who I am (There are designs for layering real anonymity on top of Bitcoin, to the extent that it would not be possible to tell which particular person participating in the scheme owned a particular Bitcoin in the scheme, but as far as I'm aware no one's actually doing this).
- A speculative vehicle. It's possible to tell unambiguously who made what Bitcoin transaction, and therefore who owns how much Bitcoin, with the understanding that "who" means "the holder(s) of which private key" and that it's at least theoretically possible for someone or someones with enough computing power to hijack the whole system. Leaving that aside and thus assuming there's clear ownership, Bitcoin can be traded just like baseball cards, sparkly pieces of rock or mortgage securities.
Ideally an anonymous payment system would maintain a stable exchange rate between the tokens of payment and actual money, but as long as the exchange mechanism is fairly liquid, and the total amount given up in the money - token - money loop is not too much, people will continue to use it, and it appears that people still do.
On the other hand, a speculative vehicle doesn't even require that much. It only requires that something can be bought and sold and at least some people want to buy and sell it.
That would make sheer speculation the simplest answer. One crucial question is, how much of the volume in Bitcoin trading is from Bitcoin as a payment system, as opposed to trading Bitcoin for its own sake?
In the last couple of months, daily volume on MtGox has varied from around 5,000 on slow days to twenty times that during major selloffs. Trading resulting from conversions for payments ought to be fairly steady over the short term, or in other words, it's probably not more than the minimum daily volume, and it's probably less.
That leaves quite a bit of room for speculation.
Thursday, October 17, 2013
Welcome back, APOD!
A couple of days ago I went to NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day (http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/) to catch up on goings-on in the sky. The site wouldn't load. Hmm ... is my network connection OK? And then, I realized that I was trying to access NASA's site, at a pod.nasa.gov, and it was down because, well, the government was down.
Because I don't live under a rock, or at least not all the time, I already knew the federal government was (partially) shut down, and that even with only a partial shutdown, many people were experiencing effects a good deal worse than not being able to load a favorite web site. What I'd forgotten -- despite the .gov in the URL -- was that APOD was run by a government agency.
That's probably partly because we don't notice URLs so much these days, which is a theme worth revisiting here one of these days, but it's also because a government web site just isn't that much different from any other. My city's web site, and my school district's, the National Hurricane Center's, and APOD are just web sites, just as government officials from the federal level on down have social media accounts, home pages and so forth just like other people.
I don't think there's any profound lesson to be drawn there, just one of those things you notice every once in a while when the occasion arises.
Lessons or not, it's nice to see APOD again.
[Note: Because APOD is only hosted by NASA, the same content was available during the shutdown from various mirror sites]
Because I don't live under a rock, or at least not all the time, I already knew the federal government was (partially) shut down, and that even with only a partial shutdown, many people were experiencing effects a good deal worse than not being able to load a favorite web site. What I'd forgotten -- despite the .gov in the URL -- was that APOD was run by a government agency.
That's probably partly because we don't notice URLs so much these days, which is a theme worth revisiting here one of these days, but it's also because a government web site just isn't that much different from any other. My city's web site, and my school district's, the National Hurricane Center's, and APOD are just web sites, just as government officials from the federal level on down have social media accounts, home pages and so forth just like other people.
I don't think there's any profound lesson to be drawn there, just one of those things you notice every once in a while when the occasion arises.
Lessons or not, it's nice to see APOD again.
[Note: Because APOD is only hosted by NASA, the same content was available during the shutdown from various mirror sites]
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
