Steve Cooper

For the last few months, I’ve been using IObit SmartDefrag. It is a freeware defrag program that keeps your drive running fast. Basically, you install it and it runs in the background, like a librarian silently alphabetising your book collection. Your machine can find and load files faster. Anyway, it feels like my machine has stayed fast, where I would have expected it to slow down over time. Anyway, it’s freeware, it seems to be reliable, and it’s kept my machine fast. Can’t go wrong.

Right. The future is officially now;

As Japan’s dwindling ranks of farmers grow old, scientists are developing new ways to lighten their physical load and keep them productive. At the Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology, a research team led by professor Shigeki Toyama has developed a wearable power-assist robot suit designed to boost the strength of farmers working in the field.

from pink tentatle

Books are dead. New books — physical paper copies — will be gone within a few decades, replaced by electronic downloads read on hand-held readers.

At my writer’s group this evening, we got to talking about the Amazon Kindle, the e-book reader that uses a very-low-power, paper-like screen to let people read books and newspapers, and have content pushed wirelessly.

I mentioned that I thought that paper books were on their way out, and some people disagreed; I’m going to explain why we won’t see bookshops on the high street in 2028.

We all know, I think, of the huge shifts in the music industry. CD sales are falling; figures from earlier this year had US CD sales dropping 20%. HMV have taken a three-year, 60% stock price plunge. Chains like MVC and Tower Records are dead. Virgin Megastores are gone from the high street.

Why?

Two things have conspired to kill the CD, and the stores that sell them. Neither of these things would have been enough on their own, but paired together, they have sealed the fate of the CD. It may look alive still, but it is fatally wounded.

The two things, then; the iPod, and broadband.

First, the iPod. Portable music used to mean a walkman. You carried round one hour of music, and left your CD library at home. The iPod changed that, though. A full-fat 160gb ipod will hold about 3,000 albums. You don’t carry one item from the library anymore; you carry the entire library. This is huge. Once you’ve experienced it, the idea of not having all your music with you feels prehistoric.

Second; broadband. So you’ve got an iPod, and now you need music on it. What options do you have;

1. Buy a CD and rip it.
2. Borrow a friend’s CD and rip it.
3. Download it from an on-line retailer line like emusic or itunes.
4. Download it from a site like mininova using peer-to-peer software like µTorrent.

Downloading is, again, simply better. Legit copies are cheaper, and the selection can be better than a shop. You don’t have to buy full albums, saving you more money. It’s fast, too. If you were standing in HMV’s doorway, and I was sitting in front of my PC, I bet you I could buy an album faster than you. And of course, using peer-to-peer software like µTorrent, one could probably download it in about ten minutes, for free.

The combination is lethal; the CD is no longer the component part of a music library; the MP3 has displaced it.

So…

books.

What would it take for this to happen to books?

Well, there would have to be a reading device that was comparable to reading a book. The kindle is one of the first devices, the sony reader is another. It won’t be long before we see a reader with a screen that compares to paper, but which will hold your entire library. And no reason why you couldn’t make readers share documents via bluetooth or wireless. We’ll have the book equivalent of iPods. Give that a couple of years.

Then we’ll need book content, delivered over the internet. Well, that won’t be hard. The beating heart of the web is just that; a text delivery system. HTML and PDFs will be the new component part of a text library. Amazon will push publishers to produce electronic equivalents of their books, which won’t be hard because they are all typeset on computers anyway. Content will drive uptake of the readers; people with readers will demand content. The internet will deliver legitimate and illegitimate content, and readers will become standard urban gear.

Borders will go the way of HMV.

You know what I think the killer app will be here? Schoolkids. Schoolkids with one reader in their bag, with all their schoolbooks downloaded, along with a copy of wikipedia P2P-copied there just in case.

So, I’m just about to wipe my machine and move from Windows Vista back to Windows XP. I actually like vista for some things, but it’s basically just too much work and not enough payout.

The upsides are

• it’s very pretty
• it’s helpful if things go wrong, diagnosing problems and such more easily.

On the downside, the security settings are just too much hassle; UAC, the control system which is supposed to limit the ability of malware to affect your machine, also stops you from doing any useful work. it’s infuriating. It also seems ’slapped on’, just making life more difficult.

It was difficult enough that I decided to install ubuntu, a friendly form of linux, just to browse the web and try things out. If I wasn’t a windows programmer by trade, I’d probably be using that full-time.

In many ways, programming is like a pantomime horse.

Most programming tasks deal with one of two halves. There is the front end, which is the colourful world of web pages and clicky buttons and scrollbars and windows on your screen. The world of the pixel. Then there is the back end, the world of reading and writing data to disk. The world of the byte.

Both of these are necessary and noble worlds, and a programmer will tend to either live entirely in one world, or straddle both. If you change jobs, you can go to your next career saying, ‘I’ve played the back end of a horse for many years now.’ and they’ll be able to partner you up with a front end, and off you’ll trot and go do productive work together.

There is another path. A darker path. A path I have wandered down. The path of middleware.

In this world, you don’t play with pixels, and you don’t play with data. Not the way others do. What you become is a conduit, a transit system transforming one thing into another. Like intestines. It is dark, and smells. It’s necessary, but it ain’t nice.

I’ve been doing stuff like this for a while now, and I’m coming to the conclusion that it’s no fun being the middle of a horse.

So I’m trying to retrain myself in the skills at the ends of the horse; I shall be (re)learning the arts of the database. The back end. After that, I’ll be learning new ways to write websites; the front end.

Then I can be a whole horse again.

So, it looks like my plan to become immortalised in a robotic exoskeleton has come a little closer; A Big Track controlled by a moth brain

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