OSNews isn't OSNews

One of the tech sites I follow is OSNews. It was originally a website for...well, news about operating systems. Linux, Windows, OS X, etc.

A recent post was titled "Why OSNews Is No Longer OSNews." The editor outlines how OSNews shifted from news about operating systems into more general news about technology, Recent stories cover news about Adobe vs. Apple and H.265 developments and Microsoft Office changes, rather than developments about new kernel threading implementations in Linux or compatibility changes in Haiku.

The article was pretty good, and I'm not writing to rehash what Thom Holwerda wrote in the article. I am writing because as I read the article and ensuing comments, it actually dawned on me the scale to which computer technology has "standardized" and stagnated.

I became interested in computers and platforms in the dawn of home computing. I was born at the dawn of the birth of Apple Computer. I saw the introduction of the Macintosh. Okay, I didn't see it, but I was becoming aware of the world and computers in 1984 when the infamous ad debuted. The Internet was expensive, slow, and difficult for home users to get access to, so I relied on shopping in local department stores (remember when Sears mattered?) and magazines in bookstores to get news about computers, and Byte and Computer Shopper were chock-full of stories about AmigaDos and AmigaOS, OS/2, the fledgling pseudo-OS called Windows, various flavors of DOS, CP/M,...all sorts of technology goodness.

But gradually the stories about operating systems dwindled because companies closed down, markets dwindled, and eventually the biggest of the niche OS's like AmigaOS were relegated to hobbyist markets. Magazines started changing their focus into something more like Cosmo for geeks; "Win95 vs. OS/2 vs. NT! Which is Best For You?"

Fast forward to today and you have the situation that the OSNews article was discussing; hobbyist OS's are largely stagnant. Operating systems are basically, for practical purposes, down the the "big three" of OS X, Linux, and the Windows family.

Hobbyist OS's that I can name include MorphOS, FreeDOS, ReactOS, Plan 9, and Haiku. There are others, but for the most part, the number of installed systems are tiny. Really tiny.

The comments put the second part of the puzzle in place for me; people commented that in colleges, computer science majors didn't have to take compiler courses. Someone else said that more recently they went to a nearby college and the computer science majors weren't even taking courses on operating systems. I remember when I went to college that the debates focused on what the latest, most relevant computer languages were to teacher...Java? Python? Should we keep C++?

My daughter applied to the college I went to, so I was able to kind of revisit what was going on with their CS program. Basically, it's gone. The college is doing something more like an information technology track rather than a computer science degree that focused on data structures and how the system worked under the hood. This would be akin to people going to a vocational school for auto repair and learning more about body work and adding spoilers without going over how pistons or fuel injectors work.

Basically, we moved to a position in technology where the public has popularized particular platforms, and the focus has shifted into the more shallow but productive application of technology. We aren't teaching data structures or operating systems and more technology-oriented interest have nothing to do with the underpinnings of improving the computer platform, it's focused on applications and supporting Grandma so she can get her email.

I'd love the hobby OS's. I had an installation CD of BeOS when it was distributed to the public for the Intel platform. I disliked MacOS because it relied heavily on cooperative multitasking, and found it fascinating when Win95 introduced preemptive multitasking to the platform (except for the Win16 subsystem, and to a degree I guess the Win32 subsystem addon for Win3.11 had some elements of preemptive multitasking, but still...). End users just glazed over when told why these things mattered. They didn't care because they just wanted to play games and browse the web. While things under the hood improved with these features, they were quiet improvements and added largely because they improved the user experience without them knowing it.

What hobby OS's are out there are relegated to R&D departments (Plan 9) or are so hobby that they basically, for practical purposes, boot up and do little else unless you're using the machine exclusively as a platform for simple web browsing and email (if you're lucky). To get any actual work done you have to use one of the "big three" operating systems.

If OSNews only covered news for operating systems, they'd have new stories maybe once a month. There simply aren't too many people working on operating systems and those that are are working just on operating systems; I can't use it to accomplish things I use every day reliably, and without more development on applications the operating system is largely useless.

Basically one of the things that attracted me to computing as a career is dead. Commoditized. And it's a shame. My first computer was a Commodore 128, and my first PC was a 486sx 33 Mhz system with 4 meg of RAM. Today if you get a new computer to run Windows 7 you really need at least 2 gig of memory and a 100 gig hard disk. But I still remember running BeOS on an Intel system that was only a couple hundred Mhz and something on the order of 128 meg of RAM and it was able to render an animated OpenGL demo without any stutter or pausing. I was spinning a three-dimensional cube on the screen while each facet played a different movie file without stuttering. It was absolutely amazing that something with such a small amount of resources was able to pull this off.

In other words, the these hobby and research (and niche) OS's can do some really amazing things, but if they don't have anything to edit home videos or play podcasts, what am I going to do with it? How many half-rendered or unreadable web pages will I have to work around before it just annoys me too much to use it?

And without users, these projects stagnate and die off. There's very little variety.

This isn't necessarily bad; as technology has become more popular (i.e., dumbed down until the average teenager could waste an entire day playing flash games and sending pointless text messages to one another) variety becomes a detriment for support and usability. It's horrible, but the more choice you give people, the more confusing it is for people who don't love the platform itself. I can relate. I don't really give a damn about who and how my tires are manufactured or what kind of configuration my engine is in my car. I just want to get to the store and run errands without a huge cost. Same for computers. As the userbase shifted away from technology geeks and educated, savvy users to more general Mom and Pop users the operating system platform became more bland and general, and feature lists were focused more on eye candy than on multitasking and memory protection.


Computer technology is going the way of the wild west. When I first became interested in the tech I was voraciously digesting articles that explored the nitty gritty of memory protection and multitasking algorithms and what additional specialized hardware made the Amiga computer from Commodore rock the special effects industry. Today, computers are migrating into appliances that are supposed to be as easy to use as VCR's and microwave ovens and are cheap enough that if they break, the cost to repair them is often higher than simply buying a new one at Wal-Mart. They're becoming civilized and boring.

I'll continue to read what news articles emerge regarding Haiku or ReactOS or a new project that still shows signs of life. I would love to try out an operating system that is niche enough to address problems with my operating system platform of choice or introduce cool and useful features without having to sacrifice my ability to "get stuff done." And I hope that these mini-projects can inject some excitement to the profession (Plan 9 has some really really interesting concepts in it...now if only I could edit video or use it to enhance our IT infrastructure without users crying and whining that it doesn't run Internet Explorer, I'd love to play with it more.)

Otherwise I guess I'll have to either move with the times or seriously look at shifting careers. The excitement simply isn't there anymore. I guess that's one of the side effects of not inventing the future but rather moving with the passage of time.

Lower Merion School District Spying Report Issued

The findings of an independent consulting company (Ballard Spahr, LLP) were released recently regarding the remote monitoring of student laptop computers by the Lower Merion School District. Already it spurs an outpouring of vitriol in comments from the smart masses who think they understand anything that is going on here. Personally I think there's a huge disconnect between the peanut gallery and their perceived intelligence.

The report, an approximately 70 page outline of everything that was leaking into the press and then some, basically said what I originally thought. The school district has a lot of idiots running it. Not in so many words and perhaps not for the reasons people would think, but they did some pretty spectacularly stupid things.

The biggest problem, of course, was the IT department hiding the presence of the tracking software. It wasn't so much that I can't relate to their desire to hide it from people in case they try to circumvent the protection; I work in IT. I know people could do that. But anyone with half a brain in IT knows that security through obscurity won't work well. The laptops, if stolen, could easily be wiped and reinstalled with a clean OS image, and the tracking software would be useless. They not only hid it was there, but apparently they tried to obscure the fact that the software was there even when rumors were swirling about its existence. That is a blatant lack of respect for the students and faculty. Whether you regard them as little vengeful monsters or not they still deserve not to be lied to.

A very close second (okay, maybe it's a tie) was the lack of an updated usage policy for taking technology home. There were no documents to disclose modified acceptable use policies for using the laptops at home versus on the school network nor was there disclosure about potential security and privacy issues in the documentation given to parents.

Everything else in the report seems to nick the school for lax and ill-codified policies, and not being fully forthright with administrators and board members.

As someone who has to work in IT, I think the two biggest sins were the lack of properly documented procedures and the hiding of the ability to monitor the laptops. The fact that administrators and board members didn't know about these things, or didn't understand it, were not the IT department's fault, unless they went out of their way to hide it.

Really...there is a point where someone needs to take responsibility for themselves. The board didn't know about it because they didn't care. Neither did the administrators. They all had a vague idea of this ability, if they've seen evidence from the "anti theft" systems. What the hell did they think it did? That this stuff runs on unicorn farts and fairy dust?

I deal with users all the time. They care about how and why their systems work about as much as you care about how your car engine works. The IT department didn't explain it to them because it was a waste of time to do so! I've dealt with users to whom I've explained a simple (to me) concept several times and they simply don't listen. I can repeat it until I'm blue in the face and it doesn't matter. So why and how would this IT department telling their school board about activating timed snapshots from a webcam and screen capture utility while logging the remote system's IP address to a central server make any fucking difference to them?

And lack of following formal policies? In most smaller businesses and schools and, I'd venture, government agencies, following strict, codified policies is a luxury. We always hold up best practices as an ideal but more often than not they're aspired to, not followed. Departments like those in public schools are under immense pressures from the powers that be to just get a task done, and if it's held together with duct tape and broken pencils then so be it. Doing it "right" takes money and time. They don't want it done right. They want it done now.

While some would say that's an excuse, it's more of an explanation for the culture that this attitude has fostered. More often than not if something works, then it's good enough, and it saves money. If it's actually bad enough to bite you in the ass later then it will be fixed then. Otherwise, good enough is good enough.

What I find interesting is that lack of citing personal responsibility by the peanut gallery. These kids were using school property and apparently treated it like their own property. It wasn't. I was floored when this story broke and people were raving about how they'd format the computers if their kid had brought one of them home; yeah, right. You can't. It's not yours. The school was extending it as part of an experiment in technology-based curriculum. And it's their computer. Not yours. Not a handout. Not your property.

I'd have trusted the laptop about as far as I could throw it. Any organization that "lends" you a thousand dollar piece of equipment, would surely have the right to inspect it for activity; porn surfing, games, inappropriate use, anything of that nature. What universe would you live in where you go to school, can't browse the web the way you want, can't play the games you want, but expect them to just hand over a thousand dollar laptop so you could surf porn at home on their dime?

Use your damn brain!

There was one report of a girl who had taken the laptop into the bathroom to listen to music while she showered, and the parent was furious because the school may have seen his little high school princess naked. Huh?!

Damp, humid room...thousand dollar laptop...electronics...water. What the hell was it doing in that environment to begin with?!

To me, there were a number of failures here. From hiding the fact that this software existed to lack of formal CYA policies to cover proper usage of the laptops at home to a lack of common sense from the students and parents, there was a systematic failure that happened here.

The sadder part in my view is the ignorance of the peanut gallery. It's simply too easy to blame the evil school district and portray them as completely at fault while completely forgetting that there was also a bit of an attitude of entitlement, that reality has slammed down hard on the community realizing that these free toys weren't free. 

Thinking About the Future of Data Access, NetBook Edition

've had some occasion now to reflect on the netbook and how practical it is to use it for mobile data access, and now I've been using a full-fledged MacBook Pro (albeit the 13 inch model). I've come to some conclusions about using them. What follows is some mental rambling, not a submission for consideration of a Pulitzer, but see if you follow my ramblings to get some semblance of what the overall picture is.

Basically, computing is moving in a direction where the term "netbook" is pointless.

What you have are more or less capable computers. Parts continue to commoditize in a way that renders computers into data access portals.

What used to be a netbook was basically a computer that scaled back speed and memory and storage to a point where it was cheap in a package that was small enough to easily carry. That was definitely the state of affairs with the Asus EEE PC I tested in my "going mobile" change in digital lifestyle.

My daughter is about to head to college, so I've kept half an eye on what computers are going for in terms of what she would probably need to take to school. The answer? Computers now considered "netbooks" are practically desktop replacements for the majority of users out there.

They aren't specialized systems that will rip through animations or video games with the highest frame rates and benchmarks. But she doesn't need that, and neither does the majority of users out there. She needs email, office applications, and maybe skype or instant messaging and web browsing. These $400 netbooks today are capable of that and more, and at that price they're practically disposable (another requirement, giving a teenager a piece of equipment that they're going to treat as well as their cellphone...it's most definitely going to have a finite lifespan before Mr. Floor or Mr. Beercan introduces itself to Mr. LCD Display).

The distinction between netbooks and notebooks are a non-issue anymore. You can buy a perfectly usable $500 machine and at that price if it lasts 2 years and something dies, it's better for your time and money to get a new $500 machine at that point than invest the money in fixing it.

And for the average user it means even less because whether they're aware of it or not, access to data is the important thing, not the computer. Most people I see now are getting information via Facebook and Twitter. They want to text friends. They don't care if it's done via email or their cellphone, they simply focus on the goal, not the means. And some are adopting tools to make them even more mobile; saving documents to Google Docs or a USB thumb drive means they can edit and print work in a computer lab or their computer or whatever computer they're sitting in front of at the time. It means that when their computer, whether a $400 "netbook" or a $2000 workstation, dies or is inaccessible or is back in the dorm while they're in another building the documents or work they need can still be accessed from another convenient system.

Parts of this revelation comes at a time when Apple is trying to redefine the non-netbook with their iPad. It's a big success for Apple. But as a computer, it both sucks and is wonderful. It doesn't neatly fit the niche filled by small computers, and Apple won't say it does. But it can redefine how people work. It's almost like the PADD device on Star Trek: The Next Generation.

It neatly fits a niche for conveniently accessing information. It can be shoehorned into being a device that can write novels or, with the proper application (or if you can program the application and get it accepted to the app store) manage servers with remote access applications like secure shell or VNC. It's ideal for what most users are using the Internet for; music, social networking website, watching videos, and in many cases instant messaging and email (although for most users that is interchangeable). It's wildly popular, and by using a combination of management tools with web interfaces and applications from the app store an iPad, while not a general purpose computer, neatly fills a niche for accessing information on the go.

Smart phones can also access much of this information. My wife's phone can get directions, Google information, and reserve movie tickets. An iPad with Internet connectivity will probably have similar abilities, as can a small notebook computer at a wifi hotspot. Three different devices with similar abilities but targeted to different audiences and tailored to suit some tasks better than others by their nature.

In the end it's the goal that is important to users, not the means. Tech people like focusing on the means. We bitch about Microsoft Windows and how it's like drinking cyanide, or why MS Office is a pain and overpriced while OpenOffice is great (and vice-versa). We debate using webmail versus Outlook versus Thunderbird for reading email. But for the average end user, it doesn't matter; they just want to use the computer and write a letter and send an email, and as long as they can do it with minimum hassle, they don't care about the means used to do so. And they'll do it with an iPad, a $400 netbook, a $1,500 Macintosh or their cellphone.

All that matters is that they can get the task accomplished.

When schools and colleges and businesses have IT departments worrying about computer deployment and management, they should probably take a few minutes to step back and reframe their perspective. It's not a matter of getting computers for students or employees. It's a matter of enabling access to the information they need.

Subtle difference, but the implications are quite large once you see them.