Pirate Bay Trial vs Big Media Part 1: Technological point of view

The verdict on the Pirate Bay Trial is out: Guilty. Big Media Corporations claim it a victory over piracy even as they know they can never truly stop sharing of copyright content. Its just about awareness and pushing it to the margins of society. The question for users of such services is: How does this effect the service itself?

Thankfully Pirate Bay is not being taken down entirely and such is unlikely to happen. However the IFPI and the MPAA are already taking the battle to another front. They are now targeting the guardians who control the gateway to the internet: the ISPs.

Complete throttling of torrent traffic will not be accepted nor can be accomplished in most democratic parts of the world but if the Big Media have their way they would like the ISP's to scan every files for traces of copyrighted material not realising the technological overload of such an act.

Also given the economical cost of such an exercise, the ISPs may not be willing to be participants in such an act. This will also require laws which give ISPs the authorisation to invade a user's privacy. This wil also be quite easily combated in the near future when bandwidth will more than double users will simply switch to secure networks to protect their privacy.

However if they are able to force P2P trackers to divulge information and obtain IP address this could be then used to track the neccessary culprits with the help of ISPs.

While Big Media seems ready to go to any length to combat piracy I fear for their short term gains they might end up creating a dsytopian society by wrongful use of technology.

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Vaio overheating issue and solution

Back in November I got my hands on my very first laptop. A Sony VAIO Core2Duo 2.o Ghz with 2 GB RAM and an Nvidia 7400 graphics chip which was unfortunately loaded with Windows Vista Business. It wasnt exactly new, as it had been purchased by my Dad 6 months ago and handed over to me but I thought it was perfect. With a carbon fibre body it weighed under 1.7kg and 13.1" screen with 1280x800 was exactly the size and resolution I was looking for. Enough to play a 720p movie and type comfortably like a desktop keyboard.

So off I went with it loading it up with my favorite apps which was bound to include a lot of games. I was very eager to test its graphics performance so I installed Most Wanted which was my standard for graphics benchmarking from the day its been released. I know purists would disagree but that is all what mattered to me.

So I am completely blown away by the graphics this computer is offering me and suddenly I find myself staring at a blank screen and hear a small whizzing motor come to a sudden halt. What was that? Did windows crash?



Time to do the thing which most software engineers do when they first encounter a bug. Try and replicate it. This time it went down even faster. 5 min instead of 15. My worst fears were confirmed. This was an overheating issue.

Frantically I searched the web for every blog entry or review which could help me eliminate this issue. After hours of research I concluded this was a design issue and that 13.1" was perhaps too small a frame to fit a graphics chip and take care of airflow. Saddened by the fact that this machine could not fulfill my gaming requirements I started hating it.

2 months later I was back in Ahmedabad having done my last semester in the campus. My Dad recommended I approach a Sony service center with the issue but I was apprehensive. Still I made one long trip and reported my problem.

For an obvious hardware issue the chaps there asked me to backup my stuff since they were going to default back to factory settings. My skepticism grew further and I gave up any hope.
Still my Dad pushed me to atleast try it once and I relented.

So now the task was to backup everything. Pretty simple right? Yes normally but I didnt want to spend time re-installing everything. So I wanted a complete backup and restore. For the first time in my life I discovered such a utility was buried somewhere inside Vista (Surprise!). Further investigation revealed it wouldnt work with an external harddrive (Sigh of relief: I am dealing with Microsoft afterall).

So I found the best thing on the market. And its called Norton Ghost and it works flawlessly. It has was more features like system restore built in which work better than MS's which can leave you halfway sometimes.

With all my data and installed programs safe, I handed over my laptop to the service center guys.

Within 2 days I was contacted by them and told my laptop was fixed!. Fixed really have you tested it? How did you do it without installing a game?

Still a skeptic I collected my machine and instantly installed a game in a bid to prove them wrong. But how wrong was I? Hours on the end the machine delivered excellent graphics and refused to go down. I could hear the fan working very hard to dispose the heat. The problem it turned out was far simpler than I had imagined.Too much dust was impending the working of the fan and trapping excess heat.

I sat in bewilderment realising the guys had Sony Ahmedbad had proved me wrong!

The Social Networking Tug of War

All geeks kindly bear with me while I make sure everyone knows what this is all about. Now I am sure none of you are new to the world of social networking unless you arrived from outerspace minutes ago; and all of you must be aware of the slow drift of people from orkut/myspace to facebook.

But this article is not about documenting those facts. Its about something much more important. However before we go further more facts.

Google realised at some point in time that orkut was by all means way behind new kid on the block: facebook. The next Microsoft, as they are rightly called I believe, they came with an ingenious plan to turn the tide : OpenSocial. Though its deceptive name may make you believe its open source; its not. It just provides a common framework for all social networking sites to work upon.



Now this was exactly what the world of social networking needed. Exactly how many sites was the poor end user supposed to maintain his onlin presence on to reamin in touch with his friends.
The debate as to what was the optimum number eluded many social networking experts. Now we had a solution and one that worked in Google's favour.

While OpenSocial was aimed at sites not providing functionality like facebook; facebook itself which had its own proprietary protocol would be the one to loose out. Imagine if all social networking sites worked with one another and facebook was left alone. Surely everyone would desert it eventually since connectivity matters in the social sphere.

Facebook realized its demise was eminent with the arrival of OpenSocial and so they released their own framework. Obviously Mark Zuckerberg was no fool would not join the ranks of college dropouts who were a one hit wonder (and yes I am thinking of you Mr. Sabeer Bhatia).

Coming back to the issues at hand, we have two equal giants eying for control. So is this good?

Yes! consolidated competition is always good for the consumer and two is a very good number. Do not agree with me and you dont believe that would offer you enough variety? Take a look at the soft drink industry and I suppose you will have your answer.

Now I have just spent too much time without getting to the point. What excites me more about this is not the prospects of the social networking world but they way Google tackled their problem. It represents a significant change in the ideology of a monopoly in the software industry.

How? Remember how Microsoft chose to tackle their extremely poor share of their browser market when they enterd late? You might argue Google had no other option but if you take a look closely at the Redmond Giant's recent endeveours you will notice that it has realised the error of its ways.

UI vs Functionality

Let me start off by admitting I like a pretty face even though I am a geek. I am all for elegance and simplicity but some people mistake simplicity for dumbing it down for the users. If you have no idea what I am blabbering about let me apologise and introduce you to the topic. I am discussing the constant battle between User Interface and Functionality faced by a product developer.



If you give it a second thought you might realize these properties are completey independent of each other. Yet stuff(esp. softwares) used all of us in the past have shown us otherwise. Windows with its loads of buttons and text fields offering you a whole lot of customization and Mac which is beautiful and seems to offer just enough; But is it enough?

For most users this may be the case however it can be pretty irratating for us geeks out there no matter how small their numbers are. As soon as we find an absent functionality for the sake of simplicity the software is as good as dead for us.

On the other hand end users hate the fact that you need to be a geek to operate a lot of stuff out there. While geeks like a lot of control on the stuff they design too much meaningless information can overwhelm the user.

So where do you draw a line?

One way out of this problem while desiging software is keeping it simple at the surface and hiding a whole lot of stuff under the "Advanced" tag which most users can safely ignore. While this does work it is causing incovenience to the geeks who have to push extra buttons to reach where they want.

A better solution would be a customizable interface with a very elgenat and simple default view and the customization option hidden under the "Advanced" tag. This makes sure geeks only have to hit it once. This approach offers the best of both worlds while causing no one harm.

Not even to the developer who now can cater to a wider audience.