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Stewart has made some predictions for the future of computing [1].
He predicts that within 2 years the majority of consumer machines will be laptops and have SSD (not rotational media). I predict that by the end of next year more than half of all new consumer machines that are being sold will be laptops (defined as being portable machines with the display and keyboard forming part of a single unit), and that more than half of such machines will have SSD as the primary storage (IE used for booting and for most common file access). I predict that by the end of 2010 the majority of all computers shipped (in all form factors including games consoles and servers) will have SSD as their primary storage. I predict that in late 2010 rotational media will start to go away for most tasks, but for at least the next year the model will be SSD for small/light/fast operations and rotational media for large capacity. I’m not disagreeing with Stewart, just being more precise. Also while Val made some good points about the reliability of SSD [2] I don’t think that this will be an obstacle in the low-end of the market. There is no little evidence of computers failing in the consumer market due to being unreliable – it seems that Microsoft has conditioned people to expect unreliability.
I predict that Sun will not release ZFS under the GPL in time for anyone to care. The release of OpenSolaris was way behind schedule and I don’t expect anything different this time around.
Stewart predicts that in five years Linux will have significantly more desktop market share than Apple. I agree and also predict that Apple will convert to the Linux kernel. I predict that Apple will become the first Linux distributor to make any significant hardware sales for the mainstream computer market (Linux bundled with hardware has already done well for mobile phones, routers, Tivo, and similar devices where the user doesn’t know what OS is running).
I predict the death of Windows mobile. I predict that in five years the mobile phone/PDA market will be dominated by Android with a variety of other Linux based phones. I predict that some time after five years the iPhone will go away.
Chris Samuel has made some predictions too [3]. He predicts that within two years “The distinction between laptops, netbooks and mobile phones will get even more blurred with consumers demanding mobiles with more power and lighter and lighter laptops/netbooks”. I believe that the difference between laptops, netbooks, and mobile phones is primarily one of IO (size of keyboard, sockets for peripherals, and size of screen). For desktop use the only application I use which requires more RAM or CPU power than my EeePC 701 can provide is Firefox. A combination of more efficient javascript interpretation and better coding practices by web designers would solve that problem. A significant portion of the mass of a laptop is dedicated to suppporting IO ports and maintaining the structural integrity of the device. A common feature in science fiction is lapotops that can be rolled up, stretched to size, etc (the Thinkpad Butterfly keyboard was an attempt at a first step towards this which failed due to issues of mechanical strength).
As some Netbook class systems already have 3G networking built in it seems a logical extension to have telephony functions built in to a laptop. I predict that laptops with full telephony support will go on sale in 2010.
One promising feature in regard to laptop IO is the new Display Port [4] video port. It will only be an incremental improvement to the space taken for IO capacity, but I am not expecting anything revolutionary in the near future. I predict that HDMI will be a failure in the market and DVI will never gain critical market share, it will be VGA and Display Port on most systems by 2012.
Predicting that technological developments won’t happen is always risky, but I predict that the mechanical issues which separate the heavier laptops and desktop-replacements from netbooks (in terms of making a large display and keyboard that won’t break frequently) won’t be solved within five years. In the same note, I don’t expect anyone to try building a mobile phone which can have a full-size screen and keyboard connected to it (although it would be possible to do so). So I expect that the phone/PDA, Netbook, and laptop distinction will remain for at least the next 5 years.
One thing that would make sense is to have a small device (PDA or mobile phone) store data that is security relevant and connect it to full-size machines for serious work. So for example you could use a desktop machine for Internet banking (maybe in an Internet cafe) and have your mobile phone ask you to confirm the transaction and then authenticate you to the bank server. I predict a larger role for PDAs and mobile phones as computers as soon as people start to take security seriously. I won’t try and guess when that might be, but I predict that it won’t be for at least five years.
I predict that increasing oil prices will significantly make a significant impact on the price of computers before the end of 2010. Not that I expect the prices to suddenly jump upwards, it’s more likely that prices will steadily increase while at the same time new technology to reduce production expenses in other areas is introduced.
I also predict that increasing oil prices will increase the desire to maintain systems for longer periods of time without maintenance. For example my Thinkpad T41p has had a few significant part replacements (a couple of motherboards, half the case, and a few keyboard replacements). This is OK while plastic costs almost nothing and the manufacturing expenses are also very low. But in future I expect that people will want laptops that can run for years without needing part replacments and which have a service life of 10 years or more. This requirement for strength will counteract the demand for laptops that are as light as netbooks.
There is currently a lot of discussion about how to protect “marriage“, such discussion is based on the issue of whether Gay Marriage should be prohibited to protect Straight Marriage. Some straight people believe that their own marriage would be better if homosexuals were allowed to get married, some have even declared that they won’t get married until discrimination in this regard is ended. I don’t believe that whether some other people get married will make any difference to my marriage.
I believe that any two consenting adults who are not closely related should be allowed to get married, but I am not going to write about that today. What I will address is some positive steps that can be taken by a government to protect Straight Marriage without regard to Gay Marriage.
By the most objective criteria, death is the greatest obstacle to marriage. To protect someone’s marriage you should first protect them from becoming a widow or widower for as long as possible. Also protecting the lives of children (both biological and adopted) is important for protecting marriage. Here are some of the many ways of preventing needless death:
- Don’t start wars except in the most extreme situations. Wars inevitably involve the death of soldiers (some of whom are married) and any war that is anything other than the smallest border incident will involve the death of civilians (married people and children).
- Protect the food supply and the environment. When toxic chemicals, heavy metals, or radioactive material are released in the environment it results in a statistical increase in the death rate from cancer.
- Increase the funding for medical research. Today there are many medical situations which can be routinely and safely resolved which would have been likely to be fatal 10 or 20 years ago. More medical research will lead to more diseases being cured.
- Spread positive technology around the world. Protecting marriage should have a larger scope than your local region, therefore life-saving medicine needs to be affordable in all countries. Patents that prevent this need to be voided in the poorer regions of the world.
- Increase the research on car safety. Car crashes are one of the largest causes of death and significant injury in the first world which can be easily reduced. Unfortunately there has been little research on making cars safe for women and children (crash-test dummies for woman and children are to a large extent scaled-down models based on research on men due to the lack of female and child cadavers for research [1]). Also I believe that the majority of car safety research in regard to crash test dummies was done in the US and therefore is biased towards caucasians and afro-americans – I believe that research on other races is needed to give equal protection to all races (caucasian and afro-american races are in a minority in the world).
This is by no means a comprehensive list, but it does cover some issues that are current and well known.
Now the next objective way to analyse this issue is to look at statistics related to divorce. It seems that money is an issue related to divorce and therefore protecting the finances of married people is a way of protecting marriage.
The first thing that can be done is to give people more continuity of employment. Being in a situation where you could lose your job at short notice is stressful and has to have a negative impact on a married couple. Recently the supposedly “conservative” Liberal government in Australia was trying to ban Gay Marriage while also introducing legislation to make it easier to lay off employees who have done nothing wrong (based on business issues). Among other things the Work Choices legislation made it more difficult for such employees to take out bank loans (which means that they often pay higher interest rates).
A final issue that causes stress for married couples is the school system (which is broken in many ways). I’m not going to try and cover this in detail here, but I will note that installing flag-poles (as the Liberal government wanted to do) is not the solution to problems with the education system.
Addressing these real issues will take some government funding, but it’s not a lot and a much greater amount of money could be saved by ending the “war on drugs”.
If the people who claim to be protecting straight marriage can address these other more serious problems that threaten straight marriages then I still won’t agree with calls to ban gay marriage. But it would make then seem less hypocritical.
Recently there has been increasing attention paid to thermal issues. The power used by computers not only impacts the electricity bill (and battery life for a portable device) but is a cooling problem. The waste heat from desktop systems and servers costs energy (and therefore money) to remove by the air-conditioning system and the heat produced by small devices can impact where they may be used.
It seems that a temperature of 40C can cause burns if applied to the human body for any period of time. As it doesn’t immediately hurt this can happen without people noticing. A friend recently reported getting a large blister on his arm after drinking a moderate amount of alcohol and falling asleep next to his EeePC.
I have noticed that my EeePC 701 has an unpleasant pattern of heat dissipation. It appears to use only one small vent in the side to vent most of the heat (with some vents in the base for air intake) and the base is all plastic. Apparently such a machine draws 14W from the wall when in active use compared to my measurements of 20W for a Thinkpad T41p. The Thinkpad however has a significantly greater size, this means bigger vents (and therefore lower temperatures of the vented air). Also the fan inside the Thinkpad makes much less noise so I guess it’s larger.
If I am working in the lounge and leave my Thinkpad on the couch it doesn’t seem to have any thermal issues. But if I leave my EeePC sitting in a normal manner the vents on the base are partially blocked and it becomes unpleasantly hot. If I leave my EeePC upside-down with the lid closed (so that the vents in the base are exposed to the air) then the screen gets very hot, I am not sure whether this is heat from the CPU going through the keyboard to the screen and then being prevented from going further by the insulating cushion or whether heat is generated in the screen (although it is supposed to be powered down when the lid is closed).
One suggestion I have received is to place a laptop on a metal baking tray. The flat tray preserves the airflow underneath it and the metal conducts heat reasonably well. Baking trays seem to be made of aluminium or thin steel, they don’t conduct heat well – but a lot better than a cushion.
It seems to me that one factor which will limit the development of NetBook class machines is the ratio of heat dissipation to either area or volume (I’m not sure which is more important). For use similar to mine providing the same compute power as an EeePC 701 with less heat dissipation would be ideal – and technically should not be difficult to achieve. Unfortunately I think that people will want to run Windows on NetBook class machines so we will see the development of machines with faster CPUs and GPUs which have worse ratios of heat to heat dissipation potential which will lead to more heat induced shutdowns and low temperature burns.
It’s a pity that no-one makes a netbook with the CPU power of an iPaQ. A 400MHz ARM CPU is all I need for my portable computing and my iPaQs don’t have cooling vents.
Dhanapalan writes about the small number of voters for Linux Australia elections [1]. I guess that blacklist-voting is partly to blame for my inactivity in this regard. Linux Australia is running pretty well so I don’t think there’s a great need for me to go out of my way to vote.
One thing that could be done given that LCA is an LA event is to give a voting session keynote status at LCA. Have it happen just after a keynote speech and have some prize given away to a random person who attends – the free laptops that were given away one year are not required, a free lunch voucher would be more than enough to increase the attendance.
A final factor that needs to be considered is the number of elections that we may vote in. I vote in Australian elections (state and federal), Debian votes (General Resolutions and DPL elections), and sometimes my local LUG. The amount of attention that I can focus on political issues is limited and divided with other elections that are more important.
The Bureau of Meteorology has forecast temperatures of 43, 43, and 35 for today and the next two days. Those temperatures are in celcius. Yesterday was also above 40C so my entire house is hot.
As my airconditioner is not overly large (a smaller unit is more efficient) the back part of my house will get really hot even without extra computers so I’m turning off my SE Linux Play Machine. Also a couple of years ago a SE Linux Play Machine died during summer in a similar situation, and I prefer not to lose hardware.
It will be on again in a few days.
Jennifer 8 Lee gave an interesting TED talk about the spread and evolution of what is called “Chinese food” [1]. In that talk she compares McDonalds to Microsoft and Chinese restaurants to Linux. Her points comparing the different local variations of Chinese food to the variations of Linux make sense.
The CentOS Plus repository has a kernel with support for the XFS filesystem, Postfix with MySQL support, and some other useful things [2].
Mary Gardiner comments about the recent loss of a blog server with all content [3]. One interesting point is that when you start using a service that maintains your data you should consider how to make personal backups in case the server goes away or you decide to stop being a customer.
Val Henson makes some interesting points about the reliability of Solid State Disks (SSD) [4]. Some people are planning to replace RAID arrays of disks with a single SSD with the idea that a SSD will be more reliable, this seems like a bad idea. Also with the risk of corruption it seems that we have a greater need for filesystems that store block checksums.
Lior Kaplan describes how to have multiple Linux bonding devices [5], the comment provides some interesting detail too.
programmableweb.com has a set of links to sites that have APIs which can be used to create mashups [6]. One of the many things I would do if I had a lot more spare time is to play with some of the web APIs that are out there.
Gunnar Wolf has written some insightful comments about the situation in Israel and Palestine [7]. He used to be a Zionist and spent some time living in Israel so he knows more about the topic than most commentators.
Charles Stross has written an informative post about Ubuntu on the EeePC [8]. What is noteworthy about this is not that he’s summarised the issues well, but that he is a well known science-fiction writer and he was responding to a SFWA member. One of his short stories is on my free short stories page [9]. He also wrote Accelerando which is one of the best sci-fi novels I’ve read (and it’s also free) [10].
Don Marti has written about Rent Seeking and proprietary software [11]. It’s an interesting article, nothing really new for anyone who has followed the news about the coal and nuclear industries.
Erik writes about “The Setting Sun” and points out that Scott McNealy had tried to capitalise on the SCO lawsuit but Red Hat has ended up beating them in the market [12].
On Tuesday afternoon I gave a talk on behalf of KaiGai Kohei about SE Linux and the LAPP (Linux Apache, PostgreSQL, PHP/Perl) stack. KaiGai has blogged about this [1], unfortunately Google Translation does a poor job of Japanese and has particular problems with KaiGai’s work (could anyone who knows Japanese and English well please submit some tips to Google). KaiGai’s post is useful for links to his notes which are good background reading.
My talks about SE-LAPP and SE-PostgreSQL have been getting some notice, Bob Edwards referenced SE-PostgreSQL in his talk about database security.
It’s good to see KaiGai’s great work getting the notice that it deserves. I hope that it becomes a standard feature of the PostgreSQL code base in the near future!
Also Casey Schaufler, James Morris, and I have bought KaiGai a present of some Tasmanian wine, in recognition of his great work.
This morning I gave a talk at the Security mini-conf of LCA about the status of SE Linux in Debian. Here is a summary of the issues I covered:
General Status
In Lenny (the new release of Debian that will come out in a month or two) SE Linux is working well. Considerably better than in Debian/Etch. There is an installation document on my documents blog [1], it’s very easy, only two scripts need to be run with no parameters to do most of the work (5 commands in total). There is more detail on installing SE Linux in Lenny (and other issues) in the Debian Wiki [2].
The default configuration of SE Linux is “targeted”. Previously we had separate policy packages for “targeted” and “strict”, now they are configuration options for selinux-policy-default. It is also possible to have some users in the unconfined_t domain (like the “targeted” policy) and some in confined domains such as user_t. Changing to strict can be done one user at a time, this needs further documentation.
Backports
I maintain an APT repository of i386 and AMD64 packages for better SE Linux support. This includes libraries built to not need an executable stack (see my previous blog post for details [3]). It also includes i386 libraries that don’t need text relocations AKA execmod (see my blog post about why i386 must die for details [4]).
My Lenny repository includes policy packages before they appear in Testing as well as the packages that are modified to fix the execmod and executable stacks issues. I plan to maintain this repository for some time, at least as long as I am actively using Lenny, but the content will change.
I might back-port the newer upstream policy to Lenny at some later date. If I do this it will be near the time that Lenny+1 is released and I will put it in a different location to my current Lenny repository.
I am currently deciding what to do with packages from external repositories such as debian-multimedia (see my previous post for the background) [5]. I may have to create a separate repository for non-standard Debian packages which I then modify to better support SE Linux.
I also plan to build packages of Security Enhanced PostgreSQL [7] for Lenny and Lenny+1. After demonstrating it’s capabilities I will suggest that it be considered for Lenny+1.
Play Machine
I have been running a Play Machine (open root machine) [6] for most of the last seven years. In the near future (probably the week after LCA) I will upgrade it to Lenny. One thing that I didn’t mention is the fact that I plan to demonstrate other things such as SE-PostgreSQL in Play Machines.
Training
I have a Xen server that is used for my Play Machine, I will run it as a SE Linux training machine and grant temporary ownership of a DomU to anyone who wants to learn and have a document with a list of tasks to complete to learn about SE Linux. I might be able to get it online this week. If so then I’ll make it available first to LCA delegates.
I will also set up a Bittorrent server for a Xen image for anyone who wants to go through the same SE Linux training program on their own machine – this will allow them a greater time limit and also avoid contention for my server. Unfortunately I have some problems with BitTorrent, I would appreciate any advice about running a torrent tracker.
Post Lenny
SE PostgreSQL is an exciting new development that I want to get in Debian. Initially I will create my own APT repository for it and include it in my Lenny repository. Hopefully it will become a standard feature in Lenny+1.
Security Enhanced X (the X window access controls) is a significant security feature. I hope to have that in Lenny+1, but it might not be possible.
On Saturday I traveled from Victoria to Tasmania via the ferry (to attend LCA), they grossly failed in their security measures and provide three lessons for others:
- Make it possible for people to read security relevant documents .
- Make obeying the rules not be a cost and make the fact known.
- Don’t be lazy.
Here is the detail:
- When driving towards the ferry in a queue that lasted about 30 minutes just around the last corner there was a sign notifying me of the security rules. As soon as it was visible I started reading it but the security guard started frantically waving at me, the time taken to read it was holding up the queue. Therefore I never discovered the full list of things that I’m not supposed to do.
- One rule was that cylinders of gas (such as propane) were apparently banned and should be surrendered – presumably to prevent a gas leak in the confined space of the ship’s hold from risking an explosion. Anyone who did have such a gas cylinder would probably not want to have it stolen by the security people and would be inclined to lie and hope that the security people wouldn’t find it. If they had made it well known that such gas cylinders would be stored in safe keeping for the duration of the voyage and then returned then they would have been more successful.
- They wanted to check the luggage compartments of all vehicles. To check the tail-gate of the Kia Carnival van I was driving first required that all the bags which had been put over the back seat be removed (they were resting against the tail-gate and would fall out if it was opened). When the guard realised that they would have to wait for me to empty a lot of luggage out they decided to just trust me that I didn’t have any bad things on board (even though due to point #1 I didn’t know what bad things were). This problem happened a second time when I reached Tasmania and the guards wanted to search for fruit.
Today was the first day of Linux Conf Au 2009 [1]. KaiGai Kohei was unable to attend the conference and give a database mini-conf presentation about his work on Security Enhanced PostgreSQL [2], so I gave the presentation in his place. It was a fairly difficult presentation and required that I learn a lot about PostgreSQL in a small amount of time. But the result seemed OK, the audience seemed reasonably interested and the questions indicated that there was no extreme negative reaction to it.
After the main presentation I gave a live demo using a Fedora 10 machine image that KaiGai provided. That ended about four minutes after the specified time, which was pretty good considering that I started about seven minutes late to allow the audience time to return from the lunch break.
Tomorrow I will give another talk for KaiGai on the topic of the Security Enhanced LAPP (Linux, Apache, PostgreSQL, and PHP) stack. I will also give a talk about the status of SE Linux in Debian/Lenny.
For both talks I have a separate laptop for the demos, so after tomorrow I will only take one laptop to LCA – which will probably be an EeePC (on some days at least).
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