My answer..

[azekeil]

My answer to the question on my last post is the ability to create a (nominally) free copy of information. I believe it is this, and this purpose alone, which underpins the success of the computer.

How about some other Killer Apps?

• Communication? Well, this is creating copies of information but this has to be communicated. Computers pre-date computer networks. I guess the ultimate purpose of creating a copy is usually for communication purposes, but I believe it's a subset of what I'm looking at. Duplicated information can be used without communication, for example.
• Processing information? Well, yes, but this requires intelligence and additional software. Certainly the ability of a computer to be a general processor of information is important; not limited to a specific task.

No. I believe it's the simple ability to do what is impossible in the 'real' world, namely create a second 'perfect' copy (and subsequent perfect copies) of an existing piece of information at nominal cost that has ensured that computers continue to proliferate.

An Aside: If this theory is true, then it's interesting to look at the implications. One of which could be that any system that tries to restrict this ability is doomed to obscurity. So does this predict the ultimate demise of DRM? I'd like to think so ;)

In fact, if this is true, then companies who design storage mediums who realise this also must surely work to ensure that their 'content protection' is breakable^[1] to ensure the continuation of their medium... DVDs are still around; they're broken. Blu-Ray and HD-DVD? Well there's already an arms race.. but seriously, can you think of any digital technology that has survived that restricts duplication of information?

---

1 - Although I believe that this is always possible if you have all the encrypted data - the proviso being it may take an infeasible amount of time to break. Luckily, as the end users need to be able to decrpyt the content as well, the key must be available somewhere too, it's just a matter of exposing it.. ;)

Comments

[woz.livejournal.com]

So its not porn then!?

Sorry I had to say it! I just had to!

[azekeil.livejournal.com]

No! The Internet is for Porn, as we all know ;)

[azekeil.livejournal.com]

Well, yes. Computer-enabled distribution is the most efficient mechanism, certainly ;)

[woz.livejournal.com]

Argh noooooo! I left that game alone after it tried to consume my life!

*grabs garlic and cross*

[azekeil.livejournal.com]

Ho ho ho ;)

I managed to avoid it with foresight ;)

[woz.livejournal.com]

I did the whole epic end game raiding thing for years, BWL, Naxx, MC - then the expansion, more faction grind, more raiding ... then the penny dropped!

[malcygoff.livejournal.com]

not sure I entirely agree with you; I think that it is broader than just the (very valid) point that you raise, possibly encompassing the theme of other people's comments. I base this on my youth, the BBC micro mainly, and how my dad used it at the time.

Initially, space was not quite cheap enough to be considered nominally free[1]. Much like memory cards now are not quite cheap enough to be disposable. Rather, the fact that the data stored on it was not fixed - the ability to delete, alter, share, copy and generally bugger about with it at no additional cost I think was the killer app.

p.s. sorry: I said I'd posted this comment, I actually just left it in the draft window.

1. although this might just have been my dad.

[malcygoff.livejournal.com]

balls, and I clearly hadn't finished it.

point [1] was meant to read:

"I remember my father complaining about having to purchase the 5 1/4" floppies and how he was out of space on them. This may have been because they were expensive, although this might just have been my dad."

[azekeil.livejournal.com]

I guess it depends how you define the term 'ubiquitous'. I don't believe at that stage that personal computers were ubiquitous. I believe that the defining thing that made them overwhelmingly popular was when the cost of duplicating information became negligible - so the early years of 10MB HDDs for > £400 probably wouldn't have fulfilled that either.

[gerald_duck]

Sinclair sold a huge number of ZX Spectrums back when any storage except compact cassette was a luxury, long before the average home user could load and save at anything above a hundred bytes a second.

In my case, it wasn't until my family received an inheritance in 1983 that we could afford a floppy drive. I managed to scrape together enough pocket money for the nastiest, cheapest modem you ever did see in 1987 and I finally got a hard drive (105MB) in 1992 by accepting one in lieu of wages when my employer went bust, the same year I got access to the global Internet (as opposed to isolated IP-based networks).

But the home-computer craze started in the late seventies. I definitely felt as though I was playing catch-up in 1982 when I went on a computer course in Croydon Public Library.

[azekeil.livejournal.com]

I think you're possibly looking at this from a biased viewpoint (admittedly, so am I) - I don't believe the home computer craze counted as ubiquity. It may have done amongst the circle of people we knew at the time, but I believe there were a large number of people who the expensive quirky things didn't appeal to, until the advent of the ability to copy information for nominal cost.

[the-magician.livejournal.com]

In which case I'd argue that the ubiquitous personal computer age is only just happening *now* with the advent of the £300 laptop computer and £100 colour laser printer and such like.

My mother is getting her first computer this weekend and has broadband ordered for delivery next Tuesday.

Two years ago the only person in my mother's road that I knew would have a computer was the nerdy-geek type down the road (who'd also rewired and replumbed his house from books he got out of the library) ... now several of my mother's friends have computers ... and is it because of cheap information copying? No, not as far as they are concerned ... it's email, shopping and looking up information.

And it's driven in part by the dispersal of society ... families are now spread further away around the world and now that there's nearly free and instantaneous communication, they can stay in contact. Shops in the high street have become more and more identical so might as well just order the exact same stuff cheaper on line and have it delivered. And information that used to be hard to get hold of, or required a trip to the library or the townhall is now available on line.

New generation adopters are driven by iPods, digital camera downloads, and to a lesser extent blogging, P2P etc. but they also use the email, the instant messaging, the shopping and the use the Interweb as a large information store.

They don't need "copies" of the data if it is always going to be there in Wikipedia or some specialised site dedicated to a tv show, to a car make, to repairing household appliances or whatever.

Information copying is certainly contemporaneous with that, but I think the mass acceptance has been driven by communication, commerce and convenient access to data repositories.

[azekeil.livejournal.com]

Ah, I don't necessarily mean cheap copying of information as an obvious process: email, shopping and looking up information all require.. copying information. Yes, OK, admittedly these things are over a network - but the only reason networks exist is to move copies of information around...

The sociological and other implications are also interesting but I don't have time to comment on them now.

You may well be right that we are really only coming into the ubiquitous computing age - I would argue that this is the case when the majority of commerce happens through computers - which I think may have already happened (the stock market? okay, perhaps from a more consumer view?)

[the-magician.livejournal.com]

"copying" ... well, legally (and yes, legality has little to do with the real world) ... sending data from one computer to another or from hard disk to screen, is no more copying data than sending music from the BBC to your car radio is "copying" ... it's more about publishing and the difference between the push and pull models.

It's a little fuzzier and we can get into semantic arguments.

Networks exist to send data around, they don't care if a copy is left behind or not once the data has been transmitted. If I view something on a webcam across a network, it's equally valid even if no recording of that image is made.

And the process of commerce isn't just in the transfer of ownership, it also subsists in advertising, marketing, comparison shopping, consumer reports, LJ recommendations etc. It's getting harder to say whether you're watching TV through "a computer" (as many of the set-top boxes are basically simple computers, some of which even have USB sockets and quite often run a linux distro or similar).

Most households have many computers in them (from the heating controller to the gameboy, from the sky+ box to the fancy new dishwasher, oh and the fancy new mobile phone) so we're being surrounded, but the idea of ubiquitous and pervasive computing really only comes into play when it becomes virtually seamless and continuous (the new femtocell 3G networks, where your 3G mobile can connect to a femtocell in your house and connect out over ADSL to the internet for VoIP calls at local landline call rates while you're in range etc. may (and I repeat *may*) mean that people will have their phone book, calendar, TV remote, phone, grocery ordering, music playing etc. etc. all in their iPhone/SmartPhone like device (convergence) or at least that a user interface for each of your appliances (heating, security, washing machine, car monitoring etc.) will "expose" an interface that will be pulled together onto your phone (and your TV and anywhere else you happen to be)

Televisions used to be rare and expensive and now they are everywhere, ditto landline phones, and then mobile phones ... and ditto cars (though they are still very expensive). And in each case it was reducing the price, reducing the complexity and being in the right place at the right time with the right product ...

... the trouble with digital technology isn't about unbreakable vs breakable storage ... it's about the scale of storage vs costs in an ever changing technological world. Whether 3.5" floppies had unbreakable copy protection or not doesn't matter any more, because they are very nearly dead (I remember paying over £1/floppy for 1.44 3.5" floppies ... Saturday I paid £17.99 for four gigabytes of USB stick, that's 154 million times the storage for the same price) ... and the pictures I could store on a floppy were incredibly primative compared to modern storage (but are we approaching a point of making things indiscernably better?)

CDs are starting to die out (they were giving away stacks of Jazz CDs at the convention over the weekend, my local market was selling off someone's CD collection at a pound a disc and people were grumbling about the price) ... it's not the storage media that is important, it's the access to what the media contains, whether on your home hard disk, or downloadable as you move around.

(cont)

[the-magician.livejournal.com]

Models of commerce such as Netflix prove that people are willing to rent content, and models such as iTunes prove that there are people that don't need the physical media anymore ... in the past we'd buy an LP and make cassette copies for people, or buy an album, make our own copy and then lend out the original to our friends ... and while there was a media cost, it didn't make a lot of difference (I had hundreds of cassettes that I copied and played) as there are only so many hours in the day, so if I copy down the entire Bob Dylan back catalog to my iPod, I can still only listen to a few albums a day before getting bored of them.

But that has little to do with the rise of computing, it's just the latest copying technology and I don't think that that is really driving the adoption of general purpose PCs by the public at large. The current boom really does seem to be riding on Web2.0 and social computing (facebook, LJ, myspace, email, flickr etc.) and on building online relationships, *plus* media playback.

[azekeil.livejournal.com]

..but I think you're missing my core point - this is all enabled by the ability to copy (and subsequently store) information cheaply! Notice the distinction I make between copy and store. When you send information over a network, you are by definition making a copy of it, unless the sending process somehow destroys the original data. It may be a very literal (and subtle) interpretation of copying that most people don't grasp.

Yes, current fads and booms are based on blah blah technology that enables yadda-yadda, but at the end of the day what it comes down to is the ability to copy information cheaply and easily.

[the-magician.livejournal.com]

Oh, I see your core point, I just disagree with it, and with it being a "killer app", as the ability to copy and store data cheaply has been around (through FTP, archie, gopher etc.) for over twenty years. The speed at which data can be "copied" and the size of the files involved have both grown fantastically, but that's to be expected.

There were downloadable porn pictures and "videos" twenty years ago (but the files were much smaller, and the storage space was much smaller) ...

... my point is that it isn't the copying that is the important part of this, but the access (whether stored locally or remotely) that's the "killer app". People can access data quickly and cheaply (and with the web and modern applications like iTunes, much more simply ... they don't have to type arcane command lines to search across the web of computers and to fill in FTP command lines, they can just click on a link and the data appears), and they can access it just as easily when it is on their local computer or their iPod.

Sure, you could regard it as two sides of the same coin *if* you want to define sending a file across a network as copying (which of course it is, but then so is playing back a VHS tape, it's copying data from the tape and then converting it into viewable information ... or playing back a 78rpm record, or sending a fax, or using a photocopier (ability to copy and subsequently store information cheaply, definitely true of a photocopier and I have years old binders full of stuff to prove it!) ... but the killer app isn't the copying or the sending, it's the ability of the receiver to access the data)

So my argument stands, copying is a technology, but the killer application is user friendly data access.

[azekeil.livejournal.com]

Ah, when you put it like this your argument makes a lot more sense. I do agree that of course user friendliness and ease of access has made probably the most changes to people's lives, and cheap network access for all has convinced the business world that doing business in this 'virtual reality' is a viable proposition.

I did think about photocopiers when I was thinking about all this - they make copies. I'm not so sure about records or VHS for slightly differing reasons - the data on the record's surface is simply translated. So too is the data on a VHS tape, but as it is contained within other electronics I guess you could argue that it has been 'copied' - but my point was that the copies that computers make are indistinguishable from the original - whereas if you take a photocopy of a photocopy, or a recording of a recording, you can only do that so many times before the quality is lost altogether, no matter how careful you are. I believe it is this advancement, something that is nigh on impossible in the 'real' world, that really differentiates computers and why I believe it's the killer app that continues to drive ubiquitous computing.

[the-magician.livejournal.com]

I think we're near an end on this but a few more comments ...

... yes computers can make near perfect copies (though in fact they tend to make less perfect copies and then fix them through error correction and resending data packets etc.) ... and if a computer can copy data perfectly from a CD, why do all these audio CD manufacturers make such a fuss about the way their players handle errors in the CD bit stream?

But things like music, video and digital pictures are already throwing away information from the original (certainly by the time you get to MP3s, AVIs and JPEGs) and people are happy enough to receive a lower quality file in exchange for faster access and lower storage requirements ...

... and this trend continues with DAB radio, digital TV and web cams (frames dropped, flickering, freezing, and tons of lossy data compression etc.)

Perfect copies (of most things) aren't what most people want or need, so it's hardly going to be a killer app for getting the non-geeky onto a computer.

And people don't care how many times a file has been copied before it gets to them, merely that the copy they get is good enough (and watching some of the torrented TV shows and videos, good enough is sometimes absolutely horrendous!)

Yes, perfect copying differentiates computers, but (IMHO) it isn't what is driving ubiquitous computing.

You might as well argue that error correction is the killer app because it is the foundation on which your perfect copies rely.

[azekeil.livejournal.com]

Haha. I've just responded to another person on my friends' list about CD players. It seems its a constant area of debate.

My belief about that (I don't fully understand it, but good friends who I trust believe they can tell the difference) is that it is down to how the CD transport reads the disc. I could understand if a CD player transport might cause more jitter if it had to work harder (error correction rather than error removal) to read the data off the disc.

To be fair, I wasn't so much thinking of pictoral or sonic representations of data, but data like text and other information. Yes, the process of copying isn't flawless, but the protocols are designed to make up for that.

In my argument, I'm not really concerned with exactly how the copy is performed, only that a computer user can make a flawless copy if they require, at nominal cost. That's the key.

In order to address your point, imagine if there was a charge for sending an email. Do you think email would have risen to the dizzying usage it has today if it cost the same as a physical letter, but was less secure (by default), and had all the attendant problems that early email systems had? (namely, reliability, etc)

Okay, this is actually a network charge rather than a copying charge. But worse still, imagine if you had to pay every time something was copied within your computer, as if we only had WORM permanent storage?

[the-magician.livejournal.com]

cheap network access for all has convinced the business world that doing business in this 'virtual reality' is a viable proposition.

Actually vastly expensive point to point access for a few which drove down the cost of doing business made electronic trading a viable proposition. I worked for twelve years for GE Information Services/International Network Services/Global eXchange Services (same company different names) and before that for two years at Ibix Computing/Blue Rainbow (another name change) and before that for a city insurance software house. All of these had in common sending important business "documents" electronically so they could be automatically processed by the recipient (B2B (business to business) and A2A (application to application) EDI (Electronic Data Interchange))

As the cost of processing paper invoices, handling cheques, sending delivery notices and shipping notices etc. was eliminated or vastly reduced, those companies that could afford to put in the leased lines, the ISDN, or (one of our products) PC software with a dial up modem into the GEIS network could cut costs and out perform their competition.
Soon it became a requirement of the large supermarkets etc. that even their smallest suppliers accept orders electronically and send back confirmations, shipping notices and invoices electronically. This has spread through various vertical industries (the car industry from parts ordering to the showroom using the ODETTE standards, customs clearance notices, electronic payment messages, insurance industry policies (from domestic to large reinsurance excess of loss policies) etc.)

Thus the "killer app" for small business adoption of computers has been a real "killer", either adopt or lose their customers and suppliers. And this is one of those places where "ease of use" very definitely came behind "communication" ... but in many cases it was just a computerised version of sending a fax, and while it might be more accurate/less prone to error, the removal of costs were the reason for adopting computers. (Including removing the cost of unnecessary stock through Just In Time systems)

Sure it's spread onto the internet now, but a number of industries still use leased lines (for security, for authentication, for Quality of Service and defined Service Level Agreements which are just about impossible to get out of an Internet provider ... though the security can now be done via VPNs and such)

[azekeil.livejournal.com]

As I said before, I know all of that - I am not discussing the intricacies of how the process is achieved - this doesn't affect the end user. The end result is something that makes computers (read: digital technology) unique, and that I also believe it to be their Killer App.

To me the above examples sound like the core of my argument: that the cheapness of copying information drove them into greater use...

[the-magician.livejournal.com]

I still disagree, and the "cheapness of copying information" had little/nothing to do with it, as it was expensive for the connecting infrastructure to the point where it forced several small businesses out of business because they couldn't afford to meet the supermarkets requirements.

There is no "app" in copying information. The app in this case was data transformation and mapping to SOP systems, the data transfer part could have (and routinely was) replaced by carrying physical data tapes from one place to another (expensive and sufficiently error prone as to require backups etc.)

I'll grant that "perfect" copies is unique to digital technology, but at the same time I'm sitting here in front of a computer with two dead drives as the data copy at some point has corrupted and now I can't access *any* of it ... so it's perfect until it fails, and then it fails completely (on an old VHS cassette you could cut out a mangled bit of tape and just lose a few seconds of TV, but on a corrupted DVD you've pretty much lost the lot ... so much for advances ... oh, and paper records dating back hundreds of years can still be read, while it's getting nearly impossible to read disks recorded just ten to twenty years ago)

You can turn anything into "well somewhere in there they copied data, therefore my argument is right", this doesn't make it a killer app, because it's not an application, it's a technology. I'd accept much more an argument of a general purpose OS and the ability for 3rd parties to write applications to run on general purpose hardware is the basis of the greater use of computers.

[the-magician.livejournal.com]

I've used email systems where there's a charge for sending email, and I've seen it proposed many times as a way of reducing spam (if it cost 10,000 pounds to send a million spam, maybe it would slow the sending of spam, and any message not paid for would just be dropped somewhere in the routing so we'd never see it) ... and just because it might cost something there's no reason to expect it to cost the same as a physical letter, so I'm rejecting that line of argument.
And physical mail is very insecure, but definitely the best way of sending food, clothing etc.!
And imagining a charge for copying data inside the computer is amusing, but doesn't really turn copying into a killer app. Imagine there was a charge everytime you plugged your computer into an electrical socket and switched it on ... Imagine there was a charge everytime you connected to the internet (by session, by data transfer or just a flat monthly charge) ... imagine there was a charge everytime you played a music track on your computer ... imagine there was a charge for sitting down in an internet cafe and using a computer ... see, all things we can imagine but they don't seem to prove anything ...

[azekeil.livejournal.com]

There is no "app" in The Matrix, but that was where I first heard the term "Killer App" in relation to it being the one for DVD players.

I think we will simply have to agree to disagree.

[the-magician.livejournal.com]

Very true :-)

And I will 100% say that you've convinced me that the ability to make identical copies of data is a key component of the digital revolution and something that separates it from other technologies ...

... "killer app" was originally coined for the application that people had to get, and so you had to get the hardware/software that application ran on.

As with many other terms, it then got applied to things outside of computing to indicate something that had an equal affect on that area ... but it's an analogy, and then reapplying the analogy back to the original reminds me of (a supposedly true) advertising slogan used in the US ...
"Cadillac, the Rolls-Royce of automobiles"
:-)

And so The Matrix was the film that people wanted on DVD and so had to buy a DVD player for it (in a slightly similar way, Brothers in Arms was the CD that people bought with the first big rush of consumer CD players, but it was more that that was a really popular album that came out at just the right time). The killer app for the Wii is (I'd say) Wii Sports, since when people see it and play it, they then have to go buy a Wii. The killer app in that case is the game, though the thing that people actually want is the motion sensing controllers, but the controllers are not an app.