Engineering at Dordt College

As we approach the end of the summer I’m reminded of the number of our students who are returning from internship experiences. Internships have become an important part of any engineering student’s learning experience. Here at Dordt College most of our students take an internship during the summer between their third and fourth years. Longer internships are also possible, although they require commeasurably more planning. My observation is that these experiences invariably improve our student’s understanding of engineering leading to higher grades and importantly, a sense of how fulfilling and worthwhile engineering work can be. Industry is also stepping up to the challenge by offering better internship opportunities each year and greater support for internships. A best case example is Jesse Van Essen’s experience this summer. You can read more here about his particular experience at Pella Corporation

Consider plain old telephone service (POTS). The telephone sets (that which you fasten to the wall or place on your desk) connected to the telephone network are simple electromechanical contraptions. There need be no computing power at all in a telephone set in order to place any type of telephone call–local, long distance, conference call, etc. Although a telephone set might offer some minor features such as speed dialing (press one button to place a call to a stored number), the real power of the system is in the network. Have you ever felt compelled to “upgrade” your telephone set in order to get some new feature offered via the network? Maybe, (adding caller ID might be an example) but it does not happen very often. The telephone company does all the hard work such as maintaining and updating the numbering system (area codes for example) and assigning telephone numbers, routing and connecting the calls, billing, etc. This is what I call a smart network. The devices connected to this network can be dumb. A telephone made in 1950 will work just fine on today’s telephone network. Even sophisticated telephone sets (cordless, answering machine etc.) are pretty dumb compared to the smarts built into the network.

At one time the Bell Telephone System had a monopoly on telephone service in the United States. In response to widespread dissatisfaction with service and pricing, the government broke that monpoly in 1984.

In contrast, consider the Internet. The computers connected to the Internet are not simple at all. In order exploit all of the content, or even a minority of the content, you need a rather powerful and up-to-date computer. A fifteen-year-old IBM-386 class computer running some old version of Windows will be frustratingly slow, probably will not be able to access much content, if it even works at all. Yet there was a time when that same computer was considered the best for using the Internet of it’s day. Users need to keep updating their hardware just in order to keep doing things they have always done, even simple things like e-mail. Most of the complexity of the Internet is at its edges, in the hardware and software users connect to it. The heart of the internet is just a rather simple method of routing packets of bits toward the intended recipient. The network itself is oblivious of what the data means and does a minimum of processing on the data. This is what I call a dumb network. The devices connected to it must be smart.

So what does it matter? The original premise of the Internet was to deliberately make it dumb so that it would be robust in war. A smart network presents the enemy with targets to attack in order to disable the network. If a dumb network is attacked, little is lost. The system will probably keep functioning at some level, and it can be easily rebuilt. Coincidentally, a dumb network empowers users since they control the smart computers connected to it–so long as the smarts remain in their computers.

Now a new trend is emerging. Some call it “Web 2.0.” I’ll define this as the offering of hosted services. I’m writing this blog entry on a hosted service (WordPress on a Dordt College server). If instead I wrote this blog on my own computer in raw html code and operated my own sever to dish this up to you, that would be consistent with the original idea behind the Internet. Now most of us are using hosted services with hardly a thought about where the smarts are. Some other examples of hosted services are Hotmail, Google Docs and Spreadsheets, You Tube, Facebook, MySpace, Xanga, and so forth. Suppose for a minute that each of these services demanded a monthly fee in order to keep hosting your content. That would be quite a change for some of us!

Web 2.0 is moving the smarts of the Internet back toward the network and away from the users. The warehouse of Googles’ many disk drives which contain who-knows-how-much now becomes a critical factor in the usefulness of the network. The loss of Google for example would be hard to replace.

We used to talk about, even joke about, the ability of “Ma Bell” to watch over our communications. I find it fascinating that companies like Google, Yahoo, and many others are working hard to corner various hosted services that can be offered on the Internet. They are striving for dominance, maybe even monopoly power. As more of the smarts of the network move toward these hosted services, the possibility for generating revenue and establishing monopolies grows. The Internet is starting to look a little (just a little at this time) like the old Bell System.

(It has been about a month since my last blog entry. I got a bit busy with senior projects, final exams, and the end-of-semester meetings to wrap up business. I hope to provide about two blog entries per month during the summer.)

In a previous blog entry I advocated use of government regulated micro-payments for the suppression of spam e-mail. In the comments, Jim asked why I assume that the government has to step in. Why can’t free market forces manage the problem of spam? In this blog entry I intend to show that the government is unavoidably involved in the consumer electronics business to a larger extent than most people realize. My assumption that it will take government action to suppress spam is based in part on past history. I’ll do this by way of example—the story of RCA.

Once upon a time there was a company that meant as much to the business of selling radios and televisions as Microsoft means to the business of selling computer software and hardware today. That company was the Radio Corporation of America. which later changed its official name to its initialism, RCA.

With the onset of World War I the use of radio for war-time communication was an obvious necessity in order to maintain military superiority in command and control. With that goal in mind, the US government passed laws which in effect gave the government free access to all wireless and radio-related patents. These rights were purchased and turned over to a new publicly held corporation, the Radio Corporation of America (RCA). With the U.S. patent rights of all earlier radio companies at its disposal, including such famous (at the time) names as Marconi, Westinghouse, and General Electric, RCA got a financial boost that it played out for more than 50 years.

With the near monopoly power that RCA had, it developed new standards with practically absolute veto power over the proposals of others. For example Edwin Armstrong developed an FM radio system prior to RCA’s effort. After World War II RCA proposed new standards for FM broadcasting, managed to get them approved by the FCC, and ran Armstrong out of the business. (Armstrong committed suicide, probably in despair over the usurpation of his FM work by RCA.) For another example, the Columbia Broadcasting System developed a color TV standard and had it fully approved by the FCC. Just a short time later, RCA came up with a new standard, had the old standard retracted by the FCC and asserted its new standard through a quasi governmental agency which it supported called the National Television Standards Committee (NTSC).

I see a huge parallel between the development of the radio business, especially early AM radio (1920 through 1950) and the development of the internet. Early AM radio broadcasting was poorly regulated. Business models for radio broadcasting were based on older technologies of wired telegraph and telephone service. These early ways of doing business did not take advantage of what broadcasting could offer and suffered from the technical differences between radio and wired services. The same thing is happening on the internet. E-mail is modeled somewhat after postal mail, but the extremely low cost of sending bits is very different from the real costs of paper, printing, and transportation involved in snail-mail. Ultimately the regulation of radio broadcasting became centered in a new government bureaucracy—now the FCC. I expect a similar outcome will have to happen with regard to regulating the internet.

RCA is not a unique case. AT&T once enjoyed not a near monopoly (as did RCA) but an actual monopoly, again possible only because of government action. Both of these companies are gone now, swept away possibly by mismanagement, but also by the increasing spirit of deregulation that followed the Reagan years in the 1980’s. Some of my readers may think this deregulation is all to the good. To them I say that deregulation is also why you have failures of perfectly good technology. For example, the FCC approved several AM stereo formats and intended to let the invisible hand of the market ferret out the best one. Today, not only is AM stereo practically a total market failure in every format, so is the AM band itself since it has not been able to keep up technologically with FM. In any case, government action or inaction has profound marketplace results.

On the positive side, durable and long lasting standards have come out of RCA’s near monopoly. Today’s FM stereo and analog color TV standards are marvels of sophistication considering the era in which they were invented. Although new standards are now entering the market (HD Radio, HDTV), the whole world avoided the chaos of the many possible incompatible standards. Although such regulation is a mixed blessing, it always can be directed for various purposes. It is the direction that counts—regulation itself will exist in some form.

The internet came about in its present form because of government sponsored research (just as in the case of RCA, government was instrumental) and FCC regulations regarding public access to the telephone system. (The backbone of the internet in the U.S. is operated by telephone companies.) That spam can exist in this situation is also due to positive legislation and rule making on the part of the U.S. Congress and the FCC to deregulate and provide open access to long-distance telephone lines. Present laws are allowing spam. Maybe the free market can get its act together and suppress the spam—but there would have to be some economic incentive. Spam filtering services and filtering software seem to be the hallmark of the free market approach. I say we should reconsider the laws which are allowing spam and modify them appropriately. Some e-mail, like certain messages “from Nigeria” are simply evil. Government action is appropriate and probably necessary for truly effective results against evil. The exponential growth of spam e-mail will eventually force the issue.

(P.S. A “boyg” is a problem that can’t be defined and is therefore insurmountable.)

I get about 30 “unsolicited” and unwanted “spam” e-mails per day. It used to be the case that my e-mail filter efficiently redirected them all into the trash. Not so any more. As of a month or two ago about a half-dozen per day started slipping past my spam filter and landing in my e-mail box. I’ve been wondering what is going on here.

As of about October 2006, e-mail volume on the internet has started growing dramatically (subscription required to view the link). The purveyors of spam are also constantly inventing new ways to spell v1@gr@, and they create ever more delicious word salad, and they use many other techniques to render our spam filters impotent. The cat-and-mouse game between the vendors of spam filters and spammers just keeps escalating.

The basic problem is a failure of policy makers to recognize the power of sin in our world. As long as the cost of sending millions, even billions of copies of unsolicited e-mail is practically free, this practice will remain profitable. Even if 99.9999% of all recipients of an e-mail recognize it as spam, the few people that respond to the spam make the practice profitable. Those who insist on keeping the cost of sending unlimited numbers of bits free simply cannot recognize that some people will sin by writing spam and others will err by believing the claims of spam. The only fix is to start charging for bits. Instead of a monthly fee for an unlimited connection to the web, there ought to be some micro payment required to send bits onto the internet. If an e-mail message cost even 1/1000 of a cent to send (or 1000 e-mails for a penny!) most of these spammers would go bust. I hate to say it, but this calls for government regulation, even taxation. It’s inevitable.

Without proper regulation, business will be corrupted.

My EGR 204 Microprocessor and Digital Logic class has just finished the hardware design and construction phase of their first project. These were rather standard projects, such as a simple circuit that adds small whole numbers or a circuit that takes a binary-coded decimal number as an input signal and then drives a seven-segment display to show the number in human-readable form. The students have also finished their first drafts of the lab reports. Here is a schematic of one student’s project:

Many of these freshman students would not have guessed that after only 8 weeks of study in this class, they would be able to design at this level of complexity. (A previous blog entry regarding this class can be found here.)