Return of the phone booth

Ellen Goodman, in her syndicated column, writes that some restaurants are installing phone booths so that customers who want to talk on a cellphone have a place to go and do so without disturbing everyone else. A nice idea, and a neat compromise between those who feel they can't even get through a meal without answering the phone and those that feel they can.

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WiFi and cellphones: Dueling technologies?

Esme Vos at MuniWireless thinks that the real reason behind Verizon's fevered opposition of community wireless in Philadelphia is that Verizon is terrified of cheap VoIP over WiFi.

Sun Rocket VoIP--$199/year

Sun Rocket, a Voice over IP company, has the VoIP universe abuzz with their ambitious business plans to expand from 3 to 50 metropolitan markets in 2005, and the company says they intend to be a player in 300 metro markets in the United States. Particularly interesting is their flat rate annual fee--for $199 a year ($16.58 a month), you get flat rate, unlimited, nationwide calling.

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Don't wait in line at the Post Office

If you hate waiting in line at the Post Office to mail packages, don't. The U.S. Postal Service has online label and postage services that are just terrific. Now that I have an account with my credit card information saved, it takes about a minute to print out a bar coded shipping label complete with postage. If you get it done early enough in the day, put a sticky note on your mailbox and the postman will come right to your door to pick up the packages. Or if you are running late (as I am today with Christmas gifts), you can walk right in the post office, drop them off, and walk out.

Cellphones appear to damage DNA

According to European scientists who have concluded a four year long study of cellphone radiation (the same gigahertz level frequencies used in microwave ovens, by the way), cellphone radiation appears to cause damage at the DNA level in cells, and not all of it was repairable by the cell. This means you end up with mutated cells in your body, which is one suspected cause of some cancers. Scientists agree more study is needed. The cellphone industry has no response.

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Distance matters....or does it?

The Roanoke region recently competed for a Dell manufacturing facility, and lost out to North Carolina, which offered Dell a whopping $242 million in tax credits. That's an awful lot to pay for just one firm that could easily pick up and leave after a few years. Imagine what a few hundred small businesses with good business plans could do if given ten or fifteen years of tax relief.

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Google desktop search has a security hole

Google released a piece of software a few months ago that would let you use Google to search your own hard disk, with results displayed just like Google displays search results from the Web. Sounds good, right?

Aside from the obvious privacy issues (Google swears they won't do anything with the data except target ads to you better, but they can change that policy anytime they like), I'd never let a third party search my own hard drive.

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Birth of the Diamond Age

Neal Stephenson, some years ago, wrote a prescient novel called "The Diamond Age," about a time in the near future when diamonds are, literally, cheap as dirt. Stephenson, who is arguably the best novelist of the past fifty years with respect to taking emerging technology trends and crafting intriguing storylines around them, imagined a world where even the most common of objects could be made from diamonds--kitchen knives, as an example, that are much sharper than razors but never need to be sharpened because of the, well, diamond-hard edge.

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Cheap solar cells can be sewn into clothes

European scientists have developed a new way to manufacture thin, flexible solar cells that are so lightweight that they could be sewn into clothes. Sound dumb? Not if you have to lug around a bunch of AC chargers for your laptop, your cellphone, your iPod, your camera, your PDA, and all the other electronic junk we burden ourselves with these days.

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Wind powers the Energy Economy

The Roanoke Time business section reports that a GE plant here is hiring 30 new electrical engineers to meet growing demand for power inverters. Inverters convert DC power to the AC power needed by the electrical grid.

GE is a major supplier of industrial inverters, and the company reports strong growth in wind energy generation is driving the company expansion.

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Congress gives IT industry cheap overseas labor

The online site Human Events chronicles what it calls a "cynical" backroom deal that Congress made with the IT industry to allow more foreign IT workers in the country on work visas in the coming year.

Not surprisingly, Oracle was apparently one of the industry "leaders" behind this kick in the pants to American workers, and by extension, to American communities where those workers live. I just wrote about Oracle and it's lack of innovation. Instead of retraining perfectly capable American workers, these companies are bringing in workers from overseas, who are happy to work for half to two-thirds less than their American counterparts.

Another part of the problem was also created by the IT industry itself, during the drunken orgy of escalating IT wages during the dot-com bubble. Fueled by venture capital funds, Internet startups, over a period of three years or so, ran IT wages up to ridiculous levels. Many of those overpaid and underqualified workers were eventually laid off, but the damage was done--the average IT wage remains higher than ever.

So the companies and industry that happily inflated its own wage structure now won't take its medicine and restructure wages or find ways to use perfectly capable American workers, of whom there are plenty. Instead, these companies have run to Congress for a handout.

This kind of thinking is going to continue to depress the future of IT innovation in the U.S., and the industry itself will slow atrophy as parallel universe efforts like the Open Source movement simply eliminate the need for whole chunks of the IT industry (Oracle's problem is that it is increasingly irrelevant).

In the Knowledge Economy, you have to be either very big (e.g. Walmart, Fedex, etc.) or as Schumpeter would put it, small and beautiful (e.g. Open Source). And you have to be flexible and innovative.

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'96 Telecom Act a "nuclear winter"

Holman Jenkins, an editorial writer for the Wall Street Journal, has an article (p. A21) about DSL and the future of that technology. Jenkins calls the '96 Telecom Deregulation Act a "DSL nuclear winter." That's probably a bit strong, but hardly anyone on either side of the linesharing issues of the telephone companies would say the law was crafted properly.

The original law forced the phone companies to share their copper lines with competitors, and it was only this fall that the FCC relaxed those rules. Again, no matter what side of the issue you are on (phone company or community), the outcome of the original ruling was to stall broadband investments by the incumbent phone companies.

As so many Federal initiatives ("We're from the government and we're here to help you..."), unintended consequences kicked in, big time. While the phone companies dithered, moaned, and complained, the cable companies upgraded their systems and captured 75% of the current broadband market, leaving DSL (the phone companies) with a paltry 15%.

Since the FCC changed the rules to free the phone companies from line sharing at wholesale prices, DSL costs have fallen dramatically--by as much as 50% in a lot of markets, and the service is generally priced below cable modem service.

But from a community perspective, the news has been bad and still looks bad. The marketplace, because of all this, has been effectively re-monopolized, but instead of a regulated public monopoly (pre 1996), communities are stuck with marketplace monopolies by the phone and cable companies.

To make things worse, in places like Pennsylvania, Verizon says it must be consulted before communities start their own broadband services. Even worse, lawmakers like Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell (D) thinks it is just fine to give a private company control over the future of rural communities.

The solution is for communities to stay away from the service end of the business. Treat broadband infrastructure just the way communities manage roads--build digital roads, but let private companies deliver the services while paying a use fee.

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Penn State says "No" to Internet Explorer

Penn State, one of the country's largest universities, has recommended that faculty, staff, and students stop using Internet Explorer because of persistent security flaws, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education.

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Oracle runs out of steam

My experiences with Oracle date back to the early eighties, when the database ran only on DEC's VAX system, and the company was working with AT&T to port the system to Unix. At that time, Oracle's chief software developer lived in a cabin in the woods somewhere in the northwest, and phoned in his work to the Silicon Valley company.

My Irish boss, Frank, used to get Larry Ellison on the phone weekly and scream at him about the all the problems we were having with the beta Unix port of Oracle.

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IBM gives up

IBM has sold their PC business to a Chinese firm. There has been much news coverage about this. They sold it for just over $1 billion, which is a paltry sum, considering the global market.

Most of the news coverage has been about whether or not it is a "good deal" for IBM. The conventional wisdom has been saying it makes sense for IBM to get out of a cutthroatl, commodity market with razor-thin margins.

But I see something different in the sale. What I see is a company that, like much of the rest of the IT industry, is intellectually bankrupt. It's almost beyond belief that IBM, with some of the brightest people in the industry on its staff, could not come with anything new, different, or interesting to differentiate IBM pcs from a cheap clone.

PCs are horrible devices. They work poorly, are virus-prone, are hard to fix and hard to maintain, and make simple things bizarrely complex much of the time. IBM could not come with a single thing that would make the PC better? This does not bode well for the American IT industry, for it IBM couldn't do it, with the resources the company has, who else will? Gateway can't. Dell won't--Dell makes it money selling stuff cheaper than everyone else, so it won't spend a nickel on research and development.

Microsoft is still two years away from the mythical Longhorn software upgrade to Windows. Longhorn has been in development for so many years now, it's almost a joke.

The only hardware innovation is coming from Apple. Apple has been delivering a major software upgrade every year for years, and issues minor upgrades almost every other month. Apple's hardware, year after year, wins design awards for it's good looks and functionality. Apple constantly strives to make its equipment simpler to use--the new G5 iMac requires, in one configuration, just one cable--the power cable--to be fully functional. That's right, you take it out of the box, plug it in the wall, and the machine is ready for use. And Apple's hardware is now cheaper, on a feature by feature basis, than Wintel pcs.

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The PaperHub--Technology hidden by good design

I'm appalled at my own computer. The box itself is fine, sitting on the floor next to my desk, but the complete rat's nest of wires next to it is just awful. Counting power cables that power numerous peripheral devices, there are more than thirty cables that are needed just to type an email or print a piece of paper.

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The coffeehouse as office space

Glenn Reynolds, better know as Instapundit, has an article on Tech Central Station about the emerging trend of using public WiFi hotspots as business meeting places.

I wrote about this a while back, but Reynolds makes some interesting points, including this one about the effect on the real estate market:

Put your thinking cap on

"Put your thinking cap on" may acquire real meaning if the brain beanie these researchers have developed comes to pass. It could be a major breakthrough for those with serious physical impairments, but it is easy to imagine all sorts of other uses as well. Unfortunately, I keep thinking of applications related to improved ways to change channels--with a "channel beanie," you would not even have to pick up the remote and stab a button...you could just think the channel changed.

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What corporate America wants from its workforce

This CNet article describes what corporate America wants from its workforce. Surprise--it's not necessarily tech-savvy youths with oversize thumbs from playing video games and keying text messages on cellphones the size of chiclets.

Computers missued in schools

A large German study of computer use in schools found that computers were overused in the early grades, and not used well enough in higher grades, like high school.

The study also found that students who spent too much time on the computer had LOWER reading and math scores. This does not surprise me, as it is entirely too easy to waste time, mostly on the Web, and parents and teachers have been too quick to assume that any time on the computer is good time.

I've had many opportunities to observe K12 technology use for a decade, and I continue to see two big problems.

  • First, as I noted above, there is this almost religious assumption that kids can use computers and technology better than the adults supervising them. This is utter nonsense. They are kids, and they need guidance and direction in their work activities. Teachers, parents, and school administrators are abrogating their responsibilities when they repeat things like, "Kids know a lot more about computers than we do." Kids may be more facile manipulating the interface, but it does not mean they have learned anything meaningful, like how to add, subtract, or write a grammatically correct sentence. It also does not mean they know how computers and the internet works, although I run into adults all the time who also make this grossly incorrect assumption.
  • Second, I have yet to find a school that has a thoughtful and meaningful definition for what I call "technological competency." I've written about this before--our schools teach our kids to do use Word and PowerPoint. These skills-directed curriculums reward the wrong things and teach the wrong things. The ability to use PowerPoint says NOTHING about your competency to stand up in front of a group and give a thoughtful and informed talk using presentation software. There are lots of software that can be used to make presentations. Some products are better than PowerPoint. Our kids need to learn how to give a talk, which is very different than knowing which buttons to click to put a heading on a page.

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