Technology Futures

The latest iPod accessory, as usual, is much bigger and more expensive than any of the current iPod models. It is a flat panel television. Manufacturer JVC is putting an iPod dock in some of its new television sets. Once an iPod has been plugged in, users will be able to use the TV remote control to play music, view photos, and watch videos from the iPod.

I have been on the 'net since the late 1970s. In the seventies, what passed for the 'net was small groups of bulletin board systems, with the amazing FreeNet and the later FidoNet cobbling together small groups of mostly local users.

In the early eighties, the precursor of the Internet was Usenet, a small conglomeration of volunteer system administrators borrowing machine cycles from AT&T servers (with the company's tacit blessing) to run a set of discussion groups. These machines also supported email, and so Usenet was arguably the first multi-user, multi-machine network accessible globally, although most users were in the U.S. and you had to have some sort of access, direct or indirect, to a Unix machine. It was a messy kind of system, loved by geeks but Usenet lacked friendliness of the sort that arrived later with the World Wide Web and its point and click links.

In 1982, the entire Usenet hierarchy of groups was a list that fit on two single-spaced pages. Today, the Usenet hierarchy has hundreds of thousands of groups. With each passing year, the amount of information available to us has continued to expand.

With the rise of blogs and the sophisticated content management systems used for Web sites, it gets easier and easier year by year to place more information online. In 2007, for me anyway, I found it more and more difficult to keep up. The daily flow of email into my Inbox, the phone calls, the Web site links, the mailing lists, the userids and passwords needed just to manage routine chores like placing an order online or checking a bank account balance became more and more difficult to manage.

I regularly try out new applications designed to help manage such information--password storage software, outliners, databases, information managers, address books, and the like. The problem is that each of these programs and devices (cellphones, iPods, GPSes, etc.) also require additional skills, time, and maintenance. But I find that few of them simplify my work or give me anymore time. Instead, they take time and effort away from real work.

Over the next five to ten years, I think there will be a growing trend to look for devices and software that break this cycle, that are truly revolutionary, and that make information management simpler. Products that work will be very valuable, and we will be less and less patient with technically complex products and software that use as much time as they save.

Following on the heels of Ohio, Colorado has de-certified the voting machines used in some of the most populous parts of the state. Diebold, Sequoia, and ES&S machines were among those found to have problems. The state found that the machines were easy to tamper with, and that the machines lacked any audit trail capabilities, meaning there would be no way to detect tampering if it happened.

Here is an interesting analysis done by Stuart Mease, who works for the City of Roanoke, Virginia. Mease's job is trying to recruit young people to live and work in the Roanoke area. He has provided a cost of living comparison between Roanoke and some of the bigger towns and cities that are more likely to attract younger workers.

Roanoke compares very favorably; you can make less money and still live as well or better than you could in some bigger towns. Most smaller towns and cities would also fare very well with this kind of analysis, and could be an important factor when trying to convince a business to relocate to your area. The ability to pay lower salaries but still offer employees a great standard of living could be very attractive.