Technology Futures

The New York Times can now be read on the iPad via an upgraded NY Times app. The full edition of the paper is available for free until sometime next year, when a subscription fee will be charged. If I was the owner of a struggling newspaper with declining circulation, I'd be not only going the app route for distribution, I'd put together some kind of deal to bundle in an iPad with something like a twelve month easy payment plan for the iPad.

Scientific American has a short article on the supposed dangers of cellphones. This is something I have always been worried about, but there has never been any convincing data for or against the supposed dangers. Many of the studies I have read about hedge a lot. I'm still not sure about what to believe, but this article provides some of the physics behind electromagnetic radiation, and it is seems to provide some hard science-based justification for worrying a bit less.

I was talked into going to see the movie "The Social Network" last night. Ostensibly about the rise of Facebook, it's hard to know how much of it was based on facts and how much was fantasy. I know that I thought the movie would never end. I can't recall another film in recent memory where every single character was so consistently unlikable. Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, probably is hard to get along with, but by the end of the movie, I was starting to feel sorry for him.

Chris Mitchell of the Minnesota Institute for Local Self-Reliance testified before the FCC recently on behalf of community broadband projects. Mitchell argued eloquently that state legislators should not be able to preempt local governments from starting and managing community broadband networks. The short video is well worth watching.

The iPad is breaking every consumer electronic sales record and setting new records. The sales records set by the device include biggest first day sales, biggest first month sales, and biggest first year sales. Apple is on track to sell something north of ten million iPads in the first year. By comparison, the DVD player, in its first year, sold a measly 350,000 units. Apple sold 300,000 iPads on the first day.

In another sure sign of the eventual rise of SkyNet, a turn by turn GPS device guided a driver into a lake, where the man drowned. A second person in the car was able to escape. These devices are making us stupid.

The city of Washington, D.C. challenged hackers to try to break into one of their secure Internet-based electronic voting system. It was part of a test for the software before deploying it in the city--letting D.C. voters skip going to the polls and voting online instead. Well, students from the University of Michigan hacked into the system and re-programmed the software to play the Michigan fight song after each vote.

Researchers have discovered a massive geothermal hotspot in West Virginia that could be used to generate green electric power. A review of previous data collected from a large number of oil and gas wells found that the temperatures had not been calculated correctly. Areas as hot as 200 degrees Centigrade were identified only five kilometers deep--shallow enough to tap for energy generation.

As I have written previously, Google and Apple are in fierce competition with each other, which is good for all us. Competition makes both companies work harder to deliver better products at less cost. Google has just announced their Google TV service. It is a bit different than Apple's Apple TV.

David Strom has a fascinating piece on his experience test-driving a Ford Edge. Strom went to some effort to identify and categorize all the electronics options available for the vehicle. If you thought today's computer-controlled engines were complicated, wait 'til you see what you can do while you are, uh, "driving," if you want to call fiddling with all this stuff while the car is moving "driving." Strom lists, among other options:

In a story that has been simmering for a while, the New York Times reports that the Feds want to be able to easily wiretap a wide variety of Internet services, including Skype, Facebook,and Blackberry (RIM) communications.

Every programmer knows it: the dreaded infinite loop. You have a little piece of code that gets the wrong input and starts repeating, over and over again. Computers being kind of fast, an innocuous few lines of code can execute millions of times an hour, sending the system of the network into "conniptions," which is the technical term used by all good programmers.

I still remember a conversation I had about a year ago when I told an business acquaintance that Blockbuster was toast, and that it was only going to be a year or two before the company would be gone.

Many parts of rural England, like many rural areas of the U.S., have "little" broadband speeds of just a few hundred kilobits, as opposed to "big" broadband delivered via fiber with a capacity of a hundred megabits or more. A speed test was recently conducted in Yorkshire, England. The goal was to download a 300 megabtye file by a "little" broadband connection and see if that was faster than sending it 120 kilometers by pigeon.

In making a hotel reservation, I wanted to double check how to get from the hotel (B) to the office building (A) where the meeting will be held. The hotel appears to be less than one block from the office building. But the loop-de-loop blue line is the route that the map software gave. And that's why I seldom use a GPS device in the car.

WiredWest is a municipal broadband project that includes 47 towns working together to build and operate a last-mile, fiber-to-the-premises network for Western Massachusetts communities unserved and underserved by high-speed broadband. The WiredWest project covers 1,445 square miles; more than 27,000 households; 3,000 businesses; and dozens of community institutions.

There is so much confusion and mis-direction in this article that it is hard to know where to start, and I don't really blame Cecilia Kang, the Washington Post reporter who wrote the article. She interviewed a bunch of wireless equipment vendors and wireless services firms, and it those firms that are doing the dreaming. And most of it is dreaming.

All these location-aware devices we have now with GPS capabilities are turning out to be a boon for crooks. Here is how it works: people go on vacation, take pictures with their location-aware iPhone or Android phone, and upload the picture to Facebook with the exact location conveniently added in. Crooks browse Facebook pages, find someone on vacation a long way from home, and then head over to your house for a leisurely romp through your belongings.

This site has collected a set of old computer ads from the late seventies and early eighties. Some of the goodies include:

In this report, Apple wants to increase iPad production to 3 million units/month. And in this report, the iOS-powered Apple products (iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad) have passed Linux to become the third most popular software platform for Internet browsing.