Technology Futures

This little gadget would be a useful addition to any home emergency kit. It is a small, folding solar panel that fits in almost any bag or briefcase and has a variety of adapters to charge cellphones, iPods, GPS receivers, and other small portable devices. The best thing about it is its USB port, so it will charge almost anything that can be powered via USB.

An interview with the new head of Qwest, Edward Mueller, has some surprising (or not so surprising) comments from the CEO. When asked about fiber to the neighborhood and fiber to the home, Mueller responded, "It's too expensive. We don't see the return."

Electric cars don't produce emissions, but the batteries have to be charged up by something. If that something is fossil fuel, you still have pollution and potentially high energy costs. A new generation of nuclear power plants, which emit virtually nothing into the air, may be part of the long term solution to the ever increasing cost of fossil fuels.

The new plants are smaller, safer, and loaded with safety features that make them easier and safer to manage.

According to this report, the merger of XM and Sirius has stalled, a year after the deal was first announced. It is a perfect storm because you have a combination of FCC confusion, Congressional confusion, silly prices paid for on-air talent, and a bad business model.

This article highlights a dark side of the Web, where blogs, FaceBook, YouTube, and MySpace, among others, makes it easy for people to be cruel. It is becoming common for students to post cruel, slanderous, and/or profane online content about their teachers. And it is not just teachers that are are the object of this cruelty. Students are "cyberbullying" other students, and even some warped adults are posting cruel comments about students that are somehow competing with their own children.

This article [link no longer available] from a rural update New York paper illustrates the power of fiber. The Adirondack region of upstate New York has a regional community fiber backbone that is pulling companies to the region--a region that would not give a second thought without the community fiber.

This moderately technical article (PDF file) has an extensive discussion of the vulnerabilities of wireless systems, including WiFi, Bluetooth, and WiMax. Communities interested in investing primarily in wireless broadband should read this article first, as the data presented illustrates why most businesses do not regard wireless as a business class service.

There are reports that Toshiba has decided to cut its losses and discontinue manufacturing HD-DVD equipment. Microsoft is the other loser in this battle, as the company had been a backer of the HD-DVD format. Christmas 2008 will be a good time to invest in the high def players and recorders, as by that time there will be plenty of competition and lower prices.

Those digital photo frames that are becoming popular hold more than pictures. Millions of them apparently come pre-loaded with a potent virus designed to thwart computer anti-virus programs. The virus is spread from the frame to a computer when the frame is plugged into a USB port.

The virus is difficult to remove, and the article recommends plugging a suspect picture frame into a Linux or Macintosh first to see what is stored in the frame memory (and then deleting it).

There are still a lot of community leaders who doubt the importance of broadband, but one city official I spoke to earlier this week said they had a Fortune 500 company that told him the firm loses a million dollars an hour for every hour their Internet connection is down. This firm is urging the city to help get additional fiber cable paths in and out of the community so those kinds of outages can be avoided.

If you live in Paris and have the new 100 megabit fiber to the home service, it only takes about ten minutes to download a high quality version of a one hour TV show. Here in the U.S., the FCC has announced that more than 95% of the U.S. has broadband. The FCC defines "broadband" as "anything faster than 256 kilobits, or about 400 times slower than the current Parisian definition of broadband.

Video continues to drive bandwidth needs, and the habits of the American public are changing rapidly. According to this report, December 2007 broke a lot of records, as people sat down in front of their computers 10 billion times to watch "TV."

I continue to be amazed that we seem to be abandoning the phone, which continues to be highly reliable, in favor of email, which is much less reliable.

A group of economic development and technology organizations are holding a reverse job fair tomorrow (February 5th) in Blacksburg. A traditional job fair has employers at booths, and job seekers walk around looking for a job. In this reverse job fair, graduating students (mostly from Virginia Tech) are at tables, and the employers walk around.

Now rumors are circulating that Yahoo! may partner with Google to avoid the likely ignominious end of the company via a Microsoft acquisition.

Google has already started preparing for an anti-trust challenge if Microsoft is successful, so it is hard to see how Google could argue that hitching Yahoo! to behemoth Microsoft is bad but hitching Yahoo! to gargantuan Google is good.

Two fiber cables on the floor of the Mediterranean were cut, causing huge disruptions in Internet service to the Mideast and Asia. A fisherman's anchor apparently snapped the two cables, which were the primary and backup links to a major Internet exchange point in Egypt.

The City of Danville, Virginia has a backlog of businesses waiting to get connected to its brand new open multi-service network (also sometimes called an open service provider network). Two service providers are offering business services on the network, and a local provider is delighted with being able to offer fiber services to its existing customers.

Galen Updike, with the State of Arizona, opened the Digital Cities Expo this morning, and told of speaking to a woman who was trying to run a business out of her rural home.

She said, "You know, I can do without public water--I can have my own well. I can do without public sewer--I can put in my own septic system. I can do without a paved road to my house. I can even do without electricity--I can generate my own. But without Internet access, my business will fail."

I had been hearing favorable reviews of the new "Terminator" TV series, but am usually busy with other things in the evening, so I have not been able to catch it at its broadcast time. So I downloaded the pilot from iTunes--the first episode is free.

A carefully designed study of cellphone use indicates that using cellphones within an hour of bedtime disrupts sleep patterns, causing fatigue and other symptoms. The double blind study ensured that participants did not know if they were exposed to cellphone radiation or not, so the results appear to be worth careful consideration. The article found that teens with cellphones were often using the devices just before going to sleep, setting up a long term pattern of restless sleep and chronic fatigue.