Technology Futures

Firefox 1.5 has been released, and it is noticeably faster loading pages. If you are not already using Firefox, it is well worth a try. I'm always experimenting with different browsers, and Firefox is very reliable and works well on virtually any site. It does an excellent job blocking popup ads, spyware, and viruses--especially pop up and pop under ads. It also has a new Software Update feature that makes it easy to keep the software up to date.

iPod accessories has become a huge marketplace that has created hundreds of millions of dollars in sales and an entirely new industry, just in the past three years. It's another example of why it is so important to adopt a futures-oriented approach to economic development planning. No one could have predicted the rapid emergence of an entirely new market five years ago. Trying to plan economic development growth by looking only at what has worked in the past necessarily limits a region's ability to capitalize on Knowledge Economy opportunities.

A North Carolina judge has jumped hard on Diebold, the leading manufacturer of electronic voting machines. This issue is a state law that correctly requires voting machine manufacturers to escrow (provide) all of the code used in a voting machine so that it can be audited by an independent third party.

The military does have a sense of humor. The Air Force has developed a laser-powered device that temporarily impairs a person's vision, apparently like staring into the sun. They named the device the Personnel Halting and Stimulation Response, or PHaSR. The device will be used for crowd control and will give military police a nonlethal alternative to guns.

This short Register article highlights the urgency of dealing with the cable redundancy issue. Communities that do not have a plan to ensure at least two separate broaband cable paths (also referred to as backhaul or Internet feeds) in and out of a community are at risk of losing local businesses to places that do provide cable redundancy.

This article on Verizon's "super fast" DSL and fiber services is "super" misleading. It makes it sound like Verizon is rolling out some state of the art new service that is much better than anything else available.

Skype has announced a deal with Radio Shack to have the electronics retailer sell Skype-ready phones and headsets.

The Register has a short article about a new service Google is quietly testing. It puts a little telephone icon in Google ads, and if you click the icon, a little form pops up and asks for your phone number. Your phone starts to ring, and when you pick up, Google transfers the call to the advertiser.

Skeptics of the Energy Economy tend to hang their hat (with some justification) on the fact that hydrogen is hard to transport and hard to store. But even while there are emerging technologies that may address those twin problems, there are increasing signs that it may not be important.

I wrote recently about the add-on device being used by truckers to generate hydrogen on the fly from water; the hydrogen is injected into the engine cylinders to increase fuel mileage and as a side benefit, create drastic reductions in pollution.

This article suggests the tide may be starting to turn on the loss of manufacturing jobs to overseas factories. A Wisconsin cookware company is starting to bring jobs back to the Midwest because of rising labor costs overseas and drastic increases in the cost of shipping.

Geeks playing with a prerelease version of OS X for Intel report that they have been able to easily install an open source Windows emulation library that then allows them to run common Windows applications--without having Windows installed.

Could this have been Apple's game plan from the beginning?

Imagine you could buy a Mac Mini for $499 that not only runs a virtually virus-proof, easy to use operating system (OS X) but also runs all your favorite Windows applications that are not available for the Mac.

Two of the biggest online dating sites (match.com and Yahoo!) are accused in separate lawsuits of defrauding members. Match.com is allegedly paying people to go on dates with fee-paying subscribers, which on the face of it sounds absurd. It's hard to see how you could make any money over the long term with that kind of business strategy.

Yahoo! is accused of posting fake profiles to make it look like there are more available "dates" registered in the service than there actually are.

I have Adelphia cable modem service at home, and had to call customer service the other day when the system was out for nearly a day. The service technician said something very revealing. The person could not determine why the service was out, and said they would have to roll a truck to make a service call. She informed me it would take a week and a half to do so. I asked if they thought it was acceptable to have a customer be without Internet access for ten days or more, and added that I sometimes work from home. Here is what she said:

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There is also a complete set of topic feeds via the site map in the menu. Clicking the topic title gets you the list of articles posted to the topic, and clicking the RSS right next to the topic name takes you to the RSS feed for that topic.

SlashDot has a long discussion thread about an opinion issued by the Federal Election Commission that "bloggers are journalists." The ruling exempts bloggers from having to file lenghty reports and paperwork to meet the McCain-Feingold campaign laws. As Slashdot points out, the ruling indicates that bias in reporting does not automatically mean a blogger is NOT a journalist.

I don't really have a category for this, but thought it was funny. If you haven't noticed, I usually look for gagdet-oriented or more lighthearted stuff on Fridays.

This news is hardly shocking--IT folks are NOT the best dressed people in the office!

But I'm not sure which is worse--sloppily dressed nerds or the solutions recommended in the article. One bit of advice cited is, "...no yellow toenails." Okay.....noted. Memo to self--keep socks and shoes on at all meetings.

Scientists have discovered that a butterfly in Africa with electroluminescent wings uses a microstructure to enhance the light emitting properties of the wings that is virtually identical to a design developed in 2001 to improve the efficiency of LEDs.

Nature is pretty amazing.

I've always thought newspapers were well-positioned to take advantage of the Internet, if they could break out of the dead trees model. The Roanoke Times gets a hap tip for jumping into IP TV.

The Flash-based news clips have excellent video and audio quality on my cable modem connection, and the somewhat sardonic commentary is closer to a blog in style than traditional television news. The clips are only a few minutes long, and the videocasts are a peak into the future.

The music industry has been complaining bitterly that online music has been cutting into the sale of CDs (legal and illegal downloads). But new data shows that online (legal) music sales have been flat for some months. This suggests what many people, including me, have been saying for some time--that the music industry has been serving up crummy music.

Google has announced a new service called GoogleBase. The "base" part of the word is from "database," which Google appears to be trying to co-opt. They probably hope to create a new verb, as in, "Let's look in GoogleBase," or "Let's GoogleBase it."