Technology Futures

Numerous reports from various sources are all pointing the runaway success of FireFox, the Open Source Web browser for Windows and other platforms. It has doubled its marketshare in the past year, and the recent release of version 1.0 has caused a big spike in downloads of the free browser.

The Energy Economy continues to heat up--literally--as practical Stirling engines, powered by light, are getting an injection of technology. The Stirling engine was invented two hundred years ago, but it was hard to control, so it was largely a novelty item.

Researchers have made what is being called a major breakthrough--a new process that allows the production of yarns made from carbon nanotubes.

Iowa has what many other communities won't take the time to get--a clear, concise vision for the future. A consortium of Iowa communities and businesspeople have decided on a very simple goal--to have the best broadband infrastructure in the country.

Even better, based on the news article, they are doing it exactly the right way--with community investments in the transport layer (e.g. dark fiber) and leasing it to access and service providers who will deliver the services.

The City of Philadelphia has been much in the technology news lately because of its ambitious plans to offer wireless broadband throughout much of the city. It's now back in the news with its announcement that it will fight a statewide ban on municipalities offering Internet access and related services.

A crucial step in the developing space tourism business occurred when the House passed a bill approving taking tourists into space.

At issue is the potential risk. Investors in the space business don't want huge lawsuits hanging over their heads, and the bill would allow companies to take tourists into space under the same "at your own risk" liability that other dangerous sports like mountainclimbing, hang-gliding, and skydiving have--you sign a waiver if you want to jump out of an airplane.

The Christmas catalogues are pouring into my mailbox, the newspaper is fat every morning with sales circulars from the local stores, and once again, electric razor ads are on TV (hint: no male has EVER bought an electric razor--spouses and significant others think this is something men want).

Just a year ago, I bought a progressive scan DVD player for $150, which I thought was a bargain. At that time, many progressive scan (better quality pictures) DVD players were often over $200. This morning, I saw an ad in the paper for a progressive scan player for $29.95.

It is amazing how much things have changed. I was in a small town restaurant two nights ago, eating dinner, and they had a stack of old magazines by the cash register. I picked one out to thumb through while eating. It was from 1998--a scant six years ago. In it, they had a short article explaining that DVD was this new kind of computer disc that could be used to play movies. It was treated as some exotic novelty.

Six years later, in our house, it's way too much trouble to watch a videotape. Remember those? Those old, antique things with moving parts, fuzzy pictures, and NO bonus material, director interviews, outtakes, dubbing in sixteen languages, or any of the other stuff that no one ever looks at but now comes on every DVD.

As an advocate of technology use, I find myself embarrased at the cheap junk being thrust upon us. Kid's toys are wretched excess. It seems that this year, virtually every toy made has about $5 worth of electronics (we're at a point where the cost of the batteries exceeds the cost of the electronics in the gadget).

Regrettably, I'm afraid that too many people think their kids will be technologically illiterate if they don't have electronic "books," electronic "first word" toys, electronic drawing games, and so on. The current crop of electronic "drawing" toys are apalling. The low resolution, the lack of printing ability, the lousy color choices, and the lack of appropriate tactile feedback are just the technological shortcomings of these things. What is much, much worse is the lack of intellectual adventure offered by them.

NASA's X-34A scramjet broke every speed record in the book by traveling at nearly Mach 10, or about 7,000 miles per hour. Scramjets have been studied and under development for years, but they were mostly theoretical--no one was really sure they would work.

Scramjets, in addition to some military uses, offer an alternative to expensive and heavy chemical rockets for getting into space. One more signal for the emerging Space Economy.

It's hard to know which way the wind blows in the corridors of the FCC. Hard on the heels of thoughtful rulings on the future of VoIP, the FCC has turned around and claimed jurisdiction over, well, everything digital, including your computer. That's the conclusion of a lot of interested parties, anyway.

The current gasoline being thrown on this fire is the Broadcast Flag mandated by the FCC to be supported on all TVs beginning with sets manufactured next year (right around the corner). The broadcast flag is a bit that tells the set or recording device that the content (i.e a television program, movie, etc.) cannot be copied.

The thinking here was that digital TV would never take off unless the content creators (the giant media companies) were protected against rampant piracy. As the Ars Technical article notes, the FCC continues to be too easily influenced by the incumbent media companies, and tends to pay too little attention to consumer interests.

I have to agree. I don't see that Congress has directed the FCC to "make sure the big media companies don't suffer any competition." The FCC ought to be seeking to create a level playing field for all content providers, large and small. Secondarily, the notion that consumers are just a bunch of thieving pirates is not only extraordinarily small-minded, there is absolutely no evidence to support it. VCRs, twenty-five years ago, were going to kill the movie industry. Now movie makers make more from selling recorded movies than they typically make in theatre box office receipts.

We have a more recent example in the music industry. Even while music industry groups continue to sue consumers for filesharing, they are making hundreds of millions of dollars on legal music downloads. Why is the FCC falling for this nonsense?

New technology and new delivery systems for entertainment always create a period of displacement; it's the beauty of creative destruction. Time after time, we have seen new and bigger markets (and new job and work opportunities) emerge out of the ashes of old businesses. As a country, why are we trying to preserve the near monopoly status of buggy whip makers?

There is a fair amount of disinformation being bandied about on the issue of community-managed telecom infrastructure. Read this article [link no longer available] by the deceptively name "Heartland Institute" for an example of a very one-sided view of community investments in telecom.

Ukraine, a country still struggling with the legacy of the Soviet past, has what many other states in the U.S. still lack--a coherent and easy to explain vision for the future. BusinessWeek has a short article on the country's drive to be one of the top software and IT countries in the world.

In a deeply disturbing ruling, the National Transportation Safety Board has ruled that car manufacturers must put black box data recorders in new cars and trucks. The boxes will record speed, acceleration, braking, direction, and other data that could be used to reconstruct accidents, among other things.

If you've ever wondered, as I have, what on earth you would do with the new "movie" feature being advertised on cellphones, wonder no longer! You can watch advertisements!

Yes! In your spare time, if you have had nothing to do, you've been wishing for access to some good ads. "Gosh, I'm bored. I wish there was a good ad I could watch."

Rest easy. Now you can watch movie trailers on your cellphone.

AOL has announced that it is dumping its broadband customers in nine states. AOL has been in decline for years, and this is one more indication that the company is completely adrift. AOL's foray into broadband service was a mystery to me in the first place, since they had to resell access purchased wholesale from other providers.

The FCC released another ruling on VoIP. The Federal Communications Commission has barred states from imposing telecom regulations on Voice over IP telephony providers.

The FCC has ruled that VoIP is an interstate service, in response to a petition from Vonage, one of the best known national VoIP providers.

I had the privilege of attending what I think was a historic and potentially revolutionary meeting in Vancouver, British Columbia, on Tuesday. The provincial government had convened an all day conversation about the broadband needs of rural communities, and how to best get affordable broadband connections to those communities.

It was Garth Graham, one of the real pioneers of the community technology movement, who grabbed me after lunch and pointed out that as far as he knew, it was the first time ever that four different groups of people met in the same room to talk about rural broadband problems. Represented at the meeting were:

• Provincial government leaders, who had convened the meeting and wanted to explore ways to use the telecom buying power of the provincial government to get better broadband services into rural communities.
• Large and small telecom access and service providers, including the incumbent telecom providers Bell and Telus.
• Community network managers and leaders; in British Columbia, community networks play a key role in providing Internet access in rural parts of the country, and collectively they have thousands of customers.
• Community leaders, who were there to share their needs, goals, and aspirations, and to learn about what they can do to get affordable broadband to their communities more quickly.

It was a remarkable meeting, with open, frank, and stimulating dialogue from all four groups. The fact that it happened, that so many people attended (over 50 people), and that there was such honest speaking, listening, and understanding, suggests that we have truly turned a corner in beginning to identify and actually implement community telecom solutions that have a chance of meeting both public needs (the common good) and private needs (increasing shareholder value).

The group agreed that more meetings were needed to hash out details, but there was remarkable consensus that the problem is largely one of policy, administration, and management, and that this is not a technology problem, in the sense that it is NOT a matter of just picking wireless, or fiber, or Gigabit Ethernet, or so on. All parties agreed that communities and regions need some new and yet to be determined entity to help with telecommunications issues (infrastructure, access, services, policy, regulation).

The MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) has decided to sue grandmothers and fourteen year old kids who are allegedly downloading bootleg copies of movies.

Like the music industry attempts at litigation, it accomplished little except prove the stupidity of these movie execs. When "millions" of people are trying to watch your movies, that's called a market opportunity, not a field day for lawyers.

There is the old joke that goes like this:

"There are two kinds of people in the world--those that divide people into two groups, and those that don't."

At the risk of self parody, there are two kinds of people in the world (and I'm broadly overgeneralizing, of course)--those that use eBay and those that don't.

For those that don't, the eBay phenomenon is a bit of mystery. From a certain distance, EBay is cluttered with junk, trivia, excess, and silliness. But it also is a terrific business transaction mechanism, for both formal and informal business.

A London computer security firm has just completed an extensive, year-long study of hundreds of thousands of security breaches against computers running a variety of operating systems, and OS X was found to be the most secure. OS X is a Unix computing environment running the BSD variant.

Surprisingly, Linux was found to be the target of many security attacks, although the Windows platform also recorded very high numbers of breaches.