Early Adopters Beware

Although this blog is not about previewing the latest new gadgets - there are plenty of other blogs that do this quite well - I couldn’t resist commenting on several items that caught my eye in the December issue of Wired Magazine.

• Trimtac Security Tag: Amazingly, this is almost exactly the device we were just talking about in relation to the proposal to track your car for road tax purposes. It records your GPS position every few minutes and sends the data to an internet database using GSM technology, like a cellphone. It is positioned as a portable LoJack-type device which you can place in any vehicle or even your luggage or golf bag (it runs for 3 months on 4 AA batteries) and then subscribe to the service. The technology is clearly available, but the big hurdle will be the logistics of getting them in vehicles and the political task of mandating it. Given some of the more insane propositions that the electorate has been passing in California, maybe that part will happen sooner than I predicted.
  
  
• MIB USB Drive: Clever little device that you upload MP3 songs into and plug into your cigarette lighter jack. You then can transmit your songs into your stereo via an unused FM frequency. Seems like $115 is a lot to spend for this feature. How hard would it be for cars to have a little jack in the dash so we can upload a bunch of songs or pictures or movies into the car’s entertainment system? Some new cars havea Bluetooth wireless feature, but not many devices support this yet.
  
  
• Arkon Laptop Holder: This clever device clips onto your steering wheel and gives you a platform to support your laptop. Now you can talk on the phone, write e-mails, and finish applying your makeup simultaneously while sitting in stop and go traffic enroute to work. What a time saver! Maybe it's just me but I think that piloting a potentially lethal object, like a car or truck, should demand your complete attention.
  
  
• Nokia Image Album: When you start using your new megapixel camera phone, you will soon realize that you need a place to store all the great candid shots you now take while standing in line at Starbucks. Nokia offers a small portable unit with a 20GB hard disk that you can download everything into and then show the pictures to your friends on your TV. Cost: $400.
  
  Sounds good but here is the problem: I just checked online with Dell and you can buy an entire PC with a 40GB hard disk, 256Mb memory, 17” monitor, and a free printer for $348! Jeez! I doubt if many people comprehend the far-reaching influence Dell has on the pricing of new technology. If I can buy a whole PC for $350, then why should I have to shell out $500 on a PDA, or $600 on a photo iPod? One has to admire Dell for proving that you can succeed in the computer business if you optimize your supply-chain and provide a quality product with a lot of value for the buck.
  
  
• Oakley MP3 Sunglasses: Oakley is known for expensive sunglasses and this one is no exception at $495. It looks like Borg hardware with an MP3 player, 256Mb of memory and ear buds so you can have all your tunes with you and look totally cool while you’re out and about. If you’re worried about running out of battery power, you can probably rig it up to your $425 Scott Solar Recharging Jacket and never have to be without tunes again. You'll be ok if you're walking in New York city or Hollywood in this getup, but I suggest you carry several forms of ID if you plan to be in one of the more rural areas of the country, just in case you need proof that you were born on the third planet from the Sun.
  
  
• Flybar Pogo Stick: If you have $300 to spend on a new high-performance pogo stick, here’s the ticket. This baby claims to be able to get you up to 5 feet of air! I predict a whole new sport emerging from this - I can see it now: 10,000 armored, helmeted athletes bouncing through Boston city streets as they crush and trample each other for the Pogo Marathon Championship!
  

Truth is, I love this time of year with all the cool geek shopping lists coming out; but it’s also time to renew my pledge to think twice before I rush out and feed my habit. Restraint is a virtue here unless one has unlimited funds. Heck, even if you do have unlimited funds, save most of it for something more worthwhile, like maybe a trip to some exotic place like Istanbul or Marrakech. Of course you would want to take along your digital camera and laptop so you can e-mail pictures to your friends at each stop along the way.

GPS and Cuff Links

Unbeknownst to the general population, GPS technology is steadily and quietly growing all around us. Once strictly limited to military and marine use, it is rapidly finding its way onto every small plane and boat, luxury car, even handheld units for hikers and bikers. Large trucking companies have them on their entire fleet, tracking them wherever they are on the continent, and farmers use them to pinpoint exactly where to navigate their heavy equipment. Soon, virtually every vehicle of any size and significance will have a GPS unit built into the instruments.

The biggest potential use is of course automobiles. The current discussions in California about mandating GPS in private automobiles (see “Taxing by the Mile”) has naturally refueled the privacy issue again. In many ways it seems silly and naive for people to complain about a GPS device recording where they travel in their car. After all, they’re out in public, traveling on city streets or public highways, and they’re not exactly invisible. Anyone could legally follow them and keep notes on their whereabouts. They are already being tracked to some extent if they use a credit card to buy gas, or a radio transponder to auto-pay at toll gates.

In spite of these recurring protests by privacy advocates, the fact is that we as a nation are slowly getting used to the idea that information about us is being stored somewhere, whether it’s the phone company, the IRS, Social Security, Dept. of Motor Vehicles, U.S. Customs, the FBI, Credit Agencies, wherever. Pretty much everything we do is already recorded somewhere, including where we buy gas, what restaurants we frequent, and what we buy at Radio Shack and Macy’s and the grocery store. As the use of debit cards grows in leaps and bounds, so does the mass of data on what is bought with them and by whom.

Many of you have no doubt seen the commercial for Onstar that demonstrates how their system knows exactly where your car is and can send a tow truck or even unlock your doors because it can connect to your car’s computer via satellite. The idea of your car being tracked is already here folks. It is not a hypothetical futuristic new thing. It’s here today and I for one, am convinced that it will continue to spread and grow and eventually become a must-have feature on every car. It may take a couple of car generations for the majority of cars to have them built-in, but it will happen.

The benefits of never getting lost again, or being able to get directions to a new store or someone's house will drive acceptance of the technology. As long as it's not abused, people will get used to the technology and will learn to rely on it if their car ever breaks down or gets stolen. Whether we like it or not, as technology permeates every aspect of our lives, there will be few things that go unnoticed by one electronic system or another.

Twenty years ago, Nicholas Negroponte, then director of the MIT Media Lab, liked to comment in his speeches that before long, “You’ll find that your left cuff link will be communicating with your right cuff link via satellite.”

We are closer than you might think to that reality.
I say, bring it on.

“PDA calling Cellphone, Hello!”

Today I was waiting in line to buy gas when my daughter pointed out a guy in the car to the right in an odd pose. With his hands out in front of him like he was holding two revolvers, this guy was obviously looking up a number from the PDA in his right hand, and then thumbing in the number in the cellphone held in his left. Although it wasn’t all that remarkable a feat, it was amusing to watch. As his head swung left and right, you could imagine the numbers from the PDA shooting through the air to his eyes, then to his brain and down his arm to his left thumb where it entered the phone mechanically. Amazing piece of human networking !!

Seems like “in this day and age” there should be a better way. So, here is my challenge to Verizon, T-Mobile, AT&T, et al: Start offering a FREE service where Average Joe can store all his names and numbers and appointments (if he is one of the few to use the calendar in his phone) in a secure account online. All he has to do is dial a toll-free number when he wants to update his online list. Now Joe also has the option of synchronizing his PC phone book and / or his PDA with his cellphone. It's also easier to enter names and numbers on your home PC than on your phone.

If Blogger will host your blog for free and Yahoo will give you an e-mail account for free, why wouldn’t Verizon do the same for the tiny amount of space needed to store your contact information? Seems like the smart thing to do for customers and build customer loyalty when it comes time to upgrade or replace a phone. Hey the next time Joe loses his phone down at Sharkeys, he could set up a new one in minutes and the wife would never know!

Just kidding guys, wives always find out about stuff,
it's one of life's mysteries.

Must-Have Gifts

Today I’m half-heartedly paging through some of the pile of catalogs that appear in our mail around this time of year. One that always catches my eye is the one from Sharper Image. This is an interesting company, and I must admit that I’m attracted to their beautiful catalogs and their overall sense of good design aesthetics.

However, several years ago I started a practice of trying to come up with a one-sentence description of what a company is all about, like Disney’s “for the best in family entertainment.” On this day I had just gone through the Sharper Image catalog and came to the conclusion that their catalog cover should have the Sharper Image name in bold text at the top followed by the phrase: “The Quintessential Source for Over-priced Stuff You Don’t Need.”

Now maybe this is a little harsh, since they do have stuff in their catalog that is not over-priced that some people might need (I’m trying to be fair here). But, being an engineer with some experience in what a product should cost to produce in Asia, and admittedly, a personal bias against spending $100 for a motorized version of something that you can get without the motor for $5, well, some of the gadgets in their catalog just leap off the page. Here are a few examples:

• Panasonic electric shaver for men - $300. Looks nice, probably works well. Has a pop-up head for sideburns. But when you get to the women’s personal products section of the catalog, you find the women’s version which looks basically identical with the same pop-up feature, different colored housing, same wet/dry, sold for $60 (that's 80% less!). One can’t be sure if this is Panasonic inflating the price of the men’s version, or SI – probably a combination of the two.
  
  
• Turbo Clipper - $50. This is basically a plain old manual toe-nail clipper that is built-around a 5” long plastic housing, and includes a small battery powered grinder at the other end. If you end up using a regular nail file, which I probably would do to get rid of the sharp edges rather than grind my skin off, you are paying $49 over the cost of a normal nail clipper for the convenience of collecting the clippings in a special compartment. This item is proudly noted as “invented here.” by the SI design team.
  
  
• Turbo-Groomer 5.0 - $60. This item, also “invented here,” is the dreaded nose-hair trimmer that seems to re-appear in all the Christmas ads. But differentiated from the garden variety trimmer, this one has “titanium nitride cutting edges that whirl at high-torque 6,000 rpm...” Everyone knows that you need a really high speed device with lots of torque to hack through all that nose hair, right? Here’s my suggestion if you are one of the few that actually need a nose-hair trimmer: Take the same simple cutter head and mount it on a stainless steel sleeve with a knob at the end to manually turn the inside cutter. It would work just as well, would be safer, and could be sold for about $8. Maybe these already exist, I really don't know.
  
  
• Ionic Breeze Quadra Air Purifier - $400. I hesitate to even mention this item since it is probably Sharper Image’s biggest source of revenue in the entire catalog, but there are a couple things that bother me. First the price seems to be extremely high given that there are no moving parts and the electronics are relatively simple. You can compare this unit with their Spire Fan: 3 speed motor, 15” taller, sleep timer, same Negative Ion feature plus a remote control for only $80. The other clue that you are probably paying way too much is that they offer to sell you a second Quadra for only $200. My guess is that the cost to produce the Quadra is around $35. Of course, when you factor in all the advertising that SI does on this unit, maybe they have to charge as much as they do.
  
  
• And lastly, my favorite: “You Can See Clearly Now!” eyeglass cleaner - $60. This “invented here” device is about the size of a large ultrasonic jewelry cleaner. You clip your glasses to the hinged lid then close it, which dunks the glasses into a solution of water and soap. After 40 seconds, the lid pops up and “shakes off any excess liquid for 20 seconds.” That’s it! No ultrasonics, no heat, just dipping your glasses in soapy water. I had to read this one several times thinking that there must be more to it. Truly amazing!

Don’t get the wrong idea. I love technology and gadgets and going through catalogs of stuff looking for cool new inventions. I’m all about tools in the general sense - things that empower and enable me to do things I couldn’t do before. But here's the thing: I’m really sensitive to hype, which is why I’m singling out Sharper Image here. As I page through their catalog, I get a very strong impression that I’m being condescended to - that SI knows full well that most people will be too embarassed to return the silly eyeglass cleaner when they discover that they paid way too much for it.

I prefer dealing with companies that are all about value - companies that are secure in the knowledge that when I bring their product home, it will work as advertised, won’t break prematurely, and most importantly, I will be satisfied that I got my money’s worth. Simple, direct, no hype. Am I being naive again?

Taxing by the Mile

I read an interesting article in the LA Times yesterday about a subject that I wrote about in July; namely, installing a tracking device on every car that feeds information to the DMV (Department of Motor Vehicles) regarding where you’re driving, or how many miles you’re driving. Believe it or not, the new DMV director that Arnold just appointed is claiming that California is not getting enough money from gasoline taxes in proportion to the miles driven because cars are getting more fuel efficient, and something should be done about it.

Here is what they are discussing:

1) install a device on each vehicle that transmits the odometer reading into the gasoline pump when you buy gas, which then calculates your tax based on how many miles you have driven since your last fillup. You would probably pay a tax that is proportional to the weight of your car, since heavier cars tend to use more gas and do more damage to the roads than light cars.

2) install a device on each vehicle that communicates with a GPS satellite and records, in addition to how many miles you drive, exactly which roads you travel and at which time of day. Here, you might pay a tax that varies with the particular road, with maybe a “rush-hour” penalty, or maybe a “freeway tax” or who knows. When you put all this data in the hands of politicians, virtually anything can happen whether it makes sense or not.

Here are a few possible scenarios that come to mind after the DMV starts distributing (selling?)your data to other agencies and select companies:

• You get a notice in the mail from the DMV that the miles per gallon for your 1995 Suburban have fallen below new minimum levels. Even though you get the same mileage you did when it was new, you are hereby required to upgrade the engine or pay a substantial fine.
  
• You receive a speeding ticket in the mail based on how long it took you to travel from Bakersfield to Las Vegas, accounting for the 35 minute stop at Denney’s in Baker. (Side note: you take pleasure in the fact that they still don’t know what you had for lunch).
  
• Your aunt Lillian calls and yells at you for not stopping to see her when you drove through Palm Springs last month (she subscribes to a new Google service that sends her alerts when her relatives pass through town).

Technology is our friend.

Coping with Change

I decided to change the title of my modest outreach experiment here to something more descriptive. The new title feels like it fits better with my interest in how technology affects our daily lives and I think is easier to remember. My apologies to any who may have to change the link description on their sites. Just remember, Change is Good.....

Tactile Feedback

I was just checking out the new Tissot watches that have a touch screen and vibration feedback feature for reading and setting the watch. Pretty amazing and very innovative; perfect thing if you’re visually impaired, or maybe if you’re a deep-cover operative meeting your contact in the dark and don’t want to give away your position prematurely.

Of course, I immediately started wondering whether this type of sensory feedback could be useful. Here is the idea I came up with:

Put a small vibration transducer under the left mouse button and add functionality to your browser so that when you mouse over a link that fits a certain set of criteria (you set this up), the mouse gives a tiny vibration to your finger to encourage you to go there. This would obviously require some sort of tie-in with a very powerful indexing service, like Google, but it seems plausible. I suppose you could do the same thing visually, or audibly and save the bother of getting a special mouse, but tactile feedback would be the most intuitive way since your brain has already got a high priority connection to your index finger. It would almost become a Pavlovian-like response.

Three questions: 1) would this become annoying? 2) how often would it lead you astray? and 3) would the lack of a feedback vibration discourage you from going to places you would otherwise have discovered by accident? I suppose it leads to another whole issue too. How hard would it be for unscrupulous folks to globally hack into people’s settings to artificially bring more people to their site?

Does anyone know if publishing an idea on a Blog prevents me from patenting it later? Something tells me I just gave away the germ of a zillion dollar idea......

iPod and the Bell Curve

Today I noticed that Apple is expanding their iPod functionality to allow you to store pictures. Maybe they are actually realizing that $400 is a lot to pay for just being able to listen to music on the train home, or that most people don’t even have 2,000 songs they like, much less 10,000. So why have they upped the price for the picture version to $500 (40Gb) and $600 (60Gb)?

Obviously I’m wrong; not only are people happy to spend $400 to listen to music, but they are also willing to spend $100 - $200 more to be able to carry around several lifetimes worth of snapshots as well. The 60Gb model will purportedly hold 15,000 songs or 25,000 pictures, or some combination.

So who’s buying these beautifully designed music players? Is it primarily a status symbol? The law of diminishing return has got to kick in here at some point, don’t you think? I mean, lets be honest, how many songs are there that you like enough to go to the effort of individually storing them on your PC, possibly ripping them from a CD, then transfer to your iPod? Maybe a couple thousand if you have a lot of free time on your hands. I know that there are people out there who will disagree with me, but come on, you guys are at the tip of the bell curve and you know it.

What about pictures? Lets say you’re an avid photographer and you take 100 digital pictures every weekend, and if you’re pretty good you select half of them to keep. At that rate it would take you ten years to fill up your iPod. But that’s assuming that you were willing to spend several hours every weekend going through your pictures, maybe fixing red eye, cropping, doing color corrections and carefully annotating every picture with who’s in it, location, date, category, good, medium, fair, etc. and organizing them into albums. With 25,000 pictures you would need a really well thought-out system for categorizing all your pictures otherwise you’ll be lucky to find them again.

You can tell that I don’t own an iPod, in which case I would probably be talking about how amazingly well thought-out the controls are (which they are), and how this makes me feel so much cooler than all those losers with CD players (which it would). Maybe an Apple evangelist will read this and send me one just to convert me. (hint, hint)

I just had a thought, what if the music/picture iPod and the cellphone could somehow merge into one product, now you’ve got something worth the money! That’s worth a whole separate post....

Pseudo Science

Although this blog is ostensibly about technology, I sometimes run across a scientific article that I just have to comment about. This one is from USA today dated 11/8/04 entitled “Global warming blamed for huge western USA wildfires.” These academic yahoos are actually spending grant money to arrive at the conclusion that multi-year drought conditions and forests that have been artificially allowed to get overgrown have less to do with the recent fires than an estimated 2 degree rise in global temperature!! Scientists can’t even predict the weather more than two days out; why should we accept their hypotheses based on tree ring data?

I admit that this whole global warming scare is a hot button for me - it triggers some sort of B.S. alarm way back in the dark recesses of my brain. After reading several books and articles over the past ten years or so that outline all the cataclysmic changes that have occurred over the geologic and biological history of the earth, especially all the various ice ages (that last of which covered half of north America with glaciers) you can’t help but wonder how objective these scientists are and how many assumptions are hidden in their “conclusions.”

For one thing, we only have reasonably accurate global temperature readings for no more than 100 years which is less than the blink of an eye in the history of life on earth, much less geologic history. Given that the temperature of the earth results from a very complicated interaction between chemical reactions and magnetic currents in the earth’s core with massively complex interactions between the atmosphere and all life forms on the earth’s surface and under the oceans and also taking into account continuous changes in the magnetic poles and solar events that also cyclically alter the earth’s magnetosphere ---- with all that how does one form a conclusion about what really controls the surface temperature of the earth over extended periods of time? Especially when you only have temperature data for 100 years?

My inherently skeptical nature leads me to conclude that this whole global warming business is a Trojan horse perpetuated by environmentalists and scientists alike. First the scientists hypothesize a theory so they can get published and continue to get grants to support their research. Then come the ever so pragmatic environmentalists who eagerly pounce on these reports claiming that “scientific evidence suggests” that man is the culprit and we should eliminate all factories, refrigerants, campfires and all internal combustion engines on the planet.

This is sounding like a rant isn’t it? Maybe I can blame it all on Michael Moore.

Does Size Really Matter?

I signed up for a fairly simple webhosting contract about 6 months ago with 1and1.com and happily they have steadily increased the webspace and bandwidth of my package since then. As I’m still in the stumble and recover stage when it comes to actually setting up and maintaining a website, maybe I’m easily impressed.

For $10/month I get 3 domain names, 2GB of webspace, 50GB of traffic, 200 e-mail accounts with 1GB storage each, a free copy of NetObjects Fusion to design my sites, and lots of other stuff I don’t understand yet. Seems like a killer deal to me.

What’s interesting is that they just upped the storage space for e-mail boxes to 1Gb each – previously it was 50Mb. Personally, it doesn’t really matter to me since I use Outlook and empty it out pretty much every day anyway. The only time it might become an issue is when I’m traveling and use their WebMail service to check my messages, leaving everything on their server till I get home. Even then, I probably wouldn’t have gone over the 50Mb limit. But maybe now that people are using their digital cameras more, and people are e-mailing huge Powerpoint presentations and such, maybe the 1Gb mailbox will be the new standard, at least for a while.

But just having all that storage space going unused makes me nervous. What could I do with it? Is there some way I can utilize that “free” space? I suppose I could set up semi-permanent storage e-mail boxes for backup purposes, or set up what would amount to a drop box for friends and family to go check when they wanted. Hey, I could charge people big bucks to rent my drop boxes for espionage purposes!!

I hope Mr. Ridge isn’t reading this blog. Erase. Erase.

Disruptive Technology

Today I was thinking about how vulnerable we are becoming to technology that is intentionally disruptive, and I’m not talking about identity theft and credit card scams.

For example, there was an article in the LA Times a week or so ago that described how an inventor came up with a universal keychain remote who’s only purpose is to turn off TVs, any TV. People are buying these zappers who don’t like having to listen to TV’s in public places. They like to be able to zap the TV off with their little stealth remote so they don’t have to suffer through some horrid soap opera while they wait for their prescription to be filled, or their oil to be changed. Now this may seem like a fairly innocuous issue, but it suggests that there are loads of other things that people may choose to mess with that are not so harmless.

Suppose you had a stealth transmitter that would trigger the traffic lights to green every where you go (as emergency vehicles do in many places). Awesome! I would love to have one and you would too. But what if even 25% of the people driving had one? It would create total chaos because you would get used to not having to slow down for lights and you would find yourself running red lights and hurting people because the guy going perpendicular got there a little ahead of you and cancelled out your signal.

Or what if the guy behind you decides you’re going too slow for him, and has a phaser-like gun behind his grille that sends out a high energy pulse that scrambles the electronics in your car. Your car promptly dies as he cuts around you and flips you off. (This one is already in test, with police agencies in several places evaluating these to stop bad guys).

Or suppose some screwed up teenager builds for her science fair project a long distance “reader” that fits in her backpack and can demagnatize or scramble all the cards in your wallet from, say, 10 feet away.

Or imagine that someone has figured out how to screw up the transponder reader on toll roads and bridges that charges people’s accounts as they commute to work, causing everyone to get charged double for a whole day.

I could go on. The point is that as we get more and more wired, we also get more and more vulnerable. The sad truth is there are a lot of very very smart people who are also totally dishonest and out to prove how clever they are.

Question: Are our bureaucrats smart enough to insist on adequate protections for all these systems, and frequent upgrades to keep up with the hackers? I’m not optimistic.

Early Adopters

Do you consider yourself to be an early adopter? Do you salivate when you dream about adding a media PC to your A/V system in the family room that the rest of you family already can’t operate? Did you spend last summer crawling in the attic and under the house to run high-speed ethernet wiring all over your house so you can automate everything under the sun? If so, then my hat’s off to you. You’re a pioneer, a visionary, a true geek. (fyi, a geek is different from a nerd in that he/she doesn’t wear a pocket protector).

However, if like me, you resist the urge to replace your PC every year or pay through the nose to have the latest new gadget, you are among the majority of people who marketeers call late adopters. These are people who tend to be more conservative in their buying habits and prefer to wait and see if this new fangled Tivo thingy is really something they need, and if it turns out they want it, they derive satisfaction out of having waited until it drops in price by 50%. These people comprise the vast majority of consumers, like 80%.

If you fall into the 20% group, you are indeed a strange breed. You love technology so much that you are willing to put up with poorly written instructions, flawed ergonomics, pre-release software, and little or no technical support just for the satisfaction of being on the cutting edge. You are so into high tech that you don’t seem to mind spending hours upon hours trying to program your new remote control or fancy security system, as long as it does something cool that you couldn’t do before. You are all about empowerment and owning tools that expand your leverage over your life.

Having said that, I must admit that I occasionallywake up and find myself in bed with the above group of geeks (figuratively speaking!!). I have always been a collector of tools; and I’m not just talking hammers and electric screwdrivers. I broaden the definition to anything that makes me feel more powerful, more in control. I know what you’re thinking, that I’m suffering from some sort of insecurity complex or it’s a macho thing; but we’re talking about a basic human need here: the need to feel in control of your environment. I freely admit that I am fascinated with technology and sometimes get need and desire mixed up.

Of course, I don’t regularly succumb to the desire to have the newest and coolest thing because as I get older my frustration threshold seems to have dropped a bit. I find myself more willing to wait for the vastly improved version 2 and I also don’t particularly like paying through the nose to help a company complete their product development.

Consequently, as I read these tech articles I find myself chuckling at the things that the innovators (very early adopters) seem to believe. Example: I just read one in Electronic House about archiving your video collection that starts out: “while most of us have computers with DVD burners in them...” This the first clue about which part of the continuum this guy is in. He goes on to explain how cool it is to have a DVD burner that needs no computer; a burner that you can set up in the kitchen and hook to your VCR to copy a movie while you’re making toast. What is this guy smoking? Probably his toast as he tries to monitor his file transfer while making breakfast. You probably ask (along with me) why is this capability worth an extra $400 to have in the kitchen? Why do people talk themselves into thinking that they “need” this kind of thing?

While I accept that articles in these kinds of publications are clearly aimed at a narrow audience of early adopters, it still makes me laugh that they are so serious about the benefits of being able to control every part of their electronic environment from every room in the house. I envision this guy with a wireless PDA strapped to his belt just itching for a member of his family to present him with a new challenge: “Dad, please tell the lawnmower robot to stay in his little charging garage this afternoon, I’m having some friends over” or “Dear, can you please show me how to play a movie on all 8 LCD screens in the house at the same time. I don’t want to have to sit in one place to watch my movie.”

Granted this is an extreme case that only applies to people with too much money on their hands, but the true early adopters that make up no more than 20% of consumers really do us a service. Even though they are clearly not as hard to please as the rest of us, they do drive the technology and they help to get the refinement process going so the rest of the population doesn’t have to suffer with so much bad design. For people like me who appreciate well thought out controls and eschew silly gadgets that nobody really needs, it is a good thing that we have these folks to run interference for us, and provide a proving ground for all the innovative designers in the world.