Networks Attempt to Disprove Human Nature

In a desperate move to maintain their ad revenues, the big networks just released “research” that claims that the impact of DVR’s is much less than earlier forecast. By using the fact, probably true, that people tend to watch more TV when they have a DVR, they postulate that they will also watch more ads. They even found three people who say they like watching the commercials and rarely skip over them.

The fact is, I agree that I watch TV more since I bought a DVR. The ease of recording shows without having to hassle with tapes is one of the biggest advantages of owning a digital video recorder. Then, of course, the ability to watch shows recorded earlier whenever you want also lets you watch your favorite shows at times when there is usually nothing on.

But for me, half the pleasure of watching a show is being able to watch it without the maddening commercial breaks that seem to come more frequently and last longer than ever. The continuity of a drama can be totally destroyed by stupid perfume ads or worse, the ones for precription drugs that end with all the gory side effects that you “may” experience. I’m sure that the writers and directors of a romantic drama don’t really appreciate a poignant scene being followed by an ad that includes the words “anal leakage.”

That said, I always skip through commercials when I’m watching a pre-recorded show. It’s not just that I don’t like having to sit through ads for stuff I don’t want; it’s that I like saving the time. I can now watch a show in 25-30% less time than it takes in real time. When I’m watching live TV upstairs, I’m constantly reaching for the remote to skip commercials only to be disappointed that I can’t.

So good luck networks in convincing your advertising agencies that DVR’s have little impact on the hours people spend watching commercials. In my house it just isn’t true.

Peer Pressure

Among my many neurotic behaviors, I get really annoyed when people use the restroom and don’t wash their hands. The thought of grabbing the door handle after the last guy who shook himself off and didn’t wash up, really turns me off. I start thinking how brainless the people are who design restrooms with doors that swing inward requiring a handle. At least if the door pushes outward, you can use your elbow or push on a part of the door that most people would not place their hand.

You’ve no doubt seen piles of paper next to the exit door where people carry out their paper towel to use to grab the door handle, or just to push the door with. Thoughtful proprietors provide a trash can right there for us neurotic people to toss the paper in after we've opened the door.

Granted, you can’t expect every establishment to be able to accommodate a door that opens out, or some arrangement where you don’t need a door at all (the ideal solution by the way), so what is the solution?

Being a techno nerd geek sort of guy, I of course came up with one. It’s very simple, you just leverage peer pressure. Peer pressure is an extremely powerful motivator. No one wants the whole bar to know that they didn’t wash their hands after using the restroom, right?

So, all you have to do is install some kind of system, maybe a series of sensors – proximity sensors, IR sensors, pressure sensors in the floor, whatever – that determine if you went to the sink and washed your hands before leaving. If you don’t, a strobe goes off above the door along with a “woop” sound or something else appropriate for the venue and the guy slinks back to his seat. After that no woman will go near him.

To protect your business from lawsuits brought by Neanderthals, you put a sign in the bathroom warning people that this establishment requires you to wash your hands before leaving, as a courtesy to other patrons – or else.

I’m telling you, the kind of people who insist on not washing their hands either will change their behavior or not return to your establishment. The place will get a reputation for caring about courtesy and cleanliness, word will spread, other places fill follow suit, the death toll from influenza will pummet.

I don’t think anyone has invented the technology to make this work yet, but it is certainly an interesting challenge, don’t you think?

Stupid Uniden Phone

How come my phone still has the IQ of a tree stump? All it has are the same basic functions that a phone had 20 years ago, but with a built in answering machine that is digital rather than the magnetic tape variety of old. Yes it is wireless so you can carry it around, but that doesn’t make it any smarter, just a little more convenient. Yes it has an intercom function, but that’s not exactly rocket science either, and by the way, we had intercoms 20 years ago too.

I’ve said this before, but here it is again. I want a phone that I can program to not ring during certain parts of the day without my having to mess with it. Is that too much to ask? I just want the damn built in answering system to operate like an automated message system – i.e. I want it to intercept all the calls between, lets say 11 pm and 7 am and politely tell the caller that I’m not available during such and such hours because I’M SLEEPING and please leave a message. I also want the option of offering the caller the power to ring through anyway, if it is an emergency, like if my wife or daughter are in trouble or something.

Since each extension is also coded, I see no reason why my automated message system couldn’t be programmed to ask the caller which extension (person) they want to talk to and just ring that extension if that’s how I want to set it up. This is all totally possible and would cost nothing since the microprocessor and digital memory are already there and the space required to save a couple messages like that would be minimal. So why hasn’t it happened yet? Am I the only person who has ever wanted this kind of functionality? I doubt it.

My current Uniden wireless phone has a base unit with a built-in answering system and three additional extensions and sells for about $100 at places like Costco. It has an intercom feature that is useful if you have a big house, and caller ID so you can answer each call in a different tone of voice depending on whether you like the person or not.

What are the engineers and marketing geniuses at Uniden waiting for? Huh? Will someone please pass this request along to the right genius?

Thank you, I’m going to bed now. Please don’t call me until tomorrow after 7.

Google Takes Next Step Toward World Dominance

Today I read about Google’s collaboration with Sun with some foggy details about their intention to put out a free version of Office that would reside on the internet, not on your PC. Sounds like a good idea to me if you have a big enough internet pipe going into your house or business.

I applaud Google’s efforts to drive Microsoft crazy any chance they get. I love it, in fact. Microsoft has abused their market dominance for way way too long. It is high time that they got a wake up call.

The concept of remote software has always held some fascination for me actually. I like the idea of the software owner keeping my code up to date automatically and fixing any flaws that might occur because of my own stupidity or because of some asshole virus hacker (There should be a special place in hell for these people).

Truth is, I had that same idea over a year ago, in the very first issue of this blog. My concept was for a revolutionary computer that never suffers from virus problems and never needs a software fix by the user. Imagine a simple computer that automatically logs into the Google mother ship during the night and gets a diagnostic fix for ALL the software on the hard disk. The only thing that would presumably never need fixing is the small kernel of ROM code that directs the diagnostic procedure. Any problem detected would prompt a rewrite of the operating system or the word processor, or whatever software you subscribed to.

This kind of basic computer may not be suitable for everyone, but for the vast majority of home users it would be a dream come true. Every morning you have a perfect system that runs fast, no spyware, no crippling incompatibilities, all your documents backed up in a secure place online.

If Google could ever pull this off, I would be at the front of the line to sign up.

Comments

I'm herewith limiting comments to registered users. Hope that stops all the spam comments I have been receiving over the last week. If not, then I may have resort to something more odious.

My apologies to the few legit commentors.....

Solving Problems We Don't Have

In spite of my attraction to technology and deep seated love of tools and gadgets, I occasionally come across a new item that brings forth the sarcastic alter-ego that I try to suppress.

Apparently there are quite a few people working on boosting the IQ of dumb objects around the house – i.e. making them smarter. One is a light bulb that notifies you when it has burned out by sending an SMS message to your network which then either pops up an annoying message on your computer or calls your cellphone, even more annoying. Another is an idea for a refrigerator that keeps track of what you have in there and reminds you to throw away outdated stuff or to go to the store an restock. Maybe it even re-orders stuff by itself.

Think about it, what will happen to our brains if we no longer have to remember anything? We already have pretty much lost the ability to do multiplication and division. What’s next?

Let’s fast forward 50 years into the future where people don’t make grocery lists anymore, and they don’t have to remember to pay their bills, they don’t have to remember phone numbers and they don’t even have to know their SSN or their anniversary. Everything will be accessible via our personal communicator – no thinking required. We won’t have reference books anymore; pretty much all knowledge will be catalogued and indexed and accessible through some electronic device every where we go 24/7.

50 years ago a person with a great deal of accumulated knowledge was once highly valued. Now, in the year 2055, that knowledge can be fetched by just writing or speaking a query. All that cerebral power that was once constantly expanding will quickly atrophy and the number of ganglia and synapses will wither away, or, in the case of young people, never form in the first place. Administrative personnel will only have to master data entry and retrieval.

I remember Sci-Fi movies where life forms from advanced civilizations were depicted as having huge heads in proportion to their spindly bodies. Now I’m beginning to wonder if the reverse will be true. 50 years from now medical science will keep our bodies very healthy and septuagenarians will no longer be an anomaly. Maybe we will all have great bodies but no brainpower to speak of. The alien with the tiny head played by Tony Shalhoub in Men In Black comes to mind.

I can see it now, I’m cruising down the road in my hovercar and my cellphone beeps. I look over at my data screen, punch a button to retrieve the message and discover to my horror that the third light bulb from the end on my side yard has burned out. Damn! That smart bulb cost me $12. I glance up just in time to see that the guy in front of me has slammed on his brakes and I’m heading right for him! 2.3 seconds later I come to a stop half way up the back of his hovercar and my front fan is chewing up his new AstroBrat something fierce. I’m thinking, “at least I know that I need to stop and get a smart bulb on the way home.”

Search: “human devolution” + “brain size” + causes

Stupid Medical Acronyms

This morning while eating breakfast I was watching the Today show for a few minutes. They were interviewing a doctor who was discussing a disorder called BDD, short for Body Dismorphic Disorder. Apparently it has similar characteristics to OCD and can be treated with either AD drugs or by administering CBT.

Never mind what these terms mean, I’m beginning to think that the medical profession has totally eclipsed the military in the use of acronyms. Long revered as the master chef of acronyms for cooking up 3, 4, even 5-letter acronyms designed to speed up communications, the military may have met their match in the medical industry.

The problem is that the ad agencies are seeing this as a goldmine. When a new commercial comes on that introduces yet another SA (stupid acronym) for some condition that is either so obscure or so common that it doesn’t even warrant an acronym, I just get really annoyed. My instinct is to TOTS (turn off the sound) or SC (switch channels). It also reinforces my respect for my PVR and adds yet another reason to record everything and watch it later BTC (bypassing the commercials).

What happens is that what was meant to be a shorthand form of communication becomes a form of code that burdens the listener with trying to decode the conversation. Miss one acronym and the whole conversation can either get way off track or the listener is forced to interrupt for clarification.

I worked for many years at Mattel where exactly the same thing was happening. In the early days the list of commonly used acronyms was fairly short, maybe 20 or so. By the time I left, there was a ten page book that was informally given to new employees that explained the hundreds and hundreds of different shorthand codes that filled almost every conversation and e-mail. New employees were at a loss to figure out the gist of the conversation, especially when the same acronym was used in different contexts. What was meant to save time quickly became a handicap.

I think this is expecially true of the medical acronyms. Since they are often formed from scientific terms that don’t usually find their way into our spoken vocabulary, people sometimes know what the acronym means without knowing what the letters actually stand for.

More often they are simply interpreted as gibberish, designed to make the speaker seem more educated or more sopisticated. They become a tool for pretentious people and a goldmine for ad agencies.

Of course, they have infiltrated every aspect of our lives; you can’t escape them.

ROM, RAM, USB, DSL, IBS, ED, MS, OCD, ADD, BDD, DDT, SBC, QVC, HP, MS, LAX, OC, LA, JFK, ABC, NBC, CBS, JPG, MP3, TLC, WTF.

In case you are stumped by any of these handy shortcuts that save us so much time, you can simply punch in this website and try to find out what the combinations of letters mean. There are about 2.5 million acronyms in the database so far. Clearly we need some sort of AAT (automatic acronym translator) that lurks in the background of our computers and suggests what the combination of letters might mean, in context of course.

One scary thought: We all know how foreign words quickly get assimilated into our vocabulary. What happens when the acronyms are made up of a combination of English and French or Swahili and Chinese? I seriously need to get on the list for a brain transplant with an AAT feature, among other things.

Best Intentions

Maybe it's the season, or maybe misalignment of the planets, but I obviously have prioritized the writing of this blog somewhere below the threshold of actually getting to it . I have recently gotten deeply involved in a work project and never seem to have any extra time or extra brain power to write.

Not a good admission for someone who claims to be a writer, but then you gotta pay the bills too.

So, with this short post, I hearby resolve to steal some time and try to get back into my routine of criticising stupid ttech things I come across and writing about them.

Honest.

The Only Thing to Fear is Fear Itself

The subject today is about science, not technology.

You see, I recently read State of Fear by Michael Crichton, and am feeling somewhat vindicated. Based on my analytical nature, together with a healthy dose of skepticism, I have long questioned all the doom and gloom pseudo-science about global warming from our news media, especially when they predict global catastrophes like the state of Florida being submerged in 50 years by melting icecaps. The basis of my skepticism comes from reading about the extreme climate changes that have occurred on our planet over the last few million years, and most recently, by books like State of Fear.

We are actually at the end of the fourth major glacial epoch; the current one having gone on for a million years. At the height of the current ice age, ice as deep as two miles blanketed North America as far south as St. Louis and Europe as far south as France. Given that such extreme global climate changes occur naturally (i.e. not man made), it is ludicrous to me that “scientists” can extrapolate 100 years of temperature readings into a global climate trend that they can definitively tie to human causes. Hell, for all we know, maybe the magnetic poles are fixing to reverse again as they have done 9 times in the last 3.6 million years. If that should happen, no doubt some scientist eager to get a research grant will postulate that we have taken too much iron out of the ground and redistributed it willy nilly.

Apparently Mr. Crichton shares my skepticism. As a student of science and it’s impact on society, he actually spent three years researching every scientific journal and publication he could find on the subject and concluded that the “theory” of global warming was nothing more than that, and more importantly there was a great body of data that contradicts this so-called theory – e.g. data that shows that Antarctica is actually getting colder, not warmer, and the Ross Ice shelf that environmentalists like to focus on only represents about 1% of the mass of ice in Antarctica. Also the mean temperature of North America has either stayed the same or decreased over the past 100 years, suggesting that we Americans were right in denouncing the Kyoto treaty.

After a great deal of study, Mr. Crichton has adopted the risky position of taking on both the environmental establishment and the media in his latest novel. It’s nice to come across influential people that actually have something important to say, as opposed to self-important yahoos like Tom Cruise.

After reading his book and noting the 175 or so listings in the bibliography, references to scientific journals and other publications that he studied on the subject, my respect for the man has risen considerably above what I would have for a normal novelist. Although I understand that a novelist has a responsibility to do research and fact checking, especially if the subject is technical in nature, the depth of Mr. Crichton’s study is very impressive. He even goes to the trouble of summarizing his personal views on the subjects covered in the book, in order to clairfy the points he is trying to make here. This is the first “novel” I have ever read that has over thirty pages of scientific bibliography and comments.

His premise is that there are a great number of organizations that benefit from manipulating the truth about global crises, and that the whole issue of global warming is a complex, perpetuating media snowball ranging from subtle subterfuge to outright lies. He reminds the reader that the number of people who believe in something is totally irrelevant to whether it is true or not. If the science doesn’t support the theory, then all you have is a lot of people who believe in something that may not be true. As he says “an educated guess is still just a guess.” This is clearly a area that he feels strongly about and is not just another novel to him.

Suffice it to say that until someone can accurately predict the weather for at least 20 years running (no one has succeeded in this to date), I remain convinced that the global warming “phenomenon” is 1) little more than a construct formed by carefully selected scientific data that supports the premise while ignoring all the conflicting data, 2) being used as a tool by certain disingenuous scientists to gain exposure and grant money, and 3) a handy emotionally charged issue being abused by environmentalists to grow their power and organizational clout, and loved by the media because it fuels peoples fears and sells newspapers and TV time.

The most interesting part of this whole issue is that virtually no one really knows if a slight increase in global temperature over a hundred or a thousand years is necessarily bad. Who can say that it won’t change global weather patterns and bring more moisture to Africa to support more farming and save millions of lives? Who’s to say that a 2 degree increase in temperature in one part of the globe won’t be offset by a 2 degree decrease in other areas that is beneficial?

Until someone develops a computer climate model that is even slightly accurate, I choose to think that all this BS about global warming is nothing more than hot air.

Dear Vonage

Approximately 3 1/2 months ago, I received an automated e-mail message from Vonage stating that my adapter did not respond correctly to an automated software upgrade. I checked and discovered I had no dialtone. The instructions told me to try to reset my adapter, and if unsuccesful, reply to the e-mail and a replacement would be sent "immediately" along with a one month credit on my next billing statement.

After 6 days went by with no dial tone, no replacement adapter showing up in the mail, and no confirmation that my reply was even received, I called. What I found out was that nothing was happening at Vonage regarding my problem. The person I spoke to said that there was no indication on my records that a replacement adapter was being sent, or that one was needed.

The representative was very polite and worked with me over the phone to try to correct the problem. Resetting the adapter once more had no effect, so finally he tried switching the service to the second line on my Linksys adapter. That worked, in fact, line quality improved slightly over what I had before. I mentioned the one month credit promised, and he said it would appear on my next billing statemtent.

When the next statement appeared, no credit was there. Surprise surprise.

I again called and this time, another polite Vonage person was able to apply the credit immediately, which appeared on the subsequent billing statement.

Now, all of three months later, I get an e-mail from "Vonage Management" indicating that your records show that no replacement adapter was ever sent, and asking if I still need one. The e-mail also directed me to call the Technical Staff at "the following number." No number followed, suggesting that maybe you didn't really want me to call.

This clearly indicates that for a communication company, your internal communications are in near total disarray. Your follow-up systems are woefully inadequate as well.

Because my VOIP phone is working fine now and I don't wish to change my number at this time, I will continue the service. However, as a technology writer, I certainly cannot recommend Vonage to any of my readers.

If you attribute these problems to the rapid growth of Vonage, I don't buy it. Come on guys, your folks sent me a follow-up 3 months after a service call number was assigned.

A well-managed company will anticipate needs before they overwhelm current systems. Vonage is certainly not there yet.

Regards,
John Woolington

Bonjour

To my 3 loyal readers, sorry for the long delay in posting. I just returned from an 18-day holiday in France, driving around the countryside trying very hard to avoid getting killed by crazy French drivers.

As I mentioned previously, my daughter has been studying in Paris under the study abroad program so we decided to join her at the end of the semester and tour the countryside for a couple of weeks. I suppose I could have stolen a few hours here and there to write a brief post or two, but the reality is that there are very few places to get on the internet in rural France. We had a laptop with us but I barely had time late in the evening to upload and organize our digital pictures, given the way that my wife likes to organize vacations. Lets just say that she likes to “fill the day.”

So, now that I am back in the land of large cars and wide streets, I finally have some time to collect my thoughts. The first thing I noticed in France, even in Paris, was that except for business usage, the internet does not appear to be nearly as much a part of people’s lives as here in L.A. As I mentioned previously, the American University doesn’t require that students submit their reports or even get their assignments online. When they need to do research online, most students just use the shared workstations at school or go to an internet cafe. The latter is still very common for private e-mail or casual internet use. When they do have a computer at home, most use dial-up rather than broadband. We all got the strong impression that the French just don’t see the internet as being important in their personal lives. Here in Los Angeles, it is rare for people to not have a private e-mail account and internet cafe’s are fast becoming a thing of the past.

The second interesting part of my trip was getting around. We were lucky and got an upgraded car with a navigation system. Truth is, I hadn’t even thought about asking for one and was pleasantly surprised when I sat down in the car. In fact, when the screen first came to life with some sort of welcome notice in French, I first thought it was just a fancy audio system that was going to be difficult to translate. When I noticed GPS in the corner, I thought, wow, it”s going to be fun to see if this thing is really what people rave about.

Although in past blog posts I have made comments about GPS technology, this was the first time I had a chance to really test it out. It turned out to be extremely useful, especially in the circumstances we found ourselves in France. After picking up the car and navigating our way to our timeshare the old fashioned way, I sat down in the evening and studied the instruction book a bit. I then went out to the car while my wife and daughter were getting organized and worked my way though the commands to get the language changed to English. That took several minutes as the DVD uploaded and reset everything. Then this pleasant female voice with a British accent said hello and announced that the process was finished.

Over the next few days, we figured out how to use the various features with my wife entering in each destination, picking from among different routes offered, and trying the various settings for fastest route, shortest route, avoiding motorways, etc. The system also had data for tourist spots, gas stations, etc, but we didn’t find those to be very useful, opting to just enter in the city center and then finding our way around. Monique, as I decided to call her even though she had a British accent, was really quite smart. Although she didn’t always send us on routes that I would have picked, she always got us to our destination. Whether I picked shortest route or fastest route, she seemed to favor these tiny little rural roads that were barely wide enough for two cars to pass each other, some that forced one car partly off the road. This was pretty nerve racking for me given the speed that French people drive. There were many times I wondered if we would meet a big tour bus or truck around the next bend and that would be it for us. I’m sure that many people were cursing the fact that I was only driving the speed limit as they flew up behind me anxiously waiting to pass.

Of course, there were a number of mistakes in Monique’s database – things like one-way roads she tried to send us into, non-existent roundabout exits, telling us to turn into the middle of a wheatfield, even roads that were not on her map at all making it appear on her screen as if we were off-roading it. After several days we learned that we couldn’t just trust Monique implicitly. We had to do three things: listen to her voice instructions, glance at the on-screen map for clarification when a complex intersection was coming up, and pay attention to the signs. In Europe even with a GPS system, a good gut-level sense of direction is still an essential ingredient to successfully getting around.

When things went smoothly, I was feeling pretty good knowing that the person behind me hadn’t a clue that I was a tourist, navigating roundabouts and complex intersections quickly and confidently. I must say that there were very few times where we were stopped in an intersection arguing and frantically pointing this way or that way.

At one bed and breakfast we were staying at, the hosts commented about a bad experience they had with their first navigation systems. Apparently this one was pretty inaccurate, earning her the title “navi-bitch.” They said that they had to decommission her and get a replacement. For some odd reason, my first reaction was to come to Monique’s defense. After all, she hadn’t gotten us lost even once, and even amazed us at how well she led us through unmarked narrow streets in towns and villages and along country roads that we never would have tried.

Even though we had only been using it for about a week, we all came to the same conclusion: when renting a car in a foreign country, request a GPS system. With a little luck, the map data will be up to date and accurate and your travels will be greatly enhanced, Who knows, you may also develop a close personal relationship with him or her.

Half-Life of a Gizmo

In the human body, the half-life of most tissues is around two weeks. That is, it takes about two weeks for half of the molecules of a particular kind to be replaced. Some last longer, like calcium in bones, some much shorter. For instance, three million red blood cells die and are replaced every second. So naturally, being an engineer, I started wondering what is the half-life of an electronic gizmo? How much time will pass before half of the iPods sold today get replaced or made obsolete by something better?

For some things, the turnover rate is extremely short. Cellphones are in that phase now, as providers consolidate and upgrade their systems, and new features pop up every few months. Digital cameras are changing very fast as well, with prices on the decrease and features rapidly improving. Home computers continue to improve steadily, but they seem to have stabilized quite a bit, now that processor speed and storage space is no longer a big deal for most people. For some other things, like stereo components and TVs, prices have stayed about the same and the rate of change hasn’t been very fast. That will pick up though when the cost of plasma and LCD screens comes within reach of middle class consumers and the production numbers really take off.

So if you’re not a tech-obsessed “early adopter” and you’re comfortable waiting for the second or third generation of a product to come out, how do you judge when it’s time to buy? What I recommend is to pay attention to where the product is in it’s development cycle.

By development cycle, I don’t just mean the part of product development that occurs before an item starts manufacturing. I like to extend it out to include the first couple of product generations after a new item is introduced. New products come out all the time that have been rushed into production with little or no real-life testing by regular people. Awkward keyboards, poorly thought-out menus, buttons too small; all these things tell me that a product was designed in a hurry and is not ready for prime time. When you buy it, you are volunteering to be part of the development team, at your own expense.

If the gadget you are salivating over has been out for a while and gone through at least one major upgrade, or if it is the second or third entry into the market, you will usually get better value for your money than if you had purchased the first off the assembly line.

But here’s the catch. The downside to being a late adopter is that you have to contend with the obsolescence factor. Just as they get the bugs worked out and the ergonomics improved, out comes some totally new gizmo that changes the playing field once again. My guess is that the half-life of innovative new stuff is no more than 2-3 years. Not counting the tech addicts who upgrade their stuff every 9 months or less, most people will try to get several years of use out of their phone or laptop or mp2 player.

So, what does all this mean? It means that whole truckloads of not-so-old technology are being retired every day. Perfectly good phones, appliances, calculators, CPUs and CRTs are being put out of service. It’s a shame really.

What happens to all those gizmos that have been marginalized, rendered obsolete, disenfranchised? Some get recycled on E-Bay, many get trashed. Others are given to undeserving relatives, or more often end up in the basement. Pitifully few of these things get donated to organizations that pass them on to people in need. Instead they end up in your own personal technology museum, otherwise called your “basement” or “attic.”

What’s in your basement whose half-life could be extended in the home of a needy child?

Headline: "Google Transforms Into Hal"

The following dyslectic paragraph appeared in my e-mail today:

“I cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid, aoccdrnig to rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer inwaht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Amzanig huh? yaeh and I awlyas thought slpeling was ipmorantt.”

I don’t know what kind of stroke results in the above, but I hope it doesn’t happen to me. I’ve noticed that my typing is getting a little worse, especially when I’m tired. I find myself occasionally transposing the two center letters in a four letter wrod, but I don’t think I ahve eevr tolltay scrweed up a logner wrod like smoe of toshe abvoe.

Thankfully my mind hasn’t devolved to that point yet, although it does appear to be heading that way. I suppose if I wanted to keep track of the slow demise of brain cells I could turn off “spell check as you type” and just activate it at the end of a page. That way I could keep tabs on how many words I misspell and gauge my mental acuity on a weekly basis. Forget it. Too much self awareness can be a bad thing.

You have to admit, it is amazing how the brain adapts – how you can actually read that first paragraph without that much trouble. The human brain is still an awesome bit of engineering any way you look at it. It’s also not likely to be upstaged anytime soon; certainly not by a pitiful little appliance like the one I’m typing on.

So, I’m thinking, what is the state of computing power today? Aren’t we getting close to duplicating the power of a human mind in silicon? No? What if you took the entire internet of connected computers and they could somehow communicate with each other independent of their human operators? Wouldn’t that be something if it didn’t self-destruct? You could even call it Hal. Maybe then you would have an entity that approaches the computing power and intrepretive genius of the homo-sapien brain.

Yesterday I happened upon a blog post that explained very clearly how to put your pants on. I found this both humorous and informative. If such a simple explanation for virtually everything that we need to do on a daily basis were available somewhere on the internet, then heck, Hal could conceivably rule the world!

You would just need some sort of incredible indexing system and probably some way to decide what is worthwhile and what is crap. That last bit is going to be the hardest, given the preponderance of crap out there.

No dobut Golgoe has sotimenhg in the wroks - of cruose wtih a mroe clveer nmae tahn Hal.

White Knights Riding Trojan Horses

I guess I don’t get an overwhelming amount of junk mail by today’s standards, certainly not as much as my wife does. I think it might be her affinity for online shopping since many of these places tend to “share” e-mail addresses with their “business partners” (i.e. trade their list through a broker).

But I do get a certain amount of unsolicited garbage, as do most people. One offers to sell me Microsoft Office for $69 or Photoshop for $99, which is obviously bogus – not just from the unprofessional appearance of the e-mail, but also because I traced the URL to somewhere in Russia. Others pitch their porn websites or offer to sell Viagra and other such drugs without a prescription.

I hate to think how many people fall for these scams, sending in their money and never hearing from the scammer again. Even if they’re willing to admit to some consumer advocate or government agency that they got scammed trying to buy illegal software or drugs, what do you think is going to happen? Nothing. They will just get their name and e-mail address put on another list. That money is gone.

And then there are all those online scam businesses that sell regular stuff – things that you need like batteries or water filters or office supplies. There are plenty of those who have put together a very professional website with absolutely no intention of shipping anything. They just collect orders for a while and then take down the site and put up another one. When I think about all the money that is stolen this way, it makes me want to reach through the internet pipeline and grab those crooks by the throat.

So I started to think, why isn’t there a way to do just that, figuratively. While there are more than enough twisted minds willing to spend a great deal of effort to construct viruses that create havoc just for the fun of it, aren’t there also some people with the same genius directed towards a more socially beneficial pursuit?

I’d be willing to pay good money for a program that intercepts scam e-mails and replies with a Trojan Horse that takes down the website. If not that, then something that creates havoc with the ISP who facilitates their mass e-mailing enterprise.

Yes I know, you’re going to say that if it were legal to do that, then all sorts of online wars would break out between legitimate businesses who are unscrupulously competitive. That’s probably true unfortunately. But I still think it is an idea worth considering. I bought a $25 program for my wife’s computer that filters out spam at the local level, according to her judgment, not someone at Earthlink or Google. It seems to work pretty well, diverting stuff to the “suspected spam” folder that she has previously identified as such. When something goes in there that she wants to read, she tags it as “good” and it is left alone thereafter.

I don’t necessarily want to encourage White Knight vigilantes on the internet like the sort of folks patrolling the Arizona border this month, but I wouldn’t shed a tear if some “anti-bacterial” software accidentally got loose on the internet and started to eat away at scammers and phishers around the globe.

If you also have some thoughts on what the Engineers and Inventors of the world should be working on, check out my other project: Inspiration 2025.

Mental Illness?

It’s always sad to see some animated person standing on a street corner waving and hollering to passing cars. You instantly recognize them as having some sort of mental handicap that has gone untreated, a reminder of the thousands of the people in this world who are in serious need of psychological help but cannot afford it.

But these days, this condition seems to be infecting people in all walks of life, not just the poor and homeless. Last week I witnessed a well-dressed woman walking through our local shopping mall alone, gesturing and talking loudly to no one in particular. Then yesterday while in line at Starbucks, a nice looking young man in front of me was carrying on an entire conversation with his imaginary friend. He even interrupted his conversation to order his coffee, and then continued on with it as he waited for them to prepare it. It was fascinating that this guy could switch so easily between two worlds, able to interact with the Starbucks clerk very appropriately, and then immediately switching back into his fantasy world to resume his conversation with himself.

Of course you know what happened next, he turned around revealing alien Bluetooth hardware growing out of his left ear. Some would say that this makes the whole thing ok, since he was actually talking to his girlfriend on his cellphone and not his inner demons. But is it really ok?

If everyone wore this Borg prosthesis on the side of their faces, how unnerving would that be? Lets say you’re talking to a friend and all of a sudden they wave you off and start a conversation with someone a hundred miles away. No ringing cellphone, nothing; he just stops listening to you. How rude is that?

It's akin to the situation where you’re paying for something at a store when the phone rings and the clerk spends several minutes answering the caller’s question instead of finishing with your transaction. Why does the person on the phone get to jump to the front of the line? Why should a cellphone conversation take priority over a real-life face-to-face conversation? Or maybe you’re sitting in the car talking and you realize that your friend hasn’t been listening to a word you’ve been saying; he’s been checking his voice mail!

Cellphones can be a wonderful adjunct to our daily lives, but common courtesy seems to have been lost in the process. People need to be reminded that a ringing telephone is not a national emergency and that the fact that they have been called in the middle of lunch doesn’t necessarily make them important. As these Bluetooth headsets get smaller and smaller to the point where they become nearly invisible, a whole new social protocol will need to be developed; in fact it’s overdue.

As wireless technology insinuates itself into every aspect of our lives, the person standing outside alone talking and gesturing into space is going to become a common sight, causing no one to notice. This doesn’t bode well for the poor guy yelling on the street corner who has no cellphone but thinks he does.
How is he going to get noticed?

Finger Condoms

Are your fingerprints on file somewhere? The answer is yes if you’ve been in the military, ever been arrested, or even recently gotten a driver’s license or had a document notarized. Chances are, in each of these situations they used ink on paper.

Not for long though. Indications are that electronic fingerprint readers are going to be everywhere soon. Already being built into laptops and security panels, these little devices read your fingerprint and can save you from entering a pin #, or carrying an ID card around your neck. For higher security situations, you may have to use a combination of these things, but for securing your laptop, most people will set it up with just one swipe of the finger to log in.

But how secure is this really? Ignoring the bizarre extreme where someone mugs you and chops off your finger to access your laptop (this actually happens - not just in mystery novels), what about someone stealing your fingerprint? Since you can get instructions for making bombs on the internet, there is probably already a website where you can learn how to take a latent fingerprint and process it into an artificial finger to use on security scanners.

Optical readers just require you to press your finger onto the pad and a matrix of sensors reads the print. Obviously this is not very secure since you leave your finger print right there on the reader for someone to lift. Consequently, these are already being replaced by readers that require you to sweep your finger sideways across a pad - apparently less susceptible to collecting prints on the surface.

If these readers really take off, and I believe they will, what are the social implications? Will we all get hyper-aware of leaving finger prints on things in public, carrying “wipe-down” rags with us or wearing finger cots? For those who don’t know this term, finger cots are used mostly by doctors and nurses for exam purposes (no need to go into more detail). They cover a single finger, come in different sizes and look like tiny condoms, which is undoubtedly what they will be called if people start wearing them.

Adults will seek ones that match their skin color, maybe with some new material that breathes. Teens will go the opposite route paying extra for brightly colored finger condoms. Groups will define themselves by finger color. Some will program their laptops to read their middle finger so they can offer up a fluorescent middle finger gesture when the situation calls for it. A whole new lexicon of gestures will emerge, maybe a whole new sign language based on a complex system of hand signals and colors.

Make it stop!!

How Long Before There is One Dominant Language?

Shortly after Al Gore invented the “information highway” regular people started to find ways to use it. The internet or “world wide web” became a frequent subject of conjecture with people making all sorts of predictions as to it’s potential influence, both good and evil. But notice that recently we don’t seem to hear much about it anymore, at least in general terms. Instead of discussions about “The Net” and how revolutionary it is, news articles now focus on specific uses of the internet, especially the grass-roots uses such as blogs.

More and more people are discovering the experience of publishing their thoughts and ideas to the world – for free! Even when you don’t know if anyone is listening, there is something strangely compelling about publishing your ideas in an open forum. If you’ve never seen your name in a newspaper, it’s like exposing a part of yourself to strangers around the globe.

Picture a housewife named Grace peering out her sitting room window onto a snow covered field. Nothing is moving outside, the only sound comes from the wind whispering through the trees. She smiles as she turns around, sits down at her computer and starts writing down her thoughts on this cold March morning. When Grace is finished with her half-page, she hits publish and ten seconds later the entire world can read what it feels like to be a widow on a farm in North Dakota.

To see life through Grace’s eyes you don’t have to buy a book, or make a trip to the library or buy a subscription to a writer’s anthology magazine; you just have to discover it online. If Grace is persistent, and publishes a little bit of her soul every week, and if her story is engaging, then people will eventually find it. Someone will stumble upon Grace’s lonely story and e-mail his friend. That friend may post the link on her own blog or website. It may take six months or a year, but those voices that are worth hearing will be heard.

All of a sudden, anyone like Grace with the knack for expressing ideas and emotions that cause people to take notice can be a published writer. Everyone has an inner voice, and now that voice can be heard around the world. As much as the publishing industry is starting to lose sleep about all this, so is the movie industry. When a movie like “Tarnation” that cost a few hundred dollars to create can get rave reviews at Sundance and Cannes, it does not bode well for those who feel they need to spend $100 million to create a work of art. This technological empowerment will change the world faster than anyone can imagine, and it will force cultural change that countries will be powerless to stop.

Right now, Mandarin Chinese is a first language for about 14% of the world’s population, followed by Hindi at 6% and English at 5% (ref: Wiki). Because of the extensive reach of the British Empire, and more recently the economic influence of the U.S. economy, English is by far the most learned second language. As internet access gets cheaper to the point where it is essentially free, and works it’s way into the farthest reaches of the globe, how long will it take for one language to totally dominate around the world?

What language will that be?

How Autonomic is Your Driving?

This morning I was driving home from getting a haircut; it was a beautiful sunny spring day and there wasn’t much traffic. I had turned up the radio because a song was on with a good beat and I was also thinking about a conversation I had with the lady who cut my hair. I guess I wasn’t really concentrating on my driving when all of a sudden I noticed that I was slowing down for a light that was turning red. The thought occurred to me that I hadn’t really consciously decided to respond to the changing light, my brain had just registered that I couldn’t make it through and told my foot to move to the brake and slow down at exactly the right rate so that I would stop just before the crosswalk. All this self-awareness was happening about half way through the stopping process.

Now my whole attention was on the driving and what must have happened inside my head at the instant that the light changed. I honestly didn’t consciously remember thinking about whether to slow down or to try and make it through the light – somewhere in my brain the decision was made to opt for slowing down. The moment was both fascinating and a little scary. What if my brain had made the wrong decision? How fast are these things processed? Would my attention have been fully diverted to the driving task at hand if there was some hesitation?

Our attention is always divided between several things at once, with one in the forefront and several others in the background. For example, when you’re sitting at your computer concentrating on reading something, you’re also aware of the sounds coming from the TV behind you, and from the wind blowing the trees outside your window and of the discomfort in your back from sitting in your chair incorrectly. Even while you’re concentrating on the computer screen, your brain is also monitoring what is on the TV and when something funny is said, your attention is shifted to the TV and you glance over.

The same thing is happening when you’re sitting in the left turn lane waiting for your chance to go. You’re talking on your cellphone, hitting the turn signal, turning the steering wheel, adjusting it as you make your turn, and operating the gas and brake alternately, maybe even listening to the radio and thinking about adjusting the delay time on your windshield wipers – all in the time span of three seconds.

So, if your brain can easily handle all these things at the same time, why all the controversy over cellphones and navigation screens in cars? I honestly am not sure how I feel about the whole thing. On the one hand, I am in awe at the number of simultaneous things that the human brain is capable of doing. However, it is easy to see that a Nav computer that forces you to take your eyes off the road is a formula for disaster. Cellphones on the other hand should be no problem in a car as long as they are hands-free with voice dialing. Unfortunately, few people have that capability yet, so they also force you to take your eyes off the road to read the tiny screen.

Maybe the solution is to just hibernate cryogenically for about 30 years or so until hands-free / voice-activated / intuitive technology is perfected. Then everyone on the road will be totally comfortable with all this high-tech stuff and will allocate the proper amount of attention to their driving and there won’t be so many things competing for cerebral priority.

Of course, when I get cryogenically thawed I won’t know how to operate anything at all. Or, since the thawing out process is not quite perfected yet, maybe the better alternative is to just escape from urban life and lead a Thoreau existence for the remainder of my days, letting other people grapple with all these problems while I’m off contemplating the flight characteristics of butterflies.

Is it Live or is it Digital?

We are rapidly approaching the point where you will not be able to tell the difference between what is real and what is not, at least when you turn on your TV or your computer. We all know it’s coming, but we don’t really want to think about it.

On the Tonight Show, they often show funny videos where they substitute another guy’s head on someone’s body doing something stupid for comic effect, often a political jab. These are really crude, quickly done and easily identified as constructs, which actually adds to the humor. At the opposite end of the spectrum, in the film “Simone” the director, played by Al Pacino, inherited a totally digitized actress, originally dubbed “Sim One” who he proceeded to turn into an onscreen star that the world thought was a real person. The futuristic software allowed Simone to say anything and do anything the director wanted her to do. She never got tired, never complained, and of course never appeared in public.

Making the leap from the crude constructs on the Tonight Show to the believable realism of Simone is an enormous technical challenge. We’re not talking here about the realistic animation you see in movies today; what we’re talking about here is a digital creation where you simply cannot tell that the performance on the screen wasn’t created by a real actor. It’s a bit like the famous Turing intelligence test where you define intelligence by the computer’s ability to fool the human into thinking that they are talking to another human. This is of course much harder to create, requiring the programmer to generate all the visual clues, body language if you will, that we expect to see in a real person.

We can already digitally edit still photographs fairly easily using any number of low cost digital editing programs. Photoshop Elements is a perfect example. With a little practice, you can remove people from a picture, switch heads, change backgrounds, etc. and it would take an expert to tell that it’s a doctored photo.

So, what happens when we approach that milestone where a digital video can be edited to change someone’s identity, or the next step, create an entire persona from 1’s and 0’s? Will the lawyers append a legal disclaimer at the end of each movie saying in effect that you shouldn’t necessarily believe what you just saw?

Will there be cameos of dead actors appearing in new movie releases? Will we be able to watch new episodes of “The Ed Sullivan Show” with the Beatles playing new songs just written? How much will it cost to have yourself digitized and uploaded into the cast of the next “Cirque du Soleil?” How soon will performances tout the fact that they include real live people?

For all those people pulling their hair out today over Intellectual Property Rights in the digital age, you may want to consider hypnosis to kick that habit.

You are now entering, The Twilight Zone.

True Story from the Future

Subject: diagnostic computer down at Wal-Mart

One day, in line at the company cafeteria, Joe says to Mike, "My elbow hurts like hell. I guess I'd better see a doctor.

"Listen, you don't have to spend that kind of money," Mike replies. "There's a diagnostic computer down at Wal-Mart. Just give it a urine sample and the computer will tell you what's wrong and what to do about it. It takes ten seconds and costs ten dollars. It's a lot cheaper than a doctor."

Although skeptical, Joe deposits a urine sample in a small jar and takes it to Wal-Mart. He deposits ten dollars, and the computer lights up and asks for the urine sample. He pours the sample into the slot and waits. Ten seconds later, the computer ejects a printout:

"You have tennis elbow. Soak your arm in warm water and avoid heavy activity. It will improve in two weeks." Thank you for shopping at Wal-Mart.

That evening while thinking how amazing this new technology was, Joe began wondering if the computer could be fooled. He mixed some tap water, a stool sample from his dog, urine samples from his wife and daughter, and a sperm sample for good measure. Joe hurries back to Wal-Mart, eager to check the results.

He deposits ten dollars, pours in his concoction and awaits the results. The computer prints the following:

1. Your tap water is too hard. Get a water softener. (Aisle 9)
2. Your dog has ringworm. Bathe him with anti-fungal shampoo. (Aisle 7)
3. Your daughter has a cocaine habit. Get her into rehab.
4. Your wife is pregnant with twins. They aren't yours. Get a lawyer.
5 If you don't stop playing with yourself, your elbow will never get better.

Thank you for shopping at Wal-Mart.

The above is obviously a joke that someone sent me. I don't know where it came from, but it struck me as something that is going to happen before long. No question that a variety of self-diagnostic kiosks in drug stores will be commonplace before long - more elaborate than the blood pressure booths you see now. There is already talk of a home DNA kit - believe it.

With the rising cost of healthcare, home care is the next hot thing.

Conspiracy Theory

I suppose some may think that a form of paranoia is overtaking me, or that I am getting more easily annoyed as I get older. Chances are good that both are happening - let me explain. A couple years ago I bought a PVR (aka DVR or Tivo). Mine is from my satellite company, Dish Network. Works fine, never had a problem with it, love it.

But recently, I have noticed that the programming is getting out of sync with the clock, meaning that when I set my PVR to record a show, it often misses the last 30 seconds to 2 minutes of the show. This only happens when the show continues past the hour or the half-hour just a little. It’s just enough for you to miss the preview of the next episode, or even the conclusion of the show. Really annoying.

Why is this happening all of a sudden? I don’t remember having this problem until just a few months ago. Why would the networks start doing this? Certainly the way they sell commercials has changed, breaking up many of the ad time slots into short 5-15 second bursts of high volume intense messages. Who knows, maybe in time they will get even shorter, possibly just a subliminal blur of logos and product names that flows right into your cortex. But that’s probably not be related to my timing problem.

Here is where the paranoia comes in. Believe it or not I am starting to think that the networks are doing this intentionally, just to annoy me. I think that is it entirely possible that they have this plan where, for their most watched shows (and consequently their most lucrative ad time), they are intentionally running the shows past the hour so that I will be dissuaded from “Tivoing” that particular show and choose to watch it real time! Then I won’t miss the ending. and will be more likely to pay attention to at least some of their ads.

I suppose there could actually be some business reason that they are doing this, like the ad rates for the show I’m watching are higher than the next one coming up. Therefore they extend the show a couple minutes so they can cram in a couple more spots while people are glued to their sets. Makes you feel manipulated doesn’t it?

Well, I’m not going to give up! Even if I have to reprogram my shows manually to extend the time a few minutes into the next hour, or pause a live show for 15 minutes and then advance through the commercials.

The days of ad agencies forcing you to watch Immodium and Preparation H commercials at dinnertime are just about over, my friend. No wonder the networks are getting desperate.

Free WiFi Update

In recent posts I have commented about the growth of free WiFi, how important I think this trend is, and how I strongly feel that public internet access should be free. Well, I just ran across a website where a gifted and generous fellow has put together an entire site dedicated to helping people set up their own WiFi hotspot, include the free software to do it with!

To borrow my daughter's favorite expression, Awesome!

If more people follow this gentleman's lead, free WiFi will hit the tipping point and all the technologies that take advantage of WiFi will really take off. It will have an impact similar to the transition from dialup to Broadband.

Check it out: http://www.publicip.net/

Submit your Ideas

As an accompanyment to this blog, I am setting up a second discussion to encourage people to submit their ideas on what they would like to see the inventors and engineers of the world work on next. Take a look, think about all the technology in your life that is lacking, or annoying or maybe even infuriating. Then submit a suggestion for how it should be.

Go Here

New Sharper Image Must-Have

Got the new SI catalog in the mail yesterday and I couldn’t resist commenting on a cool new gadget they feature on the front cover.

It is the amazing “Treat and Train” Professional Dog Training System. Basically, it’s a whole system that includes a training manual, DVD, and here’s the best part: a small remote-controlled dog-treat dispenser that plugs into the wall in the room where your dog does all of his misbehaving.

The most impressive thing about this system is that the remote-controlled dispenser relieves you of that awful job of having to present your dog with a treat from your hand. Simply push the remote control, and a treat is dispensed along with a tone to alert Sparky that he has a reward. Incredible! Just think, no more worry about the little guy licking your hand. Heck, you don’t even need to approach him. Voilá, you can train your dog from your couch while you watch TV.

For only $169.95, you will save all the time it previously took to hand Sparky a treat when he was exhibiting good behavior. Of course, you do get the training manual and the DVD, so I guess you really only paid about $150 for the Pavlovian dispenser. Aside from the big question of whether the training system is effective, (you are actually the one getting trained in case you didn’t know) one has to wonder if Sparky will learn to love the dispenser more than you?

Whatever the answer, Sharper Image continues to deserve my highly revered #1 spot as
“the quintessential source for overpriced stuff you don’t need.” However, I think that in this case, they should also get honorable mention for “solving a problem that people don’t have.”

Hmm, I wonder if I could adapt the idea to work with my kids, maybe a remote-controlled auto-parenting cash dispenser linked to the completion of household chores. Or, now that more and more schools let you turn in your homework online, maybe this little private ATM machine could be linked to their schoolwork!!

Nah, they’d figure out a way to hack into it.

Town Freaks Out over RFID

According to recent reports, the town of Sutter California is simply not ready for the Twenty First century – one wonders if some of the more vocal inhabitants there were even comfortable with the Twentieth. This small town surrounded by farms about an hour north of Sacramento made it onto the map recently when parents rose up to shield their town from a new fangled technology in the form of high tech student ID cards. Concerned parents were horrified to learn recently that the school board (there is only one public school in the town) had decided to try out new ID cards for the students with imbedded RFID tags containing the student’s ID#.

RFID tags are small passive computer chips that can be powered up by a special coded radio signal and exchange small amounts of data with the reader. They are rapidly proliferating in every corner of the globe because they are cheap, need no batteries because they are passive devices, and are perfect for ID cards, inventory tags, and may eventually replace bar codes on boxes of cereal. In this case, the school principal’s plan was to require all students to wear the ID tags and install readers at classroom doors to make it faster and more accurate to take attendance.

Apparently the thought of each child having an electronic chip in their student ID card was just too scary a proposition to comprehend for this town of 2,885. Most of the ensuing uproar, which ultimately forced the project to be abandoned, was centered around privacy rights. Some even voiced concern about possible health effects of wearing the ID tag. News crews came from far and wide, interviewing the irate parents as they picketed the school. The ACLU even came, adding their usual rhetoric to the privacy debate, claiming that the badges made every child a “walking homing beacon to stalkers with scanners.”

Never mind that the badges contained an encrypted 15 digit ID number that could only be read by the school system. Never mind that a scanner that would work at a distance would be so bulky that that the “stalker” would stand out like a sore thumb. Never mind that thousands of companies around the world use the same system for their ID badges and also in smart cards that people carry in their wallets.

Clearly this was no longer a reasoned discussion – it had rapidly devolved into an emotional reaction to technology. Some parents even quoted passages from the bible.

But maybe the tone of this uproar is being misinterpreted. Surely these parents aren’t worried about the school knowing where their children are when they are at school. And for a small school such as this, chances are that most everyone knows each other anyway. I’d be willing to bet that if you asked 5 people at random, you could find out what your friend had for lunch.

Maybe the parents are really not so worried about stalkers in their neighborhood, and maybe most of these people are not really worried about walking near the scanner any more than they are worried about passing through the metal detector at an airport or the scanners set up at the entrance to clothing stores and drug stores. Maybe it’s something else.

What if they are really worried about the future and not the present? What if they are really worried that their next drivers license issued by the state of California will have such a chip imbedded in it? What if they are more worried about being tracked themselves as they go about their day?

Maybe an innocuous ID badge for kids is seen as the first small step toward a society where your every action is recorded by some system or another and each person is profiled and logged and tagged and tracked wherever they go. Now I’m freaking myself out.

“Lifetime” Guarantees for Technology

Ever since Tivo hit the market in 1999, it has been a tough uphill battle for them to achieve their growth goals. Some said that their problem was that the were trying to sell a product that came across as a very expensive VCR. Others said that you really had to have one in your home for a week or so before you appreciated how cool it was. Still others claimed that the idea of Tivo suggesting what you would like to watch was too weird for people to believe. Although all these are true to some extent, I think that the critical problem has been the subscription fee.

You see, the Tivo business model was built around a data connection between your machine and their servers. Not only did they use that to collect information on what people were watching, with a long range plan to sell that information to the networks, they needed that connection to update your onscreen program guide. Tivo made the strategic decision that they were going to provide it over a phone connection and charge $12.95 per month, (or you could choose a one-lump-sum “lifetime” subscription fee of only $300!). The subscription approach looks good on a business plan with a huge projected subscriber base, but how about all those people out there who already have that link set up through their cable or satellite subscriptions? Will they be willing to pay an extra $13 per month for the same programming information they already get? Tivo bet the farm that they would.

That $13 extra per month is precisely why I decided to get my first DVR two years ago through Dish Network, rather than commit myself to Tivo. I paid $189 for my Dish DVR (after rebate) and the normal $5 per month fee for the extra receiver (I think all cable and satellite plans charge you some small monthly fee for additional set top boxes).

What has happened since then is that most cable and satellite companies now offer some sort of combination DVR / set top box. I haven’t checked with all the cable companies, but my satellite provider doesn’t charge any more for a DVR set top box than it does for any other set top box. So you are only paying for the benefit of piping all your TV channels into another room, not for the DVR functionality.

Although Tivo has been trying hard to set up agreements with cable and satellite providers (they have one with Direct TV), it appears that those guys are smart enough to understand that they don’t really need Tivo and that many of their customers may resist the added fees. Consequently it came as no big surprise when Direct TV announced that they will start selling their own non-Tivo DVRs (like Dish Network does). Given Tivo’s continuing financial problems, one wonders what the outlook is for all those people who paid a lump sum for a lifetime subscription? Being in the technology business, I always chuckle when I see the word “lifetime” associated with any sort of tech product.

But at the same time I feel strangely bad for the Tivo company. They picked a memorable name that rapidly became synonymous with digital video recording, did an excellent job on their software, and introduced an incredible product that is changing the way people watch TV. If the company eventually goes under, it will make a good case study for Business Strategy 101.

High Speed Internet - How Much is it Worth?

I’ve commented a couple of times on the emergence of free WiFi in various places, but it seems to be growing faster than I expected. The number of places offering free wireless internet connections is apparently growing exponentially. There are even whole commercial zones set up as hot spots, to encourage people to shop and dine there. I live near Long Beach California where in their downtown area you can sit at an outdoor cafe on Pine Avenue and check you e-mail or surf the net for free, compliments of the city and a consortium of businesses. Before long free WiFi will be a normal accepted cost of doing business. It will be a component of good service.

During each new phase of technological progress, the expectations of consumers ratchet up a notch. Remember when the fax machine was the necessary new thing to be in business? Then it was computers; now if a business doesn’t have a website, people are likely to get suspicious, thinking that they may not be legitimate or that they are in trouble financially. Personally I get annoyed if a business doesn’t provide at least the basic information online about their hours, directions to the place and other details about their business. My reaction is that they aren’t very serious about providing good service.

To me this proliferation of free internet service is an encouraging sign for all of us – even those who don’t use the free WiFi at this point. Why? Because it puts pressure on the big internet services to lower their prices for DSL and Cable. No matter who you are, $40 - $50 is a lot of money to spend on high speed internet service for home use - especially if you are already spending a fair amount on regular phone service, cellphone service, cable or satellite TV, etc.

Given the availability of free internet service, I can see a whole lot of people who own laptops opting for the occasional trip to the coffee shop down the street, to log on for free and check e-mail. Eventually, they may be able to get it right from their apartment if they live in an urban neighborhood where there are several businesses transmitting nearby.

It’s interesting how markets overlap, and create competition where you might not expect. Just as traditional toy makers compete for consumer dollars with the manufacturers of non-toy products, so do the sellers of home internet service now compete with commercial establishments that are giving it away for free. Internet service is rapidly becoming a commodity as the “information highway” extends to every aspect of our lives.

Ho Hum

A lot is being made about “video on the go” technologies at the recent CES show in Las Vegas. Several newsletters seem to view this as a big new thing worthy of shouting about. For me, it is nothing more than an interesting technology to watch- one of those long term evolutionary processes that are constantly struggling for traction. Nothing revolutionary about it at all, just the slow natural progression from VCRs to VCD players to DVD players, and now to downloadable movies off the internet.

What makes it boring to me is that the path is strewn with failed formats and standards, products that quickly become obsolete, and a sense that lately it seems to be more about marketing than real consumer demand. Yes, consumer demand is what put a VCR in every house, and demand is responsible for DVD players eclipsing VCRs finally, but the whole thing about watching videos on your cellphone or on the LCD built into your car just seems a little forced and contrived to me.

Do I really need to install a $3000 video system in my SUV so my kids don’t have to suffer through entertainment withdrawal on their 30 minute trip to school? And who is really going to spend money to subscribe to and watch “Lost in Translation” on a 1.2” cellphone screen? To be fair, what will probably happen is that people will subscribe to a mini-video service, one that sends cartoons or little funny short movies over the cellphone, or through the satellite radio system (I’m sure I’m not the only one to think of this). There are a number of producers of these mini movies working round the clock already, hoping that there is a market out there. And of course, you will get mini commercials as well, count on it.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all in favor of early adopters helping to pull the technology into the next phase, and I understand how marketing people much prefer to tout new features rather than come up with creative campaigns. But I must admit that I am going through a period where the rate of change is getting to me, along with all the people who are soooo certain that X and Y are the next great thing.

Maybe I’m still suffering from some lingering Luddite reaction to all the marketing and sales hyperbole that I experienced at CES. Maybe I should retire to the woods and clear my head for a while so when I come back to civilization I can once again be entranced by all the cool technology that is coming down the pipeline. Time to do some fly fishing.

A Glimpse of Paris

My daughter has settled in Paris for the spring semester, arriving two weeks ago. She is staying in a lovely private home arranged by the American University there as a part of an exchange program with U.C. Berkeley. What an experience for her - I’m envious!

So what does this have to do with a blog on technology? Read on.

In preparation for her trip there, we tried to find out if she would have some kind of broadband access from her apartment, hoping that we could sign her up for a VOIP phone number and hook in the adapter there so she could call home for free and vice versa. But of course we soon found out that broadband was not available, in fact, it is apparently not nearly as common a thing in private homes there. So, we told her to start looking for cheap calling cards.

She also started wondering about how she was going to get her assignments. At Berkeley, everyone is online - everyone. They sign up for classes online, get their assignments, turn in their assignments, they collaborate in groups online for projects and they communicate with their professors online. They even take tests and quizzes online in some cases. The internet is totally integrated into the school experience and every student is expected to have access to a computer and the internet.

No so at the American University in Paris. Here they don’t even have a system for the students to sign up for classes online. It’s all done on paper, so you don’t know what classes are open or not until you submit your requests in person. Seems pretty archaic to me. So at this university, the students get their assignments in lecture, turn in their assignments on paper the same way, and make appointments to see the professor via phone. It’s all quite traditional and civilized and I suppose there is nothing wrong with it from an educational perspective. But it is fascinating to me that Berkeley is so far ahead technologically. After all, one expects the major capitals of the world to be at the forefront of technology, or at least close, and the large universities in those cities to be examples for all to follow.

So, on her third day there, my daughter noticed an internet cafe a block from her apartment, and resigned herself to going there to check her e-mail and tell us when she would call. Apparently this is how a great many people in Paris use the internet. We still have them in the U.S. but they are rapidly becoming obsolete.

But then something extraordinary happened. For some reason my daughter decided to move her computer closer to the window in her room and voila’ a window popped up on her screen saying that her laptop had found a wireless network. Apparently the college, which is about a half block away has a wireless network broadcasting with a strong signal. She clicked “ok” and she was online! No authentication whatsoever.

How I found out about all this is I got an e-mail from her all excited that she is online. She was experiencing definite signs of internet withdrawal, but now everything is right with the world again. Now we can chat online and exchange pictures daily using Picasa and Hello (both excellent and free thanks to Google) and the phone bills look they may now be manageable.

As the title of this post says, this is only a glimpse of Paris, and I suspect that the city is really much more technologically advanced than these comments would suggest. It will be interesting to follow my daughter’s education in French culture and to see how such a fiercely nationalistic country steeped in tradition deals with the pressures of ever-changing technology. I will post an update in a few months as more data flows across the Atlantic.

Narrow Minded Geeks

I confess - I’m guilty of it just like many other people. What I’m talking about is the state of mind that people fall into when they start to think that the rest of the country is just like them, with the same problems and the same choices.

The actual truth is a lot different, and for me it takes a regular Whack on the Side the Head (to borrow a phrase from Roger von Oech) to keep me from regressing into the stereotyping trap.

So while I was talking to Virgil the other day (he’s a friend who lives in the eastern part of L.A. about 30 miles away from me), I got my Whack administered when he told me he can’t get broadband in his neighborhood. Their cable company doesn’t offer broadband and he was told that his house was two blocks outside of the boundary where he could get DSL. He even checked into a satellite uplink setup and they still want over $500 for the equipment and about $75/month.

Now this just didn’t make sense to me because we both live in the metropolitan area of LA. It’s not like he lives out in some rural valley where you schedule your trips into town. We’re talking one of the largest urbanized areas of the world – the proverbial concrete jungle that goes on for a hundred miles. Furthermore, Virgil lives in a pretty nice neighborhood of middle to upper class suburban homes where you would expect the demand to be pretty high for broadband.

I guess what struck me the most was that I’ve had DSL for over three years and I guess I just assumed that everyone in the LA area had a choice of either DSL or cable broadband if they wanted it.

I started thinking: If Virgil can’t get broadband in Los Angeles, then how can broadband be spreading so fast through out the country? It makes me suspicious of industry statistics that claim 50% of home internet users now have broadband. Seems sort of unlikely now doesn’t it? If you go to the website DSL reports, you can do a test to see if your house is within 18,000 feet of the central office, which is apparently the limit for reliable DSL service. For those of you who forgot your high school math, that’s about 3 ½ miles.

Now I know that there are a heck of a lot of homes in this country that are more than 3 ½ miles from a central phone office, and who also don’t have broadband cable running all the way out to their houses. These rural folks have electricity, and phone service and they get their TV from a little satellite dish mounted on the side of the barn. Maybe these numbers are extrapolations from polls taken in urban areas, or maybe they have users mixed up with households. For instance, I have one DSL account, 4 people who share it, and 7 different e-mail addresses. The statistics could vary quite a lot depending on which one of those numbers you are counting.

Sometimes I think that the enormous tech industry in the U.S. is so totally insular and hyped up on themselves that they have completely forgotten about the guy who works all day at some regular non-technical job and is struggling to protect his own version of “the simple life.” He doesn’t have 3 computers networked to a DSL modem with internet connections to a media server and wireless connections to his internet enabled refrigerator. He doesn’t even own a laptop and can’t imagine why someone would lug one to Starbucks to surf the net. The only thing that really connects this guy to the high tech industry on a personal level is his cellphone, which he bought so his wife can contact him when he is out on a job to ask him to buy milk on his way home.

After braving the crowds at CES in Las Vegas a couple weeks ago, I’m pretty sure that the majority of technical enthusiasts (i.e. geeks) that I saw there have very little contact with the folks who are labeled “late adopters.” Maybe it would be a good idea to set up a revolving program to send all these account executives of high tech firms out to roam the country in a mobile home for a month each. They would certainly get a whole new perspective on the broad profile of the American consumer. I’ll drive.