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Via Engadget comes this link to industrial designer Johan Frossen's website, which features a concept project he came up with for SonyEricsson: a wearable video camera that wraps around your neck for hands-free recording. He documents the process he went through in conceptualizing, designing and prototyping the device; a familiar thing for me because of my time with the designers at IDEO but the process should be very interesting for those of you who haven't been exposed to how industrial design works.
The camera uses a fixed-focus fish-eye lens so it captures a very wide angle image, eliminating the need for having to tweak zoom and focus while you're recording. It also eliminates the need for an LCD monitor for the camera operator to see what they're recording. Obviously this isn't suitable for every situatino where you'd want to shoot video, but for those times when you just want to get a visual record of something going on, but can't sacrifice your own two hands to run the camera, this is a great idea.
Unfortunately, it's not an actual product yet, but it's very easy to imagine this being a popular product should SonyEricsson ever decide to manufacture it.
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Finally! Engadget cites this TiVo user forum thread as proof that TiVo will be bringing out a cheaper version of the HD Series 3 unit they unveiled last fall. You just had to know that eventually there would be a more reasonably priced model, it was just a question of how long we would have to wait.
The Series 3 "Lite" will have a smaller hard drive and will not come with a couple of the bells-and-whistles on the current unit. Otherwise, functionally it has the same feature set that most people want -- the ability to record 2 HD channels simultaneously, resolution modes up to 1080i, etc. You still need to get your cable company to let you have the required CableCards, which apparently can be a struggle, and in that forum thread there's some debate as to whether you can use a "multistream" CableCard or if you need a CableCard for each of the two HD recorders.
MSRP: $299.00. Orders already being taken by online vendors in that general price range.
Pennies are tight around The (Real) Big Red House these days, but I do expect to buy one in the foreseeable future. I had been considering giving up on TiVo entirely and swapping our Series 2 TiVo in the family room for one of Comcast's DVR boxes for sake of convenience, but the Comcast boxes suck HARD and I would love to be able to go back to having a TiVo to use with our HDTV in the bedroom.
I'll be keeping an eye out for an actual review from some TiVo user once they start shipping and let you know what the skinny is.
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For a while now, the smart money has been on the idea of pervasive computing eventually superseding our present model of having a PC with which we interact. Everything will be networked, everything will have a user interface, and gone will be the beige box under the desk.
Meanwhile, there's still quite a few years of transition to come, but that doesn't mean you can't get rid of the big beige box. This is a complete miniature PC that plugs directly into a power outlet and has a handful of USB ports for your keyboard, mouse, peripherals, and so on, audio in and out, and an analog video connector.
It's a little underpowered compared to your vanilla tower configuration -- only 128MB of RAM in this model, and it only runs Windows CE -- but for your grandma who wants to surf the web and send e-mail it's probably more than adequate. I would expect future models to incorporate much bigger storage using flash memory, and hopefully some more RAM. I'd like to see something like this pretty much replace the tower in 99% of consumer installations, or even as corporate workstations.
Permalink | Comments (0)Wired has a link to an auto industry blogger who is maybe a little too enthusiastic about what he says is The Next Big Thing in cars: hard drives.
Yes, that's right. The incredible innovation of yesterday's technology tomorrow! Great big fat hard drives to hold all of your MP3s, videos, even store applications that will run on a dashboard GUI that will provide you will assorted data like mileage, GPS data, and what-have-you.
As the Wired post and several commenters on the blogger's site point out, he's looking in the wrong direction to be singing the praises of spinning platters when flash storage is expanding by leaps and bounds, plummeting in costs, and doesn't have the physical shock and environmental conditions issues that traditional platter drives have. But maybe he read this post at ITWorld about Sony's new "airbag" shock-protection system for hard drives.
After all, Detroit went for airbags once, so surely they'll do it again. Of course, that'll push the timetable for adoption off by 25-30 years.
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All of us at The (Real) Big Red House have been jonesin' for a Nintendo Wii pretty badly, but the very tight availability of the consoles earlier in the year sent us in a slightly different direction -- we each got a Nintendo DS Lite. Bridget got hers first as her birthday present, but before long the three of us were squabbling over whose turn it was to use it, so we bought one for Charlotte for her birthday in May. I then demanded one for myself as a Fathers' Day gift, because I didn't want to have to wait until August to get one.
So now that there's no squabbling over who gets to use the console, instead we squabble over who gets to use which game cartridge. This little accessory solves some of that, plus opens up the possibilities of playing many different games (I will let you use your imagination as to wha tI'm talking about). When we're not squabbling, though, we are having a ball. Unlike with the PS2 that sits forlorn and unloved in our family room, Charlotte can actually manage the simpler controls and has discovered that she likes to play video games. And we have had a ton of fun playing some multiplayer games together: part of our Fourth of July experience this year was all sitting together in the family room playing MarioKart.
The DS units have built-in wireless networking, you see, and can be used in ad-hoc mode to create a network between players within close physical range of one another. They can also connect to WiFi networks and connect to other players via the Internet. And, if you've got the web browser cartridge, you can use the DS as a portable web access device. I haven't been able to get any of our DSes connected to our home wireless network yet, but that seems to be due to some quirk with our Linksys wireless router not liking any client that isn't another piece of Linksys gear. But it hasn't really been all that important yet, since we're able to connect to one another.
Via Engadget, I read this AP story yesterday about a pilot program at Safeco Field in Seattle, where you can use your DS to connect to an interactive service offered by the ballpark. It lets you order food and drinks, watch video of the game in progress, play trivia games, and so on. It costs $5 to use the service, but considering how many different ways sporting events find to separate you from huge wads of cash, that seems pretty small. Personally, I think it's probably worth the $5 to eliminate the hassle of buying food and drinks from the concession stands, regardless of whatever else it lets you do. (The photo above comes from a Flickr user who brought his DS to a game and tried it out.)
I know that some Mutual Friends of Torrez have had success web browsing with their DSes, so I look forward to trying that out sometime. If I could carry around my DS instead of a laptop, that would be pretty cool. And I suppose I could always duct tape my cellphone to my DS for a sort of homemade iPhone, but I might not have to for long. I read last week that there's a video camera coming out for the DS soon, and the thing already has both a microphone and speakers, so it's only a matter of time before someone gins up an IP videophone that uses Skype or some other Internet telephony service.
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Everybody has been so busy gushing over the iPhone, that T-Mobile's new HotSpot@Home WiFi serivce got lost in the noise. The NYT's tech writer, David Pogue, was somehow able to tear himself away from his iPhone long enough to have a look and has a good piece on the plusses and minuses of the service.
You DO need a WiFi capable phone or similar device. And to use the service at home, you need a wireless router attached to your broadband service (the T-Mobile-branded D-Link model pictured above is a nice bit of marketing, but any wireless router will do). In effect, T-Mobile is entering the same space as Skype and Vonage (which Pogue points out) with VoIP service, but they're giving away the VoIP part (well, you do pay a $10/month charge for the service, but the calls are free) while enabling you to have just one phone that can be used for cellular or VoIP calls.
One important hiccup is that there's no seamless transition from cellular to VoIP in terms of charging you -- if you begin your call on the cellular network and then switch to a WiFi hotspot, T-Mobile charges you as if the whole call were made on cellular. But, Pogue says, the reverse is also true: if you make a WiFi call and then switch to cellular, you are NOT billed for the call. I presume that if T-Mobile finds that they're losing too much billing this way, they'll put a stop to it somehow.
The value of the service also relies on the availability of free WiFi hotspots -- great at home, but not always available when you're out and about. However, Pogue says you can make free WiFi calls from the T-Mobile hotspots found at Starbucks and Borders. Great. As if the Starbucks stores weren't already full of people with laptops hogging all the tables, now there'll be the cellphone freeloaders too.
If Vonage survives its battle with Verizon, they'd be very smart to partner with a cellular service provider ASAP to even out the playing field a bit. I think this is a very smart idea and will be paying attention to see if it's worth giving a try next year when it's time to re-evaluate our home phone service.
Permalink | Comments (2)I offer you this 100% iron-clad better-than-the-Korean-drycleaners guarantee:
I will NOT have a single word to say about the Apple iPhone today, tomorrow, or any other time in the foreseeable future.
Feel free to visit BKO often and enjoy a relaxing getaway from the near-panic-level coverage infesting every tech blog and gadget-guy website in the known universe, safe in the knowledge that the A____ i_____ will not receive so much as a whisper from me.
You're welcome.
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A few months ago, I had a couple of links to a device being designed that would allow one to print any book on demand.
Well, here it is (via). The first Espresso has been installed in, of all places, the New York Public Library (you would think they already had plenty of books, but maybe not...). The PR release says the New Orleans Public Library will also be getting one this year. That's a good idea -- I'll bet they lost a lot of books after Hurricane Katrina.
For now, the machine is available to the public at the Science, Industry, and Business Library until August and will only print copies of public domain works (plus a few select copyrighted titles).
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The Boston Globe reported yesterday that a research group at MIT has developed a way to transmit electricity to electric-powered devices without wires.
Borrowing from the name "WiFi" that sometimes gets applied to wireless computer networking, they've created the appalling term "WiTricity" for their new technology. Right now all they have is a proof-of-concept experiment, but they were able to power a 60-watt light bulb from a distance of 7 feet.
Nicola Tesla, of course, did the same thing a hundred years ago with his eponymous Tesla coils. Tesla dreamed of and promised a world of free electricitiy available wirelessly from massive coils and towers. He attracted the attentions and money of many wealthy investors, but his bitter rival Thomas Edison eventually prevailed with the wired alternating current system that we use today.
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A company called Solar Electrical Vehicles makes solar panels you can install on the roof of your hybrid car to help charge the car's batteries. According to their white paper that details their prototype for the Toyota Prius, using the solar panels to recharge the batteries reduces the gasoline consumption of the vehicle by 17-29%. They also say that with a DC converter to plug in to your home electrical supply and a bigger battery, it would be possible to forego using gasoline as a fuel altogether.
While SEV presently sells the solar roof as an aftermarket item, it would be great to see Toyota incorporate a similar technology right into the vehicle's design.
(via MAKE:blog)
Permalink | Comments (0)I posted this last week about a company that's trying to launch an electronic payment system that bypasses the middleman on transaction fees and wants to piggyback their system onto magstrip-bearing driver's licenses.
A couple of days later, I received a comment on the post from a gentleman named Randall Shake, who is the CEO of ACH Pay, LLC, one of the companies involved in trying to introduce this business. The comment provides some additional background. I subsequently traded a couple of e-mails with him which I'll share with you because I think he's made some interesting points.
More after the jump...
I've edited slightly for space, but have not altered any content:
I have been in the Merchant Processing Industry since 1997, and have watched the escalating fees impacting Merchants. In February, I was invited to address the Merchants Payment Council in Washington D.C. ...I was asked why as an ISO, I wanted to promote a solution that cut the revenue by 80%. I told them that their members were paying much more than they were posting on their web site. Which is www.unfaircreditcardfees.com. And the Interchange Fees were negatively impacting their ability to financially viable. The answer to the problem I believed and still do is to be found in the Free Market. And that with a Loyalty incentive program Merchants could take back their Cash Flow from the Card Associations. Visa and MasterCard needs competition, consumers are paying for these hidden Fees.
My own opinion here -- this is why I think their idea is going to get a lot of traction. Not because it's better for the consumer up front, but because it's a significant benefit for small independent retailers. I've had more than one conversation with store owners in all sorts of retail categories about how the cost of processing credit card transactions has risen so much that it's a major detriment to doing business. Mr. Shake recognizes the lock that Visa and Mastercard have on payment systems and is arguing that a payment system that bypasses them will naturally attract business and force them to play more fairly. It may be Economics 101, but he's dead on.
I asked Mr. Shake about security and privacy concerns, particularly since the push toward RFID-enabled payment systems is rife with these problems, and whether or not his company was considering an RFID-enabled system as well. His reply indicates that they are sticking solely to magstrip cards:
We are working on an interface with the 2D Bar coded Driver’s Licenses. And have no relation or association with RIFD technology. The Driver’s License is used as an access device to identify the checking account. A private labeled Loyalty Card with magnetic Stripe could also be utilized as long as the Merchant controls the Card Deck and it is not on a Visa or MasterCard Debit platform.
Sticking with magstrips obviates the problems assoicated with RFID, of course. There are other security and privacy issues related to electronic payment systems in general, even for magstrip cards, but at least they won't be inviting any additional problems into their system by using RFID tags. Eventually, the increased prevalence of RFID will probably force them to change direction, but the adoption of RFID-enabled cards and fobs remains a little slow and probably gives them enough time to get their system into retail stores and establish their presence before having to go that route.
We are actively working on a program for the Trucking Industry as well. And are in discussions with companies that can provide additional Risk Scoring services for Merchants as an additional option which they can purchase for additional transaction fees. One card can be tied to multiple accounts. With each having a separate Pin #. Our First terminal to market will be from TechTrex which has marketing in Chicago IL...We are seeking both Consumer Groups support, because Interchange Fees impact the costs of goods and services sold to Consumers. And from Merchants who would be interested in a beta test in their market. We are 30-45 days away from having our Terminal application ready for market. Grocery Stores who operate on thin margins could greatly benefit from our service as well.
Any readers from the Chicago area might want to keep an eye out for these terminals beginning to appear toward the middle of the summer. If you see them and use them, I would be very interested to hear about it...as I'm sure Mr. Shake would be.
Lastly, here's a link to a podcast of a radio interview with the CEO of National Payment Card, Inc., Joe Randazza.
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Though they haven't had to resort to bake sales yet to make up for the money they're not getting from the Bush Administration, the folks at NASA have come up with a program they've entitled "Centennial Challenges" to open up the design of space-going technology to people outside of the aerospace industry.
Some of the challenges are BIG, like designing a new moon lander for the Ares Program that will take us back to the Moon by 2020. Some of the challenges are a little more modest, but critical to missions, such as spacewalk tethers and moon rock excavation.
So far, the only challenge that has produced a winning design is the Astronaut Glove challenge. The winner is an engineer who lives in Southwest Harbor, Maine, and the glove he came up with offers improved flexibility and requires less hand strength for the astronaut to manipulate. Best of all, he designed it using all off-the-shelves materials, including a pair of surgical gloves he picked up from eBay. Mainers are nothing if not frugal.
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I can't decide if this is a good idea or not: an electronic nicotine delivery device that looks like and is used like a regular cigarette.
What you see coming out of the mouth of the company executive demoing the product in the picture is vapor, not smoke. The product delivers vaporized nicotine without all the noxious chemicals that are created by inhaling tobacco smoke. I suppose for some people, having the functional prop would address some of the habitual elements of smoking. I often read about how quitting smokers find that they miss the activity of smoking as much or more than the hit of nicotine.
On the downside, though, removing some of the health hazards associated with smoking might only make nicotine consumption more enticing to some people, and we probably don't need to make the addiction any worse than it already is.
Permalink |Engadget reported yesterday that cable provider Cox has disabled the ability to fast-forward through commercials inside video-on-demand programming from ABC and ESPN (both of which are owned by Disney, BTW).
As the Engadget post recognizes, it's now merely a matter of time before this spreads to anything that you might choose to download and watch through your cable-provided DVR. And don't be smug if you're not a Cox customer, because the others will be right behind them.
Meanwhile, if you recall the brief post I had recently about "channel bonding", I was wailing over the unlikelihood of faster broadband.
But Engadget also reported yesterday that Comcast has demoed the exact same technology. Comcast CEO Brian Roberts only went so far as to say that the modems might be available in this country in a "couple of years", so I guess we'll all have to hold our breaths just a little longer.
Permalink |Last week I told you about my decision to bail out on Vonage and switch over to Comcast for our home telephone service. Subsequently, I've come across a couple of things here and there that illuminate the subject, so I thought I'd share them with you.
Over the weekend, Slashdot had a link to this forum thread at Broadband Reports, wherein people are complaining about AT&T's VoIP service. Apparently, AT&T has decided to dump its VoIP service and summarily informed thousands of their customers that the service was being cancelled. However, AT&T is blocking those customers from transferring their phone service to another provider, and they are unwilling to provide a forwarding message for those customers who have abandoned their VoIP phone numbers to sign up with other providers. In essence, AT&T is holding all of their VoIP subscribers hostage.
Meanwhile...today Comcast has announced that they're rolling out a service called SmartZone that will integrate their e-mail and voicemail services. Ooh. Straight out of 1999, you guys. This is a standard feature with most VoIP services. The announcement also goes on to tell us that they won't be charging any extra for this...well, that's mighty kind of you guys. Of course, they always say that at first and then a year or two down the road discover the sudden need to start charging a fee...which then goes up every year.
Meanwhile, telco expert David Isenberg has a post this morning considering this announcement. Isenberg's take is that this is Comcast's lame attempt to re-imagine themselves into a competitor for the likes of Google in the realm of offering value-added services rather than just as the "series of tubes" that gets the services to you.
Isenberg's assessment is that tying services to the tubes is exactly the wrong thing to do. Google, Yahoo, et.al. are not limiting themselves to subscription-only customers and to a single method of distribution. As he says, why limit yourself to 12.5 million customers (Comcast's present install base) when you can market to "1,000 million" customers.
On Thursday, I have to spend my entire afternoon at home waiting for a Comcast tech to show up to connect their VoIP device. I suspect it's just a router, just like Vonage's, but the CSR on the phone who got me to sign up had no clue. When I signed up for Vonage, they just mailed me the router and told me to plug it in. I have no idea why they need to make me miss half a day of work for something I can do by myself in three minutes.
Still no warm-and-fuzzies for me.
Permalink | Comments (2)I did say I'd keep you apprised of the developments in switching Charlotte's PC from Windows to Ubuntu, so here's the first update.
Bridget offered to take Charlotte to her dance lesson on Saturday morning, even though it was my turn. So it seemed like the perfect time to sit down and have a crack at it.
I had already downloaded the Live CD ISO and burned it to a CD. The Ubuntu website promised me that the CD would do all the work of cataloguing files and settings and so on, and the whole thing would only take 25 minutes.
Except that the computer wouldn't boot from the CD. Even when I set up the boot order in BIOS to ignore everything but the CD drive, no soap. It would display a line on the screen that said something like ISOBOOT blahblah Debian blahblah and a blinking cursor, then reboot automatically after about 30 second of going nowhere.
If I booted into Windows, the CD would spin up and launch a browser with links to install software, but not to install Ubuntu itself.
So I went to the Ubuntu site and read their page about troubleshooting the Live CD, which suggested that I should try the "alternate install CD". That download took about 20 minutes, so I went and washed some dishes while it ran. Using my own PC, I burned that CD and started all over again.
Still nada. Okay, I thought, this is one of those cases where the CD drive in the old computer won't read CDs burned in my computer. That's not unusual. So I copied the ISO image from my computer to the old computer. Ready to burn to another CD...except the Windows built-in CD burning software doesn't extract ISO images, and there was no other CD-burning tool installed on the machine. Time to go look for a free CD burning tool that isn't loaded down with all sorts of spyware and crap. Not as easy to find as you might think, but eventually I did.
While that software was downloading, I took a pile of laundry upstairs and put it away. By the time I got back, the download was done. Another few minutes spent extracting/installing the software and burning the CD, change the boot order again and......nothing. Not even the ISOLINUX blahblah thing.
At this point, I decided to try another tack -- if the CDs weren't going to boot, maybe I should try burning the installer to a DVD. Except I was all out of blank DVDs. I had to go to CVS anyway to pick up some prescriptions, so off I went. Once there, I could not remember which type of DVD format my DVD burner uses, DVD+R or DVD-R, so I bought a package of each.
(Oh, at this point it's about noon. I had started at 9:30.)
Get home, re-burn the Live CD to a DVD, take it downstairs, restart the old PC...bupkis.
Unlike Georgie-Boy, I know when I need to cut my losses, so I gave up. Three hours into a 25-minute install with absolutely no progress. On the upside, I did get all my Saturday morning errands accomplished, so it wasn't a total waste of time.
Next step: tonight I'll see if there's a BIOS update for the old PC that addresses the "won't boot from CD" option. If that fails, then Plan C will be to build the Live CD on a USB memory stick and try that method. Plan D involves drop-kicking the PC and buying the Mini Mac after all. Stay Tuned.
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Yahoo News had this AP story (via) yesterday which reports that VeriSign is teaming up with at least one major bank to offer debit cards with single-use disposable passwords.
This particular security feature is long-overdue for debit cards. It has been possible to use single-use passwords for online credit card purchases for a number of years. In the AP story, VeriSign claims that the reason this hasn't been implemented sooner is that consumers would need to carry a password-generating device much like the SecurID token that is common in corporate offices. Their new product basically just shrinks the electronics required to the point where they can fit in the corner of a standard plastic debit card.
I hope this becomes standard issue very quickly. My wife and I have both had to replace our debit cards over and over again because of security breaches -- I think Bridget had to replace her card four times last year, and I had to replace mine two or three times. Single-use passwords would reduce the need to replace thousands of cards every time there's a breach, and would alleviate the bother on the consumer's end of having automated payments based on a debit card number break each time the cards are replaced.
I just wish it wasn't VeriSign. They're evil.
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When I bought my current tower PC a couple of years ago, I took my old PC, a Dell Dimension 4100, and moved it to the library room so that we could have a second desktop primarily for Charlotte. As little as she was at the time, she was still able to learn how to use the mouse, which let her play some simple games. Now that she's learning how to read and write, she's able to do more and enjoys playing games and visiting a few websites. She's not glued to the computer; it's just some other thing to play with once in a while.
Like the rest of us, though, the computer isn't getting any younger. While it seemed zippy when I bought it in 2000, it chugs along at an interminable pace now, particularly at boot time, and the demands of more recent software AND the media-rich websites kids like are outpacing older machines' specs. My thinking has been to consider buying a new computer for her use, and until recently I'd been pretty sure that I was going to buy a Mac Mini. Now, however, I'm about to go off into a different direction: I'm going to install Ubuntu on the PC she already has.
If you follow computer news at all, you probably know that the latest version of Ubuntu was released just a few days ago, and there's been quite a lot of excitement in the geek world about it. Of the myriad versions of Linux available in the marketplace, Ubuntu definitely has the "flavor of the day" buzz going for it, especially among the crowd who are promoting making Linux easy to use and accessible to the average computer user so that it might have some crumb of a chance to chip away at Windows' dominance of the PC desktop market.
So Ubuntu, along with many other Linux OSes, puts a nice graphical user interface on top of the arcane, command-line driven business of UNIX. It also has gone a long way toward making the installation and configuration of the operating system simpler and less aggravating than most Linux installs have been in the past, which makes technical users like me more likely to brave the process.
Most importantly, though, I have come to the belief that there's no longer any need to be shackled to Windows any more. Even though Linux has been around for a decade or so, and the Mac is even older than Windows, the simple reality of the PC world since the early 1990s has been the need to use Windows because of its dominant position. You simply could not expect to be able to use a non-Mac PC unless you ran Windows. I also think this continued to be true until a couple of years ago. Despite the evangelizing of the pro-Linux/anti-Microsoft crowd, Linux was not really suitable for widespread use by the garden variety user, nor was the universe of Open Source software. Now, I think we have reached the "tipping point" (to borrow from Malcolm Gladwell). Just this morning I read that Dell is going to start selling PCs with Ubuntu pre-installed, and that's on top of the recent news that they were going to bring back Windows XP pre-installs rather than force people to buy machines with Vista.
Having read quite a few "tricks-and-tips" websites, I don't expect the conversion to Ubuntu to be as simple as "follow the bouncing ball", but I remember all too well the struggles I used to face installing older verisons of Windows, and expect a similar degree of difficulty. That's okay, it's part of the challenge. The other challenge I know I'll face is the need to install WINE for the one or two software titles Charlotte has that will need a Windows environment to work.
If things go well, then I will probably take the leap myself and change my own machine over. My current PC is still quite adequate, and has enough horsepower to even get a little experimental and try running Beryl as my desktop.
I will probably post a bit about all of this as I start to undertake these projects. Stay tuned.
Permalink |I've been following the developments in the Verizon vs. Vonage patent infringement lawsuit with a great deal of interest. We've been Vonage customers for almost exactly two years, and, even though there are Vonage-bashers everywhere you turn, we have had very good luck with them. Consequently, I have been unhappy with each new development in the case, since they all seem to point to the inescapable end of Vonage. Most recently I read that Sprint might be interested in buying out Vonage as part of a deal that would resolve a different patent infringement dispute between those two companies, but it's unclear if Sprint would actually offer the same service or just use the deal to squash Vonage.
With none of the news being terribly positive, I've been mulling over the need to change phone service providers as a pre-emptive action, lest we find ourselves with no local phone service one morning. One thing has been absolutely certain in my mind from the outset: there's no way in hell that I would ever go back to being a Verizon landline customer. How anyone can let themselves be ass-raped month after month for the outrageous amount of money Verizon extorts for basic telephone service is beyond me. We were paying an average of $75/month to Verizon before including long-distance or any other services. After going with the unlimited calling package from Vonage for six months, I downgraded our service to the 500-minute package and only paid $14.99/month AND got all the services Verizon charges you extra for.
There are many other VoIP providers now, though none as well-established as Vonage. I've been sort of half-heartedly perusing the different "rate VOiP provider" websites like this one and this one, but some of these sites are bought and paid for by the VoIP providers themselves and aren't necessarily as objective as they could be. And some of the providers themselves remind me waaaay too much of the shifty businesses that flooded the market when AT&T was broken up all those years ago. Amusingly enough, even Verizon now offers a VoIP service that undercuts its own landline business.
I've been nowhere near making a decision, but then out of the blue on Saturday morning a Comcast telemarketer called pitching their recent promotional bundle to add VoIP to your broadband package for $18/month for a year. Comcast isn't exactly my favorite service provider either, I have to say, but given that they're less likely to wink out of existence than Vonage or any of the other minor providers in the next twelve months, and given that the promo price is close enough to Vonage's pricing, I bit.
At the end of the promotion, the price jumps from $18/month to $39/month, so you can bet that next May I'll be looking for another provider, but now I have that time to watch the shakeout from the Verizon vs. Vonage case and see if anyone really comes out on top.
Permalink |Engadget reports that cable modem maker Ambit Microsystems is announcing a new product for the broadband market in Taiwan that uses "bonding" technology to combine three broadband channels to provide 144Mbps down/30Mbps up throughput (link goes to a PDF).
By comparison, here in the United States, most cable modem service is capped at 1.5Mbps down and a measly 56Kbps up. That's not a technical limitation -- you can usually buy more bandwidth at a premium price without upgrading your cable modem, but even that's maxed out by the providers, usually around 4Mbps up.
Sigh...maybe someday they'll sell us REAL broadband in this country.
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The BBC had this story yesterday about scientists who would like to use smart dust for extraplanetary exploration.
I think this is an absolutely brilliant idea, eliminating a lot of the issues that have plagued other planetary probes -- particularly the primary problem of getting something the size of a car all the way to the surface intact.
This is the web page for the Berkeley professor who is generally credited with "inventing" the idea of smart dust and continues to develop and refine the technology and research. Their goal is to produce smart dust "motes" that are only 1 millimeter in length.
The BBC article says scientists envision "swarms" of the tiny sensors drfting through the atmosphere of a planet, transmitting data back to a satellite or "mothership" in orbit. The smaller size that Pister is working to develop would be required to deal with the aerophysical issues of distributing the motes into the atmosphere, so it may be a while before any workable systems can be developed.
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The graph above displays the cost per milliliter of a number of popular liquid substances. You'll note that petroleum oil is the cheapest item on the list. But head and shoulders above the rest is inkjet printer ink. The graph doesn't really offer enough points of comparison to know if inkjet ink is the costliest liquid on Earth, but it's hard to imagine any other liquid that might surpass that. (graph via Gizmodo)
With that in mind, I'm not so sure if this is a good thing or a bad thing: a company called Memjet has developed a new inkjet printing technology that dramatically speeds up the page-per-minute speed of printers by doing away with the traditional print head mechanism and instead using one that runs the entire length of the paper feed, print each line of a document at once rather than waiting for the head to move from side to side. (Be sure to watch the video of this technology in action)
I'm sure HP, Epson, and all the other printer makers will be doing some fast reverse-engineering when this hits the market, because it will blow away their current products. I'm just afraid of how much they're going to charge for replacement ink cartridges.
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Another step in the right direction for PCs: Engadget reports that VESA has approved the spec for a new video connector called "DisplayPort" that will replace the traditional DB9 VGA connector and the even bigger DVI connector.
On the downside, even though the connector has an HDMI passthrough, it doesn't support HDMI itself, so there'll still be one type of connector for your PC video and another type for your home electronics, even though the convergence between the two gets closer and closer with every new device introduced.
Personally, I won't be happy until everything uses UWB and we can kiss all the cables goodbye forever.
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Here's a bit of science news that is both amazing and deeply troubling at the same time: the journal "Nature" has published a paper that explains how researchers were able to introduce a memory into the brain of a rat and then use a drug to "erase" that one specific memory. (via 3QuarksDaily)
The memory was "given" to the rat via typical behavioral modification, nothing new there. Being able to map and follow the brain processes for creating a memory is a big deal, too, but it's the ability to deliver a targeted chemical that wipes out a specific memory that should have everyone quaking in their boots. Sure, there are some legitimate and positive uses one can imagine (the article specifically mentions using it to treat PTSD), but it's just waaaaay too easy to imagine this being used improperly against people, especially given the proclivities of the current gang of criminals in Washington. For the time being, the drug in question cannot be used on humans by law, but our dear Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has already made it clear that the rule of law really doesn't matter anymore.
Permalink |Today's Boston Globe reports that the popular local restaurant chain Legal Sea Foods is installing payment terminals at every table in every one of their locations.
There's a growing realization that a lot of credit card fraud comes from waiters who steal your card number when they take it away from the table to ring up the check (just ask my wife's brother-in-law, who was sent up the river for doing just that), and a growing acceptance of self-service payment.
Personally, I think this is a killer idea and you'll find card swipers at tables in just about every imaginable chain restaurant in short order (pun not intended). Easily one of the most aggravating parts of dining out anywhere is the silly business of attending to the check: it requires no fewer than 3 trips to your table by the server if you are paying with a credit/debit card. It slows down the servers and can keep you waiting long after you're done eating -- with a squirmy small child in tow that wait can be nearly unbearable.
I forget where we were, but I know I have dined somewhere where the server brought a wireless swiper to the table. I think that's a much better concept for high-end restaurants, where it would look incredibly tacky to have a swiper bolted to your table. The wireless device even had a printer that immediately gave out a receipt. But at your average Crapplebees or Chili's, this is perfect.
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Via CoolHunting, have a look at this website for a company called SmartWool.
They've found a way to selectively breed sheep which produce a wool that has thinner fibers than ordinary sheep wool and a high concentration of keratin, then treat it with a proprietary technology (the website doesn't say exactly what, but my guess is some nanotech not unlike the stuff used in my beloved nanopants) which increases the natural insulation value of the wool so that it not only keeps you warm when it's cold, but helps keep you cool when it's hot -- a far cry from wearing regular wool in the warm weather. It also does a better job of wicking away moisture than cotton or synthetics, and doesn't promote the growth of bacteria that produce bodily odors.
There are a ton of products already available that are made from SmartWool, with an obvious bent toward outdoor activewear. Personally, I am thinking about buying some socks for my trip, as we'll be on foot a lot, and it would be a good idea not to stink up the cottage too much with my smelly feets.
As a side benefit, this company is committed to a wide range of green and sustainable practices, and (not unlike a certain Vermont-based ice cream company) they donate a portion of their profits to environmental and other earth-positive groups.
Permalink |Via Engadget, I just read this very interesting article at ExtremeTech: a company called Novel Concepts is working on a heat-dissipating material that is only 500 microns thick and could be used to "skin" electronics and ultimately replace heat sinks and fans inside computers and other devices.
The benefits are myriad. The ability to keep microprocessors cool is a definite issue in the development of faster CPUs and computer design. If you've opened up a current-gen PC lately, you know that the thing that takes up the most room inside the case is the whopping great heat sink that has to sit on top of the CPU. That's a particular problem in laptops, where there isn't room for a toaster-sized heat sink assembly. Better heat dispersion would benefit form factor design and allow chipmakers to push CPU speeds even faster.
Then there's the issue of noise from fans. I used to support a user who had a ThinkPad with a fan so noisy it sounded like there was a small airplane revving its engine on her desk. I have gotten used to the white noise effect of having multiple computers running in my workspace all day, and almost never even notice the fan noise until they all power down and things go back to being genuinely silent. My own PC tower at home has dual fans for the motherboard AND a fan for the GPU on the graphics card (which is actually much noisier than the other two); I would kill for a little "silent running" in my den.
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Canadian cell phone service provider Telus has ended their porn-on-demand download service for video-enabled cell phones after only six weeks, according to the Toronto Globe & Mail.
There had been much public outcry against providing such a service, particularly from a Roman Catholic archdiocese, which threatened to boycott the company.
My prediction -- at least one American provider will launch something similar in less than 5 years (indeed, probably much sooner). Telus's only real mistake was being ahead of the curve on public acceptance. If a "safe" porn brand like Playboy were behind it, there would be an American market for it almost overnight. And if some major player doesn't embrace it, I guarantee there will be somebody who develops a private network for it...provided such a thing doesn't already exist and just keeps a very low profile.
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They've been promising "e-ink" and "e-paper" and the like for at least ten years now, but they've been a little shy on the deliverables. The E-Ink boys over in Cambridge have had some traction with their technology, particularly in the Sony Reader that came out late last year, but overall the pickings are slim.
Yesterday, Engadget had a blurb about the product in the picture above: a "roll-up" display called Readius from Philips, which comes a lot closer to the promise of "e-paper you roll up and put in your pocket". It collapses down to the size of a large cellphone but unfolds like a wallet to give you a five-inch display screen.
Even better, though, it can be used for a variety of applications -- e-book reader, RSS feed reader, MP3 player, GPS device, or some combination therein. The company's website doesn't mention including a cell phone a la the iPhone, but it's clearly a convergence device that covers a lot of the same territory that cell phones have tried to do in a similar form factor but with teeny-weeny screens.
For the right combination of features, I would absolutely consider buying one of these myself, and I would go so far as to say that this is a more likely direction for portable connectivity devices than anything else I've seen yet.
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See those flecks of black pepper on that finger?
They're not pepper. They're RFID tags. Teeny, tiny dust speck-sized RFID devices, developed by Hitachi.
The blogger I've linked to (via Engadget, btw) says that Hitachi's vision for these tags is for embedding in paper, particularly as an anti-counterfeiting tactic for currency. At that size, their signal range is quite minute, so they would have to be used in conjunction with an RFID scanner to be detectable. But because of their size there's almost nothing they couldn't be embedded in somehow, making them excellent for covert uses or other ubiquitous hidden monitoring purposes.
Permalink | Comments (2)You might need to brush up on your acronyms to have any idea of what I'm about to post:
Ericsson is bringing out a WAP that offers WiFi, WCDMA, GSM, and even DSL all in one handy bundle! (via Engadget
And now for the Geek-to-English translation:
Many people, particularly the all-important 18-29 demographic, have forsworn landline phones at home in favor of using their cellphone as their primary telephone. However, cellular reception can be spotty, making cell phones less than 100% reliable for that purpose. Meanwhile, the popularity of home wireless networking has also made it de rigeur for the same crowd. So the clever folks at Ericsson have devised a combo wireless unit that transmits 802.11g WiFi and the two most common cellular services in the US, GSM and WCDMA. Thus your wireless network access point can also act as a booster for your cellular signal at home. It also acts as a modem for your DSL broadband service.
The actual intended customer for this convergence device is not the home user per se, but rather the various companies competing for your dollar as an all-in-one service provider. By simplifying your connectivity down to a single box, this gives the non-cable broadband providers a way to bundle up several services into one. Don't be surprised to read in the near future that some electronics maker has done the same thing with coax instead of twisted-pair so that the cable companies can do the same thing.
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Sure, nanopants are yesterday's news. Buckyballs? *YAWN* Gray goo? Yeah, right.
All right, ya buncha techno-jaded blogsters, how's about artificial red blood cells made out of molecular nanobots? Capable of delivering 236 times the amount of oxygen that a real red blood cell can deliver to tissue! The scientist who is developing this technology, Robert Freitas, calls them "respirocytes".
In a medical application, respirocytes would be beneficial to patients with anemia and chronic lung diseases, as well as in emergency situations where maintaining oxygen saturation is critical. They could also be used to enhance stamina and physical performance as a military application...or, obviously enough, for athletes. Who needs blood doping when a shot of nanobots would crank up your performance even more? Of course, it will be a lot easier to detect the presence of the respirocytes than it is to conclusively prove blood doping, but I can already imagine the day when somebody is stripped of their gold medal for using performance-enhancing nanobots.
Permalink |Boston-based consulting company The Yankee Group has published a new report that predicts that TiVo will be out of business by 2010.
Hmmm...while various industry analysts have been predicting the imminent demise of TiVo for a while, I don't think it takes a lot of imagination to come to the conclusion that the business model for TiVo's service offerings has a finite lifespan. Their ability to persevere for as long as they have is testament to the validity of the core concepts of both the technology and the service, but the big dogs of the content provision services have too much leeway not to be able to win out in the end.
So DVRs are here to stay, and the time-shifting service is also here to stay, all provided by the cable/dish companies. But my bet is that TiVo will outlast that 2010 drop-dead date by turning into something else. At the very least, they have the strength of their superior UI and feature sets that leave them in a position to license their software (which, as you'll recall, Comcast has already agreed to buy). That also gives them the wiggle room to continue to develop and innovate in the emerging "home media convergence" space while shedding the cost of running a hardware or service business.
Maybe that's what the Yankee Group report says, too, I don't know. But if they think TiVo can't make it for another three years, I think they're jumping the gun.
Permalink |A few recent dispatches from the world of radio worth mentioning:
HD radio is beginning to make serious in-roads into many major markets. For example, in the Boston market, there are now 22 stations offering a total of 34 "channels", where just two years ago there were only a couple.
But HD is small potatoes compared with the booming growth of satellite radio. This Wired article from last week says that there are only a few hundred thousand HD radio receivers in use in the US compared to 13.5 million satellite radio receivers, and even 4.7 million HD radio sets in the UK (where it is called DAB).
The Wired article also points out that in the US, HD radio broadcasters use their sub-bands for multicasting (which is how 22 stations broadcast 34 channels of content), whereas in the UK the BBC and other broadcasters offer a variety of services in addition to the music programming (many of which would face challenges from the RIAA and friends in this country).
Even though satellite radio has the edge at the moment, there is still no guarantee that it will win out over HD radio, which has several advantages including the well-established infrastructure of thousands of radio stations across the country and the value of locally-oriented programming -- even though Clear Channel and Inifnity and the like have centralized much of their programming, it would be easy for them to decentralize it if local content proved to win away satellite listeners).
Despite their relative success as noted above, the two satellite services have still not quite lived up to their own projections. For much of 2006, there was speculation that the two would merge into a single service that would have a much larger audience. But late last week the FCC announced that they would not approve of such a deal. In fact, it was specifically disallowed in the 1997 regulation that licensed the two satellite services.
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Sorry, but the implications of this just aren't good: a biotech company in St. Louis has announced that they've developed a chipless RFID system using ink that can be tattooed onto skin harmlessly. On top of that, the ink can be colorless, creating an "invisible" tattoo. Its signal is not hindered by the presence of hair on the skin, and is detectable without line-of-sight from 4 feet away.
The ostensible use for this product, says the biotech firm, is to provide a less intrusive RFID-based system for tagging and identifying livestock, pets, and even food products. Oh, and military personnel.
Yep, people. Tattooing people with a permanent, always-trackable, "invisible" mark that allows them to be electronically monitored and/or detected by anyone with a scanner capable of picking up RFID signals from a few feet away. The last time there was this sort of systematic plan for tattooing people for easy identification, it didn't turn out so well.
Despite the undoubtedly honorable intentions of the biotech company involved, it is all too easy to imagine that, given the current degradation of civil liberties in this country, the extension of this technology to the general public would be a strong temptation to the evildoers who run the government.
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I realize I am a couple of days late in getting around to posting about this, but last week LifeHacker was quick to pick up on this forum post from a guy who built his own mini-notebook computer using the circuit board from the Commodore 64 joystick game. It even has an SD Card so you can load other games into the fully-operational C64 BASIC (provided you remembered to convert all your old 5.25" Commodore floppies to another medium years ago).
Very cool, but that's not the only way you can enjoy Jumpman, M.U.L.E., Impossible Mission, and all those other classic C64 games. You can also run a Commodore emulator on your Compaq PocketPC (pictured above as well), or even on your PalmOS device. It can't be long before there's a port to just about every imaginable platform.
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Anybody even remotely familiar with the RFID world knows that "skimming" represents a significant issue as RFID-enabled items begin to hit the market. Recently I posted about a proposed firewall solution that might help protect your RFID-enabled items by disguising their signals.
While that seems like a very elegant solution down the road, you may need to apply a little brute force in the more immediate future. RFID signals are actually very easily blocked by protective materials. So you could buy a tin-foil wallet, but Engadget says a Japanese company has introduced a card that goes in your regular wallet and has the same effect. They also have a "wrapper" of sorts for your cellphone.
Now they just need to introduce a helmet to sell to the mind-control crowd.
P.S. Why do we still call it "tin foil"? It's been "aluminum foil" for at least 50 years.
Permalink | Comments (2)The NYT Technology section reports today that AT&T, the new owner of SBC Communications, which in turn is the owner of Cingular, will be "de-branding" Cingular just in time to coincide with the rollout of those super cool Apple iPhones in June.
In the story, a talking suit for AT&T says that they don't see any issue with losing customers due to de-branding. "If you give them what they want, the brand is secondary," the mouthpiece said. There's more than a little irony there, you have to admit. I mean we're talking about a cell phone service provider. But in the larger perspective, she's made an interesting observation: the "wireless service" business has gone through so many mergers, changes in ownerships, identity swaps, and so on that the branding has become nearly meaningless. It's "brand of the week", and all you can hope for is to remember which name you're supposed to write on the check when you pay your bill.
Wireless service providers are not the only ones who are driving the very concept of branding to its inevitable doom. If you're like me, you've been the victim of at least one bank merger and subsequent name change. Ditto for cable companies (not surprising, since they're often the same people as the cell phone companies). It seems to be mostly service-oriented brands that suffer from "brand of the week", but because the engine of commodity-driven capitalism has devolved into a never-ending stream of M&A, it trickles into every aspect of our consumer culture.
I'm still trying to decide what the larger impact of the failure of branding means. Does it imply that service businesses will, in fact, have to return to paying attention to the quality of their actual service offerings in order to keep anyone as a customer for more than a month at a time? Or does it mean that the spiral of shitty service and customer churn will only increase as no one feels any need to pay anything more than lip service to the interaction? I mean, I think most people would accept the proposition that most wireless service providers, cable companies, banks, credit cards, and so on already suck ass, but just how bad can it get before the whole thing collapses? People in the former Soviet Union eventually got used to the charade of "service" in their economies and developed elaborate black markets, layers of privilege and other mechanisms to manage their daily needs; are we headed for a similar "Potemkin economy"?
Permalink |Via Obscure Store, I read this USA Today article this morning about people who have chosen not to be caught up in the swirling vortex of "always-on" electronic communication.
The "Tech-No" name is cute (and I wish I had thought of it first), but I'm not sure I buy the assertion that these people are a "small and dwindling" group. The article cites a statistic that 81% of Americans between the ages of 18 and 64 are "Internet users", but that statistic doesn't differentiate between the heavy users and the light ones. It's rather like the statistic that sometimes gets pulled out that claims that 80-something percent of Americans are "Christians" -- it doesn't distinguish between the hardcore fundie freaks and the "Easter and Christmas only" crowd.
Having worked with some seriously high-usage people at my previous job, I tend to think of myself as someone who isn't fully initiated into the cult. Then I interact with my family, old friends, people in my local community, etc. and realize that I have, in fact, consumed significantly more Kool-Aid than most of the people I know. The "digirati" have turned into a self-reflective category of people who can't see beyond their own world. I'd be willing to bet that any serious large-scale examination of the general adoption of contemporary electronic communication in all of its varied manifestations would show significant gaps in "connectedness" in the population at large.
Having said all that, though, I do agree with the proposition in the story that there will be a significant social backlash where "disconnectedness" becomes the new cool. It will begin as a perk of the rich and powerful, who always have the ability to control access to themselves through mediators. As our increasingly security-controlled society starts to push various methods of electronic monitoring onto the broader populace, the desire to be constantly accounted for will drop off dramatically, and the ability to go "off-grid" will take on huge social cache (at least up until the point it become completely illegal to be unmonitored).
Permalink |In our continuing saga of the $800 TiVo versus the El Cheapo Comcast Motorola DVR, the latest word is this: TiVo says that they have finally worked out a deal with Comcast to let Comcast DVR customers install the TiVo OS onto their set-top boxes.
The only news that would have been better was that they were rolling it out to my town tomorrow, but it will be available in test markets this spring, and across the rest of the country later in 2007.
Until I can afford that Hannibal 1 baby, I'll just have to put up with the wait.
P.S. Does this smell like TiVo's exit strategy to anyone else besides me?
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One that looks nice and is not too expensive...or we shall say "Nii!" again!!!
It's an on-demand world these days, and the next two businesses to be sacrificed on the altar of J-I-T production are big-box bookstores and anyone still in the video rental business, including NetFlix.
You've heard it before, right? Well, yes, you have. I have been hearing it for a dozen years at least, but I think this time the predictions may have more than wishful thinking behind them.
This Fortune article from last month says it's the "next little thing", but books-on-demand from a stand-alone kiosk are making their debut in 2007, offering over 2 million public domain titles, and they expect to work out deals with publishers to be able to offer virtually any book in print within the next five years.
Of course, these days big-box bookstores like to sell you a lot more than just books. The also like to sell you DVDs, but, gosh, wouldn't you know it, Sonic Solutions has just announced a DVD-on-demand system that will let people download movies and burn them to their own DVDs -- and they've already signed on all of the major studios so that you won't have to pirate anything in the process (as long as you're okay with whatever copy protection and DRM they build into the system). The resulting multi-fold increase of the number of titles legitimately available for download (whether limited-use or permanent purchase) should be the final nail in the coffin for small video stores, a serious thorn in the side of big-box bookstores, and will probably cause NetFlix to have to completely overhaul their business just to survive.
Along those lines, do take time to read David Denby's piece in this week's New Yorker where he considers the effect of recent technological innovations on the entire film industry. He does have a few decent counter-arguments to the current conventional wisdom, but overall he ends up having to agree with the prognosticators.
Nii! Nii!
Permalink |I don't know why I am always so impressed with the latest developments in electronic storage, but I am.
ZDNet reports that SanDisk has officially launched their 32GB flash drive for use in laptops just in time for the big CES show next week in Las Vegas. Though they won't name names, SanDisk claims that laptops with flash drives will be appearing in the first half of 2007.
Meanwhile, for those of you who just can't get enough disk space...you know, like Microsoft Office users...CNet reports that Hitachi has just announced their first 3.5-inch 1-terabyte hard drive, with an MSRP of $399 (which means the street price will probably be $30-$50 less).
Note that neither of these announcements involves the so-called "hybrid hard drive" technology announced by Samsung in mid-2006. Some of those will be on display at CES next week, too. Hybrid hard drives use a combination of flash and platters to speed up disk access and lower power consumption, but they aren't necessarily intended for boosting storage capacity per se. The terabyte magnetic drives make use of another recent innovation: perpendicular storage, allowing the drive makers to squeeze more storage out of existing magnetic platters and form factors.
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The idea of targeted advertisements is certainly not new at this point, but it's manifesting itself in some very different ways as we give up more and more personal data to companies trying to market stuff to us.
The picture at the top of this post is a screenshot of someone's recent experience with Microsoft's local.live.com satellite map/image service. As he zoomed in on a location in downtown Los Angeles, Microsoft's comibnation of satellite imaging and 3D modeling produced this "fly-over" map which included a billboard promoting the movie "Eragon". The billboard is not there in real life, it has been inserted by Microsoft and the ad is targeted at this particular person based on his surfing habits. Here's a Wall Street Journal story (reprinted from some local newspaper and linked on Slashdot) that describes the new advertising scheme.
Television advertising has had to be very broad by technical necessity, but now that barrier is about to fall by the wayside thanks to your friendly TiVo (and other DVRs that collect viewer data). This New York Times article talks about the ability to create tailored commercials on-the-fly. It's being tested right now on FOX by inserting different elements of a Wendy's commercial that offer "commentary" on the football game in-progress by a bunch of talking raccoons. But that's just the beginning. Two different companies are developing the technology needed to customize ad content right down to the individual household -- you might get to see an ad for your favorite beer, while I might get an ad for a new computer, all because our DVRs and cable set-tops can transmit viewing data back to the cable company, which can then differentiate what ads are sent where.
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I haven't been keeping up with RFID news as much as I used to, but I saw this post at BoingBoing last week and thought it was worth noting: a pair of computer security experts recently published a paper outlining a method for implementing a small-scale firewall for RFID tags that would be of enormous benefit by protecting consumers from having their personal and financial data swiped by remote scanners.
RFID tags are already embedded in American passports, and anyone who has ever spent time near a payphone in an airport lobby knows that the place is full of scammers stealing credit card numbers, so the likelihood of people using RFID scanners to swipe identity info that way is very high. Now extend that into the on-coming barrage of credit cards, drivers licenses, supermarket loyalty cards, even those rechargable payment cards you get at Starbucks all with RFID tags in them.
The firewall works not unlike a typical network firewall -- it broadcasts a single "translated" signal based on the signals coming from the tags it is connected to so that the original signals remain hidden to external devices but the actual data from them can be passed to authenticated receivers (such as POS terminals). (Read the original article itself here if you're interested in the hardcore technical details)
It's a bit more high-tech than the solution many people recommend -- keeping all your RFID-embedded items in a foil pouch that bounces off anything trying to receive the signal -- but tinfoil wallets probably aren't all that practical on a daily basis.
Permalink |Wired reports that Qualcomm, a company better known for its cell phones but also the publisher of the venerable e-mail software Eudora, has decided to abandon the existing code base for Eudora, port the whole thing to Mozilla's Thunderbird API, and go open source, inviting software developers to do with their product whatever they will.
(Don't you just love it when I talk geek?)
In the process, they're also going to stop charging for it. What?? Give software away?? Well, there's a few things to keep in mind: first, that whole cell phone thing. Eudora is a legacy product from Qualcomm's earlier days as a software company, but now they've got bigger fish to fry, and this just isn't the right sort of fish. Second, nobody buys e-mail software anymore; it's become part of the set of basic tools everyone just expects to be on every single computer they touch, and there are enough free e-mail clients in the world that no one wants to shell out $20 for it (except, of course, the die-hards, who are a bit over-represented in the Eudora user community). Third, in the end this reflects really well on Qualcomm; in a sense they're "donating" Eudora to the Open Source world, where fond and loving geeks can take care of it forever and polish it to a fine shine that true nerds everywhere will appreciate. They very well could have just shitcanned the whole thing (which, in fact, they tried to do once and were convinced to keep it going by that self-same geek fanbase).
As it so happens, I still use Eudora myself. I started using it on my Mac Quadra back in the early 1990s, when e-mail was still a big deal in and of itself, and when I moved over to a Windows box several years later, I kept Eudora rather than submit myself to the clusterfuck they call Outlook Express. Now, a dozen or more years later, it's still my stand-alone mail client. I dutifully perform each and every little upgrade, even though I have never paid a dime for the software in all these years (I use the "sponsored" mode). I never warmed up to the mail client that was built into Netscape, which has evolved into Thunderbird, but Eudora stayed comfortingly familiar, if more and more antiquated each year.
I will probably abandon Eudora once the switchover occurs. In fact, I may abandon it even sooner. These days I use Gmail for 90% of my e-mail tasks, and only use Eudora to pop mail from my Comcast account. I could just forward all my Comcast mail to Gmail and be done with it.
Oh, the title of the post? Read the Wired story and you'll get it.
Permalink | Comments (2)The capacity of flash memory has increased so much in the last couple of years that it is now large enough to compete with traditional magnetic hard drives both in terms of storage and price point. So much so that starting with the next "model year" of laptops, we're going to see laptop PCs loaded with flash drives instead. Laptops that now weigh 5 or 6 pounds will be even lighter and the form factor can be made even smaller without compromising performance.
But you ain't seen nuthin' yet. Among the many tantalizing peeks at upcoming technologies that got demo'ed at Intel's big conference a week or so ago is another new memory technology called "phase change memory" (PCM), or sometimes also called "ovonic memory". Intel says that they expect PCM to be ready-for-primetime within 10 years and once it is that it will supersede flash memory as the storage medium of choice.
Platters and spindles will probably continue to have a home in big hardware, even as they, too, get smaller in size and bigger in capacity, but every laptop, home PC, iPod and other gizmo that has traditionally used HDDs will be redoing their hardware roadmap to leave them by the wayside.
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Our cybernetic future is looking brighter every day thanks to the work of researchers right here in Boston.
The Boston Globe reports that Boston Scientific has won FDA approval to begin selling it's Harmony HiResoluiton bionic ear -- a cochlear implant device -- to profoundly deaf people in the U.S. beginning early next year.
Meanwhile, the FDA has also approved the AbioCor artificial heart developed by Abiomed. What's so cool about this artificial heart, unlike its several predecessors, is that it uses rotors instead of pumps to continuously circulate the blood throughout the patient's body. The rotors make the artificial heart smaller, more reliable (it could last as long as 10 years, compared to 18 months for other artifical heart technologies), and have the unusual side effect of causing the patient to have no pulse.
Doctors are not sure if the lack of a pulse is a problem or not, since usually the lack of a pulse means you're dead. It may or may not play some poorly understood role in the body that only time will tell. Research on cows indicates that the cows do just fine.
(Bonus points for you Trekkers who might appreciate the connection between the picture above and the AbioCor device)
Permalink | Comments (2)CNet News reports that at it's semi-annual conference, Intel has laid out a hardware roadmap for developing motherboards that will have 80 1-teraflop 3.1 GHz core processors within the next five years. They'll use static RAM attached directly to the processors to move data from the cores into main memory.
Obviously, such intense processing power will be used with servers and high-end computing, not with your home PC or laptop. For those you'll just have to live with the so-called "quad-core" processors, which are a package of two of the current Core Duo processors. Nevertheless, that's a mighty big leap for production-grade computing.
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As those two paper cut-out fellows say in the Guinness commercials, "Brilliant!"
This is a very clever hybridization of terchnologies -- USB "batteries". You charge these up by connecting them to the USB port of your computer and then use them like conventional AA batteries. Perfect for people who travel around with a laptop and, say, a digital camera or an MP3 player. Or you can even use them at home in place of other rechargable batteries.
At the moment they're only available in the UK and cost £12.99 (about $22) for a pair, so they're not cheap or easy to find yet. I would expect the knockoffs to start appearing pretty quickly, though.
Permalink |Standards wars come and go, and one standard usually wins out over time, but at the beginning there is often no clear leader. So it has been with the so-called "next generation" DVD technology -- HD-DVD and BluRay are battling for supremacy, with neither side showing any convincing evidence of becoming the favorite (though my own personal bet is that in the end HD-DVD will win just because Sony is behind BluRay and they have a long track record of betting on the wrong horse).
In the interim, though, the multiplicity of standards is creating nightmares for the content producers who can't just produce a DVD in one single format and get it to work on all players. They're handling this situation in a couple of different ways by either going strictly with one format, or by pressing discs in multiple formats, potentially tripling their production costs.
You should be able to see an obvious solution: make a disc that can be read in more than one format. And so the race has been on to develop just such a disc. In short order, a disc was developed that had more than one layer -- one which would play on a conventional DVD player, and one that would play on HD-DVD players.
Slashdot reported yesterday that Time-Warner may have an even better answer: a disc that can be read on all three formats by writing data on both sides of one layer and using a mirror layer to make the third format visible to theplayer's laser. What doesn't seem to be addressed in the news releases is whether or not it's cost-feasible enough to make these discs and then press them for sale in comparison to pressing separate format discs.
Permalink |Via Slashdot comes this brief post from the public site of the scientific journal "Nature": scientists doing genetic sequencing have found a gene that may be responsible for the difference between human brains and the brains of other species.
Apparently, the gene exists in the DNA of many animals, but human beings have 212 copies of the gene in their DNA, while chimps only have 37 copies, and animals such as mice and rats only 1.
They don't really know what role the gene itself plays, though further research is likely to answer that question. Once that's better understood, they'll be able to determine if the sequencing has some relation to higher brain function.
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Via Slashdot this morning, I read this Fast Company article about CFLs (Compact Fluorescent Lights).
These things have been around for 20 years or so, and they've always sucked rocks in terms of the quality of the light they put out, so despite their longevity and their energy-saving characteristics, people have tended not to use them. We certainly have never made use of them (though I think our predecessors here at The Real BRH left us one in the basement).
After reading this article, though, I have to say that I think I might give them another look. This article claims that the latest generation of CFLs has finally managed to solve the quality problems and puts out a sufficiently bright, quiet, and aesthetically-pleasing light to rival the garden-variety incandescent bulb. Plus, these bulbs can last for up to 10 years. Just one bulb saves enough electricity over time to light a city of 1.5 million people.
The article is a good read, because it talks about Wal-Mart's decision to get behind these bulbs and to try to convince Americans to stop using incandescents. The mega-retailer came to this decision when they discovered that that could save $6 million per year in electricity bills by switching over to them, and I thought it was an interesting insight into the collision of hardcore mass capitalism with environmental consciousness, resulting in a surprising outcome.
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Engadget reports today on an "in-the-wild" sighting of a TiVo Series 3.
TiVo has been conducting a small-scale customer beta of the new box. According to the Engadget post, the new TiVo has two CableCard slots ( A CableCard is a PCMCIA card that lets the TiVo directly receive cable signals without a set-top box from your cable company), but the user who has this unit reported significant difficulty getting various CableCards to actually work.
The rumor mill has it that the price of the new TiVo will be a bit steep -- anywhere from $500-800 -- but the feature set is greatly enhanced and the TiVo Faithful and/or anyone who has had to suffer with the appalling DVRs issued by their cable companies will be very likely to bite even at the highest price point. We absolutely and utterly hate our Comcast-provided DVR set-top and I would love to get rid of it at the earliest opportunty, but I have to say that $800 would probably slow me down for a couple of months. If they price it between $300-500, I would consider robbing small children of their lunch money to be able to buy one right away.
Also, if you go to the original blog post where the Engadget guys found this info and read through the comments, one commenter asserts that the Series 3 will be officially announced on September 12 and available to order beginning September 13.
I quiver with anticipation.
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MAKE:Blog has a post this morning about a fellow who bought a Bluetooth headset for his cell phone and embedded it inside a styrofoam banana.
Lucky for him it's an artificial banana, or it would get pretty nasty after about a week, unless he also has a recipe for Bluetooth Banana Bread.
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I posted about this subject years ago, but this graphic reminded me of it again yesterday, and I thought it was worth revisiting, since many of the technologies on it have moved quite a distance along this curve since the last time I talked about it.
This is the Hype Curve, a concept developed by the tech consulting firm Gartner that charts the progress of any given technology along a spectrum of distinct stages of development. There are five stages: the technology trigger, the peak of inflated expectations, the trough of disillusionment, the slope of enlightenment, and the plateau of productivity.
Anyone who pays more than half a degree of attention to tech news recognizes these stages and the seeming inevitability of them, not unlike Elizabeth Kubler-Ross's "Five Stages Of Grief". Not every new product exhibits all the classic hallmarks of each stage, yet it seems that no technology escapes the process.
The reason I like this particular graph is because it does a pretty good job of pinpointing where a lot of popular technologies are in relationship to the stages. However, it is worth pointing out that the curves for each individual technology may vary quite a bit -- some technologies suffer much sharper drop-off from the heightened expectations to the disillusionment phase, others recover into the productive pahse better, and so on. This is just a representation of the process and not an actual charting of the techs. In fact, it's probably very difficult to genuinely quantify the stages of the process except through qualitative analysis of press coverage, and it's always a tricky thing to mix quantiative and qualitative analysis that way. Of course, the Gartner people think they've got it licked and will charge you an arm and a leg for their interpretations, but that's their scam, not mine.
Permalink |Wired News has a story about efforts to bring "voice chat" to online gaming worlds such as "Worlds of Warcraft" and "Second Life".
The idea is very "retro": why not let the people in these virtual worlds actually speak to one another through the implementation of VoIP? In other words, let's make the Internet into a big giant telephone where everyone can talk to one another.
My own humble opinion is that this is where the Internet is headed anyway. The most popular thing on the Web in 2006 is YouTube and it's handful of copycat sites, all of which are turning the Internet into a seemingly endless selection of videoclips. As they have had success in chasing off clips of TV shows and movies, those clips are being replaced more and more with original content made just for the site -- not your home videos, but videos made directly to communicate with the vast audience of the Internet. The smaller-scale phenomenon of "vlogging" is pretty much the same idea without the widespread interest. Ditto for podcasts, which are direct audio programming.
Out of necessity, the original medium of the Internet was text, and this carried over to the beginning of the World Wide Web (which celebrated its 15th annviersary over the weekend, in case you missed it). But just as the telegraph ultimately gave way to the telephone, and as radio was eclipsed by television, the advances in bits-and-switches are seriously undermining the text-driven nature of the beast.
It is here that much of what we believe we "know" about the culture of the Internet and the very concept of "virtual worlds" will slam into a wall, if you ask me. Our whole notion of "virtual worlds" revolves around text. The written word, divorced from the nuances of speech and eye contact, allows ambiguities of all sorts -- contextual, affective, and (particularly) the ambiguity of personal identity. The textual Internet has allowed people to redefine their personal identities any way they like because "on the Internet no one knows you're a dog".
The rise of the MMORPG fostered large communities of people who interacted by the written word along and who chose to manifest themselves in completely artificial personae to fit the cultural norms of those communities, but that phenomenon is in no way limited to MMORPGs. Any online community is subject to these fabrications and performances -- MetaFilter went through a big crisis earlier this year when it was revealed that a longtime member was in fact a shared account used by many people and had been created as a deliberate hoax; it was further compounded when it was learned that the person who had become the principal user of that account had created a handful of "sock puppet" accounts that were passed off as "real" people.
The integration of the advanced graphics of PC games into the MMORPG realm did nothing to reduce the power (and weakness) of text-only communication. Indeed, the ability to develop visible avatars that connected to the aritifical personae actually served to reinforce the concept, acting as a false-positive for face-to-face communication. You really can look like a giant monster, a big-titted siren, a steroid-enhanced muscleman, or even a simulacrum of yourself.
The flaw, of course, is one's voice. You might be able to pretend to be a person of the opposite sex online using avatars and text, but your voice will give you away instantly. We have well over 100 years of cultural experience with communication via voice alone and have long since adapted to twigging out the nuances of vocal communication without eye contact. The arrival of "voice chat" (that is to say, the telephone) to virtual worlds will likely have the effect of sweeping away most of the artifices that we have come to think of as "virtual worlds". The Internet's nature as a medium of mass communication will obviate its adopted context of an "alternate reality".
What passes for the highest end of computer-generated graphics these days recently crossed a long-awaited threshhold where it has become possible for animators to map photographed features of real people onto entirely animated objects, resulting in the ability to make realistic animated films featuring any person, living or dead. As we've seen with just about every other cutting-edge audio-visual technology, it is only a matter of time before this trickles down to the average home computer, at which time people will be able to manifest totally lifelike replicas of themselves in the "virtual world".
I have little doubt that by the time my daughter is an adult that it will be the norm for people to communicate online using their photo-realistic avatars and their own voices the way that we use the telephone now, indeed I suspect that even the avatars will eventually fade to the inevitability of a "videophone" model. Text will be cherished by a smaller subset of people, mostly geezers like me who grew up thinking it was so cool to be able to type a message to somebody in Australia and hear back instantly, but it will cease being the "dominant paradigm" of the Internet.
Thus has spoken The Oracle. Go forth and heed this well.
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Yesterday's tech news included the announcement that Microsoft was putting out another public beta of Windows Vista specifically so that "hackers" could poke at it and point out any security flaws.
Once you've stopped laughing your ass off about that bit of news, you can also read this trade press article which tells us all not to be surprised when the release date slips another six to eight months because the damn thing is nowhere near ready.
You Mac users have my complete blessing to snicker and chortle to your hearts' content.
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The BBC had this story yesterday about a company in the UK which will be stamping eggs with a temperature-sensitive ink which will change colors as the egg boils, telling you whether the egg is soft, medium, or hard-boiled.
I don't know which is the better idea: that, or the sticker that can be placed on fruits and vegetables to detect ethylene gas to tell you the degree of ripeness BEFORE you buy the half-rotten tomatoes at the Stop & Shop.
I do know that both of those ideas are 1000% better than CBS's lame advertising gimmick of laser-etching the Big Eye logo on eggs for the upcoming fall TV season.
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Tod Maffin at ILoveRadio.org was drooling over this the other day: it's a professional grade digital microphone with built-in 1GB flash memory so you can record directly using just the microphone and then download the .wav file to your PC for editing.
Cool gadget, eh? At the moment it's a bit pricey, which will probably limit its initial use to people in radio and television, but I'll bet there'll be cheaper models suitable for the podcasting crowd before long.
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I remember posting about the efforts to bring Magnetic RAM (MRAM) to market quite a long time ago, but it's only just now made its first appearance as an actual shipping product.
Magnetic RAM has the advantage of being able to leave data in a ready state when powered off, just as other magnetic storage devices like hard drives and floppy discs (remember those?) do. And, unlike Flash memory, which has been widely used in a number of electronic devices in the last several years, it does not have a finite number of "writes".
Magnetic RAM is unlikely to replace traditional electronic memory in PCs, where there is actually some value in being able to clear volatile memory routinely, but it's very likely to become commonplace in electronic devices that benefit from instant startups and persistent states of data (think digital cameras, MP3 players, etc.) as well as industrial uses.
Permalink |For the last several weeks, Vonage had been inundating me with e-mails, voicemails, snailmails and reminders on their website about their IPO and how anyone who had been a customer since December would be able to buy in. We've been Vonage customers now for about a year, and I am glad we switched, but it smacked a little of desperation after about the umpteenth reminder.
Apparently there was cause for the desperation, as the IPO tanked on its first day (which is usually the best day), starting out at $17/share but closing under $15. Big investors made money (they always do, don't they), but small fry are left wondering what to do next. Fortune Magazine took a look at what the motivations were behind the decision to do an IPO at this point in the emerging business and came up with a couple of conclusions: the most obvious one is that the initial