Corning's Glass Computer Interactive Display of the Future

Simple Ways to Decrease Your Online Vulnerability

Here's a primer for basic common sense online security baselines. From the latest issue of the Marina Times:

SECURITY
Don’t Let Virus Season Get You Down By John Zipperer 

As this issue of Marina Times goes to press, the Middle East is reporting a widespread and sophisticated computer infiltration that has been covertly copying and relaying information from computers in that region and sending the data who-knows-where. It is just the latest reminder of the vulnerability of even heavily protected government and industry computers; in such a world, what chance do you have with your personal hardware and software?

Read the complete article

Is Your Business Ready for the Cloud?

My latest article in Smart Enterprise magazine provides "7 Ways to Determine Your Cloud-Readiness." The article gave me an opportunity to talk with some interesting people about key decisions, technology choices, and more that play into an organization's ability to move into the cloud or to expand its cloud presence.

Smart Enterprise is a custom magazine sponsored by CA and published by UBM. Its target audience is global enterprise CIOs.

You can read the entire article on the Smart Enterprise digital magazine site.

iPhone4 vs. HTC Evo

I do love Apple and Google, and I refuse to take sides. But as a confirmed Mac user (at work and at home) with a much-loved Android phone from T-Mobile, I found this video to be hilarious. (Warning: If you're offended by off-color language, this video might not be for you.)

Steve Jobs, RIP

The Apple website homepage says it all:

Farewell to a business and technology genius.

T-Mobile Still on the Block for a Purchaser?

So if AT&T can't take over T-Mobile, who benefits (other than Sprint's lobbyists, who probably earned themselves big bonus checks)?

As a T-Mobile customer who dreaded having to put up with AT&T's infamously bad customer service but who very much looked forward to getting an iPhone with the new combo company, I'm obviously split.

T-Mobile has justly famous customer service; I still rave to people about the polite, helpful, friendly customer service reps I dealt with a year and a half ago when I switched my phones with the service. Customer service is something of a telltale sign of corporate intelligence, to me; companies – especially large public companies – tend to treat the front-line customer service staff as expendable, and they pay them poorly. That has always struck me as ridiculous and self-defeating; I likely will never talk to or correspond with the CEO of T-Mobile or Comcast, so their exorbitant salaries improve my service not one bit. But I will talk to and correspond with their customer service reps from time to time, and those are the interactions that determine whether or not I stay with the company and continue to help pump in enough money to overpay the C-suite employees.

And despite whatever the corporate honchos would surely tell us during and after the merger (probably crap like, "We will never cut customer service quality" or "Customer service and excellent customer care are always our top priority" or "We'd rather shoot our grandmother into the sun on a rocket than hurt customer service,"), customer service is exactly one of the places they'd look to get rid of "redundancies" and "excess spending."

iPhone should come to T-Mobile eventually anyway (hopefully before my latest HTC smartphone dies), so if all other things remain normal, I will be a happy customer. But it seems that Deutsche Telekom AG has been looking to unload T-Mobile for some time, so it's probably going to be sold to somebody at some point. And I don't want an iPhone with terrible customer service or coverage. If I wanted that, I'd have switched to AT&T a long time ago.

Watch and wait.

Google+ Reviewed – and Liked

My latest article in Northside San Francisco magazine:

TECH TALK 

It's All Over, Zuckerberg

By John Zipperer 

Something funny happened on the way to Facebook accumulating almost as many users as McDonald’s has sold hamburgers. People began to regard Facebook with all of the wariness they usually reserve for the IRS or an angry dentist.

read the complete article

Google Buys Motorola Mobility: It's All about the Patents

Don't spend too much time trying to figure out how a cloud software giant like Google is going to use a hardware manufacturer. The purchase ain't about the hardware. It's all about the patents, and Google's need to undo the screwup it made in the recent auction of wireless patents.

I told friends at the time that Google would find someway to mitigate the damage, and it's nice when events bear me out.

Wisconsin GOP Gov-Elect Doesn't Want High-Speed Trains, Still Wants the Pork

Ever since voters in my home state of Wisconsin shot themselves in the feet last month and replaced Sen. Russ Feingold and elected a conservative Republican to succeed a Democratic governor, we've witnessed the usual short-sighted decisions that this brand of populist conservative has unleashed on our country.

In the latest move, Governor-elect Scott Walker has rejected about $810 million in federal stimulus money that was restricted for high-speed rail, arguing that the high-speed train line would cost the state (horrors!) $7.5 million a year after it was completed.

Now, Wisconsin is not profligate California, but neither is it poor Mississippi. It performs much better than average economically and it has much better than average schools. Though it is now facing large budget deficits as a result of overspending and the bad economy, it will not always face that situation. It will, however, always need innovation and leading-edge developments to stimulate its economy, make use of its world-class educational institutions, and attract talent and investment from outside the state.

If Walker was just worried about the short-term financial situation, then the train project would have been ideal. It is, after all, stimulus money, intended to stimulate economic activity during times when the financial and business systems are unable to do so themselves. Such as, oh, now. But Walker is displaying none of the vision that long-time Governor Tommy Thompson used to show. Thompson, a very conservative and very independent Republican, was vocal in his support for trains in general and high-speed trains in particular. He got it. Walker doesn't, and it will harm Wisconsin's businesses and families in future years as their state falls behind states that are innovating in this technology – and it will increase America's distance behind countries that are leading in high-speed train technology, countries such as China and Germany and France and Japan.

Oh, Newser points out, Walker still wants the money from Washington. He wanted to stimulate other parts of his economy, perhaps, or he wanted to spread it around to projects that made him happy. Either way, he's not making the investment that would have real short- and long-term benefits for his state. The money will instead be redistributed to other states that aren't technophobic.

I think this is just the latest case of short-sighted Americans learning to feel good about giving up the lead in innovation and science and creativity.

Photo from Wikipedia/Creative Commons by Sese Ingolstadt.

China's New Bullet Trains Reminds Us U.S. is Standing Still

The front page of the Financial Times this morning shows off two science-fictionish-looking bullet trains that have just gone into service between Shanghai and Hangzhou. Yes, the People's Republic of China has just added two new cool super-fast trains to its network of rapid rail that, the FT informs us, now extends 7,430 kilometers. I don't know what that is in miles and am too lazy to look up the conversion, but I know it's a lot.

Meanwhile, California is still squabbling over building a north-to-south high-speed rail line in the state. The California version will travel slower than the 400 km/h of the Chinese trains, but much faster than the usual slow rail traffic in this country.

What's happened to us? Why aren't cutting-edge trains and bridges and skyscrapers being built here in the United States? Are we too lazy? (Okay, okay, so 7,430 kilometers equals 4,616.788 miles, and 400 km/h equals 248.54848 miles per hour -- so I've proven that Americans can reform.) Too cheap? Too worried about government spending needed to do giant infrastructure projects? Or – and I think this is the main reason – do we no longer care?

I can be tempted to sympathize with that last reason. I get easily tired of the boosterism of most people in most places, for whom being the biggest and best is a self-justifying pursuit. New Yorkers think they're the center of the universe. San Franciscans think they're the coolest people ever. Texans think nothing can't be made better by making it bigger and gaudier. And we'll easily get tired of the boosterism and the boasting of other countries, such as China's rapidly expanding national economy and ego.

But Americans' lack of interest in being cutting-edge on technology and infrastructure strikes me less as a modest and mature reaction to having achieved a great deal, and more like a rejection of the concept of advancement and technology (and science) altogether. I don't think it's a coincidence that our country's fundamentalist religions are gaining strength and political power at the same time as our country has lost its fascination with how the world really works. Instead, the new spiritualism seems more dedicated to defending how we feel things are, and that's not how science works.

You can't build a 248-mph bullet train without science. Jesus and St. Paul (and the Talmud and Dianetics and the Koran and every other religious source) didn't leave us directions on building bullet trains. That's okay. I don't want Deepak Chopra or Rev. Al Sharpton performing brain surgery or designing suspension bridges, and I don't want Sir Richard Branson or Steve Jobs giving me warmed-over Wired editorials as pop spirituality.

Defenders of America's drift often claim that China's able to do these giant leaps of technology because it has an authoritarian government. But Europe is filled with countries that are even more democratic than the United States, and they're building record-breaking tunnels and bridges and high-speed trains all across that continent.

Another tactic these defenders of staying put use is to argue that private enterprise will build these things in the United States, and we don't need government involvement and funding. If that were true, of course, we'd already have privately built high-speed rail here, but we don't. I'm all for a vibrant and expanding private sector; as I've written here before, I think one of the best things to happen to space technology has been the government's near-exit from the field and private industry's embrace. But let's face it: Private enterprise will be just as happy designing and building the trains and bridges and buildings in Asia or South America or wherever as they would be building them here. Whoever cuts them a check.

Yesterday I read these words by David Gergen, a longtime presidential aide and political commentator, that he spoke at The Commonwealth Club recently:

[T]he reason America became the number-one nation in the world was that we had the best educational system in the world. As of 1900 we were the most-educated people in the world, and we continued to improve the quality of education in this country right through the first decades of the 1900s. Every generation went to school on average two years more than their parents did, and that happened generation after generation after generation. As of the 1960s, we were number-one in college graduation rates in the world, and we had and continue to have the best universities in the world. But since the 1960s and ’70s, since that “Nation at Risk” report, we have actually gone downhill very rapidly. We are now number 15 in terms of college graduation rates. And you know a third of our kids are not finishing high school, another third finish but are not ready for college, not ready for 21st-century jobs, only a third come through the system. We talk about No Child Left Behind – it’s a joke; we are leaving millions of children behind. That’s because we haven’t come to deal yet with this chronic condition.

Gergen identifies part of this overall decline, which is we're just feeding less-educated and less-equipped people into the world, while other countries are equipping their students better and better, all to the betterment of their economies.

I want bullet trains. I want spaceships. I want new cures for diseases. I want giant windmills offshore powering my cities. I want supercomputers. And I want them here, in the United States, as well as elsewhere.

But I fear the tidal forces of culture and history are going to hold back America for a while, until this new wave of superstition has run its course.

So It's Called the iPad, not iSlate or iTablet

Anywho, The New York Times is live-blogging the Steve Jobs sales pitch. When will they shut up and tell us how much it costs?

UPDATE: Naturally, the Apple web site won't post a word about the new product until after Jobs stops yakking.

Yes, I Want an Apple Tablet, but I Don't Think Print Publishers Are the Ones at Risk

Today, Apple is expected to unveil the worst-kept secret of the year: a tablet computer. Rumors have swirled for some time, but my sources tell me what everyone pretty much already knows: There Will Be a Tablet Computer from Apple.

The Baltimore Sun reports that Apple's been doing its usual hardball negotiating with potential content partners, setting prices for digital versions of books (with a generous percentage take for Apple). Others have talked about the possibilities that the tablet could offer for newspaper and magazine publishers. I'm not sure about the periodical publishers -- they (we) have been doing digital versions of our print publications for years, and millions of people already read entire digital magazines, HTML articles, or completely disaggregated bits from periodicals every day. Anyone who wants digital magazines and hates holding print magazines in their hands (it's so much work) has already discovered Zinio or Issuu. What a tablet will do that a laptop computer isn't already doing (or capable of doing) is not readily evident to me, and certainly doesn't qualify yet as a must-buy decision factor for a tablet computer. Print publishing will survive tablets, and publishers will probably find a way to make an additional revenue stream from the new devices. Fine and dandy.

But an Apple tablet will likely have its biggest effects in whatever combination of services and software are possible on a tablet (again, not sure how those differ from a touch-screen-equipped laptop, but whatever). As I've noted recently, to me the magic has always been in the combination of devices into one device, not the birthing of separate devices for each new use (good-bye, Kindle). Make a sleek, lightweight tablet with a touchscreen, voice-enable all of the input features, give it phone capabilities, internet access of course, a big hard drive for viewing movies and listening to audio and playing games, video/still camera, and all of the personal and office productivity software we use almost every day of our lives.

I suspect the Apple tablet will have much of that. And what it doesn't have now, it will in the future. (After all, the computer became the television, your cable provider became your phone and internet provider, your cell phone became your e-mail service and video camera, so why shouldn't your tablet also become a phone?)

Much of the technology reporting has for years been hyper-hype filled, and that is especially true about reporting on Apple products. Hey, I love Apple products. I have two iPods, large-screen Macs at work and at home, and I'm sure I'll buy an iTablet (or whatever it's called) as soon as my finances permit. But not every iteration of iLife is revolutionary. Not each upgrade of the iPhone is a breakthrough.

And if you look over the years at what computers have been able to do (note the 1981 magazine cover above) and each evolutionary leap that has been made due to increasing processor power and ever-more interconnectedness of hardware and data, you see that the whole thing is evolutionary. Steve Jobs is a genius for seeing the opportunities that are thus presented and for pushing his company to go there. (And Apple is not infallible; it just seems that way. Anyone remember the Newton?) But Jobs is not creating these things out of thin air. He is able to look at where the technology goes, what new features and programs and businesses can be enabled by where the technology is evolving, and he's then going there with style and quality.

Others could do the same thing, but I think the modern public corporation is not designed to think in such a way.

Once You Go Magic Mouse, You Don't Ever Go Back

I love technology. I don't get fundamentalist about it and go all extremist, but I do love the high-tech stuff that works beautifully and is designed with great skill. Such as the Nexus One.

The thought occurred to me as I was using my Apple Magic Mouse. Some people rely overwhelmingly on keyboard tricks to do all of their moves on the computer screen, other people rely mostly on their mouse and use the keyboard only when absolutely necessary. Me? I use 'em both. It's faster. And now I've found that the Magic Mouse for Macs works -- oh, so perfectly. It's top is basically a track pad. Its design is sleek (isn't every Mac design sleek?). And it was a great replacement for the wireless Microsoft (yes, Microsoft) mouse I've been using with a succession of Macs since 2000 (just one of the perks of being an editor at Internet World magazine). (Not that you care.)

To put my love with this little device in perspective: I remember hearing in college that a friend of mine had included the microwave oven in a list of inventions that were absolutely essential for life, and I found that hilarious. I still find it funny. I did not -- and I still do not -- think a microwave oven is crucial for a long and happy life.

But as I was just using my Magic Mouse to scroll down a web page, I found myself thinking that it would be incredibly difficult if this magical li'l mouse were taken away from me. Its functions are so perfectly thought out, so well executed, and so appreciated by moi that its future absence would leave me definitely feeling its absence.

So much of computer use makes one contemplate the future -- gee, wouldn't it be great if I had 10 times the memory on this old crate? What if this thing ran faster? Why can't they just integrate the two programs so I don't have to do it manually? And so on.

Well, in the age of broadband and smart phones and Steve Jobs, there are a good number of products and services that don't make you yearn for the future. You'll still welcome the future -- but you won't be hating the present because it's not the future.

And the Apple Magic Mouse is one of them.

Is ESPN Using Old 3-D Technology? Why Do You Need Glasses?

When I read the news that ESPN was going to launch the ESPN 3-D channel in June 2010, I noted with interest that viewers would still need to wear special glasses to view the screen video in three dimensions.

It reminded me of a note by one of the Starlog/Fangoria editors (sorry, I forget which wrote it) about another 3-D technology that would not require glasses for viewing. The note was in a report on the exit from the publishing company of co-founder Norman Jacobs. Jacobs was involved, we were told, in a venture aimed at bringing 3-D television to the world, and glasses would not be necessary.

It took very little digging to find more information on the company. It's called Magnetic 3D, and you can read a bit about the company and Jacobs' involvement here. Just earlier this week, the company announced that it would be debuting its new line of products at the 2010 Consumer Electronics Show, being held January 7-10 in Las Vegas.

If you go and see it, let me know if it works.

3-D TV Coming to ESPN -- Grab Your Avatar

USA Today reports that ESPN is launching a 3-D channel in June 2010 that will air at least 85 sports events in its first year. The channel, creatively called ESPN 3-D, will air as its first program a World Cup soccer match between South Africa and Mexico.

Soccer might not be the best inaugural program, because so much of the game on TV is long shots showing large portions of the playing field -- that's simply how the game is viewed, with only short closeups. Compare that to baseball, which has tons of closeups but of course only bursts of action. Nonetheless, basketball, college football, and the Summer X Games are also slated to air on ESPN 3-D, so we'll get a chance to see how each fares in this format.

How confident is ESPN in the new channel? Mixed, if you ask me. USA Today says the company has only committed to the channel for one year -- hardly enough time for a channel to build an audience, especially when that audience needs high-end televisions and has to wear special glasses.

On the other hand, "ESPN has been testing ESPN 3D for more than two years, even showing a USC-Ohio State college football game in select theaters and to 6,000 fans at the Galen Center on USC's campus," according to ESPN's own report on the development.

I'm looking forward to the soccer match between the earthlings and the Na'vi.