A hundred years ago life was simple. We lived in basic wooden houses with a few machines to crank or push stuff to do our chores. We rode a horse or buggy or walked to work or the store. Entertainment was reading a book or playing cards. If something broke, you fixed it with a tool or brute strength. Fast forward to today. With all the marvels of electronics and digital devices, the odds that something will break or fail are incredibly high. Think back to last week. Which item stopped running, didn’t work as expected, needed a battery, ink, recharging, or a new part? Did the cable, Internet, cell phone, blue-tooth, or MP3 go down again? How often does that happen? What did you do to fix it and how long did it take?
Sometimes high technology crops up in unlikely places. This would definitely be the case if Mexico City ends up providing widespread wireless Internet access to its residents. While obviously a long way off, turning Mexico City into an enormous wireless hot spot would obviously have a large number of benefits.
As with most municipal WiFi projects, the idea would be to provide Mexico City with widespread Internet access as a way of allowing for greater intercommunication of government employees. It would also allow the government to monitor things like security cameras more easily. As a spillover effect, municipal WiFi would give businesses and individuals cheap ways to communicate and get information over the Internet. For example, schools would also be included in the plan.
How about a mind-reading wheelchair? Well almost, the technology exists now and it is just a matter of lowering the costs with mass production and economies of scale. How so you ask? Well simple really, you see there has been some special forces transfer technology that is used by the military and now SWAT Teams. The technology allows a small micro device to read signals from the brain to the voice box. When you are thinking something, before you say it, your vocal cords vibrate. This concept has been getting a bit of chat at Slashdot:
You are probably saying to yourself, “A VCR?? No one uses that old technology anymore!” You may be right, but I know a lot of people who don’t own a DVR or TiVo that will use a VCR to catch an episode of a show they know they are not going to be home for. This is also probably the most common technological problem and I want to put this out there as an example of what is to come for this blog. So let’s begin!
Not long ago a very bright young man names Jason, asked me how online think tanks work. His mom was a School Teacher and you could tell that some of her nurturing had rubbed off on Jason - he was extremely bright for being only ten years old. Well, since I run a think tank, and his mom had just bought me a Latte at Starbucks because my Starbucks Card was empty, I felt obliged to explain how we run things. So, I said:
It’s official now, folks, the irrevocable transition from analog to digital television is set in stone or at least in the legal language of a specific bill. President Bush recently signed a law that makes February 17th, 2009 as the last date that TV stations are permitted to air an analog signal. In a nod to something that might be called “no TV left behind”, the same bill that sets February 17th as the target date also allocates 1.5 billion of your tax dollars to help purchase digital to analog boxes, saving millions of those analog TV’s from an early grave. That gives everyone about 3 years until this law goes into effect.
Satellite car radio is a growing industry in today’s market place. Most common car audio manufacturers have adapted their products to include satellite car radio services. This allows drivers a wider range of music for their listening pleasure making the travel place a much more entertaining place to be.
When it comes to the dreariness and monotony of the daily commute for those employed individuals, satellite car radio can offer a fresh breath of air with their wide variety of entertainment with the convenience of being mobile. Many morning show personalities have opted to take the satellite radio route as opposed to limiting themselves to syndication by normal radio station broadcasters. Satellite car radio has given the on-air personalities a wider range of listeners during the daily commute.
Technology continues its development and advancements for more and better conveniences to modern man. One of the latest innovations combines Blue-tooth technology with that of computer headsets to offer one of the greatest inventions of all time – another wireless wonder – the headset. Professionals on the go may perform their tasks anywhere or anytime with the help of this gadget. No matter how much noise is in your environment, one can easily connect a headset and block out all noise in order to accomplish work and use time efficiently. The uses of a wireless headset are varied and diverse, and wireless headsets do perform a vital function in today’s business world. People are on the go – rushing to meetings, picking up children from work and other activities, going to school, or other necessary activities.
One of the fundamental things that the electronics manufacturing business is increasingly reliant on is the ever increasing speed of computer processors. This is demonstrated in the way that software companies like Microsoft and computer chip manufacturers like Intel and AMD work in tandem. For example, the new Windows Vista operating system requires some pretty high powered hardware to perform well. Many of its advanced visual elements simply won’t run (they’ll revert back to a more standard look that you might associate with Windows XP) if the computer that’s running Vista isn’t equipped with the right kinds of graphics card.
An all too common experience in dealing with computer printers is to go out and buy an inkjet printer for forty or fifty bucks, thinking that you’re getting a great deal. Then when you get the printer home and install it on your computer, it still seems like a great deal. You can print in color, print in black and white, and even print photos. Life is good for a month or two. Then one of the ink cartridges runs out and when you go to the store to buy a new one, you find out that you’re going to have to pay thirty dollars just for a black ink cartridge. Then you start to think that if the color cartridge, which costs thirty five to forty dollars is about to run out too, it would be cheaper to just buy a new printer! Besides being wasteful and expensive, this experience is just frustrating!
