Hey Cisco, you got a new stereo

Computer networking giant Cisco is reported to be ready to release a digital stereo system in January. I guess this shouldn't be surprising since a big push in media right now is to make content available everywhere.

Tech in 2009 via the modern Magic 8-Ball

When TechMan was a TechTeen he used to have a Magic 8-Ball. The small black ball with a window was touted as being able to tell the future.

You'd turn the window down and ask a question. When you turned the window up an answer would appear.

The Magic 8-Ball is decidedly low-tech. Inside is a white, plastic, iscosahedron floating in a dark blue liquid. Each of the 20 faces of the die has an affirmative, negative, or noncommittal statement printed on it in raised letters, such as "Don't count on it," or "Outlook is good."

When the ball is turned over and the die floats to the top and one of its faces is pressed against the window, the raised letters displace the blue liquid to reveal the message.

Nowadays, of course, we have a modern way of querying the future and getting an answer that may or may not be true. It is called the Internet.

So to make his predictions for 2009, TechMan turns to the modern Magic 8-Ball.

Devices will continue to merge. Of course the best example of this is the smartphone, which merges the phone, camera, MP3 player, GPS device and personal digital assistant.

The coming year will see the further merger of the still camera and the video camera. Of course even phone cameras can take video, but it's nothing you'd want to watch on a screen bigger than a cellphone's. New high-end digital single lens reflex (DSLR) cameras have begun to come out, such as the one made by Canon. These cameras have pixels in the teens for still shooting and can shoot and store high-definition video. Although they are expensive, look for the price to go down and more cameras to make still pictures and high quality video.

The price and size of solid state (flash) memory will continue to improve and it will begin to replace hard drives. USB flash drives and memory cards will continue to get roomier and cheaper. But as solid state memory advances, it will become the sole memory in many computers.

The Apple Air and some Netbooks already offer this. Solid state memory is more reliable and faster than hard drive memory and falling price and increasing capacity will put it in more and more machines. Some also may have hybrid memory combining a hard drive with flash memory. Hard drives will still be common and will continue to push past 1 Tb in capacity.

Some of the myriad video sites and social networking sites on the Internet won't survive a protracted recession. However this dot.com bust will be less disruptive because few of these sites are publicly held companies. Expect to see some big-name sites give up the ghost.

Chips will get faster and have more cores. This is an easy one. Intel has already announced its new Corei7 chip, and AMD will debut its new Phenom II processors in January. With quad core chips becoming somewhat common and eight-core chips available in high-end Macs, look for the core wars to continue.

We could begin to see USB 3.0 hardware toward the end of 2009, making transfer of large files like video much quicker. The final specification for USB 3.0, which can be up to 10 times faster than the current USB 2.0, was released in November.

And the of course Windows 7 and Apple's new version of OS X called Snow Leopard are coming down the pike. Both will be able to utilize multiple cores.

So those are TechMan's predictions. Now, Magic 8-Ball, will they come true? "Outlook is good."

VHS has finally stopped breathing

Illustration: Jonathan Bieda

Sitting on the bottom shelf of my entertainment center is an antique Sony VCR, a dusty device whose only duty these days is to play old Disney movies and Dora the Explorer videos for my toddler. 

It hasn't recorded anything since my DVR showed up four years ago. 

I've always felt sad that someday that trusty machine would give up the ghost but it turns out the machine is just fine.  It's the whole VHS video format that is dying, and this story by the LA Times is the coffin nail.

Pop culture is finally hitting the eject button on the VHS tape, the once-ubiquitous home-video format that will finish this month as a creaky ghost of Christmas past.

After three decades of steady if unspectacular service, the spinning wheels of the home-entertainment stalwart are slowing to a halt at retail outlets. On a crisp Friday morning in October, the final truckload of VHS tapes rolled out of a Palm Harbor, Fla., warehouse run by Ryan J. Kugler, the last major supplier of the tapes.

"It's dead, this is it, this is the last Christmas, without a doubt," said Kugler, 34, a Burbank businessman. "I was the last one buying VHS and the last one selling it, and I'm done. Anything left in warehouse we'll just give away or throw away."

It had to happen eventually.  Audio LPs gave way to 8-tracks, which caved to cassettes and ultimately to CDs and digital music downloads.  In the video column, VHS was followed by DVD and now Blu-Ray, and video downloads are already occuring.  In fact, one could argue that CDs and Blu-Ray will go down in history as the last physical audio and video medium to be mass produced.

Talk about a Christmas display

 My dad used to spend hours and hours on our train platform at Christmas, but that's nothing compared to what this guy must have put in.

Cable break disrupts communication

A major break in underwater cables has disrupted communications between Europe, the Middle East and Asia. A cable in a similar location broke not too long ago.

Landline usage in homes on the decline

This should come as no surprise - cell phone-only households now number 18%, according to federal figures released today.  The report goes on to say that an additional 13% of households have landlines but receive nearly all of their calls on cell phones.  Together, these figures indicate that nearly a third of Americans are opting to be reachable primarily by a cell phone.

The 18% figure represents data for the first half of 2008.  In the last half of 2007, cell-only households numbered around 16%.  Similar reports for early 2005 have this number around 7%.

It would seem that giving up your landline in favor of a cell phone makes good sense during these tough economic times.  Personally, my landline monthly bill is the lowest of my utility bills, at around $40.  I think I'll hang onto it for just a while longer.

We want to know where you stand on phone technology.  Be sure to vote in our poll or comment below.

Source:  Discovery Channel

Social networking sites are even for the shy

TechMan has never considered himself a social butterfly. In fact, wallflower might be a more appropriate term.

This social shyness may trace back to the ninth-grade dance when the gym teachers stalked the dance floors holding basketballs. This was to enforce the rule that boys and girls could not be closer than a basketball's diameter while slow dancing. Talk about emotional scarring.

What's past is past, but perhaps as a result, TechMan was not an early adopter of the new "social networking" Web sites.

Web 1.0, which emerged in the late '90s and early aughts, was about what you can do on the Web -- shopping, searching, banking. Web 2.0, the current phase, is about sharing your words, music choices, photos and bookmarks, and even reading lists, with others.

Granted TechMan does have a blog, (post-gazette.com/techman), the earliest manifestation by some of an ego out of control. But while some people blog about their daily lives, TechMan sticks to what interests him in the world of tech.

Here are some other "social" Web sites that TechMan has haltingly begun to use:

Twitter (twitter.com) -- Perhaps the most high-profile of the social Web sites, it debuted in 2006. The idea is that you can follow the "tweets," as the postings are called, of people you choose, and others can follow your tweets on the Web site or on mobile devices.

Tweets are limited to 140 characters and the service was originally promoted as a way to tell friends what you are doing at the moment. As a result, early Twitter was somewhat of an ego trip for the digerati.

But in concert with tinyurl.com, which can shorten long URLs, Twitter became more useful. Then news organizations such as CNN started using the service to distribute headlines, Barack Obama's campaign to keep supporters up to date and even the Mars Rovers (actually someone at NASA) began sending tweets.

So now even just following people on Twitter can be interesting, but as with all social sites, it depends on the quality of the people you follow.

Friendfeed (friendfeed.com) -- Friendfeed is an example of an aggregator site, where you can follow updates from people of your choice and their friends on various feeds (Twitter, Flickr and numerous others) all in one place.

Delicious (delicious.com) -- The idea here is that you can bookmark Web sites in this Web application and share them. Even if he doesn't share, TechMan finds it very useful to be able to bookmark a site on the Web and then have that bookmark available on any computer.

StumbleUpon (stumbleupon.com) -- Similar to delicious.com, but the hook here is that you are shown random sites in your interest areas and then bookmark them if you like them.

RSS feedreaders -- TechMan uses Google reader (google.com/reader), which is Web based. There also are readers you can download as desktop applications. They let you keep up with the latest posts on blogs you choose to follow.

Socialmedian (socialmedian.com) -- This is a news site where you can follow links to information on topics of interest. You join a network on various subjects (Apple, food and cooking, lifehacks) and then you can post links to content on that subject and read what others have posted.

Flickr (flickr.com) -- Probably the most popular of the photo sharing sites. Picasa (google.com/picasa) is another. Basically you post photos on the Web that can either be seen by anyone or just people of your choosing.

LibraryThing (librarything.com) allows you to share a list of books you have read or intend to read. You also can see short reviews of books.

Microsoft has turned its gaze to social Web sites. On the home page at its recently updated windows.live.com , you can aggregate feeds from various social sites. Google has a similar service called iGoogle at google.com/ig.

That just scratches the surface of Web 2.0 There's a ton of sites out there.

So TechMan has progressed to being a "lurker" on social sites, reading what others share but not sharing much himself. That would be too much like dancing closer than a basketball.

When is a billion not a billion?

If you had a choice of having a billion coins worth one cent each given to you in Finland or the United States, which would you take?

It's sort of a trick question.

It turns on how these countries name large numbers and that depends on whether they are a long-scale country or a short-scale country.

With the current financial crisis having everyone throwing around numbers in the billions and trillions, a look at naming large numbers might be in order.

Internationally, everything is fine up to a million. But after that things get tricky.

In the United States, a short-scale country, a billion (one followed by nine zeros) is a thousand million and a trillion (one followed by 12 zeros) is a thousand billion. So in short-scale countries, large numbers progress by being multiplied by a thousand. Most native English-speaking countries, such as Canada and Australia, are short-scale countries.

In long-scale countries, such as Finland, to get from one order of magnitude to another you multiply by a million. So a billion is a million million (one followed by 12 zeros) and a trillion is a million billion (one followed by 18 zeros.)

Long-scale countries are continental European countries and those whose language derives from them. There are more long-scale countries than short scale-countries.

For reasons of clarity, some long-scale countries use the word milliard for a short-scale billion and billiard for a short-scale trillion.

But there is yet another nomenclature for big numbers.

Greece uses short-scale, multiplying by 1,000, but a U.S. million is a hundred-myriad, a billion a bi-hundred-myriad and a trillion a tri-hundred myriad. China, Japan and the Koreas use variants of the myriad system.

That brings us to England, which started as a long-scale country. Remember, this is the country that adds superfluous letters to perfectly good words (programme, colour, tonne)

In the 1970s, the United Kingdom's government, media and other official agencies switched to the short-scale system. The British never used the word milliard, preferring instead thousand million.

So, let's confine ourselves henceforth to the short-scale system.

Multiplying a trillion by a thousand three more times we get a quadrillion, quintillion and sextillion. Zillion, by the way, is a generic term for a very large number but has no clearly defined numerical value.

So we come to a googol (note the spelling, not the same as the search engine). A googol is one followed by 100 zeros. It has no particular mathematical significance and its proper name is ten duotrigintillion on the short scale and 10 thousand sexdecillion on the long scale. A googolplex is one followed by a googol of zeroes.

Astronomer Carl Sagan once remarked that to write down a googolplex would take more space than is occupied by the known universe.

In 1960, along came the International System of Units (SI), a metric system that tried to give some clarity by using a prefix for each higher number. Each prefix represents a multiplication by a thousand as in the short-scale system.

Thus mega is a million, giga is a billion, tera is a trillion and so forth through peta, exa, zeta and yotta.

This is the system used to measure computer memory -- where we get gigabytes and terabytes.

Only three countries have not adopted the SI as their primary or sole system of measurement -- Liberia, Myanmar and the United States. Go figure.

Wouldn't want to see this in my rearview mirror

A purpose-built high-tech police car, the "E7" from Atlanta-based Carbon Motors looks like it's straight out of a Batman movie.  Equipped with nifty features like a completely enclosed rear seating area and embedded lighting, this baby will hit 60mph in under 7 seconds and top out at 155mph.  It can even scan license plates and alert the officers inside if the car they're following has been stolen or involved in a crime.

It will be interesting to see if they can compete with the Big Three's law enforcement offerings, which are retro-fitted consumer sedans in most cases.

Pricing and further platform details are forthcoming.

Carbon Motors

Buying an Xbox 360 this season? Here's how to do it right

If you've had any interest in an Xbox 360 (either as a gamer or a loved-one-of-a-gamer), you've probably heard about all the trouble they've been having.  The machines have been failing due to internal heat build up, also commonly known as the "Red Ring of Death" due to the 3/4 circle of red lights that appear on the console when it dies.  Several friends of mine have had this happen more than once.

Microsoft has worked very hard to address these issues.  When my own Xbox gave up the ghost last month, I shipped it back and received my new one in less than a week.  When these problems first started appearing, the wait time was closer to a month. 

They have also redesigned the components inside the Xbox, and a new version (codenamed "Jasper") is out in stores now.  It includes a chipset that consumes less power (therefore generating less heat) and onboard storage memory to accomodate the New Xbox Experience (NXE) dashboard software.  But how can you know if the one you're buying is a Jasper?  Just look through the hole on the box.  The 12-volt side of the newer Xbox power bus required 14 amps.  Jasper models require only 12 amps.  The text visible through the hole will tell you what's inside.

Source: Gizmodo