It’s not uncommon to find a hotel over 250€ per night that has a 15€ or higher charge for Internet access. But in the hotels I frequent—I’m fine with just a bed with barely enough space to move around the edges, a shower, and Internet connection, for just over 100€ a night—it seems to be more common to have a free Internet connection included.

Perhaps this is a reflection of younger travelers looking for less-expensive hotels and being attracted like flies (there is one buzzing around my head at this instant here in Paris’ 5^eme where I am connected while sitting in the hotel lobby preparing to take the metro to a meeting) to hotels that provide connectivity.

And the true boon is that Skype on my iPhone can connect to the free wi-fi Internet and I can make Skype calls without having to purchase those “overseas” (and overpriced) mobile phone minutes! Quite a difference to spend USD$0.02 per minute rather than $1.29.

{Part of Sky’s series on using tech when traveling}

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Now why would I say that? Google and Verizon announced yesterday (August 9, 2010) their joint statement on “an Open Internet.” [Verizon] [Google]

I can read the statement two ways.

First, they propose an Open Internet ¹ with all traffic being carried with the same priority regardless of content or purpose. That’s good, and it’s what we want. And if you’re just thinking about the next few years, this is all well and good.

At the same time, they propose that services that might be developed in the future not be subject to neutrality rules, and that they may be offered as premium services.

Therefore, our proposal would allow broadband providers to offer additional, differentiated online services, in addition to the Internet access and video services (such as Verizon’s FIOS TV) offered today. This means that broadband providers can work with other players to develop new services.

This means that services that would be quite distinct from what we know as Internet services today could be offered for a price and prioritized, with access being limited in any way the developer wishes to. Naïvely, I’d say this looks fine on the surface of it because we’d still have the Internet to rely on.

Um…but, putting my analytical hat on, I’d say companies could develop these kinds of services and then “neglect” the traditional Internet, or essentially make the Internet look so bad by comparison (through marketing and promotion of new services), or argue that it’s such a cost sink that it would be left behind in favor of the new services. Services that we’d all have to pay more for². (Like data on our mobile phones, which you’d think would be cheap by now, but seems to be getting more and more expensive all the time?) The “Internet” could end up frozen in time, carrying only the services it carries now, and eventually choked off through neglect.

So, I see the Verizon-Google proposal as trying to appear to satisfy everyone, but I do not think it really serves the ideal of open communication into the unending future—it just proposes neutrality for the old-fashioned Internet as long as it continues to exist, and after that it becomes just another economic game. What would be far more valuable would be a clear statement that values a level playing field for human communication, which is what the Internet ideally serves.

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I guess you gotta wake up from the dream sooner or later. The iPhone was a really great advance, a phone with an integrated iPod, podcasting, visual voicemail, browsing, email and all the software gadgets. And the multi-touch screen clinched the deal. I have had a great two years with it—lots of exploration and fun. (Love those maps!)

But with the upgrade to iOS 4, my 3G iPhone is no longer usable for phone calls, and I’m having people call me on my landline, or just leave voicemail messages for me and I try to return them later on.

Can’t slide the green slide to answer button when a call is coming in. I touch it, try to slide, and it just sits there sucking its thumb. Slide, slide, slide…and it won’t budge. By the time it finally reacts, the call has gone to voicemail.

The Wall Street Journal online [July 28th] reported that (in their opinion) Apple is paying attention now and looking into the situation. I hope so, because I’m still looking at alternatives to this iPhone and to Apple in general, after 32 years of fanatically supporting (and purchasing) Apple products!

In my earlier trials and tribulations

I went to the Apple Genius bar and the genius told me to reset my phone to factory conditions. He wouldn’t even have a conversation with me about anything short of that. Just go home and reset—can’t anything for me.

Then I found other online solutions, none of which worked.

Then I started deleting apps – and after dropping about a dozen apps, the phone got better.

But I still can’t answer calls because of the balkiness!

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The Washington Post reported last week that the Obama administration is seeking to modify the 1993 Electronic Communications Privacy Act so that Internet service providers must turn over transaction records on email communications and possibly web browsing records, upon receipt of a “national security letter” from the FBI. This particular legal process doesn’t require review by a judge—unlike search warrants.^[1]

The law does not allow access to the contents of those emails without judicial oversight…only the more externally-visible addressing information, and that does tend to be what email systems log and archive. On the other hand, the term “electronic communication transactional records” which is what the government could require ISPs to divulge, is not defined in federal statutes, according to the Washington Post.^[2] And so it could conceivably be extended to include other person-to-person communications, such as social media contacts

This is the same process the Bush administration used, in the early 2000s, to ask libraries to turn over the records of books checked out by patrons, which was strongly resisted by librarians at that time.

Phone companies keep records of all of the numbers you call, and these are subject to the same access rules. This has never been a question, and most people in the US are probably at least marginally aware of this.

The real question isn’t whether someone is reading your email addresses and headers—it’s how they are interpreting the titles, subjects, and names of the people you are corresponding with. In the McCarthy era here in the US, you could be blacklisted for associating with the wrong people.

If you have an inquiring mind, would you want someone to judge you based on the titles of the books or publications you’re reading? Or the subjects and addressees of your email?

[2] The New York Times 30 July, 2010 — secondary report and opinion

A whole nother ancillary question is whether your ISP actually keeps these records or not. If they do not, are they then exempt from having to turn over any records, or will the government require that they keep such records in the future? Some ISPs intentionally do not keep certain kinds of records, which helps keep your use of certain services anonymous. And, for instance, I’d guess that very few ISPs, if any, keep records of your browsing history, and this makes it prohibitively difficult to document all of the web sites you’ve visited.

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They’re taking a bit of an extreme position, but in an article Is Apple Making iPhone 3G Totally Unusable To Force Upgrade? TechPulse360 hypothesizes that Apple is forcing an (equipment) upgrade on its customers by making iOS 4 run so slowly on the original 3G iPhones that they’re basically unusable. If course Apple execs aren’t that stupid. But they certainly did not test enough before releasing the system upgrade.

I reported to Apple about ten days ago^[1] that my 3G iPhone was balky and not reacting quickly enough to taps, and I wrote on Friday last week that a “genius” at the Apple Store had blown me off when I told him I wanted to talk with him about why my 3G phone was so slow. He told me to reset the phone to factory conditions and suggested that everything would be fine after that. He didn’t even tell me to come back later to check in—he just said go reset my phone. In other words, go fix the product myself. He really did not want to talk about it.

I really did feel like very few people were seeing or acknowledging this problem. And that perhaps I was one of very few people experiencing this slowness. Except that the AppleCare guy did say he was hearing this a lot…hmmm.

So finally I did reset my phone. And it didn’t make it any faster. It was still balky and stuttering when I tried to touch or drag on the screen. It was so frustratingly difficult to interact with that I just wanted to trash the iPhone and get a DroidX. I was/am that mad!

However, today when I removed a bunch of apps from my upgraded 3G iPhone, it did help quite a bit. I removed everything that has/had “push” notifications (New York Times, AP Mobile, LinkedIn, Facebook and a bunch of others—13 in total) or might be running in a background mode. I don’t know that any or all of them were the culprits, but I got rid of a long list of apps. And today, on a long urban hike, I ran EveryTrail (one of my favorite apps!) and a whole bunch of other apps with only a bit of slowness from time to time. Mostly I encountered the slowness when I was trying to slide the green button to open the phone after it had been sleeping for a while…like when I was trying to answer a call, which still can be a challenge with the slow 3G and the upgraded OS.

TechPulse360 is calling for Apple to offer a downgrade path back to iOS 3 — and I certainly agree with them. I’d like to be able to at least answer calls, and currently the phone is slow enough that this is difficult to do before the call jumps to voicemail.

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What a mistake that was! But how could I have known in advance? I always upgrade my iPhone right away, hoping that it will do more and funner things.

More and funner I’m up for, but slower I was not expecting!

Now when the phone rings (if it rings at all), and I go to slide the green button on the screen to answer the call, it’s rare that the button even responds to my touch, let alone react fast enough to actually answer the call. The phone has turned into one little spinning beachball of death^[1] with this software upgrade. [The suggested  fix is in the last paragraphs of this article, in case you want to jump ahead.]

This video was so close to my own experience I howled with laughter:

Making products obsolete used to be a matter of adding new features to new physical products until you just felt you had to upgrade to the newest phone or computer, but now……but now all it takes is to add enough software features to a device that it slows down and becomes unusable. Makes your customer want to buy another one. Huh?

I have been told that mobile handset makers want their customers buy a new phone every 18 months. And this is driven by new design and new features. I’ve had my iPhone two years now, and don’t really want to want to buy a new phone because of the expense (and poor connectivity), but with the OS slowing down like this I have two feelings. First, I am really steamed at Apple about releasing an OS that slows my phone to the point of being unusable. And second, I would rather go get a Motorola DroidX at this point because it seems like a good match for my needs, but the Droid isn’t offered as a 3G/GSM phone—otherwise I would have switched last weekend.

I went to see the Apple genius at the store. I walked there from home, which takes an hour. The whole time I was trying to open the maps app and have it plot the walking route, so I could estimate my arrival time, and I never did get that estimate because I reached the store before I could open the app and get through all of the steps in the maps app. I reached the genius bar on time, and I explained the slowness of the 3G iPhone to the genius, and his answer was

“you need to restore your phone to factory conditions and reload all of your apps and passwords.”

That was all he would say. He wouldn’t look at the phone, and wouldn’t discuss it further. Just told me to go take care of it myself. Boy did that piss me off!

For me this wasn’t an option because I really didn’t want to lose my passwords and settings, and didn’t want to spend all of the time it takes to go through the restore, the reset and then look up and restore all the passwords and setting (a couple of hours, minimum). It’s like the old canard about Windows machines that get cranky, and you call customer support and they say “just reinstall Windows.” Has Apple really come to this as the first step in fixing a product? And they won’t even discuss other options with you?

A company that insults or ignores its long-term customers is killing off its brand.

The fix, maybe: Here’s a page describing what looks like a real and much faster fix than a full restore—disabling the Spotlight indexing and search on the phone. Indexing is, of course, performed in the background, and does affect and computer’s performance to a degree. It happens on my fast MacBook Pro, and even there it affects performance at times—so it must really be killing the iPhone. Some people feel this has fixed the problem for them, and others don’t.

Cult of Mac also reports that two “hard resets” in a row will cure the slowness. Without a factory restore. And again, some people report that this worked beautifully and some said it didn’t make any difference.

Followup #1—July 30 2010: So I disabled Spotlight indexing, and did several hard resets, combined with a full Restore (factory reset and restore contents from backup). It took me nearly 3 hours (16GB 3G iPhone with 12GB of data in it) and I now have to put most of my passwords in again. I felt that the phone was somewhat faster after the restart, but I can’t really swear that these steps solved the problem. Probably I’d say “it’s not a dog anymore.”

Followup #2—July 31, 2010: It didn’t help much. Still almost impossible to slide the green button to open the phone when it’s ringing. I dumped these apps as a test: Google Earth, Google Mobile, IMDb, AIM (Free), AP Mobile, The Extraordinaries, Facebook, LinkedIn, NYTimes, Yelp!, TweetDeck, Brightkite, WebEx. Let’s see how it goes—I’ll be hiking to day and will try out everything.

So, if you’re experiencing this slowness, you might try one of both of those processes to see if it helps you. My phone was almost useless, so I had to try something.

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Media: A major benefit for all of us will be that embedding media (videos particularly) will become standardized and greatly simplified, so the web developer won’t have to worry so much about plug-ins, players and compatibility.

Geo-location: But more fun perhaps than that, there is a geo-location feature built into HTML5, and it’s available today on some browsers (Chrome, Safari, Firefox). In this article Dive into HTML5 — You are here (and so is everybody else), there’s a cookbook for creating a web page that locates you and displays a Google map centered on your coordinates. My page will figure out where you are located and display the Google map — but only if you have an HTML5-compliant browser, sorry. Mobile browsers are particularly good for this because they know your location quite precisely.

I took an hour this morning to build the page, and subject to some debugging (and figuring out that the whole process is asynchronous), I had it working. Clearly if you’re at a wired location, Google is using your IP address and maybe some routing information to locate “approximately” where you are, but on my iPhone it gets much closer to the real location. I used the “You are here…” article, plus some advice from Google code.

And the interface asks you whether to reveal your location before it goes ahead and gives it to the web page to work with. Nice!

That bit about it being asynchronous is important. Anyone used to writing plain-vanilla javascript code knows that usually javascript statements are executed one after another, right down the page (as it were), and you’d think that making a function call to get the current location would actually complete the task and then return control when it finished, to execute the rest of the javascript statements. But this particular interface simply triggers the process of getting the location, and then when it has completed, it makes a callback to a javascript function where you can complete the rest of the work of putting the map up on the page (or any other thing you want to do with the location information).

This kind of asynchronous execution of statements and functions, with callback functions being given control later on when some action is completed, is common in most programming languages, but many javascript coders don’t use it very much. This is one case where you have to pay careful attention and plan ahead.

To get a better idea of how it works, look at the page I wrote and then view source to see how the javascript is written.

Now the InfoWorld article also mentions that HTML5 might not be a fully-adopted standard until 2022, which means that everyone will have blown by it long ago by then and we’ll have a hodgepodge of implementations none of which will completely match the eventual standard. Ahem! Things have to work faster than that in the online world!

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Every unpaid volunteer; every pro-bono professional; everyone working on some project without pay; all of them are investing in their particular futures. This is particularly true for nonprofit startups.

And I mean to use specifically that word—investing—this means they are giving of their talent and time with some hope or expectation that things will work out in a particular (and good) way in the future. They have some vision of what they are working toward. A truth that so few nonprofit CEOs understand is that volunteers are actually donors and they deserve the same respectful treatment as donors.

This situation should create a covenant between the individual(s) and the organization. And in far too many ways and places it does not. The time and talent of volunteers are too often treated as worthless. Too often they’re paid nothing and they end up being treated as big zeros.

When you start a social-benefit organization, you should think about this in advance, and you should do some planning about:

• the role of your volunteers  in the strategic planning process; it varies, but you should make it explicit;
• how to value the creativity and work of your volunteers;
• how to keep them engaged in the process without getting discouraged if you begin raising money and start paying for some services;
• how to cycle back with everyone to evaluate how things are going and whether their goals are being achieved.

Also, an individual’s circumstances—more specifically whether they need to be paid for their work or not—doesn’t change their value to the organization. If you had two core founders in your company and one needed to be paid while the other could afford to ”invest” time in the venture, which one would you reward with stock certificates? Which is worth more—time or money? Or are they worth equal amounts?

And why is it that almost the opposite happens so often in nonprofit startups? Once the money comes in, or once the organization gets off the ground, those who invested in starting the org find that the transition to paid staff may be difficult or even impossible. Shouldn’t those who add their creativity to the mix be rewarded?^[1]

As JP Rangaswami pointed out recently,^{[see 2, below for link]}

It all begins with a state of mind. A willingness to share. A focus on being open, a focus on enabling people at the edge to do things they would otherwise not be able to do.

Without that state of mind there are no volunteers, there is no set of standards and protocols, there is no process, cumbersome or otherwise, to let the internet evolve: there is no internet.

Without that internet there is no goldmine for “rightsholders” to strip of all value. Without that internet artists will get paid even less than they do currently, however unlikely that sounds.

So, what I’d like you to focus on is the intentionality, the intent, of deciding up front the role those who are contributing without financial compensation, are going to play in your organization. And how to treat them fairly and equitably when it comes to shared outcomes.

[2] The Silent Spring of the Internet: Part II: Understanding “unpaid”— JP Rangaswami Confused of Calcutta

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Clearly when there is warfare in the physical world the combatants are also likely to utilize cyber tactics of some sort, even if only for informational or propaganda purposes, but more likely as powerful tactics to take down their target’s ability to respond quickly or in a focused manner. Because governments aren’t really equipped to handle these types of attacks, which would include attacks against private infrastructure, not just government systems, they’d have to rely on private companies, individuals and groups — essentially private armies — to deflect or thwart any attack.

There are some problems inherent in cyber attacks that make any kind of defense really tricky:

* During a cyber attack against private or military targets online, one might not be able to determine whether the attacker is civilian, criminal or military;

* Online citizen militias (hackers motivated by patriotism) could be impossible to distinguish from organized military cyber-attackers;

* Collateral cyber-damage to (or the freezing of, or interference with) the economic mechanisms that make daily life possible could paralyze large areas if not whole countries; the idea that a government (say the President of the US under the proposed cybersecurity bill) could shut down key elements of the Internet for up to 120 days without legislative recourse[2], could be more dangerous than the attacks themselves;

* An ISP in any particular country (say the US, for example) might be conflicted about whether to allow a sudden flood of traffic to pass through its network to “attack” some foe, or whether to stop that flood in order to preserve its ability to serve  customers—in fact the ISP probably wouldn’t be able to tell the difference;

In a sense, were someone to “shut off the Internet,” which proponents say S 3480 does not allow, it would be suicidal, since the defenders would also lose their ability to communicate with each other and to thwart any attack. Turning off the Internet would not only deny your opponent a playing field, but would deny defenders the ability to respond. And the collateral damage would be that all financial, manufacturing, transportation and other systems that depend on the net would also shut down

Lots of room for debate, but clearly governmental agencies and legislatures are beginning to think about the necessary means and the possible limits of their actions.

[2] The Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act of 2010; some fear that this bill provides a “kill switch” the President of the US could use to “turn off” the Internet;

[-] US Appoints first Cyberwarfare General in guardian.co.uk

[-] EU Committee in UK on protecting Europe against large-scale cyber-attacks

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Robert Reich, who is, like me, surfing the advancing wave of Baby Boomers, suggests that we can (and maybe are the only ones who can) solve our own problem. [April 9, 2010]

More specifically he recommends allowing more immigration and the increased payroll taxes that immigration would bring with it. (Don’t confuse immigration with illegal immigration.)

Reich quotes Ben Bernanke:

Fed Chair Ben Bernanke … listed the choices. “To avoid large and unsustainable budget deficits,” he said in a speech on Wednesday, “the nation must choose among higher taxes, modifications to entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare, less spending on everything else from education to defense, or some combination of the above.”

And then:

Bernanke is almost certainly right about “some combination,” but he leaves out one other possible remedy that should be included in that combination: Immigration.

Reich reminds us that immigrants are younger, want to work and to “succeed” and given a chance can make a difference in the economics of the US.

I think there’s a gem of truth here—but Reich is limiting this discussion to the US economy and not looking at global solutions. Yes, physical immigration and local (read “US”) taxation of income could make a big difference locally. But we’re in our current employment crisis in large measure because we have become global economically while not becoming global in terms of social policy. And maybe we just can’t do that.

And also implicit in Reich’s rhetoric is that we as old timers will need to be taken care of. Certainly we’re all playing the lottery of life, but we’re far less decrepit than people were at our age even 50 years ago.

When I began programming computers at the age of 16 (super-computers, of course, not PCs)^[1], I thought the age of software was upon us and there would be a never-ending stream of challenges and problems that I’d be able to throw my intellect at. Basically forever.

But, in the last couple of decades a lot has changed. First, beginning at most 20 years ago, software has been written by smaller and smaller groups—a few hundred engineers at Microsoft could develop software to be used by many millions of people.^[2] And then, more recently, software engineering has spread around the world with teams in Russia, India, China and many other places, now taking on development tasks. The economic and personnel growth in those parts of the world has stayed localized, reducing the employment chances is the US and therefore the tax base for care of soon-to-be-late-life boomers. It’s clear that the standard of living has to “level out.”

I think that the boomers will face the challenge by continuing to be productive long past the time when our forebears would have retired. And that our productivity will be in the intellectual sector, not the “sweat” sector. Boomers can “give back” in terms of wisdom, stories and experience. And maybe it’s not a case of giving back, but of forward-looking contribution to the active life of the present day. If the Internet survives (I have definite opinions on the fragility of the Internet!), and since online nobody cares if you’re a dog, nobody cares if you have gray hair, or none for that matter. If you’re smart, you can still make it. But, be prepared for living a simpler life.^[3] And your competitors will be all over the globe – as will be your customers.

[2] For the moment I’m ignoring free and open source developments like Linux, Gnu and many others. But they can’t really be ignored, so suspend disbelief for a moment if you will and ride with the current argument.

[3] More about the simpler life later on. It means less moving your body around the globe on airplanes, and more audio and video conferencing.

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If you’re not a cyberspace expert and don’t care for geek talk, you may think it’s just another report on cyber espionage. But the messages are important for everyone. And my point is that they are very clearly explained!

Ron Diebert and Rafal Rohozinski, in their Foreward, point out that crime and espionage go together. Or that wherever one goes, the other is soon to follow.

They don’t say this directly—these are my words: Crime, espionage (and warfare) seep into the interstitial spaces of society and occupy any vacuum they find. And from there they can grow to occupy the whole of the space, like a mold, fungus, or rot.

What we are seeing in online attacks against free speech sites these days, particularly drive-by attacks^[1], is that they do not seem to be politically or idealistically motivated, instead they are opportunistic and (presumably) economically motivated because they’re focused on injecting spambots and trojans, not on altering the message of the nonprofit web site.

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In prior years, attacks have been positioned to “take down” legitimate businesses by denying access to their sites [DDoS].^[2] Soon it was discovered (and is not widely exploited yet) that if an attacker simply hammers a site so hard that the defending organization has to dedicate more resources (read “money”) to defense, they can wear down the organization by depleting its budget and even its “will to stay alive online.” This doesn’t work if the attacker is just exploiting a site to drive traffic to its own illegitimate sales site, but it does work if the attacker’s intent is to take the organization down.

I already see evidence of small to medium attacks of the economic sort, and predict that we will see far more of them during the remainder of 2010 and 2011. I am working with NGOs now to prevent this type of “bad aftertaste” attack trend, and will report on how it’s going as I gather more information and evidence.

To get a feel for how much this is happening, see the StopBadware and the BadwareBusters web sites (forums where people are discussing these attacks and their remediation).

[2] (Distributed) Denial of Service attacks bog down the target web servers so they can’t respond to legitimate requests from customers. They make it impossible to reach the business or organization. In some cases, the attacker asks for a “ransom” payment to stop the attack, is other cases they conduct a short-lived attack to make a protest or prove a point, and in some cases they continue their attack long enough to have a direct economic impact on the target.

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Now that Apple has announced that the reception measurement on the iPhone is incorrect (reading too high by about 2 bars in some cases), I no longer have an excuse. AT&T claims to have 10 towers within a 2-mile radius of my home office, but most of the time 2 or 3 of them are ”down” and besides, in San Francisco, over half of them are “behind a hill” from me so they do me no good. There are probably only 2 or 3 towers that actually give me any coverage in the office here.

But, Apple knew about the +2 bars problem a long time ago. It was reported in 2009. We were all seeing 2 or 3 bars, and then our software was upgraded and we were seeing 5 bars routinely (except when there were none). We customers knew that the iPhone was giving us more bars than it should have. So why did Apple not know this, or not see the change when this happened in the first place?

And Apple was surprised about this?

Any mobile phone is a mobile radio. And amateur radio operators, which we all are these days, know that if you touch (and thus “ground”) the antenna, you cause a change in signal strength.

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* Understand risk. Buy low, sell high. Manage your risk.

* Spend your time (as in investor) on the companies that are doing well, don’t just “nickel and dime” the ones that are failing.

* The cost of failure is decreasing. If you start from open source, and have a designer, an engineer, a products guy, users, and you get growing 30% a month or so, you don’t even need to write a business plan. [just after 9:00 minutes into the video - THIS IS THE KEY point I want to make]. If you can get your project to the point where it is running, growing, perhaps bringing in some money, you bring in the VC investors at that point – no earlier!

* Open standards give you a big advantage. Big companies spend $ millions to even think about a new project, but you can get your project off the ground for far less by starting with open source, good ideas and good thinking.

* Development methodology needs to be flexible, iterative, and respond to what you can learn from your customers. ”If you’ve launched your product and you’re not embarrassed by it, you‘ve launched too late.”

* Distribution. Every failed startup has had a business model, team, and so forth, but no users. Almost every team that has users eventually comes up with a business model [if they’re smart and paying attention]. You must be viral – you must infect your customers.

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In Sci-Fi Channel’s series Caprica, portable computing has become “foldable” and takes the form of sheets of “paper” on which characters, symbols and other stuff light up so you can read them. The paper is touch-sensitive and you can move the characters around as well as tap them (read “keyboard”).

In Minority Report, John Anderton (senior investigator in the Department of Futurecrime) has his wall-size glass see-through display where he can touch, drag-and-drop, and call up data (and photos) from the archives. But nothing really portable, like a pad/tablet in that particular vision of the future. This theme has been picked up in numerous films over the years, most notably recently in James Cameron’s Avatar where displays are mostly glass or 3D. (Let alone that the ultimate in displays and projection is the “avatar” itself.)

And cyberpunk novels (William Gibson for sure) are campy and amusing because of their notion that data will be passed around on floppy disks. But at the same time you can “jack in” — meaning connect a computer or network into your brain directly. So there are direct computer-human interfaces, but we were still mostly using rotating disc storage of one sort or another for our real computers until just the last 2 years (SSD in the Apple Air being a primary example). Personally, I prefer this solid state or even (future) non-rotating optical storage and it’s clear that it already pervades the entire portable devices market. (The iPad has solid-state SDD storage, all phones do, cameras, etc.)

In Star Trek (the  2009 movie being the prime example) there are lots of glass-see-thru devices, and on some Trek series like DS9 (first illustration above) the portable devices look like an iPad, and you can tap on them, read data from the screen, but (interestingly and entirely the point here) the data stays with the device and one crew member will frequently hand off a device to another crew member (containing a task or assignment to be completed). This idea of “disposable” or at least “transient” devices somehow linked to the information they hold that aren’t in any sense owned by an individual, is I think not going to happen because of ubiquitous wireless, but it’s worth noting. It’s kind of like smart paper, isn’t it? And the same happens in Caprica’s vision of its parallel universe. Presumably the Trek pads talk to the mother ship and can receive assignments wirelessly, but like the economy of Star Trek (long past money and into “everyone is taken care of”) the devices just don’t have personal “ownership” like today’s phones and pads.

This kind of device handoff won’t happen for the iPad, of course, until its price reaches the disposable or discretionary level.

[2] Apple is releasing the iPad in international markets today, and WSJ reported on the big frenzy on opening day in Japan!

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