Tom’s journey from writer at Financial Times to blogger, to publisher is an interesting one. There are some parallels I’d like to call out.

[Tom’s photo here is by JD Lasica taken during Traveling Geeks 2009] [short interview]

Tom started writing for The Financial Times, then quit to become a blogger and thus one of the disruptors of journalism as it had existed until then. I was reflecting the other day and thinking that in 1970 we could and should have predicted that computers would eventually disrupt our lives. And also caught myself thinking well “how would we know the degree to which they’d be disruptive?” In those days I was thinking I’d get a job in research at IBM, or Kodak, or SRI, or be a university professor (which I was) and just keep doing that, and computers would play an increasingly important role in my life and the world. But, you know, I was pushing the disruptive edge too, without really thinking about it that much. Disruption wasn’t a word we used very often. More on disruption next time.

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Earlier, at 6am that same morning I woke up thinking “I haven’t really prepared for this exam because I’m not sure what the exam will consist of.” It was a placement exam for music dictation. So at 6am I got out of bed in a bit of a sweat, and found practice exams online, and I took 10 of these practice exams (they’re short). And I did very well. By 7am I realized that months ago I had investigated and I really did know what the exam would be like — so this had appeared to be a bit of unwarranted panic.

However, when I could not locate room 219 a real moment of panic ensued. Moving quickly, I went up and down several flights trying to understand where this room had gone…or what other room the exam might be in. I reopened the email (on my phone) and it did say room 219. Not knowing the building very well, I ended up going in circles a couple of times and lost track of exactly which floor I was on. The minutes passed. I know I came all the way around the second floor three times. Finally I dropped into an office on the second floor and asked “Where’s room 219?” Stumped, the person helped me search, going up a rear stairway, and eventually found that 319 did exist and that’s where students were seated for the exam. I was only a minute late.

Luckily a placement exam isn’t a final exam, but I was flustered enough that I wasn’t able to really pay attention for quite a while until I settled down.

Dream becomes reality.

The post Life Becomes a Dream appeared first on Sky's Blog.

First, I had to get the iPhone unlocked (by AT&T). Those of you in the US know how difficult this can be.

To begin, I was able to get a payoff quote ($325) to buy out my AT&T 24-month contract, and I immediately did that. Talked to AT&T as soon as my payment cleared (7 days) and they said the phone was mine. (It cost me basically $50 less than if I had bought an “unlocked” phone from Apple, which was not actually available at the time.) Just had to go through AT&T’s unlocking process to change carriers. “No, there is no way the rep on the phone can start the process” they said — I had to start it by going to a web page. So I did that on a Saturday. They said they’d send an email, to which I would respond, and then unlocking would begin. 48 hours later, no email had arrived. I checked online and it said “you didn’t respond to our email.” So I initiated the process again. 48 hours later, same thing, no message, no process, so I called them. “Ah, yes, I can start the unlock for you,” said the rep, and she did that. “You’ll be unlocked in 48 hours,” she said. So 72 hours later I called them to see how it was progressing. “Not unlocked yet.” I asked when it might happen, the new rep said “it takes 5 business days minimum, and it can take longer.” They had told me 48 hours. Well the rep promised something she had been promising hundreds of customers, but she wasn’t authorized to promise (according to the supervisor “They should know this.”).

Well there’s certainly no technical reason an unlock takes 5 business days. This is just how AT&T wants to play it. They want to hang onto your phone, and charge you, as long as they can. So I waited 5 business days (7 calendar days) and got an email saying “We can’t unlock your phone, sorry. Contact us when your contract finishes.” I called them and they said, “Your phone isn’t paid off, so we can’t unlock it.” Turns out that my payoff $325 was not treated as a payoff (even though they sent me an urgent notice to pay the “payoff” amount). So the rep got that credit processed correctly this time. Can I expect my phone to be unlocked right away? Well, no, “You have to wait 5 business days, minimum.” So I waited again, and this time it was unlocked on the 7th day.

I ported the phone to T-Mobile within an hour of receiving AT&T’s notification! Happy as a clam! I am now posting this article from my computer, sitting in a cafe, using data through my tethered iPhone 6 on T-Mobile. Works like a champ!

The post Unlocking + Tethering appeared first on Sky's Blog.

I have decided to call this ”fingerprint only” mode because you can touch the screen, but nothing happens.

I particularly need this for mapping and travel apps, where I want to keep the app open while I’m walking or hiking and holding the phone in my hand, but touching the screen could cause the app to fly off to different coordinates, or even to change mode or shut down. Great example is Everytrail where it tracks my movement and I frequently have it in my hand so I can watch as I walk along. Fascinating, but way too easy to touch the wrong thing and completely screw up the trip map.

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MY TOP APP PICKS FOR SYSTEM ADMINISTRATION ON iPAD

• iSSH— gives you secure shell (SSH) access to your servers using name+password or digital certs. If you use a command-line editor on your server (I use vi), be aware that up-down-right-left arrows won’t really function if you use the onscreen keyboard, but from a bluetooth keyboard they do work! Recently I’ve also had trouble with ESC, and I’ve had to tap its onscreen “button” instead on the physical key. You can also configure iSSH to emit true function keys (which are needed for some configuration work—in htop, for instance).
• 1Password— what a great way to keep all those passwords in one place! And encrypted too. 1Password for iPad syncs with 1Password on my Mac through Dropbox. When I make a new password, or change one, it is always available on the iPad as soon as I need it. This way I can use those 20-character random passwords that I’d never remember if I had to commit them to memory.
• Dropbox— Well of course you already know I use Dropbox for sync’ing 1Password across devices. And you can do without it if you sync the two devices “locally” on wi-fi, but I would never remember to do it—Dropbox lets it happen more in real-time and effortlessly.
• DropDAV— (Not an iPad app, but essential nevertheless) I need DropDAV because I have a buddy who watches my back and serves as sysadmin when I’m on those long air flights or otherwise indisposed, and he and I need to share documents, which we do through DropBox. DropDAV isn’t an app, it’s a service. Sign up and it makes your DropBox documents available to Pages and Keynote through WebDAV services on DropDAV.
• WordPress app— HTML textboxes don’t scroll properly on Safari on the iPad. This is a really big problem if you’re trying to admin a WordPress blog in Safari. So the WordPress iPad app is a necessity, though you don’t really have access to all of the WP admin features (it’s designed for bloggers, not admins), which means I’m constantly back and forth between this app and Safari even when I’m working on a single blog. This needs improvement, but I can make it work well enough for now.

PROBLEMS WITH THE iPAD

• No Flash. This means I can’t fully utilize a lot of tools, like Cloudkick, when on the road because they use Flash extensively. (However, I can log in at CloudKick even with my Yubikey one-time-password USB device, as long as I have the iPad USB camera adapter with me. That’s a trick to be explained elsewhere.)
• There’s no PGP mail encryption/decryption for the iPad mail app. Although I have other ways of dealing with encrypted mail when I’m on the road, this is still a big problem. If you rely on encrypted mail, be sure you have an alternative available when you’re traveling with your pad.

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However, as I started relying more on the iPad for my mobile life, I realized that I could go without the full backpack[1. At least on business days. On weekends I trek around the city on foot, and I prefer to have some weight on my back just to get a better workout, as well as to carry a windbreaker, sweater and other supplies.]. So I checked at REI and found two items I couldn’t live without[2. I have no connection or contact with the manufacturers, bought the products at full retail, and can highly recommend them after months of use.].

The first is this Outdoor Products 10-inch  Power Laptop Sleeve. {The blue bag in the photo.} They may call it a sleeve, but it’s a full carrying bag, padded on all sides, and large enough for a 10” clamshell computer (the type with a flip-up display—Acer, Asus etc.), so it handles an iPad with room to spare even when the iPad is already in a protective case. The bag has a shoulder strap that clips on two ways, so you can carry the bag in a “vertical” or a “horizontal” orientation. You can sling it on your back, around the front, or almost under your shoulder. Over your coat or under your coat. Over the shoulder, or across the chest (strangle-hold around your neck) because the strap loosens and shortens. You insert the iPad through a zipper pocket that allows easy access in either orientation, then you zip it closed. There’s an outer zippered pocket with a little slip-in pocket for SD memory cards, clip-ins for carrying pens (I keep a small LED flashlight in there as part of earthquake readiness), and an interior zippered pocket for headsets and the like. The case is soft enough that it expands as you feed it more gear, yet padded enough to protect against bumps and grinds. I don’t believe the case is waterproof, because water doesn’t bead up on it, so I have taken additional precautions.

Oh, and perhaps the biggest surprise of all, I use a bluetooth wireless keyboard and it fits nicely inside the sleeve along with the iPad. Just barely, but it definitely fits.

The next one isn’t from REI, but I’ve got to mention it. I enclose the iPad directly in an incase Book Jacket that is heftier than Apple’s sleeve and really gives great protection. Yes, I drop my iPad just like I drop my iPhone (and their iPhone case has saved my phone numerous times when it went flying across the room on the floor due to my waving my arms with great abandon). The case makes the iPad seem twice as thick as the naked iPad would be, but makes it so much safer to carry. And even inside the incase, the iPad fits snugly into the Power Laptop Sleeve!

And finally, since it’s rainy season in San Francisco, REI sells “4 litre” Sea to SummitUltra-Sil Dry Sacks (waterproof bags) [3. I use these bags when I’m camping in the wilderness, to keep dry supplies dry. They really are so waterproof they’ll float in a river.] and I bought a cute little yellow one (with a white interior, just like the raincoat my Mom got me to wear to kindergarten) and this bag fits very snugly around the incase and completely waterproofs the iPad for when it gets a tad rainy. I even use the larger 10 litre size sack to put entirely around the Power Laptop Sleeve when there’s a downpour, thus enclosing everything in a waterproof skin. I carry the sacks rolled up inside the larger Laptop Sleeve when I’m not using them. Yes, everything fits nicely.

And I don’t have to carry a backpack to business meetings any more! W00t!

The post My iPad’s cute little raincoat keeps it travel-ready appeared first on Sky's Blog.

RSS feeds and news readers began to change that. (Thanks Dave[2. Dave Winer].) I use NetNewsWire’s standalone software on my Mac, and online services like Google Reader let you integrate feeds into your iGoogle home page. You can also sync your Google Reader settings across multiple programs and devices. But in the last couple of months, the scene is greatly changing is subtle ways I think people haven’t spotted yet…

With the advent of larger-screen mobile devices (like iPad) and reasonable mobile apps like reeder that sync with Google Reader lists, we’re now reading our news feeds everywhere, and the pace at which we flip through them has greatly accelerated.

We all know the Facebook stickiness phenomenon — you open facebook.com and just keep it open all day and night—news is there, feed is there, friends are there, chat is there, and everything is available on that one site. Same could be said, for some people, for iGoogle or gmail, which are all squished together in one big Google mashup of a “site.” Facebook and Google “have all the eyeballs” and now you don’t stand a chance of picking up very many eyeballs for your own web site. If you put a short URL into your Facebook status/feed pointing to a blog post you just wrote, any of your friends who click to open it will read your blog post on the Facebook page—they never need to leave Facebook, even to read your blog entry.

And since the arrival of  iPad apps like Flipboard [3. I love Flipboard, and I can zoom through dozens of pages on Flipboard by flicking a finger way faster than I can use a mouse and a computer screen, and this really hammers the web server that’s at the target end of the action! Flipboard picks up its clues and links solely from FB and Twitter feeds—you can’t even tell it to track a web site—it only tracks sites and pages that get significant social activity!] pick up FB status and Twitter streams, these apps are besieging web sites with requests for content, and then caching that content on their own sites for later reading. Yeah, you’ve usually got an option to read the full content on the original site, but it’s way at the bottom of whatever you’re reading, and since attention spans are short, you’re only going to read the original once in a while. Flipboard and its cousins are a reason why web site server performance occasionally suffers these days[4. Server performance suffers when searchbots spider a site more rapidly than the server can handle. I discovered Flipboard and other crawlers were impacting small server performance about a month ago, then I got an iPad and discovered why they’re crawling the sites, and I’m impressed with the net result, so I’m finding ways to improve server performance to handle the extra load, thinking that it’ll be worth it in the long run, and that this phenomenon is going to increase.]—they’re positively crawling all over small web sites proactively finding and caching content for their readers to look at later on.

The bottom line is that you have to make all impressions count, regardless of whether they’re on your own web site or on Facebook, Flipboard (or anywhere else). You can no longer count on eyeballs coming to your web site. You brand is wherever the readers’ eyeballs are, and no longer exclusively on your own web site. You’re not in control of this, and you’d better learn to take advantage of the situation and live with it.
— Sky

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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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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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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:

[youtube Pdk2cJpSXLg]

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.

[1] On Mac OSX, when the system is waiting for software to catch up with the user, it displays a rainbow-colored spinning pinwheel that we refer to as “the beachball” — kinda like Twitter’s fail whale.

The post Forget iPhone 4, just make my 3G iPhone work again! appeared first on Sky's Blog.

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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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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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.

[1] My first table was a Toshiba Tablet PC, from around 2005, and although it required a stylus rather than finger touch, it had great handwriting recognition and operated smoothly once you got past the 5-minute MS Windows boot up time. (And sometimes even longer…)

[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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