Human memory is atrophying and will one day join our tailbone as a useless vestigial organ. After all, what’s the point in remembering anything when the Internet remembers for us?

That’s the conclusion drawn by a team of psychologists after their experiments demonstrated that, in the words of Patricia Cohen in the New York Times, “the Internet has become our primary external storage system.” In one trial, “The subjects were significantly more likely to remember information if they thought they would not be able to find it later.”

The trouble with that is, there is little information we cannot retrieve online. So why bother to bear it in mind at all?

Even the team leader, Dr. Betsy Sparrow, admitted that she happily relies on an outside memory bank, only in this case it’s her spouse. “I love watching baseball,” she told the Times, “But I know my husband knows baseball facts, so when I want to know something I ask him, and I don’t bother to remember it.”

Details in Internet Use Affects Memory, Study Finds

Richard Curtis

Back in October we wrote up the design for an absolutely astounding rollup tablet PC of the future. We were so knocked out by it that we titled our blog I Want One Today! and you may too after viewing the demo. But you’ll have to wait for the Orkin rolltop, for (as far as we know), it’s pure fantasy.

Though we don’t think that Apple’s soon-to-be-announced iSlate will be nearly as cool as Orkin’s, some commentators such as David Carr of the New York Times have succumbed to iSlate frenzy. In his “Media Equation” column Carr gushes about the rumored qualities of the iSlate: “I haven’t been this excited about buying something since I was 8 years old and sent away for the tiny seahorses I saw advertised in the back of a comic book.”

The title of his article is A Savior in the Form of a Tablet, and he says that for some tabletphiles the iSlate represents “the second coming of the iPhone, a so-called Jesus tablet that can do anything, including saving some embattled print providers from doom”.

We need to keep our heads a about this. First of all, we’re not sure Apple’s product will actually be called the iSlate, and for all we know Apple has booked an auditorium at the end of January to announce that it has discovered an app for the common cold.

We certainly don’t believe that the iSlate is the path to personal salvation. We do firmly believe however that tablets will put the e-book business over the top as colleges adopt them as standard equipment for their student bodies, and we’ve been saying that for years.

Perhaps you too are developing tablet frenzy. If you haven’t yet, you may after you click on the video in our original posting below.

Richard Curtis
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Earlier today we predicted that five years from now there’ll be a tablet PC under every student’s arm. We were wrong. It won’t be under their arms. It will be suspended from their shoulders. Or at least it will be if PC manufacturers are smart enough to adopt Orkin Design’s Rolltop, astoundingly “rolled out” and then rolled back up again in the demo video below.

A writeup says, “The device of the flexible display allows a new concept in notebook design growing out of the traditional bookformed laptop into unfurling and convolving portable computer. By virtue of the OLED-Display technology and a multi touch screen the utility of a laptop computer with its weight of a mini-notebook and screen size of 13 inch easily transforms into the graphics tablet, which with its 17-inch flat screen can be also used as a primary monitor. On top of everything else all computer utilities from power supply through the holding belt to an interactive pen are integrated in Rolltop. This is really an all-in-one gadget.”

We don’t know anything about the designer, but visit Orkin’s wonderland website for exquisite futuristic household designs (check out the barstools particularly). And some beautiful sculpture, too.

RC

New York Times tech columnist David Pogue gives Microsoft’s Windows 7, released today, a close assessment that MS-watchers will take as a green light, as long as they are aware that the new system carries with it some built-in issues that are inherently Windows-oid.

“Now, Windows 7 is still Windows,” writes Pogue. “It’s still copy-protected, it still requires antivirus software and its visuals still aren’t consistent from one corner to another.

“On the other hand, it’s still Windows in a good way, too, meaning that it’s your ticket to a world of choice — a huge catalog of software and computer options. This Win is a win if you’re in the market for a new machine, or if you’re running Vista now and you’re not thrilled by it.

“Above all, Windows 7 means that Microsoft employees can show up in public without avoiding eye contact. Looks like 7 is a lucky number after all.”

Pogue could have simply said that anything would be better than the Vista OS that 7 replaces, but he went much further, saying that “if the programmers at Microsoft have any strength left at all, they are high-fiving.”

Read Pogue’s analysis here.

RC

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by the New York Times.

We who are about to die salute Jenna Wortham. Like most of us she has ruminated about the end of life but rather than writing her own eulogy or selecting a coffin, she has been making provisions for disposing of her digital archives and leaving encrypted instructions for her survivors.

“Not to be morbid,” she writes in the “Internet Protocol” feature of the New York Times, “but I have a lot of private information and details stored on my computer — in various Google Chat logs, e-mail and social networking accounts — that I wouldn’t want to be revealed when I log off for good. Who should I consult or what do I need to do to ensure my cache is cleared and e-mail and social networking sites accounts are deleted when I die?”

A good idea, she writes, “is to appoint someone as your digital executor who is responsible for cleaning up your accounts, clearing your browser cache, deleting secret e-mails and trashing appropriate files.”

For other suggestions, read The Digital Afterlife and Morning-After Messaging or forward it to your estate lawyer or next of kin.

RC

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by the New York Times

In 2001 Bill Gates categorically declared that within five years tablets “will be the most popular form of PC sold in America.” It’s three years since his prediction expired, and looking back it seems preposterously quixotic. So here’s a preposterously quixotic update of our own on Gates’s prophecy: within five years tablets will be the most popular form of PC sold in America.

The reason, in one word: Education. As we wrote in 2008, the prize for the right student-friendly portable e-book is worth billions, and current models of Kindle, Sony Reader and iRex are simply inadequate for textbooks, illustrated books, schoolwork and homework. Even the much ballyhooed Plastic Logic Something or Other (we’ve dubbed it the “Teasle”) isn’t shaping up to handle tablet-sized tasks. For one thing, none of these gadgets is in color.

It appears, however, that Microsoft is ready to step into the ring for the Tablet PC Sweepstakes Round #2 in the form of something called the Courier. According to Gizmodo and PC World, this tablet has “two 7-inch, presumably color, touchmicrosoft courier tabletscreens that use a combination of multitouch and stylus inputs. From what we’ve seen so far, Courier does not have any kind of keyboard — virtual or physical — and depends completely on handwriting recognition software for entering text. Tech specs are scarce, but Courier would have Wi-Fi connectivity and a camera.”

And Brad Stone and Ashlee Vance, in Just a Touch Away, the Elusive Tablet PC published in the New York Times, report that “In June, Archos, a French consumer electronics company, began selling a small touch-screen tablet running Google’s Android software. Later this month, it will introduce another tablet that runs on Microsoft’s Windows 7, which has built-in support for touch screens.”

The iPhone? Steve Jobs has said “Never” to a tablet-sized iPhone. That could actually mean Never, Maybe Never, or Tomorrow Afternoon. The latest rumor places Apple’s rollout of a $700 tablet at early next year.

There are certainly hurdles to be overcome. The absence of a keyboard, even a virtual one, is a big drawback for any computer designed for classroom use. And touchscreens are fun but they can slow reactivity to a crawl. The ultimate in touchscreen tech, Microsoft Surface, is not ready for tablet prime time but if you’d like to see a mindblowing preview, visit the Surface website and be tantalized. Nevertheless, the time is right for Bill Gates’s prediction to come true. Okay, so he’s a few years late. Who of us has not been a few years late with something!

The key to successful prophecy is Don’t Be Too Specific. But we stand by our prognostication: five years from now there’ll be a tablet under every student’s arm.

Richard Curtis

Is your name John Doe and are you harboring a computer that is conducting criminal activities? Think twice before you swear “no” on a stack of Bibles.

As Saul Hansel of the New York Times explains, “These days, hackers infect hundreds of thousands of computers with software that monitors their users, waiting for them to log onto a bank account. The nasty program installed on the computers of victims sends their bank IDs and passwords back to the hackers, who use them to log into the bank accounts.” Once they have someone’s password it’s just a few keystrokes before funds have been transferred.

Who are these hackers and what do they know? All you have to do is ask the banks whose servers have been penetrated. Easy, right? Easy wrong! “A number of laws protect the confidentiality of bank customers,” says Hansel. “Moreover, the banking industry has historically avoided much discussion about fraud cases. Banks argue they do not want to give away the techniques used by criminals or those meant to thwart them. They also want to preserve the confidence of their customers.”

Now what? Well, you have to sue the bank. And one way to get around those confidentiality laws is the John Doe lawsuit. “John Doe” is the name used in a lawsuit when the plaintiff doesn’t know the real name of the defendants. One company that is attempting to get hold of bank information about hacker break-ins is employing the old John Doe technique.

Though the targets of the suit are banks, the same legal ploy has been used to gain access to personal computers in order to catch spammers, music pirates and illegal file-sharers. That means YOU, John Doe! So, keep your hands where we can see them and don’t make any sudden moves – my partner is standing behind you and he’s aiming a subpoena at your head.

You can read Hansel’s article in full here.

Richard Curtis

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by the New York Times.

New York Times 0p-ed columnist Gail Collins has pretty much given up fending off the daily popup update and upgrade notices she finds on her computer monitor every morning. She accepts her fate, reasoning that these intrusions are well meaning. And besides, without them her machine would become susceptible to viruses or compromised performance.

What bothers her is that her computer’s resolution is stronger than her own. “It’s depressing to realize that my computer is more bent on self-improvement than I am,” she writes. “At home, my laptop is so ready to update that it can barely be constrained. The other day, I found three different pleas floating around on the screen.”

After resisting all those entreaties she finally threw in the towel after Dell sent her a notice telling her she needed an upgrade “so that I will better be able to receive more upgrade requests in the future.”

Like Collins, most of the time we suffer these annoyances with resignation. But sometimes they go too far. Such as when you wake up to discover that your files have disappeared after an unsolicited upgrade caused your computer to reboot.

Collins’ conclusion? “The way you respond when your computer asks for an upgrade is a good test of how you relate to technology in general.” In other words, you are what you upgrade. Read about it in The Updating Game.

RC

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by the New York Times.

The exclamation point in Showstopper! The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsoft is no error. You’ll undoubtedly add a few of your own when you finish the dramatic inside story of the creation of Windows NT by Wall Street Journal reporter G. Pascal Zachary.

Driven by the legendary Bruce Cutler, a picked band of software engineers sacrifices almost everything in their lives to build a new, stable, operating system aimed at giving Microsoft a platform for growth through the next decade of development in the computing business. Comparable in many ways to the Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder, Showstopper! gets deep inside the process of software development, the lives and motivations of coders and the pressure to succeed coupled with the drive for originality and perfection that can pull a diverse team together to create a program consisting of many hundreds of thousands of lines of code.

RC
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Some reviews…

Released in mid-1993, Microsoft Corp.’s Windows NT software is arguably the best attempt yet at a universal operating system for personal computers, allowing PC users to open a file, move text or graphics, calculate a row of numbers and run several word processors, spreadsheets and other applications at once. With Windows NT (which stands for New Technology), Microsoft chief executive Bill Gates hopes to extend his dominion, with NT serving as the foundation for everything from desktop systems to corporate information networks. Critics, however, observe that the hardware required for NT is expensive and note that a forthcoming Microsoft operating system, Chicago, may eclipse NT. Wall Street Journal reporter Zachary tells how Microsoft wizard David Cutler and his team of programmers, working intensely for five years, overcame technical snafus, thousands of bugs, workplace skirmishes and collapsing personal lives to create Windows NT. This is both an enlightening primer on the management of complexity and a rare behind-the-scenes look at the cutthroat software wars.
Publishers Weekly
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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I found this an absolutely riveting read. The book provides a view into a type of company and an approach to software development that is different from anyplace I’ve ever worked. Many things about it have stuck with me–the perspective on testing an operating system that will have to work with every popular software product; the staffing philosophy at Microsoft; the “eating your own dog food” concept (developers and testers had to actually use NT as they were developing it, thus constantly exposing themselves to its flaws). The author does a good job of telling the stories both of the big players and the worker drones. It’s a very personal book about what strikes me as a very impersonal company. It’s one of those rare non-technical books that I recommend to people who are new to software engineering. I read it for the first time when I’d just gotten my first software development job, and again several years later, and I didn’t enjoy it any less the second time around.
Kevin B. Cohen for Amazon

The Holy Grail of screen technology is the gesture-activated virtual screen portrayed in Stephen Spielberg’s 2002 blockbuster futuristic film Minority Report. Technologists inspired by the brilliant effects have been laboring ever since to interact with screen images, getting them to do what we want them to do by a mere wave of the hand or point of an index finger.

The iPhone’s introduction of multitouch was an astounding innovation that brought Spielberg’s vision closer to actualization. But the Apple device still requires physical contact with the surface of the device, whereas the next generation of virtual screens will liberate our hands from any contact whatsoever.

Where are we on the continuum between touchscreens and Minority Report‘s magic one?

Rebounding from an Apple-led consumer flight to handhelds, a number of PC manufacturers are developing applications designed to lure consumers back to their desks and, according to Ashlee Vance of the New York Times (PC Touch Screens Move Ahead), high on the list are touchscreens. For instance, Hewlett-Packard is pushing the TouchSmart, a desktopper with an upright screen on which you can access every function with your stylus or index finger. TouchSmart offers a variety of great applications. Vance points out that “Customers can turn these machines into bespoke kiosks for, say, ordering merchandise at a sporting event or flipping through a menu while waiting at a restaurant.” Indeed, touch screens are commonly used for keeping track of tables and food orders at restaurants. They can also be embedded in homes to control lights, music, thermostat, etc., and in he kitchen to follow recipes.

However, after you’ve worked an iPhone screen with multitouch, one-finger functionality feels pretty limited, and we have to wonder how practical the TouchSmart approach is for business offices. Here’s a simple test: next time you’re sitting in front of your desktop monitor, try stretching your arm out and poking the screen every time you want to open a file, drag, drop, highlight, cut and paste or perform some other task. Do we really want to reach out to our screen every time we want to move something around or shift to another function? Don’t be surprised if your arm grows weary and your back strained. Let’s face it: some functions are best left to keyboard commands or mouse navigation. And – sitting at a desk is not necessarily where today’s sedentary or peripatetic computer users want to be. If you’re thinking about students, so am I. We’ll get to them in a moment.

You can google lots of HP promotional videos and demonstrations and decide for yourself.

But soon, even five digits may be passé. Enter advanced multitouch and an Israeli outfit called N-trig. Its advanced PC screen technology called “DuoSense” enables users to use both hands as well as a pen.

N-trig is the only industry provider to offer a combined pen, touch and multi-touch solution, having overcome the technological hurdles of combining the two seamlessly in a single device. DuoSense is an intelligent digitizer, fully compatible with Microsoft natural input standards. N-trig’s DuoSense digitizers are are easily integratable, support any type of LCD, keep devices slim, light and bright, can support numerous applications, and can be implemented in a broad range of products ranging from small notebooks to large LCDs.

For a cool demo check out this video of N-trig. By the way, if you’re fascinated by the possibilities and have some clever ideas of your own for Windows 7 apps, N-Trig offers a $900 touchscreen kit that software developers that can use to develop their own.

Note that N-trig’s demonstration is being performed on a tablet computer, as well as on a convertible laptop/slate. Why tablets? Aren’t they just a niche? So far, yes. But that’s going to change big time. There’s a whole population of computer users that is simply not deskbound. It’s called students, and, as we have stated in these pages again and again, the only viable computer product for students is the tablet. “Textbooks and other illustrated books simply cannot be crammed into anything smaller than a screen close to the size of a laptop,” I wrote. “Tablets have all the virtues of laptops PLUS touchscreen functionality. For students, reading books on an e-reading device is highly desirable but not as imperative as the ability to handwrite notes on their device’s screen.”

Students will certainly give N-trig’s DuoSense two thumbs up, plus the other eight digits as well. “Such touch software can handle lots of fingers hitting a screen at once rather than just relying on one or two digits, as most of today’s touch screens do,” writes Vance.

In anticipation of a major push into the tablet market, Microsoft is reported to have invested $24 million in N-trig, and the forthcoming Windows 7 (look for it in 2010) “supports gestures such as pinching and fingertip scrolling,”reports Wired. “Other Windows programs, such as Paint, will also include new brushes designed for multi-touch and features such as panning across a page in Internet Explorer.” But the outer limits of known touchscreen tech is Microsoft Surface’s Cynergy Labs, and it’s likely that Surface will dominate the field until 3D replaces it. Check out these dumfounding videos.

Microsoft’s Surface is probably the direction consumers will go over the next few years, but shimmering on the distant horizon is a means of projecting action onto a screen without any contact whatever. We caught a glimpse of this with the wearable “Sixth Sense” device demonstrated at a recent TED (Technology Entertainment Design) conference. But for a mind-bending look at the state of the art of virtual, check out Project Natal by Microsoft designed for XBox 360. Stephen Spielberg, eat your heart out.

Richard Curtis

This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by the New York Times. Every blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers. Without them our free society would not only be impoverished but imperiled. We must strive to find a way to rescue the industry, even if it means nothing more than buying a paper on the street. Support your local newspaper.

“Personal computers — and the companies that make their crucial components — are about to go through their biggest upheaval since the rise of the laptop,” say Ashlee Vance and Matt Richtel in the New York Times. “By the end of the year, consumers are likely to see laptops the size of thin paperback books that can run all day on a single charge and are equipped with touch screens or slide-out keyboards.” What’s more, say Vance and Richtel, they will be priced somewhere between pocket change and free. Free?

Free. Because, as we’ve been urging for some time, by giving away the device but selling or leasing the content package, you can make more – and more reliable – money. This is what I call the Gillette Razor Theory – give away the razor and sell the blades – and now it may be happening in PC-world. AT&T will provide customers with a netbook at the low low price of $50.00. But – you have to sign up for an Internet service plan, say the Times reporters. An unnamed wireless phone company goes AT&T one better – a free netbook, but again you have to commit to a data plan – the “razor blades” part of the bargain.

That’s not necessarily the biggest downside of the program. Netbooks are mini-laptops offering the bare minimum of functionality to people who are okay with the bare minimum. If you’re addicted to Youtube or videogames, you might have to abandon all hope of accessing them. For free or fifty bucks you get a Model T Flivver “in any color,” as Henry Ford might say, “as long as it’s black.” However, some manufacturers may be able to get over that hurdle, too. By employing Linux or Android technology, effecting savings, they may be able to load more goodies into the box.

If that were all there is to the story we’d be happy enough. We’ve been waiting decades for the $99 computer and all of a sudden we seem to be zooming past it into Zeroland. But the bigger news by far is that netbooks may represent the revolutionary leading edge of the next generation of personal computers.

“So far,” the Times article says, “netbooks have appealed to a relatively small audience. Some of the devices feel more like toys or overgrown phones than full-featured computers. Still, they are the big success story in the PC industry, with sales predicted to double this year, even as overall PC sales fall 12 percent, according to the research firm Gartner. By the end of 2009, netbooks could account for close to 10 percent of the PC market, an astonishing rise in a short span.” In other words, the economy’s loss is the PC industry’s gain. If people can’t afford a fully loaded laptop, for under $100 they’ll learn to live with skimpy.

To learn more, read Light and Cheap, Netbooks Are Poised to Reshape PC Industry

RC