There is no way to ignore the tremendous popularity that the Apple iPad has achieved in a very short time on the market.  The week the iPad was launched, the excitement that people showed was equivalent to the coming of a rock star to town or the launch of a hugely anticipated new movie.  Of course, the good folks at Apple were pretty happy to see their marketing do so well. But it wasn’t just marketing that made the iPad a sensation.  It is a genuinely new approach to the mobile computing marketplace and clearly it either filled an existing need in the market or it created a new one.

Since the iPad has hit the market, reviewers and early users have begun to notice some of the shortcomings of the technology.  This is to be expected because all new technology goes through a time of evolution as something very good is refined and perfected until it is something great. One troubling drawback of the iPad that is just beginning to get noticed is how the light from it can be disturbing to users even more so than other digital devises that we are all used to using.

If you aren’t sleeping well it may be due to the artificial light that your iPad gives off. There are many experts out there that believe such strong lighting plays a role in affecting a person’s internal clock. In fact, it may be responsible for resetting it and that is why your sleep may be taking a hit.

If your ability to achieve a restful sleep is being disturbed in this way, you may begin to get sleepy during other times of the day when you need to be awake. If you are about to fall asleep during an important business meeting or when you are with clients then it can seriously affect your job too. Maybe even a greater concern is how this kind of technology may affect the sleep of young people who love their iPads.  If a child or teenager cannot get a good night's sleep because of how the light the iPad emits disturbs them, that can affect them at school and have a negative impact on their health.

The type of lighting that the Ipad offers is very different than when you read paperback books.  When you read a paper document, you are using the natural lighting of the room or from sunlight to illuminate the page. This is how the eyes are accustomed to working. But when you enjoy an ebook using your iPad, the lighting comes from the pad shining at your eyes directly.  It is like one of those lights the ophthalmologist uses to peer into your eyes except it is not as strong but it is continuous.  If you read something on your iPad for a while, that can affect your eyes and even how your brain patterns work.

While you may absolutely love your iPad and what it allows you to accomplish during the day, it could be keeping you awake at night. You can try your own experimentations with this to find out. Turn off your iPad as well as other devices that give off light once the sun goes down.  By sleeping in a perfectly dark room, you give your sleep cycles the change to work through properly and you will sleep more soundly.

Chances are you will find that you are able to go to sleep several hours sooner. You will also find that you are able to stay asleep longer and without interruptions. That is very important too because if you lie down for 8 hours but really only sleep for 6 of them then you can wake up sleep deprived.

In fact, you may find that other people notice positive changes in your behavior. You may be friendlier at the office or with getting your kids off to school. You may be more alert when it comes to making quick decisions. If you have a job that relies on creativity you may become an employee that has great ideas everyone else is talking about. Above all, you will be healthier, happier and more relaxed because you didn't let your iPad keep you up at night.

It might be a little trickier to get your youngster to power down their iPads at night.  Kids love to pull their technology into bed with them and stay up far too late talking on their cell phones or playing with digital toys online. But for the health of your kids, set up some rules that they must live by if they are going to enjoy their iPads and other digital equipment.  You may set the rule that all technology is shut completely off and put in a family closet that is not in their room when the lights go off to go to sleep.  There will be some resistance to these rules but if you buy the toys, you make the rules.  And you are doing it for their own good even if the kids don't see it that way.

Technology can be a great benefit to us, but not if it is depriving you of your basic needs. It is important to get a good night of rest for both your body and your mind. Your mood, your ability to concentrate, and even your weight can be affected by a lack of sleep. Studies show that even if you feel fine on little sleep or interrupted sleep your overall state of mind suffers.

There could be a link there regarding this lack of sleep and some mental health disorders. The fact that we continue to rely on more electronic gadgets than ever before could be a huge part of what causes those kinds of sleep disorders. Before you rush out the door to go shop for an iPad or other electronic item you need to fully evaluate your sleep situation.

If you feel that you really do need an Ipad, make some limitations with it as we have discussed. For example commit to shutting it and other electronics including your computer off by 8 pm. Then you have time to unwind before you go off to bed. If you are using such devices right up to the moment your head hits the pillow it could prevent you from sleeping well. By making human interaction with your family the last thing you do before sleeping, you will sleep better. And if you can have great sleep and still enjoy new technology within the rules, that is a good lifestyle to keep up.

The iPad Took the mobile computing market by storm in the last few months.  So it stands to reason that there are plenty of big internet and mobile communications companies that want a piece of the pie.  The announcement that Google and Verizon were working on their own version of a pad style technology should not take anyone by surprise.  The competition and emulation of creative ideas between the bit internet and communications giants is well known.  The problem that comes with creating an “iPad wannabe” is that the public will be spoiled by the groundbreaking technology that Apple brought to the table and it will be tough to capture that market now that Apple is carving most of it out for themselves.

Because the announcement of the partnership between Google and Verizon is making news only a few weeks after the arrival of the IPad, the deal has been in the works for some time.  At this point, the solidification of the partnership on the product is as far as the big media and internet giants have gotten.  The time frame for getting early versions of their product on the market are a year away.  No doubt those projections are optimistic.

A Win Win if it Works

Both Google and Verizon stand to win big if their entry in the pad technology market is a success.  For Verizon, they can reap an explosion of communications revenue because they can capitalize on the ability of Google to make their version of a pad technology so attractive to customers.  Google has already shown a talent for taking over markets from smaller competitors by either buying out smaller players or deploying their own competition in that market.  If Verizon can ride the wave of popularity of the pad technology combined with the leverage Google brings to the table, that could represent a very profitable venture for them.

Google has also been looking for ways to deploy their massive investment in internet products and services into the mobile marketplace.  By cashing in on the excitement of the Apple iPad product concept, Google could have found it's platform to take their phenomenal success in the internet environment and stage a similar coup on the mobile computing world.  For Verizon and Google, this is clearly a "Win Win" project.  But those big wins will only be realized if their gamble that they can take on the mighty Apple and AT&T partnership and win.  That is a big gamble.

Finding a Weakness to Exploit

There is no question that the strength that the Google and Verizon partnership can bring to the pad wars lies in Google’s huge inventory of internet products and services that could then be deployed to the mobile world. In order to beat the iPad in a market they now own, the Google and Verizon team will have to find and exploit weaknesses in the IPad product and demonstrate that they can provide a product that is not limited by those weaknesses.

Google has the financial clout to offer many apps on their version of the iPad as standard with the purchase of the software.  Already one of the complaints users of the iPad system have lodged is how they are called upon to purchase apps for some very basic functions early on. 

For example, the iPad does not come with a product similar to Microsoft Office that comes with the unit out of the box.  Google is putting a lot of effort into turning the Google Docs suite into a viable competition for that application area.  By offering those services without extra changes, Google and Verizon can woo customers with the idea that they don’t just more for their money with the new product, they get a lot more for their money.

Other weaknesses of the IPad technology are that the device does not allow users to run more than one application at a time and the screen itself could be easily be scratched or damaged.  By coming into the market with those issues addressed and showing up out of the box as a robust and feature rich system, the Google and Verizon pad technology could make the iPad offering look clumsy and poorly designed. In that way, if the shortcomings of the iPad get more publicity in the next 12 months, that will set the stage for a very successful product launch for Google and Verizon.

Or Too Little, Too Late

Google has had a lot of success taking on smaller competition and winning a niche of cyberspace and making it their own.  However, Apple and AT&T are not little players in the internet or the communications markets.  Apple in particular has shown a market savvy and an ability to compete and take on the big players in both the internet and the mobile worlds and win big.  So the strategies that Google has used to shut down the little guy may not stand up against these formidable internet and mobile computing giants.

In addition, the problem of being late to market has a lot of hidden dangers. Google and Verizon cannot count on Apple to just sit still and not improve the iPad technology to resolve the weaknesses of the system and to give the product all of the functionality that users expect long before Google and Verizon can get their product to market. 

In order to beat Apple at their own game, Google and Verizon must find ways to develop a new product offering that is better than the iPad as it is today and better than the iPad will be in a year to 18 months when the Google and Verizon product hits the market.  That means more than just fixing what is not working in the Apple product because Apple can do that.  It means fixing what is wrong with the iPad and then offering something that is new and innovative before Apple can do so.  Considering the ability of Steve Jobs and Apple to stay ahead of the game in technological innovation, that is not going to be an easy battle to win.

Some people feel that the PC is threatened in existence by smartphones. Therefore some people get stuck in the past and they don’t want to accept the phones as part of the advances in technology. On the other side of the coin are people who become such diehards for smartphone technology that they reject the PC as "old fashioned" and obsolete.  Both of these views on where technology is going are extreme and flawed.  There is no question that so many people conduct business on the go and that a smartphone allows them to access digital information in a convenient manner.

The vision that those responsible for the creation of smartphones had in mind when the technology was developed did not include taking over the work of PCs. Instead, they are seeing a future where the can be in balance with each other. The use of smartphones can enhance what a person is able to do on their PC. On the other side of it, the smartphone can be viewed as an extension of the PC.

It isn’t practical for a person to carry around their PC and a laptop can be a huge expense. Even a laptop can become too bulky to carry around when you need it. With a smartphone, though, the uses of the device when away from the PC have made people much more productive. Being able to use some online applications while on the go can help you get more done in the time you have available. It can also significantly reduce frustrations over not having computer access when you are at a specific location.

Regardless of if you are using a PC or a smartphone, very often there is one priority that people have in mind. That priority is to be able to access and use data in a particular way. Both the PC and the smartphone enable you to do accomplish that goal.  So it isn't productive to view these two technologies as an either/or situation. Instead, it should be seen as one more option that consumers have to consider.

The concept that the PC and the smartphone are complementary technologies is one that is echoed and even preached often by leaders in the technology industry.  Michael Dell, CEO of Dell computers, spoke on the issue in May of 2010 at a Citrix Synergy user conference in San Francisco. In his keynote speech, he was adamant that there is no reason to adapt the viewpoint that one technology is superior to the other or that the smartphone was designed to replace the PC or that it could ever do that.  He stated…

"What's converging is the data, not the device…. Some are better for carrying with you. Others are for consuming content, others are better for creating content… There is an application infrastructure growing up significantly around devices like the iPad. Does this create new uses, new demand, or does it replace something else? Seem to me it creates new uses."

This is not the first time in the history of the evolution of technology that it seemed that the new was going to supplant the old.  When motion pictures became widely available to the entire population, that was forecasted to be the end of radio.  Instead radio has thrived and evolved and it is still a vibrant form of communication in the new century.  Similarly, when television became a standard part of every home, the prophecies that TV would kill the movie business were echoed in the press and throughout the entertainment industry.  Instead, movies learned to appeal to people in ways that TV could not and the two industries thrived side by side often complimenting each other. 

The rise of online video seemed to threaten the dominance of television but TV is on its way back and very few people have put their TVs out in the trash so they can watch all of their entertainment online.  The PC will follow a similar evolution and it's usefulness as a desktop workstation in homes and in businesses will only continue to change to meet the new ways people like to access data.  The development of the "virtual desktop" concept means that the PC will have a role in a matrix of data access methods that people will be able to pick from to suit their needs and lifestyles.

Keep in mind that what smartphones offer can vary due to the different applications they have available. You will need to take your time to find the one that offers you the best overall results for your needs. That is the same as when you are shopping for applications to use on your PC. So many of the skills and that "internet savvy" that you have developed being a citizen of cyberspace on the PC are directly transferable to the smartphone world.  That ease of transition is one reason the smartphone approach to online activity has been such a success.

It is believed that smartphones are in their infancy, and they will continue to become more sophisticated more advanced over time. Bugs with them will be eliminated and more of the emerging needs of consumers will be added. Still, that doesn’t mean that the need for a PC will disappear entirely. In fact, it could mean that people rely on them even more.

The fact that users of both the PC and the smartphone can have that versatility back and forth from their PC and smartphone means that technology is on their side. It can reduce the amount of time it takes to complete projects. It can also help to reduce error rates pertaining to many different tasks a person may be responsible for completing.

The reality of it is that we live in an age of technology. The changes that will continue to take place aren’t always easy for people to accept. Yet it is possible that the world of PCs and smartphones can be friends and live in harmony. They can both be powerful tools that we use for business, information, and for convenience.

For some reason, the vision of a future where we can control all of our machines with vocal commands continues to be a strong.  The ability to simply speak to a machine and have it respond flawlessly has been the stuff of science fiction for a long time.  Just consider the wonderful relationship between HAL and the human astronauts in the movie 2001 A Space Odyssey.  When you consider how well having a smart computer that could talk to you turned out for those astronauts when HAL lost its mind, that utopian world of speech recognition may not be so attractive.

Of course, that is not to say HAL would happen when we can simply tell our furnace to come on or say "lights" and the lights respond or we can talk to our computer rather than use that old fashioned keyboard.  In a world where you can simply command your toaster to do its stuff doesn’t mean that toaster will turn on your with murderous revenge.  2001 A Space Odyssey was a science fiction movie after all.  It was not a documentary.

A Long Strange Trip it has Been

The attempt to bring about the utopian world of speech recognition has been going on for a long time.  When the idea of a computer recognizing a human voice came out, it seemed like a pipe dream. And the actual first applications that tried to make this kind of application a reality were pretty laughable.  Then about ten years ago, a major breakthrough occurred at the International Computer Science Institute at UC Berkeley.  The breakthrough was called Rasta and among other things, it opened up the potential of different kinds of hardware to take advantage of the same software that does speech recognition. 

Rasta made it possible to enable devices that were not supercomputers to use the massive databases and software genius it takes to simply have a conversation with a human being. In last ten or so years, we all have gotten used to a certain amount of interaction with speech recognition software.  Probably the one you and I are most familiar with are automated phone answering systems that have you "key in or say" your account number and use your voice to confirm other information before you can do business with the agency you called on the phone.

But even with that breakthrough and even though that speech recognition is pretty good, that doesn’t make it any more attractive to have that conversation. For one thing, a chat with a computer on the phone has to go along a very strict script and there is no saying, "wait a minute, I have to chase my dog". 

You can bet if you said that to an automated speech recognition software system on the phone, it would have no clue on how to handle that situation.  Speech recognition software has not gotten to the point that it can handle the infinite verity of things that can come up during a conversation with a human being.  Until it does, even if the computer can recognize every syllable you say, it will still be irritating to be "handled" by an automated personality, even if the voice on the other end sounds like a pretty girl.

Accents and Other Speech Recognition Hurdles

When you are having that phone conversation with voice recognition software, it is quite irritating each time it asks you to repeat what you said.  While the ability of computers to recognize the human voice is better than it was, it is still not very good.  To be fair, the ability to sort out inflections, accents and the huge variety of the way people talk even just in this country is phenomenal.  You can talk to someone from New Jersey, someone from Tennessee and someone from south Louisiana and for all intents and purposes, they might be speaking a completely different language.  Even in New England, some natives there have trouble understanding the differences between how people talk in the Bronx compared to Boston compared to Rhode Island.

When you put speech recognition in the context of human communications, even humans have trouble with it sometimes. You might try to count how many times in a given day you ask someone to repeat themselves because you did not understand what they said.  So add in to the problem of accents the additional issue of people that stutter or mumble or if you are talking to someone with a stuffed up nose and you can see how impossible the task is to teach a computer to figure that all out.

Stubborn Gurus

The gurus in the computer programming world are absolutely determined to get this right.  Now there are projects going on to try to teach computers to use context to figure out what someone has said.  Of course, this is another attempt to teach a computer to do what a 10 year old kid can do. It is a tough logic to teach because context is a phenomenally diverse undertaking. But the amount of powerful intellect that has been put to the task is impressive and we can expect some more breakthroughs in the field of speech recognition in the future.

Between now and then, most of us will probably not give up our keyboards in hopes we can speak to the computer and see it get what we said right.  It really is amazing that the scientific world is so stubborn about enabling computers to pull off this parlor trick. Even if computers could recognize every word you said and then they executed the next huge leap in programming to teach computers to be able to hold up their end of a conversation, the question would come up, "Who would want to talk to a computer anyway?"

That is a big question.  There are some great applications for speech recognition such as in helping the disabled and in education.  For those reasons, we applaud what the computer gurus are trying to make happen.  But their vision of a world where every device we own is run by voice recognition is probably a pipe dream.  After all, the last thing I want to do is to go to bed and say to my computer enabled house, "Turn out the lights" and for it to answer, "I don't think that’s a good idea…. Dave."

There is no getting around the fact that when the IPad hit the market a few weeks ago, it was a genuine phenomenon.  It has to drive the powers that be at Google and Microsoft crazy how easily Steve Jobs at Apple seems to be able to put their fingers on what "the next big thing" is and get that to the market. What remains for the other giants of the computer industry to do is to play catch up.  That means getting a pad technology out on the market that has a chance of taking down the IPad.

Google is currently in the design phase to plan a device to hit the market and steal some of the popularity from the IPad.  This is a common trend when it comes to technology. Any time a new and revolutionary technology comes out, the big powers that are not part of that new wave scramble to put out "wanna be" technology that is almost as good as the original.

The only window of opportunity that Google has to beat the IPad in their own market is to exploit any weaknesses that the Apple technology has and put out a product that is not as good as the IPad but better.  For example, one complaint that many IPad owners have is that they fork out $500 for the device and then they get hit with add on after add on to make the IPad more durable and able to do what they want it to do. A cover to protect the sensitive IPad screen costs extra. 

Those "gotchas" that Apple has in place to generate revenue from hooked IPad users irk that user community.  So Google can beat Apple in the add ons game by delivering a product that is durable and functional "as is".  That might mean a cover for the Google version of the IPad that is standard with the original price tag of the unit.  Or it might mean delivering a pad technology that has a touch screen that is just as good as what the IPad can do but much more resilient so a special cover for the screen is not as necessary.  That is a clear better value that Google can exploit to beat the IPad at their own game.

Good Stuff Day One

The software packages that fire up with the IPad are an area of weakness that Google can exploit to win over a lot of people who are still waiting to see what device they will buy.  Google has a nice application suite in Google Docs that can give users a lot of functionality the minute they take the Google version of the IPad out of the shrink wrap.  IPad users have to purchase a similar version of that same application suite to get some very basic functionality on their fancy new IPad units. That extra charge irritates users who already shelled out $500 for a device that is so application poor that it really doesn’t do a whole lot day one.

Another weakness of the IPad that Google already has the lead on is GPS and mapping technology.  The IPad allows users to basically use Google maps at a very basic level. But without buying additional applications, you cannot get full GPS service on the basic IPad that will guide you to turn here and turn there to get to your destination.  This is another great tool that the Google version of the IPad can hand to users day one and then exploit that strength in their marketing to win over users from the massive Apple army of devotees.

The Basics Without a Fuss

The IPad looks and acts like a real computer but there are some very basic functions of computing that are very difficult to do on this first release of this sophisticated new technology.  Those basic functions are USB support and printing.  That means that the only way for users to get documents out of their IPad units into other devices or onto paper is for them to email them to themselves and then print or store them from their home computes or laptops.

This is a tremendous inconvenience to users if the IPad that Google should jump all over with the first release of their technology. Users should not have to buy an accessory to simply plug in their flash drives to safe off a document or to read a PDF file they downloaded at home.  Putting the ability to use your flash drive and to use that USB connectivity to plug and play to a printer to print off work you may have done on the airplane, that makes an IPad competitor product look much more intelligent and user friendly than this first release of the IPad itself.

Multitasking Like a Real Computer

When users buy into a new technology, it has to line up with what they are already used to.  One aspect of the IPad that fails in this objective totally is the ability to do more than one thing at a time.  By simply empowering their IPad competition to multitask, the Google version of the technology comes off looking smarter and better designed from day one. 

Yes, Apple has committed to deliver multitasking to the IPad later in 2010.  But that delay only frustrates users who thought they were getting futuristic new technology in the IPad only find that the device can't even do something they could do on their home PC many years ago.  That perception of incompetence added to the perception that Apple is going to charge them for every little basic functionality and the impression that the IPad is all hype with little bang for the buck are all areas where Google can swoop in and steal away a good sized chunk of this market.  If Google can get their IPad version on the market quickly to capitalize on these disappointments in the IPad technology, they may be in for that major market coup that they are hoping for.

The term “Big Brother" comes from a futuristic novel by George Orwell named 1984 which envisioned a future where the government would have monitors everywhere that allowed them to watch every movement in society.  When Orwell wrote that novel and the year 1984 was the future, that was a ridiculous and scary proposition.  But technology has moved along tremendously since then.  Between increased security monitoring to fight terrorism and the good and bad uses of GPS technology, more than one doomsayer has been calling for a 1984 situation in our modern technological world.

If that bleak vision of the future had any basis in reality, the Japanese just took us one step forward with a technology that allows an employer to go much further than to just watch where an employee was on a moment by moment basis.  The Japanese system that was created by the KDDI Corporation uses motion sensor equipment that is resident in an employee’s mobile phone to know precisely where the employee is PLUS exactly what he or she is doing.  This is scary stuff.

The KDDI system takes employee monitoring to an entirely new level of detail and complexity.  Simply by recording and analyzing the movements that the cell phone tracker detects, a manager could tell by the minute if an employee were going up stairs, emptying the trash or walking.  If the employee was detected as being involved in an activity that did not fit with the managers expectation, that gives the manger all he or she needs to take corrective action.  Quite literally, the employee cannot make a move that their manager doesn’t know about.

Of course, those who are pushing the KDDI monitoring system say that the idea is to just give managers the ability to know what their employees are doing when away from the office and that information can be used to reward successful performance or punish improper behavior.  But this big step forward in employee has lots of ramifications for all kinds of job descriptions and the uses could easily become secretive and border on the "Big Brother" images that we are all afraid of.

Human rights advocates are already outraged by this next step in sophistication in human surveillance.  In theory, an employer should disclose to the employee when the cell phone is given to him or her that there is monitoring software at work in that cell phone.  The employer and the employee should sign an agreement that the employer would be monitoring the employees every movement and that those movements would be used to evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of the employee. 

Hopefully, if things were run correctly, those movement trackers would not be the only thing used to confirm that the employee is doing his or her job correctly and well.  And employees who need the work will sign just about anything for a paycheck.  But this level of monitoring brings real questions out about whether employer monitoring at this level of detail amounts to invasion of privacy and bullying of the employee which takes the place of good management methods.  One wonders if managers who have to use spying to manage their employees are just bad managers using toys to replace management skills.

Of course, if the employee were aware that the cell phone was being used to track behavior, it is easy to imagine the employee finding ways to "fool" the tracking software.  The cell phone could be placed on the body of another employee and two employees could tag team making the right movements to satisfy the corporate office while the other goofs off.  Or the employees together may decide to deceive the tracking software such as putting the phone on a dog or leaving it in a vehicle to convince the employer that the data they are gathering is unreliable.

There are good reasons to consider how deception enters into the employer/employee relationship because of automated movement monitoring.  It points to the fact that monitoring the movements of an employee reflects a basic distrust of the employee.  If the boss needs a machine to confirm that you are doing your job well, what does that say about the relationship between employer and worker?  You can sugar coat it all you want to but any system designed to electronically monitor employees is based on distrust and an expectation that you will catch the employee doing something wrong.

Naturally, KDDI balks at the image that they are setting up a "Big Brother" relationship with their employees.  So they came up with a nice spin on that image.  A Mr. Yokoyama of KDDI said it nicely in his prepared statement to the press. 

"But this is not about curtailing employees' rights to privacy.  We'd rather like to think our creation more of a caring, mothering system rather than a Big Brother approach to watching over citizens."

Whether it is caring mom or Big Brother could be just semantics.  Before this technology was developed, Japan had a pretty dismal record in regards to human rights and the rights of privacy for employees.  This technology will only push that envelope one step further.  It isn't like this is the first type of monitoring software that has been available to employers.  There are monitor tools to use webcams in employee computers to watch behavior or to use GPS to track movements.  It will not take a lot of innovation to create an integrated system to use all of these systems to completely take over the privacy of any given employee.

It also is not hard to see the government taking an interest in this kind if surveillance.  The concept of total government invasion into the privacy of citizens is just as feared today as it was in the days of George Orwell.  It does not take much imagination to see government monitoring being used to watch every move you make using these different surveillance tools.  Plenty of movies have been made to keep that image vivid in our minds.  KDDI has just given us one more tool to make that nightmare a reality.  The illusion that it will not be used to for such insidious purposes is at its very best naive and at worst tragically flawed.

Your First Home Office Network

"Telecommuting" - it's the only way to fly! Being able to work from home will change how you think about work. And setting up a home network is easier now than ever. Gone are the days when you had to study wheel vs. ring vs. serial diagrams - network capable devices today are made with multi-tasking capabilities built right in. This will be a snap.

You need:

* A Broadband or better Internet connection

* A wireless-capable router

* Perhaps a switch or a hub

* Your PCs, be they desktop, laptop, or mobile

* Printers and speakers, whatever peripherals you'll be using

* Possibly ethernet cable, with either the plastic clip connector or USB

* network cards and adapters

Instead of connecting the Internet directly to one computer, you'll be connecting it to a router. Most routers these days are gateways as well, with several ethernet ports (they look like large telephone cord jacks) and USB ports (they look like flat, rectangular holes with a bit of metal on one side), in addition to a wireless antenna.

Once you get Internet going to a router with an antenna up, that should be it. Get on your computer and use the software to see if it can find a wireless signal. You might need to configure it first - if so, connect one computer by ethernet to the router and open a web browser. In the address bar, type the IP address of your router - these vary by manufacturer, but should be one of http://192.168.0.1 (the last two digits may vary, but will usually be either .1.1, .1.0, .0.0, something like that). Find out the default user name and password for your router (should be listed in the instructions) - it will usually be 'admin' for username and either 'admin' or 'password' for the password. The first thing you will want to do is change that default setup so anybody in the neighborhood can't just sponge your connection!

In some cases, you might not want to go full wireless. An ethernet connection is recommended for scenarios with one desktop computer downstairs and the router upstairs, since wireless signals might not pass freely through the floor. Bluetooth gadgets plugged into USB ports will also assist for scenarios like speakers and printers, where you only need a direct connection from one machine. Other things like switches and hubs might be needed if you have several wired computers or printers going to one place which is inaccessible to WiFi.

You will want to turn on the highest level of encryption you have available. WPA-2 at least is recommended. Your router and all concerned computers should be able to sort each other out through DHCP (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol). Give both your router and each computer on the network a unique name - this makes it easier to monitor what's going on, and also helps with security.

Some tips for a productive home office environment: Have the most reliable set-up you can get. Invest in a headset and speaker for those marathon conference calls. Have a comfortable chair and perhaps a couch handy for reading or for laptop work - don't live like a potted plant. Keep office space and pay space separate. Have an office with a door and be sure your housemates know when the door is shut, you're busy. Avoid the temptation to rank your office space last and end up in some dingy corner of the basement - pick a room with a nice, big window. Have a second storage device to store back-ups of important data. Oh, and don't forget to get out once in a while!

Comparing Touchscreens and Keyboards 

The home user has only to take a moment to consider whether they like touchscreens or keyboards, but the business owner and industrial provider has to ponder the question more deeply. The question changes when you're ordering for thousands of employees. We'll discuss ramifications for both here.

Keyboards have a lot of loyalty in tech circles. Especially the full-sized keyboards that go with desktop personal computers and workstations. The benefits are that human hands are most comfortable on a large keyboard, which provides the most comfortable typing. For those of us who grew up using computers in the "space cadet" or "bucky-bits" era, when you were expected to play four-and-five-key combos, nothing else feels quite as natural.

But time has marched on. In fact, the single greatest bottleneck to adopting mobile devices is the tiny keyboards we have to adapt to. UMPCs and Blackberrys are fantastic, but those tiny little buttons are suitable for little more than twiddling out one-line messages with the thumbs - and the thumbs get tired fast!

Touchscreens are a much better solution for mobile devices. One big reason is because a keyboard can be replicated in software, and then, unlike a physical keyboard, an onscreen keyboard can be changed to a different layout. It can not only switch between Querty and Dvorak, but to Icelandic or Chinese as well. In addition they can be adapted to using fingers or a stylus.

One red flag for touchscreens, however, is the large touchscreen surface. If you have a flat monitor in front of you, tapping and moving things on the screen can become tiring very fast. The syndrome has the nickname "gorilla arm," because the muscles in your forearm become strained if you're making gestures in front of your face for eight hours a day. Similarly, a large flat table surface looks really impressive in a demo, but again physically making those sweeping arm gestures day in and day out gets old fast.

But some applications are perfect for large touchscreens. One example is media. When CNN or BBC does a newcast about an election or a war and they have data spread out all over a big board, they can control it easily since all they have to do is manipulate it for thirty minutes or less in front of the camera.

Getting back to small devices, touchscreens have a couple of those drawbacks. The glass surface can easily get dirty from greasy fingerprints, and if somebody taps them with an object not suited for the task and damages the screen, there goes your device. You don't think of this until you see an engineer working in the field, who uses a screwdriver to tap his PDAs icons, since one's already in his hand.

One more thing to consider is repetitive motion injury. With large keyboards, the microcomputer revolution discovered a new disease: carpal tunnel syndrome. This is when the nerves in the wrist become pinched as a result of too much typing on those large computer keyboards. Another kind of repetitive stress comes from using a mouse, which is why many mousepads now come with gel pad wrist supports.

At the very least, you should try out a model for yourself. Whatever interface you decide on, try using it for a day or so. Note what works and what fails for your particular case. But also take into account the various needs of your staff, if you have to make such a decision.

P.S. If you're still sold on a keyboard, don't forget there's hybrid touchscreen keyboards coming - just to confuse the issue even further!

There needs to be a Gadget for everything? Right?

Well given that cardboard is so 1980's and every item of clothing will soon need to have a battery to make it "do something" - the MingleStick fills an age-old niche. The business card replacement.

While I can't see companies handing out MingleSticks instead of business cards to get the trend going, BUT if it takes off, it's sure to be a great wave. We've all been talking about Open Social and about just using a unified Card-Exchange on your Windows Mobile, Symbian or iPhone PDA - but is anyone listening?  New Gadgets are just more fun!  And I guess the simple answer is that pulling out that special iPhone application is just "too complex" for many. The Mingle Stick is extremely simple and surprisingly effective.  I look forward to seeing it at an upcoming trade-show even for business card exchange.

Here's the MingleStick home page if you want it "from the horse's mouth".

So how does it actually work?? Simple...

Step 1: Press a button

Two users point their MingleSticks at each other and press a button. The red flashing light turns solid green to indicate a successful connection. The connection is made within a split second! Just point and click! It’s that easy!

Step 2: Plug into a computer

Plug your MingleStick into a computer that is connected to the Internet. Your MingleStick connections are then uploaded to our website. You will then be asked to login to your online account with a secure username and password.

Step 3: Review your connections

View the people you connected with using your MingleStick. Check out their profile pictures and contact information within your online address book. You can also visit their social profiles found of popular social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, etc. Mingle360 turns your real-world conversations into online connections!

In Action!

Now that you have a basic understanding of how the MingleStick works, watch the
following video to see the MingleStick in action!

Over and over, we keep hearing about drives to bring a personal mobile computer to every student. There was the famed - but ultimately ill-fated - XO Laptop, which was to be cheaply produced and sold directly to governments around the world for their citizen's use. There's now about 12 versions of their story out there, from the $100 promise to the buy-one get-one program and then Microsoft getting a stake in the deal, followed by lots of internal bickering. But other projects of this scale have met with somewhat more success.

The latest attempt in this vein is by New South Wales Secondary Principals' Council president, Jim McAlpine. In this story at Australian IT News, he outlines a plan to equip secondary school students with an as-yet-unspecified brand of laptops, equipped with the opes-source Linux operating system Edubuntu.

What is Edubuntu? It is a version of Canonical's Ubuntu distribution, modified to bristle with educational software and be geared for school use. This is a very natural choice; Ubuntu has become the most popular distro by leaving behind the high-power tools and menagerie of choices typical of Linux systems to focus on a simplified, slimmed-down vision of Linux. Ubuntu has become the canonical distro to refer new Linux users to.

As one parent's review shows, like all Linux distributions you'll need to be at least a little bit of a geek to get it installed and running, but once you do, Edubuntu has many surprises and delights. The install issue would naturally be taken care of if the government provides the machines to schools, of course. But we cannot express this strongly enough: Most of the resistance to Linux on the desktop comes from people not having experience installing an operating system. If you attempt to do this on your own machine, accept as a fact of life that you're in for a lot of learning and trouble-shooting.

Anyway, quite a few manufacturers of laptop and notebook computers are beginning to offer Linux pre-installed on their products. So most likely NSW won't have much difficulty coming up with a vendor.

But don't count on it being an Edubuntu distro! As the article at AU-IT mentions, Red Hat global chief executive Jim Whitehurst has - well, we can't resist saying it - "thrown his hat into the ring" on the matter. Red Hat has been the leading commercial vendor of Linux systems for almost a decade now, so the upstart Canonical, who makes Ubuntu, can expect some competition here.

As many of the commenters on Slashdot have observed, offering schools a discount to put a computer system in front of students is perhaps the smartest marketing plan ever. Children are naturally flexible in learning new systems, and later in life as adults will be more favorable to the systems they've gotten to know. Both Microsoft and Apple knew this for years; Apple led the desktop wave in the schools with their MacIntosh line back in the 1980s, and Microsoft today uses the Bill and Melinda gates foundation to donate Windows desktop machines to school districts.

Do students like Linux? Undoubtedly, Linux has seen huge uptake with the 21st century children compared to the previous generation. Since most of your time on a PC is spent in a web browser, the Firefox web browser and its cousins are partly to thank for this ease of adoption. Open Firefox on a Windows box and on a Linux box side by side: you can't even tell the difference!