Why cellular phone voice quality sucks, and what to do about it

I've always wondered why people are ditching their land lines and going to cellular phones. In my article "Telephones: Not Ready to Give Up my Land Line Yet", I gave four good reasons for keeping a landline. The fourth reason was sound quality.

Cellular service providers made a lot of compromises to sound quality in order to fit more channels, and hence more calls, into their networks. Those compromises degraded the quality of the sound to the point that it's become very frustrating to try to hold a decent conversation over a cell phone. Compounding the problem is the fact that the handset manufacturers have forgotten that a "smartphone" is supposed to be a telephone that does other stuff. Nowadays a "smartphone" is a palm-sized computer that also makes phone calls.

And the manufacturers have also built compromises into their hardware. The built-in speaker distorts the voice of the person on the other end. And the microphone, if it picks up your voice at all, also picks up a lot of background noise.

It doesn't have to be this way. You know those interviews on NPR, when the correspondent, sitting in the studio in Washington D.C. or Los Angeles, is having an interview with two people, one in Kabul and one in London, and it sounds like they're sitting right next to them? Yeah. Those are telephone connections, people.

Why are you settling for the tinny, fuzzy, static-filled, crap that comes out of your cellphone? A recent article in IEEE Spectrum tells why cellphone sound quality is so bad, and what can (and should) be done about it. The solutions are practical, and they are available today.

So why aren't we using them? I think it all boils down to money: the same reason that airlines are mashing seats closer together and making them more uncomfortable. It doesn't have to be this way. I'm not sure what to do about it, but I'll keep my landline until the day the phone companies get this mess figured out — and do something about it.

Is anything NOT made in China?

I intend to research this for myself, but I thought I'd ask here first.

Recent news articles have exposed the terrible, sometimes fatal, working conditions imposed on workers who assemble Apple's iPhones and iPads in China. These articles have implicated Foxconn and many other Apple contractors in China, who pay their workers horribly, force them to endure long hours working in dangerous and unhealthy conditions, and more or less treat them as disposable supplies, like paper towels.

Apple has yet to respond in a way acceptable to socially conscious consumers; however, Apple's products have enough going for them that consumers are still buying them. That may change, if Apple does not quickly show some sense of social responsibility.  You read it here first, folks. But that's not the main thrust of this article.

Apple is not the only company to find itself in this predicament, with a popular and competitively priced product line, completely dependent on China for its manufacture. As I have said before, you cannot buy a small kitchen appliance right now that is not made in China. After this weekend, I will add that you cannot buy a men's suit for under $500.00 that is not made in China. Can you buy a flat-screen television that is not made in China? How about a smartphone?

Let's focus on smartphones for a minute. The largest (and maybe the only) viable competitor to the iOS smartphone right now is the Android smartphone. Two of the largest makers of Android-based smartphones are Samsung and LG, followed by Motorola, HTC, and the rest of the gang. Here's a serious question: Which Android-based smartphones are NOT made in China?


Samsung and LG are Korean labels. A South Korean businessman recently told me that iPhones make up 26% of the South Korean smartphone market, while Android phones make up the other 74%, with the  majority of those Android phones being Samsung. Are Samsung smartphones made in Korea? What about LG smartphones? Searching for the word "China" in their Wikipedia entries comes up with zero.

(Another big unanswered question: Can we assume correctly that working conditions in Korea are better than they are in China?)

And what about Nokia? Well, Nokia is a Finnish label.  That's right, one of the most reliable names in the cellular phone business is headquartered in the tiny (but very advanced!) country of Finland. According to Wikipedia, two of Nokia's nine manufacturing facilities are in China. But Nokia phones don't run Android. They still run Symbian, though some ran Linux for a bit and they're all slated to run MS Phone 7 starting in late 2011.

One of Nokia's subsidiaries is a relatively unknown company called Vertu. Vertu makes "luxury" smartphones by hand, out of the finest materials, in its factory in England. The screen is a thin sheet of clear, transparent, single-crystal sapphire. Each key is individually machined from a chunk of sapphire. All of the apps are custom-written, and they run on Symbian. Okay, so this one counts as "not made in China," but you won't find very many Vertu phones on the street. They start at about US$5000.

Does that leave Samsung and LG as the only smartphone choices for the socially responsible consumer? (And, as it turns out, for the environmentally responsible consumer - both manufacturers have been recognized for their environment-friendly practices.)

LET'S BROADEN THE DISCUSSION:  What about children's toys? Printed books? Flat-screen televisions? Stereos and home entertainment systems (even the ones with Japanese names)? Computer hardware? Dishes and cutlery? Automotive parts? Automotive accessories? Hand tools? Power tools? What can we buy today that is not made in China?

Please hit the Comment link and add to the discussion. Don't be scared off by the Captcha thingy or my comment-moderation policy. If you're not a spammer or a Net loon, your comment will be posted within a few hours.

Cell-Phone Funny

Today I'm going to post a link to another blog. I like reading this blog because the entries are always thoughtful, sometimes deep, and a combination of angst-ridden, pragmatic and humorous that works for me. The author writes about her life, past and present, good and bad, with a candor and a style that are rare among writers today. I wish I knew this author in person. We'd probably be good friends.

Today's blog entry is about a trip to the T-mobile store with a bored six-year-old in tow, in order to replace a 20-year-old cellphone. When she finally got around to leaving, she collected her son, who had been playing with all of the demo phones in an effort to relieve his boredom - and on her way out the door, she noticed his face looking back at her from every one of those demo phones.

Go read it, and enjoy the rest of the story.

The new bubble: China

In the wake of the dotcom bubble of 1995-2000, and the real-estate-bubble catastrophe of 2003-2008, economists and policymakers are looking around anxiously, trying to predict the next bubble to burst.  In all their casting about, they are quietly ignoring the dead moose lying right there on the coffee table in the middle of the room:  China.

Consider the dotcom bubble for a minute.  The bubble was caused by a bunch of entrepreneurs who jumped on the make-money-fast-on-the-Internet bandwagon (the ".com" suffix, pronounced "dot-com," became a new word and a label for the whole fiasco), and all the investors who fed them money.  Greed fueled the dotcom bubble.  Even people who should have known better, smart and educated Wall Street professionals, bought into the boom.  Some college professors and very conservative investment advisors warned that both the entrepreneurs and the speculators were ignoring the basic principles of investing, but others said that the dotcom boom had rewritten the rules.  I actually heard several "experts" on public radio saying, "This time it's different."

Well, that time, it was no different.  Most of the dotcom businesses  went bankrupt in a few years.  The entrepreneurs and the investors lost everything.  The money simply disappeared, along with everything built on that money.

When you get right down to it, the cause of the dotcom bubble was pure and simple greed:  people wanted to get rich quick.

The real estate bubble was the same way:  Before the bubble began, mortgage lending was governed by strict rules.  A potential homebuyer had to have a large enough down payment to indicate a serious intent to keep the property, and a demonstrated ability to make the required monthly payments.  Potential lenders did serious evaluations of buyers' ability to pay:  the credit appraisal.  Millions of homebuyers have experienced the anxious waiting period while their credit appraisal was being completed, wondering what kind of credit risk the lender would assess them at, and what mortgage terms they would be offered as a result.

Suddenly, almost overnight, the lending rules changed.  The required down payment dropped from 20 percent, to 10 percent, then five percent, and finally zero percent.  No down payment was required to get into a house.  At the same time, credit terms were relaxed.  There was no longer any need to demonstrate that a buyer could sustain a mortgage payment - not for one month, let alone for 30 years.  And finally, an insidious form of mortgage which had been quietly gaining in popularity for 30 years seemed to take over the market.  This was the negative-amortization loan, which allowed a buyer to make smaller payments than the minimum required by the traditional formulas, with the accrued interest being added to the principal, so that the buyer owed more and more money as time went on.  Some of these negative-amortization loans had a a schedule of gradually increasing payments as the years went on.  Some only had a term of three to five years, with a huge "balloon" payment at the end, with the unwritten (but oft-spoken) mutual expectation that the buyer would arrange new and better financing before the loan expired.

Two things happened as a result of this relaxation of the rules.  First, people who should never have been buying houses started buying houses.  Second, everybody - well, almost everybody - started buying houses bigger than they could afford.  Then sellers started realizing that they could get a lot more money for their property than they were expecting, and so they started jacking up the prices of their homes.  Home prices had been rising steadily for decades anyway, but suddenly the prices accelerated their upward trend.

Everybody was getting rich.  Buyers were getting bigger houses than they could afford.  Sellers were making lots of money.  Lenders were getting lots of mortgages - meaning that they owned lots of homes.  Then the sellers, mostly banks, started bundling the mortgages together (think of the physical metaphor, all of those paper mortgage agreements, stacked up and held together with rubber bands) and selling them to each other as investment instruments.  Heck, if all those buyers actually made their payments for 30 years, those mortgages represented a lot of income for the lenders!

(We haven't even talked about China yet.  Stay tuned.)

So buyers, sellers, lenders, and stockholders saw the chance to get really rich, really quick, and they jumped on it.  Once again, as with the dotcom bubble, people ignored the safe and sensible rules of investing, caught up in the chance to make money off the rapid rise in property values.  Builders built, banks lended, flippers flipped, and real estate agents (and their friends, the mortgage brokers) paid cash for fancy new cars and stuff.  As before, greed ruled the day.

This entire house of cards was built on a foundation of borrowers - home buyers - who couldn't afford to pay back the money they had borrowed.  When these people eventually ran out of money and defaulted on their loans, the lenders exercised the terms of the mortgage, kicked them out of their homes, and took over their property.  But foreclosed property doesn't make the banks any money.  They try to get rid of it as quickly as they can.  But the banks had acquired so many homes that they couldn't sell them all - not quickly, not slowly, and not for anywhere near their appraised value.  That's because the home values had been horrendously inflated in the price runup that was the bubble.

Now the banks had the properties, but not the cash flow that the properties were supposed to generate.  Without money coming in, the banks couldn't take care of their own financial obligations.  So the banks started failing, or at least were in danger of failing.  The only way they could generate money in a hurry was by selling some of their investments.  And the vast majority of investments were those bundles of mortgages - "mortgage-backed securities," they were called - and since those mortgages were in default, they were worthless pieces of paper.  Nobody wanted to buy them.

So the homeowners lost their homes, the banks lost their money, and the investors lost their money.  Banks couldn't afford to pay their bills or their employees.  All the money that went into the real estate market disappeared and was gone forever.  The ripple effects from this disaster led to failures in other, tightly connected industries, such as investment broker Merrill Lynch, insurance company AIG, and automaker General Motors. That's when all the banks, the investment companies, the insurance companies, and the automakers ran crying to the government, saying "we're too big to fail."

In case you haven't figured it out yet, I'll say it again.  The entire dotcom bubble and bust was caused by greed.  The entire real estate bubble and bust was caused by greed.

And that brings us to China.  I speak of China here as one monolithic entity, encompassing its government, its financial institutions,  and its industries.  Some of you may object if I include Taiwan and Hong Kong in the monolith, but for now that's what I'm doing.  I may lump the Chinese people in here as well, because the individuals are what make up the aforementioned institutions.

China is the next big bubble, and when it busts, the results will be a worldwide catastrophe.  And as with the dotcom and real estate bubbles, the driving force behind it all is greed.

China has systematically undercut prices for manufactured goods all over the world.  Because of the low prices offered by Chinese manufacturers, many American companies have moved all their manufacturing from North America to China.  It saves the American companies lots of money, which shows up in their  corporate profits.  Besides, it lets them sell their goods to American consumers more cheaply, and American consumers like "cheap."  Most American consumers prefer "cheap" over "quality," but I don't think we'll get into that here.

As a result, most, if not all, of the American companies who make their goods in China are trapped.  For example, all of Apple's iPads and iPhones are made in China.  They could not stay in that business segment if they were suddenly forced to make them here.  Even if they could set up an assembly line, they couldn't run it without the components - the display, the batteries, and so on - because the components are also made in China.

(There was a great article in Forbes recently, called "Why Amazon Can't Make a Kindle in the USA.")

Much of today's high-tech gadgetry, including the cheapest cellular phone on the market, depends on some exotic minerals known as rare earth elements to operate.  Those rare earths used to be mined in Africa, Russia, and North and South America.  Several years ago, China started mining them and selling them at drastically reduced prices.  The other mines could not compete and shut down, leaving China as the sole source for these rare earths.  Recently, China has been talking about jacking up the price or restricting the supply of these minerals.  Guess what would happen to Nokia and other (non-Chinese) cellphone manufacturers if rare earths became too expensive to buy, or simply unavailable?  That's right!

Recently, I wanted to buy my wife a new kitchen mixer.  I went to three department stores here in the western U.S.  Every single mixer I looked at was made in China.  The venerable domestic brands like Sunbeam, and the classy European brands like, um, Braun (I think) all had "Made in China" stamped on the box somewhere.  And they were all made in China because it's cheaper.

Our first vacuum cleaner was a Hoover.  It was made in America (or Canada, I think) and it was mostly made of metal.  Our second vacuum cleaner was also a Hoover.  It was mostly made of plastic, but it was still made in America.  Together, those two vacuum cleaners lasted over 30 years.  They were sturdy machines, and we used them A LOT.  Now we're shopping for our third vacuum cleaner.  We looked at the offerings from Hoover.  They're made mostly of plastic.  They're made in China.  They have a terrible reputation for workmanship, reliability, and vacuum-ability.  Why should we buy Hoover again?  We won't.

Hoover's not the worst, nor is it the cheapest.  There are cheaper vacuum cleaners.  They don't work very well, either.  And guess where every single one of them is made?

It gets worse.  Shall we look at automobiles?  The concept of a "made in America" automobile, even a manly American pickup truck, is laughable.  All of the electronics are made in China, or assembled in the U.S. (or Mexico or another country) from components made in China.  The bumpers and fenders may be made in the U.S. (or Mexico or Ohio), but the raw materials for those metal bumpers and plastic fenders were shipped to the U.S. from overseas - mostly from China!  Even the fabric or vinyl upholstery for the seats comes from China.  The light bulbs!  The floor mats!  Detroit has outsourced all of it, in an effort to make a buck.

(John Deere, in Iowa, still makes a lot of their own components.  But Chinese electronics are starting to make inroads there, even.)

How did the U.S. government finance the bailout of the companies that got caught in the 2008 financial crisis following the bust of the real estate bubble (especially the "too big to fail" companies that should have been allowed to fail, or else cut up into smaller pieces that were no longer "too big to fail")?  They sold government-backed securities to other countries.  And which country bought the lion's share of those securities?  Which country was so flush with cash (or the promise thereof - remember how the real estate bubble worked!) that it could step in and buy billions of dollars of U.S. treasury bonds without flinching?  Well, China, of course!

And guess where China got all that money from?  From America, of course!  They sell us their stuff, they collect our money, and then they buy our country and our future.

But it's all a house of cards, just like the dotcoms and the housing boom.  China has looked into their future and they're forecasting massive growth - so massive that they've gone out into the countryside and carved out entire cities from nothing.  Street lights, apartment buildings, government buildings and shopping centers have risen out of the pastures and are waiting for people to move into them.  These "ghost cities" can be seen on Google Maps, and they're eerily empty.  The Chinese are mining coal and burning it at a furious rate, to literally fuel their growth.  They are damming rivers and gouging out strip mines to supply their hungry industries with raw materials.

And they are engaging in a centuries-long tradition of imitation and deception.  They take products made in the West, try to figure out what makes them work, and then try to come up with a copy that looks the same - right down to the trademarks, the colors and the textures.  Some of the patented and trademarked cable that my own employer makes has appeared in counterfeit form in Asia - made in China.

In the ultimate irony, they duplicate not only Apple's computers and handheld products (and remember, the legitimate ones are also made in China), but they sell them in 22 imitation Apple stores.  The stores are not affiliated with Apple Computer in any way, but their layout, decor, and even employee uniforms and name badges are exact duplicates of what you will find in real Apple stores.  The deception is so complete that some of the store employees think they are really working for Apple Computer.

I have already written about the sham (and the scam) that was the 2008 Beijing Olympics.  It was a plastic imitation of the real thing, a shameless ripoff of other people's hard work, enabled by the duplicity of the Chinese government and the gullibility of the rest of the world.  In the same way, the duplicity of monolithic China and the willingness of the rest of the world to be led around by the nose (or other body parts) has contributed to the growth of the house of cards that is the Chinese bubble.

Actually, that's not completely accurate.  At the core of everything, it is the greed of monolithic China and the greed of the rest of the world that have contributed to the Chinese bubble.

One day, the U.S. government or another government will not be able to make good on the financial instruments that China holds.  China will find out that it is holding on to worthless pieces of paper, and that China does not have enough real money to keep operating.  With no money to pay its own obligations, power plants and mines will shut down.  Trains will stop operating.  With no way to get raw materials, factories will shut down and send their workers home.  With no jobs and no money to spend, Chinese people will stop buying their own goods.  With nothing to ship, ships will stop crossing the ocean, and Americans will no longer be able to buy Hoover vacuum cleaners, Sunbeam mixers, or Apple iPhones.  Without the raw materials and components from China, American automakers (and Japanese and German ones, too) will no longer be able to build cars.

Printing presses, computers, traffic lights, tables, chairs, dishes, cutlery, light bulbs, furniture, clothing:  all of it will come to a stop until alternative sources can be found or tooled up.  Those alternative mines and factories will spring up all over the world, but they won't start producing overnight.  They will take years.  And the wealth, or commerce, or economic prosperity - the money - that was lost forever will take even more years to replace.

It may take a decade for the bubble to burst.  Some people will argue with me and say it will never happen.  But it ony took 15 years for the gigantic Japanese economic machine, which was also supposed to take over the world, to come crashing down.  It surely did, and the Chinese one will come crashing down just as surely.  And when it does, it will take years for the world to recover.

From its own greed.

Microsoft can still be competitive - if they want to

Microsoft is the company everybody loves to hate. With a near monopoly on home and business computer operating systems, MS has been the bully in the computer marketplace for a long time. Not many people feel sorry for MS when it stumbles or otherwise runs into difficulty.

I worked for a division of MS for a while. It was a great work environment, and the group of people I worked with were talented, were motivated, and enjoyed some degree of autonomy. They had a solid product line and, as far as I can tell, it sold well. (Do you have an MS optical mouse on your desk?) I would have loved to become a permanent MS employee.

I understand that not all divisions of MS are as fun to work in as that division was. That's the nature of a megacorporation like MS. I can live with that.

Recently, MS has made some major missteps in the mobile computing arena, leaving MS with single-digit market share in mobile phones, tablet devices, and mobile phone and table operating systems. To quote from TechRepublic's Jason Hiner:

So Microsoft has talked about five different mobile platforms in 2010: Windows Mobile 6.5, Windows Embedded Compact 7, Windows Phone 7, Kin, and Windows 7, with very little explanation about how these platforms relate to each other and which ones Microsoft wants to use in which settings. Is it any surprise then that Microsoft is flailing so badly in the mobile space and has no coherent tablet strategy?

And I think it’s fair to say that Microsoft’s tablet troubles are indicative of the larger problems that are haunting today’s Microsoft — similar teams competing for resources, minimal collaboration between similar projects, and not enough vision from the top to get everyone pushing in the same direction.

Charter wars like this are not uncommon in large corporations. Back in the day, Hewlett Packard had at least three different dialects of the BASIC programming languages, and at least four different small computer/workstation architectures. Now, as Hiner points out, MS has five different mobile "platforms."

Charter wars, if managed properly, can be a healthy thing for a large corporation. Small businesses can't afford charter wars, but big ones can. Charter wars give competing ideas the chance to duke it out in the lab, and again in the marketplace, and a skillful management team can use the charter wars to weed out the weakest ideas — just like those reality TV shows — and find the best idea for the company to pursue.

One of the challenges for upper management is knowing how long to let the charter war run. That takes a deft hand.

Charter wars are by their nature messy, acrimonious and bloody. It's unnecessary, but unavoidable. Some of the losers will go to work for the winning team. Some will quit out of frustration or hurt feelings. Some will simply move on to something else inside the company, and talk for years about how their vastly superior project got unfairly shafted. Eh. Welcome to the corporate world.

Microsoft can afford the "similar teams competing for resources" and the "minimal collaboration between similar projects." That's the essence of a good charter war. What MS needs, though, in order to get through the charter war and come out with a real competitive product, is "vision from the top to [manage the charter war properly and eventually] get everyone pushing in the same direction." That's what they're lacking.

Telephones: Not Ready to Give Up my Land Line Yet

I like cellular phones. They have changed civilization as much as fire, the wheel, and indoor plumbing. I covet the iPhone and one day I hope to own one.

We're in a transition period, between a world that is 100% land lines (that's the new term for wired-into-the-wall-somewhere telephones) and a world that is 100% cellular phones. Most people or families have both. Some of my friends have gotten rid of their land lines and gone completely to cellular phones. They have several reasons for switching, some of which are listed below:

• convenience and portability
• freedom from the monopoly of "the phone company"
• one-stop shopping for voice, text, internet, whatever
• connectivity

(I've written about connectivity before. It's not necessarily a good thing.)

I'm not ready to give up my land line yet. My reasons for keeping it are listed below:

• cost
• reliability
• latency
• sound quality

Cellular phone service has come down in price, but it still leaves a lot to be desired. The cellular phone companies are great at nickel-and-diming their customers for additional services and for miscellaneous fees, a technique carried over from their land-line billing practices. If times get hard and I have to trim my budget, I can save a lot more money by discontinuing my cellular service than by unplugging my land line.

Unfortunately, discontinuing one's cellular service is not that simple. Most cellular providers lock you into a service plan for a certain period of time. Some providers, such as Cricket, do not, but most do. This means that you won't start saving money until your contract ends.

Land lines have it all over cell phones as far as reliability is concerned. Cell phone service is always a gamble, and not just when you're driving in a car. Dropped calls happen at the most annoying times, even when you're merely sitting in your living room. In the event of a widespread power outage or other natural disaster, cell phones are useless as communication devices.

As for land line handsets, if you still have one of the old-fashioned Western Electric electromechanical phones (the kind that only plugs into the phone jack and not into an electrical outlet, and that has a real bell inside), you can send and receive phone calls through some of the worst disasters, including power failures.

Latency, in Cell Phone Land, refers to the delay between the time you say something and the time the person on the other end hears what you said. We have all experienced the awkward cellphone conversations where one person tries to respond too quickly, or both start talking at once and don't realize they're talking on top of each other for a second or two. Latency is a phenomenon dictated by the laws of nature. Like gravity, it's something you can't avoid.

With land lines, latency is near zero. Computers and modems can detect the latency on a land line, but humans can't. It makes for smoother conversations, less frustration and less stress.

And finally, the voice quality on most cellphone calls is terrible. I don't really understand why we spend more money to make our voices sound so bad - sometimes downright unintelligible. I often catch myself wondering if I sound as bad to the person on the other end of the line as they sound to me.

Cellphones are the future of mankind; it's undeniable. But don't be too quick to abandon the past. Some moves to embrace the future are not necessarily good moves (like "upgrading" from Windows XP to Windows Vista).

Three New Superpowers! Good or Bad? Please Comment.

My first entry at Zyzmog Galactic Headquarters talked about the conflict between my fascination for, and my rejection of, new technology. I'm often heard to exclaim, "I love living in this century!" There is a lot of exciting stuff going on, and I enjoy being both a spectator and a participant in the onrush of technology.

At this point in the 21st Century, technology has granted us three superpowers that didn't exist a short time ago. Many high school students can remember the days when they didn't have these superpowers. Let me list them for you.

The three superpowers in the early 21st Century are:
1. Infinite mobility.
2. Infinite access to information.
3. Infinite connectivity.

Infinite mobility means the ability to go anywhere in the world -- and even into orbit. If you have enough time (and money), you can travel anywhere you want. In the pages of Outside, National Geographic Explorer, Men's Journal and other magazines, you can read about fantastic voyages made, not by diplomats, politicians, soldiers or spies, but by ordinary people like you and me. You can watch TV stories about those voyages on the Travel, Discovery, and National Geographic channels.

Infinite mobility probably reached its peak in August 2001. It's still possible to travel anywhere; it's just more difficult now. Okay, North Korea is still next to impossible to visit. And some places are dangerous to travel to, but this superpower gives you the ability to travel there and get into trouble if you're stupid enough.

Infinite access to information means that nearly the entire assembled body of human knowledge is now at our fingertips. The popularization of the Internet, followed by the invention of the World Wide Web, and finally the introduction of search engines like Google and knowledge bases like Wikipedia, have done for modern man what Gutenberg's printing press did for mankind in 1440. For one thing, they have fundamentally changed the way I conduct both business and research. Even in closed societies like China and Iran, anybody with enough desire can get access to this universal fount of information. The One Laptop Per Child initiative is an effort to make this power not just infinite, but universal.

At first, we were worried that this infinite access to information would lead to infinite dissemination of falsehoods and lies. Granted, there's a lot of that out there, and there always will be, and now it's even more accessible than when its dissemination was confined to mimeographs and backwater printing houses. But the social experiment that is Wikipedia shows us that a public knowledge base can be self-correcting and self-policing, over time.

Some oppressive governments, pseudo-religious groups, and other entities that live on power and paranoia may try to squelch this infinite access to information, but they have not succeeded yet, and they will not succeed. The genie is out of the bottle.

Infinite connectivity: I'm certain there are still people on this planet without an email address. You're not one of them! Even more ubiquitous than an email address is a cellular phone. In some families, even children as young as 8 or 10 have a cellphone with all the, um, bells and whistles (sorry). In countries that cannot afford the infrastructure and costs associated with what we now call "land lines," it seems as if everyone has a cellular phone.

Last year, the new computer buzzword was cloud computing, and its herald was the netbook, a minimalist computer that keeps all of its programs and data in the "cloud" instead of on a local hard disk. The trend towards cloud computing continues this year.

Then there's the phenomenon known as social networking. One day social networking, though out of style, will define this decade the way shag carpet defined the 1970s and sideways ponytails defined the 1990s. Today, though, social networking provides an important service by allowing people to maintain and to renew social and family connections. Facebook was not the first social network, but it is currently the biggest fish in the pond. The pocket-sized social network known as Twitter was hot for a while in 2008-2010, but it seems to be fading fast, a flash in the fad pan. Who knows what tomorrow will bring?

This infinite connectivity does have a dark side, though: people will always know where you are. Your cellular service provider can track your location, either through your phone's built-in GPS, or through triangulation of your phone's position relative to two or three nearby cellular towers. The GPS capability in the newest phones can be remotely activated without the user's knowledge. Radio navigation, or triangulation, has been used by sailors and aviators for 100 years.

Another facet of this dark side: in this digital age, the right software and the right Internet connections can allow anyone to track your every move in cyberspace. By assembling all of your comments on Facebook and on blogs, all of your private (or so you thought) emails, and all of your search patterns, they can write a story of your life so detailed, so graphic, and so honest that it will scare you. All of this increased connectivity means that if you're not careful, your words and your deeds, good or evil, can (and will) be shouted from the rooftops. In some ways, this infinite connectivity leads swiftly downhill to complete and total loss of privacy.

--

So I want to know: what do you think? Does your having these three superpowers make your life better, or worse? Alternatively, does humanity's possession of these three superpowers make the world better, or worse? Please tell me what you think, and why.

All comments on this blog are still subject to moderation. This is just to keep the kooks out. Most comments will be approved instantly, and the rest (as long as they don't sound like they're from kooks) will be approved within 24 hours. Please avoid foul language and personal attacks, and stick to the subject at hand.

Political extremism and lengthy partisan diatribes are frowned upon and may also be rejected by the moderator. (Whew! Have I become one of those "power and paranoia" entities? I hope not. I just want to encourage a civil and rational dialogue.)

E' il mio gioco; le regole, le faccio io.

Call me a Luddite

I like tech toys. Normally, I'm a first adopter of the newest technologies. However, I have resisted a few tech toys, and will probably continue to resist them until I am forced to use them.

First: PDAs. I owned an HP100LX Palmtop PC way back in the late 1990s. It was a nice machine. I installed WordPerfect 5.1 and some other good DOS programs on it. I wrote and published a book using (mostly) the HP100LX. I replaced it with an HP Jornada, another so-called "palmtop PC." At one point, I totally replaced my paper day planner with the 100LX and the Jornada. After two and a half years, I went back to the paper day planner. I have steadfastly refused to own or use any of the palm/stylus/fingertip based products that have come and gone since then.

Why? Well, I can find names in a paper index faster than in an Address Book application on a PDA. I can see more information at a glance about an upcoming meeting, or past meeting notes, on paper than with a PDA. But most importantly, paper doesn't spontaneously reboot, abort memory, scramble memory, or run out of juice at critical times. And the ROI isn't there for a PDA, compared with the cost of paper refills, pens and other day planner supplies.

Second: Blackberries and other fancy cellular phones. I just use my mobile phone to talk with people. I don't text that much, I don't take very many pictures, and this latest cellphone wants me to pay to play a full game of Tetris. I admit that I do covet the Apple iPhone, and I would love to have one, but I would mostly use it as a classical telephone.

Third: MP3 players and iTunes. No, I don't want one. I can tell the difference between CD sound quality and MP3 sound quality. I prefer the CD sound, thank you -- or even a good, high quality cassette tape, played on a good player. I'm not such a Luddite as to say I prefer vinyl records (you know, the big black CDs that use a contact stylus) over CDs, because a well-mastered CD has sound quality equal or superior to the best vinyl record. But MP3s don't really do it for me.

Fourth: (until today) Blogs. I'm about four years late getting into the game. I've had my own website for a long time, but I've resisted setting up a blog until now. There are several reasons, and maybe I'll go into them another day.

So, you ask, why am I a Luddite?

I work with computers every day. I used to make computers and printers, or at least the components that went into them. I write video games. I'm an accomplished computer programmer. You'd think that I would be all for technology, as far as I can push it.

No. Why balance your checkbook electronically, when a paper one will do? Why buy special recipe management software, when a handwritten recipe book will do? Why buy an electric toothbrush, when a manual one will do? Why spend all that extra money buying an electronic anything, when you can save money and do just fine with the non-electronic, or non-electric, alternative?

I used to drive a 30-year-old Ford Mustang to work. There's something infinitely satisfying about controlling the car, and feeling it respond, through the mechanical linkages rather than through a central computer and electrical wiring. When I mashed down on the accelerator pedal, a jet on the carburetor squirted raw gasoline into the intake manifold and opened the carburetor's throat wide. When the cylinders got that raw gas and took a big gulp of air, the car jumped forward like a lion on the attack, with not even an instant's hesitation. With the new electronic cars, you have to wait for the central computer to intercept the motion of the accelerator pedal and decide what to do about it. And if today's car runs rough or has trouble starting, you can't open the hood and fix the problem with a big screwdriver and a pair of pliers.

I've always been a supporter of Project Gutenberg, and I've read several classic works as ebooks, downloaded from http://www.gutenberg.org/ . But I get eyestrain trying to read for too long from a computer screen. Paper still works better than electronic displays for long periods of reading. And there's nothing as satisfying in the tech world as curling up on the couch with a comforter, a mug of hot chocolate, and a good book.