Two quick technology updates:

Found via Steve Green, I hadn't planned to buy an Apple iPhone, but I'm starting to change my mind...

And while I often have sushi while sitting in front of my PC's twin LCD monitors, apparently the in-thing amongst the really hip members of the digerati is preparing the sushi right on them. That sounds good to me, but aren't they worried that the wasabi will melt the plastic?

Allahpundit explores the boffo box office--which a different kind of PC industry, politically correct Hollywood, would kill for--of Microsoft's Halo 3, which ties in with an apt comment Glenn Reynolds made a while back:

It occurs to me that the media sectors that are doing badly -- movies, music, newspapers, TV women's shows -- seem to be the most highly politicized, while the sectors that are doing well, like games, aren't. I'd be interested to see more analysis on that subject.

Ahh, but what sort of space would be worthy to qualify as the perfect rec room in which to play such an awesomely awesome game? There can be only choice:

This.

ABC reports, "The Future of the Workplace: No Office, Headquarters in Cyberspace--Some Companies Don't Care Where Workers Are as Long as They Get the Job Done".

Geez, Toffler wrote about telecommuting in The Third Wave in 1980. Numerous businesses (not the least of which is Pajamas) rely heavily on it. Wall Street firms used telecommuting to stay afloat immediately after 9/11. Why such a breathless headline from ABC?

10,000 geeks will look at this video clip and think: "Man, I'm glad we Windows / Star Wars / Star Trek / furgasm fans aren't as crazed as these guys":

(Triumph could have had a field day in this line, incidentally.)

Huh. Off the top of my head, I can't think of anyone in the Blogosphere who would enjoy this.

SciFi.com gives us a sneak preview of what the laptop of the future will look like. As to what it will have inside, see my recent CE Pro article on 64-bit computing.

Of course, this is all contingent on the UN's forecast of the world coming to an end in 2015 not coming true, but somehow, I think we'll muddle through...

From what I've heard, once you go dual, you never go back. I'll let you know--I'm experimenting with dual 19-inch LCD monitors. Surprisingly, it was a PITA to install, because apparently my PC's ATI videocard, which is designed to simultaneously pump out both VGA and DVI video--and hence allowing two monitors--apparently had a defective DVI output. But now that I've replaced the card, and have both monitors working, it seems like it should improve workflow with recording programs such as Cakewalk Sonar, and video programs like Adobe Premiere Pro. Not to mention experimenting with rotating the monitor 90 degrees for Word documents.

Besides, it looks bitchin' cool to boot. Maybe I'll add a third!

During the late-1990s, as the new millennium was approaching and pre-Blogosphere, I was largely toiling away for various home automation magazines (something I still do quite often, actually), where I wrote my share of "Welcome To The Home Of The Future!" articles. Here's one that featured quotes from my interview of Star Trek veteran David Gerrold, and is a representative (though heavily edited, as I recall) sample of the genre.

But my sci-fi forecasting had nothing on the Minneapolis Strib's apocalyptic vision of the future domus. Roger L. Simon writes that many of us are having the same reaction from Al Gore's low budget PowerPoint presentation agitpropumentary Academy Award-winnning blockbuster film:

After viewing the movie I was less troubled with the global warming issue and more troubled by Gore's narcissism - not exactly the result intended. In fact, the reverse. And evidently, from the poll results, I am not alone.

Remember this 1993 AT&T commercial narrated by Tom Selleck? Pretty amusing to watch it again today and realize that all of the gee-whiz technology in the ad is either here now already, or particularly in the case of the clunky looking PDA/tablet computer with an AM-style telescoping antenna sending (oooooh) faxes from the beach in the last shot, already obsolete:

(Not sure which, if any, of these technologies were actually brought to us exclusively by AT&T itself, but still, it was a stylish look at the minor wonders of the near future.)

Mickey Kaus writes:

I am so not excited about Windows Vista! ... And I was excited about Windows XP, because I thought its sturdier code would stop it from crashing. I was wrong, at least for the early version of XP that I bought. Now I can't see a thing Vista's going to do for me that seems worth braving the inevitable Microsoft early teething problems. [It says you can "spend more time surfing the web"!--ed No I can't.] ... P.S.: Needless to say, if everyone has this attitude Vista (and the need to buy new computers powerful enough to run Vista, etc.) won't provide much of a boost to the economy.

Television long ago replaced the fireplace as the central gathering place in the American home, which adds to the layers of McLuhanesque irony hidden in the annual Yule Log video. Fortunately, the spotlight shines even brighter on the world's most famous log this year, as The New York Daily News reports:

Generations have sat raptly in front of the television on Christmas Day, mesmerized by a holiday classic: "The Yule Log."

Now, for the first time in the storied log's 40-year history, secrets of the burning timber will be revealed.

WPIX/Ch. 11 presents "The WPIX Yule Log: A Log's Life," Dec. 23 at 7 p.m.

I have a few articles online and on dead tree this month that you may enjoy.

Regarding the latter, I have a piece in the Robb Report's Home Entertainment magazine on IPTV, a technology being leveraged by phone companies to become players in the arena previously reserved for cable and satellite providers. Initially, it's being sold as a cheaper alternative to digital cable and satellite. But the format's long-range potential could lead to dramatic shifts in how we watch TV. For one, expect to start seeing downloadable YouTube-style TV, err, on your TV. As well as much more narrowcasting video, and... well, read the article for more.

For DIY recording enthusiasts, in the October issue of England's Computer Music magazine, I have an article on step sequencers, arpeggiators, and other electronic instruments that allow you to play one note and get ten. Or 100. Note that in the US, this issue probably streets next month. At least the Borders' chain seems to have a 30 day delay between the issues' cover dates and when they appear in stores.

At the moment, to the best of my knowledge, both of those are strictly "dead tree", but we'll let you know if that changes. As for online material, speaking of DIY music, my podcast interview with The Man From Izotope on audio mastering is also online at Blogcritics. Along with a piece that could be titled, "An Orchestra Of Davids". It's a review of an impressive self-published book on programming orchestral arrangements from MIDI synthesizers.

Sad to say, no Vanessa Williams sightings in any of these pieces, though.

Man with Website begs on Internet for money to replace aging Apple G-4 with shiny new G-5. Man promises to blow-up old PC when new one acquired.

Man receives sufficient funds; keeps his word:

Recently arrived review copies:

"Detox Clinic Opening for Video Addicts". We needed this in the 2600/Colecovision days, as badly as Elvis needed Hazelden.

I remember reading about this concept in Wired (back when Wired really was Wired) in the mid-1990s; it sounds like it's finally coming to fruition, according to Dave Johnston:

The California Public Utilities Commission approved a plan on Thursday allowing providers of high-speed Internet services to test using electricity lines to deliver online access throughout the state.

CPUC commissioner Rachelle Chong, who drafted the plan, said broadband over power lines, or BPL, could become a new competitor to Internet services delivered via telephone, cable and satellites and help reduce prices for consumers.

BPL uses existing utility lines delivering power to neighborhoods to carry broadband signals into homes.

Two new products which arrived at Ed Driscoll.com HQ this week as grist for a couple of upcoming dead tree articles are demonstrations of cutting edge high tech, circa 1960, and today.

I've already reviewed Spacecraft Films' DVDs before; I'm doing a profile of their founder, Mark Gray for a coming article. Their new Project Mercury: A New Frontier is an exhaustive six-DVD set focusing on the birth of America's manned space program, which includes a terrific, Right Stuff-flavored long form documentary, and about 24 hours worth of footage shot before and during the program, including unmanned tests, the testflights with chimps, and then finally, the six launches of the original Mercury Seven astronauts (as a result of an ear condition, Deke Slayton would have to wait until 1975 to go up on the Apollo-Soyouz mission). As I once dubbed a review of another Spacecraft Films product, this really is Space Geek Nirvana.

And I mentioned the Slingbox in my recent TCS article on the future of Web video. It allows anyone to view his or her TiVo or cable/satellite set-top box on a PC. So a salesman travelling in Des Moines--or Dubai--who has access to broadband, can watch whatever his PVR has recorded on his laptop. Or if he's working in his home office, can have the game on in the background on his computer monitor, via the cable box in the den.

I'll be reviewing the unit itself this week; I haven't had a chance to experiment much with it yet, but it was a breeze to hook-up. (The two most difficult aspects of installation were stringing the wires through the back of my home theater cabinet, and resetting my router to detect it. The accompanying software installs quickly and painlessly on both my PC, and my wife's.)

The picture quality is very good--certainly good enough for casual, background viewing. But this is all runing on my home's internal, hardwired LAN. I'll be interested to see how it performs on a laptop, via, say, Starbucks' Wi-Fi connection.

In a Business Week article titled, "How The Masses Will Innovate", MIT Media Lab head Frank Moss definitely gets it:

Creative expression (is another area). No longer will just a few write or create music. We will see 100 million people creating the content and art shared among them. Easy-to-use programs allow kids to compose everything form ringtones to full-fledged operas. It will change the meaning of creative art in our society.

We are already seeing early signs of it in blogs. The source of creative content is coming from the world. That revolution will go well outside of the written word to all forms of visual and performing arts.

it's worth noting that digital still photography, Photoshop, and especially Weblogs are all part of the same trend of creating entertainment--and opinion and news--from the bottom-up, rather than passively being a receptor to mass media. Which doesn't make the entertainment industry too thrilled, either. (And we already know what most journalists think of blogs.)

"Microsoft Unveils Ultracompact Computer".

And speaking of the Final Frontier, Drudge writes that NASA's Cassini spacecraft:

may have found evidence of liquid water reservoirs that erupt in Yellowstone-like geysers on Saturn's moon Enceladus. The rare occurrence of liquid water so near the surface raises many new questions about the mysterious moon.

(Sorry, wrong sci-fi franchise.)

I couldn't do it.

Oh how I envied Jeff, Roger, Steve, the Manolo, the GPs and Andrew Leigh. Oh how tempting it felt to live blog the Oscars myself. But that would mean...watching the Oscars. (Sadly, I lack Goldstein’s ability to accurately live blog an event I’m not directly observing...) And despite owning God-only knows how many movies on disc and tape, and loving the experience of seeing a great film in a darkened theater, I just couldn't make myself watch the Oscars.

Instead, I decided to make a little entertainment of my own.

For a variety of reasons, I've been neglecting recording my own music since the fall of last year, although I was in mid-recording of a new song. But last night, armed with a relatively new acoustic guitar, a decent condenser mic, and a copy of Sonar 5 that I haven't really explored in depth yet, I recorded a variety of guitar licks. This evening, I "comped" them down into a single pretty darn good lead line, and then played stand-up bass underneath--or at least an extremely realistic sampled synthesizer version of stand-up bass. I had forgotten a big part of the enjoyment of music making for me is what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi would call "Flow": that hypnotic trance-like state when you're honing your craft, and creating something new.

The ability to make your own entertainment is a big, big part of the Army of Davids culture, and one reason why, as I wrote a few years ago for TCS, that Silicon Valley and Hollywood are engaged in a quiet culture war with each other--Hollywood wants its audience as passive as possible, but Silicon Valley (and the rest of the computer industry, no matter where it's located) makes its money by selling tools that allow people to either make their own entertainment, or modify Hollywood's product to their heart's content via iPod playlists, video mash-ups, and all sorts of other ultra-high-tech playtimes.

While we frequently tee-off on the L.A. Times (who in the Blogosphere doesn't?), this essay by Patrick Goldstein is a pretty accurate snapshot of the clash between top-down and bottom-up culture:

As a follow-up of sorts to the TCS piece earlier today on video and the Blogosphere, I have a review of Adobe's Premiere Elements 2.0 video editing program, over at Pajamas Theater 3000. (I wrote about its previous version for PC World last year.)

If you're looking for cheap ($100) software to edit camcorder tapes to upload them to the Web or master them to DVD, this could be a great program to quickly get into the video game.

Did a product review in PC Magazine give me a bum steer? Possibly--check out my newest post over at Pajamas Theater 3000.

Stay grounded on planet earth--otherwise this could be your future, too.

Stephen King's PR firm's certainly not winning friends or influencing people with their latest book promotion efforts: cell phone spamming.

My wife gave me a 20-gig iRiver MP3 player for Christmas, which I'm happily loading up with all of my favorite tunes, and having a blast playing.

At least, I thought I was, until I read that I actually hate it:

Conservatives don't like personal audio players. Seventeen years ago, Allan Bloom inveighed against the Walkman, arguing that clapping on the headphones was a selfish, narcissistic manoeuver, in which teenagers sealed themselves into a "nonstop ... masturbational fantasy". This year, in "The Age of Egocasting", conservative writer Christine Rosen argued that iPods and MP3 players had accelerated this cultural erosion even further: iPod users had devolved into such navel-gazing twits that they don't even notice where they're going, and miss subway stops. Personal audio players, conservatives worry, are the ultimate statement that the individual is paramount; the world around us can go screw itself, because we're not even paying attention.

Hate 'em? We hate 'em as much as we hate Weblogs!

Seriously though, blogger Elemenohpee has the best rebuttal to this strawman argument:

Okay, I don't really consider myself conservative, but for the sake of this argument, let's say I am. I also know that a big chunk of my vast and highly intelligent readership is conservative. How many of you hate MP3 players? How many of you own an MP3 player? Does anyone hate hate the idea of personal choice, especially personal choice in music players?

Also, liberals are behind plenty of movements to restrict choice of various kinds. Seattle just passed a referendum to ban smoking not only in bars, restaurants and other private businesses, but also within 25 feet of any door, window or ventilation opening. Liberals are the most vociferous opponents of educational policies such as school vouchers and charter schools meant to give parents more choice in what kind of education their kids get.

Their 1980 book Free to Choose successfully instigated a revolution in public policy because it offered conservatives both a rhetorical weapon and a legislative program. Until then, the Left had a clear advantage on both scores. Rhetorically, the Left promised compassion and equality and packaged them with programmatic action in the form of ever more government power. Those opposed to an ever larger and more intrusive state were thus forced to defend hard-heartedness and inequality, and to oppose legislative change.

The Friedmans changed all this. First, they gave us the word “Choice,” the rhetorical power of which is enormous in our consumer-driven society. The Left suddenly became Anti-Choice, at least after the point at which a child is born. They are against parental choice in where the child is educated. They are for limiting choice in what medical care the child may receive when he is sick, and philosophically opposed to the idea that his parents should be able to spend some of their hard-earned dollars on better care. More broadly, they are against giving the individual a choice in how to spend a significant portion of his earnings, preferring that the state make those choices. They are against choice in how most individuals invest the major source of their retirement savings, again believing that the choice should be made by government. Rhetorically, the Left no longer has an emotive advantage: Thanks to the Friedmans, the rhetorical cleavage on most issues becomes one between “pro-choice” and “pro-government.”

But it is in the programmatic realm that Free to Choose is most empowering to those who support limited government. Conservatives in government had traditionally been the side opposing change. At a minimum this put us on the wrong side of the legislative ratchet. If we lost, individual freedom was further eroded by state power. If we won, all that happened was that things didn’t get any worse. After Free to Choose, the Right became the agent of legislative change. In the quarter-century since its publication, the posture of the Left has become so defensive that the phrase “reactionary liberalism” is now in vogue.

(Via Matt Rosenberg.)

Need a last-minute Christmas gift idea? PC World reviews "The 50 Greatest Gadgets of the Past 50 Years".

(My wife says any poll without this is bogus, though.)

Sadly I'm a day late, but allow me to send a belated happy 34th to Nolan Bushnell's Pong. Nobody knew it then, but we'd never look at our TVs the same way again.

Having written a pretty nifty piece (if I do say so myself) earlier this year on Chris Anderson's concept of The Long Tail of the Internet, I had planned to link to his recent blog post illustrating its poweful impact on assorted legacy medias. I found it (as you probably did as well) via Glenn Reynolds, who has since added this addendum to his post:

UPDATE: Reader Frank Hujber emails:

Regarding your post on the media meltdown, every six months or so, we encounter an article disparing why the loss of the male audience. Every time, I parse the article and try to find the organization responsible for the survey, and I send them an email pointing out to them the possibility that perhaps they are not showing men enough respect. I might be wrong, but in my view, the media gives so much to the women's point of view that they demonstrate disrespect, or at the very least, dismissiveness, for men and masculinity and fatherhood. I'm convinced that this is the reason men are no longer interested in watching anything but sports.

Anyway, whether I'm right or wrong, I never even get the shortest of replies. It occurs to me that they're so well steeped in their own view that they won't even listen to the notion that they might be wrong.

It seems like there MIGHT be some significant business opportunity there.

You'd think. This is a theme that's been addressed here before. Send 'em a link to Doris Lessing! Or, if you're really angry, to Steve Verdon. Yeah, people notice this stuff.

The technology of television has become much smarter over the past decade at an exponential pace (DBS, HDTV, TiVO, et al), which if anything will quicken its pace as it goes forward. But the collective mindset of the folks in New York and Hollywood who create the media that goes into our set-top boxes is probably too reactionary to reverse course in any timeframe could remotely be called the foreseeable future. And as with the movie industry, they don't seem to care much about the audience it's cost them.

There was...Atari!

(You never know what strange flotsam and jetsam will turn up on Google Video).

Back in February of 2001, I gave a brief, capsule history (as opposed to a long capsule history...) of HDTV in America in Nuts & Volts magazine, as the intro to a feature article whose text is sadly not available online:

In the US, HDTV began entering the public’s eye in the mid to late 1980s. This was the period when the nation was in awe of Japan. Remember when Hollywood cranked out films like Gung Ho, Black Rain, and Rising Sun? When the Japanese stock market was going through the roof? It was against this backdrop that the FCC made HDTV sound like a national emergency. As Jeff Taylor, the author of Reason magazine’s weekly email newsletter on technology and politics (www.reason.com) describes it, “This was the period when the Japanese were building great cars. They were building all of the consumer electronics. We used to lead the world in those areas. What are we going to do for technology? They’re going to do digital television, so we should do something about that. So that’s what got a lot of people in the FCC being very concerned about HDTV. So you have that whole backdrop of, ‘The government has to get involved or this is not going to get done right.’”

Unfortunately, the combination of government hearings, competition between the phone companies, the cable companies and the networks, and the general ramp up time that a new technology always faces, especially one designed to replace a very entrenched existing technology, meant a very, very long gestation period.

During which, in the mid-1990s, the Internet gave a tremendous boost to the phone and computer industries. So it was now doubly important that the television get HDTV off the ground.

If you noticed, one thing I haven’t mentioned is consumer interest, and feedback. As Taylor describes it, “At no part in this process, was anyone saying, ‘what about the average consumer out there who might want to look at this high definition television?’ I think that has been the missing link all along in that no one has tried to figure out if there is a market demand for this and how would you go about filling it if there was. So what we have is all of these different interests motivated by different things, trying to come up with a system that the general public may or may not want. This has taken up a better part of a decade now, just to get to the point where we just might start building things.”

In Tech Central Station, Glenn Reynolds writes:

I suppose that there are worse ways to waste the taxpayers' money -- I can't actually think of any at the moment, but given Congress's ingenuity I suppose that Ted Stevens and his colleagues probably could -- but this strikes me as pretty pathetic, especially when the government is laying off scientists for lack of money. Subsidizing TV and starving science seems like a recipe for something short of national greatness.

Meanwhile, technology is, as usual, passing Congress by. Because while the long-planned switch to HDTV creeps along, video technology is advancing by leaps and bounds in areas that, in what I'm pretty sure isn't really a coincidence, Congress hasn't managed to get its hands on yet. The result, widespread video podcasting, is likely to bring about something far more revolutionary than higher resolution commercial broadcasts: It might actually produce TV that people want to watch.

Podcasting is already big, with people producing "radio" programs for Internet distribution using nothing more than a computer and an Internet connection. Video podcasting will make producing and distributing TV programming nearly as easy. Podcasting and audio MP3 technology have demonstrated pretty clearly that in the audio world people care more about hearing what they want, when they want, than they care about super high sound quality. I suspect that video podcasting will demonstrate the same thing: a pretty good picture coupled with a show that you actually like is worth more than a stupendous picture coupled with a show you don't care about that much. And according to some people, the Video iPod is already good enough to ensure that video podcasting will be "huge."

If Congress cared about promoting video distribution technology, it could do a lot -- without even spending taxpayer dollars -- by reforming intellectual property law to make it easier on amateur producers and distributors. (Some general advice on that, from J.D. Lasica, can be found here.) That seems like a better enterprise than forking out taxpayer dollars to help buy set-top boxes, but one that's unlikely to materialize since it would involve making the entertainment industry unhappy.

On the other hand, I should probably be thankful that Congress doesn't seem to "get" the coming video revolution. As its behavior with HDTV has demonstrated, Congress isn't much good at helping new technologies along anyway, and it may well be that in these overregulated times technologies need to be fast, nimble, and below the radar to flourish. In the 21st Century, at least, Congress's biggest contribution to promoting the progress of science and the useful arts may sometimes be to overlook them until they've become a reality.

...And not necessarily in that order, N.Z. Bear notes, as he catches Apple using Rosa Parks' image on their homepage and asks:

If you want to commemorate her life and achievements, fine, I guess. But slapping your corporate logo and slogan on the image is a bit over the top, no?

Apple's about the only company I can think of that can get away with this stuff...

Roger L. Simon notes that Yahoo and Microsoft are teaming up to release a new instant messaging rogram. As Roger writes, "Be afraid. Be very afraid".

(Yes, I know Microsoft is in Redmond, Washington. But it was too good a title not to use.)

Back in January, I wrote a newsletter for Electronic House on home theater cabinetry that begin with the supposition that my dad may have had one the first predecessors to today's high tech media rooms. (Its Google cache is still online, if you can get the interminably long URL to load in your browser):

Who owned the first media room? History may never know for certain, but I’d like to put in a vote for my father. In 1969, while Neil and Buzz were exploring the moon, and Jimi, Janis, and The Who were exploring the mud at Woodstock, my father looked around his sealed, finished basement, and decided, "Why yes, a custom-built cabinet to house my hi-fi gear would look wonderful down here". He hired a carpenter to design and build beautifully finished cabinetry to run the entire length of one of the narrow walls in the rectangular basement. The space was divided between housing several hundred of his thousands of LPs (and 78s!), and his multiple reel-to-reel and cassette decks, turntables, receiver, etc. A pair of hinged doors in the corners hid the speakers behind speaker cloth. The royalty of jazz (the Duke of Ellington, the Count of Basie, and Nat "King" Cole) played there nightly—or at least their recordings did.

Revel in its advanced technology and a design so sleek, Raymond Loewy himself would have put down his conté crayon permanently in humble astonishment if he had gotten wind of it.

This was advanced technology and aesthetics, By God!

DirecTV has long had audio-only music channels in its ozone layer of 800-level channels. This sounds like a pretty cool addition:

If you eye your dish with loathing every time the signal slips--DirecTV Group wants to rekindle the romance. The No. 1 U.S. direct-broadcast satellite TV provider said Thursday it will start offering its customers 72 radio channels from fellow orbiter XM Satellite Radio Holdings.

Led by Chief Executive Hugh Panero, XM is the clear market leader in orbital radio: On Tuesday, it announced it crossed the 5-million subscriber mark, auguring 6 big ones by year's end--versus closest rival Sirius Satellite Radio's 2.1 million.

DirecTV, which boasts more than 14 million customers nationwide, said the XM broadcasts will begin in mid-November. The deal nearly doubles the TV purveyor's current aural programming lineup without an additional fee for customers, it said. The new offerings will include music channels, children's programming and "Home Plate," XM's Major League Baseball talk-radio channel. Unfortunately, the latter comes a tad late in the season.

Satellite radio may be the current next big thing, but it probably can't hurt to have some connections who are already entrenched. DirectTV just might be that well-established friend, as it's nearly 34%-owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. And if the Aussie-born Forbes 400 Richest Americans member doesn't know media--and how to sell it to people--who does?

Besides Panero, that is.

Well, in many respects, at least. (And allow me to apologize in advance for any Carly Simon flashbacks the above title causes.) Glenn Reynolds links to this post on Slashdot:

Rewind your brain 15 years and imagine what you'd think if I told you:
Your computer will be roughly 1,000 faster than what you're using today. You will probably have more than 4,000 times the memory, and a fast hard drive that stores over 100,000 times as much as that floppy you're using. You can buy these supercomputers for less than $500 at Wal-Mart.

That computer will be hooked into a self-directed network that was designed by the Department of Defense and various universities - along with nearly 400,000,000 other machines. Your connection to this network will be 10,000 times faster than the 300 baud modem you're using. In fact, it will be fast enough to download high-quality sound and video files in better than realtime.

There will be a good chance that your computer's operating system will have been written by a global team of volunteers, some of them paid by their employers to implement specific parts. Free copies of this system will be available for download over the hyperfast network. You will have free access to the tools required to make your own changes, should you want to.

You will use this mind-bendingly powerful system to view corporate sponsored, community driven messages boards where people will bitch about having to drive cars that are almost unimaginably luxurious compared to what you have today.

Remember: in some fields, the singularity has already happened.

Lebanon's "Cedar Revolution" was as inspiring an example of people power as the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Libya has dismantled its weapons of mass destruction. Egypt, by far the largest Arab nation, had its first contested election this month, and, as the Washington Post's David Ignatius writes from Cairo, "the power of the reform movement in the Arab world today ... is potent because it's coming from the Arab societies themselves and not just from democracy enthusiasts in Washington."

Which is evidence that Mr. Bush was right: Muslims and Arabs, like people everywhere, want liberty and self-rule. Afghanistan has just voted, and Iraq is about to vote a second time this year. Violence continues, but the more important story is that democracy and freedom are advancing. [...]

Polls show that most Americans think the economy is in dreadful shape, even though almost all the numbers are good: Inflation and unemployment are low, and growth is robust despite the exogenous shocks of Sept. 11 and Katrina. After a generation of almost constant low-inflation economic growth, perhaps we Americans are only satisfied when we have bubble growth, as in the late 1990s, and are unimpressed when the American economy proves once again to be amazingly resilient.

This is all the more astonishing when you consider that we are going through a time of increased competition and change, as China and India, with 37 percent of the world's population, are transforming their economies from third world to first world. Such a large proportion of mankind moving rapidly upward has never happened before and will never happen again.

Couple this with the facts that Japan seems to be growing again, after 15 years of deflation, that East Asia and Eastern Europe continue to grow robustly, and that major Latin countries like Mexico and Brazil are growing as well, and the economic picture around the world looks pretty good, despite nongrowth in Western Europe and continued poverty in Africa.

As DVD continues to pummel the sales of VHS, the latter's nostalgia value is beginning to soar, according to Delaware Online.

No VHS nostalgia for me though--it's strictly a utilitarian format that I'm glad to see fade into the past. I'm happily (if all too slowly) burning onto DVD-R and DVD-RWs as many of my old VHS tapes as possible, if they contain material that's unlikely to be commercially released onto DVD. I'm doing the same with my old laser discs as well, although their picture quality is definitely better than VHS.

One thing I hadn't realized was just how far DVDs have overtake VHS in the rental market:

In Blockbuster's second quarter, VHS rentals accounted for 4.7 percent of total rentals at company stores worldwide, Hargrove said. DVD rentals made up 84.5 percent, with the remainder coming from game rentals.

The Washington Post writes the venerable videotape's obituary, picking up a topic we discussed a few days ago.

In August of 2001, when I was writing pieces for the newly launched National Review Online Financial section, I naturally did an article on the state of the dot.com industry, which was then just recovering from a series of spectacular dot.busts. The consensus of the folks that I interviewed for the article was the obvious exception to the Silicon Valley wreckage was eBay, which looked like it had a strong future ahead of it.

Well, as the late George Allen was fond of saying when he coached the Washington Redskins, the future is now. So let's flash-forward four years to today: James Glassman writes that not only is eBay doing well itself, it's also become a haven for budding entrepreneurs:

A remarkable new survey by ACNielsen International Research finds that 724,000 Americans use eBay, the online auctioneer and general marketplace, for their primary or secondary income. That figure is up from 430,000 in a similar 2004 survey. In other words, about 300,000 people have started businesses on eBay in the past year. So eBay can properly be viewed as America's No. 1 generator of, not just businesses, but jobs.

As David Faber of CNBC said recently, "If eBay employed the . . . people who earn an income selling on its site, it would be the nation's No. 2 private employer, behind Wal-Mart."

But the point is that eBay doesn't employ them. They employ themselves. Their own cash and reputations are on the line. They innovate, they compete, they work hard. What eBay and other online sites provide is the platform: a storefront that's electronic, not brick and mortar; a market of 157 million registered users worldwide; plus help in expediting payments, shipping packages and detecting fraud.

Marketplace sites -- and eBay, with $83,000 worth of goods traded every minute, is the largest -- offer a simple way, not just to sell the occasional used tie or baseball trading card, but to start and maintain a small business, allowing the entrepreneurs themselves to concentrate on the important stuff: merchandizing and marketing.

Consider Sarah Davis of San Antonio, who graduated from the University of Maryland Law School and passed the Texas bar exam but then began having children (three now) and wanted to be with them. "I started selling on eBay about six years ago with one Louis Vuitton purse and a dream," she says.

Her business of selling high-end purses became so successful that she moved into office space and hired three employees.

Davis is a typical American entrepreneur. An extensive government study, released by the Census Bureau in July and covering 2002 data, found that small businesses owned by women rose 20 percent over five years while the number of all U.S. businesses rose by 10 percent. Black-owned businesses were up by 45 percent, Hispanic-owned by 31 percent.

Small businesses produce a little more than half of all U.S. employment and sales of goods and services. More important, these businesses now account for virtually all the net new jobs created by the economy and, says the White House, "are most likely to generate jobs for young workers, older workers and women." In addition, the Disabled Businessman's Association estimates that 40 percent of home-based businesses are operated by people with disabilities.

These trends can only intensify with the growth of the online marketplace and the spread of Internet connections throughout the world. The Federal Reserve reports that the majority of small businesses are based in the home. All you need is a desk, a computer, a connection to the greater wired world and a place to store your inventory.

Online entrepreneurship is so attractive that 14 percent of eBay sellers are people who retired early or quit their jobs to sell full-time on eBay, and another 12 percent are considering doing so.

Ever since DVD took off as a format, the clock has been ticking on the lifespan of VHS, which is has been around for at least 25 years. The Digital Bits reports that it's just been dealt another blow--20th Century Fox will not be releasing Revenge of the Sith onto videotape:

Finally this morning (our last news item), there's confirmation from 20th Century Fox and Lucasfilm that the release of Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith, certain to be one of the biggest sellers of the year, will be DVD only. There will be no VHS version released. You can read more at Video Business. It's just one more sign that VHS is soon to be an ex-format.

When I first put this site up in early 2002, I included a short piece I wrote in 1998 on the early history of the online world as filler to flesh out the then-meager content. (Before adding 7,500 or so blog posts...)

My timeline ran through the late-1980s. (In retrospect, at least to me, it's pretty crude looking in comparison to my current output. On the other hand, I'd be pretty disappointed if I looked back on something I wrote seven years ago and thought, "man, I was really dynamite back then. What happened!? Just like playing a musical keyboard, constantly hacking away at the computer keyboard hopefully improves one's chops in the long run. Hopefully...)

Whoops--sorry for the digression. Back to the topic at hand.

In a recent post, Patrick Ruffini brings the history of the 'Net up to the present day. He calls it "A Wild Ten Year Ride", which if anything, an understates how crazy the last decade of online development has been. Why? This may be the key paragraph, which Patrick quotes from Wired magazine's Kevin Kelly:

What we all failed to see was how much of this new world would be manufactured by users, not corporate interests. Amazon.com customers rushed with surprising speed and intelligence to write the reviews that made the site's long-tail selection usable. Owners of Adobe, Apple, and most major software products offer help and advice on the developer's forum Web pages, serving as high-quality customer support for new buyers. And in the greatest leverage of the common user, Google turns traffic and link patterns generated by 2 billion searches a month into the organizing intelligence for a new economy. This bottom-up takeover was not in anyone's 10-year vision.

I used to think my wife and I had a couple of cool home offices. But now I know that they pale in comparison to the room where Roger L. Simon does the bulk of his writing:

I am typing these words from the very spot where Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe slept for most of their brief marrige. Yes, my office was once their bedroom and my desk is exactly where their bed would have been.

Want a PC in your home theater? Or an all-in-one home theater PC? That's the subject of my new article over at ConnectedGuide.com.

PC World has some nifty suggestions on how to tweak your TiVo system.

Over the weekend, I received quite a bit of German-based email about Dresden and World War II. At first, I thought it was related to a review I wrote a few weeks ago of Frederick Taylor's 2003 book, Dresden: Tuesday, February 13, 1945. It turns out that it was actually spam generated by the latest version of the "Sober" mass mailing worm:

Reuters has an interesting look at the efforts of some city governments