New ways of making things

The factory of the past was based on cranking out zillions of identical products, The Economist reports. But the cost of producing much smaller batches of a wider variety, with each product tailored precisely to each customer’s whims, is falling. 

A number of remarkable technologies are converging to let this happen: clever software, novel materials, more dexterous robots, new processes (notably three-dimensional printing) and a whole range of web-based services. 

The old way of making things involved taking lots of parts and screwing or welding them together. Now a product can be designed on a computer and “printed” on a 3D printer, which creates a solid object by building up successive layers of material. The digital design can be tweaked with a few mouseclicks. The 3D printer can run unattended, and can make many things which are too complex for a traditional factory to handle. In time, these amazing machines may be able to make almost anything, anywhere—from your garage to an African village.

The applications of 3D printing are especially mind-boggling. Already, hearing aids and high-tech parts of military jets are being printed in customised shapes. The geography of supply chains will change. An engineer working in the middle of a desert who finds he lacks a certain tool no longer has to have it delivered from the nearest city. He can simply download the design and print it. The days when projects ground to a halt for want of a piece of kit, or when customers complained that they could no longer find spare parts for things they had bought, will one day seem quaint.

Like all revolutions, this one will be disruptive.

Digital technology has already rocked the media and retailing industries, just as cotton mills crushed hand looms and the Model T put farriers out of work. Many people will look at the factories of the future and shudder. They will not be full of grimy machines manned by men in oily overalls. Many will be squeaky clean—and almost deserted. Some carmakers already produce twice as many vehicles per employee as they did only a decade or so ago. Most jobs will not be on the factory floor but in the offices nearby, which will be full of designers, engineers, IT specialists, logistics experts, marketing staff and other professionals. The manufacturing jobs of the future will require more skills. Many dull, repetitive tasks will become obsolete: you no longer need riveters when a product has no rivets.

Read the whole thing. Propping up a failed General Motors looks kinda stupid.

Come fly with me

The Flight Deck of Space Shuttle Endeavour.

From NASA: What would it be like to fly a space shuttle? Although the last of NASA's space shuttles has now been retired, it is still fun to contemplate sitting at the controls of one of the humanity's most sophisticated machines. Pictured above is the flight deck of Space Shuttle Endeavour, the youngest shuttle and the second to last ever launched. The numerous panels and displays allowed the computer-controlled orbiter to enter the top of Earth's atmosphere at greater than the speed of sound and -- just thirty minutes later -- land on a runway like an airplane.

The retired space shuttles are now being sent to museums, with Endeavour being sent to California Space Center in Los Angeles, California, Atlantis to the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex on Merritt Island, Florida, and Discovery to the Udvar-Hazy Annex of the National Air and Space Museum in Chantilly, Virginia. Therefore sitting in a shuttle pilot's chair and personally contemplating the thrill of human space flight may actually be in your future.

(Thanks, Rudy)

Your phone wants to hear from you

Signing on to Facebook.

I interview a lot of people on the phone. I record the interview on a digital recorder placed next to my phone, which is on speaker. I then have to listen to the recording and transcribe it.

I could probably find a more difficult way to do this if I put my mind to it.

So I perked up when I saw a piece by Walt Mossberg, the ever-astute technology columnist for The Wall Street Journal. Both Apple and Android phones allow you to dictate things to them. Whenever you see the microphone icon, just click it and start talking.

I tried it out on my Motorola Droid X. It wouldn't let me dictate email, but it did let me dictate a Word document in Quick Office. Pretty cool. Then I found and downloaded Google Voice Search, which allows me to dictate emails.

Now maybe I could do that before. I don't know. I'm fairly certain I'm the last person on the planet to catch on to this stuff.

Back to Mossberg.

On both leading smartphone platforms, I found that relatively short dictation—such as emails, texts, tweets, Facebook posts and notes—was at least as accurate, and often more, as typing on a glass screen. It was better in quiet environments, but did OK even in most noisy places like grocery stores, coffee shops and carwashes. It was also faster, since, as long as you don't have to correct numerous errors, speaking is usually faster than typing on glass.

While the microphone keys work a bit differently on the two platforms, they are basically similar. When the keyboard appears, ready for you to type, you can instead hit the microphone key and simply dictate what you want to say. The phones then send your spoken words to a remote server, which rapidly translates them into text and sends them back to the phone's screen. If corrections are needed, you make them by typing, though both platforms make this easier by indicating the likeliest errors, and suggesting alternatives.

I found that both platforms' dictation systems worked well enough for me to recommend them Mossberg concludes. In case after case, both phones got it right, or close enough to require little correcting.

Your next back seat driver

Just as it has changed so many other aspects of life, wireless technology is about to revolutionize the way we drive.

Fender benders, rear-enders and those three-car pileups that back up traffic may be going the way of the buggy whip. 

Within a few years, cars whizzing down the highway will begin chatting among themselves. Once they all are equipped to join the conversation, every car will know the speed, distance and direction of every other car close enough to pose a risk.

Are cars slowing abruptly just beyond that tractor-trailer you can’t see around? You may get an alert, but if there’s no time for discussion, you may just feel your brakes squeeze on. A speeding pickup truck seems likely to run the red light as you approach the intersection? Your car may decide to stop rather than put you in danger.

I wish I had that kind of protection out of the car.

What Facebook knows about you

Peekaboo.

"Apps" are stylish, discrete chunks of software that live online or in your smartphone. To "buy" an app, all you have to do is click a button. Sometimes they cost a few dollars, but many apps are free, at least in monetary terms, Julia Angwin and Jeremy Singer-Vine write in The Wall Street Journal

You often pay in another way. Apps are gateways, and when you buy an app, there is a strong chance that you are supplying its developers with one of the most coveted commodities in today's economy: personal data.

Some of the most widely used apps on Facebook—the games, quizzes and sharing services that define the social-networking site and give it such appeal—are gathering volumes of personal information.

A Wall Street Journal examination of 100 of the most popular Facebook apps found that some seek the email addresses, current location and sexual preference, among other details, not only of app users but also of their Facebook friends. 

One Yahoo service powered by Facebook requests access to a person's religious and political leanings as a condition for using it. The popular Skype service for making online phone calls seeks the Facebook photos and birthdays of its users and their friends.

This appetite for personal data reflects a fundamental truth about Facebook and, by extension, the Internet economy as a whole: Facebook provides a free service that users pay for, in effect, by providing details about their lives, friendships, interests and activities. Facebook, in turn, uses that trove of information to attract advertisers, app makers and other business opportunities.

Capitalizing on personal data is a lucrative enterprise. Facebook is in the midst of planning for an initial public offering of its stock in May that could value the young company at more than $100 billion on the Nasdaq Stock Market.

Look here

Pixels in contact lens.

Google is beginning public tests of augmented reality glasses with the codename Project Glass. A video of what the device might eventually be capable of shows someone using voice commands to send messages, take photos, share to Google+, see the locations of friends, view maps, get directions, set calendar reminders, and more.

Cramming all the functionality into a sleek set of glasses is going to take time and effort, but the Google(x) skunklabs is on it. There’s a dozen ways the product could flop, most obviously if the glasses are awkward and unstylish, but also if they’re too heavy, expensive, fragile, or the world is just not quite ready. Let’s forget those for a second. Say Google figures it out and the retail version of Project Glass (which may end up being called Google Eye) becomes wildly popular. How will this disrupt Apple and Facebook, and what should they do to defend themselves?

Have a look.

This official Google photo shows how every woman will look in the future.

Do you understand 4G? I don't.

Weird photo.

Luckily for us, Walter Mossberg, the Wall Street Journal's astute technology columnist, does. Here's his take.

AT&T claims "The nation's largest 4G network," and T-Mobile says it has "America's largest 4G network." Verizon Wireless boasts "America's fastest 4G network," and Sprint says it had the first 4G network, Mossberg notes.

Yet the technology used by T-Mobile, and mostly comprising AT&T's 4G network, isn't considered "real" 4G at all by some critics, and the one used by Sprint has proven to be a dead end and is being abandoned. The flavor being used by Verizon is now being adopted by its rivals, but won't be interoperable among them.

Got that? Let's continue.

4G is the fourth and latest generation technology for data access over cellular networks. It's faster and can give networks more capacity than the 3G networks still on most phones. There's a technical definition, set by a United Nations agency in Europe, and a marketing definition, which is looser, but more relevant to most consumers. It's mostly for people with smartphones, tablets and laptops who often need fast data speeds for Web browsing, app use and email when they're out of the range of Wi-Fi networks.

Okay, we're going to get technical here, so you might want to cover your eyes as you read.

LTE, which stands for "Long Term Evolution," is the fastest, most consistent variety of 4G, and the one most technical experts feel hews most closely to the technical standard set by the U.N. In the U.S., it has primarily been deployed by Verizon, which offers it in over 200 markets. AT&T has begun deploying it, offering LTE in 28 markets so far. Sprint and T-Mobile are pivoting to LTE, though they have no cities covered by it yet. 

Sprint uses a technology called WiMax. T-Mobile and AT&T deployed a technology called HSPA+, a faster version of 3G that they relabeled as 4G, and which many technical critics regard as a "faux 4G." Sprint will begin switching to LTE later this year, and T-Mobile in 2013.

Got that? So, you ask, what?

Although it is wireless, LTE is often faster than most Americans' wired home Internet service. According to Akamai, a large Internet company, the average broadband speed in the U.S. in the third quarter of 2011 was a mere 6.1 mbps.

Wi-Fi is usually a wireless broadcast of a wired Internet service, so, if the average U.S. broadband speed is 6.1 mbps, that's around what the average Wi-Fi speed is. But, in public places, the shared Wi-Fi is often much, much slower than LTE.

So who has the biggest 4G network in the U.S.?

Even if you accept all the carriers' definitions of 4G, it's hard to tell. Carriers measure the size of their networks differently—sometimes by the number of people to whom it is theoretically available, and sometimes by the number of cities and markets, which can be defined differently. Verizon has the largest LTE network. Both AT&T and T-Mobile claim the biggest 4G network, but the first has only a limited LTE deployment and the second has none.

There you go, boys and girls. I have solved this problem by sticking with 3G, which I don't understand, and which provides all the juice I need, since I don't understand how to use my smartphone anyway.

Defending the Internet

Today is anything but a normal Saturday for the people who run the Domain Name System, which converts human-friendly domain names like google.com into numeric addresses that are more useful for computers, The New York Times reports.

They plan to be glued to their monitors, looking out for signs of unusual network traffic, communicating with one other through encrypted, digitally signed e-mails or through a private telephone hot line maintained just for this purpose.

That's because on a quiet Sunday in mid-February, something curious attracted the attention of the behind-the-scenes engineers who scour the Internet for signs of trouble.

There, among the ubiquitous boasts posted by the hacking collective Anonymous, was a call to attack some of the network’s most crucial parts. The message called it Operation Global Blackout, and rallied Anonymous supporters worldwide.

It declared when the attack would be carried out: March 31. And it detailed exactly how: by bombarding the Domain Name System with junk traffic in an effort to overwhelm it altogether.

Engineers created a fast-track, multimillion-dollar global effort to beef up the Domain Name System, adding enough computing power to handle a denial of service attack.

Personally, I think they wanted to shut down this blog.

Don't lose your phone

Perp.

According to a new study, if you lose your smart phone, you have a 50/50 chance of getting it back. But chances are much higher – nearly 100 percent – that whoever retrieves it will try to access your private information and apps.

According to a study by Symantec, 96 percent of people who picked up the lost phones tried to access personal or business data on the device. In 45 percent of cases, people tried to access the corporate email client on the device.

Symantec called the study the “Honey Stick Project.” In this case the honey on a stick consisted of 50 smartphones that were intentionally left in New York, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., San Francisco and Ottowa, Canada. The phones were deposited in spots that were easy to see, and where it would be plausible for someone to forget them, including food courts and public restrooms.

Each phone also was loaded with programs to track what finders did with the devices, and to send that information to the researchers. Among people who found the phones, 72 percent tried to access photos, 57 percent tried to open a file called “Saved Passwords,” and 43 percent tried to open an app called “Online Banking.” 

Most of the apps on the phones were protected by passwords, but the username and password fields were already filled out, so that users could simply press a button to access them. Well over half of the people who discovered the phones, 66 percent, clicked those buttons to try and start the programs. The fact that the finders had to click a button to access the apps indicates that their attempts were likely intentional.

You should know that if you pick up and try to use my phone it will explode, spewing biotoxins and chemicals that will eat your flesh and make your eyeballs burst.

A sign of the times

After 244 years, the Encyclopaedia Britannica is going out of print.

Those coolly authoritative, gold-lettered reference books that were once sold door-to-door by a fleet of traveling salesmen and displayed as proud fixtures in American homes will be discontinued, company executives said. 

In an acknowledgment of the realities of the digital age — and of competition from the Web site Wikipedia — Encyclopaedia Britannica will focus primarily on its online encyclopedias and educational curriculum for schools. The last print version is the 32-volume 2010 edition, which weighs 129 pounds and includes new entries on global warming and the Human Genome Project. 

“It’s a rite of passage in this new era,” Jorge Cauz, the president of Encyclopaedia Britannica Inc., a company based in Chicago, said in an interview. “Some people will feel sad about it and nostalgic about it. But we have a better tool now. The Web site is continuously updated, it’s much more expansive and it has multimedia.”

Gutenberg first used moveable type 573 years ago. The World Wide Web opened for business 21 years ago. I got all of this post from the Web. You will read it on the Web.