If you haven't seen the TV series or read the books, here's the basic premise in a nutshell: The characters interact in a fantasy world with thousands of years of history, with medieval-era technology and seasons that can last for years.

Paralleling our own medieval history, the world of "Westeros" (which is actually the name of one of the two super-continents in which many of the events take place) is feudalistic. There are major "Houses" that control large territories and city-states that have lesser allied families and vassals sworn to them.

Each of these Houses compete with each other, are frequently forced to cooperate due to the nature of trade, and sometimes due to their desires to control territory and resources are at all-out war with each other.

The political intrigue between the dramatis personae and shuffling of power between the Houses is what makes up the main plot elements of the books and the TV show.

During the time of the first several novels, one of the longest "summers" on record — sixteen years — is starting to come to an end. Winter, where the nights are long, temperatures plummet, and resources become scarce, is now approaching from the northern part of the continent. Along with zombies. Ice zombies!

After reading the books and watching the show, I see a lot of parallels between Game of Thrones and that of our own computer and mobile technology industry.

Like the Lords of Westeros, the mobile technology industry has four major "Houses": Microsoft, Apple, Google, and Amazon. One could argue that Apple is currently the strongest of the Houses, much like Lannister is in Game of Thrones.

Apple, like Lannister, is making the most amount of money from mobile, and can throw its weight around purely by the nature of its wealth. It has 39.2 percent of the mobile market locked up. In the context of our mobile industry, Apple is making the most amount of money from the mobile industry due to the high margins on its devices, and also has the lion's share of developer interest as well as an oath of fealty by its own loyal end users.

Google is a bigger House than Apple in the sense that it has about 52 percent of the mobile market, and has almost the same amount of developers that Apple has. But its developer ecosystem isn't nearly as profitable as Apple's. Its power base is also fractured among at least three or four other Houses — Samsung, Motorola, HTC, and LG, to name just a few.

Although it could be argued that Samsung is just as powerful a House as Google itself due to its manufacturing capacity, the critical component chain that it controls and its overall device share in Android's ecosystem.

Microsoft currently has the smallest mobile industry share if you examine it strictly from an OS platform perspective. Windows Phone and Windows-based tablets are playing catch-up in an industry that has matured over what I would call a protracted and very profitable "summer" for both Apple and Google, as it pertains to iOS and Android's success, respectively.

In our War of Mobility, Microsoft is not unlike the House Targaryen that Lannister and its lesser allies Baratheon and Stark unseated from the Iron Throne in the War of the Usurper just prior to the events of Game of Thrones.

While the other Houses are distracted in battle over such mundane things as software and design patents on the main continent, Microsoft is re-grouping its forces elsewhere.

Just like Danerys Targaryen, Redmond is flying under the radar, building a formidable army of partners and raising "dragons" — a powerful cloud (Azure) and a converged application development strategy in the form of the next generation of Windows client and server products.

Finally, there is the mysterious House Amazon. Its mobile device platform is the same as Google's, so in a sense, Amazon is one of the allied Houses of Google. But Amazon has its own Appstore for Android, and Google makes no money from Amazon's development of the Kindle Fire, not even in OS licensing, since it bases its products on a open-source implementation of Android and doesn't use any of Google's apps.

Amazon hasn't entered the smartphone arena (yet), sticking strictly to small tablets, and we don't know exactly how much money Amazon has made from device sales of Kindle Fires, or how many they have produced.

But as one learns in Game of Thrones, the complex plots and mechanisms that lie below the surface are far more revealing and much more interesting.

Apple is indeed wealthy and powerful. But just as the Houses in Game of Thrones are reliant upon each other for trade, Apple is dependent on Microsoft, Google, and Amazon for the overall success of its platform with the applications and services that are preferred by its own end users.

Apple doesn't have a search engine. Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo have those (and you might have missed it during the demos at WWDC, but Bing is now the default search engine in iOS 7).

Apple has a mail and calendaring service, iCloud, but compared to both Hotmail.com/Outlook.com and Gmail, and even Yahoo's own Mail service, Apple's cloud mail and calendar offerings are a joke.

Google's applications for iOS rival those of their own offerings on Android, and many have said that the iOS implementations actually look and work better. As a Gmail user, I vastly prefer using Google's Gmail app on iOS than Apple's own Mail application. If it had its own Calendar app to replace the one in iOS, I'd probably use that as well.

We'll see if the eventual release of iOS 7 makes me change my position on this at all.

Yahoo's newly redesigned Flickr app for iOS essentially makes Apple's iOS Photostream and built-in Photos app a vestigial organ.

Apple social networks? There are no such things. Twitter, Facebook, and Google Plus for iOS rule that platform. Plus Instagram and all the others.

Apple Maps versus Google Maps. No contest, especially now that Google is buying Waze. Apple's Siri versus Google Now in terms of overall usability and usefulness of results: Also no contest.

And how many iOS users absolutely depend on Google Voice for unified messaging? Or use Skype? I'm raising my own hand here. I'm sure another few million also just went up.

Apple has productivity applications in the form of iWork, and I admit they aren't bad, because I own and have used all of them on iOS.

But now that I have Office 365 Mobile for iPhone, I can use the very same tools and productivity cloud that I have on my Mac, Windows 8, Windows RT, and Windows Phone systems, without concern for botching up formatting when I share these documents with others, should I need to edit them on the road.

SkyDrive as the unifying cloud storage back end behind this is incredibly powerful, and having access to Lync 2013 for corporate VoIP and video call-conferencing, which is integrated into my work Exchange email and contacts platform, is killer.

And SharePoint Online, which runs on both iOS and Windows Phone, is invaluable for having access to my corporate intranet.

And lest we forget Amazon has a far more compelling ebook ecosystem than Apple currently does with iBooks, plus Kindle has the advantage of being multi-platform, in that it runs on all of the device platforms, not just its own or even just Apple's.

Its multi-platform music cloud and video-streaming platforms, while not as popular as Apple's, are extremely profitable, and Amazon also runs the cloud infrastructure that powers Netflix, which is arguably the most popular video-streaming service on the internet, period.

We should probably also not ignore that the balance of the e-commerce that flows through Apple's iOS (and, well, just about everyone's devices) also ends up at Amazon. Wanna buy that accessory cable for your iPhone? Yeah, there's an app for that, but where are you gonna spend your Prime loyalty points?

What's the main takeaway here?

Apple is indeed a powerful and wealthy company. But it is dependent on a number of third parties that it openly competes with in device market share for the essential services that its own end users expect on the platform.

To quote Nilay Patel over at The Verge, in his article criticising Apple's Phil Schiller's "Can't innovate anymore my ass" bravado at the most recent WWDC, "Until the company can master data and services — a critical component of how things work in 2013 — all that's left for Apple is how things look and feel."

The Houses have all positioned themselves. The question remains for Apple: Is it going to try to grab more territory using that big Lannister-sized war chest and continue its warlike behavior in the courts, or will it come to the realization that it needs the other Houses for commerce and to supply it with essential services?

One could say that there's really a symbiotic relationship here, because Apple's share in the mobile market funnels services users to those respective companies as well. So in all honesty, they can't swear off Apple no more than Apple can realistically swear off them, either.

Cupertino's got a giant war chest, but does it really want to be in the business of search engines, volume email services, social networks, productivity and enterprise software, and all the other things that are needed to complete the mobile picture?

I don't really think that Apple wants to be in these businesses, truthfully, nor does it have the essential expertise to pull it all off, no matter how much money they might throw at a given problem.

But the flip side of this is that the more Apple is dependent on everyone else, the more mindshare (and service revenue) it actually loses, and risks losing platform users to those Houses as well. So it is going to have to make some services investments, regardless. Where it plans to invest is anyone's guess.

What I can say is that Apple's five years or so of summer is definitely coming to an end. And winter is coming.

Does Apple need to vastly expand its services portfolio to keep pace with the other Houses? Or will it always be dependent on them in some fashion? Talk back and let me know.

My ZDNet colleague Steven J Vaughn-Nichols refers to it as a "Mashup" of everyone else's mobile operating system, Android in particular.

Our resident mobile software consultant Matthew Baxter-Reynolds believes this is an exercise of whether or not Apple should have "moved the cheese," and how much it is willing to risk alienating its end users with changes in order to advance its products.

And our editor-in-chief, Larry Dignan, would like us all to stop complaining about user interface changes and just move on.

What is the common thread in all of this? Clearly, the nature of changing user interfaces and dealing with the issue of human-device interaction is not just an Apple problem. This is a problem that every single device manufacturer and software developer has to deal with now that we are moving into an age of ubiquitous computing.

And it's not so much as a "post-PC" problem but a "Where do we go from here?" problem.

As an industry, we don't have a detailed plan of the steps that are required, and what changes are needed to get us to the next phase in human-to-device interaction. But we have a very good idea of what the ultimate destination, or rather the desired destination, is.

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Look no further than the works of popular science fiction if there was any doubt about what that destination actually looks like.

For example, in Star Trek, human beings interact directly with computers and devices primarily without the use of user interfaces at all. Our favorite characters use voice recognition and work with artificial intelligences all the time to interact with information systems. 

The "Communicator" has no UI; you simply speak to it as an extension of the Enterprise main computer system. Taken even further, there are beings depicted on the show and in the movies (such as the "Borg") that interface directly with computers by linking them with their brains.

This is not just a theme within Star Trek, but also a common theme in many other forms of SF literature, such as with William Gibson's Neuromancer series of novels published in the mid-1980s (and his short stories that preceded it, such as Johnny Mnemonic and Burning Chrome), and was further popularized in movies like The Matrix.

If you want to go back even further than the 1980s, there are endless examples in the works of the Grand Masters such as Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein, and Silverberg, just to name a few. And we shouldn't forget Philip K. Dick, either.

The ultimate goal of directly interfacing with computers or the creation of a Man-Machine intelligence has been termed the "Singularity" within the context of a prevailing theory developed by many notable computer scientists, mathematicians and theoretical physicists such as Ray Kurzweil and Michio Kaku.

Such a symbiotic existence for humanity is not expected to happen for hundreds or perhaps thousands of years.

In the interim, using conventional technology, raw consumption of information in the form of services, or data streams through applications such as Twitter, Vine, Instagram, and Facebook is more of an immediate goal. The notion of a "lifestream" as a replacement of the current web paradigm has also been introduced by Yale University computer science professor David Gelernter.

I fundamentally disagree that consumption of lifestreams will replace the web, at least in the intermediate future.

I also have noted my reservations for what a stream-oriented society will do to humanity as a whole, particularly as it relates to our youngest generation. But that's not what this article is about.

To approach singularity, or any type of direct human to computer interface, we have to remove a number of obstacles in order to have the most efficient presentation of information.

Ultimately, the purpose of computers and devices is presentation and facilitating communication of information to and from the end user.

Human beings are slow, computers are fast.

The primary obstacle bottlenecking the interaction of the human being to the computer is the user interface. Singularity is ultimately the complete elimination of user interface.

In order to remove those bottlenecks, user interfaces have to become much more simplified. So it's no surprise that all of these mobile and even our desktop operating systems are moving in this direction, as they are all attempting to solve the same problems.

To say that Apple has copied this is a bit much. The cognoscenti of Silicon Valley are all very much part of the same social group.

Smartphones and tablets have minimal real estate, and ultimately, you want to present information to the user as quickly and as efficiently as possible, and to have as few obstacles as possible for getting to that information.

When I first saw iOS 7, my first thoughts were not "Hey, this looks like Android." Actually, my initial thoughts were "Hey, this looks kind of Google-ey."

Now, you might not see a distinction between Google and Android's user experience, but to me, they are different.

Google has always had minimalistic user experience designs for their software, whether it has been in its own search page or within products like Gmail, even before Android was purchased by the company in 2005. So you could say that Android has inherited Google's tendencies toward highly efficient and minimalized UX.

Now, to say that Apple has copied this is a bit much. The cognoscenti of Silicon Valley are all very much part of the same social group.

And if you want to extend that even further out to points north of San Francisco, I think it is safe to say that you can include those folks as well. If anything, they decided to throw their babies out with the bathwater, and "move the cheese" significantly first in the name of advancing their products.

But hey, don't listen to me, I'm biased, I'm one of those people.

Jony Ive and Marissa Mayer are known to be close friends, and, as we all know, before she became CEO of Yahoo, Marissa Mayer's previous job was head of User Experience at Google. So to say that these folks don't all sit down for coffee (or dinner) on occasion to discuss wide-ranging subjects such as typography and UX minimalism is naive at best.

To imply that they all "copy" is much like saying that well-known artists during any particular stylistic period have copied each other. It's asinine. They belong to the same school of UX design, and thus that ideology is reflected in the end products of each of these companies.

That school is employing clean typography, making the most use of white space, and reducing UI element complexity to eliminate barriers to consuming information and optimizing devices for new forms of human and device interaction such as touch, speech, and gesture/facial/motion recognition. This is the new norm, no matter which of the powers that be that we are talking about.

Is the ultimate goal of computing to eliminate the user interface? Talk back and let me know.

Mac OS X "Mavericks" dominated much of the presentation, along with iOS 7, which features a new Jony Ive-style aesthetic overhaul that was completely expected (and for many of us iPhone and iPad users, long overdue).

New Haswell-based MacBook Airs, which were more of component rev types of improvements, also made an appearance, and were also entirely expected.

What we didn't expect, however, was a new Mac Pro, a product line that was thought to have reached its evolutionary dead end.

The new Mac Pro, which will be manufactured in the United States, has not even gone on sale yet, and no price has been announced. However, I think it is safe to assume that based on the components and capabilities that have been detailed by Apple in its presentation, this is an extremely high-end machine, and will have a high-end price to go along with it.

There have been many jokes made about the machine's physical appearance. That it resembles a trash can, or the progeny of a tryst between R2-D2 and jet turbine. I could go on with the zingers. But beauty is only skin deep.

That the machine is going to be made in the United States makes it more and more evident that this is going to be a very limited production computer. More than anything else, it's a statement by Apple that you really can produce top-notch technology in the United States, but at a price.

I genuinely applaud Apple for doing this, even if this is more of a PR stunt to recover from years of being dinged for its FoxConn escapades in China than overall profit motive. Anywhere that we can employ Americans doing high-end manufacturing work, even in limited capabilities, is still something to be proud of.

So, in a sense, what Apple is creating is the Ferrari or the Tesla Motors of the computer industry. It will be inaccessible to all but the most spendy creative content people (or would-be creative content people that have more money than actual creative talent) who want nothing but the most state-of-the-art, no-compromise performance workstation for the money.

But the new Mac Pro will be envied by practically everyone, so it will have served its purpose.

Just one year ago, I would have been a likely customer for a new Mac Pro. Indeed, I was longing for a new high-performance workstation to do photo editing with Aperture and Photoshop for my food blog, and to do more ambitious videos. Frankly, the Mac Pro would have been overkill for what I was doing.

But things change. First, I've been doing far more social-type photography using my smartphones due to the sheer speed in which I can get out pictures of food, compared to the editing tasks required if I use my DSLR.

In fact, I haven't picked up my DSLR in about a year, because using my iPhone 5 and now my Nokia 920 has been so convenient for taking opportunity shots, and the quality of photos I have been taking with them has been more than good enough.

I could certainly edit on my Mac Mini using aperture and do some post-processing, but to go directly from smartphone to social sharing service and cloud storage (Twitter/Instagram/Flickr) is a pretty powerful thing, indeed.

Post-processing in Aperture or in Photoshop kills a whole afternoon if I've shot 100+ restaurant photos and need to narrow them down to 20, whereas I can do some simple tweaks and make a smartphone photo look really presentable in a matter of seconds.

The Mac Pro without a doubt will have very specific uses, and the people who can really take advantage of it will be a very small userbase compared to the kinds of creative content folks that buy Macbooks, iMacs, Mac Minis, or even PCs.

The people who truly need this machine are on the "Extreme Desktop Computing" end of the scale — people who need to produce 4K video content or work on the most sophisticated CGI and visualization projects, and do advanced engineering and CAD work.

So if 10,000 to 50,000 of these new Mac Pros are produced, they will have served their purpose. But, going forward, do we really need these monster desktops?

I've already stated that the desktop PC, let alone the desktop Mac, is in danger of becoming extinct. This immediately affects the "Homebrew" PCs, as well as those in the "Extreme" category, because, as I said, few people actually need these kinds of systems, and at the end of the day, mobility trumps raw CPU power. Most people cannot take advantage of the CPU in an average PC system, let alone an extreme one.

So this gets us back to the users or the companies that need systems like Mac Pros or powerful Windows-based workstations to use high-end applications, many of which exist in the vertical space and actually tend to cost more money than the equipment than they run on.

Now, many people who need to use these sorts of high-end apps don't need to use them all the time. This is a problem for both small production shops that work on a contractual basis, as well as large design firms, which have to make capital investments in both software and hardware regardless of how often those assets are used.

Not to mention there are also serious workflow issues when you are dealing with transferring large video and file assets between remote offices if you have a decentralized operation, which is becoming more of the norm these days.

But what if you didn't actually need $5,000+ workstations and $10,000 per user license copies of high-end vertical market engineering and content creation software to produce results?

At the most recent Citrix Synergy event at the end of last month, there was a fascinating demo on "Extreme Saasification", which featured the use of Nvidia virtualized graphics processors in the cloud in a grid computing type of scenario, running remote high-end graphical applications with no sacrifice on display and response time. The entire video is fascinating, but the most interesting stuff starts at around 13 minutes in.

All of these high-end applications could theoretically run on a Citrix ICA smart terminal that could drive multiple 4K screens. Or a $999 MacBook Air. Or a $500 iPad. Or an even cheaper device, theoretically. All of that processing and the running of the app is occurring remotely, and only a fraction of discrete video processing is required on the local device to use the app to locally display and render the video.

There's a bunch of implications for technology like this. First, is that high-end vertical market apps could be sold on a subscription and a pay-as-you go basis, which not only reduces cost, but also simplifies deployment and maintenance of such complex apps.

For small production shops, this changes the game entirely. The second outcome of this type of SaaS scenario is that monster workstations like the Mac Pro are likely to be relegated to the e-waste pile of history because the cloud offers far more computational, network, and storage resiliency with the added advantage of mobility, in addition to being able to centralize workflow even between remote contributors.

The "Extreme SaaSification" that Nvidia and Citrix demonstrates using OpenGL and OpenCL on cloud grids in this video is clearly very bleeding-edge stuff. But it is a technology that is rapidly evolving, and it would not surprise me to see delivery of these types of apps in this fashion within the next few years to be the norm rather than the exception.

So indeed, the Mac Pro is a beautiful and powerful machine. But it may be the last of its kind.

Will "Extreme SaaSification" make ultra-workstations like the new Mac Pro obsolete? Talk back and let me know.

I particularly like it when consumed late in the evening, when my wife goes to bed, and I can sit down in my living room in front of the big screen with a plate of the nastiest-smelling, funky-tasting blue cheese (the more offensive the better, 'cause my wife hates the stuff) and a pile of Triscuits, along with a frosty beer. Alternate with pork rinds, and the occasional Haagen-Dazs.

Nobody's watching, right?

I grab the remote, turn on the History Channel, where along with the aforementioned guilty pleasures, I can tune into Ancient Aliens, or, better yet, America's Book of Secrets.

If you're into wacky tinfoil hat conspiracy stuff, these two shows, both produced by Prometheus Entertainment, are absolute gold.

America's Book of Secrets, especially, is the ultimate in wild speculation conspiracy porn. The show continually asks open-ended questions from the audience, and at the end of each episode, you actually feel your brain cells screaming for help due to the sheer stupidity of it all.

But it's like crack. I continue to watch it.

Every show begins with the narrative, "There are those who believe in the existence of a book. A book that contains the most highly guarded secrets of the United States of America. A book whose very existence is known to a mere select few. But if if such a book exists, what would it contain? Secret <fill in the blank?> secret <something else?> and secret <another thing?>"

Well, the bottom line is there is no "book" of secrets. But there is one gigantic building complex operated by a government agency absolutely filled with them. And it's located on the US Army base of Fort Meade, Maryland. We know this as the headquarters of the National Security Agency, or the NSA.

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PRISM: Here's how the NSA wiretapped the Internet

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Now, many of you have become recently familiar with the NSA, because you've probably just heard about this ultra-secret electronic surveillance system called PRISM (complete with this way-cool, 1970s retro science-fictioney logo). 

Since 2007, it has apparently been collecting and is capable of analyzing in real time every kind of private user data that you can possibly think of, from all of the biggest companies providing public cloud-based end-user services: Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, Dropbox, AOL, Skype, YouTube, and Apple.

This comes on the heels of another story, where apparently the NSA is vacuuming up all sorts of customer and call telemetry from Verizon (only Verizon? O RLY?)

According to UK newspaper The Guardian, which originally broke the story, PRISM monitoring was allegedly installed with the full knowledge of the companies "participating," and the project costs a mere $20 million per year to operate. Oy, what a bargain!

(By the way, by my own and others' estimations, $20 million per year would barely cover three to six months of the storage costs alone of such an endeavor, so I suspect that this is a far more expensive undertaking than we are meant to believe, if it is real. We're talking about an organization that gets all of its funding primarily from "Black Projects," has its own semiconductor manufacturing facilities for making specialized cryptoanalysis chips, and owns and operates more supercomputing equipment than probably any other single entity on this planet.)

In short, PRISM's revelation has made all other big data projects look like child's play.

By the way, I say "allegedly" because all of the companies (listed as "Providers" in the leaked documents, so this could also mean the upstream Tier-1 ISP providing bandwidth to these companies) on record have denied the existence of PRISM or cooperation with the NSA.

And until we hear otherwise from official sources within the US government, we have no idea whether PRISM is some elaborate hoax foisted on The Guardian and The Washington Post, who have provided the smoking gun PowerPoints.

Oh my God, we should be appalled that our privacy is being invaded, right? How can we trust our government ever again?

Puhleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeze.

Let's take a step back. No, let's step back over 50 years. To 1952. When the flux capacitor hits 1.21 gigawatts, and the Delorean hits 88 miles per hour... oh, never mind.

In June 1952, President Harry Truman (that would be president number 33, the same guy who authorized the only nuclear weapons releases during wartime) signed a secret order that formed the National Security Agency, which in and of itself was an outgrowth of the Armed Forces Security Agency (AFSA), formed in 1949, which was to coordinate the communications and electronic intelligence activities of all the US military intelligence units.

The formation of the NSA took this a step even further to a national level, and extended its reach beyond the armed forces.

The mission of the NSA, by US law, is limited to monitoring foreign communications, whether it is electronic intelligence (ELINT) or signal intelligence (SIGINT). The CIA, by comparison, mainly acts on human intelligence gathering (HUMINT), and the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) primarily uses satellite space imaging as their main assets.

Monitoring of domestic communications has traditionally been the purview of the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI).

What is critical to understand here is that until 9/11, these organizations did not share information freely with each other, and the events of that day were a wake-up call for this country's anti-terrorism initiative, because the tragedy almost certainly could have been averted had the NSA, the CIA, and the FBI been working more closely.

So, while the NSA's legal charter limits them to foreign communications, in reality, foreign combatants (terrorist organizations and state-sponsored entities) will have used US-based systems to conduct their operations. The US Patriot Act has made NSA wiretapping on US soil something of a gray area, particularly now that the NSA, the CIA, and the FBI freely exchange information with each other in the interests of national security.

Monitoring telephone and data communications of the agents of hostile entities extends even further from the NSA into a program known as ECHELON, which has been rumored to exist since at least the early 1960s, in the formative years of the Cold War, and is a shared system with the commonwealth nations of the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.

Marty! It's your kids!

One would think that you would need to monitor a huge number of data transmission endpoints, but in reality, there are only a few large fiber optic communications hubs where the balance of internet traffic flows.

One such site, known as Room 641A, which apparently is located in the SBC Communications building in San Francisco, has monitoring equipment installed by the NSA in it, and is essentially a gigantic wiretap on a huge portion of internet communication flowing into and out of the United States.

Room 641A apparently became active in 2003, and its existence was revealed by former AT&T technician Mark Klein as part of a class-action lawsuit filed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) against AT&T in 2006.

So to say that the NSA harvests and analyzes a lot of the personal communications and data of US citizens is shocking is a lot like being surprised that McDonald's buys millions of pounds of potatoes every year to make French Fries. Or: Oh my God, Starbucks serves coffee? William Shatner wears a toupee? The pope is catholic? You get the idea.

 Look, folks. The NSA is and always has been in the wiretapping business, and because of 9/11, business is a boomin'. The charter of the NSA since its inception has never changed, and certainly what it presumably does with PRISM is no different than what it has done with ECHELON and any other systems that preceded it and have come since.

NSA started with radio transmissions and analogue telephone signals, and as the world went digital, it wiretapped the internet. PRISM simply extends that wiretapping to not just the traffic moving across the "pipes," but now, presumably, directly into the databases of the providers hosting the most widely-used applications and services in the cloud.

So, what are we to think of all of this? Well, as my colleague David Gewirtz has noted, the national security of the United States is a paradox. The world since 9/11 has become much more complex, and the theater of war itself is also more complicated than it used to be.

And as Zack Whittaker has so eloquently told this morning, Barack Obama's greatest legacy will almost certainly be that he will be remembered as the president to shift the modern theater of war from being one centered around the shedding of blood to having superiority of bytes.

While things such as wiretapping and electronically harvesting the data (in real time) of our own citizens, as well as using drone reconnaissance and strike aircraft and SEAL teams to act quickly and decisively on that intelligence, is certainly crossing a line, which at times may infringe on our civil liberties, it is ultimately more desirable than sending soldiers into harm's way, having less precise information to work with, and suffering hundreds or perhaps thousands of American and civilian casualties in a protracted operation.

Almost certainly, the raid on Bin Laden's compound in Abbottabad in 2011 was as a result of collecting information from PRISM, ECHELON, and systems like them. The drones and NRO satellites, which confirmed the existence of the compound, must have used information compiled from these sources, and, ultimately, SEAL Team Six acted upon that information directly.

If these technologies were not available, would we have got "Geronimo" on Zero Dark Thirty? It's difficult to say. But I, for one, am happier and will sleep better at night knowing that the NSA and our executive branch have these tools at their disposal.

Would the existence of a PRISM-like system at the NSA make you feel like your personal liberties have been violated and make you trust your government even less, or would it give you a greater sense of protection? Talk back and let me know.

In it, he discusses why today's children are <cough> "the most advanced" of any generation before it, and how they will grow up with constant information at their fingertips, because they will have always known the ubiquitous smartphone and the trappings of other related mobile technologies such as tablets and high-speed wireless broadband.

While James is correct that this generation of children has unprecedented access to technology, I think portraying them as the "most advanced" is looking at today's kids through rose-colored glasses.

Indeed, today's teenagers and pre-teens have smartphones and tablets, they have their choice of "social" networks and apps that plug into them, like Instagram, Vine, and Pinterest, they have texting, all forms of instant messaging, and their choice of search engines and intelligent agents such as Google Now and Siri to spoon feed them any information they want.

But more advanced? Give me a freaking break.

If anything, today's privileged teens (and I italicise privileged because not all teens who live in North America have smartphones with data plans, nor do most in many other countries) are far too reliant on their mobile technology, and most would have no idea what to do with themselves if they were to be parted from it.

Smartphones and tablets are a drug that they cannot easily be weaned off.

If you don't believe me, see what happens when you go on vacation to some spot that has little or no Wi-Fi or 3G/4G connectivity, or where it's so prohibitively expensive that parents who bring their teens along decide not to purchase that connectivity for them.

It's like witnessing a mass withdrawal scene out of a 1970s methadone clinic. Or watching one of those Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes when the Borg drones become severed from their communications link to the Collective.

I got to see all of this first-hand back in December 2012, when my wife and I went on a seven-night Caribbean cruise on the NCL Epic.

This massive vessel, which can accommodate over 4,000 passengers, had hundreds of families on board, many with teenage and pre-teen children, who brought their smartphones, hoping they would still be able to text and access their usual social networks and apps and whatnot.

The Epic, in fact, like most modern cruise ships, does have Wi-Fi and internet access, but it is so prohibitively expensive that most families chose not to pay for it.

So what did these kids do? Well, the ship did have entertainment options — it had a club for kids that includes their own disco and video-game arcade, a giant water park, as well as activities specifically geared for teens and pre-teens.

But more often than not, I found many teens and pre-teens lying around deck and looking bored out of their minds.

Frankly, if there wasn't an ample supply of consumable alcohol, and if they weren't engaged in other (ahem) activities in their respective cabins, most twenty-somethings would have also been bored out of their minds, because they have all the exact same trappings of today's teenagers and pre-teens, having grown up as the Barney the Dinosaur generation.

The Dora and Blues Clues generation that followed aren't fundamentally different in their basic ideologies of extreme self-love, self-worth, and self-entitlement.

I consider them to be more like Shia Barneyism.

Now, don't get me wrong; I'm in my mid-40s, but I also love my gadgets. I own far more smartphones and tablets and laptops and computers than the average person does, because I write about technology. I am a technologist. I drink technology like mother's milk.

And if you mess with Fred Rogers, Big Bird, Snuffy, and Cookie Monster, I will bust a cap in your ass.

But guess what: When I go on vacation, do you know what I like to do more than anything else? I like to veg out. Hand me an ice-cold bucket of Blue Moons or Presidentes, give me a hefty paperback book, and throw my big fat ass in a jacuzzi. Mix up with going to out eat. Repeat as necessary.

Now, interspersed between this beer drinking, eating, and reading (oh, yes, the reading) is this thing called basic human interaction. You know, talking to people. It's much cruder than say, TCP/IP or web services APIs, or texting, but it gets the job done.

Using tablets, mobile devices and video games as a source of parental relief is going to have many unintended and undesirable consequences.

Observing the behavior of others when they are on vacation is a particularly interesting sociological exercise, because I have found it is a very good indicator of what people are like when they are not on vacation, and how their real personalities tend to manifest themselves.

If anything, it amplifies their personality because they they attempt to assert themselves in unfamiliar environments.

All this being said, I cannot entirely blame this generation's over-dependence on technology strictly on themselves. The balance of this weighs on the parents.

Yup. You heard me. You. All the things that drive you crazy about your children are your fault.

By the way, I have no kids. This is out of personal choice, and because I know my kids would probably be the most spoiled brats to walk this earth, and I'd very likely be an absolute tyrant of a father knowing my own personality characteristics.

While I do a lot less of it than I used to when I worked at IBM, I still do my fair share of business travel, and a lot of that happens on airplanes. Many of the flights I take are three or four hours, sometimes as much as six if I'm visiting the Redmond mothership.

And there are always young children on these flights, and in airports during multi-hour layovers. And they are cranky. They misbehave. They frequently don't listen to their parents when told to calm down.

To placate them and to keep them from becoming entirely disruptive to other passengers and travellers, more often than not I have seen a parent use an iPad or another tablet or other mobile device as a substitute babysitter so the parent can get some sleep or time away from the child.

Now, I don't know if it's because this generation of kids is particularly hyperactive, or that we have more than our share of autism spectrum disorders due to unknown environmental factors, and/or the current generation of kids are just plain spoiled rotten, but I have to think that using tablet, mobile devices, and video games as a source of parental relief is going to have many unintended and undesirable consequences.

It's interesting when you see what kids do with tablets versus what adults do with them, particularly on planes. Kids like to play games. Parents and business travellers like to watch movies, browse the web, and read books.

Rarely have I seen a teenager or a pre-teen pick up a tablet on a plane and read a book. More often than not, the ones with the Kindles are college students.

So indeed, today's children are more "advanced", if we agree they are the first generation to embrace the Version 1.0 David Gelernter "Lifestream", which I believe is quickly turning our society into one dominated by attention-deficient nitwits.

I'm certainly not suggesting that we take smartphones and tablets away from our kids. If anything, the smartphone has given the modern parent a better communications and location mechanism than any generation of parents have had before, giving them increased peace of mind.

But we have to remember that smartphones and tablets and other forms of digital interaction are no replacement for real human interaction, as well as traditional forms of learning.

And if we continue to become "advanced" as Kendrick posits, all we will be is a bunch of unlearned and uncultured automatons that are socially backward in all manner of social interaction by comparison to their "inferior" technologically deprived forbears, who read avidly, who conversed face to face, and appreciated the simpler things in life.

Are today's children really more "advanced" with access to today's mobile technology, or is it also retarding their developmental and social skills? Talk back and let me know.

In this podcast, Jason is outspoken and is fan of Google Glass and soon to be like technologies; Rick tries to normalize him a bit and find the use cases for business technology situations.

Click here to visit the Veeam Community Podcast site to to play this episode.

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It's early Sunday afternoon, my wife picks up the phone. A few minutes later, she walks into my office. From the tone of her voice, I can tell that she's been speaking to my Mother-in-Law, Sandy, and that something technical in nature, up in the place I used to call home, back in good ol' Northern New Jersey has gone awry.

Sandy's experiences with her PC have been fodder for a lot of interesting articles over the years. Interesting not because what Sandy encounters is particulary unusual, but because what she encounters are the kinds of obstacles that us technical, PC-savvy types see as simply minor annoyances but end up being total showstoppers for a novice end-user. 

"She needs to talk to you. Her printer isn't working."

I looked back at my wife, while cupping a freshly-pulled espresso lungo. "She should call Epson tech support."

"The Epson people said it was a Windows problem."

I scowled, with my best grumpy-cat face. "Rachel, what the hell, do I look like I work for Microsoft or something?"

Oh wait.

"Okay, put her on the phone."

One of the best tools for doing technical support remotely is a free program called TeamViewer. I use it to support my parents, who live locally in Florida, and also for my Mother-in-Law, who lives in New Jersey. It's multi-platform, so it runs on Windows, Mac as well as Linux.

Similar to screen sharing and remote access apps like GotoMeeting, GoToMyPC or WebEx, it's a free program when used strictly for personal, non-commerical use. I have it installed on every machine for every friend or family member I have to occasionaly help out with support issues on.

I remoted into my Mother-In-Law's PC, and noticed she was wirelessly connected to "Linksys". Well, that's odd. So I went into the router config -- which was set to the default "root/admin" combo typical of Linksys SOHO routers, and noticed it was an unsecured network.

"What the heck? I don't remember setting the router this way."

And maybe I was tired, or maybe I simply forgot, but it eluded me for about ten minutes that what I had logged into was a WRT-54G, an older, but extremely popular model of Linksys Wireless-G router. I distinctly remembered buying Sandy a brand new Wireless-N router last year, a Linksys EA-2700.

And then it dawned on me. I wasn't in Sandy's router. I was in... her neighbor's. 

Well, there's your problem, mom!

I had re-built Sandy's laptop during the winter break when she was down here visiting with my Father-in-Law, Bob. I purchased her a Windows 8 upgrade license, a new copy of Office, and configured it to use her model of printer. 

Now, Sandy's printer, an Epson Workforce 645, can be used wirelessly, over a Ethernet connection, or it can be directly connected via a USB port. For whatever reason, the Epson tech could not get the printer working with Sandy over the phone. I figured out what happened though.

First, the Epson phone tech didn't realize that Sandy was connected to an unsecured wireless network. How she got connected to it doesn't really matter. She could have clicked on the first network that popped up by accident (because it was called "Linksys" which is the same brand as her router) or the Epson tech simply assumed that was the correct network when she told him what brand of router she had.

I was not privvy to the tech support conversation, but Sandy did tell me that the tech instructed her to uninstall/re-install all her printer drivers, and then determined they "Could not get the PC to work with the printer."

An unsecured Linksys WRT-54G is the wireless security equivalent of keeping the front door of your home wide open, year-round.

For whatever reason, the PC and the Epson All-in-One lost the wireless connection to her EA2700 router. Windows 8's default behavior is not to connect to any unknown wireless network unless the user instructs it to, secured or otherwise. This is a security feature. Not "A Windows Problem".

Jersey has been having lightning storms and random power outages a lot in the last year or so, so it wouldn't surprise me if there was some temporary connectivity issue involved in the mix, combined with simple user error that caused this condition. As well as being stuck with a telephone support tech at Epson that obviously doesn't understand the fundamentals of PC and TCP/IP networking.

Either way, an unsecured wireless network tripped Sandy up. And I suspect that this sort of thing is not uncommon.

How did I fix it? Simple. I had Sandy connect an ethernet cable from her router to the printer, and another one from her laptop to her router, since it never leaves her desk, and installed/upgraded the Workforce 645 drivers and firmware.

That Epson's tech couldn't figure this out is laughable, but all sorts of end-user to tech phone communication issues can contribute to an unsatisfactory support experience. I'll give them the benefit of the doubt on this one.

In any case, in the course of fixing this minor printer issue via remote, I discovered that Sandy's neighborhood was absolutely infested with unsecured wireless networks.

The screen shot at the header of the article says it all. We've got the ubiquitous "Linksys" that tripped up Sandy, a Time Warner Cable public access Wi-Fi gateway, an Optimum Online public access Wi-Fi gateway, and a few others that didn't show up in the screen shot, such as a Comcast XFINITY W-Fi gateway, and a large number of unsecured privately-owned routers built by Netgear, D-Link, Apple and other usual suspects.

In the case of the cable companies providing public Wi-Fi access points for their subscribers, I have to say I am a bit annoyed that they tend to use unsecured, SSID broadcast Wi-Fi networks as entry points.

My general understanding is that they require registered MAC addresses in order to gain actual access, but still, it potentially can cause connectivity issues with devices that will attempt to default lock onto them, and it simply pollutes the neighborhood with unnecessary stuff showing up on our respective devices and confuses end-users.

Now, private end-users with unsecured WLANs? These people are really asking for trouble. Sandy's neighborhood is a bedroom community in Northern New Jersey, with nice houses in residental developments bordering a golf course and a country club. This is exactly the type of neighborhood that "wardrivers" stalk, looking for systems for which they can gain entry and steal information.

In the defense of most SOHO networking equipment manufacturers, they have gotten a lot better about creating default settings that require WPA2 encrypted WLANs out of the box. However, there are still many older routers still on the streets, such as the WRT-54G, which aren't secured and are running in default configurations.

An unsecured Linksys WRT-54G is the wireless security equivalent of keeping the front door of your home wide open, year-round.

Sandy's community is primarily composed of folks aged 60 and older. They've been living in their homes for at least a decade or longer, and have had broadband probably for at least that long. I don't want to make any sweeping generalizations about older people, but a lot of folks do not replace SOHO networking equipment until it actually breaks, and many of these older people are not technically savvy. So they are the perfect target for wardriving attacks.

I suspect that most of the people reading this piece are not the types to run unsecured networks. But if you do see them in your neighborhood, try to find out who owns them, and educate whoever is running them to replace their older router equipment (particularly if they are only capable of using WEP, as opposed to the newer WPA2 standard) and to set the appropriate WLAN passwords and to use Wi-Fi Protected Setup (WPS) with their devices when possible.

And while I am generally not of the opinion that governments should interfere with the usage of our own electronic equipment, I do think that anyone who runs an unsecured WLAN should be subject to fines, because they endanger themselves and the people living in their households, as well as those people who they are potentially sharing data with. 

Is your neighborhood infested with unsecured wireless networks? Talk Back and Let Me Know.

So let's just get this out of the way: I do not hate electric cars. In fact I think they are awesomely cool, and are an incredible technical achievement.

That being said, at this stage of their technical development, and given other issues related to the production of electricity in this and in many other countries, I don't think they are even close to being ready for prime time.

In the last year we've seen various aspects of the EV ecosystem self-destruct. GM's Volt sales have been so awful that the company decided to temporarily suspend production of the car in the spring of last year for over a month and had to issue heavy discounts to move inventory.

To be kind as well as factually correct, GM sold over 23,000 Volts in 2012, which is triple what it did in 2011, but that isn't saying an awful lot.

If you compare the total sales of the Volt to date with the vehicle that shares its platform, the top-selling compact car in North America --  the Chevy Cruze -- it's so small that it's practically a rounding error. Approximately 237,000 Cruzes were sold in 2012, and 231,000 in 2011.

Yes, there have been about 14 Chevy Cruzes sold for every Volt sold to date. Even if you factor in that about a quarter of all Cruzes go to rental car agencies, the consumer sales gap between GM's electric vehicle sales and comparable gasoline-based car sales is staggering.

And it's not just GM that can't seem to make significant headway with EVs. Nissan's Leaf failed to make even 10,000 deliveries in the US in 2012. The company is doing a bit better this year, but these numbers are certainly not significant by any means. The company hit the total US sales milestone of 25,000 cars this month, again after over a $6000 price cut before federal incentives.

And those are the electric cars that are doing well-ish.

Just in the last few months, both CODA Automotive, an electric car company and EV battery manufacturer, as well as A123 Systems, another battery manufacturer have filed for bankruptcy protection.

Fisker Automotive, the producer of the exotic Karma plug-in electric hybrid sports car who hired the former head of GM's Volt division, Tony Posawatz, to be its CEO, just fired almost all of its staff and is preparing for total asset liquidation after producing about 2,000 vehicles total.

Better Place, which was a Palo Alto and Israeli-based startup that tried to create an international subscriber network of charging stations for EVs ceased operations this week, after burning through approximately $700 millon of capital from multiple seed investors since beginning their venture funding in 2010.

I'm sure you Elon Musk fans are just raring at the bit to tell me that Tesla has exceeded Wall Street expectations for Q1 in 2013. True, the company is doing well, but it's the only maker of electric vehicles and related products that is doing well.

If anything, Tesla has simply validated its place as the automotive equivalent of Apple, as a high-end luxury products maker for the eco-savvy nouveau riche. The company has sold about 5,000 of its $70,000+ cars to date.  It also has an extremely wealthy benefactor, who has diversified into other industries such as commercial space vehicles, and can treat the business like an expensive hobby. 

I'm going to treat Tesla as an exception to the rule. As a whole, people don't want electric cars. Oh, don't get me wrong, they like the idea and the philosophy behind electric cars, but push comes to shove, your average middle class person who can afford to buy a new car doesn't want to own an EV.

It's also true that hybrids have gotten quite a bit of success in the last decade, such as the (regular) Toyota Prius and Honda's various hybrid offerings.

I don't consider hybrids true EVs, though, as they employ regenerative methods using their gasoline engines and braking systems to power a relatively small battery pack, which is only used a fraction of the time, and they still have mechanical linkages to the drivetrain from the gasoline motor.

The Volt, Fisker and one of the latest variations of the Prius are "Plug-in" hybrid EVs, in the sense that they rely on their battery packs first, and then kick in their gasoline engines to power the electric drivetrain when the batteries completely expend their range, which for the Volt is about 50 miles.

The Nissan Leaf and the Tesla Model S are pure EVs -- they only rely on their batteries to run and require the use of charging stations on extended trips. The Leaf can go for about 75-100 miles between charges and the Tesla Model S can go up to (an impressive) 265 miles before a recharge.

Let's summarize why these cars don't make sense. First, they cost a lot of money. Not only is your average middle class family unable to afford a $70,000 Tesla Model S, but they also can't afford to buy a $38,000 Chevy Volt, or a $35,000 Nissan Leaf, even after government incentives, when a comparable Cruze or a Sentra costs half the amount of money.

GM will shortly be releasing the Spark EV, a sub-compact, lower priced pure electric vehicle with an 82-mile range that will cost about $27,500 before federal tax credits. This is still probably too much money for an EV, especially such a small one with such limited range.

And we're not even getting into pre-owned vehicles as potential competition here. New car sales, as a whole, pretty much suck.

You could make the argument that charging these cars with electricity from your home is cheaper than filling the tank, but how long is that going to take you to make up twice the cost of a comparable gasoline vehicle?

Second is the issue of range. While the Tesla is indeed an impressive performer at a luxury price, the Volt (if you treat it strictly as an EV) and the Leaf essentially are only good for local driving.

Then there is the issue of long-term reliability and safety. We don't really know, long-term, how these exotic batteries and other parts in EVs are going to perform as these vehicles age, and what the longer-term maintenance costs will be.

We understand what to expect from fossil fuel engines because they've been around for over 100 years, and there's a hugely established parts and repair infrastructure industry surrounding it. Not so for EVs. 

Now, you could also make the argument that EVs aren't all about saving money, it's about making yourself feel good, knowing you can live a greener lifestyle. I dig that.

But the only way you're really going to live a greener lifestyle is to go completely off the grid, which means investing in (expensive) solar panels, wind and water turbines, and collecting an energy surplus using big capacitive batteries and power inverters to juice your EV with.

Otherwise, all that you are doing is juicing your car with electricity that is created largely by fossil fuel-burning power plants from your metropolitan power infrastructure. 

So if we really want to get rid of non-renewable fuel sources, not only do we have to get it out of our cars, but we have to get it out of our municipal power plants.

And guess what -- the best alternative to this is nuclear energy. Which is the greenest, most efficient electric power producing system of all. Don't beleive me? You might want to catch Pandora's Promise, a new film which hits selected theatres next month.

I'm not going to get into the political ramifications and NIMBYism of nuclear energy. Nor will I lay out an economic model which would prove that building out large scale nuclear power infrastructure would result in the creation of millions of new jobs.

Instead, let's talk about other forms of renewable, sustainable fuel sources for cars.

The modern hybrid vehicle, be it a conventional regenerative design like a Prius or a plug-in like a Chevy Volt still uses gasoline for the conventional part of its powertrain. If we want to be independent from the oil-producing nations, then we need to start thinking creatively.

We have a potential fuel source and propulsion technology that will solve our sustainability as well as greatly reduce our dependence on oil producing countries for automotive fuel and other petroleum needs.

It's proven, with over 100 years of maturity, and its use would not require a major re-tooling of our automotive manufacturing capabilities.

That fuel is Diesel. Specifically, Biodiesel and Biomass to Liquid (BTL) diesel fuel.

Today, most diesel cars run on fuel that comes from petroleum derivatives. But they can also run on fuels based on vegetable and plant oils. I drive a Chattanooga, Tennesee-built 2012 Volkswagen Passat TDI that in a pinch, could actually run on pure vegetable oil if I needed it to, Volkswagen's warranty terms notwithstanding.

My Passat TDI gets on the average of about 600 miles to the tank with mixed city and highway driving in Florida with the A/C system running whenever I drive. In various driving scenarios the car can actually achieve over 800 miles per tank, especially if you are doing mostly highway driving.

There have even been verified stories of people getting 1600 miles to a tank with this car, under careful driving conditions.

What if we reallocated much of the farmland that is producing corn -- that is being used to produce the very same high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) which is permeating virtualy every processed food product sold today and that is creating an obesity and diabetes epedemic in this country?

What if we used most of those corn fields to produce, say, marijuana or industrial hemp instead? Or grow it in areas where food crops cannot thrive?

Without getting into cannabis's psychoactive and medicinal properties and also as a potential taxable revenue source if legalized for recreational use, the industrial variants of hemp would be excellent renewable sources for biodiesel/BTL production.

And as a by-products of a large biodiesel industry, hemp would yield extremely durable fibers for all sorts of applications (including apparel and plastics) as well as excellent and healthy cooking oils and food protein. And think about the jobs these industries would create.

Pure electric vehicles might be viable someday. Unfortunately, that day may be a decade or more away. But before we even attempt to popularize them we need to figure out how to solve the overall sustainable energy problem using conventional technology, while keeping vehicle and fuel costs down.

Are the current crop of electric cars simply feel-good toys for the eco-conscious nouveau riche? Talk back and let me know.

I was once an avid homebrewer. I grew up with a love of the user-serviceable PC, to be able to understand its inner workings, to be able to do my own repairs and upgrades, and also to save money. For over 20 years I built my own PCs for these very reasons. But now this no longer makes sense.

While there still exists a cottage industry for building "White Boxes" and supporting the homebrewed PC enthusiast, this industry is not a healthy one. The homebrewing and White Box industry is on the verge of extinction.

This is because PC industry is now mature, and that a combination of factors including economies of scale in PC manufacturing by the large OEMs as well as a heavy consolidation of PC component vendors that has eliminated diversity and choice for the homebrewer.

Most importantly though, an industry movement towards integrated systems — such as accelerated processing units (APUs) and System-on-a-Chip (SoCs), which reduce the overall components required to build a PC and also a shift towards notebooks and tablets as preferred computing devices — has largely made homebrewing and white boxing an unnecessary anachronism.

There are very few advantages to building your own PC or having a reseller or integrator do this for you today. Ten years ago — more realistically 15 or 20 years — there was a healthy ecosystem of diverse component vendors as well as businesses that could competitively price systems built from scratch. They could also provide significant differentiation and value add with building systems. Part of what came along with this would be personalized support.

But that ecosystem is not healthy today, the component supply chain has become heavily consolidated, and the Tier-1 vendors can provide excellent on-site tech support contracts.

If you really prefer local, personalized tech support, there's always independent consultants who specialize in this. But many have largely ceased the practice of building and reselling systems due to the resale tax burden as well as being unable to compete with system margins sold in retail, brick and mortar retail or discount clubs, and with e-commerce direct to order.

There are also tangible risks associated with building your own PCs.

First there is the risk of a local IT firm or whiteboxer being unable to support your systems by the very real possibility of them closing up shop and you being stuck with non-retail, bulk OEM PC components with limited warrantees. While this sounded ludicrous 15 or 20 years ago, that's now a very real possibility today.

The second is being able to consistently source the same components and not being able to standardize installs and drivers. While this is not necessarily as much of an issue as it was, say, 10 years ago with the advent of componentized and scripted installs, as well as superior plug-and-play (PnP) technology in today's PC operating systems, it still adds to the support burden and it adds significantly to overall level of effort and time sink.

Why? Because you are spending an inordinate amount of time and energy on system verification rather than unpacking OEM systems from boxes and turning them on, and pushing down a standardized image with all your apps on it. Time is money. Do you want your highly-paid IT staff wasting valuable time playing PC tech, or to focus their energies in support your line of business applications and infrastructure?

You should never consider building your own PC if you actually care about the dynamics of your business and require consistent support.

You aren't going to save money, your support options are not going to be better with white boxes than with an OEM certified system, because you can get a support plan from an OEM, and you can get local consultants to deal with break-fix on simple items if the machine comes out of warranty.

And in most cases, when a key component of the system dies, it's probably simpler and more cost effective to just replace it rather than repair it due to labor costs alone.

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One could argue that there are edge-case vertical industry scenarios where an end-user or a business needs a specialized graphics or PCI card, or an extreme high performance internal storage device, extremely high-speed networking, or what have you that isn't supported in an off-the-shelf PC configuration.

There may be also be legacy hardware and peripherals with software and drivers that still needs to be supported that cannot run on modern systems, but in cases like this the business should be considering migration to rid themselves of these high-risk devices that could severely impact their business if they fail.

Industries like computer graphics, engineering, and content creation have demanding requirements that may occasionally outstrip the capabilities of what many PC vendors might offer, even with their most high-end workstations. But these are extremely rare cases and more often than not there are practical workarounds, which don't require a custom build.

I've spent a good amount of time here talking about why businesses should not build PCs. But what about the consumer?

There are no advantages to doing this today. None. Zero. Zilch. Zippo. Nada. If we are talking about a typical consumer with a capital C (and not a Hobbyist, or a Gamer) someone who browses the web, engages in social networking, and uses productivity and typical multimedia applications, and plays games casually, then you should never consider building a PC.

First of all, a brand-new PC is going to come with a Windows 8 license. A white boxer or a PC hobbyist building a system from scratch will need to buy the OEM System Builder Kit, since there is no Retail license as with Windows 7, there are only Upgrade licenses for consumers.

That System Builder license of Windows 8 will run you about $95 on Amazon for the regular version and about $135.00 for the Pro version. That's going to negate a lot of the perceived cost savings of building a box right there.

Your old Windows 7 Retail license can be re-used if your old PC is discarded, but you cannot re-use the OEM copy that came with a OEM-built system without violating the Microsoft EULA. This counts for businesses as well, unless, they have volume licenses and EAs.

And yes, my Linux friends? Building a system doesn't help you either. You can buy perfectly good Linux certified systems from OEMs and virtually every OEM system out of box that runs Windows works fine with Linux anyway, and even with the cost of that OEM license built in, you'd be hard pressed to save time, money, and frustration from building your own box. I've done this, many times.

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There still remains a group of people — ones who are in an extremely vocal minority — that identify themselves as PC builders.

These are prosumers and hobbyists which, for whatever reason, have had a history of building systems and are permanently fixated in a DIY worldview who can never be convinced to buy systems from OEMs due to whatever misguided or outdated ideologies about build costs or component quality they may still maintain.

But this is such a small and ever declining portion of the PC using population and is no foundation for a PC building industry to survive on.

The meat of the issue really has little to do with the desires of homebrewers. It has to do with the component manufacturers and a shift towards mobility.

Movement towards low-cost SoC-based and APU-based devices, whether they be Ultrabooks, tablets, smartphones, convergence devices and wearables shifts computational power and infrastructure from the desktop to the datacenter and Cloud and also software from a purchased or licensed to a subscription and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) or Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) model.

So building PCs will make far less sense than ever before.

Many of the component vendors who make PC parts are also moving their business models towards supporting and manufacturing the above mentioned systems and away from things like graphics cards, hard drives and mainboards, which will make building PCs that much more difficult.

We're moving towards a model where PCs are no longer going to be serviceable, whether it is a notebook computer with soldered-on everything or a PC mainboard that is simply a just a glorified SoC with onboard GPU, RAM and networking. I don't see how a PC building ecosystem can continue to be viable in that way.

And if you've walked into a typical enterprise lately, the tablet, laptop and notebook population far exceeds the desktop PC population. Let's face it, nobody is homebrewing or whiteboxing notebooks. And by the way, I consider "White Box" specialty notebook builders like Sager as pure OEMs, not whiteboxers.

I think we're also seeing a distinct movement toward touchscreen devices, whether they be on High-end Ultrabooks and Convertibles like the Lenovo X1 Carbon Touch, Asus's budget VivoBook X202E or all-in-ones like HP's TouchSmart line.

While the PC market as a whole is in decline, these form factors are actually showing very clear signs of adoptance.

If the industry trends and hard numbers are of any indication, consumers value mobility just as much if not more than the enterprise does. So the PC desktop, be it OEM or home-built, is long overdue for total extinction.

Then what are we as business owners and end-users to do?

We should be refocusing on supporting and building our line of business apps, and undergoing transformation processes that shift as much of our infrastructure to the datacenter and cloud as possible, and that includes moving desktops to VDI and DaaS. That may be very hard for some folks to accept but that is the path that has been laid for our industry going forward.

Five years ago I went through the "denial" stage. And then the "anger." And then "bargaining" and "depression." I am now in full "acceptance" that building PCs for personal and business use no longer makes economic and business sense, and with the exception of certain edge and vertical scenarios, of which there is a declining few, that whiteboxing and homebrewing is dead.

Have you also gone though the PC building grief cycle? Talk back and let me know.

I called that theoretical technology the "Browser Deflector Shield," evoking the defensive force field technology from "Star Trek." 

Shortly after, a company named Invincea actually implemented something very similar to what I described.

Invincea uses host-based virtualization technology on Windows desktops in order to provide the isolation for the browser, as well as a proprietary detection engine which will destroy and reset the virtual machine should any malware be detected.

While isolating the browser is certainly a good idea, there may be a better way of protecting desktop PC users from malware. That technology is micro-virtualization, or a "Microvisor."

I had a chance this week to speak for some time with Simon Crosby, co-founder and chief technology officer of Bromium, a company that is one of the first to market with a Microvisor security solution for desktop PCs, called vSentry. 

If Crosby's name rings a bell, that's because he was formerly chief technology officer of Citrix, and is the co-founder of XenSource, the company that first commercialized the Xen hypervisor, the very same that powers the core of Amazon Web Services (AWS) and its EC2 public cloud. XenSource was acquired by Citrix Systems in 2007.

Bromium vSentry is quite different from other virtualization technology that exists in the datacenter and on the desktop or even in mobile today.

vSentry is a "thin" hypervisor and does not manage hardware resources like a Type-1 hypervisor, like Microsoft's Hyper-V, which is built into Windows 8 Pro and Windows Server 2012, or like VMware ESX as part of the vSphere/vCloud suite, or even Xen for that matter. 

It also does not behave like or perform the same function as a typical Type-2 desktop virtualization product, like VMware Workstation, Parallels Desktop or Oracle VirtualBox.

The vSentry microvisor sits on top of an existing operating system that manages the hardware resources like Type-2 hypervisor might, however it makes heavy use of the hardware virtualization extensions (VT-x and VT-d) present in the current generation x86 processors.

And rather than managing the hardware, it strictly manages how operating system processes are created and destroyed, rather than creating new instances of a hosted operating system itself.

The closest type of technology I could compare a microvisor like Bromium vSentry to is something like a "containerized" solution, such as Solaris Zones or Parallels Virtuozzo/OpenVZ, where a root/privileged operating system copies out clones of itself in memory to create pseudo-servers with unique libraries, configuration files and application storage all isolated into their own region of memory, all running on top of a shared kernel instance.

This is also referred to as "OS Virtualization."

OS Virtualization is a highly efficient way of virtualizing servers and applications, but has mostly been confined to the UNIX and Linux space.

Microsoft Research has conducted some initial work and has published various academic papers on an operating system virtualization project called "Drawbridge," which has many of the same characteristics as Solaris Zones and OpenVZ, as well as some significant architectual improvements to the basic concept. But so far it has not made its way into Windows. 

(I realize this stuff sounds very geeky and borderline nerdy, and most of you are nodding off at this point, but bear with me.)

Bromium's and micro-virtualization's key purpose is not to virtualize apps or operating systems in order to increase datacenter density and maximize resource utilization, although that may be a pleasant side effect. The purpose of Bromium vSentry is to virtualize every single process that is launched by a user or spawned by an application.

Still with me? OK, great. Here's a picture that sheds a bit more light on this.

In the Bromium systems architecture, every time the user fires up an application — and let's say for the sake of simplicity that this is a Web browser like Internet Explorer, Firefox, or Chrome — it's isolated into its own virtual machine called a "Micro-VM".

A Micro-VM puts the application on a "need-to-know" basis, and only provisions out exactly what it needs in order to function. For example, it doesn't have access to every library on the system; only the ones that it needs to run.

Applications may have multiple processeses running within them, such as multiple tabs in a Web browser. In this case, a browser tab as well as any plugins inside them would be given their own Micro-VM. There are no "child" virtual machine processes, only parallel Micro-VM processes, all running within the microvisor's "ring of trust".

Now here is where things get interesting. When the application or the process within the application is closed, that Micro-VM also dies. Any malware that may have entered the system via that process is destroyed along with it.

Bromium also introduces the concept of "copy on write," which clones out system resources like dynamic-link libraries (DLLs) as well as things like user profiles and data into temporary memory, so the original copy cannot be affected if an attack takes place. 

But Bromium also pre-emptively inspects every single Micro-VM for the telltale signs of a malware attack, and uses crowdsourcing for determining if the process is being attacked.

For instance, if you are visiting a website and get hit with a redirect/cross-site scripting or a phishing attempt, it employs what the company refers to as Live Attack Visualization and Analysis (LAVA), which uses the behavioral signature of the attack to determine that it needs to shut down the virtual machine and notify the user before the compromise actually occurs. This includes sophisticated malware attacks including those that utilize polymorphism as well as rootkits and boot-kits.

Bromium's intention is to share these behavioral patterns through an open standard, so all anti-malware products as well as open source projects can reap the benefits.

Today, Bromium vSentry is restricted to running "on-the-metal" on Windows-based desktop PCs and servers, and cannot currently sit on top of an existing hypervisor platform. But there is no reason why this architecture could not be implemented in existing hypervisor platforms to provide this process isolation for Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) through a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) or virtualized session-based computing.

Bromium vSentry is able work with session-based desktop computing now, using an "on the metal" session host running Microsoft RDS or Citrix XenApp.

The fundamental technology could also be ported to Linux, or even to the Mac. Additionally, once virtualization acceleration technology makes its way onto ARM-based SoCs in the next few years, the same principles of micro-virtualization could also be used on mobile devices as well, including smartphones and tablets running different OSes.

Could micro-virtualization be the killer technology that rids the world from malware once and for all? Talk back and let me know. 

For the last several years, he's been writing seasonal posts that contains his best picks for matched components so that you can build a good performance low-cost PC yourself, instead of going to the Tier-1 OEMs, like HP, Dell, Acer and Lenovo.

If you're putting together a PC whose components cost you $300 to source, you are not shrewd. You are a schmuck.

I enjoy his posts immensely. I really do. I love PC components. I used to build PCs, usually once a year or so, sometimes more, for family and friends. I've built from scratch at least a hundred systems over the course of my professional involvement in the computer industry since the late 1980s. Perhaps even more, now that I think about it.

But now, unless you're an edge case, it doesn't make sense. I stopped building PCs a long time ago. 

If you want a "cheap and cheerful PC to handle some simple tasks" you shouldn't be surfing the web for parts and then blowing an entire Sunday afternoon putting it together thinking you've saved a hundred dollars and gotten oh-so-much-better-components for your hard-earned money.

Look, I'm going to be blunt. If you're putting together a PC whose components cost you $300 to source, you are not shrewd. You are a schmuck.

I didn't have to look very long to find very similar, fully-built PCs manufactured by Tier 1 vendors that cost approximately $300. A simple search of the usual suspects yielded these results:

Best Buy:

• Dell Inspiron 660s 4GB RAM 1TB ($319) (Small form factor, built-in wireless networking)
• $34.99) 

Amazon:

• Lenovo IdeaCentre Q190 ($339.99) (Ultra-thin, sleek form factor, wireless) 
• Gateway 4GB RAM 1TB AMD A4-5300 ($349.99) Small form factor

Newegg:

• Lenovo H520S 4GB RAM 1TB ($329) (Small form factor, built-in wireless networking)

Microsoft Store:

• ASUS VivoBook X202E Touchscreen Ultrabook ($399)

This is just a representative sample and I haven't scrounged the web for better deals, of which I am absolutely positive there are if you are willing to invest more time than the whole 10 minutes I put into it. And by the way, that ASUS VivoBook deal at the Microsoft Store? ZDNet's Ed Bott told me about it, and I'd jump on it quick if you need a new and inexpensive notebook system.

You could argue that Adrian's bill of materials is about 20 or 30 dollars cheaper than the systems above, and his components may be slightly higher speced, but I will add the following:

• Every single one of these PCs comes with a Windows 8 license. Unless you're using Linux, or are re-using a valid retail, non-OEM Windows 7 license that isn't currently running on another computer, you'll need a copy of Windows for this PC.
• Software piracy isn't cool. If you need a new Windows 8 license, you will need to buy the System Builder DVD, which I found on Amazon for $95.
• Every single one of these PCs comes with a keyboard and mouse. That's worth about 20-30 bucks right there.
• Every single one of these computers has 1-year warranty, and is sold by a online vendor with good customer service and return policies. This in and of itself is not insubstantial especially if you think you can cut corners with OEM bulk "Grey-box" system builder parts which do not have the same warranties of their retail boxed counterparts.

I've said a number of times in the past that PC building no longer makes sense for most people. I have gone into the reasons at length on various occasions, but the bottom line is that cost should not be a determining factor in being your own system builder.

Adrian is by and large addressing the hobbyist that actually enjoys putting computers together. The average end-user should not even consider going this route, no matter how much easier it has gotten to assemble a PC since 25 years ago when I first started doing this. 

I can understand to some extent, but am less than fully convinced that it may still make sense to build an extremely high-end system for an ever-shrinking demographic of extreme PC gaming folks and for engineering and graphical workstations, but for the average end-user that needs a basic system for the reasons Adrian has specified? Heck no.

When was the last time you actually built a PC? Talk Back and Let Me Know.

Advances in Treknology

In September 1966, the NBC television network released an iconic but short-lived series that would inspire generations of inventors to bring about changes in our daily lives with technology that was once within the realms of strictly science fiction.

The original series, based on a "Wagon train to the Stars" western turned sci-fi adventure concept envisioned by Gene Roddenberry, Dorothy C Fontana, and Matt Jefferies, ran for a total of three seasons from 1966 to 1969. Many films and subsequent revival series have since graced television and film in the nearly 50 years since the airing of the initial pilot.

The original series was re-envisioned with a new cast as a major motion picture in 2009, and the sequel, Star Trek: Into Darkness, premieres this month, on May 16.

In the span of those four decades, many of the gadgets and technologies showcased in Star Trek and in the revival shows and feature films that followed it in the 1980s, 1990s, and the 2000s did eventually come to fruition.

In this gallery, we'll highlight some of the most important ones.

(Image: CBS)

The "Communicator"

Perhaps the most iconic of Trek gizmos that became reality was the device simply known as the "Communicator," a palm-sized walkie-talkie with a flip-out antenna that allowed crew members to communicate with each other while in the field, and allowed the Enterprise to geo-locate and communicate with the away team from orbit on any planet they happened to have beamed down on.

The real-life version of the "Communicator" became the mobile phone, which was invented by Dr. Martin Cooper of the Motorola corporation, and released in April 1973.

Cooper admitted to being inspired by the original Star Trek show as the driving force behind the device that now permeates virtually all of modern society. The original real-life "Communicator" was brick-sized, but Motorola eventually released the appropriately named StarTAC in 1996, which was a dead ringer for the Trek original.

Today, flip-style cell phones that look like the original Communicator have largely given way to more powerful touchscreen smartphones like the iPhone and the Samsung Galaxy, but without Star Trek, we probably wouldn't have seen either of them.

The true Communicator didn't use cell towers — it was able to broadcast over huge distances, and allowed crew members to communicate both planet-wide and to the ship in orbit without the use of any support infrastructure.

We haven't gotten there yet, and we sort of failed with mass adoption of global-capable Communicator tech with Iridium, but modern cell phones do permeate our lives, and we do have the ability now to locate each other with built-in GPS capabilities, which the Enterprise was able to do for its crew members.

In 2009, Google introduced the Latitude service, which allows anyone carrying a GPS-capable smartphone running Google Maps to be visually located by their friends, so we're getting closer to the "True" Trek Communicator.

(Image: CBS)

The Federation communications earpiece

The cell/mobile phone was not the only aspect of Trek communications technology that made it to reality.

The wireless earpiece, which both communications officer Lt. Uhura and science officer Spock were known to have used on a number of occasions on the show, also became a reality as the Bluetooth Headset, which is also a Motorola innovation.

Motorola Mobility was purchased by Google in August 2011.

(Image: CBS)

Flat-panel displays

Star Trek has had so many computer and information-related technologies showcased in it over the years that it's very hard to tell where the science starts and the fiction ends.

While many of the IT advances in Star Trek haven't made it yet — such as true artificial intelligence, as featured in the Enterprise's shipboard computer system or Lieutenant Commander Data, many aspects of Trek IT have managed to filter their way into our daily lives.

Display technology is probably the biggie.

While you can hardly credit Star Trek for inventing the CRT, you can certainly see how the show has probably inspired generations of engineers to create LCD flat screens and HD widescreen wall-mounted displays, which were simply called "Viewers" or "Viewscreens" on the original show.

It should probably also be mentioned that the telepresence technology using video feeds for ship-to-ship communication first shown in 1966 is now commonplace, using technologies such as Skype, Google Hangout, and Apple FaceTime in addition to corporate video conferencing products such as Microsoft Lync, Citrix GotoMeeting, Cisco WebEx, and Cisco Jabber.

However, it should be noted that social norms have limited their actual adoption, and voice communication, while now more advanced than ever before with the advent of VoIP and digital signal processing, is still the way most people like to do things if they aren't texting or emailing.

(Image: CBS)

Tablet computers

My favorite of these display technologies is the PADD, or the Personal Access Display Device. Although the term was coined later in 1987 with the release of the Star Trek: The Next Generation series, it did actually make an appearance a few times in the original show, where it was used by various engineers and administrative staff.

Today, aspects of the PADD can be found in Apple's 9.7-inch and 7-inch iPad, dozens of Android-based tablets, and Windows 8 and Windows RT tablets, such as the Microsoft Surface.

(Image: CBS)

The Enterprise computer and data banks

In addition to advanced display technology, human/computer voice interaction as featured on the many Star Trek series has also been implemented in various forms.

While most of us do not interact with our computers by talking, voice dictation using products such as Nuance's NaturallySpeaking (originally developed at IBM) allows for limited and specialized application by using voice commands and voice dictation.

"Expert" voice recognition systems used by airlines, telecommunications, and utility companies use voice recognition for accelerating call center screening. Although, when I use them, I tend to yell "Operator!" at the top of my lungs.

Apple's introduction of Siri in the iPhone 4, and Google's introduction of Google Now in Android 4.2, are "intelligent agents" that allow for retrieval of information from the internet using voice queries, and work eerily the way the original Enterprise computer did.

Star Trek's "Memory bank" technology, which enabled the crew and various alien civilizations to record and play back music and video in digital form, has also made its appearance as some of the most popular consumer electronic devices in the world — as iPods, portable media players, and digital video recorders, as well as Secure Digital and CompactFlash memory storage cards and the latest solid-state disk drives.

And the subspace Federation communications network and database that we've seen crew members use to access any kind of information at their fingertips is probably analogous to both the internet and the cloud.

(Image: CBS)

Sickbay

The "Sickbay" on the Enterprise was a medical science marvel, filled with all sorts of fantastic tools with the capability to diagnose virtually any ailment in existence and perform complex surgeries on life-threatened patients with virtually no blood spilled.

While we've got a long way to go until we get the full set of medical tools that was available to Dr. McCoy, quite a few of Trek's medical gizmos have left their influence on real-life healthcare technology.

The magical diagnostic bed that displayed all sorts of metrics on patient vital signs that was used on the original series did eventually come to fruition as various independent diagnostic and health monitoring equipment used in hospitals today.

One of those is the LifeBed, which is a near-dead ringer for Dr. McCoy's sickbay. Similar diagnostic equipment has been used aboard the International Space Station (ISS) and in mobile field hospitals in the military. Naturally, advanced medical imaging technologies inspired by the original series and Next Generation sickbays made their way into CT and MRI equipment, which are a staple of modern medical diagnosis.

(Image: CBS)

Hypospray and non-invasive surgery

McCoy's "Hypospray," which allowed for instantaneous, bloodless, and needle-free liquid injections, hasn't quite made it in terms of handheld portability yet to every medical office, but a real-life equivalent for use in mass-dosage scenarios exists as the jet injector, and is used for vaccinations by the Department of Defense and other government and relief agencies around the world.

While the truly non-invasive surgery employed on the original Star Trek and TNG shows for generalized use still remains largely science fiction, some procedures such as Stereotactic Radiosurgery for treating specific types of tumors, allow for non-invasive surgery on brain tissue using focused radiation beams.

And while the hand-held directed energy "Phaser" guns used for combat against hostile aliens still remain a fantasy, LASIK surgery using focused low-wattage lasers to correct vision is now well on its way to making eye glasses and contact lenses obsolete.

(Image: CBS)

The "Vorta Command" headset

First shown in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, the command headset employed by the Dominion "Vorta" overseers of the brutal Jem'Hadar forces was used to have complete situational awareness while piloting their attack ships.

Today, we know this product as Google Glass.

(Image: CBS)

The "Replicator"

One of the most awe-inspiring technologies that has been in every single one of the Star Trek series has been the "Replicator," a device that is able to produce any object, of any complexity, either inorganic or organic in nature, whether it be food or machines, purely by combining raw matter and energy from patterns stored in the computer and re-arranging particles at a sub-atomic level.

In Star Trek, the "Replicator" was an offshoot of the "Transporter" technology that allowed for de-materialization and re-materialization of objects and beings at vast distances.

While this sort of power over pure matter and energy is probably hundreds, if not thousands, of years beyond our current reach, the "Replicator" is here in a much more primitive form as the 3D printer, which can produce fairly complex objects for rapid prototype and manufacture using any number of materials, including plastics, metals, and also proteins and other organic substances.

I've discussed the changes in social norms that will be needed if wearable computing truly becomes mainstream.

I've warned about the potential for misuse and abuse if Glass' software becomes compromised, and if hacked devices get in the hands of sociopaths.

I've talked about the potential industry pitfalls for Glass, as well as a potential path for monetization success in addition to various applications in vertical markets.

I've made suggestions for possible design improvements in successive iterations of the product.

And finally, I've taken a peek into the future, some 20 years hence, to see what the future of augmented reality might look like if we take the technology to its logical conclusion: Complete integration with the human brain, as depicted in the 1983 Douglas Trumbull film Brainstorm.

Human to cybernetic interfaces like I described in the last piece are probably a long ways off.

But if we are to take Glass at face value, and if we are to acknowledge that this is a potential path (of which I believe there are many) for personal computing, then we should probably explore what the near future might bring.

Today, we refer to Glass and other potential products that might emerge like it as "wearable computing devices". I include devices such as smart watches  like the rumored "iWatch"  and other wrist-mounted computing devices in this category as well.

I have a better term for this that I think might be catchy. Glass is a Cybernetic Headband, or a "Cyband" for short.

Today, Glass is the only Cyband on the market. But there could be others.

Google is attempting to set a standard with Glass by being the first product on the market. Sometimes, you succeed in that approach, and sometimes you fail. The market and consumer response is what determines the end result.

What if ... instead of there being different, competing Cyband hardware with embedded OSes and their own application standards, we were to take a completely vendor-neutral approach? What if Cybands were simply just peripherals that talked wirelessly to smartphones and other computing devices using open standards?

First and foremost, I beleive there should be certain basic design principles and assumptions about what Cybands should be.

A Cyband should not be a standalone computing device. Google Glass violates this basic principle out of the box by running on a sophisticated, power-hungry SoC with a complex embedded OS, with large amounts of localized storage, which in turn requires a smartphone or a wireless network to provide the necessary cloud connectivity.

This is wasteful, not just on power consumption, but also computing resources, and adds a layer of complexity and security risk that is currently unnaceptable.

A Cyband should be a Bluetooth 4.0/wi-fi device that acts strictly as an external sensor network and human interface controls for another computing device, such as a smartphone, which in turn provides the application logic and presentation layer to the Cyband.

It should use a low-power microcontroller, such as an ARM Cortex M, to provide basic firmware and control logic, nothing more.

A correct implementation of a Cyband as I define this today would be the Pebble smartwatch, for example, even though its capabilities are limited. Something a bit closer to a full-capability, vendor-neutral Cyband might be the soon-to-be released m100 by Vuzix.

Sensors on a Cyband would include cameras, eye and hand gesture detection, microphones, GPS, accelerometers, gyroscopes, heartbeat/pulse monitors, pedometers, proximity detectors, and photocells, induction charging components, battery monitoring, signal monitoring (such as to determine Bluetooth or wi-fi signal health), as well as RFID tags for "Antiglass" policy enforcement.

A human feedback control would include the monocular display, touch sensor(s), and buttons, as well as audio playback, among others.

To tie all of this together, you would need a published, open standard for a Cyband communications API that could be adopted by anyone that produces smartphones, tablets, personal computers, and the OSes they run on.

This means that if you had a Cyband, you could use it interchangeably on systems that ran Android, iOS, Mac OS, and any variant of Windows. Each of these OSes could have "Cyband presentation and interaction modes" for applications running on those platforms.

Today, we have similar open specifications for networking, microphone input, and audio streaming with Bluetooth 4.0. The various operating systems implement their support differently, however it's pretty much a given that if you have a Bluetooth device that meets a certain minimum specification, it works with all OSes provided that they also meet those specifications and support all of the device's capabilities.

Such would be the same with Cybands. And because Cybands would essentially be Bluetooth headsets (and wristbands) on sensor and feedback steroids, any of the usual suspects, such as Plantronics, Logitech, SONY, LG, Jabra, Jawbone, Bose, and Sennheiser could make them, among the obvious others.  

This would bring the cost of Cybands down to reasonable levels, and allow all of the application platforms that support augmented reality, lifelogging, and wearable computing to win (or lose) mindshare on their respective merits.

Do we need an open specification for Cybands? Talk back and let me know. 

We've seen its use described in popular science-fiction novels and shown in movies and television (like "Star Wars" and "Star Trek") and has been the fodder of futurists for longer than I can possibly remember.

There's no question that these devices will be used extensively, particularly in vertical markets for specific types of applications where hands-free computing has distinct advantages, such in the medical and military fields, as well as in breaking news reporting.

But products like Google Glass will face numerous adoption challenges because they present issues in any number of social situations where privacy or desire to be "off the record" is most cherished.

One might ask, why are privacy issues with Glass any different than any other device that can record, such as a smartphone or a miniature tablet?

They are absolutely different. Today, even with cameras on smartphone handsets, recording in certain areas is frowned upon, but at least there is time for the object of the recording to raise an objection and ask for the device to be put away. 

Because Glass is being worn, and might eventually be integrated into prescription eyewear, it's a "stealth" recording device. The object of the recording may not know they've been captured on video until it is too late. And, the device's ability to transmit that footage to the public-viewable cloud nearly instantaneously with a 4G or Wi-Fi connection will make it much more feared than a simple camera with localized storage.

In the "Explorer" edition of Google Glass that has now shipped to celebrity early adopters and developers, there is no indication whatsoever that the subject is being recorded.

Contrary to early reports, there is no LED or light or anything of the sort to alert that a video or a picture is being taken. This might be changed in mass-market versions of the device produced by licensing OEMs, but for now, one should assume that if Glass' 720p 5-megapixel CMOS sensor is pointed at you, you're on Candid Camera.

Glass and similar products that enter the market because of their potential for recording images and video in a stealthy fashion will be unwelcome in any place that people gather and expect some degree of privacy, and new social norms will have to be developed for their use as well as establishment of etiquette for obtaining the consent of those being recorded.

What about prescription versions of Glass? Won't it make it harder to remove them from people in social situations?

First, we're making a very big assumption that Google can get the eyewear industry to cooperate by licensing this technology. Google is probably not going to want to get into the eyewear business because there are too many styles, and people view their eyewear styles as being a very personal fashion choice. 

That being said, the balance of the designer eyeglass frame as well as the prescription eyeglass retail business, as well as the distribution channels for prescription eyewear — with the exception of Costco and Wal-Mart, which are loss leaders in this area — is effectively a monopoly controlled by the Luxottica Group S.p.A, based in Milan, Italy, which generates over €7 billion in net sales annually, based on their last financial statement.

Virtually every design patent for every licensed eyeglass brand you can think of is controlled by this firm. If Google even wants to play in this arena, it will be on Luxottica's terms. If you think Apple is litigious with protecting design patents, just imagine what Luxottica will do if it suspects Google is attempting to intrude on its business.

More than likely, I think that anyone who is serious about using these sort of devices will opt to use contact lenses or elect for corrective laser surgery, and they can simply just remove the device if someone takes offense to it being used.

• Video: Sticker Shock: Why are eyeglasses so expensive? (CBS 60 Minutes)

And again, if Luxottica feels its long-term business is threatened by the device in any way that could potentially lead toward a downward trend in the use of prescription eyewear, God help Google.

For those too squeamish for corrective surgery or contact lenses, a "clip-on" version of Glass is likely to enter the market.

And the potential for backlash?

Well, there's already backlash to Google Glass. The fact that terms like "Glasshole" and "Doucheglass" are being bandied about already means that the general public finds the product and their users to be obnoxious.

There will be Glass-free signs posted in businesses of all kinds. I can certainly see them being banned from any number of public spaces under local ordinances passed which may govern when and where they cannot be used.

They will be prohibited from being used in schools due to concerns over student distraction and possible cheating. Government buildings will almost certainly prohibit them, as will airport security. There will be incidents of "Glass Rage" where people will get into fights over their use.

And there are probably scenarios for backlash we haven't even thought of yet.

Despite the clear privacy issues and challenges that Google will face with the eyewear industry, I do think that these devices will inevitably enter the mainstream, despite restrictions that will be imposed on their use.

If Luxottica feels its long-term business is threatened by the device in any way potentially that could lead toward a downward trend in the use of prescription eyewear, God help Google.

I think there will be an initial surge for prosumers/professionals and verticals at $800 with a mass adoption price point at about $500, with universal adoption at about $250.

That Android runs at the core of Glass is probably a good thing, at least for Google's device. Android is a known quantity when it comes to software development.

However, the type of apps we will see for augmented reality use are likely to be very different than what is used on a smartphone. I expect these to be more of the "telemetry" type apps that are simply extensions of things running remotely on a Bluetooth-connected smartphone, not unlike how current smart watches work.

I believe augmented reality wearable computers are likely to enter the industry by more than just Google, and there will be different ways to market the geotargeting aspects of the technology.

The obvious one will be augmented reality superimposed advertisements that hook directly into Google Ads, but there's huge potential for noise here. 

Google has stated that no advertisements will be allowed in third-party apps on Glass. I think it is highly unlikely that Google is going to make Glass an advert-free zone. It is far more likely that it intends to reserve ad network promotion for basic device functionality so that app developers cannot abuse the system. 

More likely the advertising on the device will have to be targeted according to the user's Google+ profile and to search context, through queries such as "Okay Glass, show me pizzerias in a one mile radius."

Based on my "+1" of pizza restaurants on Google+, I could see the device popping up overlays if I'm near a particularly good one, such as a place with a particularly high Zagat rating. And it might even show me pizza restaurants that have paid for particularly high AdWords placement as well.

What we think of "advertisement" will be defined entirely by how much Google "juice" an AdWords customer is willing to pay for in order to get in front of literally as many eyeballs as possible. These will not be "pitches" for product as such, but jostling for position on an augmented overlay.

Geotargeted and context and query-based visual augmentation will almost certainly make up the bulk of the revenue model, at least initially.

But I also see Glass as a supplemental ecosystem for the existing Google Play application store, particularly for Android smartphone apps that have the ability to extend their reach into the new device through "telemetry" or Glass-optimized user interfaces.

There may be other types of Glass-oriented content that Google is looking for developers to produce that the wearers can consume and can be monetized. Perhaps industry or interest-specific augmentation overlays, much like the way dictionary add-ons for word processing packages were sold to the medical and legal industry in the 1980s.

In terms of enhancing our overall communications and collaboration experience, I'm not yet convinced it is going to raise the bar. We already have the capability to do pretty sophisticated video chat and video conferencing with smartphones and PCs and it still only has limited use.

Where I do see this making some impact is in social networking. Clearly this would be a win for Google+ and a blow to Facebook. "Liking" and "friending" people could be an act of simply pointing at an icon floating in space over somebody's head, as opposed to having to look up their profile.

The adult film industry will certainly use this device with consent, but imagine what unscrupulous, ethically-challenged sociopaths might do with Glass. 

Status updates could be dictated and photo-sharing services like Instagram could be made obsolete. So it might add some transparency to Social Networking as opposed to it being the chore that it is today.

Still, I think the technology platform has to prove itself before it becomes more than just a more sophisticated replacement to existing Bluetooth headsets. 

At the moment Glass uses very commodity system-on-a-chip (SoC) with fairly off the shelf display, camera and battery tech. Google will need to develop the technology a little further if wants to put devices on the market that are usable for more than just a few hours at a time and can really make use of the life-logging capabilities as opposed to running out of gas after 20 minutes of video recording.

They will need much lower-power SoCs and more sophisticated battery chemistry, so that the majority of the heavy lifting is done by a wireless tethered smartphone instead. Google can certainly get millions of Glass devices pumped out with the current reference design, but it may not be palatable in its current form due to short battery life.

Social and technology limitations aside, there is a significant vertical pivot in all of this. Medical, law enforcement, private security, scientific research, pharmaceutical, and aerospace. Any profession where hands-free device operation is an asset.

Even if Google Glass flops in terms of mass-market adoption, the vertical applications are tremendous, and on that alone the technology should be considered successful if it gets penetration into those industries.

There's another industry that Glass is going to get penetration, and it should be obvious to everyone — pornography.

Google may not intend the product to be used in that fashion, but let's face it, first-person, close-up perspective views of sex acts are as much the holy grail of the adult industry as wearable computing and life logging is in the collective consciousness of science fiction. In fact, the two have often come hand and hand with each other. 

For example, the production-cursed 1983 Douglas Trumbull film "Brainstrom" starring Natalie Wood and Christoper Walken depicts a lifelogging technology similar to Glass — which also has the ability to record sensation and emotion — that is misused and is exploited by one of its inventors to chronicle his bedroom exploits with women, and then share it with his colleagues.

The adult film industry will certainly use this device with consent, but imagine what unscrupulous, ethically-challenged sociopaths might do with Glass. 

If you think "sexting" is something to be wary of, and you're concerned about having your children exposed to it, that's nothing compared to what Glass has the potential to be misused for.

Google Glass will make some sort of industry impact in 2014. Whether that is strictly with early adopters, "prosumers" or use in vertical markets, this is difficult to say. It's also hard to tell this early on whether or not the product is acceptable in its current form given the limitations it has in terms of battery life and just how exactly it might be monetized by third-party developers.  

What is certain, however, is that there is a nearly universal negative reaction to the life-logging and stealth recording capabilities of the device. Regardless of how cheap Google Glass eventually becomes due to efficiencies in mass production, it's obnoxious and invasive at any price and its potential for abuse by the ethically challenged and sociopaths among us is virtually unlimited.

Is Google Glass an obnoxious technology at any price? Talk Back and Let Me Know.

This would be akin to the reference designs for Android smartphones created by Google, which companies like Samsung, HTC, and LG use to make their own licensed products today.

Executives at Google have indicated that Glass will ship to consumers sometime in 2014. Presumably, this is to debug aspects of the system and make improvements so that the market doesn't end up with a half-baked product with a limited application ecosystem at launch, like the first T-Mobile G1 Android handset did back in October 2008.

There are many ways in which an initial Glass consumer product can be improved over the existing "Explorer" edition that is now shipping to developers and first adopters. For starters, there's the issue of battery life.

Great Debate

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Everyone seems to have an opinion about Google's ground-breaking product.

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Currently, according to most reviews of the product published to date, the device only has about a five-hour battery life, and this is reduced to about 20 minutes of total recording time under battery power if the front-facing camera is used for 720p video capture.

Unlike smartphones and tablets, which can use as much as 80 percent of their surface area for battery compartments, Glass faces a number of challenges, essentially because it's a smartphone without a screen, with virtually no surface area to speak of.

The right side of the device holds a small casing that contains the SoC (system on a chip) as well as the 640x360 prism-mounted color display, the forward-facing 5MP CMOS sensor, the microphone, the bone conduction audio system, flash storage, and the support electronics for wireless networking and Bluetooth.

And oh, yes, the battery. All of which has to be packed into an extremely tight area.

So clearly, for Glass to evolve as a usable system, the art of miniaturization has to go a bit beyond what we expect from smartphones. The battery chemistry may need to be more exotic (and thus, probably more expensive) than what exists currently in smartphones, and the SoC design has to be lower power than anything that has been used on a smartphone to date.

Currently, Glass is able to do many tasks autonomously, provided that it has a wi-fi or Bluetooth connection to the internet. Because the SoC used now is of the "complex" and general-purpose variety that is similar to what is used in a smartphone, has a lot of onboard memory (like a smartphone), and runs a fully programmable OS (like a smartphone), it also consumes battery power in large amounts ... like a smartphone.

An alternative approach would be to make the next generation of Glass "dumb", essentially a thin client for the purposes of presenting application telemetry data from a remotely connected smartphone.

With a "dumb" Glass, one could use a very low-power "microcontroller" or ASIC (Application Specific Integrated Circuit) of a custom design that is optimized specifically to do the tasks that Glass needs to do, and thus would consume far less battery power.

Glass 2.0 should have a JeOS, possibly even a hardened, non-Linux kernel, with only a minimal amount of memory onboard, so that the tethered smartphone and the cloud it needs to talk to via wi-fi or Bluetooth is in fact doing the heavy lifting in terms of storage and compute.

Should Google choose to continue to use Android as the base OS for Glass, I would make it a design objective to use a secure boot and image validation technology, such has been developed by General Dynamics for its "GD Protected" suite, which includes numerous other security enhancements that should be considered not only for Glass, but for all Android smartphones.

By making Glass "dumb", there would be other advantages besides battery life. As I noted in my previous piece, Glass currently has no security controls that would prevent it from being hijacked and the data on it stolen.

Android and iOS embedded systems expert Jay Freeman, aka "Saurik", who recently published an account of how to root compromise a Glass device, suggested that Google implement a pin code procedure or a voiceprint to unlock the unit when it is not being used.

"Antiglass" would be a signal or trigger that disrupts the lifelogging capabilities of augmented reality devices. It's the Glass kill switch.

But I would go even further with this. Because of the large amounts of onboard storage, there's a lot of data that could be forensically retrieved from the unit, and since Glass currently runs on a sophisticated SoC on Linux rather than a simple microcontroller running on a rudimentary OS, the potential for compromise is significant even if a voiceprint or pin code is used to unlock the system.

In an ideal world, Glass would simply be a Bluetooth headset on steroids. It would only need a small cache to interact with its host smartphone for the card apps to function, and it would make sense to wipe the cache and disconnect from the network tether every time it is removed from the wearer's head.

There's another feature that I think, beyond everything else I've talked about, is paramount in order to get this technology accepted into the mainstream, and that is "Antiglass".

I talked a little about Antiglass in an earlier piece, about how social norms may need to change once Glass becomes popular.

In short, "Antiglass" would be a signal or trigger that disrupts the lifelogging capabilities of augmented reality devices. It's the Glass kill switch.

How this would actually get implemented might be tricky, but I've given some additional thought to this one.

I suspect that this might be possible through the use of RFID ARAT (Active Reader Active Tag) transmitters and tagging, provided that the ARAT tags were hard wired to the camera, and audio pickup electronics in Glass and were not accessible directly via the OS.

There would be many advantages to using this approach. First, it's a fairly "keep it simple, stupid" (KISS) solution, and RFID tagging is a mature and highly proven technology.

And at manufacturing scale, it should be fairly inexpensive for businesses and private individuals to install these Antiglass RFID transmitters in their buildings and homes.

Personal RFID ARAT transmitters could be incorporated into smartphones for those people who want to disrupt Glass and other lifelogging devices for a short distance (10'-100') and could be marketed as a value-added feature of new handsets.

Prosumer units intended for protecting small and medium-sized businesses with higher ranges (100'-200') may only cost a few hundred dollars to bring to market. Medium-range versions (200'-500') could be sold to organizations with larger areas to disrupt, whereas wide-cast, 2,000' versions could be used by federal, state, and local governments to "De-Glass" large public areas.

I feel strongly enough about the potential for Glass to be abused in the future that at bare minimum, an Antiglass initiative should be on the forefront of proposed telecommunications legislation in this country, requiring lifelogging augmented-reality device manufacturers such as Google to use this technology before the genie of personal lifelogging devices is let out of the bottle.

Do we need "Antiglass" technology as part of all lifelogging and augmented reality systems? Talk back and let me know.

Freeman has since released a lengthy account of how the exploit was accomplished, providing the bits and the procedure to repeat it, and has offered a number of warnings to the Glass community regarding just how ineffective the security on the device currently is.

I wanted to know from Freeman if, once rooted, it is possible to programmatically disable the "recording LED indicator" on the device, so that one could stealthily record without any indication to the subject that they are being captured on-camera.

As it turns out, there is no such indicator light on the "Explorer" version of Google Glass that has recently shipped to the first generation of users and developers who were lucky enough to get their hands on the headset. Duh.

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Everyone seems to have an opinion about Google's ground-breaking product.

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Still, there's room to make the device even stealthier. As Freeman explained to me during a phone interview, although there's no recording indicator per se, if you are being recorded, it's readily apparent from video activity being reflected off the wearer's eye prism that something is going on, particularly if you are in close proximity to the person.

But that can be changed once a Glass headset is rooted. Because Glass is an Android device, runs an ARM-based Linux kernel, and can run Android user space programs and custom libraries, any savvy developer can create code that modifies the default behavior in such a way that recording can occur with no display activity showing in the eye prism whatsoever.

And while the default video recording is 10 seconds, code could also be written that begins and stops recording for as long as needed with a custom gesture or head movement, or even with innocuous custom voice commands like: "Boy, I'm tired" to begin, and "Boy, I need coffee" to end it.

You could write and side load an application that polls the camera and takes a still photo every 30 seconds, should you, say, want to "case" and thoroughly photodocument a place of business prior to committing a crime. Or even engage in corporate espionage. Or simply capture ambient audio from unsuspecting people around you.

So while the 12.5GB of usable storage on this first version of Glass is fairly meager for storing HD video, it's plenty of space for storing still image JPG files and 64Kbps compressed audio. And that's not counting storage that could be accessed in the cloud in places like Dropbox, or even using a personal wi-fi connection to a smartphone with a large amount of internal memory.

The 5MP camera and the audio pickup of the current Glass Explorer Edition is fairly unspectacular. If an AOSP version of Glass's Android OS is ever published, there's certainly nothing to stop an OEM from producing a superior headset with optical zoom, a higher-resolution CMOS with superior light sensitivity, possibly even night vision, and significantly better microphones.

[Editor's note: Google has already released the specific source code bits that Glass uses that are a requirement of the company's commitment to using the GPLv2-licensed Linux kernel. However, this does not represent a full platform Open Source release of Glass's pre-loaded apps and complete run-time environment, which, like the rest of Android, would probably be licensed using Apache 2.0]

While Glass' current battery time is limited to about 5 hours of regular use and 20 minutes of run time while doing video recording, extended recording of video and audio could be accomplished through a thin USB connector wire (painted to match hair and skin color) hidden behind the neck, leading to a large external battery hidden in a coat or a vest such as, say, the $75 12000mah New Trent iCarrier that I carry with me on business trips to charge my smartphones.

Google intended the first version of Glass to look nerdy and clearly like a wearable computing device. But any number of techniques could be used to conceal the active components of the product through good industrial design and color blending, as well as through the use of prosthetics, makeup and hairstyles.

And if the existing Android OEM ecosystem is of any indication, it's a virtual certainty that we'll see Glass headsets that are licensed by third parties.

"Evil Glass" may include all the software necessary to turn a 14-year-old into a walking stealth surveillance device that would have been the envy of the Mossad or China's Ministry of State Security.

Once you have root on a Glass headset, any number of custom software packages could be installed without Google being able to prevent one from doing things that would make your hair stand on end, such as on-the-fly image and audio processing.

This is the kind of stuff that until now, only major intelligence agencies could do with very expensive surveillance equipment. Just wait until Israeli and Eastern European startups, which are staffed with former intelligence personnel who have a huge wealth of knowledge in using this kind of technology, get a hold of this thing.

There are tons of unlicensed Android phones and tablets being produced in China. Once the basic spec of Glass is available, there's nothing to stop an unscrupulous company in Asia from creating a Glass clone that's totally open without any hacking required.

And once Glass Explorer Edition's ROM makes it into the wild, all kinds of "Evil" re-spins can be produced to make the stock Glass into a Swiss Army surveillance kit for sociopaths, not just hackers.

Such an "Evil Glass" Android distribution may include all the software necessary to turn a 14-year-old into a walking stealth surveillance device that would have been the envy of the Mossad or China's Ministry of State Security only five or ten years ago.

So we know that once a headset is rooted, the wearer can do all sorts of stuff with the device that Google never intended for them to do with it, and there are Glass applications already in the mind's eye of malicious people ready to use them for nefarious purposes.

But what about stuff that isn't being perpetrated by the wearer? What if a Glass headset starts doing stuff without the wearer's knowledge?

Well, as it turns out, as Freeman so thoroughly documents and explains on his website, there's a lot of potential for that, too.

Because the current implementation of Glass has no "pin lock" like an Android phone or tablet has, the device is always active when it is turned on, and thus it would be relatively simple to inject a headset using a USB-connected device and the Android SDK with an exploit along with a malware playload that, say... snaps pictures and records audio of everything you do, and stores and forwards it over the internet to the hacker without the wearer's knowledge.

In short, if you buy a Glass device, don't let the thing out of your sight.

Will Glass be used to "do the evil" that Google has pledged it would never engage in? Talk back and let me know.

David Pogue of the New York Times was a little kinder. "It's basically an updated Galaxy S3" and "All told, nobody at the office will notice that you’ve bought the latest and greatest."

Ouch. Not exactly ringing endorsements from the two most influential computer and technology journalists in the mainstream.

Oh sure, us geeky technology writers can easily delve into the fact that the S4 is absolutely a spectactular technical achievement, we could micro-analyze every bit of minutiae about the product, and we'd be in remiss if we didn't acknowledge that it is clearly the top of the line (along with the HTC One) if you're going to consider a new Android smartphone.

But hey, I don't want to say I told you so, but, well... I told you so. I said that when the S4 was announced that it was just another Android phone and that when it came to the smartphone experience itself on Samsung devices, that the thrill was gone.

For all practical purposes the S4 was an exercise for Samsung to consolidate their supply chain and bring all of their manufacturing processes and components as well as much software as possible in-house. Important for Samsung, but for the end-user, not so much.

It would be simple to compartmentalize both Walt Mossberg and David Pogue as huge Apple fans that will easily dismiss anything that comes out of the Android camp.

One can certainly do that, and I think that based on their respective histories with being treated by Apple (and well, everyone else for that matter) with first nation status and their track record -- with few exceptions -- of stellar reviews of the company's products to date that such a viewpoint would be perfectly valid.

However, I feel that would be ignoring the fact that all of the manufacturers have reached a saturation point in terms of what you can really do with a smartphone outside of a continual hardware churn and revving the OS to current standards.

To give the guy credit, Pogue even thinks that Cupertino may be lagging in the innovation front as well. "Next time, it may be Apple’s turn to try harder" he concludes at the end of his S4 review, inferring that the next iPhone may not be a huge improvement over what exists today.

Rumors have circulated that the next device may be called the iPhone 5S, signalling the possibility of another evolutionary, but not revolutionary offering from Apple, not unlike the iPhone 4 to iPhone 4S transition in 2011.

The bottom line is that the buying public has certain basic expectations of what needs to be in smartphones, and that water mark is already pretty high, and may have been reached as much as two years ago.

So that we aren't treating the mainstream reviews as those that are anomalous, Mossberg and Pogue's S4 viewpoints and commentaries are consistent with reviews that have been published on numerous technology reporting sites and enthusiast blogs, ZDNet included. 

The smartphone device category is well-defined even within the sub-classifications such as phablets. You expect performance to be snappy regardless of how many cores are on the SoC that the phone uses, you expect the latest OS build.

You expect the rear-facing camera to take high-quality stills and video, you expect a front-facing HD camera for doing video chat, and you expect the device to have a high-resolution screen regardless of size that produces sharp, crisp video and has excellent color saturation and luminosity. And you expect the phone to be 4G LTE capable.

That's basic expectations, from any OEM, on any platform. 

The primary reason why people upgrade smartphones in the United States is they are on a 2-year cadence of re-upping contracts and wish to continue participating in a subsidized upgrade. Maybe their old device is acting flaky, maybe it's luster is lost on the end-user, or perhaps, as in many cases, the OS isn't updated to the latest version with the latest features.

But really, what was wrong with last year's Android smartphone? And for that matter, what was wrong with last year's iPhone? Or the one the year before that? 

And before you go there, yes, Windows Phone 8 is an interesting, different way of expressing the smartphone concept. I think Windows Phone is a great platform. I love my Nokia 920. But honestly, I know plenty of people that use Windows Phone 7 devices of various OEM and carrier origin and are perfectly happy running Windows Phone 7.5 on them.

If you're in contract, why upgrade to something newer unless you absolutely need an app that only runs on Windows Phone 8?

I have a BlackBerry 10 device for testing purposes as well, and there are some neat things that it does in order to differentiate, but groundbreaking? Nah. The real-time OS is cool, I'll give you that, although I question the actual consumer value. The hardware is at best, cutting edge as of two years ago.

One could argue, however, that Android 4.2 isn't a huge improvement over Android 4.1 or Android 4.0. Sure, there were performance tweaks, and a lot of architectual improvements in the underpinnings that developers would care about. But end-users? Not so much.

Maybe ZDNet's vocal maxi-zoom-dweebie peanut gallery cares about such distinctions, but your average consumer? They probably can't tell the diffference between any of these versions at a fundamental level.

One could also argue that iOS 6 isn't a huge improvement over iOS 5 either, but at least Apple has a pretty good track record even keeping 3 year old devices up to date, for the most part.

The smartphone industry needs to come to the conclusion that MOTSS (More of the Same Stuff) no longer cuts it. Neither does the never-ending pursuit of thinner and lighter and throwing more testosterone at the SoCs and onboard memory and GPUs either. We want innovation. We expect innovation.

Otherwise, why not turn in the smartphone in for an upgrade when the carrier eventually offers it for free, or when it finally dies out of contract and the carrier insurance plan refuses to replace it with a refurb? Why pay more than the bare minimum, if virtually every smartphone on the market meets basic expectations? 

Has smartphone innovation hit an evolutionary wall? Talk Back and Let Me Know.

In decades past, they had called it spring. But at 95+ degrees outside of Eva Konsumer's tiny studio apartment in downtown Miami, it sure felt like summer. In fact, Eva could not recall during her 25-year-old life when it wasn't blazing hot in April in Miami.

Unless there was a compelling reason to do so, these days, it was best to stay indoors where the concrete block construction and the industrial air conditioning systems could regulate temperature to a much more hospitable level. And down in South Florida, with the heavy sun, the UV alone from the hole in the Earth's ozone layer could cook you. Skin cancer city.

Like many of the new, ultra-dense apartment buildings in Miami, Eva's small studio had no windows, but she could see everything going on outside if she wanted,in completely polarized, sun-filtered ultradef crispness.

Of course, for a measly $8,000 a month, especially as a grad student studying environmental law at the University of Miami, you couldn't expect an apartment that was right on the beach. But it's not like anyone really cared about having an ocean view anymore because you could have an outside view of anything you wanted.

Hong Kong Harbor or New York City's Times Square at night. Tokyo's Roppongi district. Cairo. The International Moonbase at Tycho. Or the view outside the colony dome at Curiosity Station on Mars.

Like many young residents of Miami, Eva chose to live in a sparsely furnished flat. Its four walls and all of its cabinets were painted absolute "augwhite", with no hangings of any sort to adorn them. Lighting was an array of cool white dimmable OLEDs, integrated into the ceiling and corners.

She had her roll out bed/couch, her coffee table, her comfy chairs and stools for the breakfast bar in the kitchenette. And that was more than enough for any single girl going to school. More than enough for anyone, really.

She preferred to do most of her work on the comfy chair, unless it was one of those few times a month she had to drag herself to campus and actually meet her professors and fellow students for planned teaming events.

The University of Miami was a bit traditional when it came to their 80/20 telecommuting rules. Her best friend telepresences from Miami to MIT, and they don't have such policies.

Uncle Josef and Aunt Mindy felt all of this was a bit odd when they came to visit from New Jersey last month. They didn't understand the all-white, decor-free apartment. They didn't understand why she only went out to see her friends.

They even offered to give her some of Eva's grandmother's paintings to "lighten the place up", but what would she do with them? She could just simply have the Augplant display them anytime she felt like it since they were imaged in 32K so long ago.

She loved Uncle Josef and Aunt Mindy, even with their old-fashioned notions of how to live. They absolutely resisted getting Augplants when they became commercially avaliable about 10 years ago, instead choosing to stick with those antiquated modular tablet and smartphone systems, which few folks outside of senior citizens or children under the age of 13 use anymore.

And those huge 100-inch IGZO screens that hung on their walls in their home in New Jersey. The old cloud ThinTerms with flat panel monitors on... Desks. My God, what a waste of energy. How ungreen. How unproductive.

Of course, even if they wanted an Augplant or an AR monacle (what was that once called, Google Glass? The kind she saw in old vids?), they both would need to get corrective eye surgery as well to fix their macular degeneration, and sharpen or even replace their lenses.

Most old folks didn't do that. Not unless you were like, I dunno, someone like Mark Zuckerberg. Who had his done a while ago.

Eva's parents chose to elminate eyesight problems, among a number of other issues, from her genome before she was born. On her 13th birthday, her mom brought her to the local Gammazoft Augmentation Implantology clinic.

Eva remembered being scared of the operation, but her mom assured her everything would be ok, and that she needed this in order "to have an advantage". They gave her a general anesthetic and she went to sleep.

It was a long time ago, but she remembered waking up an hour or so later in a recovery bed. The nurse was sitting down on a chair looking over her. She had an itchy pain on the back of her head, and there was some hair missing when she felt back there. 

Why remember though? She could see it as if it had just happened moments ago.

"Personal Lifelog, playback, primary wall display. Time index zero plus five seconds."

"Playback: September 15, 2022. Logstart."

The large "window" in her apartment that was showing a live 34th-floor view of downtown Miami faded into a video playback of the moment she first started lifelogging. The day she got her augplant. 

The video began with the nice Cuban nurse. She was pudgier than she remembered. Butch, even. What was her name?

"Don't worry sweetie, it will grow back. The cut will heal quickly; we used a cauterizing laser and a skin growth accelerant to seal it. Now, I want you to quietly say the word 'display'." 

"Display."

"Gammazoft Augplant OS 9.3.2. Lifelogging enabled," is what Eva heard. Inside her head.

Then the world came to life. Everything had a label. From here on, there were answers to every question. 

She looked up at the nurse. Above her head were all sorts of statistical details. Elizabeth Hernandez, RN, age 36, graduate of the NOVA University of South Florida Nursing School with a specialization in Augmented Reality Implantology. 500 level 1 SocMed connections, Lifebook account @augnurselizzyh. Wife Janet Hernandez, age 34, Miami-Dade County director of product marketing at Gammazoft.

The list scrolled on and on. A dizzying array of information, just from one person.

There was also an icon for "Lifelog Request" on her chest. Eva pointed to thin air and touched the icon. The nurse smiled.

"Oh no, hija, there's a lot of patient confidental material in that. I can't even show Janet those things. But if you'd like, I can show you how we did your procedure. My life is boring anyway. There's so many good ones you can follow. Just ask her. Do you like her default name? Auggy?"

"Yes, I think."

"Well, you can change it anytime you like. She can tell you and show you all sorts of things, too. Do you see that wall over there?"

"Umm, yeah, it's white."

"Well, it doesn't have to stay that way. Reach out and touch it."

An interface appeared in thin air. It was kind of like the one she had on her tablet, but it had many more options than just email, social networking, and apps. And it was pre-configured with her cloud profile. She could see her friends in there. 

"Where's mom?" Eva said.

"She's in the waiting room shopping. Or logwatching. Why don't you see? Say, logwatch livestream Susan Konsumer, alias mom."

Eva said the words. It was like magic.

"Logshare enabled, Konsumer, Susan G, Newalias Mom, livestream," is what she heard. Then she saw ... She was her mom.

She was now sitting on the couch with a large display floating in front of her. It was the Gammazoft product catalog, a list of groceries. She could see her mother's hands flipping through the meat section. And then she started talking in her head.

"I'm shopping, honey. But see, you can get to me anytime you want. Your dad wants steak this weekend, so we'll have to go pick up the food at the depot tonight instead of Prime delivery."

"Wait, you said anytime? What about when you and dad are ... Ew! Gross!"

Susan laughed. Eva could almost sense her turning red. If she looked at the vital signs widget, she would have probably noticed a momentary jump in galvanic skin response and blood pressure.

"I have logshare set to 'private' for that, silly. Only your dad can see it."

"Oh. But where does it all go?"

"The family Gammazoft logstore account. We have 300 petabytes per year, and we currently pay for 10 year extended vaulting."

"So do I share with you, then?"

"I've already asked the nurse for your log to be shared with me and dad. If you want to share with your older brother and sister, that's up to you. But I have yours set for parental control with us until you are 18. What you do after you're an adult is your own business."

"So what about other people's logs?"

"If they've set them to public, or if they grant you access, you can review any kind you want. But your father and I are going to get an alert if the logcontent is explicit. You should probably only browse stuff that is age appropriate for you anyway. Like vids and your schoolwork.

And we're going to review your privacy settings until you understand how it works. Remember what happened with your sister's best friend? Everyone in her extended circles got to see what happened on that terrible date of hers. That guy was a complete creep. Tens of thousands of people saw the entire thing go down on Lifebook. Very embarrassing for her."

"Yeah, everyone in school was talking about that. So I can get Jody Bieber's lifelog?"

"Only chapter excerpts. He heavily edits it, and he'll make you pay for the extended material. And I'm going to get a bill for things like that, so I'm going to have to authorize your purchases. There's plenty of free lifelogs though, because they get monetized through Gammazoft's advertising network."

"Can I turn off the monetization? I see a lot of ads in front of you. What's this Erectile Enhancement-on-Demand implant it says that dad should get? And it says his testosterone levels are too low. What is that, anyway?"

Susan sighed. Kids.

"There's specific services we've subscribed to in order to reduce monetization exposure, but eventually, you'll tune out a lot of the ads. It keeps costs down to have them. When I'm driving, the augplant handles information presentation to reduce distraction. When you get your learner's permit, you'll have this as well."

"So, the logs... You have access to mine."

"Yes, for your protection. I want to make sure you're not getting into trouble."

"What about when I'm in the bathroom?"

"I'll know when you're in there and I won't look, obviously. Who wants to see that?"

"Besides you and dad ... and whoever else I give it to ... who else can see my logs?"

"Law enforcement, and the government if they feel it is warranted. The Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) expansion act of 2016 extended its access to lifelogs. You'll learn those things when you get moved to a class with other augplanted children soon...

"And of course, Gammazoft systems perform analytics on your logs and other metadata to give you trend analysis, which, of course, is for your benefit. Your apps and services will have the ability to interact with those reports. It's a great tool to go over what you might not remember, or not even notice on a day-to-day basis. Auggy will tell you many things that you should know."

"This is a lot of stuff, mom."

"I know sweetie. But you'll be happier. You don't want to be like the notaugs. Look how difficult life is for them." 

"Can we go home now, mom? I'm tired."

"You can always go home, now that you're an aug, sweetie."

"Personal lifelog, halt playback."

These folks are among those who are willing to pay the early adoption fee of $1,500 and become one of the select few to wear, test, and develop software for the product.

There's a not-so-flattering descriptor that has already been applied to this group of digital cognoscenti who have been seen recently at industry conferences and public venues wearing the device: Glassholes.

It could certainly be argued that whenever a new consumer technology enters society, those who are quick to adopt it are typically ridiculed by the have-nots. Eventually, many of these technologies become commonplace and are more accepted by the mainstream, particularly when they become more affordable.

This has pretty much always been the case, starting with the radio pager, then the cellular phone, text capable handsets, and then, of course, Bluetooth headsets, the smartphone and the tablet.

People who first used these things were once seen very much as elitist and not part of the mainstream, and they were considered disruptive.

To some extent, even with their popularity, they are still considered disruptive when used in various social contexts.

However, Glass is very different from all of these technologies. While it is, at the end of the day, a mobile technology platform just like a smartphone or a tablet, it differs in that it is an "always-on" technology that has one particular feature that the others do not — and that's the issue of lifelogging.

Lifelogging is fundamentally the same as having a smartphone or any small digital camera that can record and store many hours of video.

Virtually every smartphone on the market today has a built-in high-definition camera with enough onboard storage to record an entire day's worth of events, if someone wanted to use them that way and it had enough reserve battery power to do it.

But at least with these technologies, you know when they are being used. It's obvious when someone is using a smartphone or a tablet to take photographs or record video.

I'm not so sure I can live in a culture where everyone is lifelogging virtually all of the time.

If you don't know what I'm talking about, I suggest you listen to Louis CK's diatribe on the subject.

With Glass, because the device is being worn and there's no indication of when it is being used, one has to assume that the wearer is recording everyone all of the time.

I can't speak for anyone else, but I have serious issues with the notion that I could be recorded by everyone at any time. 

Look, I am aware that law enforcement and government agencies have us under surveillance, and it's not uncommon for people to be photographed and videoed hundreds of times per day, particularly if you live in a major city.

That I can accept, and it's a price that we have to pay for living in a modern society where there are people out to do us harm, and our government and law enforcement agencies need to protect us.

That's become extremely evident in recent days, as law enforcement officials in Boston sort out hundreds of hours of video, not just from stationary surveillance cameras, but from videos shot by onlookers at the marathon itself.

Sometimes, video recording at a mass scale has social benefits besides law enforcement.

Dashboard-mounted car cameras used to record footage of highway criminal activity, as well as police and government corruption in Russia, were used extensively by private citizens to video document a once-in-a-century meteor strike in Siberia in February of 2013.

Video recording can be a powerful tool, but it's also a major privacy intrusion. 

I'm not so sure I can live in a culture where everyone is lifelogging virtually all of the time. I have an idea of what one might look like, though.

In Robert J Sawyer's Hugo Award-winning science fiction novel Hominids, which is part of his Neanderthal Parallax trilogy, he portrays a humanoid society on an alternate version of earth in which virtually no crime or any form of violence occurs because every person has an implant in their body that causes all of their life events to be recorded and uploaded to a centralized storage repository.

The novel was published in 2002, but today, we'd call that centralized storage repository the Cloud. 

There's a plot element in the novel that details what happens in those rare instances in which a murder takes place and a subject goes to trial. Suffice to say that, unlike our society, where private audio and video recordings have to be submitted as evidence and might not be admissable in court, this is not the case in the world in which Sawyer has envisioned.

In the world of Hominids, a person's life is judged upon the content of their lifelogging.

My concern is not so much that people will be caught commiting crimes. For those purposes, I believe privately recorded video and audio most definitely should be considered as evidence in a court of law.

It's the things that are not so much criminal, but which are said and done in close company that make me nervous about lifelogging tech.

There are things you only say and do with close friends in confindence, others which may be revealed in private business meetings, et cetera. We all know and have seen what happens when supposedly "private" or unauthorized recordings are made behind closed doors and then leaked to the general public, either intentionally or accidentally.

It can cost someone their career. It can destroy one's personal reputation. It will most certainly cause one strife with one's friends and family. And as we have most recently seen, it can also cost you a Presidential Election.

If these kinds of devices do become commonplace — and I have no doubt that they will — then there will have to be social rules and norms for their use.

Because they are a wearable tech, and will almost certainly be integrated into regular perscription eyeglass frames, there will have to be some kind of indication (such as a LED "on air" light, or something to that effect) that they are currently recording, and there needs to be "Antiglass" technology to prevent its use by people who do not wish to be part of someone else's lifelogging activities.

I see "Antiglass" as a personal shield of sorts, that emits a radio signal that disrupts the use of Glass within a certain distance unless the wearer is legitimately using the device for law enforcement purposes. "Antiglass" could be integrated into smartphones, smart watches, or even other lifelogging devices as well.

Wide-cast antiglass fields could be set up in establishments, such as private social clubs and places of business, which prohibit the use of lifelogging functions, just as cell phone signal jamming technology is already used (albeit illegally) in some places today.

Obviously, for this type of anti-lifelogging tech to work, there has to be an agreed upon API or programmatic trigger signals that cannot easily be defeated by hackers.

But if it cannot be made to work, or if the effectiveness of the tech cannot be guaranteed, then I forsee situations where people will be forced to remove and surrender their devices in order to prevent the possibility of recording, as well as a change in our culture to be much more careful about what one says, even in very intimate situations.

And that is an Orwellian chilling effect that I think could be very harmful to the development of our society as a whole.

This chilling effect was evident in decades past in East Germany while the country was in fear of the ever-watching eyes and ears of the Stasi, which had perhaps the largest informant and surveillance network of any nation per capita in the Eastern Bloc during the Cold War, the USSR included. 

For a current take on Orwellian dystopia, look no further than modern-day North Korea, where all of that country's citizens are frightened of being observed by the state, regardless of whether or not the hermit kingdom actually has the resources to do it or not.

Except that it's not the State you would need to be fearful of with technologies like Glass.

With lifelogging, Big Brother could be a recording made by your own best friend when you both went out for drinks, and who then decides to share an off-color joke you made that evening around the office.

Or one from your spouse who decides to upload candid highlights from a family event to Facebook or YouTube without consulting you first.

Will Glasshole culture create a chilling effect on society? Talk back and let me know.

According to a report recently released by Gartner, sales of PCs in the first quarter of 2013, regardless of manufacturer and operating system platform, are the worst since an all-time low in the second quarter of 2009.

IDC presented similar results in another study that indicates sales are down 14 percent from the fourth quarter of 2012.

This is not just bad news, it's awful news for no matter who you are, whether you produce PC software and operating systems, or PCs and PC components themselves.

It also doesn't make a difference whether you're headquartered in Redmond, Santa Clara, Palo Alto, Cupertino, Austin, or Morrisville, North Carolina for that matter. Or Hong Kong.

I cannot say that I am particularly surprised about this, because this is a topic that I have been writing about for a while. 

A year ago, I participated in a Great Debate with ZDNet's Zack Whittaker on whether or not PC OEMs would survive in an environment dominated by smartphones and tablets.

I took the "No" side of the argument, and summarized my thoughts in an article aptly named "Post-PC era means mass extinction for personal computer OEMs".

I won that debate, by the way. For the second time in a row.

So the decline has been happening for at least two years, if not a bit more. We've seen the warning signs of a climate change, now we're seeing clear signs of the beginning of an extinction event.

Therefore, we can't blame this rightly or wrongly on the wholesale rejection of a single OS release by end users due to substantial UX changes as much as some people would like one to believe, because the downward trend has been with us for quite some time.  

The real reason why the PC era is coming to an end is the notion of "Good Enough" computing. 

Tablets and low-power convertibles and inexpensive ultrabooks provide an experience that yields sufficient functionality that is not as rich as the traditional PC experience, whether it is overall processing power or app complexity, but they are less expensive, more battery efficient and much easier to lug around.

I learned this lesson for myself personally when I went to a trade conference this week in Las Vegas and only brought a Microsoft Surface RT and two of my smartphones with me, an iPhone 5 and a Nokia 920. I was away from my home office with my full-blown PC laptop running Windows 8, and yet I was still able to get all of my work done.

I probably could have left my iPhone home entirely, but it was the one device that I own with an unlimited data plan for watching Netflix movies in my hotel room, and I chain-charged the phones so that one was always on duty. 

All of my important remote/mobile work was accomplished with a $500 tablet with a magnetic detachable keyboard and a smartphone.

Now, price and weight is only part of the equation. Yes, people really like the fact that these things are incredibly light, and they can get eight to ten hours of battery life, and you can still do a lot of things with them that PCs can do.

But to make these Post-PC devices do their magic, and to make the transition without being disruptive to the traditional business workflows and workloads that we currently enjoy, you need something significant to offload the functionality of complex applications that run on PCs today.

That significant thing is the Cloud, and I think we can also say with a high degree of confidence that this is going to be the workhorse of the personal computing experience going forward. Today, the Cloud is highly misunderstood and it is also in many cases vilified and feared.

But it is also what is going to facilitate a seamless transition to an industry dominated by Post-PC devices and allow our PC software ecosystem to evolve into a healthy end-state.

Without sophisticated Cloud-based applications, whether they are exposed by web services and accessed by simple applications running on iOS, Android or the Windows RT API, or as fully-hosted desktop apps running virtually in the datacenter via subscription or by using existing enterprise licensing models, Post-PC systems as we understand them in their roles as used in business and the enterprise will not work. 

So while Post-PC devices are cannibalizing their forebears for their lower price points, their superior battery life and lighter load, they are entirely dependent on the fundamental systems architecture, applications and business logic that were pioneered before them on PCs and continue to be essential today.

And as with any extinction event, the process does not happen overnight and there are those species that will continue to dominate regardless of the overall health of the ecosystem. The use of PCs is indeed declining, but certain form factors are succeeding even within that declining enviornment.

I recently ordered a Lenovo X1 Carbon Touch as my new work PC. You would think that with all this doom and gloom surrounding PC sales, I could get it delivered to my home office by FedEx or UPS in a week. Not so.

Lenovo might as well re-name the X1 Carbon Touch the X1 Unobtanium, because that's practically what it is. This high-end, touchscreen Windows 8 Ultrabook has over a one month lead time from order until delivery. I'll be lucky to receive mine sometime in June.

And as I understand, this is par for the course for other manufacturers with similar lightweight, convertible touchscreen devices. I've also been told by reliable sources that during the abysmal holiday season of 2012, big box stores didn't order enough of these systems and they sold out, whereas the old-school, heavier laptops and desktop systems didn't move and resulted in a surplus of these machines in the channel.

Why are these types of PCs thriving when others are not? Because they are adapting to their environment. The PC is changing its form factor to become more like its Post-PC counterparts. The dinosaurs are becoming birds. 

Some of this has to do with whether or not the OEM is especially agile and can mimic the attributes of their Post-PC manufacturing peers. Lenovo is a highly-focused Chinese company and understands how to leverage the Asian supply chain to its best advantage.

To quote my ZDNet colleague Ed Bott, "To a large extent, the secret of their success in the US is going up against the totally hapless HP and distracted Dell. So they maintain absolute sales in a shrinking market and actually gain share."

And like its Post-PC rival Samsung, Lenovo is also reportedly making investments in semiconductor technology so it can become more self-sufficient.

It should also be no surprise that Samsung is also doing well and actually growing its own PC business, which like Lenovo, are more of the extremely lightweight, Ultrabook style of machines that are targeted almost exclusively to business and the enterprise.

These birds for the most part aren't playing in the same consumer muck that their Cretaceous Tyrannosaurian and Certotopsian colleagues are. Which is why they are actually thriving in a chilling environment. 

The Mesozoic era of the PC had a good run. Are we now about to cede that to the Post-PC Cenozoic, dominated by birds that fly in the Clouds? Talk Back and Let Me Know.