Common Paradox Tech Blog

This cute fifth grader is named Mackenzie. She types at a rapid 119 words per minute and makes the rest of us look pathetic.

I’d be happy to just plain stop making typos and maybe type a little bit faster, but Mackenzie won’t rest until she reaches a 200 WPM pace.

Geez, these overachieving kids nowadays. [Mashable via Boing Boing]

This cute fifth grader is named Mackenzie. She types at a rapid 119 words per minute and makes the rest of us look pathetic.

I’d be happy to just plain stop making typos and maybe type a little bit faster, but Mackenzie won’t rest until she reaches a 200 WPM pace.

Geez, these overachieving kids nowadays. [Mashable via Boing Boing]

Since last week’s “Take Back Takeoff” post, I’ve had the pleasure of talking to executives & engineers from most of North America’s major airlines. First: the bad news.

The biggest airlines aren’t budging—yet. Here’s something Tim Smith of American Airlines sent me. It typifies the response from the big carriers:

The fact is (and as a technology expert you no doubt already know this) technology creates hundreds of new products each year at a pace that is so fast that we simply cannot keep up with it. We as a company do not have the time, nor the money to test every device that comes down the pike. Plus, even if we did that and one type of device were to be approved by testing, it adds a significant burden on our inflight staff to try and police whether something is actually an approved device or not. Many electronic devices and products often look alike – meaning it either takes an expert in such devices or someone who has the time to go from seat to seat with a list of devices trying to check the model numbers on each device prior to take-off or landing. That is not at all practical. There are many other things going on during that period of flight – several of them important, mandated safety-related steps.

Three obstacles are in the way:

• EMI, or electromagnetic interference, which most of the airlines are willing to admit is the least of their concerns.

• Regulation and the cost of compliance. Most of the airlines think that testing would be too expensive.

• Customer safety. More than anything, it seems most airlines are concerned with passengers being aware during safety briefings or in the case of an accident.

If things go to plan, I’ll be joining others in showing how EMI from small gadgets is a non-issue sometime in the next week or so. But even the airlines know that dozens of iPods and Kindles and other non-transmitting devices are functioning without issue in planes every day.

As far as regulation from the FAA is concerned, FAA 14 CFR 91.21B pretty much punts this to the airlines: “It should be noted that the responsibility for
permitting passenger use of a particular PED technology lies solely with the operator.”

And customer safety, well…it’s an issue. An issue for which I have a lot of sympathy with the airlines. You don’t want laptops flying around if there’s turbulence—but you don’t want that during any part of the flight, yet laptops are kosher at altitude. You want people to be able to listen to music or watch TV, but not miss announcements. As both a customer satisfaction and a customer safety issue, it gets murky very quickly.

But there is good news!

I’m happy to report that more than one airline responded to my queries with more than rote (if friendly) dismissal. And while nothing is for certain until it actually happens, it’s looking like there’s a chance the more progressive airlines are ready to take a look at the policy and question if it befits a modern airline with modern passengers.

More very soon. (With more terrible headlines.)

Denise Dubie over at NetworkWorld has posted an interesting piece on how enterprise IT leaders looking ahead to 2010 may find themselves coming up short on staff and high-tech skills needed to grow their business during an economic recovery.

Dubie points to research from various sources who all have found that high-tech suits are fearful about how to handle business in the coming year if left with a lean staff. Robert Half Technology, for example, found that 43 percent 1,400 CIOs polled recognize that their IT departments are either somewhat or very understaffed in relation to current workloads.

"Many companies have cut technology staff levels too deeply, making it challenging for IT departments to keep pace with demands," said Dave Willmer, executive director of Robert Half Technology, in a statement. "Although businesses may be able to operate with stretched teams in the short term, being perpetually understaffed isn’t sustainable and can detract from the overall productivity and morale of the organization."

Let’s also not forget that there remains a question of whether IT workers will remain loyal once the recession ends. In that same report, Willmer noted that "staffing cuts and the reduction or elimination of benefits have left many employees feeling overworked and undervalued."

The future looks bright for the wireless LAN industry, which is on pace to reach record revenue by the end of the third quarter, says market research firm Dell’Oro Group.

The WLAN market wasn’t hit as hard as other businesses in the recession, which took a particular toll in September, but was still affected enough to see lower sales in the first and second quarter of 2009. Before the economic downturn, revenue climbed to record levels in the fourth quarter of last year, and it appears the WLAN industry is finally picking up where it left off. Worldwide revenue for WLAN equipment recovered to $1.1 billion in the third quarter of this year, up about 12 percent from the second quarter, and came close to matching the $1.14 billion of the previous year’s third quarter.

Analysts attributed the upswing to stimulus money granted by the U.S. goverment, for which vendors claimed have driven deals. Market researchers also point to the growth of IEEE 802.11n and the boost it has gotten from being standardized.

If there’s something that’s gone relatively unnoticed, it’s the pace at which Palm has been releasing new apps. Most every day between one or two dozen apps land in the App Catalog, sometimes more. It’s clear that there are a lot of developers out there, especially given the size of the webOS user base. In this day and age it takes apps to make a smartphone platform happen, and right now this platform is happening. Surprise of surprises, it’s a long list of new and updated apps, so you can find it all after the break.

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As in, why’d you wait so long, Elmo? And hey, Cookie Monster, why is this a subscription model? Oh, and Count, why are you only releasing 100 out of the 5,000 books in your catalog?

Sesame Workshop, the drab corporate body behind the warm, suneshiney smile that is Sesame Street, has always been a little late to the digital party. This time they’re nipping at the heels of Disney, which opened up its own Digital Books site in September. Well, better late than never.

Sesame Street books available digitally? Terrific. What’s not so hot is how they’re handling it, along with their publishing partner Impelsys. They’ll start tomorrow by offering five free e-books at sesamestreet.org/ebooks, but those titles can only be read on your monitor, not downloaded. They’ll introduce more titles sometime next spring, but will still leave about 98% of their back catalog to be rolled out at an indeterminate pace for an indeterminate subscription price (Disney charges around $80 a year). So let’s see: a long wait for a few books that I can’t download? Might have to pass on this one.

That’s not even to mention the biggest inherent problem, which is that most e-readers currently available on the market aren’t built for kids, and can’t handle color. At least not yet they can’t. And until they can, e-books for toddlers make about as much sense as Snuffleuphagus’s taxonomy report. [Impelsys via WSJ]

Wow. Bing is completely and utterly down right now and has been for several minutes. The tweets about it are flying in at a massive pace — as are the tips to us. [Update below, it's back after about 30 mins of downtime.]

It’s one thing when startups, like Twitter, go down, which happens all the time. It’s another when a major search portal does it. If this is part of the new strategy to beat Google, Microsoft didn’t mention it in the Fall Release event the other day.

In the past few weeks, we’ve seen lots of Twitter applications push out upgrades in an effort to keep pace with Twitter’s newest capabilities, like native retweets, geolocation, and Twitter Lists.

Noticeably absent from the onslaught has been TweetDeck, which is still the most popular Twitter client on the desktop. Today, TweetDeck has answered big time, introducing support for all of these features and more.

TweetDeck has the full details on their blog, but here’s the overview:

TweetDeck’s Groups are going to turn into Twitter Lists. You can export your current Groups into Lists.

TweetDeck supports both the new and old retweet style. From their post: “Each time you retweet you can choose to “Retweet now” using the new-style, or “Edit then Retweet” which will give you an old-style retweet.”

TweetDeck’s LinkedIn integration is live.

TweetDeck’s integrated geolocation. From their post: “geo-coded tweets are identified by a red pin at the bottom of the tweet. Clicking on this pin will reveal an inline map showing the location that the tweet was sent from.”

TweetDeck demos the new features in the video below:

We’ll have more on the TweetDeck upgrades in a bit, but for now, download the latest and let us know what you think in the comments.

Reviews: TweetDeck, Twitter

Tags: tweetdeck, twitter

The Open Web Awards: Social Media Edition, our annual contest where you pick the best of the social web, is in its final stages. Time for a quick update!

Mashable readers have cast 400,000+ votes for the top individuals, companies, websites and applications – that’s in addition to the 450,000+ nominations you made in the first round. At the current pace, it looks like more than 1 million total nominations and votes will have been cast by the end of the competition. In the final weeks, we’ll highlight your picks and explore the wider web trends of 2009.

If you haven’t voted yet – and you can vote once per category per day – now’s the time to do so. Voting closes December 15th.

Vote in the Finals of the Open Web Awards 2009>>

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Reviews: Facebook, Gmail, Mashable, MySpace, Twitter

Tags: openwebawards