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While this column tends to focus on one aspect or another of technology each week, a lot of neat little snippets pass by.
andrewbyline

While this column tends to focus on one aspect or another of technology each week, a lot of neat little snippets pass by. This is catch-up week…

Apple sells 100 million iPods — Apple passed the 100 million iPods sold mark in the past five years, although no word on how many are still in operation. By way of comparison, it took Sony 14 years to sell an equal number of Walkman devices. Apple now owns about 74 per cent of the worldwide digital music market, including half the market in tech savvy Japan. As the big dog, Apple now has the power to work with record labels to grow its catalog, and with EMI recently announced plans to sell music stripped of all Digital Rights Management encoding, allowing users to copy their music as many times as they want. Other labels, at Apple CEO Steve Jobs’s urging, are considering the same.

Apple iPhone? Not yet — Speaking of Apple, it may be a long time before the touch-screen iPhone is available in the Great White North. Some projections say the fourth quarter of 2007, while others believe it could be as late as the second quarter of 2008. Meanwhile, it should be available in the U.S. as soon as June. What gives? Rogers is signed as Canada’s supplier, and everything else seems to be in place. Is it a manufacturing issue? If so Apple isn’t saying anything.

Last word on Apple — Apple’s long awaited Leopard upgrade to the OSX line of operating systems has been delayed from late spring to the fall, with Apple citing the need to pull programmers from the Leopard department to work on the iPhone. Some critics were not as kind, suggesting that the delay is attributable to glitches, while Apple fans suggested it may have something to do with the addition of some new, top-secret features.

Vista taking the long view — While Apple Leopard will be delayed four months, Microsoft’s Vista operating system was delayed four years as the company decided to revamp the software rather than just develop an upgrade. By all accounts it was worth it, although there have been some complaints about price. Recently Microsoft announced that 20 million versions of Vista have been sold, but were criticized widely when it was discovered that they were counting licenses sold to computer companies for computers that have not yet been sold to consumers, and the free Vista upgrades offered to some recent XP purchasers.

Facebook Upgrade — If you’re not one of the 19 million people out there who has created a Facebook profile and friends network, get on it. It’s like an online yearbook for every school you’ve ever been to, every place you’ve ever worked, and even the places you have lived. Originally created as a social networking tool (e.g. dating tool) for university students, the public version has grown massively in popularity. This week the company announced plans to extend the capability with a chat function, enhanced ability to share and collaborate through the site, as well as new navigation tools.

$100 laptops reach their destination

The first test versions of the $100 laptop went to school in Nigeria recently, the beginning of a $15 million project that will equip 150,000 students with the technology in the very first phase. The goal is to make the laptops available to all children in the Third World.

From a technology point of view, the laptops may seem underpowered — the motherboards and processors are last, last generation, and they use built-in flash memory and USB ports instead of hard drives to store information. The displays are 800 by 480 resolution, kids use a hand-crank to charge the battery, and the operating system and productivity software are based on free Linux applications. The goal of the project, led by Taiwan-based Negrponte and computer engineer Khaled Hassounah, is to bridge the growing digital divide, provide a basis of technology innovation for Third World countries, and to improve the way children learn.

While $100 may seem expensive in countries where people earn $1 or less a day, most of the money will come from aid programs and donations, as well as profits from sales in more affluent developing countries like Brazil. The laptops also offer some cost-saving potential, effectively replacing textbooks in schools.

Internet do-over — The Internet isn’t perfect. As a technology it’s part Frankenstein, with each generation building on the previous generations’ torso. A group of researchers believe that the Internet should therefore be scrapped, rebuilding it from square one to address security issues and mobility, while streamlining the programming. Things like Java and Flash would be built-in, rather than added on as plug-ins.

The way things currently work is that we have external software on our computers that runs the programs embedded in Internet pages, using the browser to combine all kinds of disparate elements. A reworked Internet would include a standard for video, voice, active content, embedded programs, e-mailing and more, all of it embedded in the architecture of a new Internet. The result would be streamlined transmissions, less bulky applications, and the ability to scale without just piling on more programming. It would require changes to software, changes to hardware, but the final result would an Internet that is faster, more secure, and standardized so a page would look the same in every browser.

With tens of billions of dollars already invested in infrastructure, this isn’t going to happen overnight.