From the RFID tags now embedded in everything from soda cans to the family pet, to smart buildings that subtly adapt to the changing flow of visitors, to gestural interfaces like the ones seen in Minority Report, computing no longer looks much like it used to. Increasingly invisible but present everywhere in our lives, it has moved off the desktop and out into everyday life–affecting almost every one of us, whether we're entirely aware of it or not.

Author Adam Greenfield calls this ubiquitous computing "everyware." In a uniquely engaging approach to this complex topic, Greenfield explains how such "information processing dissolving in behavior" is reshaping our lives; brief, aphoristic chapters explore the technologies, practices, and innovations that make everyware so powerful and seem so inevitable.

If you've ever sensed both the promise of the next computing, and the challenges it represents for all of us, this is the book for you. "Everyware" aims to gives its reader the tools to understand the next computing, and make the kind of wise decisions that will shape its emergence in ways that support the best that is in us.

Everyware : The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing, by Adam Greenfield

The whole idea of tracking your family in this manner is weird and alarming on some levels. So is the notion that we're all so deathly afraid for our kids that there's even a market for this.

But now that the technology is out there, it's not going away anytime soon.

Watch Out, Kids: With GPS Phones, Big Mother Is Watching

Yuki Noguchi: Hello, all. Thanks for joining us today. With me is Evan Kohlmann, an expert in counterterrorism as well as technology. The Internet has become a vital networking and communications tool for the world over, including for terrorist networks. Security and privacy are also major concerns for all users of the Internet. Kohlmann knows a great deal more than I about operations of terrorist networks online, and I am grateful that he is here to field some of your questions.

Tracking Terrorists Online

Unfortunately this seems to be Windows-only at the present time.

GMail Drive creates a virtual filesystem on top of your Google GMail account and enables you to save and retrieve files stored on your GMail account directly from inside Windows Explorer. GMail Drive literally adds a new drive to your computer under the My Computer folder, where you can create new folders, copy and drag'n'drop files to.

FileForum | GMail Drive

Rackable Systems built some of Google's first servers and stands out as a rare example of a recent hardware IPO. The company now provides X86 servers, storage platforms, and services to some of the best known companies. Barton shares an amazing accounting of the hardware, space and energy costs involved in running and cooling the millions of servers under the skin of the web. Data centers are expensive to build and operate, and a large internet company's energy bill can approach that of a small city.

Maximizing the computing power per square foot becomes the key to delivering the hardware support companies need. Barton predicts these trends will continue as we move toward more and more internet-style computing. As phones, travel, and multimedia services move on-line, web facing storage will become as important as web facing servers. Price, performance, and watts are now the metrics that companies must watch in order to build and maintain a scalable internet infrastructure.

Tom Barton - High Order Bit

You can save bookmarks by:

* Adding bookmarks through the "Add Bookmark" link on the left hand side of this page.
* Adding bookmarks through the Bookmark module on your Personalized Homepage.
* Clicking on the star button on your Google Toolbar when you are browsing the web.
* Clicking on the star icon next to any item in your Search History.

Google Bookmarks

So, what makes a good recommendation?

1. First-person experience.
2. Enthusiasm.
3. Specificity.
4. Sincerity.
5. Clarity.

The difference between good (action-inducing) and bad (zzzzzz) recommendation is the difference between one person saying:

“I'’ve read a lot of history books, but this is the best I’ve ever found on the Roman Empire, and if you read it you will have a firm grasp on Roman history and architecture and I guarantee you’ll be booking the next flight to Italy.”

and the other saying,

“I guess I liked this novel, but you probably won’t.”

Which book would you buy?

More on Recommendation

This is a series of articles excerpted from Dr. Saul Berman's white paper on "The End of TV as we know it."

The End of TV as We Know It

The AJAX approach to dynamic web programming has caught on all over the internet, heightening our expectations for a new generation of rich, interactive web applications. In this conversation, Phil Windley sits down with Ben Galbraith, Bruce Grant and Scott Lemon, three experienced AJAX developers and evangelists, to talk about progress and challenges in the AJAX world.

Given the energy of the AJAX community, we can expect very interesting times ahead as AJAX competes with rich client approaches to provide users with instantaneous feedback, powerful interfaces, and cool visual effects.

AJAX Progress and Challenges - Technometria

(This article is a preview of this weekend's Times magazine.)

Lee can sound almost evangelical when he talks about the liberating power of technology. The Internet, he says, will level the playing field for China's enormous rural underclass; once the country's small villages are connected, he says, students thousands of miles from Shanghai or Beijing will be able to access online course materials from M.I.T. or Harvard and fully educate themselves. Lee has been with Google since only last summer, but he wears the company's earnest, utopian ethos on his sleeve: when he was hired away from Microsoft, he published a gushingly emotional open letter on his personal Web site, praising Google's mission to bring information to the masses. He concluded with an exuberant equation that translates as "youth + freedom + equality + bottom-up innovation user focus + don't be evil = The Miracle of Google."

I haven't read this yet.

Google in China: The Big Disconnect