A Laptop Running on AA Batteries

…….and costing under $200. And maybe as low as $135 if acquired bare-bones.

Such could describe the newly-introduced Gecko EduBook produced by Norhtec.

Bundled like a regular small laptop with an 8.9 inch screen configured at resolution of 1024x600, it runs on 8 rechargeable (NiMH) batteries that can be recharged while installed inside the notebook. Using a regular power cord without the heavy adaptor appendage.

Its core chip module with the CPU and RAM, called the Xcore86, another product of NorhTec, is the size of a typical full-featured cell phone. Updating the unit simply requires removing and changing the module.

It operates quietly without any whirring fan. It has instead a heat sink to dissipate heat generated.

Features include the following:

CPU 1GHz Xcore86 Device on Chip™
Graphics Integrated Graphics Chip
Memory 256MB / 512MB / 1GB DDR2
Display 8.9" WSVGA 1024 x 600 resolution TFT LCD screen with LED backlight
HDD SD Card or IDE Flash Disk
Audio Line-out, Mic-in, Internal Mic, Internal stereo speakers
Ethernet Built in 10/100 Base-T
USB 2.0 ports External : 3 ports, Inernal : 1 port (reserved for WIFI, GPRS,
CDMA, 3G or 3.5G USB dongles)
I/O D-sub 15 pin VGA out, integrated SD card reader, touch pad
Power / Battery Rechargeable AA Battery - NiMH 8 pcs (4 hours max) or Li+3S (4 hours max) or Li+3S2P (6 hours max)
AC 100V-240V (no external adapter)

As seen here even amidst all the negative repercussions of a very deep global recession, we still see fearless innovation in the forefront. Creative minds continue to look for products that are not only cheaper, but adaptive to changing consumer needs.

Lately, I have shifted my usage to rechargeable batteries – for my digital cameras, flashlights, and other consumer electronic products requiring batteries. In the long run, one saves quite a lot adopting the change.

While initially the change will involve additional outlay, in the long run it will redound to considerable savings. A pair of AA rechargeable batteries will cost over 300 pesos compared to about a 100 pesos for standard batteries. A dependable Made In China battery charger will cost an additional 125 pesos. Suggest you get an extra charger for convenience.

Now both standard and rechargeable batteries last almost the same time as tests have proved. But guess what happens next?

Dead standard batteries are thrown away, but rechargeable batteries come back again, and again, and again, etc., fully charged and good as new.

SiteMeter Issues

Many may not be aware that over this weekend SiteMeter “migrated” its databases and made changes on its services. During that downtime, it was inaccessible. But it is now back on-line.

But for those availing of its services, whether as a free or premium user, you will need to re-activate your account so your stats will be updated and its data-gathering can continue seamlessly. If you do not re-activate, your stats do not get re-activated. And the process also allows one to be familiarized with the new look of SiteMeter stats and reports.

Many of those who refer regularly to or confer with Sitemeter stats to monitor blog traffic may find the new reporting different and maybe, even difficult.

As a possible back-up or in tandem, one can also avail of another “free” service Extreme Tracking, some of whose reports are quite similar with the old SiteMeter report formats. And set-up and installation are as easy as SiteMeter.

UPDATE:

Lo and behold, SiteMeter has brought back the old format, giving me now two counts, the old one for unique visits and the second one for page views. They did send a memo that because of the big howl against the new format, they would revert back.

IC Is 50 Years Old Today

Today is the 50th anniversary of the integrated circuit invented by Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments. Since its inception it has revolutionized so many of the old gadgets that we had used and the modern ones that we are using today.

Thinking about it today, immediately our attention turns to our computers sitting in our laps or desk; and recalling the past we think about those bulky and hot vacuum tubes that hid lit inside our radios and phonographs which were quickly replaced by the IC. Then we had the commercial explosion of the transistor radios.

But today try to look around your house and see, apart from your PCs, modern appliances, and digital watches, what consumer and/or business gadgets you still have that would be a throwback to an earlier period of IC use?

I looked around and found this, which to this day is still being used to do some simple math calculations such as addition and subtraction in reconciling bank statements:










An electronic calculator that fits snugly on a small desk and weighs only a pound or two. (TA ARBM 1121 PD, which came out about the late 70's)

More From The Ancient Department

Ronson lighters were the Roll Royce of their times, when smoking of cigarettes was considered "cool" for both men and women. Well-crafted, dependable, and a bit pricey, especially compared to matches.

And to extend one's "coolness" to the bathroom, Ronson also made electric shaver products, fit for the coolest of smokers and a gift fitting for the gentleman who had everything.

This yeoman's facial hair remover was in the hands of most adult males in the mornings. Sturdy, convenient, and durable. Replacement for replaceable blades was easy to secure.

Another sturdy product of youth. A heavy cast-iron hulk of a two-hole puncher, weighing at least three pounds. Could double up as weapon against pesky officemates.

For the consummate devotee of orderly and neat office paper files, a small paper cutter able to fit easily on any table top.

Big Brother Is Coming!

This government-proposed plan has hit the proverbial fan and sent cold shivers down to the biosphere of the Internet and talk radio. Heard it on the radio this morning and Drudge Report featured this story today. Now we learn that talk radio king, Rush Limbaugh, had earlier also created considerable buzz about this aimed at his millions of listeners.

As the International Herald Tribune headline declares, California wants to control home thermostats.

“Next year in California, state regulators are likely to have the emergency power to control individual thermostats, sending temperatures up or down through a radio-controlled device that will be required in new or substantially modified houses and buildings to manage electricity shortages.”

But as early as the start of last summer, those of us in the Central Valley (CA) had received an invitation from our electricity and gas provider, Pacific Gas and Electric Company, to join in their SmartAC Program.

The program is designed to work this way:

1. When high energy use drains California’s power systems, PG&E sends a signal to activate SmartAC technology installed in homes across the state.
2. The SmartAC technology then reduces your air conditioner’s energy use by cycling it on and off for brief periods or slightly raising the temperature on your thermostat.
3. Your AC fan continues to circulate air in your home during this period, helping to keep you comfortable.
4. SmartAC is only activated when it’s needed. At any time, however, you may call PG&E or go online to return your air conditioner to normal operation.

Additionally, one had the choice of installing either a SmartAC thermostat, which is installed in your home and will allow you to program both your heater and air conditioner, or the SmartAC switch which is installed close to your air conditioning unit. And an added bonus, when you are away you can log in and program your thermostat from the Internet. Now, talk about convenience.

Now, one may ask about the cost. Nada. Not a penny. As a matter of fact, we each got an appreciation check of $25 to have installed either a thermostat or switch. Thank you.

Of course, this is different because this is a private company doing it, but the proposed plan will be government initiated.

And so the resonant stir created has brought out to the fore once again George Orwell and his work, 1984, and mention of all-intrusive Big Brother.

Personally, I do not mind this little bit of intrusion into privacy and the shedding away of a bit of control on how cool or hot the interior of “castle as my home” should be. Better that than total breakdown or blackout, which we have had in the past. Or have people forgotten that, too?









The SmartAC switch was installed in the air-con unit which is located outside of the house.

Inner Life Of A Cell

Or for a more comprehensive and narrated version, please view here.

Watch and be magically awed, showing the awesome wonders, powers, and complexities of pure chance. Not.

Hat Tip to Instapundit.

Land Of The Free

Heard or read lately of any pernicious virus/Trojan Horse/etc going crazily viral in the Web lately?

Maybe not. Maybe because the devilish sprites in the virtual world have simmered down, or simply grew up and matured.

But still, it is best to be protected from them 24/7. Like those inscrutable jihadist/ terrorists, who knows when they will see fit to strike again?

It is easy to imagine why we could let our guards down. Most of the tools and measures we need to give us some sense of security still cost more than a pretty penny.

Take anti-virus software for example. True, companies like Comcast offer free anti-virus protection (McAfee) to their subscribers, but it still costs more than a pretty penny connecting to Comcast’s broadband Internet. Have you asked lately how much to get the latest of Norton’s anti-virus?

But for those desirous of owning their own free-standing anti-virus software, but one that could be had for FREE, that is still a reality. AVG Free offers one ample protection and has been popular with many users. Home users can download the software free and can use it in as many PCs at home that they have.

And there are still loads of free software out there for different purposes, with many of them being “open source” software.



Even the seemingly unchallenged but dearly-priced Microsoft Office suite has a rival that can be had for free – The Star Office. And this is not a new kid on the block. I still have on file the version that came in about 5 floppy disks which I downloaded for free many years ago. The proprietary owner, Sun Microsystems, had this available many, many years ago, and it has undergone countless revisions and/or enhancements. Now you can even get this as part of the Google Pack – as a free bonus. And guess what, it is not only compatible with Microsoft Office, it can do most anything MS Office can do, and more. It is open-source.

And there are many more freebies, as multi-media software, media players, and image editing software.

There is Picasa which comes with the Google Pack, one of many photo-editing software out there.

There is Audacity if one is into recording and editing sounds. And it works across many different platforms – Windows, Mac, Linux, etc. Much like the commercial software, this can record live audio and convert tapes into different formats like from .wav files to mp3s.



And if you want to try a media player other than Windows Media Player or QuickTime or Real, you may want to try another open-source, VideoLAN.

It seems there is a glut of freeware and shareware out there to satisfy the most discriminating computer users.

One just needs to be selective and cautious about the credibility and reliability of each one. Fortunately the web itself does provide the information necessary to learn about these free software.

Wind As Productive Energy

Nasa Picture
Today as the unaffected rest of us in the United States go about our workaday lives, about a million harried and displaced residents in the Southern part of California, specifically San Diego County, are caught in the vise-like grip of fear and uncertainty caused by fearsome conflagrations unabatedly fueled by fierce winds popularly referred to by natives as the gusty Santa Ana winds. This added deadly factor has made possible the indiscriminate razing of hundreds of thousand of acres dotted with many precious residences, in spite of having the best fire-fighting technology and people in the world. Many separate fires that now may have been purposely started by loathsome arsonists.

We no doubt fully understand the destructive powers of wind energy in deadly combination with other factors, such as dry as tinderbox conditions in certain wooded or grass areas whether accidentally or purposely combusted with the introduction of sparks or fire.

And overly cautious people that we are, I and the wife wondered whether such an unwanted calamity could happen in our very neck of the woods, Tracy, in Northern California. We see hills and mountains to the west, openly bald-headed and coated brown by dead flora. And we have the added ingredient of gusty winds, too. The Altamont Pass being home to thousands of wind turbines that rely on steady streams of winds to turn them on.

And of course, it could happen. As a matter of fact, it has happened in the recent past and we used to see unmistakable signs of their aftermath as evidenced by easily distinguishable blackened spots while driving through the pass after reading or hearing about them.

While cognizant of its gale-force destructive powers, we like to think of the wind in more benign, soothing and constructive ways. The wind as fatherly image blowing on lifeless sails of ships carrying homeward-bound sailors to familiar ports, or so our early children’s books used to fancifully regale us with.


The Altamont Pass which actually knifes through a range of stretched-out hills of comparative height and ominously called Diablo Range, is precisely one such location where wind energy has been harnessed to provide an alternate source to electrify our homes, our businesses and industries. The pass and several other locations in the state proudly define the area’s worthy contributions to the country’s resolve to tap other sources of energy to satiate our ever-growing needs for power. A commendable drive toward possibly independence from foreign energy sources such as oil.

Geographically the pass could be considered a defining landmark for Tracy because it separates it from its western neighbors. Like the daring riding adventures in the Western movies of the past, the narrow mountain pass with its maze of winding uphill and downhill grade have to be carefully negotiated to arrive in Tracy from the west. And would be the only straight and direct way to Tracy, of course, discounting the other surface roads and the original Altamont Pass Road which can be taken as alternate routes when not using Interstate 580.

But beyond this romanticized depiction of the pass, the Altamont Pass is stellar because of the pivotal role it plays in the generation of wind energy for the state.

According to the California Energy Commission, the pass is one of several major wind energy resource areas in the state, the rest are: Solano, Pacheco Pass, Tehachapi Ranges, and San Gorgonio Pass.

On this list two are located in Northern California, namely Solano and Altamont.

Three sites on the list, namely Altamont, San Gorgonio Pass and Tehachapi Ranges, comprise 95 percent of the commercial wind energy generated in the state. And to understand the global impact of this production, this represents 11% of the world’s wind- generated energy.

And to reduce further to terms we can more readily relate to:

“With an average California household using 6,500 kWh of electricity per year, 3.5 billion kilowatt-hours (kWh) of annual electricity generation from wind resource in the state provides electricity sufficient to power over 530,000 homes.”

Altamont alone generates 1.071 gWh from 4,788 wind turbines (2003 figures), making it the world’s largest wind farm in terms of number of turbines. These turbines are spread out on hilltops stretching some 15 kilometers in diameter, many of them visible from the highway.

So gusty winds are not necessarily bad all the time. At the very least like most fortuitous events in nature, they are indifferent.

And loosely speaking if it is any consolation, Southern California’s ongoing wind-caused losses may somehow be offset by Northern California’s benefits from wind-generated energy resources.

Credits for Altamont panoramic picture.

Transport For Comfort

Is it a plane? Is it a bird? Is it Supe…..?

No, silly. It is a gyrocopter, or an autogyro, or a gyroplane, or, err, a rotaplane.

Needless to state, heavier-than-air Homo sapiens has always been fascinated and intrigued about flying. Many a youngster’s dreams have been woven into episodes of being able to fly through flimsy air.

Of course, man has done most anything that strikes his many capricious fancies and whims, typically by inventing machines to accomplish them. He will even go beyond altering man’s exterior environment to make realities of those dreams. If given the opportunities, he will even invent or devise whatever means necessary to actually change man’s physical or mental constitutions in this pursuit, bound and limited most of the time by the perimeters of ethics and morality.

But enough of and away with the ethereal musings. Over time man has generally attended to with sterling successes in satiating his many wishes and fantasies, whether as necessities or simply as conveniences.

For God’s sake, we have planes and/or flying machines of various shapes and sizes to enable him to fly, or lift him from the ground and bring him places.

But that is not the attendant question. The more relevant question is how many of the vast numbers of humanity in the planet can afford to own a flying machine for his personal uses. On land, a vast number of us can travel faster than the fastest animals using a wide array of machines – bikes, motorbikes, cars, trucks, boats, jetskis, etc. And a vast number of us can own those land/water vehicles for our personal uses.

But a flying machine that we can use at the strike of our fancy or need? A flying machine one can keep in your garage or load up in your pick-up truck like a kayak for your skyward excursions? Now, that’s a great possibility. Easily translatable to reality.

Hoverhawk Corporation here in the US can provide you with the precious key to open up your own dreams of flying on your own, in your own little plane, transporting you anywhere you want to go.

For as little as 15k dollars plus shipping and handling costs, you can own the cheapest model which can be delivered to any location you desire, packaged and requiring some assembly before use. Most cars in the market today cost at least that much and most garages (and curbs) are filled with two or three cars to a family. Making one wonder why this addictive bias toward land travel does not carry over to the equally innate love of free flight in thin air. Like a soaring bird traveling to any part of the globe, unfettered by the bounds of the very limiting constraints of geography. Where one does not need roads, or valleys, or land or water, for land/water obstacles that may present some difficulty in scaling or navigating can be conquered by simply flying over them.

So the adventure begins. First item on the menu, learn about flying and its dynamics and when done, take some basic short-time flying lessons.

So excuse me, while I attend to those. Till then.

Are You Taken Over By The Internet?(Part 2)

13 Compuserve/Prodigy
In the 1980s, they became the first mainstream companies to offer consumer Internet access. CompuServe was more for the geek set; Prodigy was more for the masses.

Though both names are familiar, I never got the opportunity to use either. If I remember correctly Compuserve was quite a challenge for your programming-challenged user. Prodigy software continues to be pre-loaded in some PCs but I am not sure what its status is today.

14 The Well
The precursor for social networking, the Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link, founded in 1985, was the original (now longest-running) virtual community. It gained popularity for its forums.

Now, this is completely alien to me, though as stated above it is still in existence.

15 Vices
Regulators scrapped plans for a .xxx domain, but vice remains one of the Net’s biggest businesses. Online gambling, illegal in the U.S., topped $12 billion last year; online porn was $2.84 billion. Searches for “Paris Hilton video” return about a million hits.

Vices – on-line gambling, porn, and all those juicy scandals. Yes, the internet has spawned them. And many peer-to-peer (p2p) networks continue to be good, and free, sources for them.

16 Spam/Spyware
Unsolicited e-mail, and software that watches your Web habits, mushroomed from annoyance to menace. Junk e-mail now accounts for more than 9 of every 10 messages sent over the Internet.

Hormel’s ever popular food product, Spam, has taken on a bad connotation. And junk mail has spilled over from one’s mailbox into one’s inbox, more pernicious and more menacing. Thankfully, lesser number of trees has been sacrificed as a result, one would presume.

Spam has given birth to anti-spam software to combat this menace.

And yes, spyware. It is everywhere, all-knowing, and difficult to shake off. As smart and intuitive as your most experienced life-breathing spies. And just as destructive.

17 Flash
Adobe’s Flash player is on 98% of all computers. Seen a video on YouTube or MySpace? Then you’ve probably used Flash. It animated the Web, spawning zillions of online cartoons and videos.

Comic book hero Flash has moved into the realm of software and codes, still with his signature speed and coverage.

And what about Flash memory, or card, or stick?

18 Online mapping tools
MapQuest started saving marriages in 1996 by offering turn-by-turn directions. Followers such as Yahoo and Google beam directions to cellphones and offer satellite images of neighborhoods.

GPS (Global Positioning System) has made pinpoint-specific directions an everyday occurrence and expectation. A system held together by satellites in the atmosphere triangulating to pinpoint specific locations.

Whereas before its use was limited to the military, GPS can be found in a typical cellphone, in cars, as a stand-alone tracking device, or even in microchips implanted maybe in one’s pet.

19 Napster
Created in Shawn Fanning’s dorm room, Napster let more than 26 million people tap into a free database of music. Record companies shut it down. In its wake emerged legitimate download sites, such as Apple’s iTunes.

What fun, exciting, and beneficial memories I have of the original Napster. Even on a dial-up connection from a “freebie” ISP, I was downloading like crazy mesmerized by the novelty and unheralded capabilities of the network. Songs of the 40’s, 50’s, and the 60’s, all at my fingertips, literally.

Now, there may be scores of copy-cat (p2p) networks including a revived and supposedly revitalized Napster. Some with downloads for a price, and still others operating in the shadowy world of copyright infringement quietly churning out free downloads.

20 YouTube
The video-sharing site, bought by Google in 2006 for $1.65 billion, ignited a user-generated revolution online and introduced millions to the delights of Stephen Colbert, Chad Vader and Lonelygirl15.

A notch up audio files sharing is of course, video files sharing. And upstart YouTube capitalized on this need or hunger and converted the effort into a billion-dollar enterprise, good enough for it to be gobbled up by giant Google. And as expected, apers appeared to fill up the vacuum.

Ironic, that Google had started earlier its own video-sharing service, Google Video, prior to the widespread success of Youtube. But hey, why compete, just buy out the competition.

21 The Drudge Report
Matt Drudge’s news site helped break the Monica Lewinsky story in 1998, paving the way for politically-minded bloggers everywhere. He claims to have about 500 million visitors a month.

Many still question whether the Drudge Report qualifies as a blog, rather than as simply a news aggregator. But hey, why worry? I go to its site and get my important breaking news there. It definitely predates the uniformly-formatted blogs of today.

22 Bloggers
The more than 75 million Web logs have changed how the world gets its news. Bloggers have challenged the traditional media, lobbied for and against wars, started debates, and posted far too many pictures of their pets.

Bloggers? What is that animal? Not boogers? Not foggers?

Hey, I need to fill some space.

23 Craigslist
Craig Newmark’s gathering place for (mostly) free classified ads changed the way we find apartments, cars and dates. The site relies on users who supply friendly neighborhood information — about 14 million ads a month.

Dear to my heart since it is a native San Franciscan, and life-line for the millions of able-bodied men and women, even to the not so able-bodied ones, poring over classified ads on-line for whatever needs they may have – used cars, apartments to let, and even personal dates.

24 MySpace
This online hangout has replaced the mall as a home away from home for teenagers. The site has more than 173 million personalized pages. News Corp paid $580 million for it in 2005.

Though I followed the crowds and registered with it, I still am not sure what it is I am trying to get out of it, or vice-versa. But it must be good, after all Mr. Murdoch of NewsCorp (and known more as owner of Fox News) paid a fortune for it.

25 Gaming and virtual worlds
More than 19 million globally pay to explore three-dimensional Massively Multiplayer Online (MMO) games such as World of Warcraft and virtual communities such as Second Life, which let players do business or just hang out. Both use the easy connections fostered by the Web to build communities.

The gaming world has made possible PCs that can compute at dizzying speeds, with their very elaborate liquid cooling systems, with peripheral cards (like sound and video) that can cost as much as your typical PC, and physical looks that in our dreams probably belong in spaceships.

This niche provides all the PC/Mac makers the pecuniary incentives to keep breaking Moore’s laws on processor speed and other IT development

Graphics Credit

Are You Taken Over By The Internet?

The McPaper of the US, USA Today, has started a “book of lists” series to celebrate its quarter-century existence.

The latest and the sixth is entitled How the Internet Took Over.

For us, consumers/proponents/devotees of the Internet, it might be entertaining to slither through memory lane, just on a 25-year span, to relate with nostalgia how the 25 items on the list personally touched and affected us on a personal basis.

Twenty-five years ago the Internet as we now know it was in the process of being birthed by the National Science Foundation. Since then it's been an information explosion. From e-mail to eBay, communication and shopping have forever changed.

So, let’s start with No. 1.

1 World Wide Web
Tim Berners-Lee created user-friendly “Web pages” that could travel over the Internet, a network built to shuttle research between universities. The world logged on: 747 million adults in January.

The ubiquitous 3 Ws in each URL we had to type constantly reminded us that we were accessing and becoming part of that Web. But that didn’t preclude our puzzlement over how to distinguish it from the Internet that some had grown accustomed to. It was initially quite difficult to create a mental image of the differences between the web and the Internet, even after consulting their respective definitions.

In review, we present their differentiating definitions:

The Internet, or simply the Net, is the publicly available worldwide system of interconnected computer networks that transmit data by packet switching using a standardized Internet Protocol (IP) and many other protocols. It is made up of thousands of smaller commercial, academic, domestic and government networks. It carries various information and services, such as electronic mail, online chat and the interlinked web pages and other documents of the World Wide Web.

A hypermedia-based system for browsing Internet sites. It is named the Web because it is made of many sites linked together; users can travel from one site to another by clicking on hyperlinks. Or "The World Wide Web is the universe of network-accessible information, an embodiment of human knowledge." - Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web.

Are we clear now?

2 E-mail
Tech’s answer to the Pony Express. Programs such as 1988’s Eudora made it easy to use. In-boxes have been filling up ever since. Nearly 97 billion e-mails are sent each day.

E-mail gave us the term, snail mail. Just a little pejorative to drive deeper the world of difference between the former with other forms of traditional mail – whether through the postal system, or those private mailing companies like UPS and FedEx. Mail through the speed of light is now our standard measure for efficiency and effectiveness of our communications.

Never got to install Eudora, since I started with the Netscape Navigator email client, which came and gained fame before MS Outlook. When Internet Explorer got bundled with MS Windows operating system, starting with the 95 version, that too signaled the demise of Netscape and its other services. Although the “bundling” got Microsoft back to the courts and into a number of litigation against it. Nevertheless, Internet Explorer was well on its way to its unchallenged monopoly, that is until recently when open-source FireFox threw down its gauntlet for a mighty challenge.

Anyway, back to email.

Now, many users are partial to web-based email services which can be accessed from anywhere internet access can be had.

Can any Internet or Web user now live without one, whether web-based or computer-resident?

3 Graphical user interface (GUI)
Most computer displays were blinking lines of text until Apple featured clickable icons and other graphic tools in its 1984 Mac. Microsoft’s Windows took GUI — pronounced “gooey” — to the masses.

I can remember Apple’s Macintosh proudly display its initial version of GUI, still quite coarse and very low resolution. We can also remember how Windows beat Apple to the draw in capitalizing on GUI, clearly sealing the defeat with the introduction of Windows 95 in 1995. This heavy loss most probably drove Apple to the courts to seek redress, claiming it had prior proprietary rights to graphical interface. No such luck, since the courts ruled against Apple after some years passed. Now GUI is so commonplace that most users now suffer selective amnesia when asked what came before it.

4 AOL
AOL turned people on to Web portals, chat rooms and instant messaging. Early subscribers paid by the hour. AOL once boasted 35 million subscribers. It bought Time Warner for $106 billion in 2001.

AOL blazed through the entire web, decimating whatever competition was already extant. It became the ISP to be a member of. And Steve Case of AOL became the darling of consumer technology enabling AOL to gobble up giant Time Warner.

Say, whatever happened to Steve Case and how is AOL doing?

5 Broadband
The answer to the drip-drip-drip of dial-up, high-speed Internet service fuels online entertainment. About 78% of home Internet users in the U.S. have broadband, up from less than 1% in 1998.

Yes, broad against narrow band of dial-up. Yet even during the drip-drip-drip period of AOL, I shied away and consorted with the “freebies”, starting with Bigger.net and then moving on to Netzero.net before it became for-pay. With Bigger.net and Netzero.net one simply allowed ad sponsors clutter to colonize one’s monitor screen to get free access.

In a couple of years Bigger.net went kaput to be replaced by Netzero.net. The latter has survived to this day but subscription is now for pay. Still cheaper compared to AOL.

Broadband now comes in different flavors – DSL, cable, or satellite/wireless/microwave, and even using your home electric wiring system.

6 Google
So popular it’s a verb. The search powerhouse, with a market capitalization of nearly $149 billion, perfected how we find info on the Web. Google sites had nearly 500 million visitors in December.

What more can one say about Google. The search engine of search engines.

And who were the precursor webcrawlers?

7 Mosaic/Netscape
Created by Marc Andreessen and others, Mosaic was the first widely-used multimedia Web browser. Spin-off Netscape Navigator ruled the ‘90s until Microsoft’s Internet Explorer took off around ‘98.

I still have somewhere the earliest version of Netscape Navigator stored on floppy disks. Numbering 2 or 3 maybe, each holding 1.44Mb of data? But remember during those times, the entire Windows 95 suite resided on 12 floppy disks.

8 eBay
Thanks to eBay, we can all now buy and sell almost anything (skip the body parts). eBay has 230 million customers worldwide who engage in 100 million auctions at any given time.

And who has not gone through the eBay site, either to browse or purchase, and if the latter, kept coming back to find out how your bid(s) did? I still maintain an inactive account since I haven’t purchased any lately. I was for a while quite active on obscure rival, uBid, though.

9 Amazon.com
Jeff Bezos’ baby began as an always-in-stock book seller. It survived the tech bubble and now is the definitive big box online store. It was the second most-visited online retailer in December, after eBay.

Any book buyer worth his salt must have gone through Amazon. And of course, those who write and publish books. But still a funny name for a company selling essentially books and other publications.

10 Wi-Fi
Have coffee shop, will compute: Wireless fidelity lets us lug our laptops out of the office and connect to the Net on the fly. More than 200 million Wi-Fi equipped products sold last year.

For many years, Ethernet was the buzz word for wired networking with its bulkier and more robust wiring, which was double that of your ordinary phone line. Cat5(Category 5), then Cat6, were the standards for PCs connecting to the network, and eventually to the Internet/WWW. And we thought that further future development was heading and winding in that direction, until wireless reared its head and made the wired network connection go limp for many.

Whatever happened to Gigabit Ethernet?

11 Instant Messaging
LOL! Web surfers began to “laugh out loud” and BRB (“be right back”) in the mid-‘90s, with the launch of ICQ and AOL Instant Messenger. Millions use it to swap messages and photos, even telephone pals.

Was never a devotee of IM, but I could decently frame and send SMS, which is very popular in the old homeland since it is quite cheap, sometimes even free, to send and receive text messages.

12 Yahoo!
Stanford University graduate students Jerry Yang and David Filo created this popular Web portal in 1994. It remains a favorite for email, photo sharing (it owns Flickr) and other services.

Okay, so I use Yahoo!Groups where I participate in at least a dozen email lists, being a moderator in at least one. But Iwon continues to be my home portal, with a customized MyIwon page. One good reason? Using it gives one the opportunity to win various cash prizes, and great items, too.

(To be continued.)