Tech Talk

Web statistics are getting a makeover. Yesterday, Nielsen//NetRatings, a leading provider of Internet stats, announced it will switch from primarily basing Web site usage metrics on the traditional page view to two new units of measure, total minutes and total sessions. The online research firm said that the new yardsticks more efficiently describe user activity on the Net in today's environment in which people are increasingly viewing material that no longer fits the description of a typical Web page, such as messaging, videos, and multimedia. The move could dramatically alter the landscape of online advertising.

The firm that pioneered the television ratings system said in its announcement that, while Rich Internet Application (RIA) technologies such as Ajax and streaming media are enhancing the consumer experience via a phenomenon called Web 2.0 (think of YouTube), they pose challenges to Internet audience measurement. Ajax refreshes content without reloading entire pages and streaming provides dynamically changing content within a single page or a media player. While a page view metric under-credits such engagement, Nielsen//NetRatings said, the total minutes metric provides a common denominator for user behavior that is independent of site design.

"Total minutes is the best engagement metric in this initial stage of Web 2.0 development, not only because it ensures fair measurement of Web sites using RIA and streaming media, but also of Web environments that have never been well-served by the page view, such as online gaming and Internet applications," said Scott Ross, director of product marketing for the NetView service from Nielsen//NetRatings.

The Oldsmar, Fla., firm cited the example of the discrepancy in usage metrics between the social networking sites MySpace and YouTube, in which the time spent ratio is 3.6 to 1.0, but the ratio of page views is much larger, at 10.4 to 1.0. YouTube visitors spend more time per page than MySpace, because they are primarily watching videos, requiring fewer page refreshes. While MySpace may be able to serve more ads because of its number of page refreshes, the time-spent ratio is an important comparison of audience engagement on the two sites, according to Nielsen//NetRatings.

The firm then reorganized its list of the leading properties on the Web by total minutes and found that the ranks of the Top Ten brands had slightly changed. As of May, statistics measured by minutes showed that AOL Media Network, Yahoo!, and MSN/Windows Live led the standings. These global properties were followed by Fox Interactive Media, Google, eBay, Microsoft, EA Electronic Arts Online, Apple, and YouTube.

As the Web changes, with new functionality seeming to spring up every year, look for further changes in the ways research analysts measure its usage. It's another sign of the times.

It could be a pleasure to fly in and a boon to the environment. On Sunday, Boeing unveiled the new 787 Dreamliner, a commercial aviation breakthrough in both technical achievement and environmental progress. The Everett, Wash., aerospace giant threw a spectacular party for the debut of the completed prototype of the Dreamliner, with some 15 000 in attendance and millions more tuning in to the premiere via satellite broadcast and online webcast.

The point of all the hoopla was to show off the new aircraft's remarkable innovations in design and construction. At Spectrum, though, we needed little in the way of ceremony to appreciate some of the super-jet's most advanced features. We first wrote about the 787 more than a year ago. In our January 2006 special issue on Technology Winners and Losers, we proclaimed the Dreamliner's special composite-based body to be one of the winners in our annual review of futuristic technologies (please see "Winner: Carbon Takeoff").

Boeing promotes the Dreamliner as the world's first "mostly composite" commercial aircraft. It states that the next-generation jet will use 20 percent less fuel per passenger than similarly sized models, produce fewer carbon emissions, and will make quieter takeoffs and landings.

"Our journey began some six years ago when we knew we were on the cusp of delivering valuable technologies that would make an economic difference to our airline customers," Mike Bair, Boeing Commercial Airplanes' vice president/general manager of the 787 program, said in a statement to the press. "In our business, that happens every 15 or so years, so we have to get it right."

In our 2006 article on the Dreamliner's advanced composites technology, Associate Editor Erico Guizzo noted that the plane's designers decided to go with an all-composite wing for the 787 only after years of experience with composite structures in previous planes, notably the tail of the 777, which has been operational for a decade.

The earlier work gave Boeing engineers better understanding of the advantages of composites -- as well as their drawbacks. Problems can vary from moisture absorption that can reduce stiffness to tiny fissures that can go undetected and result in abrupt cracks, Guizzo pointed out. And then there's the simple fact that aircraft designers have more experience with metals. In fact, Boeing is using aluminum, steel, and titanium in some parts of the 787.

Though Boeing will not disclose the total cost of developing the Dreamliner, Guizzo's research puts an estimated price on the overall project at between US $8 billion to $10 billion. The aerospace firm said in its announcement on Sunday that it already has 47 customers worldwide lined up to take delivery of 677 aircraft worth more than $110 billion. The company and its international partners will initially build six test copies of the new jet in Everett in the weeks ahead, with first flights expected later this summer. After shakeout testing, scheduled for completion next year, Boeing intends to begin delivering fully certified 787s for passenger service by May 2008.

That sounds like something worth celebrating. But, of course, we knew that all along.

Today was supposed to be the day that news from the high frontier concerned the launch of the Dawn Mission to explore the solar system's asteroid field. However, gremlins have intervened (once again) apparently, and NASA officials made the decision on Saturday to postpone the launch until September at the earliest. The U.S. space agency explained that the move is being made primarily due to resource conflicts with another mission, the Phoenix Mars Lander, scheduled for lift-off next month. Still, one can't help but suspect other motives may have intruded to delay the on-again/off-again status of the beleaguered Dawn spacecraft.

Instead, today has become the day to discuss another momentous piece of news from outer space (and it's not the next Mars rover). It seems everywhere you turn in the world of aerospace engineering on this particular day, people are buzzing about the deal NASA signed last Wednesday with RSC Energia, of Korolev, Russia, for 'various hardware items and their integration into the International Space Station' -- chief among which is a US $19 million space toilet. That's right, the imaginations of rocket scientists the world over are dwelling on the new privy for the space station.

NASA said in its announcement of the Korolev contract that the personal facility, similar in design to the unit installed in the Zvezda Service Module on the ISS, features a privacy enclosure (thankfully) and a system for processing urine into potable water and disposing of waste.

A spokesperson for the space agency told the Associated Press that the decision to buy rather than build the vital amenity for the American living quarters module was based on simple economics -- it was just cheaper. At $19 million, though, it has some wondering just how much more expensive a toilet can be.

"It's akin to building a municipal treatment center on Earth," NASA's Lynnette Madison said from the Johnson Space Center, in Houston, by way of defending the unique apparatus.

The Korolev toilet system is equipped with leg restraints and thigh bars to keep weightless astronauts and cosmonauts in place, as electric fans draw waste into the commode. It also employs individual funnels attached to hoses to deposit urine into a wastewater tank.

As off-putting as this may sound to the earthbound, NASA's spokesperson said that those who have traveled to the ISS have become accustomed to the hygienic rituals of using this type of lavatory, and that this comfort level figured into the decision-making process among space officials, as well.

Over the next few years, the rotating crew onboard the ISS will grow to six astronauts and cosmonauts, as well as the occasional visitor. With crews from vessels such as the space shuttle popping in to deliver supplies and perform construction tasks, the orbiting platform's sponsors expect its confines to become a bit crowded. And this lies at the root of all the discussion today about the importance of the new toilet.

After all, whether we're in a crowded restaurant or in a crowded space station, we all are keenly aware of the necessities of the human condition. There's room for a humorous reference here, but let's just leave it at that.

Don't answer "no", because I'm going to write one anyway.

By way of introduction, I'm Harry Teasley, and I most typically write on sister-blog The Sandbox when I'm not developing games. Though a relative luddite for my first couple of decades, professional software development turned me into a technophile gadget freak for my latter two decades. Thus, June 29th (my birthday) found me standing in line outside an AT&T store in Tampa, FL, waiting to pay a lot of money for a small black box of The Future.

We are one week into said Future. Let's see how things are going.

In a word, we are content. The iPhone was surprisingly unsurprising: everything works exactly as you've been shown. I suppose the most unexpected thing is that the features that seemed most dubious prior to launch work, on the whole, much better than I had anticipated. This, however, wasn't a huge shock, as Jobs' Apple is well-known for delivering a polished user experience, and very explicitly not delivering something half-baked.

The user interface ("UI") is wonderfully polished, and incredibly responsive: I discovered I am deeply habituated to computer interfaces that don't instantly respond to my input. The iPhone pointed this out immediately. I am used to applications not surrendering focus until they stop thinking hard, or Application #2 being sluggish because Application #1 is busy in the background eating up CPU cycles like chocolate-covered cherries. I am so used to these little delays in all my computer devices that I didn't even realize they were happening.

But the iPhone does away with that. Downloading a webpage, and want to get to the home screen? Blink, you're there. Safari is still busy, still thinking very hard, but I'm off checking appointments in iCal, with Mail gently beeping to alert me that new messages have arrived. A check on Safari shows me that the EDGE network is still taxed with downloading all of the Seattle Mariners homepage. There is zero evidence that the iPhone is multitasking at all. It's a subtle, yet wondrous, experience that had me instantly smitten.

The virtual keyboard, a concern of many, is much better than you would suppose. I chalk this up to the wonderful touchscreen, a far superior descendent of the more common plastic touchscreens of other, less divinely favored, devices. While plastic screen devices require much more force to register a click, the iPhone's screen registers it effortlessly. Clicking a key is very easy, feedback on the click is more pleasing than I had feared, and, with a week of practice, I've gotten pretty good at typing. The main downside to the keyboard is that the email keyboard will not orient any way except vertical, which makes things tight for thumb typing, and the period and comma require mode-switching to the number & punctuation keyboard (or, as I discovered, tapping and dragging off the mode-switch key to the punctuation mark you want: this will type the mark, and bring you back to the main keyboard). The mode switching isn't as bothersome as I had assumed it would be; on reflection, I realize that I've been beaten into acceptance of the idea by my old Treo 650, which requires the same, only worse.

It is UI polish that makes the iPhone a dream to use. I hated the idea of web browsing on the Treo: I love it on the iPhone. I hated checking my mail on the Treo: it is second-nature on the iPhone. The iPod interface is different but still elegant. This actually brings up what I see as the only problem moving forward: I'm using the phone so much, that battery drain is an issue. Even though the battery performance is better than most comparable phones, I'm draining it much faster because I'm using it a lot more. I'm listening to music, and doing screen-brightening things like the web and email, while with the Treo, I seldom did more than brief checks of the calendar, and talk on the phone. So my standby time for my phone is paradoxically a lot shorter than with my old phone.

Because I'm a fairly grumpy person, I have to get my gripes in before closing:

1. There's no copy/cut/paste in email, and there's no whole-line deleting. It makes replying to emails a pain. I like to edit quoted emails down to what is relevant, and that is exceedingly annoying to do.

2. The iPod functionality has a bug that shows the wrong album cover art frequently in the vertical view. I was wondering why The Postal Service sounded an awful lot like Tom Waits earlier today, until turning the phone sideways showed me the correct Nighthawks at the Diner cover, instead of the We Will Become Silhouettes image that the vertical view shows. Bugs bother me, and obvious ones like this make me cringe.

3. I purchased a Jawbone bluetooth headset to go with the phone, and it works beautifully, but it is bothersome if I don't want to use it. The phone tries to transfer calls to the headset three times during a call, even when I explicitly tell it to use the phone instead of the headset. This forces me to turn bluetooth on and off on the phone a few times a day, and that is a nested option that I have to navigate to. That's a little tiresome.

It also doesn't adequately indicate when the headset is actively connected, so I often have to test the phone on a number to determine whether or not it is going to offer me the choices of "Jawbone, iPhone, Speaker" or if it will just start the call using the default typical phone configuration.

These are fairly minor gripes: I'm surprised I have so few, and that they're as mild as they are. What gives me hope is these can be easily addressed in future OS updates. The virtual keyboard can be updated to include the period and comma on the main keyboard, the email client can be updated to work in sideways mode, the bluetooth status indicator can be enhanced.

The people who love Apple do so because Apple actually delivers what it says it will deliver. The iPhone is actually as good as Apple told you it was going to be, and the future for it looks very bright.

In North America, the hazy days of summer are back. That means it's time to conserve energy during peak hours. The U.S. Southwest is currently sweltering under daytime temperatures of over 100 degrees (Fahrenheit), but that doesn't mean businesses and individuals shouldn't be trying their level best to avoid excess power consumption while the sun is scorching. The risk of electricity outages is just too great under such circumstances. It's better to wait until the sun goes down to do things like running the washing machine. If we could find a way to store the extra juice power plants produce during off-peak hours and keep it on-hand during particularly stressful periods, we'd all be better off.

But wait a minute -- we already can. At least, we have a device, just finding emerging use, that's capable of doing just that. It's the sodium-sulfur (NaS) battery, and it's in the news today. USA Today carries an article, "New battery packs powerful punch", that touts the merits of NaS technology as a means of storing that extra juice for emergency situations.

NaS batteries are industrial-size units that could fill a garage. They offer the promise of enabling utilities to store energy in much the same way that reservoirs store water but in a much more efficient fashion than the typical vaults of lead-acid batteries now employed by some power companies. They could also make the electricity generated by wind farms more attractive as a commodity.

While they've been in development for decades, it's only now that NaS systems are beginning to see deployment in countries such as Japan and the United States. The city of Tsunashima, Japan, has installed a 6-megawatt unit attached to its local grid. And American Electric Power (AEP), one of the largest U.S. utilities, has been using a 1.2-MW unit in Charleston, W.Va., the past year and plans to install one twice that size elsewhere in the state next year, according to a spokesperson.

"Our vision is to have [batteries] throughout our system," Ali Nourai, AEP's manager of distributed energy, told USA Today.

Other utilities are planning or considering the technology, according to the national newspaper. On Long Island, N.Y., the New York Power Authority plans to install a NaS unit at a bus depot. They'll charge the battery at night, when power prices are low, and discharge it during the day to pump natural gas into the fuel tanks of the buses. That should lower costs for the transit company and ease stress on the local grid. And Pacific Gas and Electric has plans to install a 5-MW battery for backup purposes by 2009.

Look to see more NaS installations following suit. If there are more efficient and less expensive means of wringing every last watt of energy out of the electrical grid, look for power engineers to find them. The latest tool in their kit could be a technology that has been waiting for years to get its chance to keep the juice flowing.

Just don't start thinking, however, that this will give you an excuse to waste a precious commodity when you know you shouldn't. Remember to conserve.

Sparse cellular coverage in the Adirondacks was the final straw in my decision to leave the old pre-Cingular AT&T Wireless network back in 1997 for Verizon Wireless. This past weekend saw me back in the Park, this time with phones from both Verizon and the new, post-Cingular AT&T. This is, needless to say, an iPhone story.

New York's lush Adirondacks, the largest state park in the U.S., includes what must be the largest inhabited expanse of cellular non-coverage in the lower 48. Created by a covenant in the state's constitution, the Park contains hundreds of pre-existing small towns and small commercial enterprises within its 6.1 million acres. The Park's motto, taken from a phrase in the Constitution, is "Forever Wild."

In the late 1990s, my various frustrations with AT&T boiled over when I casually mentioned to a customer service manager that there was still at least one vast tract, right in New York State, not covered by the company's then-new and much-touted nationwide coverage. The manager, consulting a map, said that no such place existed. I, consulting my personal experiences of the prior few weeks, said that there was no signal in Lake Placid, Keene, Keene Valley, Elizabethtown, Lewis, Jay, and presumably all the other towns between, roughly, Lake George Village, Potsdam, and Watertown.

The manager maintained his stance and I decided to take my business to a company that would at least acknowledge the limitations of its network. After all, when would AT&T ever get around to improving coverage if it thought it was already okay?

As it turns out, sometime in the intervening 10 years, it did. And last weekend, armed with my new AT&T iPhone and my one-year-old Verizon Razr, I traveled to those same towns. Both networks still have poor coverage, except in Lake Placid, where AT&T seemed to have the stronger signal, but each was more than adequate. On the other hand, each had a tiny signal at a restaurant in Keene, 15 miles east of Lake Placid. A fellow patron, sitting at the bar, saw me staring at my phone, told me of a parking lot just up the road where I could pull over and get a good connection.

The iPhone, though, has Wi-Fi as well as AT&T's EDGE network. Though it seems odd to imagine the one available without the other, that was true at a campground about 5 miles east of Lake Placid. Someone, perhaps the campground office, had an open Linksys router, even as both cellphones said "No Service" (the iPhone, of course, in stunning color). I attached the iPhone to the Internet via the router. Hopefully, I was drawing from a broadband connection, not slowing down someone's dial-up!

Given the limited connectivity, I haven't used the e-mail on the iPhone very much. Even back in Manhattan, I'm not sure how much I will. It's easy to set up POP accounts, but not so easy to use them, especially if you get a lot of spam. I'm used to killing messages based only on the From and Subject lines, but you have to open a message to delete it on the iPhone, a pointless and tedious process that also forces you to open legitimate messages before I want to. Web mail doesn't have the same problems, and tThe mobile version of Gmail is very nice. But in any event, the iPhone will never replace a Blackberry until it communicates with corporate mail servers better, in particular with Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Notes Server. You need the synchronization that these servers provide.

Even without using e-mail much, the iPhone proved to be a very useful traveling companion, even on a vacation devoted to camping and rock climbing. Google Maps was useful enough several times to nearly justify the purchase on its own. Though you have to be connected to the EDGE network (or a Wi-Fi one) to get directions, the most recent ones stay on the phone. Fresh weather reports are also a godsend for anyone out camping, hiking, and climbing. To call weather in the Daks, as they're called, variable to is an understatement. They're one of those places where if you don't like the weather, you wait a few minutes.

There's one network connectivity issue even more fundamental then EDGE and Wi-Fi: the power grid. On my iPhone's second day I unexpectedly ran down the battery, I believe because I inadvertently left the Wi-Fi running. I had no car charger; the Razr's car charger is USB, but not the same USB the iPhone uses. The Razr's cables have the tiny connector tip that many digital cameras have. The iPhone itself has a proprietary port and, at the other end of its cable, a standard USB at the other end to connect to a computer.

This morning, I notice that XtremeMac has a nice car charger for $19.95 that keeps the USB connector distinct from the cigarette lighter plug, so that you don't need to carry a separate USB cable for synching.

I was never as worried about the health and well-being of my Razr as that of the iPhone. Griffin not only has has a similar charger at the same price, there are cases and other accessories for the iPhone as well.

After about a week, I'm pretty thrilled with the iPhone, but I'm sure it's not for everyone, if only for the price, the AT&T exclusive deal, and the e-mail limitations. For a Mac user like me, though, it's liberating to use the same iCal, the same Addressbook, and the same iTunes as on my computers, and to rapidly synch with all of them and with iPhoto as well.

I had only a little taste of the much-noted activation problems Friday night, as described earlier this week by my colleague Suhas, with whom I waited on line at the Times Square AT&T store. I entered the store about 6:05, as the 13th customer, and left about 6:35. Most of that time was waiting for some database that was overloaded. (I suppose having 12 simultaneous transactions in all 1800 stores is unusual, but it seems like something worth testing.) The credit check done in the store wasn't retained by AT&T's system, so I had to do it all over again at home, a process that took all of about 3 minutes.

My main problem was that I didn't transfer my Verizon phone number. I have some months to go on my contract, and even though the company is being reasonable in pro-rating termination fees, as described by MSNBC here, I still have my daughter, who is on my contract, to consider.

Scaling back the existing contract is still cheaper than terminating it. And if I'm going to continue to pay for the Verizon phone, I might as well have use of it, hence getting a new number for the iPhone. Which, shockingly was simply assigned in iTunes without my having any say in it. The first number was awful. It was so bad I'm not even going to list it here, except the area code, 646, with its ugly and unlucky 4 right in the middle. There were other 4s, and no 8s. Awful. And very unlucky.

So I called AT&T's special number for iPhone support and got some of the politest, friendliest, and most helpful help I've ever gotten from a customer support line. It was so good I had to ask the woman I spoke with if she was with AT&T or with Apple, not that I've ever had so nice an experience even calling Apple. She worked for AT&T. Perhaps they put their best people on the iPhone lines that night.

In any event, she gave me another phone number, in the 917 area code, as I requested. The new number has no 4s, and though she offered me one that had an 8, I like the one I ended up getting even better. Every other number is a 5, which means that every number touches its neighbors, at least diagonally. Before hanging up she mentioned that AT&T normally charges $36 to change a number, but she was able to waive that, presumably because the old one was still warm.

I've hardly given the phone number out as yet, so I haven't gotten to test the visual voicemail that's supposed to be one its main features. But then, the iPhone is so much more than a phone. I've spent much more time listening to music and podcasts, taking and transferring photos, looking up driving directions, and checking the weather than I have making phone calls. And after all, where I was, there really wasn't much cellular service to begin with.

When a fire ripped through the Walgreens drug store and Subway sandwich shop in downtown Palo Alto late Sunday night, most residents worried about damage to the historic Walgreens building, street closures, and what would happen to their prescription records. But the tech savvy had another concern.

â''The building just suffered a structural collapse. Everyone is being evacuated 200 feet from the structure in case it goes down. Could PAIX be in danger?â'' posted a city resident on the local discussion board, Town Square Forum, at 11:47 pm July 1.

PAIX, which once stood for Palo Alto Internet Exchange, houses banks of computers just a few feet away from the burned Walgreens.

Built as part of a DEC research facility in 1991, PAIX is one of the oldest Internet exchange points in continuous operation; such facilities allow diverse commercial networks to pass data back and forth. In 1997 it was one of the largest Internet exchanges on the planet, its share of U.S. Internet traffic around that time was about 60 percent. These days, operated by Switch and Data as the Peering And Internet Exchange, PAIX handles 30 or 40 gigabits per second of Internet traffic. That still makes it one of the largest exchanges in the U.S., though itâ''s dwarfed by mega exchanges in other countries. A failure at PAIX would slow down Internet traffic as packets found other, less efficient routes to travel, says Bill Woodcock of Packet Clearing House, but probably not significantly.

â''The loss would likely not be catastrophic,â'' Vinton Cerf, vice president and chief internet evangelist for Google, told Spectrum.

Still, the threat to PAIX was keeping at least a few tech cognizanti up Sunday night. But PAIX was spared. â''No danger to PAIX. Fire is out!" another resident posted on the discussion board at 1:40 a.m.

Employees, however, are still entering the building through a side door; the front door is behind police barricades.

First, the good news: Hiring is up in the tech world. Next, the bad news: Hiring is up in the tech world. If the dot-com bubble of the last decade taught us anything, it's that too much good news can be bad news. It's too early to predict that the turnaround in the tech sector is going to lead to the overindulgences of the past, but it's still a specter that haunts every piece of positive data that arrives on the relative health of the technology job market. In this month's issue of Spectrum, contributor Terry Costlow, who covers engineering careers for us, reports -- in "Hiring Heats Up" -- that tech jobs are plentiful again and wages are on the rise to meet growing demand.

The boisterous era of workplaces filled with foosball tables may be out of fashion in most settings, but that doesn't mean that perks small and large aren't being dangled in front of potential new hires nowadays.

"It's gotten a lot harder to find talent," Amy McKee, senior manager for global staffing at Autodesk, of San Rafael, Calif., told Costlow "There's a lot more venture capital money in Silicon Valley. Candidates now have multiple offers."

The industry trade group AeA (formerly the American Electronics Association) estimates that the United States added 150 000 high-tech jobs in 2006, nearly twice as many as in the previous year, for a two-year increase in total employment of 2 percent. The group estimates that unemployment is now 2.5 percent among computer scientists and less than 2 percent among engineers, Costlow writes. In economics, that's the equivalent of full employment.

Moreover, pay raises of 4 to 5 percent are considered the norm for U.S. tech employees. Plus, job security looks much more stable than in recent times. "There's much less job hopping," Elaine Peacock, the rewards manager at Freescale Semiconductor UK in Glasgow, told Costlow. "That's why the market is not moving as much."

While stock options are still being used as incentives for employees, the preferred new reward is an old standby, bonuses. Costlow notes that employers tend to favor bonuses because they allow them to retain talent without ratcheting up base salaries. For example, Freescale is holding wage increases to 2 to 4 percent in Europe, about the same level as last year, but the company is becoming much more generous with bonuses.

"We're rolling out a new bonus program," Mike Bristow, manager of compensation and benefits at Siemens VDO Automotive of Farmington, Mich., told Costlow. "Those who are eligible will see a significant increase." Bristow said that bonuses are tied to company performance, as well as to individual achievement. "When we're doing well, the program funds itself. When we're not, it doesn't cost us anything."

As if on cue, an item labeled "Dot-Com Work Culture Making a Comeback?" appears in today's line-up at the techie community site Slashdot. Citing a report from Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu, the international business consultancy, a Slashdot contributor noted that, "[H]igh on the agenda of CEOs around the world is the shortage of tech talent." The posting links to a column by Brendon Chase for builder.au, a software developer resource out of Australia. In it, Chase writes:

The word is out. IT rock geeks are back in demand and stereotypical "dot-com" culture (and smell) is back in vogue. Managers are again in a bidding war to compete with their rivals and new Web juggernauts like Google to retain their best employees by offering a laid-back environment to benefit staff moral, retention and productivity.

So the sands of time have seemingly erased the pitted landscape of the tech wreck of this decade and restored a competitive environment for workers to grow once more. It may not yet be appropriate to demand Hacky Sack breaks in the afternoon (oh, those were the days). But the doom and gloom have lifted. And talented employees are getting the benefits they deserve again. Tattoo parlors the world over must be rejoicing.

(but does it crank up the radio when no one is watching?)

On a sunny June morning in Silicon Valley, a new driver took his first driving test. And while it sure felt like watching my learning-to-drive teen carefully negotiate the family car around a deserted parking lot, this Volkswagon Passat cruising the parking lot of Mountain Viewâ''s Shoreline Amphitheater was something quite different. Because it was driving itself.

A brisk breeze off the bay cooled the crowd of observers as VW pulled up to the four-way stop. Another car was already there. A third car arrived from a different direction. The VW waited while the first car made a turn.

A group of observers held its collective breath, waiting to see if the VW would move forward next, or if it would wait for the third car to go out of turn. The crowd burst into applause when the VW did indeed move forward, soon followed by the third car. Download video

The VW, codenamed Junior, is an autonomous vehicle designed for the upcoming Urban Challenge sponsored by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa). This, the third in a series of Grand Challenge competitions for autonomous vehicles, will go forward on November 3 at a location yet to be announced. The winning team collects US$2 million; second place is $1 million and third $500,000. But first potential challengersâ''there are 53--have to qualify by passing a series of tests administered by DARPA representatives. Junior passed with only one mistake.

Juniorâ''s pretty smart, and heâ''s got better vision than most drivers. Mike Montemerlo, a member of the Stanford Racing Team, gave me a tour of Juniorâ''s sensors. Download video Junior can look 200 meters ahead and behind with two lidars mounted on the front and two more on the back of the car. He does a 360-degree scan with a high definition lidar mounted on top of the car 15 times a secondâ''that one sees 65 meters in the distance, while two more lidars stare down at the lane markers. And heâ''s not afraid to ask for directions; heâ''s got several GPS receivers that place him on the map with an accuracy of about 50 centimeters.

He is probably more cautious than most human drivers. â''He drives like my grandma,â'' commented one spectator. And this caution got him into a bit of trouble.

The qualifying tests were in three categories: an emergency stop, which tests the only remote control feature of the car; a navigation test, in which the car follows a programmed route selected by Darpa, staying in its lanes, stopping at stop signs, and making U-turns successfully; and traffic, in which Darpa representatives find out if the contending car can deal with other cars on the road, including following a moving car and negotiating a four-way stop.

Junior passed the first two tests handily. In the traffic segment of the evaluation, Junior was brilliant at four-way stops. However, in an attempt to pass a stopped car, Junior froze. The problem, it turned out, was that one of the cones marking the boundaries of the course had been set a little out of line, and Junior, calculating that it didnâ''t have enough room to pass safely, decided to wait. Forever, if need be; artificial drivers are apparently a lot more patient than real ones. (In this case, until a human driver hit override on the autonomous driving system.) The Darpa representatives allowed Junior to retake this portion of the test, and the car passed.

Meanwhile, in an adjacent parking lot, Junior 2 took this visitor for a ride; Junior 2 is operating with limited smarts; heâ''s got fewer sensors hooked up, so while he can follow a preset course he canâ''t yet deal with traffic. Eventually, Juniorâ''s smarts will be moved over to Junior 2, so a presumably less dented Passat will represent Stanford in the finals. I was only a little nervous; a member of the Stanford development team sat in the driverâ''s chair. His hands stayed off the controls, but he was ready to slam the emergency disable button just in case Junior 2 ran amok.

While the DARPA officials have yet to announce whether or not Junior made the cut, Stanford team members were pleased with his performance and expect to move forward to the national qualifying event, to be held in October. Up next for me; 40 hours on the road with a newly permitted 15-year-old driver behind the wheel. Iâ''m thinking driving with Junior will turn out to have been a lot less nerve-wracking.

The hype cycle often looks like a sine wave. Starting out, everything is on the rise. At its height, though, there's nowhere to go but down. So it is with the much-hyped iPhone, the center of the tech world's attention for the past few weeks. Now, that the first shipment has been sold -- over a half million flying off the shelves of Apple Stores and AT&T Phone Centers this weekend -- comes the inevitable second-guessing, the technical glitches, and the sticker shock. The Associated Press today prominently leads with a report on new owners experiencing trouble activating their iPhones. Of course, unless you can activate the device, you're stuck with a handsome paperweight -- costing US $500 to $600.

Representatives from AT&T told the AP that the widespread problem is due to server overload over the weekend, as nearly a half million new customers all tried to do the same thing at the same time, open an iPhone account. The telephone giant's reps said today that it was making technical adjustments to its activation system so that new subscribers wouldn't face the same delays.

"We are working on any issues on an individual basis with customers who were impacted," Michael Coe, a spokesperson for AT&T, told the AP.

Reuters carried a similar story yesterday. While most new users gushed about the merits of the new device, some were not thrilled about the delays in getting their iPhones to work. "It's a real buzz kill," said Brad Bargman of Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, who waited nine hours on Friday to buy his unit. "Now I'm soured on it a little bit."

And the technophiles at C|Net offered praise and caution together in their comprehensive technical review of the new smart phone. They note that the "iPhone has variable call quality and lacks some basic features found in many cell phones, including stereo Bluetooth support and 3G compatibility. Integrated memory is stingy for an iPod, and you have to sync the iPhone to manage music content."

However, their reviewers' final word is largely positive:

Despite some important missing features, a slow data network, and call quality that doesn't always deliver, the Apple iPhone sets a new benchmark for an integrated cell phone and MP3 player.

So, as usual, the ultimate judges will be individual consumers who are shelling out top dollar for an unproven device with plenty of potential but just now taking its first baby steps in the real world, where things don't always work the way they're expected to. Give Apple credit for putting together a clever, sophisticated handheld in version 1.0, but don't be surprised when you hear a little moaning coming from the ranks of anxious early adopters who were expecting a little more for their money.