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Variously called tablet PCs, tablet computers, or convertibles, mobile computing devices combining fully functional keyboards, touch screens, and all the performance and features you expect from a business laptop computer are solutions for business professionals on the go.

The iPad was not the first tablet computer. The tablet computer has been around for on the order of two decades. The original tablet computer was not a skinny undersized Internet connection device. It was a super-laptop.

In a fit of marketing hubris worthy of Microsoft, Apple hijacked the term "tablet computer" to paste on their oversized but underfeatured smartphone. The iPad is, in network-systems parlance, essentially a "thin client."

Now, I've never much liked the term "tablet computer," anyway. To me it evokes images of Edward-Gorey-esque illustrations of graveyards. I guess from that point of view, I'm perfectly happy having it applied to the physically thin, usefulness-challenged iPad thin client, which actually does look like a Colonial American slate gravestone that has been torn away from its rightful job keeping the mouldering corpse of a Revolutionary War hero from climbing out of the ground to pester third-millennium technogeeks who just wanna surf the Internet while pretending to pump iron at the gym.

"I'm resting between sets," they usually tell me.

I dunno. When I rest between sets, I'm usually waiting for the stars to clear from my vision, my panting breath to re-oxygenate my blood, and my heart rate to return to normal after exhausting my major muscle groups with nearly three-hundred pounds balanced on my shoulders. The last thing on my mind then is clearing out spam from my email inbox, or finding out what Lady Ga-Ga has been up to today.

But, different strokes ....

So, what were tablet computers during the first 90% of their existence?

Doc Manchek, a main protagonist in my novel Red is seen using the original style of tablet computer to run through his email during a stopover at the Driskill hotel in Austin, Texas while traveling by motorcycle across the southern United States. This description, which was drafted, edited, and ready for publication before Apple brought out their pathetic version, shows what is essentially a full-service laptop computer fitted with a touch screen.

Of course, just pasting a touch screen on a laptop-computer display would make a very clumsy package. To properly operate a touch screen, you've got to have it sitting against a fairly solid surface. Otherwise, poking it in the heat of doing whatever you're wanting to do with your portable computer, from ordering electronic parts online to writing the Great American Novel, or even just shoving email spam into the trash bin, would result in bouncing around of the display, knocking the whole thing off your lap, and possible premature failure of the display hinge. To avoid such unpleasantness, tablet computer makers developed an interesting display-hinge arrangement that allowed the user to either raise the display screen over the keyboard, as in a regular laptop, or flip it entirely over to cover the keyboard so it could be used like the current generation of tablets.

Being a complex enhancement of a top-of-the-line mobile-computing solution (which at the time meant a laptop), the thing cost about double what you could get a high-performance business-oriented laptop for. It was economically justifiable only for people who really needed touch-screen-oriented applications as well as keyboard applications. For the vast majority of casual consumers, who just want to download music videos from the Web, it was rediculous overkill.

Some of us, however, wanted them in them in the worst way. When Apple started yammering about coming out with a tablet computer at a bargain price, we started salivating.

When we actually saw the iPad, however, our faces fell. No keyboard. You try hacking HTML code without a keyboard! Or, writing anything more extensive than a text message. Worthless for professional use. In addition, the thing seemed to lack enough horsepower or memory to do decent graphic illustration. Basically, it was a smartphone that was too big to hold up to your ear!

So, it's not a smartphone. It's not an ebook reader. It's not a real computer. It's too big and heavy to shove into your pocket. It's a thin-client Web appliance.

I'd still like to get myself a real tablet computer.

I guess they're now called "convertibles."

I saw an ad for one of them the other day for less than $600. Maybe next time I get paid.

This is going to have to be a short post, sans image because I'm running out of work time, today. Before I dive into what I want to write about, however, I want to thank my loyal fans, who've put up with my website going "dark" for several months while I consolidated my move to Florida. Especially, all of you who've jumped in to add your comments so quickly after I started posting again, and opened the site up for comments. The hard part has been to keep up with all of your kind words.

What I want to talk about today is a little saying I picked up in MBA school, although I do not remember exactly where it originated: "Do what you do best, and let somebody else do the rest."

This saying came up in answer to multiple commenters complementing my blog site, and wondering how I managed it.

The short answer is that I didn't. I'm a writer. What I write about is mostly technology, but I also tell a few stories, crack a few jokes, and even cover some news items.That's what I do best, and have been doing it long enough so I can claim to be an expert.

Although I know how to create a website, and have done so many times, it's not what I do best. Other people can do a much better job in less time than me. So, what I do is hire them to do what they do best -- design websites.

Since I'm trying to drum up interest in my latest novel, Red, and the principle of doing what you do best is a major theme in it, I'm going to be flagrantly self-promoting and refer to it.

The main character, Red McKenna, is on a quest to find her long-lost father. Her initial idea is to just drive to the last place she knows for sure he was, and look. That gets her about 250 miles (out of a couple of thousand) before she ends up stranded by the side of the road.

She does finally succeed in her quest, but not without the aid of over a dozen experts who each contribute a little bit to her reaching her goal, from the mechanic who fixes her car, to the SEAL team that finally springs the trap to catch the bad guy. Part way through the project, she admits: "When I first started out, I thought I could do it on my own, but I couldn't....I didn't realize how big it was until I started working on the details."

What she ends up doing is managing the project, not doing it all herself. She's the one who wants to find her father, but she really doesn't have the skills to complete all of the tasks her quest involves. What saves her bacon is hooking up with her mentor, Doc, who does know how to handle the thousands of details that any project involves. He knows to identify those details, then find an expert to do each one right.

So, when you decide you want to build your website, or repair your car's transmission, or any of the thousands of things that people living in a technological society need to do, start by asking if it's in your area of expertise.

We all have our area of expertise, which is a small island surrounded by an ocean of stuff we're really not competent to do on our own. If what you want to do is in your area of expertise, have at it. If not, go find somebody who can do it better. Then get them to do it.

A final example: I'm in the process of publishing a sequel to Red entitled Vengeance Is Mine! One of the most expensive parts of publishing a novel is getting cover art.

I'm supposed to have some talent as an artist. In fact, my mother once told me she expected me to grow up to be a graphic artist, not a writer. I can -- in fact I did -- rough out a cover for the new book that cost me nothing.

I'm not planning to use it, however. I know that there are people out there whom I can pay to put together a much better, more attractive, and more compelling cover than I can. I'm going to end up paying them to do it because I'm not conceited enough to think I can do a better job than somebody who does it day-in and day-out for a living.

Just as I did for Red, I expect to rough out a concept, which I'll hand off to a professional graphic artist, who will do a much better job executing the finished product than I could.

The Red McKenna series chronicles the adventures of a six-foot, three-inch redhead with an athlete's body, a mathematical-genius mind, and an independent streak a mile wide.

Months ago, I promised to alert readers of this blog when my first full-length novel Red appeared. Well, it's out. Actually, it's been out for a while in hard cover, paperback, and e-book formats. It is available through online and brick-and-mortar booksellers. Published by iUniverse, the novel introduces a unique heroine whom I think readers of this blog could relate to. She's a six-foot, three-inch redhead with a mathematical genius mind, as well as a crack-athelete's body and an independent streak a mile wide. Her soul mate is a biker who's even bigger, smarter, and more independent. Together, they harness science and advanced technology to solve riddles that life throws at them.

The idea for the story started back in early 2001 on a bitterly cold January night in Woonsocket, Rhode Island. I'd just flown in from Arizona to spend a week emptying out and closing up the house of my recently deceased father, who'd finally succumbed to cancer at age 87.

When I say it was bitterly cold, I ain't just kiddin'. The high for the day was about zero Fahrenheit, which is cold even for New England in January. For a desert rat living in Arizona, it was unbelievable!

Then, the sun set, and it got colder.

I curled up in a lotus position with the thickest quilt I could find wrapped around me, hoping the furnace would soon drive away the chill that had seeped into the walls during two weeks of the house being empty. Since the house had been empty, there was no TV. I'd been cooped up on an airplane for hours with nothing to do but read, so I was read out. My body was still on Mountain Standard Time, and I'm a night owl, anyway, so sleep was many hours away.

I just sat, and thought.

What I thought was the beginning of this story. It was going to be the adventures of two young people who made a transcontinental journey by motorcycle, visiting all the places I liked to go by motorcycle, doing the things I like to do when touring by motorcycle, and meeting the kinds of people I meet when wandering around by motorcycle.

To make it interesting, I'd have the lady be a newbie biker, who'd never been on a motorcycle tour before. Everything would be new to her, and a surprise.

What would she look like? Well, I like tall redheads who are really, really smart. My mother was tall, had auburn hair, and was one of the smartest people I've ever met. My wife is tall, has red hair, and is no slouch between the ears, either. In fact, I'm a sucker for tall redheads with lots of brains. So, my heroine would be tall, have red hair, and be really, really smart.

Since everything in an exciting fiction story must be bigger than life, she'd have to be extremely tall - like six-foot, three-inches tall - have lots of flaming red hair, and be a genius with a full scholarship in an Ivy League college studying something that gives most people phobias: mathematics.

The guy would be a veteran biker, who knew all the right places to go, and could introduce her to the most interesting people. To be able to match her, he'd have to be really tall - like six-foot, six-inches tall - more athletic, and even smarter.

They'd visit motorcycle races, camp out at biker rallies, spend hours shopping at motorcycle flea markets, and spend evenings getting plastered at biker bars. Being really, really smart would give them the wherewithal to thumb their noses at convention whenever they wanted to. They could get into stuff the rest of us only fantasize about.

It'd be a lot of fun for them, and, maybe, for readers.

In that form, however, it'd be lucky to make fifty pages long. That's a longish short story, not a novel. A novel needs a lot more. It needs character development. It needs suspense. It needs mystery.

It needed a lot of work.

Over the next nine years, the story grew. The young lady got a name, Judith McKenna (nicknamed "Red" for obvious reasons), as well as a troubled past. Her troubles, however, were not her fault, and not the fault of any character flaw. The troubles stemmed from a singular event that made building relationships difficult at best, especially building relationships with guys. That event was the untimely and mysterious disappearance of her father just at the time an adolescent girl needs a father figure most.

So, the father figure would be supplied by the mysterious biker, who takes her on a journey, which is no longer a touristy vacation, but a journey of self-discovery. Who was she, inside? How could she relate to other people? What was she going to do with her life?

One of the ambiguities she'd have to resolve could be a bit of sexual confusion. That could be fun!

The mystery, of course, is what happened to her father. Why'd he leave? Why'd he not come back?

Now, my favorite fiction genres over the past lots-and-lots-of-decades have been mystery and science fiction. And, my favorite stories have always combined both. And, my favorite author has been Rober Heinlein, who generally combined those two genres and used them to weave epic tales that explored basic human values. That's what I'd try to do.

Judith's story had a mystery, and had some serious character-development potential. It also had two young people off on their own, providing plenty of opportunities for fooling around between sheets, which will seriously spice up any story. In fact, giving her a chance to peel back layers to slowly discover who this biker was would add a second mystery, which might be fun to develop as well.

What she would find is a scientific genius who could provide technology that would make solving her other mystery - what happened to her father - possible, where it hadn't been before. He'd have built his own company in very short time, capitalizing on his inventions in aerospace technology. I know about aerospace technology. I can do that.

With all that additional content packed in, the space needed to tell the story expanded tenfold. When I finally sat down to type it out, it took a year instead of the three-to-six months I envisioned. From a simple little story about a motorcycle trip, it grew to an epic adventure.

By the way, it's still growing, with new titles coming soon. My wife says she likes the sequel even better.

I think you'll like it, too.

This en

View of the Damifino docked in Seneca, Ill. prior to departure.

This entry breaks, once again, from the stated theme of this blog, which is to look at repurcussions of technological developments for society. We'll get back to that theme when we get back to that theme. In the meantime, take a trip with me down the Illinois, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Tombigbee rivers, thence around the Gulf of Mexico to the southern tip of Florida.

Some 40-plus years ago, my then bride-to-be asked: "Hey, could we live on a boat?"

She'd seen my parents spending weeks at a time aboard their 36-foot cabin cruiser during the summer, and it looked like a fun, romantic (and cheap) lifestyle. We were at the time firmly rooted in the Boston, Mass. area, however, so the full-time live-aboard lifestyle was impractical. Yet, the idea persisted, resurfacing from time to time.

Another persistent theme became the "I've never been to Florida. Could we go there?" question. Having visited my grandparents at their winter home near Orlando (long before Disney Corp. turned the place into Mickey's Corporate Office), my impression of Florida was of a gigantic sand spit with bugs, and rain every afternoon. It was never top of my list of places to go, so that idea didn't get very far, either.

More recently, when the school failed to pick up Bonnie's teaching contract for the forthcoming year, we finally decided to chuck it all, and abandon the Chicago-area winters for year-round live-aboard boating at the southern tip of Florida.

In the decades since getting married, we'd developed into gypsies, anyway; we'd picked up our own cabin cruiser; and learned the advantages of avoiding the annual butt-freezing season. It was time to live out Bonnie's particular fantasies.

The first step was, of course, a reconnaissance trip. Borrowing the temporarily empty house of a friend in Marco Island, Florida, we spent a week sampling the fleshpots (which, unlike Las Vegas, means beaches, not night clubs), and scrutinizing marinas.

Destination in hand, we returned to refit the Damifino (pronounced "Damn if I know!" We didn't name her. The previous owner did.) for indefinite occupancy, and move her through the western half of the Great Loop cruise track down through the river system and the Inland Waterway to the Gulf of Mexico, thence around to Florida's southern tip.

Lest this entry be completely without technological interest, let me note that I'm writing this on the upper deck (under that blue awning in the picture) using my laptop computer, which is wirelessly linked to a WiFi router attached to one of the bulkheads below, and running on ship's 12 VDC. Also on the wireless LAN are a printer, and Bonnie's laptop. The router ties into the Internet through a cellphone link.

The text editor I'm using does not run on my laptop. It's an example of thin-client technology in which I type into text boxes in a web page provided by the blogging section of my website, which runs in rented space on my ISP's server. Since the ISP's hardware is a server farm distributed over much of the U.S., it's also an example of cloud computing at its best.

Ain't tecknollogie wunnerfull!

We're now ready -- or as ready as we ever will be. Today, we drop the lines and blow a kiss and a wave to Illinois. In the words of the Paul Simon song: "We're on our way. We don't know where we're goin'!"

We'll know when we get there.

Author C.G. Masi's forthcoming novel looks at how technology developers go about their business in a corporate environment.

Many thanks to the loyal readers of this blog, who have put up with a low posting frequency over the past few months. My excuse is that I've been trying to get my next book into production. It's nearly there, so I should be able to provide more frequent posts to this blog.

Readers who enjoy my commentaries on how technological advances affect current events will have a lot to interest them in the book, which should be in bookstores around mid-summer. Entitled Red, it is a novel whose main characters work in a private applied-physics research company. The title comes from the nickname for the central character, Judith McKenna, who is a tall, athletic, young mathematician, who tosses everything away to search for her missing father after the authorities have exhausted all conventional means of finding him. Her faltering quest is saved by Doc, her mentor and sometime lover, who shows her how to organize the scientific and technical resources she didn't even realize were available to solve the mystery.

To reach her goal, she needs to learn techniques of organization, resource allocation, team building, and decision making under uncertain conditions. If you thought such issues were dry and academic, it's because you haven't seen them played out in the emotionally charged, risk-filled environments where real-life technology developers live and work, where millions of dollars, careers, and even lives are often at stake, and any mistake can lead to disaster.

If you think that's hyperbole, take a look at what's happening right now in the Gulf of Mexico.

We're now doing the final polish edit on Red. The schedule calls for that to be done before the end of June, at which time the book will go directly into production.

Most of the work is now in the hands of others, so I will have more time to devote to looking at how technology interacts with society, which is the focus of this blog. I plan to start by sorting through the issues surrounding the Gulf oil disaster. What actually happened? Who should really be pointing fingers at whom? Are the actions contemplated by the Obama Administration likely to help the situation, or make it worse?

Hopefully, I can help make sense of it all.

First, I want to thank the large number of readers who have taken the time to add comments to my blog. I've been blogging for about three years now, and this is the highest volume of comments, and the kindest words in them, that I've ever encountered. It's very encouraging.

Second, I should apologize for being lazy about adding new posts. I've been busy with books. The third edition of my How-To book entitled How to Set Up Your Motorcycle Workshop is coming out momentarily (it was supposed to be out in mid-January, but the publisher warned me it would be delayed at the printer). I have a collection of short stories entitled Shakedown Blues, which is just out. I'm also hammering hard and heavy on the keyboard with my first full novel, provisionally entitled Red. I hope to have Red out sometime in the second quarter of 2010. I'll have more to say about these books later in this post.

The main subject of this posting, however, is blogging itself. I've received multiple requests for advice about blogging. Now, I do not consider myself an expert. Lots of other folks have blogs that generate a lot more traffic than mine. But, I've been at it awhile, so here goes.

Blogging is basically another in a long list of publishing methods. It fills a niche between social networking, and professionally produced news websites. Professional journalists treat blogging as the online equivalent of newspaper or magazine editorial writing. That is, they commit to a regular deadline schedule, and write more-or-less to a set length. Usually, they draft the copy for their postings using a word processor (WP), such as Microsoft Word (I use the Open Source equivalent: OpenOffice Writer). They revise and polish articles extensively in their WP, and transfer them to the blogging software for publication. I do a final polish in the blogging software, where I can see what the final result will look like, and then hit the "publish" button.

Blogging software was developed a few years ago to make it easier for journalists, who are generally not web experts, to create copy for Internet publication. I believe the original idea was to make it possible for journalists to bang out short, highly formatted articles quickly. The folks who wrote the software imagined that writers would type their articles directly into the blogging software, skipping the word processing step.

That goes to show that blogging software developers had no clue as to how professional writers work. Professional writers start by spending a pile of time researching what they're going to write, so they know what facts they'll use, and have organized and checked them beforehand. By the time they pull out the electronic equivalent of a blank sheet of paper, they already have a clear idea of what the article will be about, what facts they will include, what will be their "lead" (which is the first few sentences designed to pique the reader's interest). They also have a pretty clear outline in their heads.

They then bang out copy based on that plan. The idea is to avoid writer's block by typing whatever comes into their heads, no matter how inane, confused, or inappropriate. Then, they go back and revise the article to make sure it's clear, concise, interesting, and complete. They especially try to weed out extraneous material that shouldn't have been included, anyway. Finally, they go back to check for typos, spelling errors, bad sentence structures, and so forth. All this work is best done using fully functional word processing software. Blogging software just isn't up to the task.

Once the writer is happy with his or her manuscript in Word format, he or she can transfer it to the blogging software. The blogging software provides, usually, a window for entering the title, and another for entering the text. It also provides a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) view of the posting as it will appear on the website, and some means of adding images.

Professional writers are all familiar with the effect that text seems different when seen in its final form. It's a strange phenomenon where, when you look at the final copy in a letter, magazine, book, or whatever, you always see things that you wish you'd done differently. Typos appear out of nowhere. Sentences that looked great in the manuscript seem clumsy in the final form, and so forth. So, professionals always look at a final proof of their articles as the readers will see them before releasing them on an unsuspecting world. Blogging software provides that opportunity.

Another thing blogging software does is pre-format the article. The writer doesn't have to think about where to put the ads, where to put the navigation bar, what type face to use for the title, and so forth. That's all done ahead of time by a layout designer (who might be the author some time in the past), and enforced by the software itself. The author only has to worry about the words.

Don't agonize over what blogging software to use. All the blogging software I've used, and I've used four different systems, does pretty much the same thing, can be used pretty much the same way, and produces pretty much the same result. For this blog, I chose MoveableType for its compatibility with Google AdSense. I wanted to run Google ads, so I made sure the blogging software worked well with them.

I do not, generally, design my own layout, or set up the software. I hired a professional team through my Internet service provider (ISP) to set it all up and make sure it worked. I then did some minor tweaking to the blog's look and feel. I could do that because forty years ago I made the commitment to learn computer programming, and fifteen years ago I made the effort to learn how to build websites using HTML (the programming language of websites), and seven or eight years ago I taught myself how to write PHP (a language folks use to control all the fancy databases and such needed for interactive websites). Tweaking blog formats is a dawdle after that.

Most bloggers, who don't have the programming background, just use the templates the blogging software provides. That's what it's for, anyway.

So, that's a rundown on what it takes to write a blog. To be successful, you should post at least two entries a week. More is better. The most successful bloggers post every day. Some even post more than once a day.

I find that my readers prefer longer posts. I know bloggers, however, who post a few lines once or twice a day. I feel they'd be better off on Facebook or Twitter, but that's just my opinion.

Changing the subject, I promised to provide a little more information about my books for those readers who might be interested.

For some reason, the third edition of How to Set Up Your Motorcycle Workshop was delayed. It was supposed to come off the printing press by 15 January, but still isn't out. You can, however, preorder it on Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble, and other online booksellers. A few collector copies of the first and second editions are also available online for exhorbitant prices. Most motorcycle hobbyists are familiar with the book, but I think it might be of interest to more general readers who just like reading my stuff.

Shakedown Blues is a collection of motorcycle touring stories written originally for enthusiast magazines. I think they'd also be interesting to more general readers who like reading about road trips. Stealing an idea from Herman Melville, I've embedded the stories themselves in explanatory chapters that would be of interest to general readers, and to folks interested in some of what goes on behind the scenes at national magazine editorial departments.

The novel I'm working on now, Red, involves a transcontinental motorcycle trip; a six-foot three-inch red head with a chip on her shoulder; a mysterious biker with apparently limitless resources and a Zen attitude; an evil step father; and a lost gold mine. The title refers to our heroine's nickname, which she got for the color of her hair, and those cute little freckles she has all over ... . The story includes elements of science fiction, a murder mystery, sex, a love story (or four), more sex, eastern philosophy, a look behind the scenes at the biker lifestyle, a peek into how engineers develop advanced technology, and some hair-raising adventure. Did I mention the sex?

It'll be out in a few months, if I ever finish writing the thing.

Racks of Cisco Unified Computing Systems gear supporting 23 different labs at VMworld. Source: Cisco Systems

In previous blog postings, I've attempted to pique your interest in the rapid technological changes that are transforming the data centers that we all rely on. Very soon these changes will revolutionize how folks around the world will use the Internet and what they will be able to do with it.

You don't have to just take my word for it, though. Tomorrow (Wednesday, 9/29) Cisco Systems will host a live Internet TV broadcast and Q&A session to discuss its vision for Data Center 3.0 and how the company's core technologies and new solutions are mapping to its overall corporate business strategy. Best of all, you don't have to be anyone special to attend. The session will be distributed free to all. No registration required. Just visit the event URL at 10:00 a.m. PDT and select "Play" to launch the live presentation.

Presenters will include:

Rajiv Ramaswami, vice president and general manager of the Data Center Switching Technology Group, will discuss how storage networking technology is evolving, including a glimpse at Cisco's future technology for storage networking innovation.

Ed Chapman, vice president of product management, Server Access and Virtualization Group, Cisco, will discuss how IT organizations are evolving their data centers with new protocols such as Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) to reduce operating costs and simplify management. The presentation will include a glimpse at new technology being developed for unifying SAN and LAN networks in the data center.

Derek Masseth, Senior Director for Infrastructure Services at the University of Arizona, will describe how the university recently united its data center networks using Fibre Channel over Ethernet to create a unified fabric. Masseth will explain the reasons for choosing this technology and the upgrade process, as well as benefits and cost reductions achieved.

The event will air Tuesday, September 29, 2009, from 10:00 to 11:00 a.m. PDT. Attendees who experience difficulties connecting can contact support at (866) 614-0208 or (617) 778-9652. Phone support is available 30 minutes prior to and after the event, as well as during the videocast. Attendees may also submit an Online Support Request to CiscoTV_help@external.cisco.com or ciscotv_help@btci.com if necessary.

Volcano monitoring is a task that the Three Ds say definitely should be automated. Source: NASA

I've had occasion to write articles about factory automation several times, and one question that often comes up is: "Why automate a manual process?" In the short run, automation is expensive. It's a lot cheaper to keep running the same old manual system (especially if it's working well) than to take on the capital expense of replacing it with automation.

Any automated system replacing a manual one will be, by definition, novel. There is large technical risk in any novel system. Experienced engineers know that nobody is smart enough get it right the first time (at least not with any consistency). There are always things you don't know, forgot, or did just a little bit wrong - not to mention the dreaded unintended consequences that plague any complex system.

These days, it's possible to automate virtually any task. The challenge in the industrial engineering field is to interlink islands of automation into what my friends at Siemens like to call "Totally Integrated Automation" (TIA).

There are, however, still a few tasks that are manual in nature. Folding them in under the TIA umbrella, whether using technology from Siemens or another factory automation equipment vendor, as manual systems is problematic. There is a tendency to automate any task as a knee-jerk reaction to manualism.

That can be a mistake. Not everything should be automated, even in a TIA environment. Some things people are better at doing than machines. There aren't many, and the number grows fewer as automated systems become ever more capable. But, they are still there, and represent big land mines for system integrators.

The issue will also start to impact consumers in the general public as embedded control systems spread throughout society. In fact, it's already becoming significant in the automotive space, as systems become commercialized to monitor (and correct) driver actions that the computers deem suspect. Poor shifting habits were the first to succumb to the engineers' heavy hands with automatic transmissions. Then, decades later, overbraking by panicked drivers was theoretically eliminated by anti-lock brake systems (ABS). Now, we're poised for a host of computer intrusions into the driving process, from falling asleep at the wheel to clumsy parking techniques.

There are a number of criteria that can be used to decide when to automate a task, but the earliest, and still the most universally applicable, is the Three Ds. The Three Ds hail from the early days of robotics, when doing anything automatically was a major challenge. It's a razor that can be used to divide sharply between what is essentially for humans to do, and what is fair game for automation.

(A razor is a logical device used to guide difficult this versus that decisions. The famous Occam's Razor, which tells you to always favor the simplest hypothesis that explains the facts, is a well known example. Razors should be short, easy to understand and apply, and unambiguous. It also helps if the actually work!)

The Three Ds are "dirty, dull, and dangerous." The razor says that any task that exhibits even one of these characteristics should be considered for automation. If it exhibits any two, its a strong candidate for automation with all deliberate speed. If it exhibits all three, get the humans out of there as fast as their little legs can carry them.

Recently, NASA deployed some robotic sensing devices atop Mt. St. Helens that demonstrate how to apply the Three Ds. The task is to carefully monitor a number of significant variables at hot spots on the volcano.

Dirty does not just mean a tendency to get coated with unspecified unpleasant guck. I once had a summer job cleaning the hard-water scale from the insides of boiler tubes. It came out as nano-scale red powder particles suspended in the air. That was a traditionally dirty job. It was also dirty in a wider Three Ds sense: ambient conditions were such as to physically stress human organisms. Basically, the insides of boilers were uncomfortably hot. Not quite hyperthermia-inducing hot, but hot enough that you didn't want to be in there any longer than you had to be. While being outdoors on the top of a high mountain might seem an ideal environment to a city dweller locked in an office, to those of us who've been left out in the elements long enough to feel the effects of exposure, it qualifies as mildly dirty. Add in noxious vapors and other things that tend to leak out of volcanic hot spots, and it gets dirty, indeed.

Dull really means tedious. Anything repetitive, especially if the situation requires constant attention, is dull. Again, data logging is something that sounds like a walk in the park to those who haven't done it manually. I remember one day as an undergraduate student, when I was studying the stability of an oscillator I'd just finished building. I set the thing up with a frequency counter displaying measurements to six digit accuracy on a nixie-tube display. This was before the days of LED readouts, and long before PC-based data acquisition. Only the last two digits were changing. I sat in a (happily reasonably comfortable) chair writing down the last three digits every 30 seconds for six hours straight. No bathroom breaks. No talking with the guy at the next bench. No reading a book. That taught me the real meaning of dull. The poor robots on Mt. St. Helens are tasked with doing that job 24/7 with the only reprieve coming when the mountain next blows its top and ends their miserable existences.

Dangerous means who or what is undertaking the task is in imminent danger of annihilation, or at least grievous bodily harm. NASA's robots weren't put in nice, safe locations. They were put in places the volcanologists deemed most likely to vaporize catastrophically, taking the robots' spindly little bodies with them.

Folks - and you're going to see a lot of them in the next year or so as the economic recovery seems endlessly "jobless" - who complain that automation is taking away their jobs should heed the Three Ds. The only people that automation (properly done) will put out of work are those who are so stupid they embrace tedium, so expendable they get sent into the lion's maw, or so desperate that they're willing to work under inhuman conditions. The rest of us will make do with the good jobs.

Some media analysts have admitted to being confused by the fact that companies engaged in the personal computer business, such as Dell and Microsoft, have recently published less-than-stellar financial results and gloomy guidance for the future, while other companies, such as Intel and Apple, are fairly jumping with glee over future prospects. This seeming paradox evaporates, however, as soon as one realizes that the vast majority of computers aren't PCs, anymore.

I talked about one aspect of this phenomenon in this blog's last entry ("The PC as Dodo"). In today's entry, I'll talk about a second trend: embedded systems technology. I've mentioned embedded systems before in this blog, but today I want to get a little deeper into the guts of the things to show how this trend affects so many technology companies so differently.

Embedded systems, as Figure 1 shows, generally embody a control loop where a microcontroller reads signals from sensors attached to some equipment out in the real world (IRL). Based on those sensor readings, the microcontroller calculates some changes it wants to make IRL to control the equipment. The equipment responds to these changing signals, which changes the sensor readings.

Figure 1: Embedded systems include a control loop governed by a microcontroller.

What makes the system a control loop, rather than the proverbial snake swallowing its tail, is the fact that there is a control input, called a set point to which the controller compares the sensor inputs. The controller bases its output signals on how the actual readings from the sensors compare to the set point. In actual fact, there may be several sensors and several set points, and the controller likely will take into account how the sensor inputs are changing with time as well as their instantaneous values. People can select how they want the system to behave by changing the set points.

The classic embedded system that everyone uses as an example is a digital thermostat. This system has one sensor (a temperature sensor sampling the room air), one IRL equipment unit (a heater or air conditioner), and one controller (the digital thermostat). You control the temperature you want to have in the room by changing the temperature set point. Almost any digital thermostat worth its price will also include a time sensor (a clock) that allows you to program different temperature set points depending on the time of day.

What makes this technology important is the fact that embedded systems are now used to control just about every device we have. In the past, I've commented that microcontrollers now run just about every device more complicated than a lead pencil. That may be an exaggeration, but not much of one. To paraphrase the announcer from the old "Chickenman" radio show: "They're everywhere! They're everywhere!"

(If you don't know about Chickenman, you missed one of the great campy entertainment experiences of the mid-1960s. Episodes from the original series and two resurrections are still available for purchase on the Internet.)

Figure 2: Microcontrollers include a microprocessor, memory and I/O circuits on a single chip.

The heart of an embedded system is that little microcontroller. Figure 2 shows what's inside a typical microcontroller. It's a monolithic integrated circuit (IC) that has a microprocessor, multiple types of memory, including read-only memory (ROM), random-access memory (RAM) similar to what you see in a PC, along with a programmable read-only memory that holds the software that the microprocessor needs to run, along with several types of input/output circuits to take care of reading sensors, driving actuators, and communicating with the outside world. Many microcontrollers even have microscopic radio sets to communicate wirelessly with other systems.

What sets these things apart is that, unlike the components of a personal computer, all of this circuitry is crammed into one tiny chip. As anyone who's seen a PC with the covers off knows, the PC architecture has its circuitry spread around on a number of ICs. That takes up a lot of space, adds weight, and makes the whole thing bulky. One characteristic that embedded systems, from experimental nanobots to cellphones to television set-top boxes, share is the need to have their controllers as tiny and as light as possible.

Now, the semiconductor companies that make chips for PCs also make chips for embedded systems. The companies that use these chips in their products are more-or-less traditional industrial companies that make dishwashers, microwave ovens, cars, cellphones, etc.

The software these microcontrollers run is not the same as the software PCs run, either. Instead of operating systems like Windows Vista, or Apple Mac OS, they run things like LynxOS, QNX, and VxWorks that most people have never heard of.

In the world of computer technology, embedded systems are where the action is. PCs, for all their historical significance and public share of mind, are a small part of the market with lackluster (at best) growth prospects.

So, companies involved in the embedded system business, such as Intel and Apple, report spectacular profits and predict stellar growth prospects. Companies whose businesses depend on the PC industry complain of shrinking markets and poor future prospects.

I've just spent some time debating with my book publisher at Whitehorse Press about what we should put into a new chapter to be included in the third edition of my book How to Set Up Your Motorcycle Workshop. The reason there's any debate is because we're in the middle of a change in computer architecture that's bigger than the introduction of the PC. (See my July 8 blog entry "Why a Thin Layer of Chrome Will be the New Thick.")

First of all, I need to specify what I mean by "PC." Some folks want to reserve the term for stand-alone desktop machines running a Windows operating system (OS). I, on the other hand, am old school. To me "PC" is just shorthand for "personal computer," and that means a computer made for personal use by, well, a person. It includes all the offerings of such machines from Acer to Zenith . Main PC OSs include Mac OS, certain distributions of Linux, and, of course, the various versions of Windows. It also includes laptops, tablets, etc. that are just modified packages for computers meant to be used in exactly the same way that the desktop systems are used.

Closely allied are workstations, which are intended for use in an intensive work environment. They are generally connected to an enterprise intranet, rather than directly to the Internet. They usually have enhanced processors and memories, and data-storage capabilities. They generally run larger and more involved programs appropriate to meeting enterprise-level needs.

Also similar to PCs are netbooks, which are essentially stripped-down models intended for thin-client applications, such as surfing the net. They have far less memory storage space, and may even lack hard drives. What distinguishes netbooks from what I call PCs is their intended use as thin-client terminals at the expense of making them practically useless for anything else.

Just as PCs' performance is sandwiched between that of workstations and netbooks, their price range is as well. Workstations are generally more expensive (often several times more expensive) than PCs, while netbooks typically cost far less.

In the past, any introduction to computer use would have to start with choosing an operating system. That's no longer the case, however. The choice of operating system has become pretty much moot, as there's application software available for every popular OS to do pretty much anything, and non-PC architectures are becoming increasingly important.

Advanced networking technologies, such as virtualization and cloud computing, are driving this shift by making it possible to serve up most applications, from email to computational fluid dynamics (CFD) as Web applications. With this technology, the user's computer becomes a thin client - little more than a terminal to display the system's user interface. Since Web applications are OS agnostic, choice of OS to run on your personal computing station (PC, netbook, mobile platform, or whatever) is immaterial.

These are not future technologies. As a technology journalist, I get to see these things develop years before mainstream media. I've been watching these technologies - and using them - for about five years. They are quite ready for prime time, and in regular use by mainstream computer users today.

All major ISPs use virtualization and cloud computing technology to run their operations. Most e-commerce sites are built on MySQL databases. This generation of PCs are capable of virtualization using software downloadable from Xen. Every bank website is a thin-client Web app.

Dell's already seeing PC sales crash. Microsoft's scrambling to react. Apple's already made the transition, as have Google and leading chip makers like Intel.

In the end, PCs as such will be squeezed practically out of existence. Very soon PCs will be dinosaurs. Ordinary folks won't have or want to have them. It'll all be netbooks and mobile computing. Even Kindle may be obsolete before it really gets started! It'll just be an application on next years' iPods and Blackberrys.

What will count will be the application you run, and not the OS.

The trend is moving much faster than I thought it would. I figured we'd still have another 2-3 years for it to roll out. Now it looks more like a matter of months.

The PC, as such, is already dead, the general public just doesn't know it, yet. PC sales will not recover significantly from the present slump. "Computer" sales growth has already moved to other platforms, such as products from Apple, RIM, and Palm.