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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.

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.

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.

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.

The media is painting it as a wrestling match between giants: Google vs. Microsoft. Operating system king Microsoft recently introduced a new Bing! browser, followed last night by search engine titan Google's announcement that it's working on an operating system for netbooks.

As usual, the mass media have somewhat missed the mark. What's actually happening is the whole landscape of computing is changing, and a race is on to see who's going to plant their flag on the new territory first.

The change in computing is the steady migration of computer technology from a thick client model to a thin client model for most routine computing needs. If you haven't yet heard about this, yet, let me explain:

Thick Clients are powerful stand-alone computers with network access. To do something useful, you download the file you want to do it to from a server; do it; then upload the file to the server again, keeping (or not) a copy of the updated file on your local computer.

Thin Clients are computers with powerful communications and display capabilities, but which are otherwise pretty anemic by conventional computer-performance standards. To do something useful, you visit an extremely powerful server, which is actually a supercomputer based on cloud-computing architecture (see "Computing With Your Head in the Clouds"). This server creates a virtual computer (See "Virtualization flies under the mass-media radar") with enough resources to run an application program (which it preloads onto the virtual computer) to do whatever it is you want to do with the file (which is stored somewhere in the computing cloud). When you're done doing your thing, the server updates the file and dissolves the virtual computer into - nothing.

Thin clients have been around for a long time. The old time-shared computer terminals we used in the 1970s to access minicomputers were very much like today's thin clients, which you know as netbooks.

The term was coined in the early 1990s by Tim Negris, VP of Server Marketing at Oracle Corp. The technology has been growing in popularity and usefulness ever since. Expect in the future (probably less than 5 years) that this style of computing will be almost universal, with everything from mobile devices to home entertainment centers architected as thin clients allowing users to interface over the Internet with service providers, such as banks, online stores, news providers, and entertainment content providers. I'm already writing this blog entry using exactly this technology!

Don't invest in companies that make personal computers.

So, how does the Google vs. Microsoft struggle fit into this landscape? They both see it coming and want to provide you with the means to partake of its bounties. The problem is that they have competition. All the makers of mobile devices, household appliances, TV set-top-boxes, telecommunications suppliers, and virtually anyone who makes anything with even the potential for Internet connectivity sees it coming, too. Especially, all the Internet service providers building all the computer clouds see it coming. Google and Microsoft are really just struggling to avoid being left behind!

Google does have one advantage, at least relative to Microsoft. Google is wisely basing its Chrome OS on Linux, which is the Open Source leader. To develop application software in a Linux-based thin-client environment, a company can hire a few pimply-faced ex-hackers who learned to roll their own Linux distribution before they reached puberty. Software engineers with expertise in the latest of the never-ending stream of Windows versions are harder to come by.

Basically, the days when anybody cares what operating system or browser your Internet-connected device uses are gone. In the thin-client/cloud-computing world of the future, like in the post-Civil-War land of Gone With the Wind, frankly, my dear, nobody is going to give a damn.

As with so many terms bandied about in mass media, "Smart Grid" is a cutesy umbrella term that allows politicians, analysts, and newscasters to vaguely refer to a collection of technologies that neither they nor their audiences fully comprehend, with advantages that are easily stated, and of uncertain measurability.

While that sounds pretty negative, let me point out that nothing in the above paragraph says anything against the technologies themselves, or their value, but merely pans vague marketspeak terms in general, and the folks who rely on them for ... anything.

Smart grids are part of a general technology trend toward incorporating embedded microcontrollers and data-communication capabilities into all sorts of previously existing devices. For those unfamiliar with them, a "microcontroller" is an integrated circuit that includes a microprocessor and peripheral circuits that allow the microprocessor to sense conditions and events in the external world (data acquisition) and put out signals to drive actuators in the external world (control).

Perhaps the first "smart" devices were automobile engines, which came under microprocessor control during the late 1970s, long before the term "smart xxx" became current. Such engine control modules (ECMs) sensed such variables as outside air temperature and throttle position, and used that information to control such parameters as fuel/air ratio and spark timing. Later, ECMs gained the ability to communicate with additional embedded microcontrollers managing such functions as anti-lock braking systems (ABS) and alarm systems. Modern automobiles now contain dozens of networked microcontrollers operating nearly all functions.

Today, most significant appliances operate under guidance of microcontrollers. Microwave ovens, dishwashers, clothes dryers, televisions, and home thermostats are familiar examples. The extent to which manufacturing operations rely on "smart" technology is even more profound.

Electricity generation and distribution networks, however, are far behind other industries in incorporating smart technology. That is the impetus behind all of the noise and fury about "Smart Grids" in the media.

To be fair, there are significant barriers to incorporating smart technology into electric-power infrastructure. Most significantly, it is imperative to keep the system operating reliably while applying new technology to it. Second, the cost of upgrading existing equipment that was never intended to be part of a computer-integrated system is, shall we say, large. There are many additional issues to be considered when making the move to smart utility grids.

The motivation to incorporate computer control and networking technology into the electric power system is not just to make it more "modern." The concept avoids Scheiber's Rule (Just because you can doesn't mean you should.) by solving a number of present and future problems arising from electric-utility development trends.

The first issue is the fact that the present distribution grid developed from early systems where a single generating plant distributed power to an isolated netword of loads. That placed the responsibility for maintaining voltage, frequency, and phase of the provided electricity squarely on one generating facility. Such installations are amenable to simple closed-loop control.

Later, but still quite some time ago, outputs from multiple generating plants were combined to supply power to the user network. That created the issue of coordinating the output levels and phases of the sources. At least, the sources on a given network were controlled by a common authority capable of centrally guiding the generators via more complex closed-loop control.

Problems became serious when power-distribution networks were interconnected to allow power sharing between sources operated by separate authorities. This makes simple reactive closed-loop control problematic. When you have multiple agents independently providing control inputs in response to observed conditions, the system becomes chaotic. This is not a slam on the engineers who designed and operated the system. It's a fact of life dictated by mathematics. Voltage variations, unpredictable frequency and phase shifts, and seemingly random catastrophic failures ensue.

Happily, all the folks on the supply side of the system were highly intelligent professionals who realized that the only solution was to co-operate their power-generation controls. We'll call it meta-control, where individual operators don't blindly react to every movement of the controlled system, which is what drives the system into chaotic behavior. Instead, when they observe a departure from nominal status, they first communicate among themselves, and devise a coordinated response that brings the entire system back toward nominal.

You can do that when there are relatively few operators. As the number of operators grows, the time needed to communicate and devise a coordinated strategy becomes longer, while the frequency and severity of divergences become more severe.

In the past, the economics of power-generation have favored large generating stations because they can be made more efficient. Costs for fossil fuels and nuclear power scale more slowly than generating plants' output. Emerging energy sources, such as photoelectric and wind power, have been billed as "free energy sources," although they are nothing of the kind, so power-plant efficiency figures less in the installation decision. Thus, we expect to see many more smaller plants. With more small plants, the number of sources that need to be coordinated will rise dramatically, and system-control cost and difficulty will increase.

The assumption is that increased deployment of smart-grid technology will make it possible to maintain system control in the face of increased chaos. High-speed data sharing is to improve coordination while expanded computer automation improves the speed and quality of meta-control decision making.

According to Wikipedia, support for smart grids became federal policy with passage of the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007. The law, Title13, set out $100 million per fiscal year in funding for fiscal years 2008-2012, established a matching program for states, utilities and consumers to build smart grid capabilities, and created a Grid Modernization Commission to assess the benefits of demand response, and recommend protocol standards.

The Act directs the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to coordinate the development of smart grid standards, which the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) would then promulgate through official rulemakings. Smart grids received further support with the passage of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, which set aside $11 billion for the creation of a smart grid.

Progress has been swift, as it needs to be. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) issued a proposed policy statement and action plan on 19 March 2009 for standards governing the development of a smart grid. However, FERC noted that the electric industry started moving ahead with smart grid technologies prior to these government initiatives. The Commission is proposing to establish some general principles that the smart grid standards should follow.

We have known for some years that the trend was toward more numerous smaller power plants. The handwriting has been on the wall since the introduction of a feed-in tariff (FIT) system in 1978. A feed-in tariff is an incentive structure to encourage the adoption of renewable energy through government legislation. The regional or national electricity utilities are obligated to buy renewable electricity (electricity generated from renewable sources, such as solar photovoltaics, wind power, biomass, hydropower and geothermal power) at above-market rates set by the government. The higher price helps overcome the cost disadvantages of renewable energy sources. The rate may differ among various forms of power generation.

FIT means that any Tom, Dick, and Harriett with access to enough cash can set up a generating station, then sell the power to utilities, which are obliged to buy it. This model works well for facilities, such as hospitals and certain manufacturing operations, that need to maintain back-up power generation plants in the event of power failure. Most of the time these generators stand idle. FIT allows their owners to defray some of their cost by running them during peak periods, when demand may exceed fixed-power plant capacity and electricity costs (and FIT repayments) are largest.

The unintended consequence, of course, was a more chaotic electricity environment. Specifically, since a hallmark of chaotic systems is scale invariance, departures from nominal expanded to higher spectral frequencies with smaller amplitude signals (amplitude varies inversely with frequency. While these departures are smaller, their higher frequency translates into the need for faster response. Utilities began experimenting with smart-grid technology in hope of reigning in chaos over a much larger bandwidth.

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES:

U.S. Department of Energy Smart Grid

IBM Smart Grid

American Superconductor Smart Grid: It's More than you Think

Before I get into this posting, I want to apologize for going "silent" for a few weeks. I spent a week clearing a bunch of on-deadline projects off my desk so I could spend a vacation week obsessing about my "new" boat.

At 25 years old, most folks would not call my boat "new." Welcome to my life, in which Charlie spends inordinate amounts of time hunting the greater Chicago area looking for a fixer-upper that will provide an excuse for endless hours of puttering around in the workshop.

Anyway, I finally got the thing:
1. Legally titled and registered;
2. Tested to the point where I could believe it would both float and take me where I want to go;
3. Moved from the far side of Lake Michigan up the Illinois river to its berth at the (name suppressed on account of paranoia) marina, stopping for a week along the way to haul the thing out to check for damage after hitting a massive object drifting just under the surface in the middle of the channel;
4. Moved again to another (and far more expensive) berth to satisfy my wife's insistence on being in the Ritzy-cratic part of town; and
5. Finally getting in a one-day fun cruise.

Now that I list it all out, it does seem like an awful lot to have accomplished in less than a month!

Now to business: before wandering off to play boats, I'd started covering developments at (mostly) Cisco Systems surrounding virtualization technology. Mainstream media, including business media, haven't said much of anything about this development, despite 2-3 press releases coming over the wire per day. I know 'cause I've watched.

Apparently, virtualization, which is going to end up being built into every operating system for nearly every computer on the planet and will change the way we use computers forever, is too sophisticated for the liberal-arts majors running mass media. So, as usual, they're ignoring it.

In previous posts, I've explained what virtualization is and a little of what it brings to the party. Today, I want to give you a link to a series of seminars sponsored by Schneider Electric's APC unit that can help you learn a little more about it and other landscape-changing developments. To learn more about the seminars, visit the company's APC Learning page, and look for events with NetApp Alliance in the title. The series kicks off on 2 June with a seminar located in Chicago.

Entitled the "Go Green and Stop the Red" event series. The half-day seminars, co-hosted by APC, Microsoft and NetApp, at their technology demonstration centers across the United States, will examine how to leverage advances in data center applications and architecture to yield a more positive impact on the environment and the company's bottom line. One of those advances, as I've subtly intimated, is virtualization.

"Businesses are continually faced with the challenge of how to maximize efficiency and savings, while minimizing space and waste," said Alistair Pim, APC's vice president of global strategic alliances. "This event series features presentations from experts that look at how adopting sustainable IT practices, such as virtualization, can be cost effective solutions for long-term business growth."

"Deploy virtualization projects to save assets, support and energy costs. Such projects can produce a reduction of more than 80% in energy consumption," stated Rakesh Kumar, Gartner's research vice president, in the May 7, 2009 report "How to Cut Your Data Center Costs.

Seminars will feature industry experts who will demonstrate how to:
* Connect virtual and physical infrastructures to achieve a holistic view of your data center energy consumption.
* Accelerate business breakthroughs and achieve cost efficiencies by
implementing data management solutions.
* Build pay-as-you-grow data center architecture to reduce operating expenses today and plan more effectively for tomorrow.

And, you thought the infrastructure-spending portion of the Obama Administration's Stimulus Plan was a waste of time and money. CG/LA Infrastructure LLC means to dispel that idea. One way to do so is to identify the top 100 infrastructure projects now in the works, and publish the list, which they've now done.

The Top 100 US Strategic Infrastructure Projects is available as a free download. Readers interested in this topic might want to register for the the North America Strategic Infrastructure Leadership Forum to be held September 22 - 24, 2009 at the Omni Shoreham Hotel in Washington, DC.

"These projects will form the backbone for a new, competitive US economy and breathe life into the Obama government's vision going forward," according to Norman F. Anderson, President and CEO of CG/LA. Led by both the Obama Administration's commitment to improving the nation's faltering infrastructure stock and by a regional drive towards carbon-neutral energy and productive infrastructure, the North American Leadership Forum will host not only the top projects in the US, but also the leading projects in Canada and Mexico. "The US economy is in trouble, and these projects define a powerfully competitive, critical path forward," says Anderson.

The Top 100 projects were identified as possessing three specific criteria: (1) strong probability of going forward in the next 12 months; (2) critical as building blocks for US competitiveness; and (3) strong relevance to the Obama government's 'connect the dots' infrastructure priorities.

The organization separated projects into three classes:

Smart Grid projects will provide an upgraded power distribution system. It is best understood as the operating system for the new economy, and is what Warren Buffet calls "the single most important investment in the US economy." Fourteen of the 100 projects are tied to the Smart Grid, either directly or through the projects that the Grid enables, including: 6 transmission projects ($25.1 billion), lead by the Midwest's Green Power Express project; and 8 renewable energy projects ($15.3 billion), including wind, solar and energy efficiency, the largest of which is T. Boone Picken's Pampa project.

New Infrastructure will provide "building blocks" for finance and physical capacity creation to drive a globally competitive US economy. These projects are largely "carbon-neutral" and will include 6 high-speed passenger rail projects ($109.4 billion, the largest spend by far on our list), lead by the San Francisco/Los Angeles and Midwest Rail Initiative; and 18 urban mass transit projects ($44.4 billion) including Michigan's Regional Rail Link and Northern Virginia's Dulles Access Corridor project. The visionary $10 billion electric freight rail initiative would also fall into this category.

Traditional Infrastructure projects will rebuild what we normally think of as infrastructure; the physical structures created 50 years ago that have allowed our economy to be competitive and have created opportunities for Americans over the last half-century. These projects were selected based on their ability to renew that competitiveness, including: 17 project in surface transportation ($58.3 billion); 7 projects in ports & logistics ($5 billion); 4 projects in traditional electricity generation ($21.4 billion); 9 projects in natural gas, including pipelines, LNG terminals and exploration ($55.1 billion); and 14 projects in the 'forgotten' infrastructure of water/wastewater ($19 billion).

It is said that roughly 2 million new jobs would be created each year from 2010 through 2014, directly and indirectly, through the development of these 100 strategic infrastructure projects.

Ben Franklin's advice to "do well by doing good" seems to run counter to popular sentiment these days. Still, some companies make an effort to combine profit and altruistic motives. A case in point is yesterday's announcement that network technology developer Cisco Systems signed a set of agreements to combine forces with the Mexican government to foster socio-economic development in Mexico.

At a meeting held at the official presidential residence, Los Pinos, in Mexico City, in the presence of President Felipe Calderon Hinojosa, Cisco Chairman and CEO John Chambers signed collaborative memoranda of understanding with Secretary of Education Alonso Lujambio Irazabal, Secretary of Economy Gerardo Ruiz Mateos and Secretary of Social Development Ernesto Cordero Arroyo. The memoranda outline a series of steps to help improve Mexican economic competitiveness, and deepen the country's technical talent pool. Not incidentally, these agreements are seen to promote digital communication infrastructure development, which can only be good for Cisco, one of the leading providers of equipment for information-technology infrastructure development.

"Today's collaboration with President Calderon's administration underscores the importance that Cisco places on Mexico," said Cisco Chairman and CEO John Chambers. "With business and government working together we can make a positive impact on education, facilitate greater effectiveness in government, and further extend broadband to rural areas. With the network as the platform, we have the potential to bring even greater opportunity to Mexico and its citizens."

Cisco says the memoranda align with its globalization strategy of supporting sustainable growth, innovation and talent development in key global economies.

Among the goals which Cisco plans to pursue in the collaboration described in the memoranda are:

• Cooperation with the Secretaria of Public Education to establish two pilot programs to help improve the teaching of 21st-century skills in basic and middle education by increasing the competency, productivity and professional development of educators.

• Establishment of a co-operative Education Center of Excellence within Mexico, incorporating leading universities, global education experts from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and other leading non-governmental organizations. Its objective will be to help carry out the transformation of Mexico's education strategy.

• Support for a 21st-Century collaboration environment with education leaders worldwide through the Cisco® 3.0 Leadership Program and a Cisco TelePresence™ for Education Network with key universities around the world.

• Establishment of a Center for Competitiveness and Globalization together with the Secretaria of Economy to share best practices and to support the government in the design and implementation of programs aimed at providing government services more efficiently using digital infrastructure.

• Development of a "one-stop solution" for maximizing collaborative work among government agencies to achieve substantial improvements in competitiveness.

• Development of programs for rural connectivity in collaboration with the Secretaria of Social Development, international multilateral agencies and private companies focusing on deployment of infrastructure to provide access to voice, video and data services for rural populations at sustainable economic levels.

• Support for preparation and implementation of a business model to design and prototype an inexpensive and scalable wireless network solution to bring affordable broadband connectivity to rural communities in the region of Yucatán, Mexico.

"We're pleased to work together with the federal government in Mexico to implement these initiatives that should bring about swift economic change," stated Jaime Valles, vice president of Cisco Latin America. "The ability to help educational and governmental institutions around the country take advantage of the network to promote 21st-Century learning skills and develop collaborative work in government is a tremendous opportunity. We're pleased that the federal government in Mexico shares this vision and is committed to implementing these programs."

We hope that more companies will resist pressure to separate profit-motivated activities from altruistic aims. When you're doing something to help raise the tide for everyone, there's nothing wrong with making sure your boat gets a boost as well. It's good business.

It's also good social policy. Instead of eyeing private companies as predators whose only motive is selfishness, government officials and social activists should view them as potential allies. By helping align business interests with social causes, we can harness tremendous energy and resources to make the Universe a better place in which to live.