Tech TIME: Heaven on Wheels
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Our guide for updating your car with high-end audio, video, GPS and more
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The equipment manufacturer may have hit its peak.
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Drained by your commute? Blood-sucking utility bills got you down? Wondering if that tomato in your dinner salad was really organic?The cures to those ills and more may arrive within five years, according to IBM.The company recently released its second annual set of &quot;Next Five in Five&quot; predictions, visions that sketch out a future where driving is a relative pleasure, eco-friendly devices save you money, and super doctors use advanced technology to probe your body&#39;s innermost depths in search of disease.IBM&#39;s contention that driving will become safer and less aggravating may be particularly tantalizing for many.The company said that during the next five years, a &quot;wave of connectivity&quot; between vehicles and roadways will help keep traffic flowing smoothly, drive down pollution, and get you to your destination easier, &quot;without the stress.&quot;This will be accomplished through &quot;intelligent&quot; traffic systems that automatically adjust light patterns and shift traffic to alternative routes, as well as cars that exhibit &quot;reflexes&quot; thanks to communication with other vehicles and roadside sensors, according to IBM.The company&#39;s crystal ball also revealed that the long-simmering trend toward &quot;smart energy&quot; devices will proliferate wildly. &quot;Dishwashers, air conditioners, house lights, and more will be connected directly to a &#39;smart&#39; electric grid, making it possible to turn them on and off using your cell phone or any Web browser,&quot; a company statement asserts.Even the act of eating will take on new meaning, in IBM&#39;s view: &quot;You will know everything from the climate and soil the food was grown in, to the pesticides and pollution it was exposed to, to the energy consumed to create the product, to the temperature and air quality of the shipping containers it traveled through on the way to your dinner table.&quot;The report also suggests that doctors&#39; ability to heal us will become even more astounding. Due to advances in X-ray and audio technologies, doctors will gain &quot;superpowers,&quot; according to IBM. Computers will also be able to compare your health data to an ocean&#39;s worth of other patient records, helping with diagnosis and treatment, the company said.In addition, the company said cell phones will continue to grow in power and functionality. For example, phones will enable users to snap a photo of an article of clothing, pull in results from the Web about the brand and where to buy it, and then render the garment on top of a 3-D image of the user, IBM said.IBM&#39;s list received a measured nod from Edward Cornish, editor of The Futurist magazine and past president of the World Future Society, an organization based in Bethesda, Maryland.&quot;Basically, the five forecasts seem to me to be quite reasonable,&quot; Cornish said. &quot;They&#39;re based on technologies that have been around for a number of years and are simply extrapolations.&quot;The Futurist has released its own list of predictions for 2008 and beyond.The organization contends, among other things, that the world will have a billion millionaires by 2025; the earth is on the verge of a &quot;significant extinction event;&quot; and &quot;nonhuman entities,&quot; such as robots fueled by artificial intelligence, will make more decisions.
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A gorgeous tablet PC, a folding bike that looks very cool and a pair of definitive noise-canceling earbuds are just a few of the latest and greatest from the Gadget Lab blog.
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100,000 miles, one despotic owner So, you've shelled out for the eye-catching L1NUX number plate, and now need a set of wheels worthy of bearing the illustrious open source celebration.â¦
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New sensor technology is not limited to tracking mileage.
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Legs or wheels? Entertaining or functional? The robot world has a lot of questions to resolve.
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Finding the gently used car of your dreams.
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Blog: In the 91st Indianapolis 500 on Sunday, the much-hyped 'Linux car' crashes, but since it isn't Windows, there was no blue screen of death.
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The ultimate flight-to-safety investment.
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Here are CNET Reviews' 10 favorite items from the past week, including a navigation system for motorcycles, the BlackBerry 8800 and the new version of Roxio Toast.
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Also: New modular Hummer 'more animalistic,' 'eco-friendlier'. See what people are saying on News.com Extra.
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EMC subsidiary demonstrates future crash-proofing technology that lets one machine take over where another left off, plus other pies in the virtual sky.
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Who needs technology when you can make beautiful drawings in dirt on the windows of an ordinary car?
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A leading software exporter from India won a multi-year contract to design Ferrari's Formula 1 engines. Also: IBM to become the technical adviser to British bank & hellip;. Orange unveils 3G phone for France and Britin & hellip;. and more.
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New technology supercharges dog-sled racing. This is the real polar express. By Aria Pearson from Wired magazine.
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Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls... It's with much anticipation that I say this. I have a new product that may be familiar to those of you who used Radio 8, and in other ways may be completely new.  The idea is simple.  There's a convergence between big screen high-definition televisions, and photography as an Internet based activity. The purpose of this product is to smooth that convergence, to make it easy to set up a connection between the Internet and your television. To allow photography to come into your living room in new, powerful and easy ways. Think of it as the networked living room and you'll understand the vision. Some of the work I've done is technical, some is user interface, and some is working with media organizations to try to create a comfort level, or at least a spirit of Let's Give This A Try. In the latter case, it's much like working with the NY Times to get their news headlines and summaries to flow through Radio's RSS aggregator in 2002. Only this time we're working with photographs, and we think, the best news photographers in the world. And the pictures are beautifully high-def, they look really great when displayed on LCD and plasma screens. I use it with my 52-inch Samsung and 46-inch Sony. Of course what looks great on a wall, also looks great on a 15-inch Macbook or 24-inch iMac.   And while we connect those pros with your TV, it's equally important that we connect your friends and families too. One of the early testers found the pictures that Doc Searls uploads to Flickr a great revelation. Me too. That's because Doc is not only a great photographer, he's also a great story-teller. I find that I can follow the lives of far more friends visually than I can through text messages (which I love to do too!). Viewing great photos on bigscreen TVs, desktops and laptops -- that's one focus, but not the only one.  I wanted to provide a complete two-way tool for people who love Flickr, as I do.  Why Flickr? Well, they've got this great thing called an API. It makes it possible for people like me to make software that runs on a desktop computer that does things like automatically backing up your new photos every night, and providing a drop-folder on your desktop for quick uploads. (It understands tags too, it's incredibly simple.) We also made it easy to post pictures you like to Twitter. Why Twitter? It's that API thing again. They made it easy for us to love them. I wish more network service developers understood how powerful this outstretched hand is.  But that's not all! Not by a long shot. The reason all this will be so familiar to Radio 8 users is that it builds on the same engine, the one that was released as open source in 2004. So I've been working on other tools to drop into this base platform and once we have a good-sized base of people using it for "really simple photos" on the desktop, there will be other tools. And because it's an open platform, other developers can do the same. Not saying they will, but they can.  Anyway, I'm in the last stages, preparing the download site, and a FAQ, and tweaking the installer. One caveat, the first beta release is Mac only. That's because I'm doing all my work on the Mac, and this is a one-man show. Later we will work it out for Windows too, and with a bit more work and a bit more luck, for Linux.  It should be ready before the sun goes down today.