Different century

After a couple of months of using MS Office products, I feel like I stepped back to the previous century. One application says it all: MS Outlook.
After using free Gmail (still Beta), I get upset every single day when I have to use MS O. It is slow, extremely inconvenient to use, unreliable and lacks certain features.
A simple thing like search: my boss has lots of emails. So do I on my private email. Finding one takes me about 0.5 second. At most. It takes him 1-2 minutes. Unfortunately, one cannot forward his business email to gmail for seemingly obvious reasons: security of information. But can anyone explain to me what is the difference between trusting MS to secure the software on servers, on your desktop and in between and trusting Google?
BTW: during 3 years, I could not access Gmail for about 5 hours total - and I had a backup, of course. During 6 weeks in my new job, I could not access Outlook for 3 hours already. And there was no backup. Great experience!
Other products are similarly terrible. And someone has to pay for them. A lot. Why???

Overall, anything I use from Google tells me that Microsoft is way, way behind Google. The only thing that keeps MS running is the monopoly position and that huge, disgusting cash cow it runs.

Predicting future

Predicting future is hard, even in the short term. Yet, it is fun to read about old predictions. This one is 40 years old and quite interesting.
It would be great to see how the world will look like in 400 years, but I hope 40 years or so will have to be enough. For this generation

Teaching Scinece

Why didn't they show us experiments like this


in our science classes?

Technology

Isn't technology making us stupid?



Well, it probably isn't always making us smarter.

How you can tell you are living in the future

Well, it is sort of obvious when people start (plan) to teach crows to pick up trash. I guess no sci-fi writer guessed that crows will come before robots.

Maybe TeraScale

Maybe not. But Windows Vista will boot under 5 minutes, I'm quite certain. Maybe.

The next small thing

Many people are trying to predict the "next big thing" - the invention that will change our world like computers, internet or mobile phones did. The successful ones will undoubtedly make big money on it.
But I have notice many small "big things" that are less known, probably less important yet very helpful, too. For example LED lights and reflective materials.LED lights are interesting because they have very large expected lifetime (around 100,000 hours) and they are very effective (no heat is generated). Notably, most trucks in the US use them already; they are also used in the street lights everywhere. The reflective materials are used on many things - street signs for better visibility in night, clothes etc. They are able to reflect the very little light that hits them back to the source (I'm not sure I understand how they work in detail), which makes them VERY visible in night.
The combination of these two is cool, too. I was riding a bike with a LED light that lasts more than 20 hours with three small AAA batteries, while generating so much light. And all street signs and warnings were so visible I did not have to be afraid of riding of the road etc.
These small things are pretty much trivial, right? Yet they improved our lives significantly for better, in certain areas.
This makes me wonder what will come next. Big hopes are on the carbon nanotubes, but something else might come first. For example, the mechanism by which certain plants (like water lilies) keep themselves clean using only water seems to be understood, allowing it to be replicated in factories. The secret lies in a special structure of their surface that makes cleaning very simple (using water and no pressure). Image the possibilities - easy to clean kitchen, shoes, cars, walls that can be cleaned from the dust or graffiti with just water hose.
This or any other small thing will not change the way we live (LEDs did not either), but it can make life much easier.

Stove

Since everything is bigger in America, also stoves are larger than I'm used to. But the one we have has other advantage, probably much more useful than its size. It is a system that generates sparks automatically, when needed.So you do not need matches or lighter and if the fire stops (whatever the reason) but gas continues to flow, it automatically restarts. WOW.