Demographics, the Elephant at the Far End of the Western World's Room

I'd recommend reading A Global Intelligence Briefing for CEOs. The mosting interesting part is that the birth rates in Europe and Japan are so low the countries risk imploding in the next few generations.
From the article:

The birth rate in Russia is so low that by 2050 their population will be smaller than that of Yemen. Russia has one-sixth of the earth’s land surface and much of its oil. You can’t control that much area with such a small population.

The native European population will be overtaken by the guest workers whose birthrate is so much higher.

Air Powered Cars

Interesting article on air powered cars. The concept has been around for quite a few years, but no real products yet.

NetBeans 5.5 and Java 6

To maintain my web site, I use a series of java programs to automatically prep pictures and create html. I downloaded NetBeans 5.5 with Java 6 to add some long needed features to the programs. NetBeans seems much better than the last time I took it for a spin. It's fairly fast with many new features. It's worth the download.

Please welcome...Rachel Ann Fincher

Pam and I just had our second daughter, Rachel Ann.

PodCast with David Platt

I highly recommend this podcast with author David Platt on his book,
. The interview is an easy listen. David doesn't give hardcore technical guidelines, but makes a compelling case that the user experience is critical to successful software.

A Quiet User is Not Necessarily a Happy User

Note to fellow software developers:
Just because the users of your software are not complaining to you, doesn't mean they are happy. You need to periodically communicate with your customers to see how they are doing with your software. Discover what features they need and learn what confuses them about your software. A quiet user is not necessarily a happy user.

Wave of the Future

D-Wave is announcing a demonstration of their 16-qubit quantum computer tomorrow. If true, this will be the technology story of the decade. While the mainstream media and blogsphere have been fixated on Vista, D-Wave could be the paradigm shift of computing.
While finding the primes in a 256-bit number might take our fastest computers millennium, quantum computers can run through all the possibilities in a clock cycle. Digital encryption as we know it now would be dead - if D-Wave's announcement is true. Whole new vistas of science will open as complex protein folding algorithms which previously took months to calculate are discovered in seconds. Crash simulations at auto companies can be performed over hundreds of body designs instead of just a few promising ones. It will be a brave new world of computing - if true.

Another story at Techworld .