10 Comparisons Between Star Trek and Modern Technologies

For those of us who were around to watch the original Star Trek series on television, we remember thinking how cool it would be to have some of the great gadgets they used. The future is now! Many of their ‘futuristic’ ideas have become available in some form, since then.

1. Communicators to cell phones – Flip open devices that allowed you to communicate with others from almost any location. Of course, there was the occasional atmospheric interference that cut off your connection to the other person. Lots of similarities in these two.
2. PADDs to tablet computers - Personal access display devices were used in Star Trek: The Next Generation. They were flat panel touch screen devices that were used for a multitude of tasks and gaining access to all kinds of information. Although the PADDs were a bit undefined at the time, they have definite similarity to the ipad and other tablet computers.
3. Ear piece headset to bluetooth technology – Wireless headsets were worn on the bridge of the Enterprise. They were small and attached to one ear. Bluetooth headsets are used in environments today that are not near as sophisticated as the star ship’s command deck.
4. Portable data disks to floppy disks/data drives – Thin, small pieces of plastic were inserted into the computer consoles of the star ship, which were close in size to the 3-1/2 floppy disk. Today we have even smaller USB data drives for transporting data.
5. Voice commands to voice commands – The ability to give verbal commands to electronics is a true reality today, even though it isn’t used as often as it was on Star Trek. Computers and many cell phones have the capability of being directed by voice command.
6. Tricorder to modern thermometers – The tricorder could scan a person’s body and provide readings on a number of different things. There have been some similar devices created, but the closest one to be seen in many homes today is the modern digital ear thermometer. The thought of getting a temperature reading from an infant so easily was not even thought of by mothers during the first years of Star Trek.
7. Transporter to GPS – No, we haven’t been able to ‘beam’ anyone up or down, but we can locate people just as specifically with a GPS as the transporter was able to lock into the location of people it was called on to retrieve.
8. Diagnostic scan to CAT, MRI and ultrasound – Dr. McCoy could lay you on his diagnostic table and perform a scan of your body to come up with a diagnosis. We use several different scanning technologies for diagnosis today.
9. Phasers to Tasers – In Star Trek, they pointed their phasers at the enemy and were able stun or disable them with a blast of energy. The reaction to being struck by a taser looks very similar to what you saw by those who had been hit by the beam of a phaser on the television show.
10. Video Screen Communication to Skype – We may not talk to people on a screen quite the size of the one Captain Kirk used on the Enterprise, but we easily communicate from screen to screen using Skype. The big screens are used, though, for teleconference speaking, all the time.

No one guessed at the time that Star Trek first aired, just how fast some of those technologies would develop. We still aren’t traveling at ‘warp speed’, and we haven’t found the Vulcan’s with those pointed ears, but Spock could show up any day now.

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IE9 RC debuts with 'do not track'

SAN FRANCISCO--The next generation of Internet Explorer is nearly ready for the public at large, as Microsoft announces the release candidate of Internet Explorer 9 at the Hang Art Gallery in San Francisco's Union Square this morning.

Internet Explorer 9's ActiveX filter in action.

(Credit: Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)

 

A massive list of improvements debuted in the new RC, available for 32-bit Windows 7; 64-bit Windows 7; 32-bit Windows Vista; and 64-bit Windows Vista. Among the most notable enhancements are the new ActiveX filter, expanded support for HTML5 and "future-tech" standards, and advertiser tracking protection, which also was introduced this week into a prerelease version of Firefox 4.

The feature changes from the first beta are focused largely, yet not exclusively, on security. Like the Firefox 4 feature, the new "do not track" feature will prevent Web advertisers from tracking your behavior using a header-based solution. Unlike Mozilla's implementation of the protection, IE9 uses both the header and customizable blacklists, Internet Explorer business and marketing senior director Ryan Gavin said in an interview yesterday. "Using only the header is too narrow a solution," he said, noting that Internet Explorer also allows users to create a whitelist for sites that people actively want to track online surfing behavior.
If you go to the Gear menu and then the Safety submenu, there's an option for tracking protection. Clicking it opens the Manage Add-ons window and defaults to the new Tracking Protection tab, from which you can add sites that you want to block. Once the feature has been enabled, simply start browsing. If you go back to the list after checking out a few sites, you ought to see that the list has auto-populated. The configurable number below the main list allows you to set your tolerance for being tracked. If you set it to three, for example, the tracking protection will wait until it sees a tracker on three or more sites before blocking it.
Also new is an ActiveX filter, which you can use to block all ActiveX content and then selectively activate it on a per-site basis. For people unfamiliar with why ActiveX technology is potentially dangerous, to function it requires full access to the operating system that the browser is running in. The new ActiveX filter gives you the ability to restrict ActiveX on a per-site basis, with a toggle in the location bar. If you go to the Gear menu and then the Safety sub-menu, you can block all ActiveX content with one click. Then on the right-side of the location bar, click the circle with a line through it to allow ActiveX content to load on a per-site basis.
Performance gains have been dramatic in the IE9 beta with Microsoft's new JavaScript engine Chakra, and the release candidate continues that trajectory. IE9 RC now places right in the same ballpark for speed as Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and Opera, its four primary competitors. And according to Microsoft, IE9 actually placed fastest on WebKit's SunSpider test.

Also new in the release candidate is expanded support for HTML5 and other "future-Web" technologies. These include support for the geolocation feature, HTML5 semantic tags, CSS3 2D transforms, and support for the WebM video codec. These features are largely present in other browsers, so that they're finally coming to Internet Explorer must be a comfort to developers.

Internet Explorer 9 will come with advertiser tracking protection to make it easier for you to opt out of targeted Web ads.

(Credit: Microsoft)

 

Quite a few minor improvements have been made since the last beta was released, too. The default maximum temporary Internet file size has been increased to 250MB from 50MB, which means that while your cache will be significantly bigger on disk, IE can store more data locally and make it that much quicker to load Web content. Pinned sites have been extended to the trackless private browsing, and you can now set tabs to show on a row below the location bar, which gives them the width of the browser to be displayed. Background tabs have received a Close button, which appears on mouse-over, and Microsoft has tweaked the interface itself to cede more space back to the Web page being displayed. In other words, IE9 RC is thinner than IE9 beta.

While testing the release candidate yesterday, I was pleased to discover that the instability that had plagued the first beta was gone. The release candidate didn't crash once over a six-hour period of use, although it did hang for a few seconds several times. Sites loaded quickly, and most importantly the browser not only felt ready for daily use, but felt like it could stand comfortably next to other modern browsers.