Into Tech

Not many websites have kept their pre-eminence for more than a decade, but Expedia has managed it. The design is showing its age but it’s often the simplest, quickest and cheapest way to book a trip if it includes a flight and a hotel. Even if you eventually book through a travel agent, Expedia is a great source of information.

The cheapest long-haul flights usually involve a change of planes, and I’ve found that Expedia UK often comes up with options the travel agent can’t see. Most importantly, you can instantly see how long the flight will take, and you can sort flights by duration to juggle price and time. You can - and I do - save money by booking flights to Las Vegas via Phoenix, or Vancouver via Seattle. But you don’t want to spend more than 20 hours getting somewhere that’s 10 hours away, and that’s an easy mistake to make.

Because Expedia pulls up lots of options quickly, you can also save money by trying different travel dates, especially if you can include a Saturday night. If you can travel midweek, it may be cheaper to stay for six or seven days than for a weekend.

But the biggest savings usually come by constructing a package with a flight and a hotel where Expedia has special prices. These aren’t as good as they used to be, but Expedia’s deals can still come out cheaper than making separate bookings on discount sites. And by using Expedia’s hotel area maps, you can also balance convenience (eg close to the beach or conference centre) and price.

Expedia is based in Bellevue, Washington, which is a good place to stay if you’re visiting Microsoft. This isn’t a coincidence: Microsoft launched the website in 1996, before spinning it off as a separate business. Expedia has had no connection with the software giant since 2001, and it is now part of a group that includes Hotels.com, Hotwire.com and the excellent TripAdvisor.

But the site still carries Microsoft’s fingerprints: you can sign in using a Microsoft Live ID (your Hotmail or Passport address), and Expedia still uses Microsoft’s MapPoint. However, you can’t move its maps around easily, as you can in Microsoft’s Virtual Earth and Google Maps.

Unlike some of its rivals, Expedia also has a reasonable global network, with sites in 15 countries. These now include Australia, China, India and Japan, as well as the major European countries.

And although Expedia has its detractors, when Fortune magazine published its annual list of America’s Most Admired Companies in March 2008, Expedia was placed third in its category, between Google and Amazon.

Like Amazon, eBay, Yahoo and a few other giants from the 1990s, Expedia’s site is showing its age. However, it’s so big, and has so much traffic, it is increasingly hard to change.

If you’re prepared to shop around using some of the newer, more focused travel sites, you may get a better deal. But as a one-stop supermarket that covers everything from cruises to corporate travel, Expedia does the job.

The family gathers for tea, and there are four cream cakes for four people. If one person grabbed three of them, words would be said. However, peer-to-peer file sharers think it’s perfectly OK to grab three quarters of the communal internet bandwidth. Indeed, some are defiant about it. Their internet service provider has foolishly sold them an “unlimited” connection so they are entitled to download 5GB a day, or more, at any time. The fact that today’s internet is incapable of coping with their demands is beside the point: ISPs should simply provide more bandwidth.

Alas, this doesn’t work, for two reasons. The first is “backhoe time”. (Backhoes are used to dig trenches to lay cables.) Digging up thousands of roads is expensive and takes a very long time. The second reason is that if you provide more bandwidth, people consume more bandwidth faster. If they can download a 2GB movie in five minutes instead of 50 hours, more people will download more movies. It’s like building more roads to “solve” the car problem.

Thus, the arrival of mass-market broadband this century has apparently resulted in a dramatic decline in the web. Of course, the web hasn’t really declined. It’s just that the rise in file-sharing and video is making web traffic far less significant. A 2GB movie trumps a 200K web page. ISPs are trying to deal with the problem by selling “capped” internet connections with extra charges, by throttling bandwidth, by blocking file download sites, and by trying to enforce “fair use” policies.

In the US, Time Warner Cable has just started an “internet metering” trial in Texas, while Comcast has stepped up its actions against “bandwidth hogs”. Most people already pay for electricity units and mobile phone minutes, and many have water meters. Don’t be surprised if we end up paying by the megabyte. The attempt to constrain usage is attracting criticism. It’s not good for the people whose businesses are based on delivering TV shows, videos and streamed radio stations over the net. Further, Google’s Vint Cerf, the “father of the internet”, says it discourages people from trying new applications, so innovation dries up.

Google has been campaigning for “net neutrality”, which means preventing ISPs from speeding up or slowing down internet traffic based on its source, type or destination. This means not charging Google for YouTube traffic, or the BBC for iPlayer delivery costs, and not discriminating against bandwidth hogs. Google is also, according to recent reports, developing tools to enable users to tell if their internet connection is “neutral” or being tampered with. The idea that everyone shall have cream cakes is admirable, as long as there’s an endless supply of cakes. There isn’t. What Google is encouraging is the over-exploitation of shared resources, which can lead to the resources’ usefulness being destroyed. In economics, this is known as “the tragedy of the commons“. On a larger scale, it’s destroying the planet.

But there may be other ways to mitigate the poisonous effects of bittorrent in particular. Bob Briscoe, a BT researcher, has asked the Internet Engineering Task Force to change the “fairness algorithm” that lets the worst P2P-using 10% selfishly grab around 75% of the internet’s bandwidth. The problem is that P2P programs open multiple TCP streams to speed up painfully slow downloads. Briscoe proposes that each user should get roughly the same bandwidth whether they open one TCP stream or 1,000. Isn’t “one man, one cake” what Google should actually be fighting for?

Alternative therapies are the in-thing these days, from sucking expensive oxygen to weekly enemas.
Now, you can step up your love of the alternative while sticking two fingers up to those peasant air suckers in oxygen bars, by checking out the full-size oxygen tank. Built by Japanese firm Adrect, this is the IDEA [...]

The European Union has stumped up 14 million euro to fund research into creating a standard method of sending TV over the Internet.
The money has been granted to the P2P-Next consortium, consisting of 21 organisations including the BBC, European Broadcasting Union, Lancaster University and Pioneer Digital Design Centre, among others. An additional 5 [...]

GPS market leader, Garmin, has thrown its hat into the mobile phone arena with an interesting first product, the “nüvifone”.
The stylish looking device combines phone, mobile Web-browser and GPS into one touchscreen handheld. The company boasts that it’s the ‘ultimate multi-tasker’ and the “first of its kind to integrate premium 3.5G mobile phone capability [...]

There’s nothing like taking forty winks when you’re tired - just not while doing 70mph on the motorway.

Toyota is working on a system that could help save lives by monitoring a driver’s eyes for signs of drowsiness or lack of attention to the road.

The Lexus LS600H already has a face monitoring system in front of the driver that emits a loud alarm if it catches you spending too long looking away from the road and will apply the brakes if it thinks a crash is imminent. The new twist employs an eye monitoring camera that first stores what the normal position of your eyelids are and then watches for signs of sleepiness. Very sci-fi indeed.

Again, an alarm will sound if it looks like you’re nodding off and the system will hit the brakes if the proximity sensors sense anything coming up too fast. Like a wall. In a statement, Toyota said:

“Driver-condition evaluation technologies are vital to improving overall vehicle safety performance, as driver condition is a key factor in traffic safety, with driver error being the main cause.”

Toyota says the new system will be deployed in more of its cars in the coming years.-Martin Lynch

cars driving technology

BBC Click’s David Reid travels to Italy to find out how research into real-time maps may solve Rome’s traffic problems.

CHANDIGARH, India (Reuters) - Fed up with traffic snarls
and scarred roads, a software engineer in India’s flagship IT
hub of Bangalore took to the streets in protest last year –
doodling on his laptop while trotting along on a bullock-cart.

NEW YORK (Billboard) - By now the practice has become old
hat: an eagerly anticipated album gets distributed and devoured
by MP3 bloggers before it ever hits stores. But when Columbia
Records released Beyonce’s “B’Day Anthology Video Album” on
April 3, it marked a rare instance of a similar phenomenon
happening with a music DVD.

Traffic police are delighted a character in BBC Radio 4’s The Archers opts for a driving course after falling foul of the law.