The surroundings may change, but being a good parent still means guidance and supervision.  Three is no question that the Internet has brought the world’s libraries to our homes and our kids.  An amazing resource, to be sure, for homework and research. 

However, distractions are still distractions and the Internet provides many for teenagers.  Music, videos, social websites, games, email and instant messaging can eat up valuable time. You should have faith in your kid to do the right thing, but the distractions serve up a tasty dish of temptation for a teenager. So when you’re not looking, what is your kid doing? Homework or……….

Article from Home News Tribune by David Stegon:

Gloria Bachmann’s parents complained that as a teenager she spent too much time listening to John, Paul, George and Ringo play music, so when the talk turns to her son and the hours he spends each day on the Internet, she can relate.

“When I was younger it was the Beatles and talking to my girlfriends on the phone,” said Bachmann, a Highland Park resident. “There is always going to be something that parents think their kids spend too much time with, but with the Internet, I try to look at all the positives and educational benefits that my son is getting and not worry how many hours per day he’s spending in front of the screen.”

One in five American parents believe their kids are spending too much time on the Internet, though most say the online activities have not affected their grades either way, according to a study being released today by the University of Southern California. The study said 21 percent of adult Internet users with children believe the kids are online too long, compared with 11 percent in 2000. Still, that’s less than the 49 percent who complain their kids watch too much TV, according to The Associated Press.

About 80 percent of the children say the Internet is important for schoolwork, although three-quarters of the parents say grades haven’t gone up or down since they got Internet access.

Bachmann said her 16-year-old son Michael, a junior at Highland Park High School, is on the computer several hours a day either doing schoolwork, playing games or communicating with friends via Instant Messenger.

“The Internet is an amazing advance where he can find almost any piece of information he needs from encyclopedias, to study, to really anything.” Bachmann said. “When I was younger we had to go to a library and dust off these old encyclopedias, but now things are completely different.”

Bachmann said the family’s computer is in the kitchen where she can monitor what sites her son visits. She said while there are bad things on the Internet, she chooses to focus on the positive learning aspects and trusts her son makes the right choices.

“It’s like driving a car,” she said. “We could give him the keys and he could get in an accident, he could go somewhere we do not want, or we can trust he is being responsible and not allow the negatives to outweigh the positives.”

Even with the positives, parents still try to monitor the time their children spend online.

Ann Ortiz of Woodbridge said her two daughters — Cathy, 13, and Jackie, 11 — are just getting into the Internet and spend an hour or so each day online.

“Right now it’s not a problem, but it’s something my husband and I constantly monitor,” Ortiz said. “As they get older, we are sure it may turn into two hours, three hours, so we are going to watch and if it becomes a problem then put a stop to it.”

Debbie Casabona said her 17-year-old daughter Kristen spends about three hours per day on the computer, but the majority of it is doing schoolwork, talking with friends or playing games to relax. “The only time I have a problem is if the family is eating dinner and she’s on the computer,” said Casabona, an Edison resident. “Other than that, I have no problems with how much time she spends.”

Casabona said the computer is in the family’s living room and she can monitor what sites her daughter goes to. She’s always expressed concerns over sites, like MySpace, which she does not want her daughter visiting.

“It’s the new technology and you have to trust your kids,” she said. “I know that if I tell her not to go to a certain site, then she will not do it. I have complete faith in her.”

From eWeek.com:

Two key e-commerce leaders—Wal-Mart and Macy’s—found themselves shut out of the online portion of the holiday sales rush for much of Friday, as their sites slowed to a crawl starting at about 4 .m. EST.

This was especially troubling as it happened on the so-called Black Friday, where major retailers hope to see their financial ledgers go from being in the red to being in the black.

This trend, however, may be changing, as online sales start to challenge brick-and-mortars for market share and as the day after Thanksgiving starts to become a much less significant day for e-commerce players. The most important date for e-commerce players may instead be late in December. One industry report placed the new date as Dec. 18.

Keynote Systems, which tracks Web traffic, said the Wal-Mart site, www.walmart.com, was “effectively down” from 4:30 a.m. EST Friday until 2:30 p.m.

Friday morning, according to Ben Rushlo, a Keynote senior manager of competitive research, the site of the nation’s largest retailer was eight times slower than normal, with many customers unable to even reach the home page. “Every request was either completely down—with an error message—or unusually slow,” he said.

Things changed at 1:15 p.m., when the site went down completely, apparently a deliberate move by Wal-Mart to try to fix the problem. Users were then greeted with a Wal-Mart maintenance page. About an hour later—at 2:30 p.m.—the site was up and functioning without problems.

A Wal-Mart spokesperson—Amy Colella—was quoted by the Associated Press as blaming the problems on a “higher than anticipated traffic surge.” But 4:30 a.m. seems to an unusually early time for such a surge, especially given that Wal-Mart’s site would presumably have been prepared for a huge traffic surge on Friday anyway.

That said, this year did see extremely early traffic surges at Wal-Mart’s brick-and-mortars, which absolutely would have prompted an online traffic spike. Ironically, the E-Commerce player that had been having periodic outages this year—Amazon—had a very uneventful day on Black Friday. One possible reason is that, unlike brick and mortars like Wal-Mart and Macys, Amazon is obviously always open 24×7, so it is less exposed to huge traffic surges as would Wal-Mart when it opens early for special events. Reports of huge lines out of Wal-Marts at 4 AM were flooding the Web.

Some industry observers speculated that it might have been an outsourced data center that was cause of the problem. Completely overloaded routers could have triggered such a situation, but the time of the impact makes that less likely. Another scenario was a denial-of-service attack, but the pattern of when the servers were back up makes that a less likely scenario

Another key retailer who had problems on Friday was Macy’s. The parade people suffered what could be called The Disaster on 34th Street starting at about 4 a.m., when its site, www.macys.com, was returning almost 100 percent error rates, according to a source familiar with Macys.com’s Web operations but who requested anonymity. Its performance dropped to one-sixth normal response time, and it didn’t get repaired until about 2:15 p.m.

The closeness in the times of both Macy’s and Wal-Mart’s outages—starting at 4 a.m. and 4:30 a.m. and being resolved at 2:15 p.m. and 2:30 p.m., respectively—raised initial questions about whether it was an Internet-wide problem, but the strengths of many other retail sites make that explanation less likely. The possibility that both sites were using the same data center seems more likely, although that could not be confirmed.

On the good news front, the e-commerce giant that was most closely watched on Friday—Amazon.com—fared quite well, after some well-publicized outages. Amazon had a small hiccup on its site on Thanksgiving, but fared well on Black Friday, Rushlo said. “Amazon.com has been virtually perfect over the last two days, with no performance slowdowns and only a small period of performance stress when the Xbox 360 promotion was occurring,” he said. “Amazon.com was clearly ready for the holiday rush.”

According to Internet Reatiler magazine, the Top Ten Retail Websites are:

1. Amazon.com
2. Office Depot
3. Staples
4. Dell
5. HP Home/Home Office
6. OfficeMax
7. Sears / Lands’ End / Kmart
8. CDW
9. Sony Style
10. Newegg.com

A lot of shopping sites are offering free shipping.

Stay tuned for “Cyber Monday”.  That’s the Web’s equivelent to “Black Friday” for the brick and mortar stores. There’s even a web site for “Cyber Monday” with many sites listing their special holiday offers. 

But is “Cyber Monday” the biggest online shopping day of the year? According to the National Retail Federation site, Shop.org, no.

“Much like the day after Thanksgiving, Cyber Monday is one of the busiest shopping days of the year but is not the biggest. (Last year, according to retailers, the busiest online shopping day was December 12, one of the last days of the holiday season that retailers were offering free standard shipping.) However, many retailers see Cyber Monday as the online equivalent to “Black Friday.” It is the kickoff to the online holiday shopping season when retailers offer special promotions to bring customers to the web and introduce them to holiday merchandise.”

A Shop.com quiz revealed that more than a third (36 percent of participants) start buying presents around the Thanksgiving holiday, but nearly a quarter of them say they would rather “Eat their arm off” than venture into a store on Black Friday.

Has any operating system been so maligned and so praised during a painfully long development cycle as Windows Vista? The march to Vista’s launch has sometimes seemed longer than the Hundred Years War.

Now that Windows Vista is at hand, let the debating begin. Is it a look into the future of operating systems, or the last, dying gasp of an old way of computing? Should you upgrade your system to meet its considerable hardware needs? Is it anything other than Mac OS X Lite?

Some may complain that Vista isn’t as revolutionary as it should be after five years of work. But you don’t judge an OS by the amount of time developers have put into it. You judge it by how useful and how pleasurable it is to work with–and in these respects, Windows Vista is a clear winner. It’s beautiful, sports much-improved security, offers superb networking capabilities…and maybe most of all, it’s just plain fun to use.

That’s not to say it’s perfect–far from it. Some may view the new interface as little more than fluff or be turned off by the intrusive User Account Control feature. Expect a long-running discourse between Vista lovers and Vista haters. On which side will you fall? There’s only one way to find out–by taking a tour of the operating system.

Check out entire article on Windows Vista here

PC World also has a good FAQ on Vista here

Windows Vista home page here

Microsoft’s multimedia tour of Windows Vista here

In-depth review of Windows Vista by Paul Thurrott

Excerpt from NY Daily News article:

To Vista or not to Vista? That is the question PC users will soon face.

In late January, Microsoft will roll out Vista, a major new operating platform with 3D bells and whistles and better security features - or so Bill Gates says.

Users with Windows XP and older versions of Microsoft’s operating system must decide whether to buy new machines, upgrade their old ones, or keep what they already have.

Those looking for a new machine under the Christmas tree have a real dilemma.

“Expect vendors to be selling systems for very attractive prices,” said Michael Gartenberg, an analyst with JupiterResearch. “For consumers, the question will be whether to get a system at a very good price over the next few weeks or to wait for a machine with Vista installed.”

Robert Vamosi, a senior editor at CNET.com, advises buyers - especially the less tech-savvy - to wait.

“I just hesitate to say go out and buy a machine today and then two months from now, download and install Vista, because there could be some wrinkles there,” he said.

The ill-timed release date - partly the result of years of delays in cooking up the feature-laden software - has many PC makers and retailers seeing red.

“It is going to dampen sales over the holidays,” Vamosi predicted, even with the promise by some stores of free or discounted upgrades to Vista.

From Kirk Yuhnke aat WJRT in Flint, Michigan:

Many people will be shopping big time on Black Friday, and this year, technology is taking over more of the shelf space at your favorite store!

If you are shopping for kids, don’t be afraid of all the aisles filled with high-tech toys.

It’s to easy to get lost and it’s easy to get confused.

“When we were little growing up, it was board games and cars and toys,” says Meijer store manager Greg Johnson.  “Now everything has a chip in it and it’s electrified!”

We’re here to help by taking a look at some of the hottest gifts this year.

The iDog was popular last year and this year, it’s the iFish — an accessory for your kid’s MP3 music player.

It may just seem like a glorified speaker for about $40 dollars, but it’s hot!  Kid’s love it!

Also for under $50, DVD based games called Scene It.  They’ve been around for years for adults.  Now they’re for kids too!

The Disney version has kids answer questions based on scenes from Disney productions.  There is also a Harry Potter version as well as other kids themes as well.  These games are on sale for $30!

If you’re willing to spend a little bit more, then THE gift this year is the Massively Mini Media.

“I’ve had a lot of parents in her asking about it!” says Johnson.

It’s a media player for kids.  It’s tiny, the size of your palm.  It plays songs and video.  They can store other things on it, and it can slip into your pocket very easily.

Not only is the player small, the price is small too.  It’s about $80.

The crème of the crop when it comes to tech toys this holiday is something that kids love, but parents’ checking accounts hate.  It’s called the Robosapien version 2.  It is a 21st century toy for 21st century kids.

“He’s a robot really is what he is,” Johnson says.  “The way he’s designed, he moves, not like a robot but it’s much more human like. He’s built to interact, he’ll do things on his own.”

He’s not cheap, about $200 on sale!

Of course, this is the hot video game system for kids this year is the Nintendo Wii.

It’s been tough to find but not as difficult as the Playstation 3.  It uses motion controllers to play the games, a whole lot of fun!

Store managers say, the best way to get one of these, is to bug the store!  Keep calling and checking in!

If you are shopping for a teen or college-aged kid, there are plenty of tech gifts that won’t break the bank.

The electronics store is a candy store teens.  It’s hard to spend less than $100 on a gift there, so here’s a suggestion.  Find out the big gadgets they already have and go from there.

“Now it’s about accessories,” says Best Buy store manager Dave Murphy.  “Know what the kids have. You can accessorize, there are a lot of options out there.”

A music download gift card is perfect for anyone with iPod or MP3 player.  It lets them use the money to buy more music on the internet.

New headphones are another cool idea for those music loving teens, or how about a memory card for their cell phone or digital camera!  Find out what model they have and the workers at the store can help you pick.

If they’re into video games, spend a little bit more and get the Dance Dance Revolution game which comes complete with a dancing pad.

“What I think is great about this, it gets kids off the couch,” says Murphy.  “It gets them exercising. A lot of the parents do it with the kid. It’s not just a kid thing anymore. It really gets their blood pumping instead of just sitting on the couch and playing video games.”

These games are still hot and sell for about $60.

If you’re willing to spend a little bit more, you might want to consider it a cell phone.  These things do everything these days! The price is right too.  In fact, you can add one of these phones to a family share plan and they won’t cost that much!

“Maybe $9.99 depending one what you go with,” Murphy says.  “Add a line and they share your minutes.  You just make sure you monitor their minutes and the phone is free. Or you can get a pay as you go phone.”

If you’re thinking about an MP3 player as a gift, remember, you don’t have to spend an arm and a leg!

Sure, the iPods are about $200, but there are other options.  The Creative Zen V is a one gigabyte version with a color screen is only $90!

Even if Sony does fly them in, don’t expect to just walk into any store before Christmas and just pick one up.  An excerpt from an AP story on Silicon Valley:

Sony Corp.’s PlayStation 3 is in high demand and short supply, prompting some gamers to camp out in front of stores for the chance to pay up to $600 for one of the sleek consoles.

In an interview with The Associated Press, Kazuo Hirai, the head of Sony Computer Entertainment America, emphasized that while the company is trying to satisfy demand as quickly as possible, it’s in it for the long haul — and sticking to strategies that have allowed it to dominate the video game market for a decade.

——

AP: How long will it take until everyone who wants a PS3 can get one?

Hirai: We are trying everything we can to get as many units into the North American market as possible. The thing that we’re trying to focus on now is shortening the lead time from the factories to the retailers and consumers. Usually, something this size and weight we would put on a boat, but what we’re doing is chartering planes to fly them in … that combined with trying to ramp up production as quickly as possible as well.

AP: So are we talking months here before there’s a surplus in the stores?

Hirai: Well, I think that’s really going to be a function of the demand for the product. … I think we are going to be selling out of the product very quickly. Hopefully we’ll replenish it very quickly as well with the weekly shipments. But ultimately, when we have a situation that the consumer can walk into retail and pick one up remains to be seen, basically.

AP: There are rumblings out there among people waiting for the PS3 that some stores won’t be able to fill their pre-orders because allocations have been moved between retailers. Is there anything to that?

Hirai: We’ve always allocated our products to our retail partners in a very fair way and also a transparent way. We don’t favor one retailer over another.

AP: There was a price break on the cheaper PS3 model in Japan (the price was cut from about $500 to $400). Is that something we can expect in the U.S.?

Hirai: We’ve been very comfortable with the pricing points we’ve announced. In speaking to our retail partners, they’re very happy with the price points as well. We see no need to adjust the pricing at this point in time.

AP: There have been some complaints in Japan that the PS3 had problems playing some games from the older PlayStations. Is that something that can be fixed?

Hirai: Just to put it in perspective, I think there are probably 8,000 titles out there for the PlayStation 2 on a worldwide basis, and the vast majority of those titles will play on the PlayStation 3 right out of the box. If you look at the launch of the PlayStation 2, there were some titles there as well that did not play on the PlayStation 2.

The beauty with the PlayStation 3 is that you can always have the firmware (the console’s underlying software) updated as you connect the PlayStation 3 on to the Internet. As we go through these upgrades, one of the things we want to do is make sure that the percentage of compatible games goes higher and higher.

I know it’s not exactly “tech”, but I like it

The annual Leonid meteor shower could produce a strong outburst this weekend for residents of eastern North America and Western Europe.

A brief surge of activity is expected begin around 11:45 p.m. ET Saturday, Nov. 18. In Europe, that corresponds to early Sunday morning, Nov. 19 at 4:45 GMT. The outburst could last up to two hours.

At the peak, people in these favorable locations could see up to 150 shooting stars per hour, or more than two per minute.

“We expect an outburst of more than 100 Leonids per hour,” said Bill Cooke, the head of NASA’s Meteoroid Environment Office. Cooke notes that the shooting stars during this peak period are likely to be faint, however, created by very small meteoroid grains.

Elsewhere people will see the typically enjoyable Leonid display of a few meteors each hour, weather permitting and assuming dark skies away from city lights.

Manhattan resident seeks companion for ride to airport, maybe more.

In the latest novelty for a mobile city in a networked world, an online service that debuted during the weekend offers to help New Yorkers hook up for cabs and any other connection that might blossom along the way.

Called Hitchsters.com, it’s ride-sharing with a side of social networking, the digital trend that made MySpace a household word.

Hitchsters’ pitch is largely economic in a city where a cab to the airport can run upward of $50, but the service isn’t shy about its social potential. Its Web site extols the possibility of meeting new people — and maybe getting a free ride if one of the travelers is on business. Users can even specify their fellow rider’s gender, and whether they’re more interested in safety or socializing.

“If people want to use it for the social networking aspect, we wanted to provide that,'’ explained Hitchsters founder Terry Crawford. A lawyer, he says the free service stems from his own travel frustrations. He ultimately hopes to expand it to other cities.

The Web has linked like-minded people from the start, but social networking became a buzz word — and big business — after Friendster.com emerged in 2002. Networking sites try to foster interpersonal connections, sometimes by joining friends of friends in an exponentially growing chain.

More than one in 10 adult Internet users in the country have visited a networking site, according to the nonprofit Pew Internet & American Life Project. There are networks for dieters, job seekers, book lovers, snowboarders, even hamster owners.

Computers “do, for some people, get people more comfortable meeting other people,'’ says Brian M. O’Connell, a computer science and philosophy professor at Central Connecticut State University in New Britain, Conn.

Hitchsters.com users, of course, will have to be comfortable meeting each other not only online, but in person.

Users plug in basics about where and when they need to go, and the site searches for fellow travelers. If there’s a potential match, each party gets an e-mail and a cell phone text message. The arrangements are up to them.

Various rules attempt to forestall arguments over who pays what and who gets off first. Safety precautions aim to discourage hitchsters from turning into, well, stalksters.

Some New Yorkers already negotiate airport cab pools on the online clearinghouse Craigslist.com. Cab sharing is also popular among the 18,000 nationwide users of AirTroductions.com, an airplane seatmate matchmaking service, says founder Peter Shankman. In New York, a taxi ride’s cost is based on distance, not the number of passengers.

From PC World web site:

Samsung Electronics wants to see TVs made using LCD panels compete more closely against plasma display panel screens, a company executive said Monday.

PDP and LCD TVs occupy different segments of the flat-panel television market, with PDPs generally used for larger screens, or those that measure more than 40 inches across the diagonal. However, Samsung hopes that a new factory set to start production late next year will permit volume production of LCD TVs with screens that measure 50 inches or more across the diagonal.

“If they lose the final battlefield at 50 inches, I think the future is very cloudy for PDPs,” said Jun Souk, the executive vice president of Samsung’s LCD research and development (R&D) center, speaking at a conference in Singapore. “It’s a big problem.”

To push PDPs out of the market for TVs in the 50-inch range, LCD makers such as Samsung and Sony have to show they can bring down the costs of larger panels, Souk said. PDP makers face their own challenges, including proving they can produce screens with full 1080p high-definition in volume, he said.

Samsung is counting on a new joint-venture factory it’s building with Sony to produce larger panels that can compete against PDP screens at sizes above 50 inches. That factory, being built in Tangjeong, South Korea, is an eighth-generation (8G) factory, using sheets of glass that measure roughly 6.5 by 8 feet to produce LCD panels–larger than the panels used by existing plants.

The larger sheets and improvements to the manufacturing process will help Samsung and Sony produce larger panels more efficiently, Souk he said. The partners also expects to get high yields from the plant, making volume production of 52-inch LCD TVs possible at lower costs, he said.

“Samsung is concentrating on large-size panels,” Souk said, noting that the company’s most advanced plant currently in operation produces 40-inch panels in volume. The same plant–which produces 1 million panels for LCD TVs every month–also produces larger sizes in smaller quantities, including panels that measure 70 inches across the diagonal, he said.

When the 8G factory enters production in late 2007, it will lead Samsung’s efforts to make TVs that use 46-inch and 52-inch panels a standard in the market place. “We’re working very hard to make this happen,” Souk said.