Programming Jobs Lose Appeal

By Ian Bell June 20, 2005

Rachel Konrad, technology writer for the Associated Press has written a great article that talks about where technology jobs are heading and why many people are studying alternative courses at Universities. A couple factors are the cause for this. A lot of technology jobs are being shipped overseas and those that do stay here in the U.S. prove to be unreliable or give low job satisfaction.

According to a report by research firm Gartner, they predict that up to 15% percent of tech workers will leave their profession by the year 2010, mostly due to the lack of tech jobs available, there are better paying jobs available or jobs with better satisfaction.

That article says that thousands of companies here in the U.S. have opened branches or hired workers in India, China and Russia, and suggests there is little motivation to hire someone here in the U.S. when compared to offshore workers.

You can read the full article here

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Ups and downs of tech in 2021: A look back at the smart home

Google Nest Hub 2nd Gen on table

The end of the calendar year is often when we reflect on all the big announcements, new product launches, and huge advancements in the home technology sphere. While there have been a few notable concepts, gadgets, and ideas that will make 2021 memorable, the year might be notable more for all the stuff we didn’t get.
Cool smart home technology
When it comes to progress in 2021, there were a handful of notable advancements. One of the most tangible and useful is artificial intelligence (A.I.) in the home, and we saw it in products like iRobot’s new Roomba j7+ vacuum robot.

iRobot's j7 with its camera John Velasco / Digital Trends
Artificial intelligence for the home
iRobot rolled out a host of object recognition features that make its robot vacuum more useful since now it won’t get caught on things as much. A new camera built into Roomba j7 can ‘see’ and avoid specific objects like cords, cables, and socks, and even pet poop, so there’s no more coming home to unpleasant surprises or half-finished cleanings. iRobot (and to be honest, other robot vacuum and mop manufacturers are also doing this too) has been training its bots to be smarter and more adaptable to us humans in the home, since we can be forgetful and careless when it comes to leaving hazards in the way of a fresh floor sweep.
Biometrics everywhere
If it wasn’t A.I. infiltrating our smart homes, it was biometrics. We saw smart fingerprint-enabled padlocks and bike locks become more common, like those from BenjiLock. The beauty of using a fingerprint is that you never need to worry about remembering keys. Unlike PINs or combinations, you can’t forget your fingerprint. Biometric access is also used on many smart door locks including those made by Ultraloq and Eufy and the convenience can’t be understated. We covered the best of them all in our best smart lock roundup.

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Need to weigh yourself? ‘Empathic technology’ may soon let you do it on a rug

need measure your weight rug may be able help newterritory smart concept

The modern smart home operates on accessories. You set up an air purifier for cleaner airor you wear a Fitbit to track your heart rate and other vital statistics. Imagine if that wasn't necessary. Imagine, for a moment, that your rug could tell you your weight, your BMI, and more. Imagine if your window automatically filtered the air and also blocked out noise, resulting in a quieter home.

That's the vision behind NewTerritory, a design studio that seeks to make a home truly smart by blending these accessories into the very design of the house itself, rather than as included accessories. It does this through a concept known as Empathic Technology, which focuses on three main ideas.

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How long does smart lighting last?

Wyze Bulb Color in lamp green

When you're spending a healthy chunk of change on a smart lighting system, you want to know that it will last. We're here to break down expected timelines for a smart lighting system and figure out which components are likely to fail first.
How long do smart lights last?
Smart lights use LEDs, which reports show last much, much longer than incandescent bulbs. LEDs can last 30,000 to 50,000 hours of output until brightness decreases to 70% of what it initially had. Meanwhile, CFL bulbs will go for 8,000 to 10,000 hours, while traditional incandescent lamps only last 1,000 hours. Applying a little math shows that you could run an LED bulb eight hours a day for 17 years, and even then, you'd only be dealing with a slight diminishment of bulb brightness. If you're really concerned about making sure your smart lights last long enough, you can always set a schedule so they're only on exactly when they need to be.
Do smart bulbs burn out?
LEDs will emit less light over time. Rather than burn out from overuse, it's much more likely that they'll become unusable due to a wiring fault or gradual decline in color quality before then.

The reason LEDs last so much longer than incandescent bulbs is because they don't rely on generating heat in order to create light. Incandescent bulbs send their voltage through a filament that gets hot until it starts emitting light as well, but over 90% of that energy is lost as heat. So there's a lot less stress on the materials at play in an LED, but it doesn't mean they produce no heat at all. Improper materials that don't account for the small amount of heat they do produce could result in a burnout. In that vein, LEDs that have been built with poor heat sinks are likely to burn out. Home wiring that's running at too high of a voltage could equally fry a smart light bulb. There are outliers, however, and in general, you shouldn't expect your smart lights to burn out in the same way as incandescent bulbs.
Do smart bulbs last longer than regular bulbs?
Smart bulbs do last longer than non-LED bulbs. One potential pitfall with smart lights versus "dumb" LED lights is software support. For example, Philips Hue light bulbs require a wireless hub to communicate with your phone. After a while, the mobile app stopped supporting voice commands to any Hue bulbs that were connected to the first-generation hub, requiring users to upgrade to the next generation. In these instances, the smart light bulbs themselves worked just fine, but the software backbone they needed had partially failed. Basic functions were still supported, but it should be expected that smart lights will lose some of their functions as software platforms evolve.
Do smart bulbs go bad?
At worst, smart bulbs become less useful over time. Diminishing light quality is likely to happen with any LED bulb, and it's unlikely manufacturers will provide software support for any given product for an indefinite amount of time.