I'm sitting in the Fort Lauderdale/Hollywood International Airport in Florida. A few minutes ago the Associated Press flashed an advisory that AT&T Wireless and other carriers have learned of an outage affecting BlackBerry devices, one of the most popular handhelds, especially among business users.

Part of the issue is that Research in Motion, BlackBerry's maker, routes all e-mail/messaging traffic through its servers — at least, all that its commercial customers use. (I imagine that the Defense Department might have its own
arrangement.)

Something's down; it'll be back up in due course, and life will resume for so called "CrackBerry" addicts. If you see some forlorn faces in Union Station, however, this is probably why.

— Mark Kellner, The Washington Times

Among the 2008 inductees into the National Inventors Hall of Fame is Amar Bose, founder of the Bose Corp. and giver (to the world) of some incredible audio products, according to a news release.

I had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Bose and sharing lunch at his corporation's Framingham, Mass., headquarters last September. His is an incredible, only-in-America kind of business story, one that deserves acclaim beyond the hall of fame precincts.

He is a man committed to innovation and invention; for most of his company's existence, he kept at his "day job" of teaching engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, his alma mater.

I've reviewed a few Bose products, including the Bose Computer MusicMonitor speakers, an amazing $399 product any computer user will appreciate. The QuietComfort 3 headphones are another item appreciated by users, especially those who travel.

Congrats are due to Mr. Bose ... and the thanks of audiophiles everywhere.

Information on the awards can be found at www.invent.org/2008induction.

— Mark Kellner, The Washington Times

Thursday's announcement by the Pentagon that a failing U.S. spy satellite would be the target of an anti-satellite missile, a story ably explained by Bill Gertz on Page One of Friday's paper, reflects the latest— but not the first — such attempt by the U.S. military.

As Mr. Gertz's story noted, the forthcoming try would "be the first time a missile defense interceptor will be used against a satellite, something that has not been attempted since the 1980s, when the Pentagon tested an anti-satellite missile from a jet fighter."

The jet fighter in question was an F-15, and its pilot was then-Capt. Wilbert D. "Doug" Pearson Jr., U.S. Air Force, who retired in 2005 as a Major General in charge of the Air Force Flight Test Center at California's Edwards Air Force Base. He's now Lockheed Martin's vice president of the F-35 Integrated Test Force, based in Fort Worth, Texas.

In a telephone interview Feb. 15, Mr. Pearson said that unlike his accomplishment of 25 and one-half years ago, the Navy's task of bringing down this new satellite will have its challenges.

"It will be more difficult in some ways, specifically, they have a target that is not particularly stable," Mr. Pearson said from his Fort Worth office. The current satellite "is probably tumbling. When you look at it today and try to predict where it will be tomorrow at a particular time, there will be a much larger error than what we had in [1982]."

However, Mr. Pearson said, "it is quite do-able. We have demonstrated intercepts before with ballistic missiles. They've done that a couple of times at least."

Maj. Gen. Wilbert D. "Doug" Pearson Jr., U.S. Air Force, retired

In 1982, under a mandate signed by then-President Ronald Reagan, Mr. Pearson's team used the F-15 to launch a specially designed, two-stage, anti-satellite missile that would sense the target and hit the center of the satellite at a high velocity, achieving a "kinetic kill."

The Air Force used "an infrared sensor that could sense a heat source from very far away," Mr. Pearson said, to target the satellite. The sensor was a byproduct of the Reagan-era "Star Wars" antimissile defense program, he said, and was able to differentiate between the heat signature of a satellite and those of any nearby stars, even though the two signatures were similar. This was done by programming
the sensor with information about the stars in the satellite's vicinity; any extra signatures would have to suggest a target.

"We put our eggs in the basket of being very precise and make it a kinetic kill, which would involve a very small vehicle," Mr. Pearson recalled. "But you had to actually hit it. If you missed by just an inch or two, it just went whizzing by. The sensor had to guide precisely to the center of the satellite and hit at a high velocity and would destroy the target," he added.

"And that's exactly what happened," Mr. Pearson said. "There were 210 individual items that had to be correct to get a successful launch, and I said we got 210 miracles."

— Mark Kellner, The Washington Times

In today's "On Computers" column, I suggest that many readers will, sooner or later, buy a flat-screen TV. It seems I'm not the only one with such thoughts:

DisplaySearch, the worldwide leader in display market research and consulting, reported in its latest Quarterly Global TV Shipment and Forecast Report that global TV shipments grew 21% Q/Q and 5% Y/Y to 60.8 million units, which brought 2007 total shipments to almost 200 million units worldwide. For the full year in 2007, TV revenues exceeded $100 billion for the first time, with Q4'07 revenues
climbing 10% Y/Y and 26% Q/Q to a record $32.9 billion.

Also of note, DisplaySearch reported that LCD TV shipments worldwide overtook CRT TV shipments for the first time, after rising 56% Y/Y to a record of more than 28.5 million units or 47% of the world TV market. The strong LCD TV share gains can be attributed to:

Share gains in all regions — LCD unit share improved in every region worldwide, including Europe, which had the strongest growth of the quarter. LCD penetration was highest in developed regions, reaching 86% in Japan, 84% in Western Europe and 78% in North America. But the strongest unit growth for LCD was in developing regions, such as Latin America, Asia Pacific, and Middle East & Africa, which combined rose 106% Y/Y, where penetration is low and the opportunity is substantial.

Natural replacement for CRT — LCD is the only other technology that extends down in screen size to less than 20", which makes it a natural replacement to CRT TVs, as consumers upgrade and CRT TV tube capacity shrinks. Current plasma (PDP) TV technology extends down to 32", but the CRT market is largely below this size, and many regions of the world have limited acceptance of 40"+ screen sizes.

The numbers are impressive, and I suspect the trend will continue to grow. Goodbye to tube sets which, given their weight, are a nice thing to farewell, I believe!

— Mark Kellner, The Washington Times

The sad and, to this writer, surprising news that conservative thinker, author, broadcaster and wordsmith-without-peer William F. Buckley Jr. has passed from the scene at age 82 recalls his seemingly unusual involvement with high-tech.

Long before many of us, if memory serves correctly, Mr. Buckley took to "portable" computing, lugging either a Kaypro II or Osborne 1 and thus wrestling with one of the first word-processing programs for the "mass market," WordStar.

Sometime thereafter, Mr. Buckley moved to Toshiba laptops and discovered XyWrite, a program first created for MS-DOS and later for Microsoft Windows. It was a clean, elegant and useful solution adopted by a number of publications and, for a time, by this writer.

In 1988, "XyWrite Made Easier" appeared in print, written by David H. Rothman of Alexandria, Va. Though it seems to me that Mr. Rothman and Mr. Buckley had little in common politically, Mr. Rothman's work found favor with the founder of National Review, who graced one edition of the Rothman book with an introduction written in the usual witty, erudite Buckley style.

Mr. Buckley's last book, whose title contains a word not normally used in a family newspaper, comprises items from "Notes & Asides," a feature Mr. Buckley compiled for his magazine since pretty close to its inception. That feature was described as a forerunner of today's blogs, and perhaps it was.

— Mark Kellner, The Washington Times