Why do we always have to cram? Why do we always have to wait until the last moment before we do things? Look at our House of Representatives and Senate, the lairs of our honorable lawmakers. Why do they have to wait until the first quarter of 2009 is about to end before acting on legislative bills seeking to automate our elections?

Information technology can neither make honest men and women out of our corrupt elections officials, nor can IT teach those who are numerically and morally challenged how to count honestly. But putting an IT-enabled automated poll system sure will demand some learning curve for electoral hocus-focus experts who have honed their vote tally-altering skills with manual voting and counting systems.

Ultimately, these people who have been bastardizing our electoral system would be able to manipulate even the most high-tech voting systems, but at least, let us make them work for it. Let them sweat from having to learn new technologies, or at least spend part of the money they have appropriated from the national coffers in doing so.

Kumo Over Here

Lately, the Internet has been buzzing about a new Internet search engine being tested by software giant Microsoft. According to blogs and news reports quoting leaked memos by Microsoft executives, a Kumo.com search engine is being privately tested by Microsoft employees.

Rumors have it that the search engine can understand sentences and relationships between words. Well, if these rumors are true, Kumo represents a giant stride in the world of Internet search engines. Today’s popular search engines depend on matching words keyed in by users with those found on Web sites and other online content.

Will Kumo finally enable Microsoft to escape its poor third status in the online search market?

New Macs

Apple Inc. introduced new models of Macintosh desktop computers. The Mac Mini, at $599, is the company’s cheapest Mac computer. The quad-core Mac Pro, the company’s workhorse for creative professionals, comes with a $2,499 price tag. Mac Pro computers with eight-core Intel processors start at $3,299.

Apple trimmed the prices of most of the new computer models, but only a little. In fact, the price cuts were a lot smaller than what most investors were expecting the company would implement.

But nobody can blame the company. When consumers are willing to part with their hard-earned cash in order to have quality and reliability from their computers, who are we to quarrel with Steve Jobs and company?

That’s all for the meantime, folks. Join me again next time as we keep on watching IT. For reactions and feedback: adlfrancis@gmail.com.