Midterm Essay #3

Email has indisputably changed the way people interact and communicate. There are some pros and cons to weigh in this area. Email has allowed for instantaneous information in a way that neither standard mail nor the telephone have. A person can send off an email and in a few seconds, it's there. If the person is not available at the moment, the message will probably still get through. Sending mail and placing telephone calls to other countries can be expensive. The phone quality might not be the best and the mail may take several days to reach its destination. Email can be free and if I wanted to send a message to someone in China, it could be there in a few seconds. That is another point: email can be free. Google, Yahoo, and others provide free email service to anyone. This has the effect of allowing people to keep in touch over great distances.

On the downside, however, email when used in small-scale settings, such as in offices, can create artificial barriers between people. Email can also be used as a vector for internet-borne illnesses. Viruses can be spread in email attachments. If an HTML email message contains an image and the message is opened, it will alert the spammer that they have hit a functional email address and will continue to spam that address. Phishing is really more a form of social engineering, but it is primarily performed via email. Email has its pros and its cons, but I feel that as long as we are careful and use the technology properly, the benefits will far outweigh any of the risks.

Midterm Essay #2

Computer literacy is important for three reasons. First, an increasing number of jobs require at least some skill with a computer. It could be anything from a web developer to a police officer. Granted, there are some jobs that do not require such skills. However, one does not necessarily need for the computer to be central to whatever his or her job may be. Computer literacy may be required to a limited extent. People could use them for tasks as simple as exchanging email and submitting reports.

Another reason that it pays to be a computer user is profit. There are people out there, people like Kevin Rose, who made their fortunes on the internet. On a smaller and slightly less glamorous scale, money can be made in online commerce. Sites like eBay can be used to buy and sell items, maybe even for a profit. Services like Google's AdSense allow you to easily make money off of advertising on your site. In a much more tech-savvy way, a person could produce and distribute their own software. If a developer can think of a program, there is probably a market for it.

The third reason it pays to be computer literate is to stay informed. So much useful information is available on the internet, older media cannot possibly keep up in variety or volume. If the television networks are not reporting on a given event, there is a good chance that that event is being reported somewhere on the internet. Since the internet does not respect borders, it is very easy to get information from sources all over the world. It can often help to get an international perspective on an event and conventional media outlets here in the United States may not provide that extra perspective.

Midterm Essay #1

In Triumph of the Nerds, Steve Jobs quotes Pablo Picasso, "Good artists copy, great artists steal." Given the context in which that statement was made, I would have to say that I agree with him. It was made in 1996, when Microsoft had a virtual monopoly on the personal computer market and Apple was tanking. Jobs had been fired from his position at Apple due to creative differences with the CEO, John Scully. Jobs saw the company that he had helped to create being cornered by a company that had used some of Apple's own design techniques to make their own success.

I have to understand where he was coming from. He was angry about the situation at the time. He did have a point, though. Apple effectively stole the GUI from Xerox and, in turn, Microsoft stole it from Apple. Xerox owned the technology to begin with and could have effectively destroyed Apple and Microsoft before they got bigger. It would seem that in this situation, the person who stole the technology made a bigger profit off of it than the company they stole it from.

World's Largest Solar Power Plant to Open in 2011

You can find the original article here.

Solar power is becoming more and more prevalent in our energy plan. There is now a new solar power plant in the works for rural Arizona about 70 miles outside of Phoenix. Of course, solar power is nothing new, but it has seen much more attention in recent years than it has before. The new plant will be called "Solana" and will cover roughly 1900 acres. Once completed, it will be able to singlehandedly power 70,000 homes, all from the power of the sun. Rather than the traditional Photovoltaic (PV) cells, the plant will use Concentrating Solar Power (CSP) technology. A large series of parabolic mirrors will redirect the solar radiation onto a single, central point beneath chimney. This will heat the air, causing it to rise quickly through the chimney, turning turbines on its way out.

I see this technology making a big impact on the Phoenix area. It will set a precedent for solar power plants elsewhere. I sincerely hope more American cities will begin to take advantage of this source of power. However, the CSP technology requires much more space and prior planning than simply setting up an array of PV panels. However, I am sure that the idea of clean, cheap, safe energy will become a more and more attractive option in the future.

Browser Wars

Safari is Apple's own entry into the browser market. Originally it was restricted to the Mac, but has recently released for Windows, as well. Safari offers native RSS support, rather than requiring another application to manage feeds. It supports tabbed browsing. It comes free on every Mac sold. However, the current version for Mac, Safari 3 still in beta and is available for free download on both Mac and Windows. It can also import bookmarks from any other browser.

Firefox is another free web browser provided by Mozilla. Firefox is available for Mac, Windows, and Linux. It is open-source software, meaning not only is it free, anyone can mess with the browser's code, tweak it, upgrade it, and enhance it. There is a community surrounding this browser and they help to keep it updated. It works well with its companion email program, Thunderbird. It can show RSS headlines, but requires Thunderbird for email and the ability to read RSS articles in full. It has a phishing filter, which can help a user from inadvertently revealing sensitive information online. It is also "skinnable," meaning its appearance can be easily changed with third-party skins. It can import settings from Internet Explorer, Netscape Navigator, and Opera. It can also import bookmarks in the form of an HTML file.

Camino is a browser offered exclusively for the Mac. It is a free download and is open source. It does not offer native RSS support. However, it can detect feeds and will allow you to set up an external RSS feed reader. Like the other two browsers mentioned here, it supports tabbed browsing. It includes a built-in spell checker and it can save your last session for when you decide to reopen Camino. This will store all the windows and tabs you had open as well as data for the Forward and Back buttons. From a technical standpoint, there really is not much of a difference between Camino and Firefox, other than the organizations that maintain them.

In the wake of Internet Explorer 7, it looks like Mozilla will take a big bite out of Microsoft's browser market share with Firefox. It could go either way on the Mac with Safari and Firefox. IE is not a factor on the Mac anymore as Microsoft has long since stopped developing its web browser for the Mac platform. Microsoft Windows users will not have a hard time finding a free browser with IE7, Firefox, and a whole host of others. WIth more and more people, malware authors and hackers will have a more difficult time damaging people's systems. When a single browser, Internet Explorer, has 80% to 90% browser market share, it makes them a very large target for the jerks out on the internet. Also, Internet Explorer is directly linked to its operating system, Windows, and is used as the file browser on the computer's internal hard drive. The others listed are not so closely entwined with the systems that they are on.

Personally, I prefer Safari and Firefox. I use Safari primarily for reading my many RSS feeds and Firefox for tabbed browsing and broadcasting. As long as I keep both of them up to date, they rarely fail me. Also, I downloaded and tried out Camino. I thought it looked very clean and elegant. Its specs were pretty good. However, I did not think it was compelling enough to adopt permanently.

Computer Shopping

Pricing Page

Computer:
I selected the iMac desktop computer from Apple, Inc. It has a 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor and 4GB of RAM. The machine is an all-in-one that has the 500GB hard drive, the optical drive, the webcam, and the 20" LCD display in one piece. The keyboard and mouse are included. There are no expansion bays, but new RAM can be added at the bottom of the computer and the hard drive can be replaced by opening the case. Besides the power port, there are 3 USB 2.0 ports, a FireWire 400 port, a FireWire 800 port, a Gigabit Ethernet port, a Mini-DVI port, an audio-in port, and an audio-out port. Bluetooth and WiFi are already built into the system, so external devices could also be connected that way. The computer has iLife '08, iWork '08, and Aperture. Also, the machine comes with Mac OS X Leopard (v. 10.5) preinstalled. As you can see on the pricing page, I have expensive taste.

Printer:
The Canon Pixma IP3500m is an inkjet printer with a print rate of up to 25 pages per minute.

Ning

I just had to post this. There is a website where you can go and create your own social network around anything. Like cooking? Social network. Earth Day? Social network. You can create a social network around anything and use this free utility to build it. You can even put a domain name in front of it. Anyone can come in and join your social network if they are interested. Cool, ain't it?

http://www.ning.com/

January 30th is "Delete is International Your Myspace Day"

http://bloggasm.com/january-30th-is-international-delete-your-myspace-account-day


Recently, a blogger named Simon Owens became so fed up and irate over various aspects of the Myspace user experience, that he called for all Myspace users who were sick of the site as well to delete their accounts. I hope that this works. Although I am not a Myspace user, nor do I use any social network, I think that this would be a signal to NewsCorp, owners of Myspace, that their customers want better service. I will not go into any specific details about most of the gripes that Owen had. However, I feel that Myspace is one of the worst offenders on the internet for bad site design. Not to get too political, I really do not approve of Rupert Murdoch owning any social networking site. Tomorrow is January 30th. I will be interested to see how successful this call to arms will be.

Assignment 1: Obligatory post-Macworld blog post

I have to post this simply because it is so cool. In case you didn't know, Apple announced various products on January 15. Among them was the MacBook Air. Here's the ad:



I was very impressed by the engineering involved. They managed to cram a Core 2 Duo processor, 2 GB of RAM, an 80 GB hard drive, and an iSight camera into this thing. There's an option for a 64 GB solid-state (flash memory) drive rather than the 80 GB hard drive. It costs an extra $1000, though. There's also a 13.3-inch screen and an ambient light sensor that controls the brightness of the full-size back-lit keyboard. There is no internal optical drive, but you can buy one from Apple for an extra $99 or you can use some included software to "borrow" the optical drive of another computer on your local wireless network. This isn't cheap, though, it starts at $1799.
I'm looking forward to seeing this in stores next week. By the way, I have also embedded Apple's official promotional/introductory video for the MacBook Air.



Also released was the AppleTV "Take Two." The AppleTV is a set-top box that, in essence, turned your HDTV into a giant iPod, which could be synced across your home network. Music, podcasts, video, and photos could be copied over to the device and viewed in the living room. Apple realized that they had made some mistakes with the AppleTV last year and is now hoping to rectify the situation. Probably the biggest improvement was the addition of iTunes movie rentals, which is a feature that was introduced into iTunes itself at the same time. Now one can sit on the couch at home and rent movies for $3 or $4, which will be downloaded instantly. The movie must be started within 30 day and once started, the user has 24 hours to finish. It can be replayed as often as the user like within the 24 hour window. Photos can also be viewed from Flickr and videos streamed from YouTube. Apple also dropped the price by $70 to $229.

There was also an update to the iPhone and iPod touch. The update allows the user to move icons around and create new Home Screens. This will not do much in the short term. However, Apple is due to release an iPhone SDK to all developers. So, at that point, the ability to manage icons on the iPhone and iPod touch will be much more important.

Apple also released a companion product to their backup up software, Time Machine. The device is called Time Capsule. On the outside, it looks like an AirPort Extreme base station, and it does fill that role. It has three Ethernet ports on the back for connecting computers to the internet, plus one port for the modem. It also support the 802.11 WiFi standard. However, these devices can have either a 500 GB drive or a 1 TB drive on the inside. These automatically back up all the computers set up with it wirelessly, meaning the user no longer has to physically connect a USB or FireWire cable to back up one or more laptops.

I would say it was a good Macworld. I hope Apple does not slack this year. I hate that. As is customary with Apple, its products are a little on the pricey side. This will always drive away people, but I think that there are always those out there who will need or just want this stuff.

Post teh first

This is my first post on this blog. Hooray!

This blog exists for the sake of my Informatics I101 class. It should be fun!

I also have a personal blog on this site. http://patrick42h.blogspot.com

(The typo in the post title was for irony's sake.)

-patrick proctor 42h