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Viewing all posts tagged "technology"
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Three goofy Finns hawk the Google Chrome browser during tonight’s The Simpsons commercial break. Those goofy Finns!
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”…there’s an obvious search-related rationale for launching a social network like Google, since indexing and mining that kind of activity can help the company provide better “social search” results. But the real-name issue has more to do with Google’s other business: namely, advertising.
It’s official: Google wants to own your online identity — Tech News and Analysis
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Why US Broadband is so slow
In 1996, the US Congress kicked off the broadband revolution when it passed the Telecom Act. The 1996 Act created a level playing field for competitive carriers, and brought about widespread deployment of DSL and other broadband technologies.
Then in 2003 and 2004, the then Republican led FCC reversed course, removing shared access to essential fiber infrastructure for competitive carriers and codifying instead a policy of exclusive use and “multi-modal competition”.
This concreted our unique US duopoly: cable versus telco, the two broadband choices that most Americans have today.
In exchange for a truly competitive market, the US received promises of widespread deployment. And, to some degree this has worked. Unfettered by significant competition or price pressure, broadband in at least in its most basic form can now be delivered to most homes in America, albeit at a comparatively high cost to the consumer.
What was given up in exchange for this far-reaching but mediocre pablum was true competition and innovation.
(Source: yewknee)
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The Internet back when it was just Internet
I stumbled across our old family World Book encyclopedia set last night. Printed in 1988, the year in which World Book received a major design overhaul including new typeface and page layouts, the term Internet is nowhere to be found. It’s mentioned for the first time in the encyclopedia’s 1994 annual supplement under the updated entry for Library.
Internet was viewed principally as a means for individuals to search the catalogs of libraries around the world. In 1993, the supplement reports, the Cleveland Public Library became the first U.S. library to offer public access to Internet. Other libraries then linked up to Internet, thus creating a collection of computer networks that spanned the globe. Planning began on the construction of an “information superhighway” to link persons with computers to information databases.
The 1999 World Book supplement describes how Clinton Administration officials sought to spur private investment in Internet by setting communications standards, making government data available on the network, and proposing laws that foster competition.
Ironically, I suppose, Internet played a major role in the 1998 scandal regarding the relationship between President Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, a former White House intern and cigar receptacle of sorts. Reports of their relationship broke via the Drudge Report, a new independent Internet Website. Kenneth Starr’s report to Congress on his investigation into the affair was allowed to be released publicly via Internet.
I remember downloading the Ken Starr report on the old Macintosh LC using our BEEE BEE BEEE BOOOOOO WISSHHHHH BOP BOP dial-up connection. It was a text-only file and took a few hours to download. That was some literally juicy reading.
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Starting at 3:35 UTC today (6:35am local time), approximately two-thirds of all Syrian networks became unreachable from the global Internet. Over the course of roughly half an hour, the routes to 40 of 59 networks were withdrawn from the global routing table.
The Internet in Syria basically depends on one domestic provider, state-owned SyriaTel. (AS29256 and AS29386). They buy most of their Internet transit from Turk Telekom and Deutsche Telekom, with some contribution from PCCW, Tata, and Telecom Italia. Connectivity has historically come in over submarine cable from Cyprus; activation of new terrestrial fiber connections to Turkey have been delayed by this year’s political unrest.
The network prefixes that remain reachable include those belonging to the Syrian government, although many government websites are slow to respond or down. The Oil Ministry is up, for example, and Syrian Telecom’s official page, but the Ministry of Education is down, as is the Damascus city government page, and the Syrian Customs website.
The networks that are not reachable include, substantially, all of the prefixes reserved for SyriaTel’s 3G mobile data networks, and smaller downstream ISPs including Sawa, INET, and Runnet.
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Proof The iPad Is Affecting Consumer PC Sales
Microsoft’s consumer PC sales growth has pretty much never declined. Not even when Microsoft released Vista. Not even when the economy went in the toilet.
But suddenly, the growth of sales is about to go negative, says Citi analyst Walter Pritchard. Take a look at the chart below, and consider what changed in the last year.
» via Business Insider
I’ll still get a Kindle before an iPad.
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Thoughts on technology, global interconnectedness, and violence
Communications technologies are enabling individuals to connect regardless of the physical distance and political barriers which separate them. I’ve always presumed this to be a good thing, although recently I’ve been led to question my presumptions and think hard about the what happens when traditional separation barriers — the ones designed to keep people from escaping — are broken down and replaced with new sorts of barriers (both virtual and physical) designed to prevent people from coming in.
The segregation of people is the reality of economic globalization, and many of the humanitarian crises that just seem to keep popping up all over the world — the ones we hear about in bullet point headline form, coupled with disheartening and brutal images, endorsed by celebrity personalities and philanthropists like Sean Penn, Wyclef Jean or Bill Gates who helping put out urgent appeals for charitable donations, these sorts of conflicts liberals love to espouse as driving mission in live — seem to have actually been caused by the very system that was supposed to prevent violence.
“In the much-celebrated free circulation opened up by global capitalism,” writes Žižek, “it is ‘things’ (commodities) which freely circulate, while the circulation of ‘persons’ is more and more controlled.” The violence we perceive with our own eyes constitute a “subjective” violence, and it is the very process of reproducing such violent images that masks the underlying causes of the violence. “Objective” violence, in other words, is rendered invisible while the traumatic, gut-wrenching, visible “subjective” violence dominates the airwaves.
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Life data: using Android device and Google Maps to visualize my daily commute
(Note: I fully realize that less-than-three-miles can hardly be considered a commute. It’s more of a sputter down the road. But I can’t help it if my office moved so closed to where I live. Commute used to be 8 miles.)
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