Week 10: Clear

I never realized before the intricacies of setting up fiber optic cables. Although I have spent many nights hoping for them to reach where I live. I do a lot of downloading, usually have a couple torrents going at any certain time, and to keep my uploading ratio even close to my downloading ratio is a serious chore. My ability to upload is at about 60kb/s compared to the 1.5mb/s that I'm downloading at.

Google realizes that a lot more things could happen if everyone had better internet connections and that's why they're putting Gigabit connections in a city somewhere in america and see how it affects life there and what benefits people put it to use. http://www.google.com/appserve/fiberrfi/public/options is the place where cities, and the people that live in them can apply.

I remember finally moving from dial-up to cable back in elementary school, and the difference in my ability to find and retrieve all types of data on the internet was greatly expanded. Now I've got multiple routers in my apartment, running over a dozen computers.

Week 7: Clear

The lecture on the booting of a computer was very interesting. Learned a new acronym, MBR (Master boot record), and reminded of what POST stood for.

Unfortunately lately, the computers I've been buying always cover over the POST and so all I generally get to see is a big ACER advertisement every time I turn the computer back on. I realize it's able to be turned off, however I'm too lazy for that.

Back when I was big into overclocking my computer hardware I spent a lot of time messing with the blue BIOS screen. Generally I don't have to use it at all anymore, as college has reduced my ability to buy new parts.

Week 6: Clear

As far as fast-paced technological advances go, I consider myself very lucky for growing up in this time period. At the core (pun alert) of this advancement are transistor-based processors. My first processor I bought was a whopping 133mhz intel. I moved onto an AMD chip that was around 1ghz, then I upgraded to an AMD 3200+, which is around when companies stopped going by the clock-speed of their processors as the main benchmark and things got a lot more confusing with naming schemes. Those are all on just single cores, and now I'm running an Intel Q6600 which has 4 cores, and is way faster than I could've ever imagined originally when I was young.

Recently they've discovered how to use graphene instead of silicon in processors and IBM made a 100Ghz processor out of it, they say 10x faster than the maximum of a silicon one! Although I've read this technology is years away from the mainstream (it always is). Eventually it's said that they can reach upto 1000Ghz on a graphene-based chip!

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9152960/IBM_details_world_s_fastest_graphene_transistor?source=rss_news

Week 4: Clear

I just recently reformatted my hard drive and reinstalled Windows 7. I was moving from the Release Candidate/Beta build to the Professional Edition. The beta goes inactive in March, and this class had that MSDN E-Academy deal for 23$ dollars for the Professional Edition. I hope I can use my UFL email to get cheap software forever!

Usually, after installing I'd have to go spending hours to retrieve and re-install all of the programs I had on the computer before that. Thanks to web 2.0, and other modern software improvements I was back to normal in less than 10 minutes after Windows finished updating!

I used Ninite.com to automatically find, download, and install my music player (Zune), my web browser (Chrome), my utility programs (Spybot, CCleaner, uTorrent, Flash, FoxIt Reader, and WinRar), and also Steam. Steam is sort of like Ninite for PC Games. When I login to my account, it knows all the games I've bought, and I can download them from their servers and play them within the hour. Chrome also allows you to login wherever you are and get your bookmarks, and I have an addon that also collects my usernames and passwords wherever I am as well for it.

I might reinstall it more often just to keep things clean when it becomes this easy to be up and running again in no time.

Week 3: Clear

An interesting anecdote about the name WiFi. It's amusing that even the text book says WiFi (Wireless Fidelity), guess they haven't read the article! There is nothing that causes more anger in me than a bad router. It's like they have no quality control at those factories. I bought a 20$ Belkin a couple years ago when I first moved to Gainesville. It lasted me perfectly up until the beginning of this semester. I could access the control panel, it never dropped my connection, etc. When it failed due to the power connection losing its functionality, we switched to my roommate's fancy Netgear router. This thing requires it to be restarted at least a couple times a week. Sometime it doesn't let me even reach the control panel, and I have to factory default it. However the Netgear I use at my parent's home works perfectly fine.

I also found it amusing that the company considers Yahoo! to be on the cutting edge. The website still looks like it was made in 1998.I use it as an old email address for spam, and every time I login, they've stolen yet another feature from some other website (i.e. Status updates, and Avatars). I'd change email, or forward it but I don't really use e-mail for anything other than signing up for things, only every couple months do I actually send someone a message over it.

The website I visit most often would have to be Reddit. It's an aggregator, and much more up to speed than Digg. Also you can customize what appears on your front page by certain topics.

Week 2: Clear

I could listen to the history of computing for days on end. My subscription to Netflix has been used to watch every documentary it has on the subject of science and history (and the history of science). Most of my time is spent wondering why I'm a Business major instead of History.

The progression of computer technology was a nice refresher, and I chuckled when he noted the statistics of a modern day computer, and even though the power point was only a few years old I imagine, the stats were horribly out of date.

On the computer coding schemes side, the reasoning behind the hexadecimal system was an interesting note. EBCDIC is something new to me altogether, but UTF-8 is something I found out quickly after connecting to the Internet. Whenever someone would type something with an apostrophe and it would show a c instead of the ' I learned to set my browser to read in UTF-8. I've been learning Python as a hobby for the last couple months, and better learning these coding schemes should help me along the way.

Week 1: Clear

I've had a connection to the Internet for as long as I can remember. My father always kept me up to date with the latest and greatest computer technology. Like magic, my childhood disappeared. I was turned into a cave hermit, illuminated by the glow of my old CRT monitor.

As such, I've grown accustomed to the way things are communicated. I tell my Aunt that I don't have an email address anymore, as to avoid the forwarded emails.

FW:FW:FW:FW:FW:FW: CAN U BELIEVE THIS?

I don't believe that Netiquette is adapted by the denizens of the Internet in any way though. Even in work-related e-mails you will receive the garbled transmission of what appears to be a new-born baby, though is actually your boss.

Respect is generally lost for them when that happens, and that's why Netiquette is an important part of the business environment. Unless your boss or customer is a grandma that loves pictures of kittens it's best to leave those for your friends (or no one at all).

As for copyright laws, I had not realized the length that it lasted for. A lifetime + 70 years seems like a long time. In my opinion holding on to something for that long just hinders the spread of knowledge and is terrible for society. I realize that they exist to allow for people to profit from their works, however 69 years past when they've died?