“How can we best make use of this media, even though it means changing the way we’ve always done it.” – Clay Shirky
So my roommate has got me watching TED talks now. These are really quite interesting; I highly recommend them.
I recently came across this one, in which Clay Shirky talks about social media and its affect on society and history. His lecture is based off the realization that every member of the audience can now be a producer, due to the ubiquity of technology. “It’s as if, when you bought a book, they threw in the printing press for free.”
He talks about several recent events and how social media affected them- most notably the massive earthquake in China and Barack Obama’s campaign. The take away here is that social media cannot be used to control supporters or group members, but rather to offer a place for them to convene.
But I’m not nearly as eloquent as him, so without further ado:
-Andrew S. Mederos
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Well, I’ve done it. Bowed down to my master… I pre-orded Windows 7.
As you command, Darth...uh.. Mr. Gates
I would have liked to wait a little longer, but I got sucked in by the pricing. Ideally, I would want to wait until a few patches are out, or even until SP1. That way I won’t have to deal with all of the inevitable bugs. But $110 for Home Premium? Yeah, right. And with Pirate Bay treading uneasy waters, the 58% discount was really my best option. Well, I look forward to working thorough he bugs and glitches as they come!
But seriously, Windows 7 looks fairly decent. A few of my fellow interns have played with the Release Candidate, and they seem to really enjoy it. Apparently, its an XP frame with Vista dressings, and all the lessons learned from Vista. I’m fine with that. It will be nice to have a more nimble machine then anyways.
Somewhat related, Google announced Chrome OS, their stab at the operating system market. I love Google, and I am very excited to see this OS. I will definitely be dual-booting into Chrome. However, I don’t think it will ever really take off beyond dual booting and netbooks (if those stick around). It seems to be geared entirely to getting the computer on and online- great for the two environments I mentioned, but it doesn’t appear to be robust enough to handle mainstream desktop computing, nevertheless enterprise solutions. I would love to be proved wrong, though. Let’s see what you can do Google!
In other news, I continued clearing out my hard drive. By getting rid of shadow files, out of date backups, reducing my recycling bin to a tenth of its size and clearing out some Virtual Machines I had forgotten, I was able to add yet another 31 GB of free space. I’m awesome. Now I can load that up with alternate operating system!
“If life give you lemons- hey, free lemons!”
-Andrew Mederos
Late night- I have no idea why I’m still up. I’m tired as anything and I didn’t even get to finish my movie (The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly). Didn’t help that laptop kept freezing up at ch. 16. I’ve been having a lot of trouble watching DVD’s on my laptop lately. I’ll have to look into that.
But whatever the reason I am up now doing a tech overhaul of sorts. Since this is a (mildly) tech blog, I’ll tell you what I’m doing. Not that anyone is actually reading this (except you, Dad and Ash). So without further ado…
Tales of Technology
Act 1: The Breaking News
Mozilla released Firefox 3.5 today, and it has been one of the hottest tech stories on Google News. 3.0 was the most downloaded application ever on the day it was released (“Download Day”). Mozilla’s servers actually took a hit from it. Now they’re daring people to beat that with 3.5. So I figured I’d join in the fun. I’ve been using Chrome for a long time now and google I please absolutely hire love me it. But FF3.5 seems to have learned a lot of lessons from Chrome and is supposedly wicked fast, so why not. I’ll probably be doing a side-by-side comparison over the next few days, much like I did with Bing vs. Google. (I’ll post on that….eventually…)
Act 2: The Suspense Thickens
So now I’m in a techy mood and decide to do something about my dwindling hard drive space. Now, I expect disk space to creep away, especially after almost two years. And I have a decently sized music collection. But I also have a 160GB hard drive and only 12 gigs were left. That just seems wrong to me. I blame Vista. So I did some tidying up.
Downloads folder – 3 GB
Random games I never play – 4 GB
Random crap and recycling bin – 1 GB
8 more GB of memory – about $1.92 at today’s rates.
So its acceptable. If I defrag that could maybe squeeze another GB out, but I’m gunna have to do some cleaning, especially if I’m going to duel boot anytime soon (and yes I spelled it that way intentionally).
Act 3: A Challenger Appears
So my Blackberry has been acting up lately. Increased battery drain, load times and missed calls. The battery drain has not been scientifically tested, but I feel like just last week it was lasting me longer. Anyways.
Guess its time to finally install that update. But that means new drivers,a new desktop manager, re-logging in to my apps, and a bunch of EULA’s. Spectacular. This better work. At least I should be able to upload some decent music onto it. I am so sick of “Bach Fugue” being my ringtone.
Act 4: The Dark Embrace.
That’s it, I’m going to bed. I have a bunch of stuff to write about, including the much anticipated Bing vs. Google battle. But knowing my biases, google please hire me it shouldn’t be too hard to figure out what I liked better. Also, I got some videos to post and some great new material for the “Miscellenea” page. But until then, watch the Twitter feed and I’ll see you at 7:30 AM.
Any publicity is good publicity,
-A. Scott Mederos
Started following the #IranElection on Twitter.
For those of you that don’t know, the election has gone to hell in a handbasket in Iran, and there are massive uprisings and protests. These consequently being quelled and put down with excessive force. And of course, all communications in and out of Iran are being blocked- except one.
Twitter.
Wow. In one of my first posts, I mused at how frivolous and trivial Twitter was, while hinting at a few decent uses. This definitely qualifies for the latter. Twitter is being used to get news out of the country, get information in, and organize the protests. The White House is even tweeting in Farsi, keeping the revolutionaries informed.
It’s astounding that a major historical event is being facilitated by this silly technology. Earth is truly moving towards being a digital world.
Follow the Twitter yourself here https://twitter.com/#search?q=%23IranElection or just search ” #IranElection “.
-A. Scott Mederos
The other day I witness my boss do his job and put some people in place. As I told my AL, he was “swingin’ the Boss Hammer.” (Which, as I found out today, also applies to his volleyball skills). The interesting and educational part of this was how he did this. He kept it entirely professional, always criticizing the idea and never those that supported it. His arguments were well founded and relevant. In short, he did it exactly how a boss should.
I was later talking to him about this, and he explained an interesting lesson to me. It was the lesson of Positional negotiations versus Principlednegotiations. His parable:
“Suppose there is an orange. I want the orange, and so do you. To compromise, we split it in half, each get an equal part. This is Positional negotiation, as we took a position and stuck by them to keep it fair.
“But why do you want the orange? Say you want to eat the insides. And then say I want the rinds for baking. With the Positional negotiation, we both only get a some of what we want and a lot is wasted.
“Principled negotiations focus on what each of us is trying to get out the deal. Using a Principled approach, I would scoop out the insides of the orange and give them to you, keeping the rinds. We each get 100% of what we want.
“Sometimes a Principled approach is the best result for negotiations. But sometimes you have to take a Positional approach.”
Wise words. Guess that’s why he’s the boss.
-A. Scott Mederos
So, it’s been a while since I’ve written anything here. This is due partly to being out of school, busy working and just not having anything interesting to write about. I apologize to the 2 (maybe 3) people who have read this. But moving on.
So as I mentioned in my previous post, I am working for GE this summer, but not at the Global Research Center as I originally thought. A significant portion of my day is given to phone conferences and an occasion screen share (using leveraging a tool called WebEx). So when my AL asked me to attend a “telepresence” meeting with him, I thought it would be much of the same. I was surprised when we had to go to a different building to do this. I was more surprised when I walked into the room.
I entered an amazing portal known as a Cisco Systems (R) TelePresence (TM) conferencing room.
PART I: Layout and Technology
The layout of the room was rather simple, but contributed immensely to this technology. Firstly, there was curved table, shaped much like a “(“. Essentially half of a hallow oval. On the open half of the oval, and thus completing it, were 3 large, high-definition plasma TVs. These are back-lit and have 3 cameras mounted in the middle. I was impressed.
PART II: Experience
Soon the meeting began. The TVs lit up, showing a bunch of co-workers in an identical set up. Except they were in South Carolina. They appeared life sized, and began talking normally with no lag or delay. The TVs were even lined up so they’re half-table completed our half-table. It was almost as if they were right there in the room. I was very impressed.
PART III: Impact
So what does this mean? This means that “virtual teams” are becoming both more virtual and more team-like. These TelePresence rooms, scattered across the globe, can allow for instant, face-to-face communication and collaboration from anywhere. Geographic differences mean almost nothing. Travel expenses are slashed. And all the while, the ever elusive element of emotion is maintained. This is one of the most impressive collaboration tools I have ever heard of, never mind seen. I am incredibly impressed.
PART IV: Future
The only way to go now is up. And GE, you’re already halfway there.
The Emperor reviews the latest Action Items, leveraging Cisco's next solution.
-A. Scott Mederos
I logged onto Slashdot briefly today. The top article was about how GE has just released a holographic disk that could store around 500 gigabytes. For those of you crunching the numbers that’s 10 high-end Blu-Ray disks or 100 DVD’s. Every movie and video game in my room right now, plus the contents of both my hard drives on one disk. It comes out to about 10 cents a gigabyte (much less than Blu-Ray).
The second to best part? HOLOGRAMS
GE's new storage system
The best part? I WORK FOR THESE PEOPLE
subject of article = my place of work
Pinch me.
-A. Scott Mederos
It is well known that the US has taken quite a defensive position in regards to cyber warfare. Our infrastructure is constantly being attacked as hackers and cyber terrorists try to crack into our power grid, financial system, defense network, etc. Luckily we have some of the best and brightest working on our side to counter any attacks and prevent future ones.
Inspired by this Slashdot article, I want to take this a step further. I think we should go on the offensive. Counter-worms, cyber booby-traps, I don’t know. Just start doing things to attack our cyber enemies. Imagine how hackers would feel after being crippled by a denial of service attack. What if we had all of North Korea’s computers hooked up to a zombie network, and we could turn the entire system against them if they do something crazy? Can we cripple Iran’s defense network with a few simple keystrokes?
I don’t know how feasible any of this is. Of course, there are all sorts of legal considerations (both national and international). But I’m dreaming of a Tom Clancy- esque world, where there are clearly defined terrorists (Mexicans in red armor) and clearly defined ways to eliminate them (Shoot them). Government- if you need an army of cyber-commandos, please hire me.
-A. Scott Mederos
EDIT
P.S. This is exactly what I am talking about. Why can’t we do this stuff to other people?
I came across this sketch while surfing Cracked.com’s top picks. It tales the woeful story of tech support guy and the problems he has to deal with. All in all pretty fun. I just hope this doesn’t end up being my job.
-A. Scott Mederos
