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The Virtual Revolution

February 10, 2010 by wroolie Leave a Comment

BBC started airing a very good documentary about the internet a few weeks ago called The Virtual Revolution.  I finally watched the first episode just the other night.  It’s amazing how much has happened in such a small time.

Google was incorporated in 1998 (went public in 2004).  Youtube started in 2005.  Twitter in 2006.  The World Wide Web was created in 1990 with the first web server being created by Tim Berners-Lee in that year.

It was a fantastic documentary and it really makes you think. 

We are still very much in the beginning of all of this.  There are still things to be done that no one has thought of yet.  We still haven’t reaped much of the benefits that the improvements in communication channels will have lent to science and medicine and as much as the internet has changed all of our lives, I’m sure it’s nothing compared to what’s to come.

I routinely chat with people in China and India (and back home in the States) while visiting offices here in the UK. In high school, these places all seemed so far away.

This twenty years of the internet will one-day seem like just a blip to us.  One day years in the future, people will talk about how the newspapers and music industries cried foul before they found their own way.  We will talk about the quaint days of waiting for our favourite TV programs to be aired.  Soon, we will look back on Twitter and Facebook the same way we look back on the old newsgroups (it was all so crude!).

The other day I found myself falling into the trap of thinking that everything had been invented already.  Surely, there are no new opportunities out there because they’ve all been invented.  Or, someone is already working on them.  But the truth is that we’ve hardly scratched the surface. 

There are still things that aren’t quite right in technology.  Still loads to do.  For example, as much as webcam chat is fantastic and a nice novelty, it’s still too complicated to get “ordinary” people to use it. 

As much as things change, we still think in old terms.  Artists still come out with Albums, even though we can buy and download only the tracks we want.  Why do we need the album grouping?  We still have business people who think they need to fly thousands of miles to have a meeting in another office, because we haven’t found a method of communication that is better an 8 hour flight.  Too many of us still get up in the morning and drive or take a train to an office building to do work that could easily be done at home.  When we get to grips with some of these new realities, we will start thinking differently and even more innovation will come.

I was reading the xkcd comic strip (if you haven’t read it, you’re missing out—http://xkcd.com), and saw this this strip:

Xkcd strip

2003 wasn’t that long ago. Or maybe my age is just catching up with me.

Filed Under: Blogging, Social Media, The Environment, Work

Leave it on or shut it down?

July 4, 2009 by wroolie 5 Comments

I turn my desktop computer (running XP) off every day when I’m not using it.  It is a pain to wait for startup and shutdown times, but I’m concerned for the environment and all that.

I think most people leave it running 24 hours.  I can understand why.  Sometimes it take over 10 minutes to really get all services loaded.  I’ve tried hibernate, but the Dell 9150 I use comes back from Hibernate with the fan running at full speed and it’s very noisy.  Windows seems to be geared for 24 operation– with automated processes kicking off at different times of the day.  It’s like the fridge– but I’m not sure how it compares in terms of energy consumption.

I’ve actually set my bios to kick on at 4am so the computer has finished start-up before I get up there ten minutes later.  It does all my site backups at a specific time.

I’m trying to find more energy efficient uses of the pc.  If anyone has any ideas, I’d love to know.

Filed Under: Miscellaneous Rants, The Environment

The Story of Stuff

July 15, 2008 by wroolie Leave a Comment

I watched a video over the weekend that I’ve been thinking about continuously ever since.  It is all about where our stuff comes from, how it is consumed, and how it is disposed of.  It talks a lot about the crap we buy in Wal*Mart, etc.

http://www.storyofstuff.com/

It’s about 20 minutes long, but worth the time to watch it.

Filed Under: The Environment

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