From: http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2014/01/24/265238567/at-30-the-original-mac-is-still-an-archetype-of-innovation?ft=1&f=1001%5B/caption%5D
Happy Birthday Mac! Hard to believe that 30 years have gone by and the genius of the folks, headed by Steve Jobs, that resulted in a computer for the masses, has withstood the brutal technology landscape for so long. Many of the original ideas with respect to the interfaces still remain, giving a sense of familiarity that people crave for, while the underlying software has gone through enormous changes. The Macs, like all other computing devices, has gotten much faster and is able to do a lot more, but life’s simple pleasures such as ⌘Q still remain. I thoroughly miss Hypercard. I loved it and drove my officemate nuts by making Apple read the text in HyperCard, using MacinTalk, I think. Oh, those good old days!
I was listening to an NPR story on this today, I was amazed at the creativity of the group that designed the first Mac. “A self educated dropout, someone in the middle of an MD-Phd program, musicians, an archaeologist, and an artist” who formed the initial team that designed the Mac. Of course, the result shows that this was indeed a brilliant idea. Leave it to the techies and you will get Alt-CTRL-Del!
I have been fortunate to have participated in the evolution of the Macs since its existence. Since I worked in computational chemistry, we had plenty of chances to dabble in new technologies. Initially we used it for writing papers, but soon it became evident that it had enough compute power and a version of Basic programming language that allowed us to visualize small molecules. Soon after several programs emerged such as ChemDraw, that allowed you to draw and rotate small molecules with ease. This was extremely useful.
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I saw this image posted by someone I follow on Google Plus and I love it. It captures the perception of various people on what you do and in reality what you actually do! I saw something similar posted to our LTS discussion group about Librarians, which was very funny too.
OK, let us get down to the topic at hand. What is net neutrality? This definition by Wikipedia captures it well “Net neutrality (also network neutrality or Internet neutrality) is the principle that Internet service providers and governments should treat all data on the Internet equally, not discriminating or charging differentially by user, content, site, platform, application, type of attached equipment, and modes of communication.” Makes sense, right? It turns out to be not so and the Internet Service Providers such as AT&T, Verizon and Comcast have been fighting this in the courts. Net neutrality suffered a big blow recently when a court struck down this on technicality.
I am not a lawyer, so I don’t necessarily understand the intricacies of the difference, but as you see in this Time magazine article, “The groundwork for Tuesday’s defeat was established in 2002, when the FCC made the fateful decision to classify broadband as an “information service” not a “telecommunications service,” which would have allowed the agency to impose “common carrier” regulations prohibiting discrimination by the broadband companies.”
Bottom line – your ISPs will soon have a lot of control over what content and how it is delivered to you and you won’t have a say on it except to choose the best available option, which may not be necessarily the one you are so used to. You can read this article for “What the Internet could Look Like without Net Neutrality”
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We enjoyed the holiday break and I hope you all did too. We have been spared the wrath of Hercules in central CT. As far as I can tell, we got about 3 inches of snow, however, it is supposed to be bone chilling cold. Boston area seems to be affected more significantly and the College is closed for the day.
Though weekends, end of the month and beginning of a year are all totally arbitrary, we have grown accustomed to them and live with the cycles and in some cases the hype that comes with them. In that spirit, I have been following the various technology predictions for 2014. “2014: The Year That Puts the Nail in Desktop’s Coffin“, “Eric Schmidt’s 2014 predictions: big genomics and smartphones everywhere“, “Top Technology Trends for 2014” and “Cybersecurity Will Get More Complex in 2014” are a few that are worth a quick read. The problem with all of these is that no one bothers to measure these predictions at the end of the year to identify who has been a reliable predictor so far. In fact, in the second one regarding Eric Schmidt, the author notes correctly “It’s worth noting that Schmidt has a shaky track record on predictions.” It is the case that these trends have significant implications for libraries, but you would be hard pressed to find direct predictions for libraries!
Many of these predictions are relevant to businesses to prepare to maximize their profits and based on “consumer” behavior. Whereas we all have a “consumer” persona when we make purchasing decisions in our personal lives, it is a bit different when it comes to the use of technologies at the College. Primarily, the “consumer” options don’t always work well for what one needs to get done as a faculty, staff or a student. Whereas all the buzz about mobile phones and tablets is exciting and these devices are great for information consumption or even reading (for those who can like e-books), you can’t write a paper on them or solve a math problem or even run many of the academic software that you need to run. Of course, for the advanced users, there are apps that solve every one of these, but they are not convenient or efficient. Though it is extremely important to be tuned into these trends because our future students will be arriving on campus as users of some of these trendy technologies and we need to be prepared to support them.
A more relevant prediction for us is from New Media Consortium’s Horizon report. For 2014, they have identified what is going to be featured in the report and we will closely follow how it develops.
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