Uncut Unedited - Just simple thoughts dribbled out on a page

Technology

The World Wide Web is an extremely abundant source of information. It is also a place where people from all over the world can come and communicate with each other. There are many things that people use today in the way of technology that they couldn’t imagine ever not having.

The cell phone is one of these technologies. Even little kids have cell phones now. My niece is like eight years old and she has a cell phone. Her mom sees it as a great way to be able to keep in touch with her kids when they’re spending the night at someone else’s house or something like that. My oldest sister has a cell phone just for emergencies. It’s one of those “pay as you go” cell phones. People use cell phones so often now though, that they’re primary use isn’t even to make phone calls anymore. It’s to listen to music or browse the Web. I was talking to people online the other day about these technologies and nobody ever brought up the topic of which one lasts longer. It’s all about which one has the most features. Even cost isn’t an issue with some people anymore. They just want to know what it can do in comparison with someone else’s product.

One of the best and most useful technologies I’ve seen come out in recent years is the Flashdrive. The flashdrive is a little memory stick that plugs into a USB port on your computer. You type up a document in Microsoft Word and then you can save it to your flashdrive and carry it with you wherever you go. It’s just like a floppy disc was back in the day only it can hold a lot more data and it’s easier to transport. People use them to backup their data, to save pictures and multimedia that they create or retrieve from the web, and also to burn ISO images from Linux distributions. I used to use mine all the time until I got a laptop.

The laptop is a great way to transport data to and from work and home or home to school and vise versa. I can just do my work on my laptop and bring it to class and not even have to worry about plugging a flash drive into another computer to bring up my word documents. With a laptop, you can show other people what you’ve been working on without having to plug your work into another computer. They’ve also become very lightweight and easy to carry with the new Macbook Air weighing in at well under three pounds.

Also, there’s the World Wide Web. The World Wide Web was invented back in the early 1990s by a man named Tim Berners-Lee. He created it so that people would have a more visual representation of what was going on on the Internet. He is also the creator of HTML and the founder of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the group which regulates the standards for the Web.

Well, here we are almost twenty years later and the invention has become a way of breathing for many people across the globe. Every day we get onto the Web to view the news, visit youtube to see what the most popular videos are that have been posted lately, view stocks, check website statistics, read email, and even order take-out food. It’s very addictive. If it weren’t for the Web, I wouldn’t even be able to do my Math homework. People even do their Christmas shopping online nowadays. It used to be just Black Friday but now that the Web is so popular, we now have Black Monday. This is the Monday after Black Friday that people do most of their shopping on the Internet. It used to be that people would just go out on Friday and buy a bunch of things that they probably weren’t going to need or use and then get online on Monday and sell them on EBay. Now, online stores have caught onto this and have started having big sales online on Black Monday keeping it the busiest online shopping day of the year and rightfully so. People shop online so much, that a few years ago when the Pittsburg Steelers won the Super Bowl, I immediately went over to shop.nfl.com to buy a hat but there was so much traffic on that particular site at the time that I couldn’t even get in.

How fast a page downloads on your computer could depend somewhat on what Web browser you’re using. I’m almost completely biased when it comes to talking about Web Browsers. I gave Internet Explorer a chance. I really did. But with Web Browsers like Safari and Firefox, why would I settle for something that isn’t up to par? For one thing, Safari is extremely faster than Internet Explorer and it’s a lot safer. Firefox has useful add-ons on their website and they don’t cost you anything to download. In order to get any good add-ons for Internet Explorer, Microsoft wants you to pay for them. Another good thing about Firefox is that it’s opensource, which means that I can run it on my computer no matter what operating system I’m in. So I can run Firefox on my PC with Windows XP, my Macbook Pro with Mac OS-X Leopard 10.5.2, and Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon, which is the latest distribution of the Linux operating system. By the way, Linux is free and opensource. Opensource also means that people from the community can not only offer feedback as to what they’d like to see in the next version of the Web browser, they can also help in the development of the product. Firefox may not be as fast as Opera or Safari for the Mac, but it’s still faster than Internet Explorer. It seems like it was almost in the same week that Apple stopped supporting Internet Explorer for the Mac, that Windows picked up Safari. I wish Apple would start supporting IE again because there are still some things that I can’t do with my Mac. Like my math homework. I have to be inside of Internet Explorer in order for the mymathlab software to work. However, until people start developing Web applications for both operating systems, there’s always a solution.

A Mac comes with a built-in feature that allows a user to remotely login to any other Macintosh computer on the user’s home network. However, there isn’t a built in solution to login and remotely control a Windows machine from a Mac. I use Remote Desktop Connection on my Mac. This is an application that allows me to login to and work within my Windows machine from my Mac. I’m only using this on my home network at the moment, but I bet if I mapped the ports out on my router, I would be able to do this from anywhere. That means that I would be able to be on the Internet from anywhere.

How can we make these technologies better for the future? What is it that’s slowing them down? Is it legal issues? Is it security? I think that some Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEM) should spend less time competing with each other and bickering over copyrights and more time deciding on what’s best for the user. After all, this is why they started building these home computers in the first place.

-Leave me comments. Suggestions, criticism, and/or praise are all welcome-