Now take this not too far into the future where the glasses are sending the information directly to the back of the eye and providing an even more realistic experience. These days in the Western world at least people are becoming more and more dissociated from each other. The family dinner now consists of the older generation talking to each other with the newest generation focused on their Nintendo DSI or equivalent. Sometimes they are in their own world, other times there are communicating with one or more people in the same room. The call to eat requires multiple attempts.
People locked into the latter paradigm send pictures of themselves, often altered or avatar in nature, that rarely match their real life images and attributes. It is interesting to imagine how our perceptions of each other will change over time as the lines between reality and fantasy become blurred. Recent examples have shown that it is easy to confuse and be confused by imagined age, sex and orientation that can end up being the opposite of the reality.
When is an unlimited connection not an unlimited connection? When AT&T says it isn’t. The following is an example of where I seeing many others going in the future. If you're a heavy downloader with an unlimited AT&T wireless data plan then according to AT&T you have another two months before you will be throttled, if you are in the top five percent of heavy users. In official speak this was expressed as “smartphone customers with unlimited data plans may experience reduced speeds once their usage in a billing cycle reaches the level that puts them among the top 5 per cent of heaviest data users." They plan to give out warnings and only hobble repeat offenders, promise.
There are others in the US that throttle after a certain point and I expect that the NBN in Australia will have the same conditions and others at many places around the world as connectivity and connected speed increases. My current plan for example allows me to pull down about 200GB of data of which I use only a fraction of that, unless I have some kind of exploit in operation. As content improves it would however be easy to pull at least that for say streaming BD level materials. Given that restrictions are being imposed in the US it shows how bandwidth is being outstripped by technology.
Mini Review – The Classic Shell Replacement for Windows 7
Those that have been around for a while, e.g. those who used XP for a while, will have complaints about Vista and Windows 7 as far as the interface, the Start Menu and Explorer. For those that still use it this also includes Internet Explorer. A work associate pointed me to Classic Shell, an add-on for Windows 7 and Vista that brings back some of the better and most missed features of the XP shell. You can find it here http://classicshell.sourceforge.net/ and it is free.
The add-on is essentially the classic start menu from XP that in some cases adds a few features. I dropped it into Windows 7 where a Shift Click will bring up the regular Win 7 menu. A regular click displays the traditional format. You can drag and drop to reorganize the apps. Recently used documents are easy to find and how many show is customizable. A right click allows renaming, deleting and other options. The Search option is back and you can even skin the menu to your taste.
The Classic Explorer replacement adds a toolbar to Explorer for some common operations like cut, copy, and email and is fully customizable. The Copy UI is more compact and useful. Alt-Enter shows the folder properties and has a range of customizing options including showing the free disk space and the total size of the selected files in the status bar. It fixes a lot of ‘broken’ features in Win 7 like the jumping folders in the navigation pane and the missing sorting headers in list view. Classic IE9 shows the load progress, adds a caption and shows the security zone. There are regular updates.
Industry News
Here is an interesting study. A fairly detailed study of 100K Web users was carried out by recording the Web browsers people used as they completed a Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (IV) IQ test. The firm was AptiQuant from Canada and they found that Opera users had the highest average IQ followed by Camino and Internet Explorer with Chrome Frame. Next came the group of Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox and Apple's Safari. At the bottom of the list were those using any standard version of IE ranking “significantly lower on an average than others.” English-speaking users from the US, Canada, UK, Australia, and New Zealand were drawn to a free IQ assessment test on AptiQuant's site. Age and gender were collected and those below 16 redirected to a different site. The results were compared to a similar exercise from 2006.
Essentially the results indicate that those with a higher IQ have moved away from IE in the past 5 years or that the smarter you are, the less likely you are to be using IE. The real result is also that individuals on the lower side of the IQ scale tend to resist a change/upgrade of their browsers. The study also found that IE was somewhat of a downer for web developers viz "Any IT company involved in web development will acknowledge the fact that millions of man hours are wasted each year to make otherwise perfectly functional websites work in Internet Explorer." You can find all the details here http://www.aptiquant.com/news/is-internet-explorer-for-the-dumb-a-new-study-suggests-exactly-that/.
Anonymous, the hacking group, claim that they have broken into the networks of Mantech International and stole internal documents belonging to the US government contractor. Members then posted a 390 MB download that looked like it contained NATO, the US Army and personnel files. An attached note file said the hack was intended to defy the FBI after they charged 14 people for being part of an Anonymous-led web attack in December.
In even later news hackers have posted the names, addresses, and other personal information of 7,000 law enforcement officers that were stolen from a training academy website they hacked into. The data included social security numbers, email addresses, and the usernames and passwords for their accounts on the internal training website. The group responsible was AntiSec an affiliate of the Anonymous hacking collective. It was no surprise that many of the passwords used were either normal ones found in a dictionary, their names or their badge numbers. Given that many people also use the same passwords in multiple places this would have also compromised other accounts. There was other information compromised including other websites in other places. All due to the same reasons given above. I suspect that US law enforcement has not seen the last of these attacks and information release.
So will DIDO save us all? Distributed-Input-Distributed-Output (DIDO) Wireless Technology made the news recently in an announcement from Steve Perlman that the wireless technology would make things like the Australian National Broadband Network (NBN) redundant. More on this next week after I have read through the paper a few times.
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