December, 2008

Terms that we heard (and heard and heard) in 2008

In the Register, John K. Waters has written about the year’s most overused terms: They used ‘em, you reeled: the year’s most overused phrases (Green cloud-as-a-service, anyone?)

Top of the list? No surprise — cloud computing:

Credit crunch and economic meltdown aside, if 2008 is remembered for anything in tech it will be for the domination of the phrase “cloud computing”. The “cloud” was seized on by start-ups and tech giants rushing to catch the next wave or remain relevant.

The usual suspects round out the list: Web 2.0, agile, green and fill-in-the-blanks-as-a-service.

More fun with Skype: The laughter chain

Did you know that 15 minutes of laughter = 2 hours sleep?  Or that a good belly laugh burns 3.5 calories? Granted, you’d still have to laugh a heck of a lot to incinerate all the festive eggnog and rumballs but every little bit helps…

The Skype laughter chain is a viral marketing campaign that involves watching a video of people laughing and recording your response:

Do you have an infectious laugh? Speaking of things that are infectious/viral, laughter also boosts your immune system — why not give it a shot?

Skype’s 2008 — the good, the bad, the… back door?

On FierceVoIP, Doug Mohney discusses the kind of year Skype’s had: 2008 Year in Review: Just Skype, Baby

Skype celebrated its fifth year of operation over the summer and now has more than 370 million registered users. The company brags that its peer-to-peer VoIP/IM/video client software is in use in nearly every country on the planet and that people have made more than 100 billion minutes worth of free Skype-to-Skype calls.

Further on in the post, Mohney mentions that Skype’s Chinese parter was discovered to be eavesdropping on customers and in this post, Mohney speculates about the possiblity that Skype has a built-in back door for precisely that purpose:

Rumors have been floating around on Skype selling a special listening device to interested governments and there has long been speculation about a back door to the program. Because Skype’s code and protocols are both proprietary and closed, security experts have long wondered what Skype is capable of and what risks may arise in deploying the software in an enterprise environment.

Seebeck effect demo

Skype tutorial demos

This video takes you through the process of making free calls with Skype from downloading the software to connecting:

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This video from Skype demonstrates using the service for business: 

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FrugalTech discusses more ways to save money using Skype for business:

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Kid Guru explains how to record calls for podcasting and other purposes:

Happy 40th birthday, computer mouse!

Today the computer mouse celebrates its 40th anniversary.

Pictured is version 1.0, held held by inventor Douglas Engelbart.

[Image credit: CERN Courier]

Modern mice have come a long way since this wooden prototype but the essential function — transferring physical motion to moving a cursor on the screen — remains the same.

Some great factoids about the computer mouse, via Wikipedia:

• The name ‘mouse’ originated at originated at the Stanford Research Institute, where researchers noted its similarity of the cord to a certain rodent’s tail
• Bill English, builder of Engelbart’s original mouse, invented the so-called ball mouse in 1972 while working for Xerox PARC.
• The first mouse shipped as a part of a computer came with the Xerox 8010 Star Information System in 1981
• Inclusion with Apple’s Macintosh is where the mouse really took off

The BBC has posted videos of Englebart explaining how the mouse got its name and the first demonstration of the mouse in a fascinating story that includes extensive quotes from the inventor.  (Sorry, no embeds available for BBC video content.)

Gearlog also has a great guided tour of 40 Years of The Mouse, if you’d like to take look back at the evolution of modern computing’s most ubiquitous peripheral.

Just move that cursor over and click on the hyperlink above — and thank Engelbart for his vision.

Jaguar and ECOphlex - Greening the data center, fast

This video from Cray takes you on a tour of the ECOphlex cooling system at work in a data center.

Adobe’s Zoetrope really takes you back

Adobe's come up with an application that lets users look at past versions of Web pages or sections of pages and perform complex comparisons of various data, such as exchange rates or gas prices over time. A scroll bar at the bottom of the screen allows you to scroll backwards in time. So, for example, if you were on the WhatIs.com home page, you could scroll backwards to see what the Word of the Day was yesterday, check out the Overheard in the Blogosphere quote and the trivia and Writing for Business questions. You can also perform more complicated research and explore correlation among varying factors over time.

Here's a video demo:

Erica Naone wrote about Zoetrope for MIT’s Technology Review.  As Naone points out, the historical data will have to be available for the system to maintain it. That’s a lot of data and it will take a while to amass.

Zoetrope isn’t available as a download yet but it could be pretty useful when it is. It’s not yet known whether it will be released as a standalone application or will be a browser component.