January, 2009

The Mac hits the quarter-century, going strong

Happy Birthday, Mac!  Yesterday was a big day for the Macintosh — 25 years old. Apple introduced the new computer on January 22, 1984 during the broadcast of Superbowl XVIII.

MG Siegler writes about the original Macintosh for Venture Beat:

It had a 9-inch black and white CRT screen and featured a 400 kB, single-sided 3.5-inch floppy disk drive. The price? $2,495, which in today’s dollars would have been well over $5,000.

The computer featured the signatures of the entire Apple Macintosh division molded inside the case. Those name include Raskin, Apple chief executive Steve Jobs, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and many others.

The Mac specs also included:

• Graphical user interface
• Mouse
• A built-in handhold on top
• 128 kilobytes of RAM
• 8 MHz Motorola 68000 microprocessor

Here’s the commercial that started it all…

IPv6 addresses - how many is that in numbers?

IPv6 is our Word of the Day today. The big difference between it andIPv4 is the increase in address space. IPv4 addresses are 32 bits; IPv6 addresses are 128 bits. That’s a lot more, for sure, but what does it look like in numbers? What could we compare it to in real-world terms?

DevDevin did the math:

How many IP addresses does IPv6 support? Well, without knowing the exact implementation details, we can get a rough estimate based on the fact that it uses 128 bits. So 2 to the power of 128 ends up being 340,282,366,920,938,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 unique IP addresses.

How do you say that, though?  340 trillion, 282 billion, 366 million, 920 thousand, 938 — followed by 24 zeroes.  There’s no short way to say it in numbers without resorting to math. 

Here’s how Wikipedia expresses it:

The very large IPv6 address space supports a total of 2¹²⁸ (about 3.4×10³⁸) addresses - or approximately 5×10²⁸ (roughly 2⁹⁵) addresses for each of the roughly 6.5 billion (6.5×10⁹) people alive today. In a different perspective, this is 2⁵² addresses for every observable star in the known universe.

 Steve Leibson takes a shot at putting it in real world terms. It’s big — grains of sand don’t even enter into it. No, he’s got to take it to the atomic level. Here’s his conclusion:

So we could assign an IPV6 address to EVERY ATOM ON THE SURFACE OF THE EARTH, and still have enough addresses left to do another 100+ earths. It isn’t remotely likely that we’ll run out of IPV6 addresses at any time in the future.

Rob Elamb takes a shot at expressing the number of possible IPv6 addresses in words:

First of all, he’s more precise with his numbers: 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456

And he shows us how to say it:

340- undecillion
282- decillion
366- nonillion
920- octillion
938- septillion
463- sextillion
463- quintillion
374- quadrillion
607- trillion
431- billion
768- million
211- thousand
456

So, all words, that would look like:

Three hundred and forty undecillion, two hundred and eighty-two decillion, three hundred and sixty-six nonillion, nine hundred and twenty octillion, nine hundred and thirty-eight septillion, four hundred and sixty-three sextillion, four hundred and sixty-three quintillion, three hundred and seventy-four quadrillion, six hundred and seven trillion, four hundred and thirty-one billion, seven hundred and sixty-eight million, two hundred and eleven thousand, four hundred and fifty-six.

That’s a big number.  

IPv4 allowed for four billion IP addresses, which must have seemed like plenty at the time. I guess the assumption was that not everyone on the planet would want an IP address and nobody’s coffee maker or toaster would need one. Just goes to show you, you never know.

IPTV or Internet TV?

When I selected IPTV for today’s Word of the Day, it was in response to seeing articles about iTV (Internet television) and assuming — silly me! — that it was the same thing.

Uh. No, as it turns out, they’re two competing delivery models. IPTV is like a replacement for cable TV and typically offered by the same carriers. And it isn’t always delivered over the Internet, as this Crash course in IPTV explains. However, I think I can say confidently that Internet TV is always delivered over the Internet. Robin Good explains the difference between Internet TV and IPTV in this post.

If this all seems unnecessarily complicated and difficult to untangle, maybe you should just wait. According to many Industry watchers, the two will eventually converge into a hybrid of some sort. What that will look like is still up in the air. Or will it be online?  

Millennials vs. Boomers Smackdown: Talkin’ ’bout my generation

In his Ramblings from a glass half full blog, Terry Starbucker posted a refutation of Don Tapscott’s paean to the millennial generation, Grown up Digital. Here’s the post: Generational Smackdown: Baby Boomers vs. The Millennials

Starbucker was reading Harry Hurt III’s review of Grown Up Digital in the NY Times.

Tapscott’s thesis? Get this:  Millennials are “smarter, quicker, and more tolerant of diversity than their predecessors.“ Well, I’ve got to say — that smarts!

Starbucker:

His thesis, based on interviews with nearly 10,000 people, is that as the first generation that came of age in the Internet era, the Millennials are “smarter, quicker, and more tolerant of diversity than their predecessors”

Why? Because of the “collaborative” nature of the Internet. Us older folks, baby boomers weaned on the one-way medium of television and radio, were apparently dumber, slower, and less tolerant at a similar age.

I know and love a goodly number of the Y gen. I’m even related to quite a few. And they’re a wonderful bunch of people. In some circumstances I’ve even seen them demonstrate that type of evolutionary superiority — say, perhaps, in the last hours of a big, multigenerational party. Before they were old enough to drink.

Those days are done. They may quite likely best us in a partying contest, should we agree to take them on. And, (harrrumph) on behalf of not only myself and my fellow Boomers but also my dear (also smart, quick and tolerant) friends, the Gen Xers, I am officially affronted. On a good day, we’re as smart, quick and tolerant as any of the millennial generation. And — hey! — I’m sure they have their bad days too.

Starbucker soundly refutes eight “norms” that supposedly illustrate Gen Y superiority. Here’s a sample:

Tapscott: M’s scrutinize everything. Starbucker: BB’s didn’t have the Internet to research everything under the sun in seconds flat, but that didn’t stop us from hitting the library or the good ol’ encyclopedia if we really needed the straight scoop. Or better yet, actually having a face to face conversation with someone to pick up those nuances missed on those text messages.

Pound for pound, I maintain that a good representative of the Baby Boomers could go head-to-head and toe-to-toe with a similar representative of Gen Y. Or Gen X, for that matter. Once you control for age, of course. We were quick! We were smart! (Note: Do not read foregoing in Grampa Simpson voice.) Tolerance? Puh-lease. We invented it. That and sex.

K, I’ll admit I haven’t read Hurt’s review of Grown up Digital, let alone the book itself. And I guess I shouldn’t be too upset at Tapscott because I know what generation he belongs to. 

Here’s a hint: Not Gen Y. Not Gen X. Nope, Tapscott went to school with my husband, which places him firmly among the rest of us knuckle-draggers in the Baby Boomer generation.

~ Ivy Wigmore