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Jan 25 2009   4:28PM GMT

The Mac hits the quarter-century, going strong

Posted by: Ivy Wigmore
Uncategorized, Apple, innovation, design, desktop, interface, computing history, personal computing

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…

Jan 1 2009   1:47PM GMT

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

Posted by: Ivy Wigmore
Uncategorized

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

Dec 30 2008   7:34PM GMT

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

Posted by: Ivy Wigmore
Uncategorized

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.

Dec 23 2008   4:45PM GMT

More fun with Skype: The laughter chain

Posted by: Ivy Wigmore
Uncategorized, fun, video, free, Skype

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?

Dec 10 2008   1:20PM GMT

Skype tutorial demos

Posted by: Ivy Wigmore
Uncategorized, VoIP, Mobile, Web 2.0, video, new media, podcasting, multimedia, useful, free, lifehack, collaboration, gadgets, communications, environmentalism, Mobile Computing, Skype

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:

—————————————————————————————————————— Betchaboy demonstrates making a video call with Skype:

Dec 9 2008   6:17PM GMT

Jaguar and ECOphlex - Greening the data center, fast

Posted by: Ivy Wigmore
Uncategorized, data center, energy efficiency, green, environmentalism, HPC, high-performance computing, supercomputers

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

Dec 8 2008   5:59PM GMT

Adobe’s Zoetrope really takes you back

Posted by: Ivy Wigmore
Uncategorized, applications, news, Web 2.0, YouTube, new media, innovation, cool, interactive media, Web analytics, documentation, mashup, adobe, Web applications

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.

Nov 30 2008   5:38PM GMT

Who could resist Fennec? It’s so cute!

Posted by: Ivy Wigmore
Uncategorized, messaging, wireless, Mobile, applications, video, social bookmarking, design, gadgets, social networking, CIO, demonstration, Mobile Computing, browsers, Fennec

Site director Margaret Rouse and I were IMing a couple of weeks ago, which we do a fair amount of because our “office” spans about 800 miles. We were discussing a definition for Fennec, Mozilla’s mobile version of the Firefox browser when suddenly she said, apropos of nothing I could discern, “It’s so cute!”

As you probably know, IM conversations are prone to the occasional missed step or dropped thread. I wondered briefly what she was talking about. A cute browser, I wondered? But I had faith… and then there it was, a link.  Here’s what I saw:

No denying, it’s cute. But I was still none the wiser. I knew that Margaret is a dog person and, in fact, has raised guide dogs. That’s a cute pup, I said. “What kind is it?” It’s a fennec, she told me. A little fox. (Comprehension was, you’ll be glad to hear, swift and, well, comprehensive: Big Firefox: full-sized fox mascot. Small verson: small fox mascot. Gotcha.)

At least at this point, the mobile adaptation of Firefox is named for a small, desert-dwelling fox. Here’s a video demo:

All clear? Me too. Now I wonder what this week's IMs will bring...

~ Ivy Wigmore 

Nov 20 2008   9:08AM GMT

Windows Azure video demo

Posted by: Ivy Wigmore
Uncategorized, Microsoft, Virtualization, Web 2.0, programming, operating systems, Web services, WhatIs.com, Web applications, software development, cloud computing, utility computing, the cloud, Windows

Here’s Manuvir Das’ presentation about Windows Azure, from Microsoft’s 2008 Professional Developers’ Conference:

Nov 6 2008   4:56PM GMT

Will buckypaper cars fly — or will we need buckypaper airplanes?

Posted by: Ivy Wigmore
Uncategorized

From the Associated Press:

It’s called ‘buckypaper’ and looks a lot like ordinary carbon paper, but don’t be fooled by the cute name or flimsy appearance. It could revolutionize the way everything from airplanes to TVs are made.

See the video: