Politicians technology

I picked President Obama as my research project and found his approach to technology to be fascinating. President Obama and his new media team came up with Obama`s vision of open- source democracy. After he was sworn in, his new media team took control of the website Whitehouse.gov. They came up with three top priorities for the new administration. They are as follows:

Communication: In using google-you tube and others the President keeps the people up to date on the important issues. This allows us to visit the briefing room his blog and we can sign up for email updates so we can know about announcements and other news that might come out of the White house.

Transparency: The President is allowing us to see what is going on within his administration. His executive orders and proclamations.

Participation: The internet is playing a huge role in letting us participate in Obama`s non-emergency legislation. For five days we will be able to review and comment on whatever bill is being put forth before the President signs it.

My take on this is, I think it`s awesome to be able to be apart of something that we as the general public probably never thought we could have. In my opinion I think it`s the Presidents age and the sign of the times that make this at all possible. In the most recent past, even though we had this technology, the good ol boys didn`t want to give in to technology and would have never thought about letting us public be apart of the government as we are now. Kudos to President Obama.

My source was techcrunch.com

Google

After listening to this news about Google trying to create it`s own OS I have this thought. While I`m sure that google will make some kind of money from this I think most likely it will not be a profit. They already are making a huge profit from their interface that runs on windows now. Why do they want to ruin that. I don`t believe that any OS will overtake windows in the near future or ever for that matter. From what I have heard and have been reading there are alot of other people way smarter than me that have that same opinion. A great man once said " If it ain`t broke don`t fix it ". I agree.

Linux

What is Linux ? Linux is a operating system cloned after the OS Unix. This OS was invented by Linus Torvald and he had assistance from a bunch of hackers from around the world.

Who uses Linux ? Well from what I have read it seems that Linux with it`s open - source operating system is growing ever more popular in the Corporate world here in the US and around the world. Even the Military and Intelligence agencies in US, Canada, France, England, Spain and other countries are now running this OS along with China`s post office.

Would I use this OS ? I think once I get more computer savvy that I might use some of it`s software that is cheaper and from what I have read works just as good. For right now I think I`ll will stay with good O`L Windows.

Fighting Cybercrime

After listening to this interview with Joseph Minn and Barrett Lyon I was shocked. I cannot believe that these people from Russia, China and other parts of the world are software savvy enough to figure out how to get into our computers. I would think that our Government would have been on top of this along time ago. Thank goodness for Mr. Lyon. It also amazes me that the very people doing this are helping China steal our military secrets. This I think is scary.

Multimedia devices

After doing some research I found a new multimedia device being introduced by NEC in June. This device is an projector that is designed to be used in small spaces. This projector is the WT600. It uses no lenses like the projectors that are being used theses days , but uses aspherical mirrors that bounce the image back and forth until it is projected on the screen. This will project a large image up to 100 inches diagonally even as close as 8-10 inches away from the screen. This unit weighs around 10-12 lbs. and it has all the inputs and ports to connct to your laptop or PC. You can also use it wirelessly. I think this will be great for small venued presentations as well as large venues. The cost of this projector is expected to be around $7000.00 to start. You can find more info on this device at http://www.pcworld.com/article/110222/multimedia_devices

Hard drive

From the BIOS setup on my computer these are the settings related to my hard drive.
Drive configuration : Diskette Drive A: The size of my installed driver is 3.5 inches at 1.44 MB
Primary Master drive: is my Hard drive
Primary Slave drive is off
Secondary Master drive is my CD-ROM Device
My secondary Slave drive is off
IDE Drive UDMA is on
Hard disk drive sequence is as so: #1.System BIOS boot devices
#2 USB Devices (not installed)
Boot sequence : #1. Hard disk drive C:
#2. IDE CD-ROM Device

DMA - (direct memory access) This the fastest way of transferring data to the memory because it don`t have to go to the CPU 1st.

Low level formatting - Creates the physical format that defines where data is stored on the disk.

SATA - Serial ATA is a drive interface that is a flat and thin cable. One end connects to the driver and the other end to the motherboard connector.

ATA - Is an AT attachment. Parallel or Serial.

IDE (Intergarated drive electronics) is a 40 pin data cable that conncts to the motherboard. Used for CD or DVD Drives.

The History of Memory

In this weeks blog we were asked to research the history of Memory. Give some timelines and some interesting points that we learned from this research. Here is what I learned :


In 1932 in Austria, the magnetic drum was invented. It had 1o KB in capacity and was widely used in the 1950`s- 60`s.


In 1946 the Selectron tube was invented. It had a capacity of 256-4096 bits (32-512 bytes) but had to many problems and was very expensive to make therefore it never really succeeded in the industry.

The magnetic Core memory was introduced to us in 1949 by Jay Forrester. This dominated in the 1950`s and remained popular through the 1970`s. This was a small donut wired into the grid that passed 1/2 of the current through 2 wires that met back at the core.


The Hard disk drive was invented in 1956 by IBM. It had 50 24-inch disks that held 5 million characters, just short of 5 MB.

The 1st DRAM chip was developed by Intel in 1970. It was the best selling semi conductor in the world by 1972. It was 1st used by HP in their 9800 series.

In 1984 Apple came out with their 128 KB memory Macintosh computer. The 1 MB chip was developed at this time.

In 1995 Extended Data Out EDO DRAM is developed and IBM released the 64-bit AS/400.

Double data rate DDR SDRAM 266 MHz was introduced to us in 2000.


In 2004 the DDR SDRAM was increased to 533 MHz. Intel introduces its Pentium 4 processors.

This brings you up to todays advanced state of Memory that we are learning about.


I researched all this material on the following sites : Pingdom.com, About.com, wizcraftcomputerservices.com and Timeline Help.