What is a browser?

Living in our digital ivory towers, it is easy to forget how disconnected we technocrats are with the general public. Many of the concepts and jargon that comes naturally to us is just unintelligible to most. Here, Scott Suiter, a former Google intern explores if people know what a browser is ...

Family Net

The New York Times featured a very amusing story illustrating how the Internet is rapidly becoming a basic essential of life. It tells the story of the effect on the dynamics of a family gathering.

That was my first inkling of how the vastly expanded electronic and informational needs of houseguests would flavor our time together. Soon guests were positioning themselves to get dibs on one of the three computers in our Long Island house the way they would otherwise line up to jump in the shower.

...

Oy! Couldn’t we all stop the keying/ringing/texting/e-mailing and just talk? Mea culpa, on that score. My own escape from an overstuffed house was to sneak away to my office, where I pecked away at the mounting e-mail and checked Yankees scores. But my solace didn’t last long.

“I hate to bother you,” came a small voice from behind me. “The downstairs printer is jammed up. If I send you an attachment as a Zip file, can you unstuff it and print it up here?”

A somewhat much milder version of this happens in our family as well. In the last 3 years, our very geographically extended family got together twice, after a long time, for a couple of weddings (including mine). At some of the venues where we stayed, there was obviously no internet. Those of us who have become habitually connected into the online world, felt very fidgety about being unplugged. There was an element of restlessness and feeling helpless. One's eyes inevitably seek some sort of monitor, fingers itch for buttons to press. And wherever there's a computer, usually it's only one without Wi-Fi, everybody takes turns checking their emails, making sure all is well with their online world. People upload their digital photographs and everybody gathers around to see them again and again. Conversations drift towards discussing latest software, hardware and digital exploits. Yes, I did load some old movies & photos and show them off to relatives - to various reactions of embarrasment and laughter.

There were other aspects - everybody carried cellphones (and their chargers), everybody carried digital cameras (and their chargers, memory cards etc. ). Some moments in our wedding felt like walking into a field of paparazzi - there were so many continous flash bulbs from so many digital cameras.

Our family is still safe - there are not that many confirmed techies among us. We are still able to talk to each other in person. Our recent gatherings turned out to be a lot of fun (after the digital withdrawal symptoms had dissipated) and there were many lively conversations and sharing of experiences.

Nevertheless, I feel more connected to those who are online. Those I cannot email, seem to be living in an unreachable place. I can't tell whether this is the new 'normal' or the digitally obsessive.

The New York times story is here.

You can also try the quiz below (thanks, Praz), to see how geeky you are

80% Geek

Video Guides: Social Bookmarking

Here's another useful video from the Common Craft Show explaining another internet concept. This time it's 'social bookmarking'. Forget the 'social' for a while and think of bookmarking. Most of us bookmark our favorite sites using the browser menu, but this then keeps the bookmarks on just our local computer. If we were to go and work on some other computer, we would lose all that information. This is about saving your bookmarks on the internet so you can access them on any computer connected to the net. Very very useful to those who mostly frequent the internet using Cyber Cafes. The social part comes at a later stage, when you share your bookmarks with other people and access other people's bookmarks to gather more information.

I use del.icio.us, which is what this video is about, and my place of work has also launched into this sphere by having an account.

Video tutorial


Note that it is also possible to download add-on features to integrate this bookmarking service into your browser. Links to these are available below

Relevant Links

• del.icio.us website
• Firefox browser extension
• Internet Explorer 7 browser extension

Video Guides: RSS and Wiki's

These were perhaps the first two technologies that set the concept of Web2.0 on fire. RSS is more or less, a way to provide a website's 'table of contents', so that you click on any of the headings and get taken to the corresponding 'chapter'. They allow ways to take the links to the content out of the original site's context into your own, at your convenience. Wikis are largely text-based centralized spaces where a communities can get together and share their interests.

However the point of this blog post is, now matter how I try to explain it, it is still incomprehensible to many people. So ... here are two video's that illustrate these concepts in a much more entertaining and engaging way. Enjoy!

RSS in Plain English



Wiki's in Plain English

Vista follows Unaffordable Suite

I mentioned in my last blog that the huge price difference between Academic and Normal versions of Microsoft Office Professional 2007 Suite is just waiting to be exploited. Now here are examples of individuals making profits off the inflated price of the Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate Edition.

The following is a screenshot of ongoing auction on Trademe, considered New Zealand's most popular website.



So why are they selling it, instead of using it? Apart from the obvious profit motive, here's samples of what is described on Trademe:

"Picked this up at a Microsoft conference and have no need for it."

"I won it at a product show and I cannot use it as it needs a better computer than what I have."

"Purchased and realised it would run in the computer but with limited feature so decided to sell - make sure you have good system."

Most users don't want half-baked versions, they want everything available under the brand. Vista is a much better version of the Windows operating system, with a lot of nice features for monitoring and enhancing PC performance, not to mention the updated look. Everybody wants Windows Vista Ultimate with all the features working on their current computers. Microsoft is propagating, if not highlighting, an economic class-structure of users. And who doesn't want to climb a class-structure?

The price of Vista Ultimate in the New Zealand market is listed by Dick Smith Electronics is nearly NZ$1000. Now that's much more than you would have to pay for a current above-average configuration desktop computer or an average configuration laptop. Consider in India, it costs above Rs. 30,000, an amount many times the monthly salary for most Indians.

Vista is also working very hard to avoid piracy at all costs. I would really like to see that succeed, because if Vista becomes hard to get at anything less than the full price, people will start discovering the joy and freedom of using Open Source operating systems such as Linux. Sun Microsystems has also recently released a free version of the Solaris operating system. There are going to be exciting times ahead. There are many agencies, including the United Nations, advocating free open source software alternatives especially in economic vulnerable areas such as found in developing countries. High costs don't help the Digital Literacy Divide.