Triumph of the Nerds: Great Artists Steal

By 1980, Apple was already the biggest Personal Computer (PC) producing company in the world. Then IBM came up with its own version of the PC to challenged Apple. Nevertheless, PC usage was still not convenient enough, and the race to make the PC more user-friendly began…
The journey to make PC more user-friendly began at the Palo Alto Research Centre (PARC), where under funding by Xerox, engineers had developed the precursor to the modern, user-friendly PC, which is the Graphic User Interface (GUI). But sadly Xerox did not appreciate the benefits of the GUI, and Steve Jobs soon snatched the opportunity by copying the idea and further developing it into the Apple PC. The IBM PC was hurting Apple’s sales, and this was due to the software in the IBM PC. Steve Jobs then recruited Microsoft to write the applications for the new Apple PC. Initially, Apple tried to produce LISA, a PC utilizing GUI, but there was a problem. LISA didn’t work properly, and it had an extremely high price tag, which in the end turned the LISA into a flop. Then came the Macintosh, Apple’s second effort to introduce the user-friendly PC, and it proved to be a hit.
Although the Macintosh, or “Mac” was “insanely great” and despite the hype due to intense advertising, the sales of the Mac were disastrous. The applications in the Mac was still scarce, having only the “Mac Paint” and “Mac Write”, as compared to the IBM PC, which on the other hand, contained applications that people could really use, such as the spreadsheet etc. Another problem is the dot-matrix printer. GUI just couldn’t “express” its fullest potential due to limitation in printing. Then, developments were done on the printer by Adobe which introduced laser-printing, bringing salvation to the Mac, creating a whole new business― word processing.
Nevertheless, Mac sales were still flat, and Steve Jobs left Apple after a sharp contention arose between him and John Scully. The years after Steve Jobs were the most profitable for Apple. Sales rose to millions a year. In the background, Microsoft was plotting to unleash its own version of the GUI, as it saw the Mac as a competitor to the MS-DOS. Out came Windows…
Apple sued Microsoft as it felt that it was copying the Mac, but sadly it lost. Then came Windows 95, which sealed the fate of Apple, pushing it into a niche in the PC industry. Although Microsoft was a success, Bill Gates wasn’t resting on his laurels. He invested in the animation company, Dreamworks and many other ventures. But competitors were starting to rear their heads, one of them being Larry Ellison, who believed the PC will be replaced by an “information device”.
The future is the internet. Everyone knows it. And Bill Gates, Larry Ellison agrees on that.

Triumph of the Nerds: Impressing their Friends

In the film “Triumph of the Nerds: Impressing their Friends”, it spoke about the emergence of the Personal Computer (PC), stimulating the “PC Revolution”. And it was all started by nerds.

Earlier computers were not convenient. They were big, bulky, and required special care. Besides that, the operators need to learn a bunch of codes in order to operate it. And to add to the problem, every computer used different codes, known as “machine language”. It was not until Grace Hopper created the “computer language”, making the computer a bit more user friendly. Initially, computers were not given much attention. But some did take notice, the “nerds”. Microprocessors were soon created by Intel, replacing transistors and vacuum tubes, and it rolled the ball for what would be the “PC Revolution”.

Nevertheless, Intel did not make good use of it creation, using it only for calculators etc, but someone did come up with something. In 1975, Ed Roberts introduced the world’s first PC, the Altair 8800. This stimulated the founding of computer clubs, one of them being the “Homebrew Club”. But it was practically useless, until Paul Allen came up with a “basic interpreter” or software for it, known as “Basic”. After a successful demonstration with “Basic” using the Altair, Paul Allen team up with Bill Gates and founded Microsoft in Albuquerque. Soon, by the end of 1975, a few companies producing micro-computer cropped out.

The computer industry might not have taken off, if it were not for the Hippies. They caused the development of the PC industry. And in the “Homebrew Club”, a PC computer called Apple was founded by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak.

Apple had a shaky beginning, but Steve Jobs turned to venture capital for funding. The result is the “Apple II”. The “Apple II” was a hit, being brilliantly designed by Steve Jobs. Sales and profits were so good that Apple soon have more money than they can spend. But the PC was still mostly for hobbyist. Then came the software and applications, which made the PC more useful. The first to appear is the spread sheet, VISICALC. At it came just at the right time, at a time when the commercial world was booming, and a spread sheet program was proofing to be really useful.

The PC industry was developing rapidly, where a billion dollar industry was growing in Silicon Valley. PC companies have mushroomed to meet the enormous demand, but still Apple dominated the scene.

Triumph of the Nerds: Riding the Bear

The film “Triumph of the Nerds: Riding the Bear” deals primary with the initial introduction of the Personal Computer (PC), and the rise of Microsoft as a major company the produces the world’s most widely use Operating System (OS).
After the Apple marketed one of the world’s first PCs, IBM too intended to enter the newly expanding PC market. IBM planned to used “Open Architecture” to come up with a PC within a year. They have almost everything, the keyboard, monitor etc, but they lack 1 thing, the OS and the computer language. Then two candidates came to mind, Bill Gates’ Microsoft and Gary Kildall’s Inter-galactic Digital Research. The most suitable candidate seemed to be Gary Kildall, nevertheless due to a stroke of luck, IBM turned away from Gary Kildall and instead choose Microsoft. It didn’t matter that Microsoft didn’t have an OS, but with only $50000, Microsoft bought an OS from an obscure small company and the rest was history. Microsoft was on the way to success…
IBM reaped a fortune during the first few years, but rivals soon appeared. IBM was losing ground in the now rapidly expanding PC market. But Microsoft was still doing great since most of the rival company’s of IBM bought their OS from them.
IBM fought back by creating the OS2, which was planned to overcome the clone issue. Microsoft’s business is being threaten, and they responded by creating Windows. A disagreement arose which soon caused the partnership between IBM and Microsoft to disintegrate.
For a while IBM dominated the PC market, but soon it returned to become a mainframe producing company. Microsoft on the other hand, while “riding the bear”, rose to the top in the end.

Group Assignment 2- Uses and Implication of Blogging

What is blogging?

Blogging, as with any new (or in transition) concept, is difficult to define - it has not yet fully become what it will be. Here are some attempts to define blogging:

Meg Hourihan
"If we look beneath the content of weblogs, we can observe the common ground all bloggers share -- the format. The weblog format provides a framework for our universal blog experiences, enabling the social interactions we associate with blogging...These tools spit out our varied content in the same format -- archives, permalinks, time stamps, and date headers."

Dave Winer

Weblogs as being personal, on the web, published, and part of communities.

Halley Suitt

Multiple characteritcs including: last place on earth to tell the truth, watching brains at work, a love letter, a diary, an open head - for the reader's convenience.

Andrew Sullivan

"But what bloggers do is completely new - and cannot be replicated on any other medium. It's somewhere in between writing a column and talk radio. It's genuinely new. And it harnesses the web's real genius - its ability to empower anyone to do what only a few in the past could genuinely pull off. In that sense, blogging is the first journalistic model that actually harnesses rather than merely exploits the true democratic nature of the web. It's a new medium finally finding a unique voice."

Cass McNutt
"The best description I’ve read regarding blogging is that “it’s somewhere between writing a column and talk radio.”

Jay Cross
"A blog is defined as a Website with dated entries, usually by a single author, often accompanied by links to other blogs that the site’s editor visits on a regular basis. Think of a blog as one person’s public diary or suggestion list. Early blogs were started by Web enthusiasts who would post links to cool stuff that they found on the Internet. They added commentary. They began posting daily. They read one another’s blogs. A community culture took hold."

Uses

As an emerging tool, blogging uses have still not been completely explored. Some current uses:

• Knowledge sharing and knowledge management

• Customer service
  
• Interactive journalism
  
• Communication
  
• Self-expression
  
• Learning
  
• Self-marketing
  
• Campaigning/social reform

• Community building
  
• Experience tracking
  
• Storytelling

Most common uses for blogging are personal and, considering its origins as a personal web publishing forum, this makes sense. Emerging uses promise opportunities in corporations and education. Further application will also be realized as existing uses (communication, learning, knowledge management, interactive journalism, etc.) are adopted by various industries - notably entertainment, health care, government

Implications

As a disruptive technology, blogging is altering (or perhaps responding to?) many aspects of information/content creation and use. These changes are not without impact. What are some of the implications of a tool that functions at the same speed as the medium it serves? Here's a few:

• Content creation and consumption on the Internet has finally caught up with the Internet itself. Traditional suppliers of content (publishers, media, news organizations) will face substantial pressures to respond appropriately, or cease being relevant.
  
• Decentralization of content and distribution. This is a trend well underway on the Internet as a whole. Napster capitalized on it...and blogging is the "canary in a mine" reacting to (and reflecting) it.
  
• The user is in control. The end user (or audience) of a service or product has acquired a central (rather than previous fringe) role. Disagree with a blogger? Tell him/her via "comments links", and initiate a dialogue with not only the author, but other readers as well. Disagree with a newspaper columnist? Throw out the newspaper...
  
• Conversation vs. lecture...We have a mind..Hava an opinion.It counts. Just like yours
  
• The pipe is more important than the content. By various estimates, bloggers number between 750,000 and 1 million. The ecosystem of blogging is more important than the content being generated. The content has a life (i.e. new technology becomes obsolete)...but the process for content acquisition (blogging) stays continually fresh.
  
• Shared meaning and understandings. Knowledge is acquired and shaped as a social process - resulting in spiraling: I say something, you comment on it, I evaluate it, comment and present a new perspective, you take it to the next level...and the process repeats until a concept has been thoroughly explored.
  
• Ideas are presented as the starting point for dialogue, not the ending point.

As a conclusion, blogging brings a lot of benefits to us. It is already used by many people around the world. In the time to come everyone will have a blog.

Done By,

Devika Darshini

Jeevan Kuranadan

Azwan

Fadli

Censorship

Censorship is the suppression of speech or deletion of communicative material which may be considered objectionable, harmful or sensitive, as determined by a censor. The rationale for censorship is different for various types of data censored:

• Moral censorship, is the removal of materials that censor deems to be obscene or otherwise morally questionable. Pornography, graphic violence

• Military censorship is the process of keeping military intelligence and tactics confidential and away from the enemy. This is used to counter espionage, which is the process of gleaning military information.

• Political censorship occurs when governments hold back secret information from their citizens. The logic is to prevent the free expression needed to rebel.

• Religious censorship is the means by which any material objectionable to a certain faith is removed. This often involves a dominant religion forcing limitations on less prevalent ones.

• Corporate censorship is the process by which editors in corporate media outlets intervene to halt the publishing of information that portrays their business or business partners in a negative light. Privately owned corporations in the business of reporting the news also sometimes refuse to distribute information due to the potential loss of advertiser revenue or shareholder value which adverse publicity may bring.

As for me, I strongly disagree in censorship. I believe the world should know the truth. If everything around us was hidden what is the use of honesty. We have rights to know what is going around us. As they say ‘honesty is the best policy’. As for the young ones, who have not reached the age to know such things an age limit should be implied.

There may be benefits in censorship as it serves as a protective shield against negative elements such as pornography and excessive violence. This is particularly important in order to protect children from being exposed to things they are not supposed to be exposed to but in may opinion the benefits can be ignored as I believe and stand for the fact censorship should not be done as the WORLD NEEDSTO KNOW THE TRUTH!!!

Arrangements of My Music File....

Different people arrange their music files different ways. It is to search for it easier when they need to listen to it.

As for me I like to arrange my music according to my moods because I believe songs always heals pain and keep you excited according to the mood you are. It always plays a huge role in my mood.

Above is the picture showing how I arrange My Music....

Advantages and disadvantages of Technology Socially

Technology effects our life in many ways especially to teenagers. If you are a loyal fan of the latest series GOSSIP GIRL you will realise how technology can effect our generations. There are many advantages and disadvantages using the technology in this millienium. We have decided to explain about this topic using the famous drama series as a example. To make people understand more about the topic. So for those who have not watch or heard about this series, it's time to start everyone.

Disadvantages of technology

Gossip are sent very fast to everyone around the world - It can partically spoils a person's social life.

There is no such thing as privacy - Today you meet a guy/girl tommorow everyone around you knows about it even before you tell anyone

It is an addict - You keep on playing games, chatting and doing stuff in the internet or sms with your handphone until you forget about important things like studying.

It tends to concentrate wealth and power, and to increase the disparity of rich and poor - When the poor kids see the rich kids having expensive stuff they really feel it.

Prevent kids from learning important concepts - Tendecy to use calculators until they forget the traditional methode.

Exposure to wrong things - Watching pornography and wasting time.Makes us lazy - you will tend to do all the work from home and not move about.

Advantages of Technology

Fast - Important messages are sent using handphones and emails just a click away.Knowledge - You can find out about stuff you do not know immediately.

Time saving - Instead of writting a letter and sending it through post which will take ages to reach all you have to do is sent by a mail and it will reach in few seconds.

Easy and reliable - To find a place you just have to on your phone's GPS and there you have it on your palm.

Saves money - Instead of wasting money making call long distance you can just use the internet service by using a webcam which is more real and CHEAP!!!

Easy access - You can study from your house through the internet. You don't have to go classes.

Shopping - All you have to do is order online and give your account number, the next minuate the the things is in your door step.

There are many more advantages and disadvantages of technology. So everyone who is reading this think before you do anything with technology. It may bring good thing to life if you do not use it carefully it may destroy a person social life. Our dear friends think before doing anything!!!

XOXO
Devika Darshini
Jeevan Kuranadan
Azwan
Mohammad Fadli