Connected life

This is the last blog and one of the hardest I find to write. The Web of Things, wow what a topic there is so much to choose from. Pretty much we all know from the last weeks lecture what it is, but for those who don’t it’s the amazing path that currently household items will take in a quest to become smarter and work harder for us! So to do this it requires normal household items, to become a separate entity. Basically we are almost trying to make them become more human in the way that they can not only think about an idea but act on it to. We are giving products the eyes and ears through sensors and RFID technology to see and react to our environment.

What I found that was really interesting for me coming from a farming back ground is the use of this tech in animals. It has been around for quite some time in dogs and cats when you take it to the vet to get its “microchip”. What this is usually is a passive RFID chip that is about the size of a grain of rice. This allows a sensor to read data that is associated with the animal on request. That’s cool and all but what if this chips as well as giving information when requested, but when it detects a change and could transmit this info. This is what battery assisted “active” RFID can help with. Back to the animals, this website http://www.ti.com/rfid/shtml/apps-anim-tracking-id.shtml gives a few details on how animal RFID tagging works. It can provide farmers with information on a individual animals heart rate, body temp, if it has not moved from the same location via GPS and much more to ensure that if something is out of the ordinary the farmers will know about it. Very helpful when each cow can be worth over a $1000 and the tags are only $3.

This future will be amazing with the internet being the core of all this technologic growth. I have learnt so much in this subject, I hope you have to.

Thanks for tuning in, cheers Duncs  

Battle of the operating system!

The upcoming years will set the stage for a fierce war between the giants over market share in a number of devices.

Android, is Google’s mobile operating system that is pretty dam good. If I had to give it a metaphor, it’s like the trusty pair of sneakers you own in the way that they are pretty universal, you can take them to the pub, beach, home or where ever. By this I mean it is a system that is more open and is more compatible in a variety of situations.  On the other hand is the Apple and their iOS. Again if I was to assign a metaphor to the system it would be like the pair of leather shoes that only go with the suit in your wardrobe. The options you have with these “shoes” are very limited. I know this is a rubbish analogy but what im getting at is the nature of both systems.

After reading Geoffrey Goetz blog about the development platforms of both operating systems it seems that both brands have a few tricks up their sleeves. Apple has ensured that people will still invest in their products due to the company’s seriousness to custom service. They have developed apple products that will sell other apple products due to the ability to seamlessly link with each other. What I am talking about is if you have an Imac, the best phone to couple it up with is the Iphone, if you then decide to invest in a tablet, you guessed it more often than not people are going to stick with the same operating system. Such synergy between multiple consumer devices is yet to be seen in the Android operating system.  

The Android system, coupled with the leading hardware makers (Samsung, HTC and so on) has the potential to be the leaders in mobile technology. What is a big spanner in the works is “open source” nature of its apps. This means that anyone can create and upload dangerous software and spyware for the not so technological savvy user to become a victim. Google became so popular due to their ability to organise and aggregate data so I think that they will be able to figure a solution to this problem.

Some interesting articles I also read: http://www.businessinsider.com/google-is-battling-android-fragmentation-2011-5

http://gigaom.com/apple/one-year-later-ios-is-still-the-best-development-platform/

wk 11, Jumping on the social media bandwagon

So after this weeks lecture i have realized that there is so much in going on in the world that i am, and a few others in my class are totally unaware of! For example the little thing call the ARAB SPRING. Sure i had heard there was some unrest or something going on over the other side of the world, but im kind of unintentional not tuned into those sorts of news articles because i feel like its sort of expected in those countries. Its probs due to the mainstream media not seeing it as important to report on as events like the Queen coming to Australia or some other rubbish. I think this sucks, just because we have more ties with the queen means she gets all this media attention, when real revolutionary and historical events are occurring. Anyway enough of that, back to the main point. Revolution in the Arab springs and the role that social media plays. After looking at the prescribed reading, it was kind of put out there by  Evgeny Morozov, that he is a little sceptical of the role that the social media plays. I see his point but I think that if the same situation was to be played out again, this time with no social media present it would may not have the same impact. It takes a lot of passion and belief in a idea to just blow every thing off in your schedule (think about if you where one of the lucky few that had a job, and if you went to voice your opinion and not many people turned up you could potentially be out of a job and no actual change to the situation you are stuck in.) I think that with this example, seeing is believing. People who kind of believe but dont have the same passion can be inspired by the tweets, facebook pages and more importantly the Youtube footage and get off their asses and join together.

One case in particular is an Egyptian by the name of Asmaa Mahfouz who helped start an idea that is still gathering support today using viral media campaigns through social media sites. It is truly amazing to see what happens when one persons little voice is combined with so many. As can be seen from the pictures, people power is a very extraordinary thing and when times need changing there is a way to get these changes to happen. Social media is not the answer, but it sure adds another element to help speed up getting good ideas out there.  

Week 9 and the hackers!

So as we know from the lecture and tutes in week 9, hackers are coming continuity more relevant in our lives as our society integrates the internet more and more into our everyday living. The fact that we are so venerable online to the “black hats” and relying on the hacking ethics of the “white hats” to help expose the possible weak spots is a little daunting for me personally. I feel that the amount of anonymity that is based around these people scares me. It seems that if u know what ur doing and are smart enough the internet world is at ur disposal, and you can cover your tracks and never be found. Then if you do end up getting caught for what ever bad ass shit, you can even score yourself a job. This also makes me wonder, if the person who got caught hacking the banks or what ever other big company then gets a job with them, they are the top of their game and are steps ahead of the person creating the security systems, what stops them from pretending to fix something and then going home and telling a mate how the system works exactly and then taking everything. I understand that alot of the hackers are about bragging rights and sticking it to the man, but still there are the scary guys like the people responsible for a virus like STUXNET, (check out the vid i have included) who are more like “cyber terrorist”. 

Personally I like that we have the hackers who sit in the middle, like Lulzsec and can be termed “grey hats” as they help expose the weak links and seem to be in it for laughs. All this stuff seems to be pretty much above my head so the best i can do is hope that i have a tidy anti virus program keeping that stuff under wraps, either that or go buy a beach pad and a surfboard in some remote island and throw my computer away. Seems much safer. 

Too many citizen journo's

So we are finding ourselves in a world where we are not only the prosumers but the consumers as well. Due to the fact that there is so many creators of content, it is inevitable that with all the free flow of information in such large quantities, there always will be rubbish amongst the good stuff. This is where it kinda sucks that any joe blo, (kinda like this blog, but at least im doing it for my uni) can get online and ramble the day away. I don’t do much blogging or blog reading but from the little bit I have done nothing sucks more than when you spend a few minutes of your time reading some hunk of crap that has been uploaded on the net. Since when was it necessary to claim to the world that your cup of tea this morning was the best thing since sliced bread. It comes back to the old notion that “time is money”, and from what I have learnt in this weeks lecture, peoples attention is valuable. This is where having some sort of organisational systems in place can be profitable and act as some sort of filter.

This ties into the citizen journalism side of things. So in the old days to become a journalist you would have to spend time at a institution and do some sort of training to become proficient in reporting on various issues that where deemed news worthy by one of your bosses. Now it seems that any punter with a smart phone can quickly throw it up on the net and report it to all. This is good as the “feedback loop” is massively shortened but it also leaves room for massive amounts of rubbish to be published. This is where the peer review system works for me, if its good it will be read by some one who recommends its and then someone else likes it, on and on it goes. I kind of like how now every one has a voice now, and in a small way even the rubbish stories are news as well.

Week 7 What digc has taught me

I find my self always learning new things in this subject that are quite relevant, rather than other subjects that can some times be full of jargon and complication of simple stuff. What i picked up on this week was the idea of cloud storage and its possibilities. Since the tutorial i have signed up for the free 5gb that amazon gives out. As soon as i entered my email i was of course bombarded with the daunting and over worded "end user agreement" and thought to myself after learning about what rights facebook has to the content we up load i better have a skim through it, two or three lines i decide to brush that idea. I swear thats how they rob us blind, by making the most cumbersome and boring bit of writing that even a ridaline junkie would not even be able to sit down through. Never mind that i signed up and have been using it ever since. It is so easy now, i was always pretty good at loosing USB's with important work on them, so now i just throw it all up on the sky drive. Im not sure if i would trust it, (or be bothered to read through the end user agreement ) to store my personal goods on it just yet. I like the idea that if you physically loose your storage in a fire or something else its kind of safe somewhere else.

Also what intrigued me was the idea of the "hit driven model" being modified into a modern version where there is still a basic "hit = popular" idea but now instead of a mass hit it is more a "niche hit model". This is evident in sites like reddit.com where the user can give their approval or disapproval to stories if they think its not worthy. I think its awesome that we, the consumer now has a much better way of picking and choosing what we want to read. 

old school and new school wk6

The idea of our broad culture becoming converged into one melting plot intrigues me. It is obvious that with this convergence our lives are becoming more convenient but at what cost? In the lecture there was a slide that stated “convergent technologies are more than the sum of their parts”. I like this notion as it rings true in so many various elements of our lives. Look at the mobile phne for example. Once apon a time mobiles where used simply for ringing people. They where large and cumbersome but now we cant basily do everything under the sun with our smart devices. God knows how we used to find our way around with out GPS technologies in our back pocket, also how would you be able to tell your hot date your running ten minutes late to the date.

The idea that all this content, that was only once accessible by going out on your own time to each place where you could find it is now merging into more accessible platforms. This means that we have now old and new media content. There is a divide between the older generations who are not using the iphone to read the head lines and those that who are. We also talked about these companys like the newspaper printers who are finding it hard to sell papers now, what if they went broke and could not print papers. How would our oldies get their news? This is why the future of technology is very unclear, better go and catch the latest news lines on reddit.com