Moving Technologies in 2011

 

As the year gradually winds up I began rummaging through my activities on the cyberspace and my relationship with technology. In looking at the effects technology has had on my life so far, I also took to consideration the changes users of the web should very much look forward to in the coming year. In this post, activities web users should stay off from are also touched.

Since a larger percentage of computer and smart phone users run Microsoft Windows, it is important you are informed of this: Microsoft has just released a plan to go ahead updating all its older versions of Internet Explorer to the newest version in 2012. This action, they averred, is in the interest of the users who will most likely fall preys to hackers posing as the company to offer update with the intention to steal users’ personal details. You may want to know how Microsoft intends doing this. They have planned updating all older IEs with what they’ve termed “Silent Update”. This means users wouldn’t know when the update is going on until it is installed and ready for use. So, it is incontestable many users will be kept in the dark on this development. This plan is no magical however; it will certainly run over the Internet. Another question is what users without Internet will face. Users not connected to the internet would really not be bothered because of their minimal security porosity, as all threats are dominantly carried out over the web. In the foregoing, Microsoft shouldn’t also be expecting a 100% success as a sizeable number of users without internet connection will be side-tracked in the process.

My question to Microsoft thus is this; how do they plan to respect the privacy right of users in the absence of downloading prompt during the update exercise? For users who still surf with the older IEs of version 5 and 6, expect to be silently updated on in 2012. You have no say in the matter as Microsoft needs everything to go silent.

I never really had the preference for Mozilla. I just considered it unnecessary in the midst of three other installed browsers on my computer. I only saw the use of it months ago, when some platforms wouldn’t just run on Opera and Chrome due to page-incompatibility. At present, there are two browsers I constantly use; the first is Chrome and the other is Mozilla, with Chrome being my most used. Since I adopted Mozilla Firefox, I have observed how it always snails to starting up. Also combined to this is the large CPU strength it consumes while working. Anytime my notebook is working on battery and needs conserving power for longer operation, Mozilla crashes and freezes up irritatingly. Having to restart the browser and incessantly reload webpages utterly angers me. The good news now is, recently, an end was moderately put to this scourge. With the renewed partnership between Google and Mozilla, the company released a newer version 9.0.1 some days ago. They promised this to be 30% faster than before. You should try it out soon.

Honestly, I have been using the version for some days and I can confidently avow that real changes have indeed been done. For most users, the doubt will still remain. This isn’t the first time new releases of Mozilla are published with lofty assured improvement; assurance that only did little at making the browser a user friendly in the past.

I loathe putting up with people who are only capable of whining on the social media against some gripes they are discontented about. It is such an inanity to live with. I consider it hypocritical too. If they truly want to bring about real changes, social media should only be the information disseminator and be followed up with relevant physical actions. In the coming year, there are some facebook friends to be unfriended for this attitude. These sets of friends; all they do is run amok on Zukerberg’s pages claiming they are some activist or instrument of change. On how to make effective changes happen, toeing the example of B4RN planners will be a good step. Not for once in the media did I read about this particular group wasting precious planning time disturbing cyberpeace before they started the B4RN (Broadband for the Rural North) movement. Go to their website and read how far they have gone. Download their PowerPoint master plan on their webpage and you would be awed at how they have planned bringing broadband connection to their neighborhood. This people have in a short reasonable while gathered momentum to their cause through individual self-help and qualitative actions. That is the kind of gesture I admire, not the toothless rampaging tigerism on Social Networking Sites.

Internet has affected my life in numerous ways. This year I have been a writing prize winner and election campaigner; all of these on the web! I once wrote here on how my worlds are divided between the cyber and the earthly. The internet is changing. The sooner one realizes that, the safer one is. How do you imagine this; that one day your prospective employer wouldn’t demand a CV but go online scrounging for the activities you have been up to. A veritable tool in doing this will be Google, which will really prove an effective way in collecting the data that will point to the kind of personality you possess. This has always been mooted in the past, and may even have been done in some advanced countries. Until now, that mightn’t have been easy in this part of the world without the current facebook-timeline newly introduced weeks ago. Timeline is one easy show-pages of who you are online. Instead of the previous profile that hides things about you under clickable options, timeline spreads your whole life on a single page divided into two major columns. With it, none of your activities is hidden from your friends. Friends can go as far as knowing what your first activity was on the site. With this new tweak, only a dumb will continue in stupid indulgences, after being aware of the ease his activities could be searched and viewed by. Check here to see how my timeline looks. It is no longer your profile on facebook, it is now your life timeline on the web.

Several changes have happened to Google this year. There have been Google+ and other unnoticed ones. The grand technological revolution Google introduced is the Google Ngram. Google Ngram is a new and efficient way to carry out researches . This is how it works; Google Ngram shows how cultures have been changing since 1800 to 2008 around the world through the use of words. For instance, with the word ‘sex’ typed into the Ngram bar, a plotted graph comes up showing how the use of this word has declined or increased over the years. With this, you can track how the use of this word has affected cultures. Ngram scans through 5 millions books collected for this purpose, books that have been written since 1800 to 2008, to bring about this result. For more details on this, the video presentation of Erez Lieberman Aiden & Jean-Batiste Michel on TED will very much do.

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I know your Christmas was greatly celebrated; happy Celebration. For the New Year; I wish you a prosperous one.