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Showing posts from February, 2021

Report review

 Most of what was described in the report post by Pekka Himanen has not changed. Things have stayed more or less same. We still have health care problems in third world countries, we still have a divide amongst the richest and the poorest, and so on.  The author however, was right about the rise of cultural industries. As most of TV, music and other entertainment material is solely contained for online use only. The pandemic that came to us over a year ago has definitely helped to further set this standard in stone. With less people going outside the online e-commerce system has been booming. I think that it is one of the best outcomes, because even in difficult times we found a way to keep the system running. Also with the ability to work from home a lot of employers noticed that the employees are more efficient at their work and the best part about it was that if everyone is working from home then you do not need to pay rent or utility bills for your office. This allowed employers to

Wireless telecommunication has changed the way we interact with people

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Brief history of communication devices that led us to wireless telecommunication In the past when you wanted to meet someone or plan an activity with them you would have to set the rendezvous in person and you had no certainty, whether the other person would show up or not. But that all changed, because the telephone was invented in the late 1800s and it allowed people to connect over great distances, however it was not available for the general population until mid 20th century. Also, initially it required a physical cable to be present between two phones to be able to call someone on the other end.  That all changed when we got cell phone towers in place and we were able to communicate with other people around the globe. By the end of the 20th century the first thoughts of the world wide web were being tossed around. ARPANET was the first wide-area packet switching network. It later merged with other networks to form the Internet, which is almost essential to life today.  Chat rooms

To encrypt or not to encypt

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Encryption is a fundamental part of our everyday lives, yet it usually goes unnoticed by users, because everything is happening in the back-end. It has been used throughout history to secure communication between people. One of the earliest forms of encryption was used back in 100BC by Julius Ceasar and that, which you have probably guessed already, was the Ceasar Cipher. It worked by shifting the letters of the alphabet by a certain factor. In current times we have much more safer ways of encrypting our messages, however the principle of encryption has stayed the same - to make readable text unreadable. One of the simplest, but yet still very useful technology from the past was the hourglass. It was used to measure a set amount of time. However it went obsolete when humanity discovered electricity and began manufacturing clocks. Clocks provided us a much more accurate way of telling the time.   References: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caesar_cipher https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hourg

Unsuccessful technologies from the past

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There has been quite a bit of technological development over the past decade, some of the ideas that made it into production were very successful, while others were not, not to mention the ones that were doomed from the start.  HYPERLOOP Hyperloop was supposed to be another one of Elon Musk's success stories, but it did not turn out as he originally intended. The original purpose of Hyperloop was to link Los Angeles to the San Francisco Bay Area and provide extremely fast transportation. They developed a technology that uses reduced-pressure tubes in which pressurized capsules ride on air bearings at speeds of up to 1200 km/h. This would reduce the travel time significantly. But unfortunately to this day only 1.6km of track has been built for Hyperloop.  GOOGLE GLASS Google Glass was supposed to be this uber advancement in technology that would revolutionize the way people work and perform some field specific tasks.  They released it to the general public but they did not get the r