Lifestyle posts

When Mark Zuckerberg created Facebook, he wanted to make a closed network for the elite at Harvard. Over time, he realized that by opening it up, he would be able to build something that cataloged the college experience for everyone. Eventually, it expanded outside of college but the roots were embedded in the entire college experience. A case could be made that today, as the vast majority of college students are on social networks when they enter or join them shortly after getting to college, social media is as big of a part of the college experience as parties have always been. Is this a good thing?…

Statistics can be beautiful. They can point us in the right direction and tell us things about society that highlight good and bad, right and wrong. They can scare us, inspire us, or simply entertain us. This graphic should do a little of everything. Since 2008, internet traffic has more than doubled each year. Are we too dependent or is it a natural progression towards simpler communication and knowledge-sharing? There are a ton of questions that can be asked about the content of this graphic, but one thing is certain. We’re hooked. Click to enlarge. Created by: OnlineMastersDegree.com…

Sometime in the near future you may see people walking around with eyeglasses on that only have a small lens visible at the top of one eye. They will be talking to seemingly nobody and possibly bumping into things while they update their Google+ profiles. They will be annoying to many of us the same way that the self-talking bluetooth-wearing phone people annoy. Then, almost magically, it could all go mainstream to the point that it’s commonplace and we won’t think anything of it again. Google’s Project Glass will attempt to bring augmented reality from a vision to a reality. The vision of a wearable…

The majority of people would say that the internet has enhanced our lives. It has given us access to more information than many dreamed of a couple of decades ago and we can get it more easily than most thought possible one decade ago. These opinions, however, may be influenced by the fact that the majority of us admit that we are addicted to the internet. Can we trust our own opinions on something that may actually be harming us? Thanks to Google, we no longer need to “know” as much at any given time. Collective knowledge is readily available and (usually) more reliable than our own memories. With that…

Late last week payment processor Global Payments revealed that MasterCard and Visa cardholders were at risk through a security flaw in their system.  We now know that the cards affected in the breach processing system were only in North America but that the original estimates of tens of thousands of cards affected were grossly understated. The worst is apparently over as the security flaw is reportedly plugged. Names, addresses, and social security numbers were not affected, only credit card numbers. “We are making rapid progress toward bringing this issue to a close. Our nearly 4,000…

There has been a push to replace books in the educational arena for some time now. This push hasn’t been in Washington or school board meeting rooms even though they are happening there as well. The big push is happening in the minds of students who are growing increasingly tablet-savvy and almost “spoiled” to the point that paper-products are old, almost archaic. Today’s children can work an iPad more adeptly than they can ride bikes. There’s a social question that rises with over-teching our children, but that’s not really a part of this discussion (yet). For now, the way that educational materials…

France made waves in the P2P industry by implementing a controversial graduated response program in 2010 that was designed to reduce the amount of illegal downloads by establishing progressively-harsher penalties on file sharers. The results were strong, as shown in Hadopi’s report, with file-sharing activities traffic slashed by two-thirds in 2011. However, the goal of increasing revenues in the French music and movie industries did not materialize and revenues fell in both industries. The French music market fell 3.9% in 2011 while the video market fell 2.7%. As Ernesto of TorrentFreak…

While browsing tech posts on Google Plus (yes, I’m the guy who’s still using G+) I came across an advertorial infographic by Intel discussing the growing needs of the world when it comes to storage and connectivity. The graphic was more of a pitch to use Intel cloud services, but the data portion (image above) got me thinking about a looming challenge. With data creation, storage, consumption, and sharing growing at such a great pace, will the infrastructure be able to improve quickly enough to meet demand? We’re already seeing signs of increased expenses, systems breaking, and delivery elements…

Lately the social media buzz in the film industry has surrounded Marvel’s new summer tent pole release The Avengers. The Avengers, a team of superheroes including, Iron Man, Thor, Hulk, Hawkeye, Black Widow, Nick Fury and Captain America, band together to defend Earth from an alien invader bent on world domination. Since the release of the Spiderman film franchise starring Tobey Maguire, the comic movie industry has taken Hollywood by storm. From DC’s Dark Knight to Marvel’s X-Men, comic franchises are becoming more popular and technologically superior since their introduction…

We often look back at the great minds of the past in wonder as their predictions of what the future would look like. Sometimes, they are relatively accurate. Other times, they’re way off. In an interview with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in 1974, Clarke nailed it. He said that we would all have computers, not like the ones that surround him in the video but much smaller ones.  As he describes them, he motions with his hands an approximate size and shape and one can imagine a laptop resting in his hands as they were perfectly positioned. He said we would be able to talk to people around the…