Engadget Story
If you've read my earlier posts on quantum computers and artilects, you may have thought "Thats all very interesting but its not gonna happen in my lifetime" well you'd be wrong. You can now pick up from D-Wave a 16-Qubit computer.
While its not quite upto the standard of Andromeda' we're getting closer.
I have been a bit low on the postings lately, hopefully I am about to change this. New theme new ideas (thats the idea) I now intend to keep content fresh and also make it easy to get to the content on the site. As you may know/see this new theme is based on hemingway and is a big contrast to the old website. The idea is to get all the content on the site is places were its easy to get to and easy to share and bookmark. Only time will tell if the theory will work out OK. I plan to post every other day or maybe more depending on what I feel Like.
I have been pondering this one for a while and I just can't seem to get it resolved in my mind, like most things its double edged.
In my case i think that blogging has significantly improved my written (pity I didn't pick a-level english) I also find it easier to write longer more in-depth things that I would ordinarily just leave well alone.
Think of it, outside of the blogging context though. You write lots, you get better at writing, blogging is just an extension of that writing skill. You then have the flip side, the fact that you can get so into the blogging and other related things on the web that you then spend less time working and more time blogging. The key would seem to be getting the right balance of blogging and work, lets say the blog to work ratio. In my case I would love to spend every living moment making stuff for the web, and blogging. Alas I need to work because I aren't doing particularly well on the maths side of things but Computing is entirely other story.
Sorry for disjointed nature of this post, and the fact it would seem to posting for postings sake but I think it's genuinely instresting to actually see what benefits you get from blogging. We all want to blog or do we?
"Everyone thinks they have something to say, until they're put on stage and asked to say it." Mr Plummer
We are entering a time were computers run our lives, we put blind faith into them (do you take a regular backup?) and also are starting to increase the amount of transactions we take online, with the populisation of internet shopping and internet banking in no small contributed by eBay and PayPal.
We (depending were you read this blog) live in countries with few or no laws on how to protect ourselves online, fair enough there's the DPA in the UK which goes somewhere near but there is no clear definition of what constitutes hacking or any other cyber-offence.
It stupidly simple to get access to a computer that you don't own that its scary. You can take a standard off the shelf USB stick, push it in a computer it will create you a Administrator account a remote user account and give you the password to anybody who logs into that machine. Many homes now are switching to wi-fi indeed BT offer there Home Hub which is wireless with all there packages, albeit with a very simple 64-bit encryption assigned to it, but who's responsibility is it to secure there wi-fi, I am firmly in the camp that if you leave it open its fair game to anybody, but just think about what you do online in a particular day and how much somebody could find about you it just a few hours on your network. Its enough to steal your Identity and rob you blind, yet many people just don't understand the scope of the problem.
It's all well and good knowing that these things are problems but how do we stop this from happening in the first place. As yet I haven't been able to come up with a single thing that could be feasibly enforced, or surrendering our own privacy to some higher power (which I don't think anybody in there right mind would be comfortable with. This is a problem that is almost as big as Global Warming if we manage to survive what ever apocalyptic event we make. Yet, we continue for the most part ignoring the fact it is a problem and how it would effect you if your identity was cloned and bank accounts cleaned, not a particularly nice thought.
I have dabbled in many office applications google's offerings microsoft open office and some i cant even remember.
I am amazed at ThinkFree Office it is exactly what a web app should be and the learning curve is 0 cos it looks just like office on you desktop. Wel done guys, and ThinkFree Office is my default Office of choice.
And I got this from 5 minutes using it.
