I will not comment on this, this will get out of hands. But I have to commit that I´m amused. A little. Or a bit more.

• the internet sow it’s wild oats in the dot com bubble, then its coming-of-agewith the web 2.0, 2005 the world faces one billion internet users. After all, the internet is serious business. The factor bandwidth and its technical manifestation, broadband, becomes an issue for the location of economies and even private households, though the vanished analog modem dial-in sound is still engraved in the hearings of millions of people.
• mobile phone reception almost completely covers the civilized world, for good reasons.
• WiFi, WiMax, AccessPoints, free WLAN, UMTS, HSDPA. The Internet starts to get wireless. Meanwhile, mobile phone and landline providers tremble by the thought of Voice over IP applications.
• Cloud computing and virtualization, massive parallelization, distributed computing. Skynet starts to gain consciousness.
• In June 2000, the ASCI Red super computer heads the TOP500, the list of supercomputers, with 1.34 GFlops of computing power. In November 2009, the top machine’s name is Jaguar, manufactured by the honorable Cray Inc. corporation, with 1.64 PetaFlops. Moore’s Law is still going strong.
• Faster, storage-wise bigger and overall more efficient computer technologies raise a couple of questions, amongst others in the area of data privacy, in a sidenote the human genome finally gets unpuzzled with the help of some mere electrical calculators times a trillion.
• In 2001 the first iPod was introduced. Stockholders were unimpressed. In 2007, the iPhone causes a great stir. This time everyone knew it would change a lot of things. No one uses PDAs anymore, smartphones simply provide better connectivity. The ruler of the 90s, PalmOS, slowly declines until put to sleep. In contrast, Blackberry jams cause annoyances in the collapsing traffics of New York, London and the like.
• Free and Open Source Software starts to conquer the servers and private households. OpenOffice will be downloaded far over a hundred million times. Linux evolves with it’s advanced desktop environments. The Mozilla project organizes a rich media advertisement in newspapers world wide for their adolescent browser spinoff “Firefox”.
• Notebooks, laptops, mobile pcs start to show up everywhere. While prices fall, the laptop in the auditorium becomes a normal sight. Later, netbooks attract millions of customers, although more or less accidentally invented, inspired by the One-Laptop-Per-Child (OLPC, now XO) project.
• Napster reaches it’s climax in the beginning of the decade afterwards sued to death by the music industry, it’s shallow remains sold to Bertelsmann, later re-vamped for a working business model. Peer-to-peer and copyright becomes a growing issue as the music industry faces it’s oblivion. Kazzaa, eMule, Gnutella and BitTorrent follow the basic idea of peer-to-peer sharing. ThePirateBay shuts down it’s torrent-tracker after advised to pay 2.74 Mio Euros to various music and film companies. Legal digital business models seem to work, the iTunes (Music) store flourishes.
• No one buys CDs anymore except me. In an antagonistic development, vinyl record sales go up again. The DVD format establishes, MP3 Players replace some of the last portable cassette players and while they’re at it they kick portable CD players and the MiniDisc format in the behinds. DV comes up and starts to wave goodbye before the decade is over. Then SSDs announce to replace their magnetic disk grandparents. Soon it’s farewell, magnetic formats!
• Floppy Disks are still being sold out of spite.
• Growing bandwidth allows a variety of services unthinkable in the beginning of the world wide web – first and foremost the real time consumption of high quality video. In 2007, YouTube, the most successful video portal to date, is responsible for ca. 20% of the traffic generated in the world wide web, i.e. 10% of all internet traffic. Most videos are made by little kids mashin up copyrighted material for 7h3 lulz.
• Apple’s OS X gets introduced and the old system architecture was brought to it’s grave. Windows XP causes lot of criticism in the beginning and ends up as a robust long-runner. Vista sux, Windows 7 should have been XP’s successor in the first place.
• Y2K-what? Bug? My VCR already stopped timing in 1998.
• Talking about VHS. BluRay wins the fight against HD DVD. The children of the Betamax party once again judged that the inferior system won again and provide sell-out HD DVD players a place in their basement.
• Ultima Online was a joke compared to the Hype World of Warcraft causes. 11.5 Mio players logged in to see what the fuzz is all about, some of them never came back. Chinese gold farmers sell virtual goods on eBay while some of their Indian neighbors do something more equitable and play the support desk from next door for customers a few thousand miles away.
• Nintendo comes up with some great ideas, then some people come up with some great ideas with touchscreens and Wiimotes – despite the fact that a lot of Wii’s cary the dust beside the 360s and PS3s. Segas Dreamcast journey finds an early finish, only because the PlayStation 2 provides DVD support. Almost no one will remember the Gamecube, while the first XBox still runs as a linux server in some places. Nintendo just doesn’t want the DS to decline and produces spin-off after spin-off. The PSP… well, it’s a portable PS2. Movie UMDs will one day sell for high prices!
• Green IT. A google search causes up to 5g CO². Spam causes a substantial part of the overall co² emissions of IT and the decline of billions of nervous cells. LEDs ever-y-where.
• and digital camera sensors!
• Fives stars seem to replace every other judgmental system.
• And what future generations will be puzzled about the most are the memes which came up in the 00s. knowyourmeme.com knows about ca. 1500 internet memes, most of them emerged in the decade, most of them require zeitgeist-sensibility and background knowledge.

I provided no direct links here, but you know, there’s been a new word around for searching the internet: google it.

What important issue have I not mentioned here? What’s your anecdote? Tell it in the comments!

Gordon Brown issued an unequivocal apology last night on behalf of the government to Alan Turing, the second world war codebreaker who took his own life 55 years ago after being sentenced to chemical castration for being gay.

Describing Turing’s treatment as “horrifying” and “utterly unfair”, Brown said the country owed the brilliant mathematician a huge debt. He was proud, he said, to offer an official apology. “We’re sorry, you deserved so much better,” Brown writes in a statement posted on the No 10 website.

More.

There certainly was too much pointless blabla about the Web in the past few years. After watching this cut by Andre Fillippone Jr. made with source material he took from Charlie Rose’ shows, I feel much better.

Leopard Wallpaper Aurora

Scene from 2001: A Space Odyssey

What you see here is the well-known Apple Wallpaper Aurora, the standard background in Mac OS X Leopard. Yeah, it’s the first one, not the second. The second is a movie still from 2001: A Space Odyssey, Stanley Kubrick’s SciFi masterpiece from 1968, roundabout 40 years senior than the Apple wallpaper. I recently watched the movie for the 20th time and I came across this resemblance. (It’s of course the sequence where Dave Bowman “evolves”).

It’s not only the color scheme and the diffusion of light which is incredibly similar. Have a look at the ratios, e.g. the amount of blue. The lavender is more dominant in the movie still, but somehow is the point of flight of both pictures center with their white light. 

The question: was the Apple wallpaper ment to be as a hommage or is it a  sneaky copy-cat? Did Apple speak about the similarity anywhere, anytime? And what about those cheesy stars in the Apple version, anyway?

While I was sorting my old mails and mailinglists, I happened to come across an older post of the German Thesis E.V. Mailinglist recommending this video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGCJ46vyR9o

Here is the Link for follow up discussions they mention at the end:
Revisiting “A Vision of Students Today”

I think, even though American conditions are shown in the video, a lot of the mentioned facts are probably directly transferable to German or International circumstances. At the moment, I am reassessing what I did during my studies (since I am now so close to finish it), what I could have done better, what I might have helped change. It occurs to me, that I of course could have tried harder, especially when it comes to collaborations with the students’ union executive committee (ASTA, StugA) and alike organisations. I always avoided those for the strangest and most simple reasons. Sometimes, I get angry about myself, because there are people like me who want to change things in their course of study for the better. Every time I tried (alone or in a small group), somehow the efforts got lost at some point.

I learned one thing in all these years at very different universities: If you do not ask rock-solidly, self-confidently and patiently (plus politely but firmly) over and over again for certain things from your professors as well as from their and our (!!!) administration, nothing will happen or change for the better. Then, the shown implications of the video will get worse, we, the students will drag ourselves down by our own behavior, mediocrity will prevail and extraordinary events that could probably inspire our whole future and becoming will not happen anymore. It was the striving for (positive) distinctiveness and several unique events, created by the exceptional efforts of some professors (and alike) as well as the students, that inspired me along the way. This is the reason why I enjoyed my education so much. This is the reason why we all should aim higher and try harder to save our little paradise of being a student. And we should counteract distractions and obstacles in order to create a good learning environment instead of constructing just a place where we somehow get by in order to gain some stupid degree to earn (possibly more) money with some (brainless) activity. Studying should be more than that. Tough stuff.