Looking back....wow.....

Today I was looking back through my original blog, It’s A Binary World (now 1.0), and it was interesting to see what I was writing about. I found some really fun posts. Here are links to the posts and some highlights.

When I started up this server and blog(of course it was on an old Fedora Core 1 machine back then):

Why does technology excite me so? I think because my knowledge of technology frees me from the slavery of others. I can run my own server with as much space as I want on it. I can post any content I want (as long as the goverment doesn’t shut me down q;o) and I can be free of paying for software that doesn’t work right out of the box -> by switching to Open Source alternative. Also…I’m a bit of a geek. q;o)

The first time I heard about the One Laptop Per Child project. (which is just now getting ready to deploy!!):

The founder and chairman of the MIT Media Lab wants to create a $100 portable computer for the developing world. Nicholas Negroponte, author of Being Digital and the Wiesner Professor of Media Technology at MIT, says he has obtained promises of support from a number of major companies, including Advanced Micro Devices, Google, Motorola, Samsung, and News Corp.

The low-cost computer will have a 14-inch color screen, AMD chips, and will run Linux (emphasis added) software, Mr. Negroponte said during an interview Friday with Red Herring at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. AMD is separately working on a cheap desktop computer for emerging markets. It will be sold to governments for wide distribution.

The first time I discovered Xvid (which I now use to encode all my videos) and also predicted the effects of a system like the OLPC laptop:

Yesterday I discovered the video codec Xvid. This is an opensource MPEG-4 codec that embodies the movement I have recently chosen to become a part of - the open source movement. Although I don’t know the ramifications of a true software economy based upon open source software (it only previously existed in the very early years of computing, but computers were crappy back then), I do know that I like the principles of open source software.

First of all, it empowers poor countries so that they can rise up to our technological level. Instead of being left behind because they can’t afford expensive copies of Win XP, they can get open source software for free. (Software is, after all, a large part of the price paid for new computers - the components barely cost anything) It also allows college students, such as myself, to be able to afford to have the lastest and best software.

And finally, some great quotes! Which I’ll just reproduce here:

“You feel a warm fuzzy heat unless you have the 10KW laser -then you feel tha tyour arm is missing” - Prof Pollock

“When you are young your stability is very large” - Prof Chiang comparing Humans and Power Systems

“I will show you my work and you can decide whether I am 3rd class researcher, 2nd class researcher, or 1st class researcher” - Prof Chiang

“Hydrogen is forever” - Prof Tiwari

“I’m waiting for my university to recall my degree since everything I learned is outdated” - Prof Pollock