Wednesday, July 6, 2011
Linux OS
I never understood the meaning of OS until now. And I never understood that compueter companies could write and withold entire source codes. See, I always assumed that operating systems were what we actually used when we ran a program but i never occured to me that behind it all was a source code that made it all work. Microsoft made billions off of keeping their code to themselves and selling you the access to use it. Now the free software movement is great because with so many people now so knowledgable these days there can be made great improvements to the software. With so many minds thinking about it, only the best will come out.
Tuesday, July 5, 2011
Carr, Nicholas. "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" Atlantic Magazine. The Atlantic Monthly Group, July/August 2008. Web. 6 July 2011.
Read this article
In Nicholas Carr’s “Is Google making Us Stupid?” the author has a sense that online information and the web has weakened our minds, slowed our thinking process, and taking over everything we do. In other words, it’s making us stupid. He fears that with online information so available we humans don’t have to work to find the same information in books. We now skim through precise information instead of taking the time to read everything. And it’s not that we don’t have time to read these lengthily books and articles, it’s that our attention spans are so warped that we cannot concentrate on anything longer that a few paragraphs. It has been proven that, “The human brain is almost infinitely malleable”, and because of that Carr believes we will start to think like the web: quick and shallow. Carr see’s that in the future the web will relate to almost every aspect of our life because we have become so accustomed to the ease of quick knowledge and efficiency.
This is a very important topic to talk about because it deals with our generation and so on. We are the people who are making the internet what it is right now. As Richard Foreman said, we risk turning in to “pancake people”. If we constantly rely on looking up information on the web, how can we expect to truly know anything? Socrates was worried about the written word and the ease of knowledge in his time so we should too. The New York Times even started slimming down their articles because people would rather absorb the headlines rather read an entire story. Google is trying to create artificial intelligence as smart or even smarter then humans now. The web makes hard to find information, which used to take hours of searching to find, just a hyperlink away. And this can be beneficial or detrimental so that is why this is worth thinking of. We could in fact become a stupider world or Carr is just a heretic, either way it’s important to think about.
Read this article
In Nicholas Carr’s “Is Google making Us Stupid?” the author has a sense that online information and the web has weakened our minds, slowed our thinking process, and taking over everything we do. In other words, it’s making us stupid. He fears that with online information so available we humans don’t have to work to find the same information in books. We now skim through precise information instead of taking the time to read everything. And it’s not that we don’t have time to read these lengthily books and articles, it’s that our attention spans are so warped that we cannot concentrate on anything longer that a few paragraphs. It has been proven that, “The human brain is almost infinitely malleable”, and because of that Carr believes we will start to think like the web: quick and shallow. Carr see’s that in the future the web will relate to almost every aspect of our life because we have become so accustomed to the ease of quick knowledge and efficiency.
This is a very important topic to talk about because it deals with our generation and so on. We are the people who are making the internet what it is right now. As Richard Foreman said, we risk turning in to “pancake people”. If we constantly rely on looking up information on the web, how can we expect to truly know anything? Socrates was worried about the written word and the ease of knowledge in his time so we should too. The New York Times even started slimming down their articles because people would rather absorb the headlines rather read an entire story. Google is trying to create artificial intelligence as smart or even smarter then humans now. The web makes hard to find information, which used to take hours of searching to find, just a hyperlink away. And this can be beneficial or detrimental so that is why this is worth thinking of. We could in fact become a stupider world or Carr is just a heretic, either way it’s important to think about.
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