The Aim of Computer Technology

Please see this interesting video presented at the Wharton Business Tech Conference by Stephen Elop of Microsoft about a vision of 2019. Of course the gadgets are amazing and all of the actors are very attractive and seem well-to-do. And that's what a vision of future ought to be. But it got me thinking about what was the common thread connecting all of the scenarios beyond the basic premise that by 2019 we'll be completely wired.

I believe it's all about finding things: information, your car, evidence of a medical condition, a product in a store, your bank balance, your friends, a restaurant and so on. And before you can find the things you want, you must decide what it is you wish to find. In other words you must define your search. If you accept that ongoing convergence of networks, computing, information storage, data management and most forms of communications that can use these tools provide the primary advantage of delivering information at blazing speeds, then we must ask how best to use this advantage.

There are two means of attacking this problem. Most strategies near as I can tell depend on at least some of both means. The things you're looking for must be cataloged in such a manner that they can be found and accessed by whatever system you're using. But the ideal system must also know a lot about you to cache the information you most likely would wish to find most often, how you prefer it to organized, when you want the information and how you wish it to be sent to you. It is this side of a search that I wonder about.

In many situations, an efficient search is one where the parameters of what you wish to find are very well defined. I don't mean exactly to the dotted 'i' or the crossed 't' but in a contextual basis that narrows your search to not the single best choice of what you're looking for but to the top 10 or 20 choices. Efficient searches would also build on the experience of prior searches. Various search engines strive to accomplish this based on very little information input from the searcher. But the vision of 2019 presented in this video will require a lot more input from the searcher to complete the real time, mobile and continuous searches the user would make as they go about there business in this brave new world.

So where is all of the information from the searcher side accumulated? Who stores this information, authorizes access and secures it? What rights do we sacrifice to gain such convenience and power of this world? Where will the line between our personal privacy and society's collective need to know be drawn in 2019? Now that's a video I'd like to see.

Manage Your Virtual Presence

The many means of communicating using the cable, wireless and phone systems are magnificent. The dream of the convergence of these many streams into a great river of information in such a brief period of time is surely one of the greatest ongoing achievements of the human race. E-mail, blogs, websites, cell phones, social networks, text messages, twitter: the list of the means to communicate in a virtual way are many. That being said, it's the responsibility each user of the river to protect themselves from those who would do harm to the river and the users of the river. To this end, I recommend that you should consider doing the following:

1. Actively manage your online presence. Establish and grab control of your own profiles on the various social networking websites before somebody does it for you. Even if you insert only minimal information, at least it's you doing it. And check it ever so often. If I were a crook bent on finding a new identity, the first place I'd look would be on a social network site.
2. Maintain strong firewall and other security software on your various machines, keep them upgraded/patched and monitor their performance. So what if your performance is slightly degraded; its still better than what you had just a few years ago.
3. Use strong passwords and encrypt your most sensitive information.
4. Google yourself and see what comes up. If you see something fishy, check it out.
5. Monitor your credit reports. There are three major providers of this service. You're entitled to one free report per year from each. So get one every four months.
6. Remember that anything you put out there is potentially out there forever. Those old college pictures that were fun and appropriate when you were 19 can come back and haunt you when you're interviewing for that dream gig when you're 28.
7. If you buy stuff online, use a one time credit card number. You can get them from all of the major credit card companies. Don't save credit card information at sellers websites. Sure it reduces the convenience of the 'one click' experience. Show a little patience and enter the credit card info each time. You might even save some money doing this as the extra time gives you an opportunity to reconsider that impulse purchase.
8. Don't download stuff or click on links unless you a absolutely sure they are from a trusted source. If you are not sure, don't do it.

However the most important thing that many experts advocate is to think before you click.

I'm sure there are many other things one can do to safely enjoy the information river. And I'll add them as they occur to me or are brought to my attention.

Standard Wisdom

Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently.Henry Ford