Module 8: Computers in My Life

Computers have been a major part of my life since I was very young. Although I haven’t done much intensive work as far as they’re concerned, I loved exploring the Mac as a very young child; playing games and navigating around to see what trouble I could cause. Moving from the Mac to a Windows 98’ machine didn’t seem to change much for me, I was too young to really see the difference between the two machines. One difference that I’ve found has still prevailed to this day is the ease at which I can get something on a Windows machine to bug out. I learned many of my computer skills from screwing up a system and having to go back into the system and fixing the problem, usually with the help of an online forum or several.

One of my favorite memories from when I was a child playing with a computer was when a friend of mine and I explored my elementary school’s computer system and found a work around that would allow us to install almost any computer game we wanted onto the system. After the school patched that up we found a way to play any game we wanted off of a flash drive, that way there was almost no trace that we’d ever been playing the games on the computers. Over the next years of my schooling I didn’t use computers very often unless I needed to because my parents restricted access to all electronics at my house, allowing us minimal time on them.

I picked up computers again just for fun part way through high school and did a lot of work on several, even becoming the techie in my group of friends, if a friend had a problem they always knew that I could sit down and look at it for a little bit  and find a fix. the problem with many of those fixes is that they could take a few hours to repair. One of these experiences was with a computer that wouldn’t even turn on, it was a joy. I began by flashing the BIOS to get the computer to at least get through the BIOS but would still not turn on. I tried multiple things for the next steps including spending hours formatting and wiping a flash drive, then attempting to create a bootable USB. (I was unsuccessful in doing but I did discover just recently that all I needed was a separated partition with a copy of a Windows 98’ kernel on it which would make it bootable to install Windows XP.) After being unsuccessful in my attempts to boot from a flash drive with the XP data on it, I turned to a more conventional means which was to simply borrow a USB disk drive and use a XP install disk I had laying around. This story was one of the most extensive software fixes I have ever done because not only did the computer have no ‘heartbeat’ but it was a netbook which do not have disk drives. As far as hardware, I have minor abilities to repair it and can replace any part as a whole. Unfortunately I haven’t been able to learn how to solder parts to physically repair a piece of hardware. 

Although I have a moderate background in being able to repair computer systems it was always cumbersome. I have found myself frustrated because of the shear numbers of repairs that never seemed to all be fixed. The last few years I decided I wanted to try something new so I began working towards buying myself a Macbook Air. I reached that goal just this last January and ever since receiving my Macbook I have decided that for my personal computer I will never look back to Windows. I can’t seem to screw this thing up no matter how much I mess with it. Any of the fixes I’ve had to do were in relation to a software update I received that caused certain compatibility issues with another application but these issues were easily and quickly fixed by myself and I have never run into the exact problem again. Now in the past with my Windows OS systems that would be a major problem because any new problem needed to be researched and fixed but with my Mac even though I don’t run into repeat problems the issues I run into are so infrequent that the research is enjoyable instead of a hassle. This has saved me hours of tinkering and allows me to stay on top of my school work when it tends to be computer based.

Module 7: The World is Flat

Some people are stubborn and hate receiving help, while others love accepting the help of another. This can be a perfect answer to the question, “Why are some countries or regions better at doing some things than other countries or regions?” As we see the world change from being round to flat we all have to adapt and learn how to function in the flat world. The best way to do so is to work with others and realize you can’t survive in the flat world by being closed off from everyone else.

The ability to collaborate is one skill everyone will need to acquire and hone to become successful. As countries and regions open their borders and loosen regulations so that communication and trade can be done smoothly and easily it can be observed that that country or region begins to gain a foothold in the world. Countries such as Ireland that the book has talked about anticipated the coming of the flat world and became more lenient in their trade and communications, they are now one of the most successful countries in Europe.

Module 6: The World is Flat

The reading this week was enjoyable for me. I have found some things in the reading that I have always agreed with. For example, the importance of the liberal arts in education and future development of technologies and economy and the future of the middle class. 

Personally, I love the liberal arts and have consistently participated in them in some form or another through out high school. I started taking choral and voice classes from 8th grade and continued through my senior year. I have loved to sing all my life and through that I’ve been able to improve my grades through various strategies that I personally use to remember facts, such as making little songs up or using songs that I knew to remind me of little things. In 9th and 10th grade, I participated in the school musical as well as a small musical my show choir put on during my 9th grade year. Continuing into my 11th grade year I actually began going to a performing arts school with focuses on Theatre and Voice. The point behind this small timeline was to show the major things I’ve done in the liberal arts and then to state that I have throughout my high school career tested and scored in the top 10% of my class in all subjects. Through my personal experiences I know the liberal arts are a major contributor to my education and my success, allowing me to be as creative as possible and give me an edge in the middle class market, if not give me an advantage to progress even higher.

The middle class has always been something I’ve looked at, probably not in the sense of the “middle class” but more in a sense of my future. When looking into careers I had a very hard time trying to find something that I could have more of a sense of security in my job lasting. I considered many fields and have yet to completely decide on what I’m going to progress in my education towards. I’ve narrowed it down from 10 subjects to 2, Chemical engineering or a Masters in Computer Science with specifics in Binary Math.

As someone whom will need to become a new middler, I will need to develop various personality traits and skills to make sure I am not left behind in the working world. The characteristics of a new middler would be flexibility, creativity, and a competitive work ethic. Some skills that we’ll need as new middlers will be a mix of standard jobs with a twist combining with computers, the book gives one example of film and digital photography skills being melded with computers to take a standard business of film development and editing into the new age of computers to allow digital editing such as morphing. These twists on standard business come about because of a passion for a subject that pushes someone to have the drive to continue doing what they can to do what they love.

The book refers to the equation of CQ + PQ > IQ. CQ refers to the level of curiosity one has, PQ refers to the level of passion one has, and finally IQ is someone’s level of intelligence. The equation just states that in the future job market employers will be looking for people with passion and curiosity over their level of intelligence. If someone has passion and curiosity they can learn anything and enjoy doing anything very quickly and easily. This is not the only thing changing with the shift into a flat world scheme. The development of computer systems have not just effected individuals but the global economic system taking a free trade economic system globally.

The concept of free trade is that there are no tariffs and subsides to goods being exported or imported between countries. This concept allows countries to pay only shipping costs and not taxes on their products. Therefore allowing companies to build their products by off shoring and export the finished products all over the world. The reason for the tariffs that we charge on exporting goods is to maintain our own economy and to discourage off shoring and outsourcing jobs.

Module 5: The World is Flat

This week’s reading of Friedman’s book has been more positive for me. Once it was back onto a track of looking at the past and predicting the future, instead of focusing on the present, I began to enjoy the book once again. My thoughts on this section of reading were consistently something to the effect of, “That makes total sense!” or “I’m thinking the same thing.”

The triple convergence was a subject that I was very agreeable on. The triple convergence is the concept that, although all the flatteners existed, it still took time for companies to develop themselves to be able to take advantage of them. For example, workflow software, although it has been around for years, took several years to distribute and be seen by companies as a tool they could use to improve their businesses. Once distributed though those systems had to be learned by the employees to allow them to be effective.

I still see people who can’t use their company’s systems effectively because they haven’t been given proper training or been flexible enough during the assimilation of computers into their workplace. At times I’ve had the opportunity to step in, look at a company’s system as a user, and been able to pick up on it easily where others have struggled. I’ve grown up with these (what changes) changes in technology constantly around me and been forced to become flexible and adapt to those changes. While most of the work force we have today just became introduced to the computer world, they have yet to adjust to be flexible enough to deal with the constant change.

The development and assimilation of computers has ramped up the threat of theft of intellectual property. Before computers, intellectual property was a challenge to steal. Someone would have to infiltrate a company and then send out information about ideas manually. Intellectual property is anything that one person could think of and gain rights over an intangible idea. Today anything on a computer is potentially accessible if you have the right hands and mind. As people begin developing plans to create a product they input those ideas into a computer system. Thereafter, someone with the skills and a minor knowledge of what they were looking for could look into that person’s computer and pull any intellectual property and attempt to develop it before the original or sell the ideas. This is a major concern for companies and has most likely caused the downfall of many. The challenge of these types of cases is to glean who actually had the idea first. Patents have become a minor solution to this problem.

However, patents have their own problems. We have all seen over the last few years massive “Patent Wars.” One of the major patent wars going on is between Samsung and Apple. They have been going back and forth for over a year now over a few of Samsung’s products copying the design and some of the patented technologies from Apple’s iPhone and vice versa. This has been a very active debate among the technical communities, whom already have a heated debate going on over Samsung and Apple in-general on top of the patent wars. In the case of Apple vs. Samsung, many of the complications have come from them being multinational companies as well as being headquartered in 2 different countries.

One conflict that was brought up in Friedman’s book was the case of India and Indiana. Indiana was looking to upgrade their unemployment computer systems. Many companies gave bids on the project. A company in India gave a bid that was 8.1 million dollars under any other company and won the contract. As the India company went to work, Indiana elected a new governor. The contract with the India company came to the public eye and the new government made a decision to break the contract. 

Friedman asks the question as to whether India or Indiana was being exploited and who was the exploiter. To answer this question, you have to look at it as a flat world vs a round world. In the round world I would have to say Indiana was exploiting India for the cheap labor and the ability to come in to do the work for a lot less than any other company. But in a flat world I would say no one is being exploited. The Indian company came in and placed their bid at what they were able and willing to do the work. They took their market advantage and used it to their benefit. Indiana was in no way forcing them to bid. Indiana didn’t seek out the cheapest way to complete the task, they put the job out there and when a company got a hold of the information, they came to Indiana to put in their bid to see if they could get the job.

Module 4: IT Job Interview

I pulled aside a friend of mine by the name of Mike Dopp, whom works as a Senior Systems Administrator for a company that manages video phones for the deaf and hard of hearing. He is in charge of the large enterprise networks and servers that manage the businesses systems, as well as the customer’s video conversations, and other inter-company interactions. Amidst managing the enterprise systems for the company, he also manages the roll out and creation of new projects based on the businesses needs.

On the management side of Mike’s job, he is in charge of many different parts of the company, making sure everything in the company works together. Some of these parts include but are not limited to: 

1. The systems that manage the purchases of video phone equipment that customers make;
2. The telecommunications customer interactions that give the customer access to technical support, billing, and service support;
3. Managing the communications between the company’s devices to ensure a smooth experience;
1. For the company while they provide the services;
2. For the customer in using the services and contacting the company if a need arises;
4. The acquisition of new technologies to benefit the company to keep them technically up-to-date.

One of the main purposes of acquiring new hardware is to roll out new company projects, which is the other half of Mike’s job. Mike is informed of a new project and is asked to find new technologies that would be the most productive to do the job correctly and in the most efficient way. His job is to research equipment and recommend what would be best for the project and then the company considers his suggestions, weighing them quite heavily, and makes a purchase. The next part of his job is to prepare that equipment to be used for the job needing to be done. Normally, he would have to install the operating systems and all the programs separately but Mike actually wrote his own distribution software for the job. This software allows him to input the computer’s information that he’s distributing the software to, such as MAC Addresses, IP Addresses, etc. and where to get the software from. He is able to then run his program and theoretically he could go to sleep and wake up the next morning, having rolled out a new project without much hassle. His expertise didn’t just come overnight and he’s worked a lot to get where he is now.

I asked Mike what he had to do to get into the job he is doing now, his response, “I started when nobody else was doing it.” He started just playing on his personal computer to learn what kinds of things he could but he really got started when he entered the professional market. His start came from a small computer company doing repairs, both hardware and software, and building computers. Now we got a little distracted while talking tech so I never really got a timeline of the jobs he worked at while in the IT field. He did tell me that, over his IT career, he’s gone through 8 jobs usually due to a better offer from another company whom was trying to acquire his expertise. As far as education, he went to school for web development at Weber State and never finished but did complete a certification program for computer programming. His experience precedes him, he actually at one point got a job offer from GE and at the end of the interview they asked him if he had a degree, he said no but that he had ‘this’ much experience. They said they would get back to him and hung up. 15 minutes later they called him back, asking if he would be willing to get a degree if they hired him and paid for the schooling. He said that he would be but later ended up turning the job down, for reasons unknown to me.

Module 3: The World is Flat

While reading the last few chapters in Friedman’s book, I found quite a few things that bothered me. This even had me asking the question, “Is this book the best resource to learn these subjects?” Now I will say up to this point there was a specific focus that everything being stated was based in the past. These last few chapters have felt outdated as if Friedman decided that the development of the flat world ended in 2007 and it was a good time to stop writing. The reason that this bothered me so much is not particularly that the content is outdated but because I have a great interest in these subjects. (I’m aware that the book was written in 2007 and will have outdated information.) 

In the preface he states, “At some point I will stop writing this book. But for now, I am enjoying the chance to keep sharing what I am learning....” Apparently, he decided it was time to stop writing the book after 2007.  A lot has occurred though since 2007 to flatten the world even more. For example, smartphones, Facebook, and many other recent additions to technology that make communications in the world simpler and as Friedman says, “flatter.”

Despite my distress with the last few chapters I did learn a few things. For example, I wasn’t really sure of the differences between off-shoring and outsourcing. Off-shoring is the practice of taking a portion of your business such as a factory or call center to another country while keeping it within the same company. Outsourcing is the same concept but it takes it a little further to contract out to a third party company to do the same work. Both have their upsides and down sides. Unfortunately they both move jobs putting many people out of work but they both cause companies to be able to lower costs and provide services and products for better prices. Another benefit is that it frees up that knowledge base for those workers to move up to develop better products and needed services.

Now every company has a process that it needs to go through to produce and offer the products and services they provide. They do this through supply chains. Supply chains are the pathways from the suppliers to the retailers. Walmart is the greatest example of a company completely based on supply chains. Walmart does not make any products, they have only created the pathways from manufacturers, to the retail stores and eventually the customers. Walmart has developed a system for manufacturers to be notified that someone bought their product and that they need to produce another, send it to a Walmart distribution center, which then ships the product out to the specified store whom can sell it to start the process over. This system was developed out of necessity but has been the successful basis of Walmart’s business.

Another company that has developed a system that revolutionized business is Google. Google starting with just a search engine had to find a way to make money. This problem gave Google a challenge but they solved it and have changed the advertising industry single handedly. Due to people searching for things on Google, Google developed a strategy to make money through advertising but not in the conventional way. The standard in advertising would be to put an ad out there in the best place and hope that the audience you’re trying to reach sees it, but in Google’s case they had a little more control. Google developed a platform to personalize advertisements to the specific person that was running the searches. Therefore if someone had previously searched for cameras, Google could recognize this and show an advertisement for camera products such as film, lenses, or cameras themselves (even down to the exact cameras that person had looked at previously.) Through this model businesses could guarantee that their advertisements were being seen by the audience they were originally intended for.

Module 2: The World is Flat

Having had a minor background in computer technologies, I’ve dealt with open source software and loved it. There are so many possibilities involved in it’s development, if you want something in the software, you add it. It’s as simple as that. Open source software is just as simple as it’s name, the program comes with the source code attached and anyone is open to change it. Sometimes open source software can also be known as freeware with the exception that some freeware does not include the source code. In other words all open source software is freeware but not all freeware is open source, kind of like all squares are rectangles but not all rectangles are squares. 

In the book the subject of the GNU/Linux operating system arises which has to be the most well known open source software/firmware that there could be and consists mainly of open source software that allows someone to manage their computer environment almost for free. The only problem that someone runs into with GNU/Linux is if you create your own problem there’s not many computer shops that could fix it, you’re on your own. Some of us like it that way, most people wouldn’t play with Linux if they weren’t up to the challenge. 

Now I believe commercial software will always have it’s place, not because there’s more money to develop it or because there will always be someone who can fix a problem (which usually takes a while before a request gets attention). The real reasons that commercial software will always have it’s place are clearly stated in the book but not applied to the discussion about commercial software. The major problem that the development of the internet ran into was the lack of compatibility and standards, the same applies to commercial software. Personally my word processing program is Pages which is a commercial piece of software, the reason I use it? Simplicity and I’ve found it has everything I need in it. The only problem I’ve run into is that the standard for word processing happens to be .doc* files which means when uploading documents to various places I am forced to export into a .doc* file so that almost anyone can download it and read it. I can’t tell you how frustrating it can be to have accidentally uploaded a .pages* file. Through this example though, we see that any word processing program now needs to be capable of exporting to a .doc* file to be able to be read on almost any computer. If you know computers you know that that standard was set by Microsoft through it’s commercial program, Microsoft Word. Another reason that commercial software will always have it’s place would be simply that many people don’t want to do the work to find a program that works for them, instead they look to a large well known company to develop something that they can conform to and learn.

Many of those well known companies have conformed to a standard of their own to get work done efficiently and cost effectively. This standard is to outsource, outsourcing is allowing large and even small companies to get minor work done quite cheaply and quickly giving them a greater margin for profit. The book mentions quite a few times that a lot of this work can be done while most of the people in the US that manage those companies are sleeping because this work is being done on the other side of the world. This system has allowed many companies to be working and making money 24/7. One of the benefits that Friedman talks about is the ability to free up minds in the US to pursue greater developments so we continue to evolve and gain new technologies. This is actually becoming a fact as we are seeing more and more people going back to school, many of whom are going for a major in a computer technology field. Before reading this book outsourcing was always an idea that I found to be negative and I see the negative effects it can have because I do work in a call center. When I transfer to my technical support office it isn’t uncommon to have the customer become upset because they don’t want to talk to someone from the Philippines. The reasons behind this could be that they think they won’t be able to understand the agent on the line, that they are in support of having Americans do the same job, or they themselves have had a bad experience with outsourcing. Some of the small effects of this can be that a company can lose customers because they do outsource. Overall outsourcing can be a very good thing but there can be minor consequences to companies that do depending on the type of outsourcing being done.

Now outsourcing wouldn’t have been at all possible without workflow software even with the ability to connect with those countries we in the US use for outsourcing the work needing to be done would be too complicated to be done on the other side of the world. In the US we were struggling within our own offices to get work done because of the gap in systems communications. Workflow software bridged that gap allowing companies to have a way to integrate their systems to allow easy communication between departments. Without the development of a common language that almost any computer could easily understand and do the work that needed to be done at that step and then passing the information along to the next department we’d still be running companies that end up being isolated to one building. The development of workflow software allows me to take a customers call and determine what needs to be done and then pass the work to another background department and move onto the next call. As an example at my work I can write an order and that order goes to my order writer’s department to be inputted into the billing, services, and dispatch departments so that a bill will be generated as the customer receives service, the services department is told to do the work to allocate the services that the customer is purchasing, and finally the dispatch department can put the physical work onto a technician’s schedule. All of this work could even be being input by someone halfway across the world because work flow software has given us the ability to give them a system that understands the work that I originally did.

Module 1: The World is Flat

Friedman’s view on the infrastructure of the world as it enters the information age has been intriguing, seeing the different stages society took to become connected and integrated to become not many societies across over 100 countries but merging into one singular society over the entire world only separated by governments, religions, and ethnic groups. One of the many ways this occurred is referred to by Friedman as a 3 stage globalization the first being the journey of Christopher Columbus expanding society’s view of the true size of the earth and revealing that the earth is a round surface geographically, the second was the reconnection of the world through changes in transportation, the invention of the telephone, and many other improvements in society’s major forms of communication, and the third is the current boom of the information age with the development of computers, the internet, cell phones, and continuous other improvements on the way we live our lives that will come about in the near future.

To look at each of these globalizations more easily you see an expansion of the world in the first globalization which in turn moved to actually limit our abilities to communicate, expanding from what could have been a few weeks to send a message to what could be months or even years as the eastern world colonized the Americas. This forced a need for better communication which made many eager to find a solution. As a society people feel the need to communicate and through this need for human contact methods of communication that we would’ve never thought up before arise and serve to surprise us.

The Second Globalization served to repair the rift created in the expansion of the world as society previously knew it, with the invention of the telegraph and telephone people could communicate by sound instead of through just the written word. Through the development of steam engines, airplanes, and cars people could travel faster and more efficiently. It just wasn’t fast enough and someone got creative.

The computer was born in this third globalization and turned the world upside down in the matter of 30 years, going from a simple digital interface that simplified various activities but didn’t do much to assist communication, to being interconnected but complicated to easily communicate with, to finally with the development and invention of the internet browser allowing communication to be simple and usable for virtually anyone willing to learn. Computers have revolutionized our lives and change every aspect of how we communicate with each other. Friedman talks about one of the major leaps in connecting the world was the invention of the NetScape Browser which Friedman views as one of the most significant accomplishments involving the connection of the world. NetScape was an extremely significant stride and is a shame to have been lost in the rat race.

The story behind NetScape’s rise shows the innate desire of people’s desire for communication. As soon as it released it boomed with the internet crowds and those that would’ve otherwise been unable to access the internet due to lack of technical knowledge. Though it also reveals how quickly society is moving in the development of these technologies, as Internet Explorer was developed many moved away from NetScape due to the cost to use the browser when they could use Internet Explorer for free as well as the easy accessibility of Internet Explorer. If NetScape had found a way to provide their browser for free as well as to find a way to integrate it into the main core of an operating system they could still be a successful browser although somewhere down the road there would be obstacles the possibilities of what NetScape could’ve become were endless but it got trampled by the rush of innovation around it. NetScape showed the speed that things were changing at and looking at the rate of speed that things are ever changing at you can see that we haven’t seen a lull in the development of new technologies. 

Friedman speaks about major changes in the world that really caused a boom in our technology and the way the world conducts it’s communications. The specific event he brings up that really changed everything was the fall of the Berlin Wall, through the fall in the Berlin wall the world began seeing itself as a global ecosystem instead of being individual nations supporting themselves. This was huge for the development of communication not by just the people but by governments, by merchants, by markets, etc. The world market wasn’t closed the world market was ramping up it’s trafficking countries would begin relying on outlying countries allowing a community to form; trading products, working together to develop new technologies, and empowering a global push for easier, more efficient, inexpensive communications.

One of the major aspects of this reliance and communication is to outsource jobs for cheaper and more efficient systems, having been in a call center for almost a year now I have seen the outsourcing issue as well as the benefits. Outsourcing does remove many people within the US to lose jobs and the way Friedman addresses it I can see his points about people being removed from the menial labor jobs to allow progress and advancement. I also see the view from the workers losing their jobs to outsourcing and although it does support the economy it also can ruin the economy by putting those consumers out of work forcing them to either go on welfare or begin to stockpile anything and everything and cease spending. To adapt is within our nature and to outsource jobs is an adaptation that is necessary for the development of many different technologies and systems, making them more successful as well as cost effective.

Update

I am taking a college class called The Wired Society. This post is to update my blog to prepare for the class.