Week 6 - Topics and Readings

This week we concluded the Computing section. Can I get an amen? Not my favorite part of the course, but I will never deny the power of the personal computer and their purpose. On Tuesday we looked at hot topics like virtualization, thin computing, and cloud computing. Also, we finished up with some US and International sales info for the industry. Simply said Acer improved, Dell hasn't been impressive, Lenovo is down, HP is respectable and Apple only made the US list. Oh yeah, Virtualization, Mobile Computing and Cloud Computing are hot topics and very relevant. The benefits are pretty obvious depending on the situation.

Thursday we will dive in head first into Digital Media. We will meet in WSOM 009 and "kick the tires." My plan is to attack Photoshop, Flash, iMovie, Windows Movie Maker and Powerpoint, this class will help you as you work on your second project. You are required to create a digital media advertisment (see syllabus). Next week we'll get into the details and power of digital media, drivers, formats, definitions and issues.

Oh yeah, three more things:

1. We'll keep cranking on the individual project presentations. I'm hoping you are seeing the pattern.

2. Twitter is silly, see here. Why are people following my useless comments?

3. Quiz and Project grades should be posted on Blackboard by Tuesday.

Download Reading Assignments Here

My First Computer from 1982!

As we move into the Computing Section of this course I started thinking about my first computer it was the Commodore 64. What a purchase by my dad. At the time the C64's graphics and sound capabilities were rivaled only by the Atari (hopefully you know what Atari is). Also it was the best selling computer of all time (at the time). At the time I was five and playing some really lame games: Super Bowl Sunday, Frogger and Q-Bert.

What are the biggest differences between your first computer and your present computer?

These screenshots are pathetic and real. I remember these games, the lame controller and the 5in floppy disks. Oh yeah did I mention there was no internet. That explains my 15 year obsession with John Madden Football and the Internet.

As you can see, when you are an old timer a lot has changed. The biggest difference my my C64 and my MacBookPro is speed, size, power, storage, networking and graphics capabilities:

64KB of RAM (C64) vs. 2GB of RAM (my MacBookPro)
1.02 MHz CPU (C64) vs. 2.4 GHz Intel Core Duo (my MacBookPro)
16 Colors (Monitor) vs. Millions of Colors (Monitor)
Commodore BASIC 2.0 OS (C64) vs. Mac OS X Leopard (my MacBookPro)
$595 COST (C64) vs. over $2,000 (my MacBookPro)