Next December 9 will mark the 40th year since, for the first time in computer history, public saw a mouse at work. Four decades later, in the Memorial Auditorium of that same Stanford University where one of the most important inventions of the then-germinal information society was born, the academy and the industry will celebrate the “mother of all demos“, the start of a new era for the interaction between man and machine.
Space, final network frontier: the Disruption-Tolerant Networking protocol (DTN, previously known as Delay Tolerant Networking) has sent out its first wails the last weeks when the NASA engineers have tested the first interplanetary-class network communication. It’s an historic step that opens novel opportunities to communicate in space, remote-control probes and eventually to liaise with the future human outposts in the Solar System.
While the humorists are discussing about comedy in the age of Barack Obama, the senator elected as an Internet star even before that 44th President of the United States hasn’t took long to become the subject of a good number of quality strips available on the web. Waiting for January 20, the fatal date in which the new commander in chief of the USA declining superpower will move to the White House, Obama is being busy by opening his direct line with the netizens thanks to the weekly address posted on YouTube, writing back (or letting the others do it for him) to an 8 years old teenager letter, coming to the nanometric scale and by obtaining even the Homer Simpson’s endorsement in the most pert American tv show.
When, in the night between the 4th and 5th of November, Barack Hussein Obama II has been elected the 44th President of the United States of America, the world has suddenly stopped. It has been crystallized in the thing by itself, feeling the whole gravity and the importance of an historic moment, and then it has started over to whirling run accelerating and burning down lives and stock markets. What remains is the hope that the promises by Mr.President haven’t been useful only to harangue the crowd, and looking at the matter from the poor Italy in ruin I can’t help to make some considerations also and above all in regard of technology and computing.
It is in Bradford, Middle England, held by the National Media Museum, that one of the first preservation institutions for videogaming culture in the world will sprout. An offspring of the collaboration between the Nottingham Trent University and the Media Museum, the archive will keep everything is related to electronic games from Pong to nowadays, offering a view of how much videogames have contributed and contribute to the pop culture as much and even more of other entertainment media.
Blu-ray, the optical format for high definition that won the commercial and technology war against Toshiba HD DVD, continues to be the great question mark of the multimedia market. If the inquiries highlight how consumers aren’t presently interested to the new technology, the disk “in blue” brings controversy also and foremost among the giants of consumer electronics, alternatingly foreseeing for Blu-ray the perspective of a bright future or a short run which soon will take it into oblivion, replaced by more advanced contents delivery channels.
The most important cultural institute of the USA returns to deal with two of the hot topics of archiving and preservation of contents in digital format, namely the anti-copy and anti-user technologies best known as Digital Rights Management (DRM) measures and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), the States law on copyright that makes illegal the circumvention technologies of the above said DRM.
