I have been doing research on Web 3.0 for the past couple of days for a presentation our group has to give next week. All of the articles I have read are very vague and no one really has a set definition on what it will entail. The buzz word that keeps coming up is the Semantic Web coined by Tim Berners-Lee. This more or less means that computers will be able to better understand what we are looking for and provide more meaningful results.

One of the examples that I read was asking your computer to check your calendar and compare it to available appointments with doctors in a 5-mile radius. The computer would then be able to provide you with results. In an interview with James Hendler, he says, “What the traditional Web does for the text documents in our lives, the Semantic Web does for all our data and information.” This brings up a privacy issue of how much data is available on us via the Internet. I think this is already a big concern among some Internet users, so will there be even more skepticism about the Internet in the future? It makes me wonder if some people will take a step back from the technology and say it is to invasive, or will they embrace it and further its growth.

There are several companies already investing millions of dollars in this new technology. I think it will provide us with new ways of using the Internet that we never imagined before. I just hope that computers don’t become too smart and destroy us all…that’s probably way in the future though…at least 10 years.

After getting a new computer, I decided to turn my current desktop into a file server that Leigh and I could share. I had received a couple of hard drives for presents but had put off using them until I had a need to. I started to run out of space, so I figured with the new computer, now was as good of time as any.

Since I can’t afford the licenses necessary for Windows Server 2003, I decided to go open source. I had tried this once before on my everyday computer, but there were too many Windows programs that I used on a regular basis. Since I would only be using the server for file storage, I figured I would be ok and would still keep windows on my laptop.

I went with Fedora 9 which was released not too long ago. It is based on Red Hat Linux and has pretty good support. I was able to find books on Fedora, which can’t be said about all Linux distributions. The install was very easy. My next step was to configure Samba on this server so all the other computers could see and share files. This took some reading, but I finally found the answers I was looking for. I ended up changing some settings in the IP tables that fixed all of my problems.

We have been using the server for a couple of weeks now and it seems to work fine. This will hopefully give me the opportunity to learn some command line in Linux as I have not used it before. The best way for me to learn is by forcing myself to use something and figuring out problems and solutions as I go. I am able to use Putty for an SSH connection back to the server without having to hook up a monitor, keyboard and mouse. It should be interesting to see if I move away from Windows and more towards Linux.

Maybe my next step will be to move the website over and setup an Apache web server on this box. That is a project for another day though.

I had to give a presentation in one of my classes this week. Luckily it was short and only lasted a few minutes. Every class, a different group presents some news in the IT industry. I did mine on Windows 7. It will be the successor to Windows Vista with a release date probably in 2010. The new operating system was discussed at the All Things Digital conference last week. Their big thing was the new multi touch technology that it will have. Multi touch is different from regular touch screen in that it will recognize multiple touches simultaneously. Just like the iPhone and iPod touch. Here is a video to check out to see it in action:

Windows 7 Multi Touch

It is kind of interesting to me that this is Microsoft’s big selling feature on the new OS. This came out awhile back with Microsoft Surface which was going to revolutionize the way we order food at restaurants by selecting what we wanted to eat from the screen built in to the table…Maybe I am not eating at the right restaurants.

This is really the only thing that Microsoft will say about WIndows 7. From what I have heard they don’t want to promise all the cool features that it will have and then under deliver like they did with Vista…apparently that backfired.

I have my midterm on Tuesday. It only covers 5 chapters, but that first test is always tough since you don’t know how the professor grades. Now, I just have to find time to study this weekend.