Changing Woman's Blog

Browsing through my opera's writers compedition page, my page and "the invention of wheel" by Mary Bellis on About.com, I thought it is time to stimulate some creative juices myself and thus follow the legacy of our Mesopotamian ancestors who invented the oldest wheel centuries ago..Following is an account of my journey down the tech-lane...

Sociologist Lewis H. Morgan categorize technology in three eras, the savagery depicted by bow, pottery and fire, the barbarism depicted by domestication of animals and agriculture and the civilization depicted by development of language and alphabets. Leslie White looks upon technology as five stages of harnessing energy..the muscle stage, animal stage, agriculture stage, use of fossil fuel stage and finally the nuclear stage. Gerhard Lenski argues that the focus of technology is spread of information, the more is the spread of information, the more technologically advance a society is! I am a Lenskian, a hard core Lenskian!

Technology is a very broad term, even broader a science! Technology means an efficient merge of knowledge, skills, tools, material, man power and capital to produce desireable changes in humanly circumstances.
Innovation on the other hand is a bright idea, a creative design, an improved plan! Innovation is a way of modifying an existing design or to altogeher change a design to improve humanly circumstances and cater for the need of hour..innovation can be classified into two more broad terms..the sustainable innovation and the disruptive innovation.The sustainable innovation occurs in a step by step procedure, it is generally an enhancement of the technology and often is introduced in the market by the same company.
However disruptive innovation is a cheap alternative to technology, it provides cheap, low quality alternatives to technology and is often a danger to the product line of parent company!

I really do want to write about the locomotives and the auomobile industry, the invasion of our homes by television sets and the remarkable invention of printing press. I also want to pay hearty tribute to the microwave oven. I want to go on writing lengths on how single monopole antenna placed on roof top was replaced by a Yagi Uda which was later changed for a cable Tv and now the satellites are incorporated to bring us better TV services! I may as well talk about how the telephone got into our houses, the analog systems conquered by digital systems and the advent of wireless and internet telephoney. However this would take me years of research and writing and I would exceed the compedition deadlines and word limit!

So, just for now let me stick with the herd and write about the todays hype!

With due respect to inventor of the first wheel,I shall keep the focus of my article concentrated on to infotainment (information and entertainment) and communication, following are five technologies and innovations of our time that made straight to our hearts and homes!


Elecronic mail, is the first on my list!
The technology was there since 1984, however through different stages of innovation today we have the elecronic mail we know! The first emails were intra-departmental, that cannot be forwarded, did not contain graphical options, invoked no delivery reports, could not be send to multiple recipients and the were not user friendly. However today the technology has innovated so much that even grandpa owns and uses an email account. The Opera mail is an email client provided by opera that I love using!

The world wide web is second on my list!
The biggest infotainment and communication providing facility today is the world wide web, it grew out of the need to collaborate a huge number of scienist working world wide on particle physics.The proposal came out of the documents of CERN physicist Tim Berners Lee in March 1989.Today, I call my computer with the internet connection on it 'my window into the world'! You access unlimited information (hit click google..and there you go!), learn whatever skills you wish to ( I learned html online and took fran kerrs free online acne course) , find jobs online (hit click a job portal), earn by performing online task, socialize with different nationals, connect to your friends (yes, i mean facebooking..), make purchases online, check your grammer, mind your spellings, watch a video (as if you didn't go youtube before), download a song, check your location and ofcourse you can blog, twitter and let the world know what it feels like!

hmmm..something innovative..ok..Opera unite logo running on opera 10.0 beta version provides web server capabiliies, which means you can host your own website, share file or phote and access streaming media..doesn't that sound great!

The world wide web is basically a collection of static pages. So we need to have a program to view these pages..thus the browser makes third place on my list!

The idea of a page pointing another page is called hypertext and was invented by Vannevar Bush in 1945. The purpose of a browser is to fetch the requested page, interpret the text , format command on it,display the page properly and format it on the screen.Famous browsers are internet explorer and the netscape navigator. non graphical browsers such as Lynx are also there however not much popular. Voice based browser...yes they are there too and the opera browsers are an example!

Opera 9.5 with tabbed browsing, pop up ad blocking, fraud protection, download manger, Bit Torrent client , search bar , web feed aggregator, email client, IRC chat client and speed dial feature is the fastest browser on earth! Opera browsers are multimodal browsers with spatial navigation feature.They have voice control functionality as well. The web page can be zoomed for better visibility. They are very secured with build in phishing and malware protection. They have very strong encryption and the ability to delete all private data such as html cookies. The opera browsers are very versatile and can work on all operating systems and are compatible to all standard websites.
Opera browsers supports opera widgets too!

Talking about browsing, the wireless web is number four on my list. Nokia, ericssion, motorola and phone.com were pioneers in integraing the internet features with the wireless cellular phone.Today a million small portable devices such as mobile phones, PDAs and notebook computer call themselves WAP (wireless application protocol) devices! The basic idea was that a user would call up a WAP gateway over the wireless link and send page request to it. if the pages are present in its cache it sends them back or else it request them over the wired internet connection.

Opera mobile is used for smart phones and Nokia 6630 as well as many other devices. it is an amazing innovation for a wap browser. it dynamically fits a page to screen using small screen rendering technology and ensures that the whole site is visible!

however opera mini remains my personal favorite wap browser, it is a life saver! When I got gprs connection activated on my Nokia 6120c i accessed internet from my device, in few minutes time my pre paid balance exhausted..I was about to discard WAP as an expensive worthless technology when i got around wih opera mini..it compresses the page by 90% and thus lessens the cost of WAP usage and speeds up the whole process. I love it!

I broadly categorize multimedia as fifth on my list. multimedia includes streaming audio and video. as well as the internet radio and voice over IP.The internet is full of multimedia. I believe that the use of internet would not have been so pleasant had it not been for the audio and video streaming. All you have to do is point your browser on a link that conains audio or video file. The browser would bring that file to your system and an helper application such as real player or flash player would play it for you! And that gives me one more reason to love opera 9.5 browser for download manger and the bit Torrent client, you can always continue your download from where it got discontinued!

So I leave you here wondering what more wonders can technology and innovation do!