Computer Business

Through the years technology has been increasing with a high percentage meanwhile other business maintain the regular tendency. It is true that having an education, a degree in a good school and a good job in a corporation is a secure way to have a stable life which secures a certain amount of money for all your life but what about thinking of having a your own business in technology. Recently while i was having a lunch with my friend in a restaurant, who is pursuing a Computer Engineering major, we have the idea of putting our business in computer hardware and software. Customizing computer hardware by adding specific features depending the customer's preference that could be adding front and rear camera, more memory, hard drive or solid state drive with different capacity with a high quality. Adding a longer battery life than regular laptops with enough time to do customers regular task without looking to charge again to recharge the battery. 

Customizing computer software by adding software packages that customer usually needs, having a regular upgrade for each customer, teach how to use high tech program which usually is a headache for people who don't have tech skills but they are eager to learn in their own pace. Provide a high quality parts and service. Add another features like maximize what certain apps offer them since some of them use the basic of each app, how to navigate the web and even technology advise by phone for maybe a membership.

This idea just came as a brainstorming that we wish we could make it real soon. First we need to study how much will be the required investment, look for a place where will be located and where the market will be suitable in short and long term. Analyze who will be our primary and secondary stakeholder, satisfy stakeholder's needs and retain and gain new customers. Make a project plan to do not fail in the process. Hopefully this project with perseverance and good analysis of the market will work.

Have Cell Phones Ruined the Holidays?

                Have cell phones ruined the holidays? I would say yes for those from the ages of 6-18. When I was with in those ages, entertainment at holidays was all about each other. TV was limited to football and if that did not hold your attention you were forced to seek alternatives. What at first seemed like a devastatingly boring couple of hours always turned quickly around with the help of my siblings and cousins. I got to play with my cousins for the first time in a couple of months. We would build forts, have elaborate adventures and wreak havoc on the adults that let us ban together. Holidays were about spending time with distant family that we did not get the opportunity to see often.

                Even as I grew up and “playing” with my cousins began to seem too juvenile for me, I began to transition to talking to the older generation and spending more time with my aunts and uncles. I would butt into conversations and learn more about the generation that came before me.  As time moved on I learned to have real contributions and hold interesting conversation with the adults.

                The way that I grew up at holidays is far from what I see my younger cousins do now. I watch my younger cousins all staring at their electronic devices, cell phones and ipads. There is no imagination, no creativity, just blank stares and silent kids. The fun that I used to have is nowhere to be seen.  I cannot say that the adults are not also guilty of abusing their own use of electronic devices, but I can say that it is not making the same impact. The games and fun we had is being replaced with these devices. Instead of being forced to find a way out of boredom, they turn to the instant gratification of their phones.

                This is taking away the incentive to get closer to their cousins. And as they grow they get more and more attached to their screens and avoid any personal contact with their family. This removes the transition from playing to adult conversation, and leaves the kids antisocial. They see no need to talk to their family because they have their phones to occupy their time.

                This passed Thanksgiving, my sister noticed this trend, and decided to collect phones. She walked around the living room and got a hefty stack of cellphones that she put into the other room. It did have a positive affect for a short while. It was amusing for all involved and for about a half an hour most followed the rules and sat around with each other. The adults were actually the first to crack and ask for phones back to take and post pictures, but what I really noticed was that the kids still did not do anything with that time. No game was made, or activity concocted, they just sat around and waited staring at the football game that clearly held very little interest for them. The instinct to entertain themselves has been lost. I fear to see how this will develop as time goes on. It may very well be that holidays as I knew them, are over.

Surveillance Robots

Nowadays there are many companies that gather personal information of millions of American citizens through Internet connected devices. These companies, knows as data brokers, sell this information to other firms, which use the data to specifically assign advertisements based on someone’s profile. For example, on your Facebook profile says you are pregnant. This information might be sold to Target, which will send you pregnancy and baby products’ coupons by e-mail or mail. Data brokers usually gather this information through phones and computers. However, Amazon has a new frightening invention that goes deeper than online information. It hears us.

The device is called Echo. It is a cylinder about the size of two coke cans and responds to the name of “Alexa”. It streams music or radio, supply sports scores and traffic conditions, buy products online, and answer questions all by the tone of your voice. So far it seems like it’s the device you always wanted to have at your house and make your life easier. This is probably what Amazon wants you to think. However, there is much more to Echo, and it is not pretty.

In addition to all Echo’s great features, it also stores all your interactivity with the robot. The songs you have played, the questions you have asked, the things you have bought are all stored in the device and sent to your phone. It is pretty cool to have all these activities stored on your phone, but the reality is that they go much further than your phone. Your personal data is uploaded to Amazon’s servers and used to manipulate you into buying more products from Amazon and possibly from companies Amazon sold your information to.

Rory Carroll states in his article “Goodbye privacy, hello 'Alexa'” his experience with the robot. According to him, much remains unclear. “Alexa streams audio ‘a fraction of a second’ before the ‘wake word’ (“Alexa”) and continues until the request has been processed, according to Amazon. So fragments of intimate conversations may be captured.” Rory Carroll continues, saying that a few days after his wife and him discussed babies, his Kindle, another Amazon device, showed an advertisement for Seventh Generation diapers, while no online research had been made on baby products. Data brokers seem to have reached a new level of surveillance. They have broken the gates of the online world and reached us in our very homes.

Consumers should be aware of not only the specifics and features of a new device, but also the possibility of surveillance. Unfortunately there are no laws available yet against this kind of surveillance. In addition, companies are smart enough to not advertise it.

Therefore, consumers must be with their eyes opened to any connection they might see between a new technology and their personal information. It is now clear that companies are investing money in order to improve surveillance and make it even more personal. Unless you want a gossiper roommate, we should not allow our homes to be filled with actuating surveillance robots.

A (Partially) Fictional Story About a Dead Phone

If anyone is reading this, send help.  I took a train trying to get to Montclair State University but unbeknownst to me the train stops 5 stops short of the campus on the weekends so I had to download the Uber app using 3G Internet and it left my iPhone 4 (yes 4 not 4s) at 5% battery, I forgot my charger, and I'm afraid it's going to die before I get to campus.  I know it's a piece of archaic technology and most people probably don't even remember what the charger for the iPhone 4 looks like (it's the same charger that works with your iPod Video), but if you're reading this, I need your help.  If my phone dies I'm sure I'm gonna miss the email about our grades on the stats quiz and I was expecting a call from my dad later and you know how he gets when I don't answer his calls. so please if you can meet me-

Okay sorry about that, my phone died but it's okay because I found a charging station outside a classroom on the Montclair campus so this should keep me going for a while. My phone's already at 7% and climbing so I should be fine for the rest of the night... Shit all my friends are waiting for me so we can leave to go out to dinner, uhhh we'll be at Chevy's Fresh Mex on NJ route 3 if anyone reads this and has an iPhone 4 charge I can borrow! Crap it's about to-

Wow what a night.  It's Sunday afternoon now and i just made it back to my room in Hoboken but it wasn't easy let me tell you.  First off my phone died before I could instagram or snapchat a single picture of me and my friends at dinner, and when a song I liked came on the radio but I couldn't remember the artist I had to ask my friends to use shazam for me.  I couldn't even set an alarm for the morning so I'm amazed I woke up on time.  Worst of all the train ride was a nightmare because I couldn't listen to music and this family had 4 small children who wouldn't stop running around screaming and giggling trying to hit each-others butts.  The dad seemed completely oblivious to his obnoxious children.  When I finally made it to the Hoboken station I realized I was incredibly hungry but the water main burst in closed most of my favorite restaurants so I had to walk all the way to 10th street to find out that Asia was closed and back tracked to Vito's.  I really wish somebody would have read my post and helped out but it's fine now I'm plugged in and I won't make the mistake of forgetting my charger when I leave home any time soon...

Hey it's me again, does anybody live near NJIT or know somebody who goes here who might have an iPhone 4 charger?

IEEE Hack-a-home

Justin Tsang

HSS 371

Blog #7 – IEEE Hack-a-home

11/22/15

My Experience at Stevens Hack-a-home

            Over this weekend, Stevens IEEE hosted its first hack-a-home where teams of four Stevens undergraduate students would modify home appliances to become smart appliances. The team I was a part of was given a coffee maker, a CanaKit Raspberry Pi 2 starter kit, a two-channel relay module, and an Arduino UNO. My initial thoughts coming into this competition was mainly fear because I was entering an engineering competition as a computer scientist. I had minimal knowledge on circuits and experience with hardware programming, so I felt that I would make my team lag behind. The other teams who entered the hack-a-home consisted of engineers who knew what they were doing with years of hardware experience. It was intimidating seeing other teams already building circuit boards that were populated with a bunch of intertwined wires connected to sensors and LED’s. However, with the assistance of my team members as well as the vast resources on Python and the Twitter API, I was able to take up the responsibility of programming the entire software to allow the Raspberry Pi communicate with the buzzer as well as the relay module that controlled the electricity flow to the coffee maker. In the end, our design of the smart coffee maker allows the user to tweet to the coffee maker to request the appliance to make coffee at a certain time for a certain amount of cups. The raspberry pi sets an alarm for set time and 5 seconds before the designated time will set off the alarm for 5 seconds. After, the relay module allows electricity to flow through the coffee maker and make coffee. Then, a tweet is sent back to the user to notify that the coffee has finished brewing.

In my opinion, I would prefer working alongside engineers over programmers. I have participated in past software development projects with other Stevens computer science students, but all of my experiences have failed. Every time I have worked with programmers, they always wanted jump into the code without investing time into the design process. As a result, we always became de-synchronized where one guy would write code that only worked for his part of the project but not for everyone else’s. This ultimately led to hours spent afterwards editing the code so one part of the program would still function when augmented in the whole program. My partner would start programming without allowing me to catch up, so I would start coding my own program. I never felt like there was a feeling of teamwork when I worked with other programmers. However, my experience this weekend was completely different. Because my partners were all engineers, they know the importance of the design process before beginning the actual implementation of the design. When the competition officially began, we invested the first hour and a half on solely discussing and drawing out different design propositions, and when we finally decided on a design, we discussed the different components needed to make the idea work. I liked this more because there were fewer faults later down the implementation process. When I was lost in how the pin on the Raspberry Pi would send logical bits to the relay module to allow voltage to flow, my engineering friends would always stop and prioritize the team over the work. My friends care more that everyone was the same level and no one was confused about any components of the project. As a result, the team becomes more efficient because no one person will lag behind the others and slow down the design process. I like this more because there is more communication in the team. With programmers, there is no communication because everyone would start coding and wanting to solve the problem his, or her, own way.

Meaning in Entertainment

“Shallow, unaccredited noise...”

                - Some guy on the Internet

Last class, there was a fairly involved discussion about the 'value' of entertainment. Some people did not seem to understand the basic difference between art that challenges you in a deep and meaningful way and art that does not, or why listening to the former is preferable to the latter. So I thought I would attempt to explain.

I don't want to sound pretentious and elitist (not everything you need to listen to needs to be experimental art music), but people will think I am anyways so I might as well roll with it. And, in the spirit of being as obnoxiously pretentious as possible, I’m going to run my explanation through a comparison of two Death Grips songs. (Death Grips is widely considered one of the most pretentious and ``modern-art'' groups of the 2010's.  If you haven’t heard Meme Grips yet, be warned: their music is quite violent and, to be honest, doesn’t really appeal to most people.)

The first song I would like to discuss is a fairly celebrated track off the album Exmilitary, called “Culture Shock”. The song is an unashamed criticism of the modern addiction to information overload. The author rails against Hollywood and the media for producing intellectual garbage, as well as society for consuming it in disturbing and unnaturally large quantities. He warns his audience that the unrelenting bombardment of data jetsam destabilizes and weakens their minds, as well as opening them up to undesirable influences, both from their own vices and from third parties wishing to do them harm.

It’s an alright song. By the second or third listen, you might begin thinking to yourself that, yep, I get it already. That’s because the song, while it brings up some interesting ideas about the author’s views of society, is pretty straightforward. You, as a listener, are told exactly what the author is thinking, and very little about how or why, to boot. The gubment is bad, mmkay? Down with the man!

The second of the two is a significantly less appreciated song, the opening track to the group’s album No Love Deep Web, titled “Come up and get me”. The entire album is a musical personification of crippling paranoia, drug use, and physical and mental control, as well as a disturbing warning as to the consequences of abuse of or overexposure to these sins. “Come up and get me” really gets the ball rolling with this.

What makes “Come up and get me” an interesting song, lyrically, is the layers of abstraction. Powerfully described is this notion of a man cracked out and alone in an abandoned building on the eight floor, with a police task force blocking off his exit. However, MC Ride takes this terrifying vision, which he has built in only a few verses, and starts tearing it down. His description of his assailants as ‘Nazis’ and ‘the world’ suggest that he may actually be speaking about a society which he feels is authoritative and oppressive. His admittance that he cannot really determine the identities of his demons due to his own ‘fragmented mind’ suggest that they may not even be there at all, that he himself is the enemy. In the end, the speaker decides that no matter what, conflict and its potential consequences are preferable to endless paranoia and dread, and screams at his demons to ‘come up and get him’, whoever they may be.

The lyrics are intentionally vague. This allows the artist to make a decisive, concrete statement (COME UP AND GET ME wuhbwuhbwuhb) but at the same time, forces the viewer to make a decisive, concrete statement about what he believes by deciding what the speaker is actually talking about. Is the speaker a victim or his own enemy? Your answer to that question is a direct reflection of your opinions on the topics he is discussing. Ultimately, there is no right answer, and that’s the point – all that’s left is the assertion that you shouldn’t take whatever is assailing you lying down. Whatever the meaning behind the song, its complexity certainly makes it more valuable than the one-dimensional counterpart.

Death Grips is very much music reliant on its shock value, which is in itself limiting in some ways. These songs are absolutely not the deepest, most engaging pieces of music you will ever hear. However, it is precisely because neither of these tracks are untouchable masterpieces that it’s easy to see the clear difference between them. One, a musical exploration of otherwise unrelated themes by attempting to construct a conflict around them. It is interactive (the listener decides what to think, ultimately) but also clearly directed (as in, the artist has intent behind writing and performing the song, and wants to send a message). The other is just a very angry rapper telling it like he thinks it is. If you understand the difference between these two songs, you will understand why Professor Vinsel thinks Star Wars sucks.

Communications via technology

Technology is very instrumental in communications between people.  I realized this after doing my tech diary.  Most of the times that I’ve talked to my old school friends are through a Skype call.  We sometimes have a call going for nearly the entire day as people enter and leave the chat room.  This is showing me the importance of how technology keeps us together.

I want to discuss how technology allows us to keep in touch with our friends.  Before I discuss this, I want to say that I do not use snap chat, Twitter, Facebook, or other similar websites or apps.  These sites I see as being mindless vortex of information.  I will acknowledge that that Facebook is a useful tool when used to keep in touch with old friends.  I don’t think it should be used to keep a day to day diary on the internet.  I also don’t understand the need to post pictures of what you ate for dinner.

No, the usefulness in technology comes from proper usage of devices.  The primary device I use is Skype.  I find this program fascinating because it allows all of my friends across the state to essentially be together in the same ‘room’ and talk to each other.  Personally, I have a preference when it comes to communicating with others.  First and foremost, I like to talk in person.  Next, I enjoy talking over a phone or Skype.  My least favorite is communicating via messaging.  As stated earlier, Facebook can be a useful tool.  I have heard of stories where companies look up potential employee’s Facebooks to see what their personalities are like and dismiss those who post degrading material of themselves.  Another use of Facebook is how my brother found a house to dorm in during collage by posting up a status of where he was going and what he liked.  His dorm mates saw his status and decided to invite him to stay with them.

I know that I’ve stated this before, but in the future I really want there to be a VR chat room.  Imagine being able to talk to each other ‘face to face’ in a virtual room, though it would probably take a long time before we could perfectly render our faces so we would have to be content with generic faces or customizable faces like in popular MMORPGs.  Currently we could face chat, but none of us want to pay for that functionality, so we settle with simple voice chat.

When I think about it, it has become almost second nature for us to call each other via our phones when we want to contact someone or send a text.  This habit has developed after constant exposure to our mobile smart phones.  I don’t think that it would be too far fetched to say that if some VR technology like Google Glasses or Oculus Rift became readily available along with communication capabilities, it could become second nature to communicate via virtual reality. Food for thought. I know I was very biased in my blog today, but it can’t be helped because I have chosen not to use those websites and apps.