Semantic Computing

On February 2nd I gave my second presentation to the Barrie Users Group. This presentation was on Google Wave, Google’s implementation of the Wave Protocol. Google hopes that people will move away from email and on to wave for their communications needs because email is a broken system. Eventually, there will be wave clients (like Outlook or Thunderbird is for email) and wave website (like GMail and Hotmail is for email).

Below is the presentation I gave. In total, it’s about 1 hour 40 minutes long, including many questions and demonstrations of Google Wave. I hope to slice it up and put it on YouTube eventually, maybe even later this week. However, to get the basic idea, you only need to watch the first 20 minutes. And the next 10 minutes show a great example.

• Download my Google Wave presentation for BUG in Windows Media Video (WMV) format (87.7 MB).

Links of interest:

• The “What is Google Wave” video used in the presentation.
• The Google Wave Developer Preview from 2009 Google I/O that I stole some slides from.  (Ironically, it’s only 1 hour 20 minutes long, but is far more technical.)

Here is a presentation I created for the Barrie Users Group meeting that was held on September 2, 2009. It explains the history of Linux including Bell Labs, Unix, and GNU and continues through today with Ubuntu and Mint Linux.

The Presentation

• Audio + Visual online: Or, you can watch the Linux history presentation in your browser, with the slides synced with the audio.
• Audio:
  • Linux History OGG file or
  • Linux History MP3 file.
• Visual:
  • Linux History slides PDF file,
  • Linux History slides OpenOffice.org Impress file, or
  • Linux History slides PowerPoint file.

The Links

Here are important items I mentioned in the presentation, or diagrams I referenced:

• Linux Mint is the easiest, most completely Linux user experience. You can buy Linux Mint and have a CD sent to you for about $20 or download it for free from their website and burn in to your own CD.
• Linux Mint is built on the power of Ubuntu which is another fine distribution. You can get a CD of Ubuntu shipped to you for free from the Ubuntu website or download the CD image for free from their website and burn it to your own CD.
• Xubuntu, a cut down Linux designed to run as fast as possible on old computer with all applications you need. You can get a CD shipped to you for free from the website or download Xubuntu to burn on your own CD.
• Wikipedia’s Unix page has the Unix time-line chart that shows the relationship between Unix types and their relationships. I forgot to mention that OS X comes from NextStep, a Unix system.
• Linux Distribution Time-line is the chart that shows all the different Linux distributions and how they relate to each other. This page lets you see the revisions the chart has gone through, but you only need to download the newest version in the list at the bottom.
• Finally, here are two great resources on Linux that I read about 4 years ago, from which I just may have stolen many of my points from. I went back to find these pages just for this presentation. The first is A Brief History of Unix and the second is The Complete History of Tux (So Far).

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Canada License.