Scott's blog

Final Post

I enjoyed taking BIT 320 and I felt that blogging was an important experience for all of us.  Our blogosphere was a great place to exchange ideas and share knowledge.  I think that a blogosphere could work well in other classrooms as well.  I echo the sentiment that was brough up by some classmates that in the future, you could have a topic of the week to blog on so our postings could be more interrelated.  Glad I took the class.

iPods supply limited

Story on iPods

iPods in short supply for the holidays.  If you want to give someone a particular iPod this Christmas, you may have to settle for a different modell or color than what you originally intended, that is, unless you are willing to bid on one through ebay.  Besides, you can definately get a deal on eBay over the fixed retail price at stores.  I believe you may also be able to get a discount at the UM computer showcase on iPods.

Firefox Ad News

Link: Slashdot | Firefox New York Times Ad, Soon. Remember the big NY Times ad planned once Firefox 1.0 was released? Well, it hasn't happened yet, and this brief slashdot news snippet explains why. Basically, they have had way more donars than initially expected. It remains to be seen when they will publish the ad. I have also heard rumors on them scrapping the NYT ad and trying to raise enough money for a superbowl ad. We'll have to wait and see. You can also read the threads below the article on the reaction of people to this news story. Some of them are pretty strong.

Firefox surpasses 10 million

Link: Firefox surpasses 10 million download mark | CNET News.com. I think its great how much success Firefox has had. Firefox has gained 5 percentage points in the battle for Web browser market. Corporate users/schools will most likely to continue to use IE's Internet Explorer because of the ability for the ease of updates. We'll see how much more of an inroad Firefox can make on the market.

PodCasting: iPodder.org :

Link: iPodder.org :.
I was reading Popular Science, and they had an interesting article on podcasting.  This technology uses RSS feeds to download previously recorded feeds from different radio shows, such as NPR, to your computer.  Then, when you connet your iPod, you will automatically have those radio shows on your iPod.  Check out the link above to iPodder.com for information on how to do it.

Blogging from the front lines

Link: MSNBC - Blogging from the front lines. I thought this article was pretty interesting. It talks about how soldiers have the opportunity to access the internet and have their own blogs. This allows people back in the US to really get a feel for what the soldiers are going through.

Cool Article in WSJ

I was reading the Wall Street Journal today, and they had a neat article on The Journal's 2004 Technology Innovation Awards. You can read the article by picking up the WSJ and turning to pg R1...or if you have an online subcription to the WSJ...click here If you don't have a subcription, and you want to read about the technology, read this article from ZDNet. The number one technology was a new way to have chips communicate with each other which was thought of by some people at Sun, i believe the process was called proximity communications. Basically...they said that current chips need hardwired connections through the circuits on the mother board and this is a documented bottleneck of the increasing microprocessor speed.  The new technology allows transmission of data wirelessly along short distances, but it requires precise placement of the chips.  This could greatly improve the overall speed of computers by placing the cache back outside of the processor chip which was originally needed to be on the chip to amplify bandwidth.  They could place the cache outside the chip without negatively affecting performance. 

4x6 Printers?

Link: The New York Times > Technology > Circuits > State of the Art: From Digital Camera to Print, No Computer Required. I can see the attraction of such printers....they are small, relatively inexpensive, and they print high quality images. Yet, they need to get down the cost of printing each photo, as I can goto my local CVS pharmacy, or Meijers and print out images from a compact flash card at a Kodak station for less. And I guess I don't really see why I would need to buy another printer when my printer now already does 4x6 photo prints at of relatively good speed and quality.

Spacelines!

Link: CBS News | Next Space Race Under Way | November 7, 2004�19:29:14.
Hey I think this is pretty cool that a relatively small company managed to build and fly a spacecraft into space twice. Virgin's Richard Branson has a $120 million deal with these guys to start a "spaceline" of 10 ships to take passengers into space. All they need is to get a license from the government. It will cost $100,000 or so at first, which is a bargain compared to what the Russian space agency was charging (~$10 million). We'll see how quickly they actually get approval from the government for this spaceline. I wouldn't mind going for a ride, but I'd wait until the price came down.

Google News

Link: Google News.
I have found that Google news is the best online news portal to view multiple sources of news simultanesouly. It tells how long ago each news story was posted, whether you need a subscription to view the news or not (mostly not). As a bonus, you can also search using google's search engine the entire database of news stories.