http://bloggasm.com/january-30th-is-international-delete-your-myspace-account-day
Recently, a blogger named Simon Owens became so fed up and irate over various aspects of the Myspace user experience, that he called for all Myspace users who were sick of the site as well to delete their accounts. I hope that this works. Although I am not a Myspace user, nor do I use any social network, I think that this would be a signal to NewsCorp, owners of Myspace, that their customers want better service. I will not go into any specific details about most of the gripes that Owen had. However, I feel that Myspace is one of the worst offenders on the internet for bad site design. Not to get too political, I really do not approve of Rupert Murdoch owning any social networking site. Tomorrow is January 30th. I will be interested to see how successful this call to arms will be.
Tuesday, January 29, 2008
Monday, January 21, 2008
Assignment 1: Obligatory post-Macworld blog post
I have to post this simply because it is so cool. In case you didn't know, Apple announced various products on January 15. Among them was the MacBook Air. Here's the ad:
I was very impressed by the engineering involved. They managed to cram a Core 2 Duo processor, 2 GB of RAM, an 80 GB hard drive, and an iSight camera into this thing. There's an option for a 64 GB solid-state (flash memory) drive rather than the 80 GB hard drive. It costs an extra $1000, though. There's also a 13.3-inch screen and an ambient light sensor that controls the brightness of the full-size back-lit keyboard. There is no internal optical drive, but you can buy one from Apple for an extra $99 or you can use some included software to "borrow" the optical drive of another computer on your local wireless network. This isn't cheap, though, it starts at $1799.
I'm looking forward to seeing this in stores next week. By the way, I have also embedded Apple's official promotional/introductory video for the MacBook Air.
Also released was the AppleTV "Take Two." The AppleTV is a set-top box that, in essence, turned your HDTV into a giant iPod, which could be synced across your home network. Music, podcasts, video, and photos could be copied over to the device and viewed in the living room. Apple realized that they had made some mistakes with the AppleTV last year and is now hoping to rectify the situation. Probably the biggest improvement was the addition of iTunes movie rentals, which is a feature that was introduced into iTunes itself at the same time. Now one can sit on the couch at home and rent movies for $3 or $4, which will be downloaded instantly. The movie must be started within 30 day and once started, the user has 24 hours to finish. It can be replayed as often as the user like within the 24 hour window. Photos can also be viewed from Flickr and videos streamed from YouTube. Apple also dropped the price by $70 to $229.
There was also an update to the iPhone and iPod touch. The update allows the user to move icons around and create new Home Screens. This will not do much in the short term. However, Apple is due to release an iPhone SDK to all developers. So, at that point, the ability to manage icons on the iPhone and iPod touch will be much more important.
Apple also released a companion product to their backup up software, Time Machine. The device is called Time Capsule. On the outside, it looks like an AirPort Extreme base station, and it does fill that role. It has three Ethernet ports on the back for connecting computers to the internet, plus one port for the modem. It also support the 802.11 WiFi standard. However, these devices can have either a 500 GB drive or a 1 TB drive on the inside. These automatically back up all the computers set up with it wirelessly, meaning the user no longer has to physically connect a USB or FireWire cable to back up one or more laptops.
I would say it was a good Macworld. I hope Apple does not slack this year. I hate that. As is customary with Apple, its products are a little on the pricey side. This will always drive away people, but I think that there are always those out there who will need or just want this stuff.
I was very impressed by the engineering involved. They managed to cram a Core 2 Duo processor, 2 GB of RAM, an 80 GB hard drive, and an iSight camera into this thing. There's an option for a 64 GB solid-state (flash memory) drive rather than the 80 GB hard drive. It costs an extra $1000, though. There's also a 13.3-inch screen and an ambient light sensor that controls the brightness of the full-size back-lit keyboard. There is no internal optical drive, but you can buy one from Apple for an extra $99 or you can use some included software to "borrow" the optical drive of another computer on your local wireless network. This isn't cheap, though, it starts at $1799.
I'm looking forward to seeing this in stores next week. By the way, I have also embedded Apple's official promotional/introductory video for the MacBook Air.
Also released was the AppleTV "Take Two." The AppleTV is a set-top box that, in essence, turned your HDTV into a giant iPod, which could be synced across your home network. Music, podcasts, video, and photos could be copied over to the device and viewed in the living room. Apple realized that they had made some mistakes with the AppleTV last year and is now hoping to rectify the situation. Probably the biggest improvement was the addition of iTunes movie rentals, which is a feature that was introduced into iTunes itself at the same time. Now one can sit on the couch at home and rent movies for $3 or $4, which will be downloaded instantly. The movie must be started within 30 day and once started, the user has 24 hours to finish. It can be replayed as often as the user like within the 24 hour window. Photos can also be viewed from Flickr and videos streamed from YouTube. Apple also dropped the price by $70 to $229.
There was also an update to the iPhone and iPod touch. The update allows the user to move icons around and create new Home Screens. This will not do much in the short term. However, Apple is due to release an iPhone SDK to all developers. So, at that point, the ability to manage icons on the iPhone and iPod touch will be much more important.
Apple also released a companion product to their backup up software, Time Machine. The device is called Time Capsule. On the outside, it looks like an AirPort Extreme base station, and it does fill that role. It has three Ethernet ports on the back for connecting computers to the internet, plus one port for the modem. It also support the 802.11 WiFi standard. However, these devices can have either a 500 GB drive or a 1 TB drive on the inside. These automatically back up all the computers set up with it wirelessly, meaning the user no longer has to physically connect a USB or FireWire cable to back up one or more laptops.
I would say it was a good Macworld. I hope Apple does not slack this year. I hate that. As is customary with Apple, its products are a little on the pricey side. This will always drive away people, but I think that there are always those out there who will need or just want this stuff.
Tuesday, January 15, 2008
Post teh first
This is my first post on this blog. Hooray!
This blog exists for the sake of my Informatics I101 class. It should be fun!
I also have a personal blog on this site. http://patrick42h.blogspot.com
(The typo in the post title was for irony's sake.)
-patrick proctor 42h
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