Microsoft Surface
I’m not sure if any of you have heard about this yet but Microsoft has a new… well a new surface pretty much. It can be a counter top, or a table and is a computer.
It might be better if you check out this video first:
I was amazed at the ‘moving puzzle’ part because I can only imagine the types of toys my children will have in twenty years… I was also excited to hear that they project it will be for personal use as well. A month or so ago it was only projected to be used for casinos and restaurants.
Here is Microsoft’s site as well.
There are so many possibilities with this type of technology…
OnStar can find your car
Okay, so the gist is that on newer GM vehicles (I’m pretty sure right now its just GM) OnStar can locate a stolen vehicle through its built in GPS. Then they alert the police and can actually kill the car’s horsepower so the thief can’t get any farther.
They say that once OnStar gets notice of a stolen car, it alerts the police and then the police and OnStar stay in contact until the police find the car and say its safe for the car to be slowed down to a stop.
Some guy on the comments yelled ‘Big Brother’ but whatever. If you choose to have your car hooked up with a GPS locating device that’s on you, not the government. My only concern is that this is brand new and what happens if they accidentally locate the wrong vehicle and the police say its okay to stop it yet the vehicle they’re actually stopping is doing 80 on a freeway…
Anyway, here’s the video where they test it out:
Watercone
I think this is AWESOME!
My freshman year here at Miami I was in a geology class where my teacher tried to convince all of us that Earth was going to run out of drinking water in our lifetime. Whether or not that’s true, I don’t know but I do know that this device will be so useful for poorer countries and I bet grassroots organizations are going to be delivering them like crazy, especially if they are as inexpensive as planned.
Maybe they’ll come up with a portable one and you’ll see it on Man V Wild?
Remember when Facebook was this brand new thing just for college kids and you’d never heard of it before? Ya well, according to this article, they now have 175 MILLION users… those days are totally over!
Movie Piracy a big problem?
So I was reading this NYTimes article: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/05/business/media/05piracy.html?_r=1
and it claimed that the movie industry is hurting because of online movie piracy and that they tried really hard to prevent piracy when the new Batman movie came out but it did no good. When napster had its huge problems way back when for music piracy, they just made you buy the music and then iTunes came along and made it legitimate to buy songs one by one.
Like we were talking about in my IMS class the other day, things like Facebook were created with norms that you must participate and post things in order to observe and see other’s profiles etc. whereas Youtube was not started with those same norms (think about how many times you’ve watched youtube videos but then how many times have you posted videos?). I think this same idea comes with movie and music piracy.
Norms have been reestablished around the music industry. While some still download, it is so easy to buy music from iTunes and there are perks too. If you buy it you get album art and all the info on the song where if you download you dont. So, after making these changes for music to prevent this form of piracy, why didn’t they jump start this with the movie business? I mean, they HAD to have known it was coming… people watch movies online all the time, they don’t even have to download them they can just stream them.
Maybe iTunes should make an app where you can pay a few bucks to just watch a movie once, instead of purchasing it. I don’t know what they’re going to do but I’m shocked that they didn’t forsee this problem a long time ago.
-Mel
Wikipedia’s new flagged revisions
So, Wikipedia has recently decided to use ‘flagged revisions’ according to the Guardian.
Article here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jan/29/wikipedia-internet-publishing
With these new flagged revisions, the public will only be able to see certain edits of Wikipedia entries once they’ve been cleared by ‘trusted editors.’ While it’s understandable why something like this would have to be put into place (the lede of the article explains that) it does seem as though this goes against the purpose of Wikipedia.
It’s so refreshing to know that Wikipedia was written by people who don’t all exist within the academic community and to know that these descriptions of things continually change just like the world around us. Okay okay, having editors look at most of the content before it’s published does not take away from either of these parts of Wikipedia. But it does take away from the instant idea of the information… now we have to wait for an editor to look at the content. I’m not sure how long it took before for content to appear but now it most likely will take much longer.
All in all, this isn’t the worst thing to happen to Wikipedia. Hopefully it will help protect from all those teen boys calling themselves the heroes of their state.
-Mel
