Here are a few pics from our booth at the BizTech conference yesterday in Wilmington NC. The conference was great. The keynote speakers made some great points concerning the importance of education in NC to small and large businesses in the state.
Archive for the ‘News’ Category
Wilmington NC BizTech Conference
Friday, January 27th, 2012Copyright concern when publishing with Apple’s iBook App
Monday, January 23rd, 2012Apple’s new iBook App seems great. However, more research into the tool seems to show that when you publish to Apple’s App, you are now bound to an agreement and you cannot just go ahead and sell the material you wrote. As noted by mashable, here is bit of the agreement:
“IMPORTANT NOTE: If you charge a fee for any book or other work you generate using this software (a “Work”), you may only sell or distribute such Work through Apple (e.g., through the iBookstore) and such distribution will be subject to a separate agreement with Apple.”
What does this mean? You cannot take this work and put it into a book to sell or sell it anywhere else. Essentially you are giving Apple the rights to it.
This is kind of scary and not what this app should be about. Copyright needs to be maintained by the author. So Apple, if you are out there are and listening, please change this. I am now hesitant to publish here and I would recommend ALL to avoid this app until this is changed. If you want to publish, publish it online at your own website where you retain copyright.
Source:
Apple iBooks App
Thursday, January 19th, 2012Apple’s big announcement today: An app that allows a teacher to create their own book and publish it to iBook. Thus you can take a Word document and the app formats it to be read on the ipad. Its supposed to be very user friendly. I am excited to use this in my courses this semester. For more info see:
What is SOPA?
Wednesday, January 18th, 2012What is SOPA?
The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), otherwise known as H.R. 3261, was started by Lamar Smith (R-TX) and other representatives (bipartisan group with their company sponsors) to the house of representatives (more info on SOPA at Google).
Here are the dangerous parts to this bill (from Mashable):
- Any site accused of supporting copyright violations can be shut down – felony to post copywritten material (without a trial)
- Attorney general has a right to take action against these sites (again without a trial)
- Once accused to copyright violations, no company is allowed to do business with this company and their site needs to be shut down
What does this do? This gives companies and the government the right to stop and shut down an internet site without due process, no court or trial involved, just being accused. So if you post something on Facebook, like a picture that is copyright protected, Facebook could be shut down. That is the extent of this law.
Many from the silicon valley are protesting SOPA, today January 18th 2012. These sites are going dark. Here is a small list of companies doing it (many more are as well and the list can found at the bottom of this post):
- Tor Project
- iSchool at Syracuse University
- Oreilly.com
- Wikipedia
- Mozilla
- WordPress.org
- Minecraft
If you go to wikipedia today this is the message you will find:
“Imagine a World Without Free Knowledge – For over a decade, we have spent millions of hours building the largest encyclopedia in human history. Right now, the U.S. Congress is considering legislation that could fatally damage the free and open Internet. For 24 hours, to raise awareness, we are blacking out Wikipedia.”
FYI – my site could be shut down after my post today because much of my information was paraphrased and/or taken from other internet sites…even though I am citing them here:
Well stopping privacy doesn’t sound too bad?
No it doesn’t, however, given my example above, sites like facebook and youtube could be shut down because you or I post a picture or video that is copyright protected. Under current law, the Digital Millennium Act, when copyright material is found on a site, the site owner is notified they have a copyright protected image posted on their site and they have to remove it immediately. Well that sounds reasonable, right? I mean we need to protect copyright, but SOPA takes it a step too far.
CES 2012
Thursday, January 5th, 2012For those interested in the latest and greatest gadgets and computer technology coming out this year, check out the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2012 – jan 10-13. Many cool devices will be shown….one of which I am looking forward to seeing is a quad core phone. I would also like to see phones with 10+mp which would not be surprising as 12+ ones have been released overseas.
Here is the link to CES 2012: http://www.cesweb.org/
10 things your IT wants you to know….
Thursday, December 22nd, 2011Thought this was pretty funny:
1. Don’t argue with me.
2. If you say you’re an idiot for doing something, I’ll likely agree.
3. Don’t lie about what you did, we’ll find out anyway.
4. IT might be awesome and powerful, but even we have limitations.
5. Don’t cry wolf.
6. It’s pretty likely you don’t have the most important job.
7. Like an elevator button, we won’t come to you faster if you keep pushing ours.
8. Email me, we’ve got 5 devices that tell us when we get a new email. However, many of us still only have one that tells us when you left a voicemail.
9. Don’t cry.
10. We can do most, if not more than the things you think we can do, but we don’t because we don’t really care.
Here is a link to the article with descriptions of each point on the list
Self healing electronics
Thursday, December 22nd, 2011This is absolutely amazing and makes quite a bit of sense.Essentially, wires and devices are cased in a liquid metal, thus, when they break/fail the liquid metal fills in the ‘break’ and allows the process to continue functioning. Technically it’s not self healing but it allows you to continue without interruption until you can fix it. This seems like it would be great for things like airplanes.
MIT expanding open courseware
Tuesday, December 20th, 2011MIT is going to be expanding open courseware by actually offering certificates from it. However there is a catch, or two:) The certificates will not be from MIT, rather a non-profit organization, and it will cost money.
My thoughts on this concept: Great in theory but this is going to go nowhere. People do NOT have the motivation or time to do things like this. Online courses in general have high drop out rates due to lack of motivation. So my question to MIT, what are you going to do differently here? Why should I take one of these courses and complete it? I just do NOT see the motivation but that does not mean it’s not there, I just might not have read it or maybe it’s still in development.
Star wars vs World of Warcraft
Monday, December 19th, 2011With the upcoming release of Star Wars I thought this was pretty funny:
