APPLE'S NEW GENERATION IBOOKS+TEXTBOOKS

Steve Jobs vision of the future has one time again fomented revolution in the media industry, this time in the type of a brand spanking new education-oriented iBooks package that Apple announced today at an event in New York City. Looking to take the textbook industry head-on, Cupertino has created a set of apps that will lead to the extinction of the physical textbook & replace it with electronic media while simultaneously increasing the market penetration of its iPad tool. Apple's aim is to get schools to buy an iPad to give to every student, a aim that after the announcement today could very well become a reality. impressively, Apple also announced today that it's secured partnerships with Pearson, McGraw Hill, & Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, publishers that make up 90% of textbook sales in the US & get this: e-textbooks will cost $15.

Apple has taken a three-pronged approach to its work to make a powerful move back to being the leader in desktop publishing. First, iBooks has received a major update to become iBooks two. Included in the book store is a brand spanking new textbook section that allows students to buy & download the titles they require for class. While this is nothing new in the world of e-publishing, Cupertino has added a wealth of interactivity that finally brings important features to using an e-reader for study. The most obvious being the ability to interact with the textbook through the iPad's touchscreen; students will be able to rotate & look at virtual 3D models, as well as getting descriptions & definitions that are associated with it. Videos & the ability to search online glossaries will truly bring a rich media experience to textbook study. of the largest gripes about e-books is the shortage of ability to take notes in an effective way: iBooks two has tackled that by giving you a highlighting technique that not only lets you generate visual cues when re-reading, but also gives the ability to generate electronic note cards that look like the actual thing for studying key ideas & terms.

Apple has thought of this as well by implementing the third part of its plan. Distribution will be handled through iTunes U, which historicallyin the past had been a separate section of the popular online music store. Historicallyin the past only offered to universities, iTunes U allows lecturers to upload audio & video content for students to make use of in study or to audit a work from home. Cupertino has now opened this process up to all schools, meaning that K-12 schooling districts can sign up to distribute materials created by teachers & other educators.

While interactivity is important, another major barrier for the success of the digital textbooks has been getting such content created by major publishers. Textbook companies have been dragging their feet because of the fact that the current model in place makes them a immense amount of funds. In lieu of trying to forge deals with each individual publisher, Apple has completed an end-around by generating iBooks Author, a free application that allows someone to generate an e-book for use with iBooks two. Teachers & professors can take Keynote presentations, text documents, videos, music, & pics to generate their own textbooks for use in the schooling arena. A amazing move on Apple's part, this busts through the content barrier by putting the power of creation in the hands of the user. But how are these created materials going to be distributed?

Today is going to be looked at as the time that marked the death of the physical book. Soon they are going to see authors that creatt works of written art that bring the tales they write to life in the hands of their readers. They are going to see a true convergence of media experience which will be seen as the end-times by some. I for am hoping that Wizards of the Coast will bring back the elderly Dungeons & Dragons choose your own adventure books in this format. I won't mourn the death of the physical novel, but revel in the evolution of the medium that will finally bring it in line with the way they are consuming other forms of media.

In neat package, Apple has implemented a content creation & delivery method that doesn't depend on partnerships with large corporations though it's secured the publishers that count & will without a doubt go on to sell large amounts of hardware to students & institutions similar. The iPad is now poised to make a significant alter like the iPod did on its release. Today's students have not known a world without computers or electronics to aid them in their everyday tasks. The classroom is of the last frontiers that has yet to see a significant advance that brings convergence between digital devices & learning. Until now. While Apple will be the leader for some time because of the announcement today, it won't be long before everyone else falls in line & begins to operate in the same method.

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MAGICAL PORTABLE FUEL BATTERIES

Transportable fuel cells have been billed as the final solution for several years now. Regrettably, early pioneers like Jadoo have had trouble achieving the little size & low cost needed to make their products ubiquitous. reason is that most current fuel cell products depend on hydrogen storage, often in refillable canisters. Direct hydrogen storage adds complexity & isn't practical for little units or truly remote applications.

Batteries & chargers are the bane of a high-tech lifestyle. For each new tool there is usually a new size battery, a new charger, & a new set of concerns about battery life. & then comes the quest for an AC power outlet to fire all of them up. For years the industry has been looking for some type of holy grail that would permit road warriors to travel freely without being slaves to power sockets & backup batteries. Solar was the first candidate, but transportable solar cells have limited power output, & naturally only work when the sun is shining.

Enter Signa Chemistry, which provides a smart way of using a powder, sodium silicide, and water, to generate hydrogen on the fly. The hydrogen is mixed with air in the fuel cell itself, combining to generate electricity & water. The hydrogen produced by SiGNa's fuel can be used to power a traditional fuel cell, from briefcase-sized models from Jadoo down to a small hand-held version from Swedish company MyFC. The hand-held model is being introduced to the US market this spring, under the name PowerTrekk & is designed for transportable re-charging of smartphones or other little electronic devices. The PowerTrekk can output up to watts, allowing it to directly power  any smartphone, even if it's dead.

The PowerTrekk will be obtainable from REI for $199 for the base unit. Fuel pucks will be sold in packages of for $12. Each PowerPukk has the equivalent power capacity of 6 AA batteries, at a similar cost but much higher power than alkaline cells. Compared to long-life rechargeable NiMH AA batteries that's not much of a saving, but compared to the throw-away high-power Lithium AA batteries needed as a power source for walking plenty of modern smartphones, it is a bargain.

In larger units, like its briefcase-sized DPS300, Signa can claim that its fuel cell-driven power supplies are more cost-effective than rechargeable Lithium batteries like those currently used to power computers & electric cars. They're also lighter. As an example, Signa provided this analysis of using its briefcase unit for 30 full charges:

For now, the PowerTrekk is clearly as much of a lifestyle product it comes in a choice of red, yellow or green as a practical alternative to rechargeable batteries. It'll take some improvements before it becomes a mainstream alternative although Apple has been reported to be taking a look at fuel cells to power future Mac models. But the DPS300 is already being ordered by organizations including USAID for vaccination clinics in remote areas. It is lighter & cheaper for it to make use of a DPS300 fuel cell & supply of sodium silicate than it is to drag along a generator & it is definitely more environmentally friendly.

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FreeDOS 1.1 IS BACK NOW!

The history of FreeDOS stems back to the summer of 1994 when Microsoft announced that MS-DOS as a separate product would no longer be supported. It would live on as part of Windows 95, 98, and (ugh!) Me, but for Jim Hall that wasn't , and so public domain (PD) DOS was born. Other developers quickly jumped on board, a kernel and utilities were made, as well as a usable version of PD-DOS began to emerge. It wouldn't be until 1998 that the first alpha build (version 0.05) was released, however; a slow trend that would continue, with a slew of betas culminating in a final one.0 build in 2006, some 12 years after the project begun. Finally, it would be renamed FreeDOS.

Some 17 years after its first release in 1994, and over years since one.0, FreeDOS one.1 the definitive, open source version of MS-DOS is now obtainable to download.

When I tell the story of FreeDOS to my friends the next query is usually: So, like, what's the point of FreeDOS? A fair query, given the maturity of Linux and its giant support framework. Well, for a start, FreeDOS is already extensively used by recovery disks. If you've ever made a boot disk for the sake of checking your hard disk or memory, or fixing a broken installation of Windows, you  certainly used FreeDOS.

Beyond that, though, FreeDOS is actually an excellent surroundings for educational or simple systems. Linux, compared to MS/FreeDOS, is fat. When combined with QBASIC or DJGPP (a C/C++ development surroundings), FreeDOS makes a surprisingly lovely development platform. It's also important to point out that FreeDOS isn't actually an old operating method: It supports FAT32 (with LBA) and UDMA for hard drives and DVD players, and the FreeDOS distro comes with an antivirus scanner as well as a BitTorrent client. USB support isn't there, but USB keyboards, mice, and outside storage can be finagled in to working.

When it comes down to it, though, the reason I am liking FreeDOS is that I can run it inside VirtualBox and play Doom. With a burst of nostalgia, I can fiddle around with HIMEM and EMM386 and Autoexec.bat to eke out  conventional memory to play Cannon Fodder. Ultimately, though, with DOSBox providing a much better (if less actual) gambling experience, I would must admit that FreeDOS is mostly a curio for old-timer geeks.

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2012 3D TV REVIEW

CES 2011 was billed as the year of 3D, but this year's show also had dozens of offerings, lots of of which sound similar on paper. Here, ExtremeTech checks out the most fascinating prospects for no-glasses 3D in 2012 & beyond.

Stream TV's Ultra-D: Wide-viewing-angle 3D without glasses

After the rush to upgrade to HDTV, 3D was supposed to be the next giant thing. Propelled by the enthusiasm for a few well-crafted media properties like the blockbuster film Avatar, preliminary expectations were set high. But cost, a lack of compelling content, potential health issues, & the necessity for annoying & pricey glasses have kept 3D TV from getting far. Now, several firms are trying to break through by getting rid of those pesky glasses, offering glasses-free 3D experiences, while others are upping the ante by providing a premium experience with cheap polarized glasses or even new version of pricey, but now wireless, active glasses.

Until now, the most common way to accomplish 3D viewing without glasses has been with specially designed displays using what is called a parallax barrier where any viewer to the left of the display's middle sees the picture recorded by the left camera (& meant for the left eye) & any viewer to the right sees the right-side picture (meant for the right eye). As you can imagine, this only works if the person viewing the screen sits exactly where the parallax barrier is set up to divide the picture. As a result, it works well for personal display screens like the on the Fujifilm & Panasonic 3D cameras, & the LG Thrill & HTC Evo 3D smartphones, which permit capturing & viewing 3D. But a parallax barrier doesn't work well when you have over person in the audience, or in the event you require to move around at all while watching the media since it only performs properly if the viewer is directly in front of the direction for which the barrier is tuned.

 The Ultra-D method requires a small bit of heavy lifting on the hardware and program side. Existing LCD, LED and OLED panels can be used, but an additional microlens layer is necessary for the displays, as well as new firmware and program. StreamTV is aggressively licensing its platform to makers of TVs, tablets, and smartphones, with the promise of 42-inch and 55-inch LED TVs available in retail by this summer. The Ultra-D TVs will be bundled with Stream TV's SeeCube, which allows the realtime conversion of 2D to 3D and of traditional 3D content designed for use with glasses in to autostereoscopic content for display on an Ultra-D gizmo. Tablets and digital picture frames are also on tap, although details haven't been disclosed.

Several companies are using this year's CES to launch new solutions for multi-viewer 3D without glasses. StreamTV, best known for the Elocity tablet, rolled out an impressive platform called Ultra-D, which allows not autostereoscopic (without glasses) viewing of existing 3D content, but realtime conversion of conventional 2D images and video in to its 3D format. On paper Ultra-D slices through the major bottlenecks hampering 3D very nicely. By having displays that are autostereoscopic no glasses are necessary, and by allowing realtime conversion to 3D, suddenly a near boundless amount of content is available.

StreamTV is tight-lipped about how the method actually works, but from watching a variety of their prototypes and speaking to some of their researchers, it turns out that in lieu of the traditional glasses-free solution of having images for the left eye and for the right then showing to each eye Ultra-D creates 9 different images, each with a matchless angle on the scene. The specially built display has an array of microlenses in front of the conventional LCD that project each picture out in a series of overlapping cones. As a result each eye sees a combination of as plenty of as four different images all with a slightly different point of view and is responsible for integrating the total in to a coherent picture. Since your eyes are a few inches apart, at most viewing positions your left eye sees a different set of four images than your right eye (in essence your right eye is moved over by, so if your left eye sees picture two, three, four, five, for example, your right eye might see images three, four, five, and 6). This clever approach means that as you move around the viewing area, the picture you see actually changes.

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MEGAUPLOAD'S TIMEOUT

If you are only joining us, late yesterday the US Department of Justice shutdown Megaupload, arrested seven employees, & seized assets worth over $50 million (including 82-inch TVs, 108-inch TVs, 14 Mercedes, & other rich boys toys). This immense indictment poses lots of questions, but today we are going to look at of them: What happens to all of those files that people had stored on Megaupload servers?

This morning the net is littered with hundreds of millions of broken Megaupload links. There was no warning, no preamble: In the event you stored files on Megaupload, they are gone at least for now. So you have some idea of the scale of Megaupload, a speedy search on XDA-Developers for megaupload returns some 226,000 hits. There's hundreds if not thousands of forums on the net that are similar in scale to XDA-Developers.

In short, in the event you stored important files on Megaupload, I hope you had an up-to-date backup on your computer.

It is feasible that Megaupload servers will be brought back online, but only if Megaupload & its employees are found innocent & in all likelihood, the trial & sentencing process will take months. Even if Megaupload does return, there is no guarantee that your files will still be there.

There's always been major concerns about cloud services in general, and cloud storage (Dropbox, Megaupload, SkyDrive, iCloud, and so on). The first is privacy: When you upload knowledge to a third party, there's always the risk that they can look at the contents of your files. Some cloud providers securely encrypt knowledge, but plenty of don't. The second issue is knowledge security and integrity: Does the third party keep a tight ship against hackers? What happens if a hard drive fails? What protections have the cloud provider put in place to mitigate against natural disasters, bankruptcy, or being shutdown by the Feds?

The folly of cloud storage

For the most part, the only actual way of ameliorating these concerns is by doing an terrible lot of research before pushing in your chips. Even then, though, you would be hard pressed to discover a cloud storage provider that offers an simple way to migrate your knowledge in case of bankruptcy. If Dropbox decides to close down, the only way to transfer knowledge to another cyberlocker is to download it and re-upload to another service. If you're an enterprise customer using Microsoft Azure or Amazon AWS, you ought to probably be given help to migrate your knowledge to another provider. In the case of a federal indictment, though, I don't think any cloud provider offers a way out and if there's an earthquake, you better hope that they kept an offsite backup (and you can bet that consumer services like Dropbox or Backblaze).

At the finish of the day, though, the only other option is keeping your own backups on some kind of NAS and maintaining your own offsite backups which is feasible, and how plenty of companies and individuals select to do it, but rife with its own issues. Cloud storage is so simple it is the epitome of fire-and-forget that you forget about the risks and then Megaupload gets shutdown.

So, what happens to my files when a cloud service dies?

Assuming the midden hits the windmill, then, and your cloud storage provider goes offline without notice what happens to your files?

For consumer-oriented services that are more about backup than file sharing Backblaze, for example your files would probably stay in the digital ether, encrypted for all eternity. It's unlikely that a backup provider would ever be shutdown, but it could go bankrupt. In such a situation, you would probably be given a week or month to grab all of your information and then that would be it. There is no chance of Backblaze sending you a hard drive along with your information on, for example.

In Megaupload's case, where some one,000 servers (and thousands of hard drives) were seized, the Feds will probably pore through your files looking for facts that improves their chance of a conviction. It's  guaranteed that Megaupload stored the IP address of file uploaders, and the Feds could pursue individual copyright infringement cases at a later date. If Dropbox was ever indicted of similar charges, the situation would probably be the same.

Finally, at the enterprise level Azure, AWS, Rackspace, etc. It's likely that you would be given ample opportunity to recover your files, and you might even get help in migrating your information directly to another cloud service. In this case, if you're storing terabytes of information in the cloud, you could probably even request that your information be returned by FedEx hard drives.

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MAKE YOUR OWN COPY OF WIKIPEDIA

Beyond your anger about conflicted representatives voting on disgusting & broken laws, though, you are probably experiencing a very different emotion entirely: loss. Loss for your beloved Wikipedia. The Wikipedia Foundation knows how important its encyclopedia is, it knows that blacking out the site for 24 hours will generate an uproar but most importantly, it knows that a blackout will make people query the future safety of of the most important services in the world. I mean, if SOPA was enacted & Wikipedia was made to close down, what would they do?

With today's blackout of Wikipedia, its editors & governing Foundation are sending a very clear message to Congress & other governments around the globe: In case you mess with the net the fabric on which Wikipedia is built there will be more trouble & strife than you can ever imagine.

Wikipedia, being the awesome site that it is, provides complete dumps of each of its encyclopedias to make the mirroring technique simple. With a tiny little bit of developer know-how, you can set up your very own Wikipedia mirror, available & editable by the public, like Wikipedia itself. Even if you are a standard web surfer without geek credentials, you can set up a local version of Wikipedia right on your computer, available at any time, irrespective of blackouts or shutdowns. Let's start!
Download a replica of Wikipedia

I have been thinking about this for the last couple of days, poring over potential solutions. Speaking to your local Representative or Senator (or member of parliament, if you are outside the US) is definitely a nice preventative step. But if Wikipedia actually goes dark not in a soft sense like today the only actual solution is to have a network of mirrors.

To start with, you will need to grab a compressed copy of the Wikipedia language that you need to reflect English, French, French, & so on from dumps.wikipedia.org. I strongly recommend you use a mirror, as the official servers appear to be slow. I used a fast Brazilian mirror, but its latest dump is over a month elderly.

You are looking for a file name that looks something like: enwiki-20120104-pages-articles.xml.bz2. The important thing is that the file name ends with pages-articles.xml.bz2.

If you are mirroring the English Wikipedia, this file will be around 7.5GB; other wikis will be considerably smaller.

 

Decompress Wikipedia

Now you have options:

You can cease reading now in the event you only require to generate a local mirror; otherwise, read on

In the event you require to make a web-accessible version of Wikipedia (i.e. an actual mirror of Wikipedia), you require to uncompressed pages-articles.xml.bz2. On Windows, this can be completed with 7-Zip. On Linux and Mac OS X it can be completed with bunzip2. The uncompressed English Wikipedia, without pics, is around 25GB.
 

In the event you require to make a local mirror of Wikipedia in the event you require a duplicate of Wikipedia on your computer, in case the world wide web-site suddenly disappears download WikiTaxi.It can take your compressed Wikipedia dump and turn it in to a browsable, searchable Wikipedia with a few clicks. The import technique will around an hour for English Wikipedia, or considerably more in the event you have an older computer.

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Now Record Your History @ Facebook Apps

Life log: Timeline apps let Facebook collect stats on previous activity, like the travel log shown here.

Facebook won the loyalty of over 800 million users largely by getting them in to the habit of visiting lots of times to see the latest updates, comments, and photographs posted by friends. Now the site will also let outside apps provide even more content, and it will encourage people to spend time looking back over activity from months or even years ago. New features introduced at an event in San Francisco last night will enable users to automatically record their eating, reading, exercise, and other habits over time, share them with friends, and review their earlier actions.

The key to the new features is an update to the Timeline page that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg introduced at his company's F8 event last September. Now, with a user's permission, third-party sites and mobile apps can record details of what the person is doing and automatically feed that knowledge to the person's Timeline page through a "Timeline app" that sends the information to Facebook and provides the necessary permission and privacy settings.

"Your timeline is not a way to tell your story based on what you are doing on Facebook, but using your activity out in the remainder of the world as well," said Carl Sjogreen, director of platform products at Facebook, at the launch event.

Fans and researchers have experimented with comprehensively logging their lives for years. In 1998, for example, Microsoft researcher Gordon Bell began trying to digitally capture as much as they could about everything they did. But Bell and others have often found that browsing and reviewing their records introduced a greater challenge than capturing them. Facebook's new design could help people do both.

Facebook's hope is not to hook in users with more experiences, but also to make use of the new trove of information that Timeline apps will provide. The knowledge could help the company's efforts to target ads more cleverly, although Facebook says that for now, information from Timeline apps is not used in that way.

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