Posts Tagged ‘web’

Most students use Wikipedia, avoid telling profs about it

// March 17th, 2010 // No Comments » // Tech News

Surprise! Most students use Wikipedia at some point during their research on a paper or project, and they usually do so early on in the process. Online peer-reviewed journal First Monday recently published the findings of its research on student Wikipedia use and said that the service often serves as a starting point for the students who use it, allowing them to gather information for further investigation elsewhere. This is despite the fact that their professors still frown on Wikipedia use—but it seems that students believe what their profs don’t know won’t hurt them. The research was done as part of Project Information Literacy (PIL) out of the University of Washington. Researchers included data from focus groups across seven university campuses in the US as well as survey responses from six campuses. What they found was that a full three-quarters of students use Wikipedia at least occasionally, with 30 percent of the group saying they always use it when performing their own research. Thirteen percent used it rarely and only nine percent said they never used Wikipedia (mysteriously, three percent said they didn’t know whether they used it or not). Read the comments on this post

Color E Ink coming at the end of the year

// March 17th, 2010 // No Comments » // Tech News

In an interview with Xconomy.com, the new head of E Ink talks about the company’s plans to launch color displays at the end of this year. T.H. Peng, executive vice president of E Ink’s parent company, Prime View International, admitted to Xconomy that in terms of quality color E Ink won’t be ready to go head-to-head with LCD anytime soon. “Our color quality will not be as good as LCD, initially,” Peng told Xconomy. “But we have already received very encouraging signs from a few customers that they want to launch our color e-paper product by the end of this year or the beginning of 2011.” Peng went on to insist that E Ink’s color capabilities compare favorably with that of newsprint—a bar that Peng himself admits is substantially lower than that of glossy magazines. I actually got a glimpse of a color E Ink prototype at this past CES, and I will admit that I wasn’t too impressed. Color saturation and contrast were very low, and it was fairly hard to tell the different colors apart. But the Skiff spokesperson who had the demo mentioned that it represented only one of a number of possible methods for bringing color to E Ink, and this fits with what Peng says in the interview. Right now, E Ink is staffing up in R&D and is exploring a range of options for bringing color to E Ink screens. It’s likely that the company will iterate through a number of approaches in the coming years as it pursues its goal of getting E Ink closer to full-color printing. While E Ink explores its color options, competing approaches aren’t standing still. I didn’t care for the Mirasol demo that I saw at Qualcomm’s CES booth, but the company claims that it has a newer, much improved version of the MEMs-based technology that looks significantly better. I was supposed to get a demo of the new Mirasol tech last week, but I wasn’t able to go. We’ve rescheduled, though, so look for a report next month. Read the comments on this post

Image hosting on the cheap: a look at three free services

// March 17th, 2010 // No Comments » // Tech News

Image hosting is the kind of service many people use for sharing their images. There are several great options that cost money—like SmugMug , for instance—but unless you’re a major shutterbug, a free service might fit your modest needs and usage pattern better. Here we round up three of the top options for free image hosting around the Web—Flickr, Picasa, and Photobucket. Read the comments on this post

Ubuntu prerelease testing made easy with TestDrive

// March 17th, 2010 // No Comments » // Tech News

I frequently download the latest Ubuntu daily build and set up a fresh install in a virtualized environment so that I can test software that I’m developing or evaluate the status of Ubuntu development. Canonical’s Jorge Castro recently introduced me to a nifty tool called TestDrive that simplifies the setup process by automatically downloading the ISO and configuring a VM. TestDrive provides a simple command-line tool that allows you to select which ISO image you want to test. It will download the image and then configure and launch a VM. The real win is that it caches the ISO images and uses rsync to update the parts that have changed so that you don’t have to download the whole ISO again every time you want to test a new daily build. It has saved me a bit of time over the past week. It’s also fairly easy to use, which makes it a handy tool for casual Ubuntu users who want to see the latest updates to the new default theme or try out some of the new features that have been prominently discussed in recent reviews. It supports both KVM and VirtualBox. You can configure your preferred virtualization software, the default ISO caching path, and the default memory configuration by editing the /etc/testdriverc file. To get TestDrive on Ubuntu 9.10, you can install it from the project’s PPA . For more details, visit its project page on Launchpad. Read the comments on this post

Online presence of hate, terrorist groups up 20%

// March 16th, 2010 // No Comments » // Tech News

Hate groups have always been a presence on the Internet, but their presence is growing quicker lately thanks to social networking sites. According to a report from the Simon Wiesenthal Center (SWC), groups that promote violence, terrorism, homophobia, antisemitism, and other forms of intolerance grew by 20 percent in the last year alone. The report is part of the Center’s annual look at the spread of hate groups online, which noted that there are now more than 11,500 social networks, websites, forums, and blogs that focus on spreading intolerance, recruiting new members, and instructing people on how to hurt others. “The numbers are probably, at the end of the day, multiples of that,” the SWC’s associate dean Abraham Cooper said in a news conference Monday. “That should be taken as a low ball figure.” Read the comments on this post

National Broadband Plan arrives, quoting Shakespeare

// March 16th, 2010 // No Comments » // Tech News

When the federal government spends more than a year developing a 300+ page report on national broadband policy, perhaps the last thing one expects to find in it is a quote from Shakespeare’s Henry IV . As two rebels plot their assault on the English king, the Welsh leader Owen Glendower brags that he can “call spirits from the vasty deep.” The English Hotspur retorts, “Why, so can I, or so can any man; but will they come when you do call for them?” Anyone can talk a good game about conjuring broadband policy from the vasty deep of the FCC—but can those people actually implement their visions? The National Broadband Plan , released today, drops this bit of Shakespeare on readers at the bottom of page 11 to make a simple point: this Plan is about the art of the possible. Perhaps a better quote from Henry IV might be from the lips of the famous comic figure Falstaff: “The better part of valor is discretion.” Read the comments on this post

feature: Platform Preview gives Web developers first taste of IE9

// March 16th, 2010 // No Comments » // Tech News

Microsoft today released the Windows Internet Explorer Platform Preview to the public. The release is meant to demonstrate the capabilities of Internet Explorer 9 to Web developers while at the same time providing feedback to the IE9 team. Microsoft says it is committed to updating the Platform Preview to keep a more effective rhythm for discussion, and it will be updated every eight weeks or so. Microsoft will share feedback with standards-setting bodies in addition to using it for internal development. The Platform Preview is a minimal wrapper: it’s not a full-fledged browser. It has no tabs. It has no address bar. It has no back button. So what is included? Everything that Web developers need to see: the rendering engine, of course, as well as the new JavaScript engine, hardware acceleration features, and the developer tools. The IE9 team told Ars that each update will use one of the latest internal engineering builds, at which point the feedback loop will start again. Read the comments on this post

Microsoft avoids being lost in translation with new framework

// March 15th, 2010 // No Comments » // Tech News

The Microsoft Translator team has given up and concluded that “no matter how many machines you throw at translation, it is still impossible to get the correct, error-free, contextually accurate translation every time.” Microsoft’s solution to this problem is the Collaborative Translations Framework, which supposedly combines the scale and speed of automatic machine translation with the accuracy and context awareness of human translation. At MIX 2010, Microsoft Translator API version 2 was announced. In addition to the collaborative features, version 2 includes a batch interface to translate large amounts of data, support for communicating with the service securely via SSL, and a “Translate-and-Speak” feature (text-to-speech functionality). The translation APIs are available at no cost to developers and partners in SOAP , HTTP , and AJAX flavors so that developers can choose the one that best fits their requirements. All you need to get started is a Bing Developer AppID. Since the Microsoft Translator team works closely on Bing, the Translate-and-Speak functionality will be available on the Bing Translator user site after you hit translate (you should notice a speaker icon that you can click on to hear your translation). Currently, this feature is only available in seven of the 30 languages Bing supports: English, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, and Russian. The Microsoft Translator widget, released just under a year ago , offers real-time, in-place translations on your website into the languages your users choose. Built on top of the new translation API, version 2 of the translator widget also adds collaborative features that help tailor the translations of a website. This means website owners can not only offer their site in multiple languages, but they can also ask their community or professional translators to improve those translations of their site’s content. Each MIX10 attendee received an exclusive invite code in their attendee bags to enable Collaborative Translations features in their widget. If you are not attending MIX, you can add yourself to the Collaborative Translations feature invite list after you get the widget. Microsoft still plans on polishing the translation widget, toolbar, and alternatives UI as well as analytics for site and app owners based on user feedback. There is also more customizability on the way, such as limiting the number of languages site owners can show as part of the widget. In addition, Microsoft is working on making the Silverlight translator control available as part of the Silverlight toolkit release that will ship when Silverlight 4 goes final. All this new functionality is still considered prerelease, so you’ll want to check out the known issues list before diving in. You can submit bugs and suggestions on the MSDN forums or via mtcont@microsoft.com . Read the comments on this post

China warns Google partners as censored results leak through

// March 15th, 2010 // No Comments » // Tech News

Google’s partners are getting a stern warning from Chinese authorities over Google’s decision to ditch censorship in the country, which some believe has already begun. An “industry expert” speaking anonymously to the New York Times said that a notice went out to Google’s biggest online partners on Friday, telling them to be prepared to continue censoring search results no matter what Google does. As we covered on Friday , Google is on the verge of either ending its censorship of search results or pulling its business out of China, although insiders say that Google is trying to work out an agreement with a handful of agencies so it doesn’t have to leave altogether. China’s Minister of Industry and Information Technology, however, has made it clear that if the company doesn’t respect Chinese laws with regards to censorship, “the consequences will be on you.” According to the Times , the government’s warning to Google’s partners is primarily meant to avoid confusion if China is forced to flip the switch on the Great Firewall to block Google’s results. Like other parts of the world, there are numerous Chinese portals that use Google-powered search boxes on their sites, and readers might be a little more frustrated when it’s not just Google.cn that’s being blocked, but also sina.com.cn or ganji.com. Implementing a last-minute switch to another search service could be difficult for those sites, though, so it seems reasonable to expect that there will be some downtime for one and all. According to some, however, Decision Day has already arrived: Silicon Alley Insider notes that Beijing resident Bill Bishop is already pulling up uncensored results for the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, which were previously blocked within China. Other taboo subjects remain inaccessible, however, meaning that the Tiananmen Square results are either a bug or evidence of Google testing the waters before going whole hog. Given the company’s commitment to standing by its original word , we’re going to guess the latter. Read the comments on this post

Losses from Internet crime more than doubled in 2009

// March 15th, 2010 // No Comments » // Tech News

Back in the golden age of comic books, you always knew what was coming after the bad guy got a good dose of hot lead from the cops. “Remember boys and girls…” the last panel warned in 30 point type, “crime doesn’t pay!” Alas, it appears that Internet crime pays. Read the comments on this post

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »


eXTReMe Tracker