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Wednesday, February 14, 2007 |
YouTube Hands Over User Info To Fox. An anonymous reader writes "Tech Crunch has an article about YouTube identifying and handing over a user's information after a request from Fox. 'Three weeks after receiving a subpoena from the U.S. District Court in Northern California, YouTube has reportedly identified a user accused by 20th Century Fox Television of uploading episodes of the show 24 a week prior to their running on television. That user, named ECOTtotal, is also alleged to have uploaded 12 episodes of The Simpsons, some quite old. Apparently Google and YouTube were willing and able to identify the owner of the username ECOTtotal, according to a report on InternetNews.com.'"[Slashdot]
4:09:16 PM  Google It!.
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Window's Meeting Place - Educational Review. A couple of weeks ago I wrote an article about some of the new features available in Vista for Education. Today I finally found some time to test out one of those features, Window's Meeting Place. This article reviews the features, pro's, con's and possible educational uses of the program.
Features:
- Users - A complete list of users is shown on the right hand side
- Note - Double click on a user and send them a note. (Note: does not function like a chat screen... only one way.)
- Share your entire desktop or just one program with the whole meeting - each participant can share their desktop too, but only one at a time. You can also give control of your desktop to any participant!
- Attach "Handouts" - The rest of the meeting can open a copy and edit a local copy (will not affect the original).
- Ability to connect directly with a projector with an IP address (not shown above).
Set-up: Setting up a meeting or joining one was super easy!! - Start up Window's Meeting Space
- Click Start New Meeting (or join a meeting already in progress - shown on sign in screen)
- Give your meeting a name and a password and hit the little arrow button.
After you have started the meeting you can invite others via e-mail. The invitation will include a small attachment that the participants only need to double click to join. You can also invite people directly if they are in the local network. They just accept the invitation and join in. Nice! Pro's: - Easy and fast to set up a meeting and connect with other's around you.
- Works both in an online environment or just connecting computers together where there is no network connection.
- Great way to share files with a class in real time.
- You can't beat the collaboration ability! The response in instantaneous! No lag.
- FREE! Need I say more!
Con's: - Only supports up to 10 people at a time.
- No voice support, so another option (Skype... Skypecast?) would have to be employed for those not in the same room.
- No integrated Chat options... although the note is a beginning.
- When sharing program the content on everyone else's computer goes blank when you navigate away from the shared program.
Educational Uses: - The best and most obvious use would be in a classroom. If you had a small class and you wanted to share a presentation, but didn't have a projector you could just all meet there and present. Not only could you present, you could share documents and the whole class could share content they found with each other! Great for a lab class!
- Document Collaboration. Have you ever tried to huddle around one monitor as several people tried to edit a document. Just log into the meeting room and edit the document together. (Con, only one person can have control of the mouse, but all could see it).
- Small Group Projects. Have students inside of a class set up their own meetings and collaborate on a project.
- Remote Assistance. Although this is probably not what it is meant for, you could set up a meeting and send a student an invitation. They could then share their desktop and give you the control if they need help configuring something on their computer.
- Remote Class. Although it would be hard without the audio integration, you could certainly set up a remote classroom and conference call (using Skype or another program).
I'm sure this is just the beginning. What other ideas do you have? How will you/have you used Microsoft Meeting Space? Original Article: http://www.edutechie.com/2007/02/windows-meeting-place-educational-review/ [EDUCAUSE CONNECT blogs]
4:07:45 PM Google It!.
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NASA World Wind 1.4 Released With Trailer. Bull_UK writes "As many of you probably already know NASA had to shift it's priorities to the upcoming Java version of World Wind, leaving 1.4 effectively orphaned, but the Open Source community came together and with a lot of hard work we were able to finish what Chris Maxwell started. Some of the new things which differentiate the new World Wind from the competition are the amazing new visual effects, including HDR, check out the video for some examples. Remember this virtual globe has never had the same goals as Google Earth, if you just want to see your house stick with GE, although many areas have high resolution as good and sometimes better than GE. World Wind is aimed at education and science, all the default imagery is copyright free, you don't need to purchase a license to redistribute the imagery and there are no pro or expert versions to buy, you can happily use World Wind at work or school without fear of any lawyers confiscating your research."[Slashdot]
4:00:05 PM Google It!.
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Supercruncher Applications. starheight writes "Bill McColl has written an article contrasting traditional massively parallel supercomputing with a whole new generation of compute-intensive apps that require massively scalable architectures and can deliver both incredible throughput and real-time responsivenes when processing millions or billions of tasks. [Slashdot]
10:13:46 AM Google It!.
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Illinois Bill Would Ban Social Networking Sites. AlexDV writes "Library blogger Michael Stephens is reporting that an Illinois state senator, Matt Murphy (R-27, Palatine), has filed a bill that 'Creates the Social Networking Web site Prohibition Act. Provides that each public library must prohibit access to social networking Web sites on all computers made available to the public in the library. Provides that each public school must prohibit access to social networking Web sites on all computers made available to students in the school.' Here is the bill's full text." This local effort harks back to an attempt last May to get federal legislation banning school and library use of social networking sites (Wikipedia summary here). The DOPA bill passed the House but died in the Senate.[Slashdot]
9:47:07 AM Google It!.
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VeriChip Implants 222 People With RFID. cnet-declan writes "Anyone remember VeriChip, a company that came up with the idea of implanting chips in humans for tracking them? They've been behind ideas like RFID tagging immigrant and guest workers at the border, and they've persuaded a former Bush Health Secretary to get himself chipped. In this CNET News.com article, we offer an update on how successful the idea has been. It turns out that, according to IPO documents, 222 people have been implanted, with sales revenue of $100,000."[Slashdot]
9:44:13 AM Google It!.
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© Copyright 2007 Bruce Landon.
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