Books on the shelves aren’t moving off the shelves quick enough? Maybe because of e-books that books on the shelves are stuck on the shelves? Coffee pours nicely into various cups in the store are hot and smelling great and taste great, but not enough people are willing to sip some coffee cups? For whatever the reasons may be, Borders is just like many other physical stores — out in force to provide better experience to store visitors, and this is why Borders and others are giving or will be giving out FREE Wi-Fi. I can already see me go to Borders more often to read more books on the shelves, but not likely buying more books due to a thin wallet that I carry, and definitely I can see me browsing the Internet on my laptop at Borders even though it will be a distraction for my main interest at Borders which is books. Nationwide availability, free Wi-Fi will be available at Borders in mid October this year. Source.
New Dell’s laptop, the Latitude Z, is a creation in an attempt of targeting more buyers from the business market, but with features such as wireless charging pad and instant on and touch interfaces, you can bet that average computer users will want such features for their laptops. Though it’s an expensive accessory, wireless charging pad is an awesome accessory where it will charge the laptop’s battery to its full battery life as cabled adapter would have. According to CNET, Dell is the first computer maker to adopt wireless charging capability with laptops. Other features such as instant on and touch interfaces are amazing too. Instant on allows computer users to access specific computer’s applications without the need of booting Windows, so this allows faster access to frequently use applications. “Touch interfaces” allows computer users touch the computer monitors’ specific area to control and manipulate various applications. You can read more about Dell’s Latitude Z at CNET.
Internet is overtaking TV in the advertising industry in UK. As the economy isn’t performed so well, and so businesses are looking for ways to cut cost and be more effective. Bad economy and desperation sometimes lead to new way of thinking! This may be the cause for many businesses to take a look at online advertising as a possible way of cutting cost and be more effective. Get a complete picture of this topic at Guardian.co.uk.
Google is eager to show off its new web application that will get release later this year known as Google Wave. Google says Wave is open source and it’s rare for Google to show new application when the application is still not yet finished. It’s clearly that Google wants as many developers to be able to see the work in progress of Wave and get their hands on Wave’s API. Wave is also an open source because Google wants many developers around the world to help build Wave better as time ticks on.
So what is Wave? By viewing a YouTube introduction video to Wave, the Google’s engineers begin the introduction by showing off how Wave works similarly to email, but it is taking a more modern style. Email has been around for 40 years, but as time grew and networks of computers got improved, email has becoming everyday users centric. You think Gmail is great? Well Wave is even better! With Wave your email conversation flows smoother. Email users can open up the old conversation, enter new conversation between the old conversation and even between old conversation’s paragraph. In Gmail you get to use Google chat to chat with your friends, but Wave allows chatting to work within and between email’s conversations in real time — this means when your friends type something, you get to see letter by letter immediately. There is an option for you to check to disallow your friends to see what you are typing while typing.
While a typical Gmail’s single email conversation usually is between two persons, Wave allows you to add other friends and email users to your current email conversations. This means the email conversation or conversation grows even bigger and be more interesting. Wave takes your normal and boring email activity to a more exciting level by incorporating a social element and allow interaction in real time. There is also a playback option that allows you to see conversation in steps — this means you don’t have to guess who is talking to who when there is three or more people in a single conversation since the playback feature will play the conversation in steps. As a conversation goes on, sometimes a person in a conversation wants to whisper a private message to another person within a public conversation, Wave has a feature that allows you to do just that. Adding pictures to the conversations in Wave is cake, because all you have to do is to drag the pictures that you’ve highlighted on your computer’s hard-drive onto Wave’s conversations.
Bloggers will be like holy cow as they see Wave and blog works as if both are one application though blog and Wave are two different things, and this is possible because Wave has an API that allows this to work. Let say you read your friend’s blog post, and you want to write a comment under the blog post, and let say you did just that, your friend will see your comment under his blog (that’s normal); the kicker is that your friend also get to see your comment in Wave and doesn’t need to go to the blog to read your comment. For your friend, if he is using wave while he comments away on your blog, his or her Wave will also show the comment he or she wrote. Wave’s API allows websites such as wiki, forums, blogs, normal websites, and countless other types of websites to incorporate a very rich user interface that can handle conversations in amazingly exciting and modern approach. Users who use Wave do not have to check each conversation on each website that they have participated, but all they have to do is to log into Wave to continue their conversations, in real time or not.
There is a lot more to Wave and you can see what Wave can do in this YouTube’s video.
Wave is truly amazing by just looking at the demo video, and I’m anxious to see the real version of Wave when it gets release later this year. Another exciting thought is that Wave’s API may allow open source developers to develop some really cool widgets. There is no doubt that there will be many websites use Wave to enhance user experience. It’s a hopeful and exciting future for the online world provides to you by Google!
According to Neowin.net’s blog post, Microsoft is going to release a strip down version of its Live OneCare subscription service for free. Many people who are using Windows but are not willing to pay for a yearly subscription security software often find their computers get infected with computer viruses and worms. Though it’s unclear how Microsoft benefits by releasing free security software for everyone to use, but this move helps many people use Windows feel a bit more safe.
On a negative note, not a single security software that is out there can really provide 100% confidence that you will not get infected with viruses and worms. Why? New viruses and worms can be created each day, and so if you’re the unlucky one who gets infected with those first, then the security software you’re using might not have a way to recognize or remove such computer viruses and worms. On a positive note, it’s better to have a well known security software installed on your computer to keep your data safe from well known and recent computer viruses and worms.
A great CGI trailer for Final Fantasy XIV Online. The video game will come out in 2010.
Digitally enhanced photographs in France may have to be clearly shown with caption that says digitally enhanced or something that is similar. Some politicians in France think this may be necessary as it may help teenagers and some adults to see that to be looking as sexy as the digitally enhanced super models in photographs can be unrealistic. Some people went through extreme eating disorders to lose weight unhealthily, and only few people could achieve the sexiness that looks like digitally enhanced super models in photographs. Not a healthy thing to do obviously!
It’s clearly shown that technology such as computer graphic software can digitally edit just about any photograph to make it looks so realistic that one cannot tell there is a digital editing process involved or not. Slap on the caption to clarify that digital editing was involved is a good thing in general. The confusion can be cleared up, and people don’t have to argue or guess or go through unhealthy diet process to be just like the sexy models that were digitally enhanced in photos.
I think America should do the same thing! Though France has not yet legislated any law to mandate that photographers should label their photos as digitally enhanced or not, but it’s a good thing that politicians in France recognizes the unhealthy factors about digitally enhanced photographs. America needs to be talking about this too as there are way too many people in America are totally buy into the perfect looking sexy models in ads and magazines and on the Internet — though the photos are usually digitally enhanced. When a society begins to think that looking extremely thin as sexy, diseases such as anorexia and bulimia can be more common. Digitally enhanced photographic software can be a good example of how technology can do both good and bad for society.
Human vs computer, which has more processing power? To simply put, people think that human may be a lot slower than a computer since they like to think a computer can process math functions at light speed, and it’s true that computer is much faster in that sense, but is it really that a computer has more processing power? After reading the article “Geeks Weigh In: Does a Human Think Faster Than a Computer?” — I’m agreeing with the author, Ryan Dube, that a human has more processing power than a computer.
A computer may know how to calculate the chess moves quite fast and in abundance of steps ahead a human chess player, but a computer can only do that and a few more things at the same time. Let say a virus scanner suddenly scans the hard-drive for virus and a music software plays MP3, the computer will start to slow down eventually; to compensate the slowdown, one may add more RAM and upgrade from one core to dual core and quad core and multiple processors, but the limitation of to how many applications that can run at the same time is still clearly there although it’s depending on how heavy resource hogging each application requires.
Scientifically compare a human with a computer, one can say a human is much more sophisticated and has more processing power due to the subtle functions that a human performs throughout a human lifetime in seconds or more exact in milliseconds or even more exact in nanoseconds. For examples, a human brain regulates heart beats, moves your muscles to move hands and feet and eyes and facial movements and internal organs’ movements, accepts external information such as sounds from all type of sources, processes external information such as languages and sounds and logics and the natures of the information at specific point in time and so on, and so much more — most of these can be done at the same time as long the functions aren’t in conflicting with each other. Internal organs may have its own processors to process its own functions, an example would be the heart as it has its own way of regulating the heart beats in addition to the brain. The eye’s retina has its own processing power, too.
Simply put, the things that a human does a computer cannot even if a computer maker adds more processors, and this is hold true for now. Though one can argue if we add unlimited number of processor power to a computer, a computer can be faster and smarter than a human, but that argument will have to be waited for unknown amount of time since human technology is currently not capable of creating such a scary computer.
Collective number of computers from multiple places all over the world combine to create a super massive processing unit to process information and to calculate various things may be considered as having more processing power than a human, but that is not true either, because humans can communicate with each other just like computers can. Sure, the information travel very fast over the Internet and arrive at a precise destination quite fast, but each computer still has to process the information (if the information is quite large, it will take a long time to process). A human can process the information quite fast when a cell phone or video conference acts as the medium of which information could travel just as the information of a computer travels over telephone wires and air as wireless and fiber optic cables. We can say that each human still has to slow down just like a computer when a human consumes large amount of data such as reading a large book, but remember this a human is doing countless other things at the same time while reading a book — those things computers of this age cannot yet do. Can a computer thinks for itself, imagines things, dreams of things, lies to itself, heals itself physically besides the logistical calculations? I bet you know the answer to that question already!
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