Learning Aloud

The Consumers Union claims that U.S. government Internet policy under the present administration has been a failure and U.S. has slipped to 13th in broadband connectivity.

The situation is complex – companies claim they must invest heavily to serve broad band customers, but rising costs represent a significant barrier to those low income customers who presently struggle to afford even dial-up access. About half of all households with incomes above $75,000 have broadband, but half of all households with incomes below $30,000 have no access of any kind.

The full report can be obtained from http://www.consumersunion.org/pub/ddnewbook.pdf

Regular iTunes user or not, you may want to explore the iTunes site. iTunes makes some free content available and presently is providing material related to the election (e.g., debates).

Today I attended a local demonstration of Apple high end multimedia authoring products (Final Cut HD, Motion, Shake, etc.). These are not of great interest to me because I am not interested in “pro” tools, but the products are certainly impressive.

I did come away with a couple of web links for those looking for demonstrations and tutorials.
Ken Stone offers resources related to Final Cut
Apple offers some great instructional videos for its “pro products – follow the links under the heading “Professional Tools” and then look for the Quick Tour link on each of the pro tool pages. You will find a series of instructional videos.
Ripple Training offers some free training videos.

One of the drawbacks of open source software is the lack of documentation. Not all software is intuitively obvious and those who volunteer their time to develop this software are often more interested in coding than in explaining how what they have developed works.

Enter the Purdue Open Source Documentation Project. The concept is simple – make the development of documentation a technical writing class project.

I do not get to cite my local paper very often. Here is an article that describes some of the consequences North Dakota schools are experiencing because of the delay in releasing e-rate funds.

You may perfectly happy running IE as your browser of choice. I do recommend that you consider options if for no other reason than I happen to feel competition is healthy.

MIT Technology Review provides an analysis of Mozilla Firefox and the potential advantages of an open source browser.

There was a time I was very excited by the Java programming language. It was not that I was going to ever learn to program in Java, but the concept and the potential seemed very promising. As I understand the intent, Java was to offer two advantages: 1) it was to be cross platform and 2) it was to be Internet friendly.

The first idea assumed that programmers would develop an application once and this code would be “interpreted” by a free application associated with each operating system (windows, Mac OS, UNIX).

The second idea was that some Java applications would be downloaded from the Internet as needed rather than being stored on individual computers. In certain situations, this would change the hardware requirements and reduce costs.

It simply did not happen. I am not sure why. It seemed that the various parties could not agree on the “version” of java that would be promoted. Perhaps the business opportunities for individual companies prevented a common vision from being implemented.

I can’t say that everyone has given up on the vision. However, I do know of one company (eZedia) that had embraced the idea has now moved to some version of C because they have concluded this is simply not going to work.

I remembered my previous interest in this topic when I came across some of the resources developed by the National Council Of Teachers of Mathematics. This organization was supporting the development of applets that would allow users to explore mathematics in an interactive fashion.

For example, one applet offers a functional spreadsheet (the following is an image and not the actual applet).

I do encourage you to visit this site and explore some of the resources. A warning – I did find inconsistencies in my ability to use the resources depending on operating system and browser.