Most of the current crop of HD Blu-ray players are not able to be upgraded to access the new features that are coming on stream in the near future reports the BBC.
Owners of Blu-ray DVD players may find themselves frozen out of future developments in the technology because their machines are not upgradeable.
The Blu-ray camp has recently rolled out new features for players, which include picture in picture options.
But the majority of Blu-ray players sold to date do not have the necessary hardware to offer the features.
Here in the UK it is (still) illegal to rip a CD to your computer (so when using iTunes or Windows Media Player you are technically breaking the law if you import a CD).
However the BBC reports that this may soon change…
Copying music from a CD to a home computer could be made legal under new proposals from the UK government.
Millions of people already “rip” discs to their computers and move the files to MP3 players, although the process is technically against copyright law.
This is of course of those things that we do on a regular basis, but is in fact still illegal, I would suspect most people don’t even realise it is illegal.
The results are in for this year’s Edublog awards (“Eddies” for short), an online event that showcases the best use of blogs, podcasting and other social software in education.
A full list of winners and nominations can be found at edublogawards.com.
The BBC reports from CES that Intel see mobile devices as core to the future use of the internet.
Mobile devices will deliver a more personal internet within five years, using chips with the power of today’s desktop PCs, Intel’s head has said.
Speaking at the Consumer Electronics Show, Paul Otellini predicted mobile devices could soon “augment reality” by pulling data from the net in real time.
He said the industry was on the verge of creating a “new level of capability and usefulness to the internet”
Wikia is a new search engine and unlike the closed Google system, the results are “created” by a community of users.
Wikia’s search engine concept is that of trusted user feedback from a community of users acting together in an open, transparent, public way. Of course, before we start, we have no user feedback data. So the results are pretty bad. But we expect them to improve rapidly in coming weeks, so please bookmark the site and return often.
As Wikia comes from Jimmy Wales (one of the names behind Wikipedia) you will have an understanding of the philosophy behind this new search engine.
What with HMRC losing personal data, along with others, it doesn’t surprise me that next to be looked at is education.
The BBC is reporting how an IT firm believes that:
Sensitive information on school pupils is being put at risk by staff who take it home with them.
How often are teaching staff in your institution given proper training on how to deal with sensitive data?
This is an issue which doesn’t just affect schools, colleges and universities also have data protection policies, though a policy is only a statement, practice is another matter entirely.
If you take a computer from work home, you have to ask yourself is the data secure?
Despite a lot of scepticism and negative coverage about Amazon’s new digital book reader, the device has sold out according to the BBC.
Amazon’s Kindle e-book reader has sold out despite scepticism about whether the device will prove popular. A notice on the Kindle pages on the Amazon web store said “heavy customer demand” for the device meant it would be out of stock until 3 December. Since its launch on 19 November the device has been widely examined but opinions about it are mixed.
Looks like people are interested in this digital book reader. Is this the device for e-books what the iPod was for digital music? We will have to wait and see.
news and views on e-learning, TEL and learning stuff in general…
