Around The Web - Issue 1

Around The Web 

Issue 1 

Date: 07/27/2010 

By: Joshua Millikan 

Education:  

For Those that are looking for For some educational things or just looking to make money off of your old text books the web has many different things for you to find these goodies. Lets start with making money off your old text books as we all like to make money. The Textbook revolt at www.textbookrevolt.com is starting up by some two guys that got tired of text book prices and having to pay a lot of the books.  they have created a textbook rental serves where students can list their books that they want to rent out  and they get paid to have them rent out. Though this service has not yet started and it is still being create but it will interesting to see where it will be going from there. the idea is good and it is always nice to see people trying to tackle the high prices of textbooks that students have to pay on top of already high tuitions  

The next thing would be that of FREE textbooks. Yes you heard it free textbooks. nothing is sweeter to the ears of students than that of the word free. Bookboon is a site that has free textbooks. Not only do they have a website but also have a Facebook application. bookboon.com has a a few topics and looks like they are adding to them.  but they have more than just textbooks but also travel guides and business books.  Though there is a downside to this as many of the books on here are not many of them are used by professors. Though that may change if professors started reading them to compare them and if they start thinking about how the students don’t want to pay another $100 for another textbook. especially as growing trend of students reading less and less of their text books.  

Computers: 

Music: 

For those that are looking for a program that feels a lot like the Itunes player but want more functionality on other operating systems and other devices and phones. Then they should look no further than that of Songbird. Songbird is a open source music player that gives you the nice feel of Itunes but with so much more. With the openness of the open source to it it brings integration for a web browser and extra plugins.  The Web browser looks to be that of mozilla firefox build with the ability to have some of the firefox plugins installed like adblock plus and videodownload helper it sure makes it a wonderful feel to the program. With plugins like concerts that show the artists concert dates next to the artists in your library helps you keep on top of the things happening  in your area. It also comes with extentions that bring up the lyrics of the song your listening to and also that of  adding a wikipedia info on the artist your listening to. Songbird is something that will make you fall in love with.  

Ubuntu: 

Ubuntu Maverick is taking up the cause of speed in Ubuntu’s latest upcoming release.  It does not add much off of the last release of Ubuntu 10.04 which added a lot to the Ubuntu experience. Though the release is still in its first alpha stage so it will be interesting to see what they have coming in the later releases.  

 

Canonical, the parent of Ubuntu, has announced that they are working on creating out with a multi touch OS that will be made to be able to run on the new upcoming tablet pcs coming out when they do, probably not till mid next year.  This will be interesting if they can take a little control of the open source tablet market. Though this will be hard for them to competitor against the likes of  Android, Windows 7, and Apple.   

Security: 

This past year has been busy for Apple they have come out with many new software and new products. They also are not the underdog anymore as they are the surpassed microsoft in their market value. Though a sad note to their success comes with the glory, they have recently became the leader in the world in software insecurities. This does not mean that Apple is starting to become the worst software vender our there but it does show a sign that they are growing and they are having growing pains trying to keep up with the growth and with the fads. Lot of these insecurities do not come from apples operating system but from their software and third party software like flash or java.  Third party software is starting to become a real problem for any operating system as it is where a lot of the flaws that compromise the computer come from.  It is going to be interesting to see if they stay the leader and how fast they will fix the problems  or even if they will omit that they have problems.