In looking at the Google News tech articles this morning, each of the highlighted articles found my interest for different reasons:
“Cisco’s consumer electronics dream” discusses Cisco’s purchase of Pure Digital Technologies. Yeah, I didn’t know who they were, either, but they make the Flip Video digital cameras. I’ve heard of those and they seem to be very popular with folks wanting a low-cost way of capturing and uploading video content. Cisco has also recently announced that they’re pushing to virtualize the data center, essentially getting into the server business. Cisco was formerly associated only with routers and switches, but these announcements along with their telephony products really demonstrate Cisco’s wide reach.
“Microsoft release IE8” – guess it’s time for me to put IE7 on my desktop. 🙂 One other article compared IE8 to Firefox. To me, browsers are a matter of personal preference, though I completely understand the school districts’ need to standardize on IE in order to control proxy and other administrative settings with Group Policy.
“It’s the iPhone, All the Time on Every Channel” – The title captures my opinions on the matter. I’ve resisted the urge, primarily because I’m too much of a cheapskate. Everybody I know with an iPhone raves about their iPhone and the apps that are available. Districts have mentioned that they’d consider the iPod Touch for a 1:1 initiative if they could easily image these devices. I’ve seen the app where you shake the phone and it finds a restaurant. I’ve seen the flashlight app (where somebody wrote code to display white pixels on the screen I guess). If you can make $40K in two days for THIS, I guess anything’s possible. Seriously, though, are we ready to use these for instruction?