Interesting report out of Canada today: Canadian college students are failing at some classes because their grammar, spelling, and writing styles all too often reflect Twitter or text-messaging styles. LOL!

Here’s a video showing how you might be able to keep all of your textbooks in a single, small tablet device. Notice that the program allows for highlighting text, typing notes, bookmarking pages, searching the text, viewing video lectures, and more. The video is OK, although the animated hand is terrible…

Note how they keep saying “the very near future.” Also, the style of the software is Apple–they use iPhone keyboards and Mac programs. Apple is set to announce a new tablet computer in one week. It probably won’t look like what they showed, but the textbook program will be available. However, don’t get excited just yet–buying English textbooks may require an American account, which requires a credit card with a U.S. billing address.

If you need photos for web sites or blogs, can’t take the photos yourself, and you do not want to pay for them, you can get free photos from “stock photography” sites. Many of them are listed here.

You can play a Flash version of the game which is unique, in that it lets you play from the perspective of each block that falls. Warning: it might make you dizzy!

First Person Tetris

Welcome everyone! This is the home page for the CPS100 class for the Spring 2010 semester. I will be posting messages from time to time in this central area, but you will also find chapters, links, and other valuable information on the right-hand side of this page. Make sure that you carefully read the Syllabus, check out the study guide, and know what you have to do in this class. Be sure to check the Blackboard site on a regular basis–at least twice a week! Your Blackboard account should be active in the next week or two; I will give you your log-in information and show you how to use the site.

I hope you enjoy the class!

In class, someone recently asked about laying trans-oceanic cables. When I looked it up, to my surprise I found that this has been done for quite some time. The first was a telegraph cable in 1858, though that worked only for one month before failing.However, the first real trans-oceanic telephone was laid in 1956–which only could handle a few dozen calls at one time. The first fiber-optic cable was laid in the 80’s, and these days, trans-oceanic cables are pretty common.

In fact, one is being laid right now, with KDDI, Google, and other companies paying the $300 million price tag:

The laying of a new high-bandwidth fiber-optic cable connecting North America and Asia via the northern Pacific Ocean began on November 1st from Japan. The cable line, called “Unity”, is a project of six major communication companies, including Google and Japan’s KDDI.

The Unity cable plan was announced in February of 2008 at a projected cost of $300 million USD. In the wake of rapidly increasing traffic between the two regions of the world, the six companies aim to increase the overall transpacific cable capacity by at least 20% when it is set to start operation sometime in spring of 2010. Yutaka Yasuda, KDDI’s General Manager of Technology Sector, commented “The project is of great importance to Japan and America, as well as Asia.”

The cable, when finished, will stretch approximately 10,000 km (6,200 miles) from data centers in the Los Angeles area to KDDI’s data center in Chikura, just outside of Tokyo. From Japan, information can then be distributed to other countries in East Asia. The planned maximum capacity of Unity was 7.68 Tbps, however that number has since fallen to 4.8 Tbps for its initial use, according to a report from Japan’s ITpro. (For the curious, according to one reporter, John Bourdreau, 4.8 Tbps would supposedly be the equivalent of approximately 75 million simultaneous voice calls!)

Just in time to accompany the low-bit image assistance below, Gizmodo has a story
on someone who came to Halloween dressed as a 256-color bitmapped image. Cute!

Here are some images to help you understand Color Depth (part of the Hardware Section, the chapter on Monitors).

2-bit (4 colors)	4-bit (16 colors)	6-bit (64 colors)
8-bit (256 colors)	24-bit (16 million colors)	If you look very closely at the 8-bit and 24-bit images, you’ll see very small but noticeable differences. Look especially at the white space at the lower left, or at the edge of the blue object.

Japan has the cheapest broadband Internet in the world, as measured by cost per Megabit. In the U.S., people have an average speed of 4.8 Mbps and pay $3.33 per Megabit; in Japan, the average is 61 Mbps and people pay only 27 cents per each Megabit. Japan has more than 12 times faster than American broadband, but Americans pay 12 times more.

You do the math.

After a long wait, Windows 7 is on sale now. Here’s a review (in English). Here are a lot more.

Many say that Windows 7 is “Vista done right.” In a sense, this is the first “good” Windows OS since 2001. One problem: the upgrade from XP requires you to erase your hard disk drive–which means backing up all of your data and re-installing all of your apps. The upgrade from Vista should be easier.