S2W8 Friday: Phone Wars, Homework Review, Prof Teaches, Quiz, Picture Formats

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1. Global Events & Phone Wars

Since a Tunisian fruit seller lit himself on fire in protest on the 17th of December 2010, the following has taken place:

    * Unrest in Tunisia
    * Unrest in Bahrain
    * Unrest in Libya (including civil war)
    * Unrest in Yemen
    * Unrest in Algeria
    * Unrest in Morocco
    * Unrest in Iran
    * Unrest in Jordan
    * Unrest in India
    * Unrest in Greece
    * Unrest in North Korea
    * Iran's warships on the move
    * Oil above $100 and beyond
    * Record prices in commodities (gold, silver, cotton, etc.)
    * German resistance to bailing out the PIIGS
    * Italian bond default risk jumps, other PIIGS at risk
    * Flooding in Australia
    * Earthquake in Christchurch
    * South Korean bank runs
    * Massive government layoffs in various US states
    * Record budget deficits in the US and a budget standoff
    * Unrest in Wisconsin, USA
    * US house prices resume falling & US treasury yields rising
    * US dollar falling
    * List of banks at risk of failing at 18-year highs

Yes, it's been a busy few weeks. Never complain that you live in a boring time.

Amongst other things, phone wars have broken out in Libya with authorities there confiscating the SIM cards from the mobile phones of people as well laptops. The old adage of the pen being mightier than the sword coined by Edward Bulwer-Lytton in the 1800s may still be true, but today it is not the quite the pen but a thumb and a portable communications device that poses the huge threat to autocratic leaders:


The Guardian's Peter Beaumont said today that Libyan authorities are "trying to take laptops off journalists leaving Tripoli Airport along with SIM cards."

 http://www.aolnews.com/2011/03/10/bbc-reporters-beaten-in-libya-cant-describe-how-bad-it-was/
 
People can't send or receive text messages - they think phones are being monitored and SIM cards are being cancelled, but he has secured internet access through satellite links.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-12695138

Apple vs. Android are also engaged in phone wars

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2. Homework Review

Please take out your homework so we can review it.

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Those of you who use Apple computers you can find a guide to Apple shortcuts below, lest I be acused of only catering to Windows users:

http://guides.macrumors.com/Keyboard_shortcuts

http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1343 

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3. Professor Teaches HTML

  

We will do a brief quiz today on the Professor Teaches HTML Advanced Introducing JavaScript. Please work through the chapter. We will do the quiz once everyone is finished the chapter on Friday. Questions will be drawn solely from the content of Chapter on JavaScript.

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4. Dinosaur Twitter

  

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5. Evolution of Mobile Phones

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6. Who Knows You Best?

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7. Photo Format Types

Here's the very brief lowdown:

JPEGs are for photographs and realistic images. PNGs are for line art, text-heavy images, and images with few colors. GIFs are just outmoded.

Here's a little more detail:

JPEG/JPG

Short for Joint Photographic Experts Group, the original name of the committee that wrote the standard. JPG is one of the image file formats supported on the Web. JPG is a lossy compression technique that is designed to compress color and grayscale continuous-tone images. The information that is discarded in the compression is information that the human eye cannot detect. JPG images support 16 million colors and are best suited for photographs and complex graphics. The user typically has to compromise on either the quality of the image or the size of the file. JPG does not work well on line drawings, lettering or simple graphics because there is not a lot of the image that can be thrown out in the lossy process, so the image loses clarity and sharpness.
 

GIF

Short for Graphics Interchange Format, another of the graphics formats supported by the Web. Unlike JPG, the GIF format is a lossless compression technique and it supports only 256 colors. GIF is better than JPG for images with only a few distinct colors, such as line drawings, black and white images and small text that is only a few pixels high. With an animation editor, GIF images can be put together for animated images. GIF also supports transparency, where the background color can be set to transparent in order to let the color on the underlying Web page to show through. The compression algorithm used in the GIF format is owned by Unisys, and companies that use the algorithm are supposed to license the use from Unisys.
 

PNG

Short for Portable Network Graphics, the third graphics standard supported by the Web (though not supported by all browsers). PNG was developed as a patent-free answer to the GIF format but is also an improvement on the GIF technique. An image in a lossless PNG file can be 5%-25% more compressed than a GIF file of the same image. PNG builds on the idea of transparency in GIF images and allows the control of the degree of transparency, known as opacity. Saving, restoring and re-saving a PNG image will not degrade its quality. PNG does not support animation like GIF does.

More information:

http://www.ou.edu/class/digitalmedia/articles/CompressionMethods_Gif_Jpeg_PNG.html

http://info.eps.surrey.ac.uk/FAQ/standards.html
 

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8. Gadget Anatomy

 

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9. Laptop Selfcharger

 

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