Class Discussion on Feb 25th for IT Foundations

This weeks class discusion covered many topics: working with Vista and Graphics, how to get images onto your computer, Type of Image File Formats, Information on the image file formats, Acquiring images thorough Vista, Creating a Slide Show, and Making a Movie. The one topic that I enjoyed and learned the most from was the Creating the Slide Show. In Vista, the toolbar is at the bottom in the Photo Gallerey consisting of eight buttons: Image Display, Thumbnails, Back Button, Play slide show, Forward Button, Rotate 90 CCW, Rotate 90 CW, Delete Image. This was very easy and very fun to learn.

Reality TV turns into a film made in seven days......

I visited this blog to find out about movie making and found this to be interesting. There is a lot of hype these days with reality television. It looks as if this man worked with a group of different culture people for seven days, with their different personalities, and come up with the movie CO/MA

Acronyms, and other IT terms related to class. Week of Feb 25th

The acronyms I chose this week are as follows:
1 .jpg, .jpeg - In computing, JPEG (pronounced JAY-peg; IPA: /ˈdʒeɪpɛg/) is a commonly used method of compression for photographic images. The name JPEG stands for Joint Photographic Experts Group, the name of the committee that created the standard. The group was organized in 1986, issuing a standard in 1992, which was approved in 1994 as ISO 10918-1. JPEG is distinct from MPEG (Moving Picture Experts Group), which produces compression schemes for video.

2. .tif, .tiff - Tagged Image File Format (abbreviated TIFF) is a file format for storing images, including photographs and line art. It is now under the control of Adobe. Originally created by the company Aldus[1] for use with what was then called "desktop publishing", the TIFF format is widely supported by image-manipulation applications, by publishing and page layout applications, by scanning, faxing, word processing, optical character recognition and other applications.[2]

3. .bmp - The BMP file format, sometimes called bitmap or DIB file format (for device-independent bitmap), is an image file format used to store bitmap digital images, especially on Microsoft Windows and OS/2 operating systems.

4. .png -Portable Network Graphics (PNG) is a bitmapped image format that employs lossless data compression. PNG was created to improve upon and replace the GIF format, as an image-file format not requiring a patent license. PNG is pronounced /ˈpɪŋ/ both P-N-G and ping.[1] The PNG initialism is optionally recursive, unofficially standing for “PNG's Not GIF”.[2]

5. .pcx - PCX is an image file format developed by the ZSoft Corporation of Marietta, Georgia, USA. It was the native file format for PC Paintbrush (PCX = "PC Paintbrush Exchange") and became one of the first widely accepted DOS imaging standards, although its use has since been succeeded by more sophisticated image formats such as GIF, JPEG, and PNG.

6. .aiff - Audio Interchange File Format (AIFF) is an audio file format standard used for storing sound data for personal computers and other electronic audio devices. The format was co-developed by Apple Computer in 1988 [1] based on Electronic Arts' Interchange File Format (IFF, widely used on Amiga systems) and is most commonly used on Apple Macintosh computer systems. AIFF is also used by Silicon Graphics Incorporated.

7. .swf - SWF (acronym of "Shockwave Flash",[1] pronounced swif) is a proprietary file format for multimedia and especially vector graphics. It was developed by Macromedia and is now, following their acquisition, coming from Adobe. Intended to be small enough for publication on the web, SWF files can contain animations or applets of varying degrees of interactivity and function. SWF is also sometimes used for creating animated display graphics and menus for DVD movies, and television commercials.

WoW.............the final puzzle piece on the blu-ray's

The format wars have came to an abrupt halt. As of Tuesday, Toshiba's withdrawl from the HD DVD players and PC drives, consumers can breathe easier and whip out their credit cards. Now there are some pro's and con's to this interesting battle.

Pro One: One format will rule them all - meaning that all movie sudios will release their movies on Blu-ray. Which means that consumers can be confident when they purchase the Blu-ray Disc Player because regardless which studio produces and distributes the films, it will be compatible with the Blu-ray player.

Pro Two: All movie collections will play in the Blu-ray Disc player - consumers can put their minds at ease because the HD DVD's will play in this player. With that being said, beware because the older models will not support the Bonus View, or the picture-in-picture, and other features. But..they will play the movie.

Con One: Slowdown of Price Drops - meaning that in 2006, Blu-ray players were introduced at $1000.00. But..acoording to Consumer Electronics Association, the average player was $500.00.
Now let us fast forward to 2007 and the average selling price has dropped to $395.00. Now let us update to 2008, the CEA expects the price to be $307.

Con Two: Fewer Deals - meaning that, will we see the Blu-ray's combined with the HD TV's? Will we see the buy one and get one free? It is true that Blu-ray's should have an investment in the promotions but the predictment on this is fewer promotions than we seen with HD DVD's.

Pro and Con: HD DVD Movies and the Hardware very cheap - meaning that since the movies and players are in the melting pot, we can expect this material at a cheaper price later in the Spring and Summer of 2008.

Acronyms, and other IT terms related to class.

1. The Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a general-purpose markup language.[1] It is classified as an extensible language because it allows its users to define their own elements. Its primary purpose is to facilitate the sharing of structured data across different information systems, particularly via the Internet,[2] and it is used both to encode documents and to serialize data. In the latter context, it is comparable with other text-based serialization languages such as JSON and YAML.[3]

2. SGML - The Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) is a metalanguage in which one can define markup languages for documents. SGML is a descendant of IBM's Generalized Markup Language (GML), developed in the 1960s by Charles Goldfarb, Edward Mosher and Raymond Lorie (whose surname initials were used by Goldfarb to make up the term GML[1]).

3. GML - Generalized Markup Language (GML) is a set of macros that implement intent-based markup tags for the IBM text formatter, "SCRIPT". SCRIPT is the main component of IBM's Document Composition Facility (DCF). A starter set of tags in GML is provided with the DCF product.
GML simplifies the description of a document in terms of its format, organization structure, content parts and their relationship, and other properties. GML markup (or tags) describes such parts as chapters, important sections, and less important sections (by specifying heading levels), paragraphs, lists, tables, and so forth.

4. CDF -Channel Definition Format (CDF) is an XML standard used in conjunction with Microsoft Active Channel and Smart Offline Favorites technologies. Its use is to define a website's content and structure. The standard is somewhat similar to the RSS standard introduced by Netscape several years after CDF was introduced in 1997. The standard and Active Channel were introduced with the launch of Internet Explorer 4.0, while Smart Offline Favorites was introduced with the launch of Internet Explorer 5.0.

5. CML- CML (Chemical Markup Language) is a new approach to managing molecular information using tools such as XML and Java. It was the first domain specific implementation based strictly on XML, the most robust and widely used system for precise information management in many areas. It has been developed over more than a decade by Murray-Rust, Rzepa and others and has been tested in many areas and on a variety of machines.

6. OFX -Open Financial Exchange (OFX) arising from Microsoft's OFC and Intuit's Open Exchange is a data-stream format for exchanging financial information.

7. MathML -Mathematical Markup Language (MathML) is an application of XML for describing mathematical notations and capturing both its structure and content. It aims at integrating mathematical formulae into World Wide Web documents. It is a recommendation of the W3C math working group.

Class Discussion on Feb 18th for IT Foundations

For our classroom discussion we studied the history of xml, html, sgml, and gml. I thought this lecture was very interesting. Our teacher showed us the history of the mark up languages and espcially how to do the xml. XML is Extensible Markup Language. This language specifies a document's stucture and content. It is a simplified version of SGML or a subset which could be called "SGML lite". I found out that this xml makes a document searchabe by a search engine on the internet. XML was developed by the W3C which consists of the XML Working group and the XML Special Interest Group. There are ten goals when working in XML:
1. must be easy to use over the Internet
2. must support a variety of applications
3. must be compatible with SGML
4. must be easy to write programs with that processes XML documents
5. the ideal optional feastures in XML must be kept to a minimum, the ideal would be one.
6. should be clear and easily understood by nonprogrammers
7. should be prepared quickly
8. design must be exact and concise
9. easy to create
10. terseness in XML markup is of minimum importance.

Intel IT studies the impacts:

I went to this blog out of curiousity of another class, I am in which is Network +. This blog had the conclusions of the studies that were conducted by Intel IT on the impacts of streamed client and Virtual Hosted Desktop. The study consisted of computing modules on server and Network utilization. The study concluded that Network utilization was low for Virtual Hosted Desktop, and the server utilization was lower for streaming than the Virtual Hosted Desktop(VHD). This streaming was a lot more efficient for a wider variety of applications.

Keeping up with the Blu-rays..the last piece to the puzzle.

This was an article from the Hollywood Reporter. It seems like Paramount Home Entertainment is also releasing their films on Blu-ray formats. At first, Paromount supported both: the HD DVD and the blu-ray formats, but when Universal Stuidios announced that they would also be in support of the blu-rays, Paramount also jumped on the game board, and became the sixth and final puzzle piece that blu-ray formats needed.

Acronyms, and other IT terms related to class.

Here are the seven terms that were asked in class.

1. CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) - used to describe the presentation of a document that is written in a mark-up language. It's most common application is to style web pages written in HTML and XHTML, but the language can be applied to any kind of XML document.

2. Flicker - a method for comparing images for different Internet Service Providers on your own Web Browser.

3. Facebook - a social networking site, created in 02/2004 buy Mark Zuckerburg, which was a Harvard Student. Then in 9/2006, anyone older than thirteen years of age can join this online networking. It has about 62 million members and the title of the site refers to the paper facebook application writers to customize the look and the styles of the writer's own page.

4. Media Player - a term used to describe computer software that plays back computer software multimedia files. Most media players support an array of media formats, including audio and video files.

5. Podcast - a collection of digital media files which is distributed over the Internet, often used for encryption fields, for playing back on portable media players and personal computers.

6. MetaData - are data about data. An item of metadata may describe an individual dactum, or current item or a collection of data including multiple content items.

7. Meta Tags - information that is inserted into the "head" area of a web page. The most valuable feature is the ability to control the way search engines are describing a web page.






Reference: Google Wikipedia

Visiting a Blog of Interest

I visited this blog out of curiousity. We had talked about it in class last week and I really wanted to see what the IT's of the 2000's had to say about it. It was very interesting espcially the title. If you are into IT, this would be the site for you.

Learning More and More....................................

I am in Internet Foundations II class at my college. We discussed last week about the differences in blog, blogger, blogosphere and how they interact between each other. We had to review sites to see where we could post for free and actually set one up for our class project. I chose Blogger.com. This site is very user friendly and I am enjoying doing this. We also discussed in a little detail what CSS stands for. I found out that CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets. This is used to describe the presentation of a document, mainly a web page. This is written in a mark up language such as HTML AND XHTML. I like this because this language can be used or applied to any kind of xml document, even SVG and XUL. The SVG is also used to help the readers of web pages to define different colors, fonts, and layouts. SVG stands for Scalable Vector Graphics. This also makes the Web Page less complex and provides more accessibility.

It's the Double Wammy with Blu-ray backers.

Sony’s Blu-ray format is being recommended by Best Buy. This is one of the largest U.S. consumer electronics chain. Best Buy will carry the HD DVD, but the Blu-ray format will be on display with more emphasis than the HD DVD. Not only did Best Buy back this new format, Netflix, which is one of the largest online DVD rental services, is going to phase out the HD DVDs and only carry the Blu-ray formats. Now the Blu-ray formats are already being endorsed by the following: Walt Disney, Sony Pictures, Twentieth Fox, Warner Brothers, and MGM. This has the same similarities of Betamax and VHS in the 1980’s over which was the better tape for the consumers eyes. We all remember how the VHS tape won the battle over twenty years ago. Will history repeat itself?