Various developments in the field of Computing.
Well I was helping out with the NLC CfE roadshow. My theme was free or at least cheap ICT resources. I have tried to keep the software as multi platform as I could and have stayed away from Linux only products. I know that I should have more primary school resources, but I just don’t have the experience with them and will post an entry in a week or so with some educational games.
If you want the original file then please just ask.
CfE4Free Software
Its always handy if you have a scanning electron microscope in your room.
Microprocessors are small, but its not until you get them under a microscope that you find out how small.
We have been chosen as one of the pilot schools for the roll out of Glow Mail in the authority. This should happen this week but training will take longer.
LTS has this to say about Glow Mail
Glow Mail
Glow mail is a web based email system integrated into Glow. Anyone familiar with web based email will instantly be familiar with Glow Mail. The benefit of using Glow Mail is the single sign-on. Users will have access to an inbox within Glow without having to visit another website. As soon as a user logs in to Glow, they will have instant access to any new mail waiting for them.
You can read the training notes here
I see a lot of powerpoints in use and I have made use of quite a few over the years, a lot of them are weak at best. I found this article while looking for a way to improve what I was offering. It makes good clear sense and although I may not agree with every dot and comma of it (although I am doing most of them already), I do intent to make better use of themes and colours.
Remember the contents of external sites can change without warning and can not be constantly content checked.
Let me take you back to the early 90’s. PCs ran DOS and windows 3.1 was what you used to get Word working. 286’s were dead and 486’s were the new king (types of processor 80286 & 80486), no one had heard of a Pentium and graphics cards had 512KB of ram on them. This was the era of 16 bit computing, of Mega Drives and SNES (Sony didn’t bring out the Playstation till 1994/95).
Minecraft is a game that captures that spirit, blocky graphics, midi sound & great game play. Minecraft is a sandbox game where players work in huge levels to create structures, think lego but MUCH bigger. You can work in single or multiplayer servers and the levels are all randomly created.As a games design resource it might not be up there with Kodu or a games development environment like UDK but it does allow kids (and teachers) to work together and build incredible structures. Its a long way off to release but give the free version a shot.
Here are some stats lifted off the site today. It costs 10 euros and was developed by a small team of programmers (one or two). 544236 people have purchased the game, this makes it quite an enterprise example as well.
Statistics
In the last 24 hours, 19384 people registered, and 6212 people bought the game.
Games started in the last 24 hours:
Minecraft Alpha: 60399
Minecraft Classic: 47565
3368 players online, in 1047 servers.
1717135 registered users, of which 544236 (31.69%) have bought the game.
China has now got the fastest computer on the planet according to the top 500 list.
These super computers are custom built to allow organisations to carry out research that requires a large amount of maths. They often cost hundreds of thousands of pounds and are well used. However, there is another way to create a super computer on the cheap and that is called clustering. A cluster is a network of computers that share processing between them. Software (often free) allows clusters to be created by home and school users. There is even a competition to find the best one, here is view of what is like to compete.
Add new and exciting content and tools to your sites with Google Gadgets. These little snippets of code allow all sorts of content to be added to your school website or some blogs.
Korea are planning ultra fast Internet access for their home market.
In the UK we get a few Megabits on our internet access (a bit is a 1 or a 0, a letter requires 8 bits to be sent. 1 Megabit = 1,000,000 bits). Korea are planning to roll out Gigabit (1,000,000,000 bits), this would allow them to access a lot of content very quickly. However, connection speed is not the only factor when connecting to the internet. The speed of the server you are connecting to and the number of users sharing the connection (contention), also play a huge roll in the Internet experience.
To give you some idea of how fast this is. The school computers are connected to each other at 100 Mbs (Megabits/second), Korea will have 10 times this speed connecting their houses together.
This story hit The Register today. An ex-employee planted a program called a logic bomb that would remove data from a companies server on a pre-programed date. What is most striking about the story is number of servers that could have been effected 5,000! That would have taken a lot of work hours to bring them all back on line.
Its not the first time that a company has been effected, a previous logic bomb effected over a 1,000 machines when it went undetected.
The moral here is have a backup but also make sure that only approved people have access to your sensitive information.
The internet is not totally connected with satellites a most of the traffic goes the old way, under the sea.
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