In 1974, Dr. Ed Roberts’ company, MITS, released a personal computer for $395 called the Altair 8800, Engadget reports. It was featured on the cover of Popular Electronics in the January 1975 issue (which cost 75 cents on the newsstand!) and from there, rocketed to success as a household machine.

In response to a letter from two young Computer Science students claiming that they had written a BASIC interpreter for the 8080 microprocessor, Dr. Roberts later contracted a young Bill Gates and Paul Allen to write Altair BASIC, giving the young company Micro-soft a foothold into the future of technology.  Gates and Allen released this statement yesterday in response to the news of Dr. Roberts’ passing:

“Ed was willing to take a chance on us — two young guys interested in computers long before they were commonplace — and we have always been grateful to him… The day our first untested software worked on his Altair was the start of a lot of great things. We will always have many fond memories of working with Ed in Albuquerque, in the MITS office right on Route 66 — where so many exciting things happened that none of us could have imagined back then.”

- from Engadget

To learn more about Roberts’ work and about the rise of the personal computer, check out the documentary “Triumph of the Nerds,” available for free at Drexel Library.  Transcripts provided by PBS can be found here.

Dr. Henry Edward “Ed” Roberts, father of personal computing, passed away yesterday from pneumonia, at age 68.

What’s the deal with Flash on the iPhone?  There have been many reports that a lack of Flash support for the iPhone will continue.  This is despite the fact that more mobile devices including Blackberry, Palm, and even Google Android (custom installs with wide support coming next year), are building up support for the web technology.  Whether you love Flash sites or hate them, Flash is a prevalent technology, meaning that users require some sort of support on popular user agents, and if no support, then a good explanation for its absence.

According to Adobe, the developers of Flash have been attempting for over a year to work with Apple to get Flash loadable on iPhones, but are not getting the support from Apple that they need.  And why not?  According to an article from PC World Magazine, speculation includes two main reasons now.  One, a lack of support for Flash on iPhones based on their one-app-at-a-time functionality, which could make users unable to access other features in Safari or other web browsers on the iPhone.  And two, far more likely also, is Apple’s heavy involvement with the development of HTML 5, which promises to make plugin applications a thing of the past, ultimately.  They’re already testing HTML 5 in browsers.  It is important to note that Apple has not come out and said there will be no Flash support on the iPhone, but chances are, it’s going to take a long time if it comes at all.

So Adobe has come up with a solution.  In an effort to keep Flash relevant, usable, and adaptable on the Internet, according to an article in yesterday’s Computer World, an announcement was made at the Adobe Max conference that Adobe Systems has developed a workaround for Flash developers who want to work with the iPhone.  It will not be able to run in the Safari browser due to Apple’s license terms, and will not be able to compile runtime code.  It will, however, allow Flash developers to compile things written for other mobile devices, and reinterpret them as standalone applications for the iPhone.

This feature will initially be available in Flash CS5 Professional only, out in beta soon.  If it solves the problem of Flash on the iPhone, we can look forward to its adoption in other versions of the Flash CS5 software as well.

According to news released on the official Google Blog this morning, Google Apps is finally, truly out of beta.  This includes Google Calendar, Docs, GTalk, and of course GMail.  The “beta” is being removed from all logos today and the party hats are going on.

The Google folks aren’t resting on their laurels for long though.  According to an addition Google Enterprise Blog entry, Google’s efforts to be adopted by small to middling business companies will be strengthened in the coming weeks, with additional enterprise features for Premier accounts, such as email delegation (send or filter emails on behalf of another person) and email retention (so that IT admins can determine when a corporate email should be purged) currently in serious beta, to be rolled out soon.

They’ve even made it easy to restore the “beta” label to the GMail logo under the “Labs” tab in your settings, for users who just prefer that look. They’ve thought of everything!

According to W3.org, the Mobile Web Best Practices (MWBP) Working Group and the Web Access Initiative (WAI) Education and Outreach Working Group yesterday released a final draft of “Relationship Between MWBP and WCAG.”

This document is one of several new writings to come out of W3 regarding the mobile web and content accessibility standards.  As more and more mobile devices gain access to the interwebs, more standards arise.

The Mobile Web Best Practices 1.0 Guidelines came out as a recommendation in July 2008, providing the first real list of common problems with mobile-accessed sites, as well as what developers can do to avoid these problems.

Not long after, the WAI published a document called “Web Content Accessibility and Mobile Web: Making a Web Site Accessible Both for People with Disabilities and for Mobile Devices,” in which the hypothesis was stated that web accessibility problems for users with disabilities and web accessibility problems for mobile devices tend to overlap in many areas.  By learning about how to develop for one, meeting the standards of the other is suddenly much less daunting.

The draft serves as a last-chance piece of public review material before the draft’s status moves to W3C Working Group Note.  Check it and its supporting documents out here:

• Web Content Accessibility and Mobile Web: Making a Web Site Accessible Both for People with Disabilities and for Mobile Devices – People are encouraged to read this one first
• Relationship between Mobile Web Best Practices (MWBP) and Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG)
• Shared Web Experiences: Barriers Common to Mobile Device Users and People with Disabilities
• Mobile Web Best Practices 1.0

As Earth Month draws to a close, here are some tools and resources to help web designers work greener. The people at StressDesign, a New York-based brand design company, released the Windpower Logo, a sleek logo representing wind power and green design, meaning that a site using that logo was developed and is maintained with green technology.

If you’re going green in your site hosting/design and want to utilize the Windpower Logo, you can get the full (Open Source!) deal here, at Windpowerlogo.com.  You can also be exceptionally nerdy and become a fan of the Windpower logo on Facebook.

Green web hosting is also becoming an in-demand resource for designers.  The key difference between regular web-hosting and green is mainly offset of energy use through carbon offset or wind energy, and housing the servers in a “green” location.  Web-Hosting Geeks has a good list of the Best Eco-friendly Web Hosting providers based on review, space, pricing, etc.

Drexel Libraries has some interesting books for website and graphic designers wishing to go green.  Everything from what type of ink to request from commercial printers to what source of energy should power your site servers can be found in these and other resources:

• Eco design : the sourcebook / Alastair Fuad-Luke.
• Green graphic design / by Brian Dougherty ; with Celery Design Collaborative.
• Green technology and design for the environment / Samir B. Billatos, Nadia A. Basaly.

And if you’re just looking for a good, thought-provoking to round out Earth Month, check out any of the following:

• Hot, flat, and crowded : why we need a green revolution– and how it can renew America / Thomas L. Friedman.
• As the world burns : 50 simple things you can do to stay in denial / Derrick Jensen and Stephanie McMillan.
• Eco-warriors : understanding the radical environmental movement / Rik Scarce ; foreword by David Brower.

In 2001, with help from Duke’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain, the Creative Commons Corporation was formed.  Their mission was to create a set of licenses in the vein of GNU GPL that would allow creative works to be published and shared with a varying level of distribution restrictions.  The thought behind this was to encourage sharing of creative products–films, images, songs, etc–to encourage and inspire others in artistic/creative pursuits, and to expand the creative product’s viewing audience.

In 2006, the band Pearl Jam became one of the first highly commercial users of Creative Commons, licensing the video for their song “Life Wasted” under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-NoDerivs license.  This meant that anyone could view or share the video with others but in presenting it, could not pass it off as his/her own work and specifically had to give proper credit as specified by the band, could not make money off of the video, and could not make works deriving anything from the video.

This may sound somewhat locked down, but bear in mind that otherwise, many music videos are technically illegal to share with others.  This is when “Terms of Use” violations pop up on Youtube.  Under the CC license that the band chose, the music video was openly and legally offered for download from several websites, including the ubiquitous BitTorrent.

Since 2006, many musicians are turning to Creative Commons to license not just videos, but also music in general.  In 2008, the band Nine Inch Nails released two albums under the CC Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share-Alike license.  A detailed description of this CC music movement can be found here.

Now, Creative Commons is being used for everything from music to film to the web.  And not just any sites; massive media and data sources like Internet Archive, Flickr, DeviantArt, and Newgrounds are all under some variation of the Creative Commons license.  WordPress.com and Blogger-hosted blogs, the MITOpenCourseware course management system, and even the deservedly cult-hit web comic xkcd also utilize Creative Commons.

So what does this mean?  As of right now, chances are, you have published something under a Creative Commons license.  If you pull photos from a Flickr feed and post them on your Facebook wall, you are agreeing to the Creative Commons license that applies to those photos.  If you quote someone’s WordPress blog post in your own blog, this applies.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing either.  Creative Commons is a part of the copyleft movement, and as stated above, is meant to aid in opening access to data, particularly online data and media.  In the new age of social networking and publishing, a wealth of information in all formats is becoming available for consumption.  Rather than resist the ease of information spread, many websites and even commercial artists or entities are jumping on the copyleft bandwagon.  By doing this, they are allowing their information to be spread, thereby gaining notoriety for themselves.  They are also encouraging others to share the information they cull.

Creative Commons use is growing and evolving.  CCLearn has recently formed, a website dedicated to education about and the circulation of open education resources.  And most recently, MSNBC reported that Uncensored Interview is releasing a large collection of their videos in Ogg Theora under the CC Attribution license.  Under this new license, CC creative director Eric Steuer reported that Uncensored Interview hopes that they “are making a clear statement that allowing the sharing and creative reuse of material — even for commercial purposes — can enhance the value of that material for its creators. In promoting a ‘some rights reserved’ approach to distribution, Uncensored Interview is opening up a wide variety of possibilities…”

Those possibilities are available to all users of Creative Commons licenses now.  As the license becomes more widely used and more popularly favored, more data will become available to everyone.  For the future of open data in general, this can only be a boon.

Sources/More Information:

• Creative Commons Wiki
• List of CC Projects (Wikipedia)
• Creative Commons Network
• MIT OpenCourseware Terms of Use
• Creative Commons on Twitter

One of many buzzwords peppering the Web 2.0 blogosphere is actually a mneumonic, “AJAX.”  AJAX stands for “Asynchronous Javascript and XML.”  One of the most notable features of AJAX, which is basically an extension of Javascript, is the XMLHttpRequest object.  This object can talk to other pages on the server, written in PHP, ASP, and other languages to retrieve data and display it dynamically on a page.  AJAX has opened many doors to web developers, allowing data to be easily refreshed without refreshing a page itself.

Additionally, Flash-like effects such as certain animations or drag-and-drop can be implemented on pages using AJAX.  This comes in handy, as a small but significant percentage of Internet users do not have the Flash browser plugin or have an out-of-date version of the player.  This can also help with certain less Flash-friendly mobile apps. (more…)

This past Sunday, an article on Consumerist.com brought to light a new aspect of Facebook’s Terms of Use:

“Facebook’s terms of service (TOS) used to say that when you closed an account on their network, any rights they claimed to the original content you uploaded would expire. Not anymore.

Now, anything you upload to Facebook can be used by Facebook in any way they deem fit, forever, no matter what you do later.  Want to close your account? Good for you, but Facebook still has the right to do whatever it wants with your old content. They can even sublicense it if they want.”

-Chris Walters, Consumerist.com

This article sparked such concern among Facebook users that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has actually come forward, issuing a statement meant to clarify these new terms of use:

“…if you send a message to another user (or post to their wall, etc…), that content might not be removed by Facebook if you delete your account (but can be deleted by your friend)…Even if the person deactivates their account, their friend still has a copy of that message.  We think this is the right way for Facebook to work, and it is consistent with how other services like e-mail work. One of the reasons we updated our terms was to make this more clear,” Zuckerberg is quoted as saying.

These new TOS seem to be clarifying the fact that, if you deactivate your account, there is no guarantee that all of the information you have put up on Facebook will go away with it.  In many cases, things like messages, wall postings, photos, and virtual gifts remain on the site with only your profile no longer linked.

Additionally, when a user has Facebook email notifications set, this sends a transcript of a message or wall posting to his/her email, creating another copy of the data.

Essentially, Zuckerberg’s claim is that nothing has changed about the privacy of your information on Facebook.  Earlier Beacon concerns notwithstanding, it seems that Facebook is still not as close to self-awareness as these last few days have made users fear.

The full transcript of the clarification can be found at the end of the Consumerist.com article and in this USA Today article.

Sun has announced a new Java platform aimed at programming for mobile devices, JavaFX.  Among those said to be supporting this new language and pledging to use it are the likes of Sony, Sprint, and MobiTV.

Adobe and Microsoft are also developing new and better ways to integrate their famous technologies into programming for mobile apps.  While there are already an estimated 2.6 billion mobile devices already use Java regularly, with over 6 billion developers worldwide already writing in the language specifically for mobile devices.  GPSs, bluetooth devices, and address books are some examples of what the new JavaFX platform will be able to do quickly, easily, and perhaps most importantly, very securely.

Full details can be found at TechNewsWorld, here: Sun Brews New Java Platform to Go.

Geek Feminism Wiki is an interesting resource for women in technology, CS, gaming, engineering, and other “geek communities,” detailing the issues faced by women in these areas.  It provides a brief explanation of Feminism and how it applies to the “geek” aka technology community.

Some of the most interesting reads on the wiki so far include:

• List of historical women geeks – a great list of names of famous women with a short blurb about who they are
• List of women in Open Source – a terrific jumping-off point to find out what women have done and are doing in the OS movement
• Getting girls into IT – What programmers and educators can do to encourage young women to enter the field of technology
• Blogging – an interesting history of issues that women bloggers face online

What’s so great about this site is that, as a wiki, you have the power to contribute and many of the sections of the wiki are off to a great start but are clearly asking to be filled with contributions.  Sections are ready for women in science, engineering, and even “hacker” culture, but they need more information.  As this wiki grows, it will continue to grow into an impressive resource for young people and educators in the field of Information Technology.