Funny Comic Friday!

Happy Friday everyone! Thought I'd give you all some IT humor...

Pownce gets eaten by SixApart!

Well to be honest, I kind of saw this coming; not so much being bought by SixApart, but Pownce being a failure, albeit a cool one. For those of you who don't even know what Pownce is, its pretty similar to Twitter except with more features. I believe that there was a set limit to what you could type, but you could post videos, images, text, files and events. A pretty neat concept, no question about it, but it seems as though people do not want that. I had a Pownce account (didn't use it much) and I thought it would evolve to be something, but the major thing for me was that it did not have mobile texting updates. I use Twitter primarily on my phone and on my laptop, so take one of those things out of the equation and there's one client gone.

Co-creator Leah Culver had a "bittersweet" post on the Pownce blog about the acquisition:

We have some very big news today at Pownce. We will be closing the service and Mike and I, along with the Pownce technology, have joined Six Apart, the company behind such great blogging software as Movable Type, TypePad and Vox. We’re bittersweet about shutting down the service but we believe we’ll come back with something much better in 2009. We love the Pownce community and we will miss you all.

A sad day indeed for all Powncers, but I'm sure SixApart (creators of TypePad, Vox and Moveable Type) will do something cool with it. Our friends over at TechCrunch posted this growth trend chart (thanks Google) showing the growth of Twitter vs Pownce:

Taking a moment to check out Konqueror

Here at Allegheny College, the Linux/Fedora computer labs in the Computer Science department have, at the moment, two browsers: the obvious Firefox and the lesser known Konqueror.

Konqueror? What is that?

Konqueror is an Open Source browser for the Linux platform. Actually, I take that back, it is more than simply a web browser; Konqueror can read files on its browser (like PDFs, Word Documents, heck I've even viewed Java code on it). It also acts as a file manager, depending how you set it up, it can organize even the largest filesystems. If you run Linux, I highly recommend Konqueror.

...Though I'm still a huge Firefox/Thunderbird guy.

(For Linux environment only...KDE required)

MIT OpenCourseWare

Recently, while attending my collegiate level classes, something came up that provided me with great interest: MIT OpenCourseWare. For those who have always wanted to see what class material is like at MIT, this is perfect for you. They outline the course in a pretty detailed manner. Not only that, they also upload the lecture notes as well as the homework or in-class assignments for each class (I am currently looking at the Computer Science intro class, they focus on Python...awesome). Pretty cool stuff, so if you ever want to learn about a topic in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering or even Literature, check out MIT OpenCourseWare, you won't regret it!

Stumbled Upon This....

This is just a personal thing for future reference, people where I work always want to know how to convert PDF files to word, well here's the site to do it at...Enjoy!

http://convertpdftoword.net/

WideScreen YouTube!

From TechCrunch

YouTube has apparently changed all videos on its site to play in widescreen format. Because most videos on the site were originally uploaded in a ratio closer to 4:3 (the standard size used on non-HD televisions), it seems that most videos are playing with horizontal black bars on the side.

It seems that Google is either doing A/B testing or that the changes haven’t propogated to all servers (if that’s even possible) - hard refreshing on videos seems to alternate between the standard video player and the widescreen one.

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Nice!

Check it out here

Just a humorous little comic....