Two months ago, my XBOX 360 that I purchased over a year ago came down with the infamous “Ring of Death,” a problem that all too many Xbox owners are aware of. In short, the Ring of Death makes your Xbox unusable due to a flaw in the connection between the CPU and motherboard. Microsoft has sold over 11 million Xbox systems and some estimate that between one third and one half of these suffer the flaw that results in the red ring of death symptom. Like Vista, this has proven to be a PR nightmare for the product line. As a result, Microsoft has extended its standard year warranty by an extra year so that any and all Xbox owners who experience the problem can get their box repaired for free by mailing in the unit with the supplied shipping box for UPS.
The fix has cost Microsoft nearly two billion dollars. The Ring of Death is also a classic example of how the Internet has become a highly used research tool to troubleshoot and find home remedies for broken products. One can go to YouTube and find dozens of videos showing how common users have temporarily remedied the Ring of Death through the “Towel Trick”. Using the towel trick, one wraps their Xbox in 3 towels and leaves the unit on for at least twenty minutes. Encasing the box in towels causes the unit to overheat the unit which actually reseats the CPU in the motherboard by heating up the solder connections. The fix is only temporary as it only lasts for a week or so, but allows you to finish your game.
With Apple continuing to dominate the headlines and industry buzz with one acclaimed release after another, it’s easy to forget that the so-called ”Evil Empire” has been rather quietly refining their Surface computing technology. We’re talking about more than multi-touch features for your mobile phone; Surface is perhaps most intriguing for its’ “surface” adaptability and potential virtual applications. Check out this video demonstration of Microsoft’s Sphere prototype. I’m an Apple guy myself, but I must admit that Sphere could be interesting…
Ryan Rode
Interactive Services Manager
Ashworth University
Thanks to tifotter for permission to use this Photo.
YouTube enthusiasts were denied access to their daily dose of online videos earlier this year when the site went down for two hours back in February. The culprit was not due to any type of hardware failure, but due to the direct efforts of the Pakistani government. Pakistan, like a number of countries, such as China, Thailand and Turkey to name a few—regularly attempt to monitor internet traffic by their citizens and block designated sites, especially YouTube.
Pakistan Telecom, and the country’s main ISP PCCW, blocked access by hijacking YouTube web address. Anyone based in the country who then attempted to visit the video sharing site was redirected to an unknown alternative site. Unfortunately, the hijack didn’t stop there, and was leaked to the wider Internet.
This meant that ISPs around the world started blocking access too, which resulted in the site being unobtainable by users in Germany, China, USA, Russia, the UK, and Australia. The problem lasted for approximately two hours, before YouTube engineers issued a statement concerning the problem, and PCCW stopped the blockage.
The event has proven to be more than just an embarrassing mishap for the Pakistani government, but has brought up concerns as to the vulnerability of the Internet. Is it now possible for a country to bring down designated website traffic world wide?
There are not many people who can seriously put into question the projected dominance of Google search technology in the future evolution of the Internet. Through his brilliantly engineered software architecture and conceptual maps of its' potential applications, supergenius Tim Berners-Lee, the acknowledged inventor of the World Wide Web, has for years been carrying his message of a "semantic web" that will make the current incarnation of the web seem like your Dad's Rolodex by comparison.
In Berners-Lee vision, the next generation of web technology will be semantic, i.e. all data will be interconnected and capable of communicating with other "information" through a common language so speak. The following article discusses the development of the semantic web alongside the related, but not parallel development of Google’s search, mapping, and tracking applications. Berners-Lee is not anti-Google, but he is passionately against the centralization of web data and any form of proprietary control over Internet content.
I also encourage you to check out this very insightful video presentation in which Berners-Lee takes you on a virtual tour of the Web from its’ beginnings into tomorrow. This is fascinating stuff. Please share your thoughts with the Ashworth Blog community after brainstorming on your own.
Thanks to conskeptical for permission to use this Photo.
Have you ever wanted to revisit a link that was fifty or more characters long and was impossible to remember? Have you tried to tell someone about a site with an extensively elongated URL? A great example is the link for a specific link on YouTube.
If you access such a site from the same computer all the time you can simply save that site as a favorite in your browser. But what if you want to access the site from any computer you want? Here is a great website to help you do just that,
This is a nasty link that only someone with a photographic memory could possibly remember. Simply go to tinyurl.com and paste in the link. Then assign it an easy to remember name such as
win2008book_i_want
And save it. You would then access the link by simply typing
You have to type in unique names that no one else has used before because each link has to be unique. Most easy links such as www.tinyurl.com/Brad are already used. Of course, like most technological tools, this site poses a security risk to organizations as well as a great benefit. People who use computers at organizations that utilize web filtering, such as schools and businesses, can create personal custom links for websites that are filtered by the organization, allowing them full access to these sites. For this reason, Tiny Url is sometimes blocked by organizations to prevent this. I recommend that you try it out for yourself…
Johnny Lee is a brilliant technologist who’s become a YouTube star through his amazing demonstration of Wii remote hacks. After watching this video, you’ll never look at your Wii the same again. I love this video because Lee once again proves how integral human creativity and ingenuity are to the process of technological innovation. In this case, a relatively unknown guy like Lee on center stage at the famed TED conference, reinventing the very essence of what an already popular technology’s applications can ultimately be. These hacks are insane. Don’t miss this one…
Thanks to 3ep Media for permission to use this Photo.
I received a couple messages yesterday from student bloggers who were having difficulty embedding videos on their blog. In the spirit of open community resources, I’d like to provide you with the same wordpress plugin that I’ve found very easy to install and quite reliable. Here it is. Let me know how it works out for your blog!
Blip.tv is regarded as “the world’s leading videoblogging and podcasting service,” but it’s their community based ethos and collaborative principles that really persuaded our Ashworth University Student Life team to deveop our own television channel through this incredible company. Blip.tv’s video publishing, sharing, and syndication features make it easy for anyone to get their message heard in the increasingly crowded online video marketplace. We here at Ashworth University would like to thank Blip.tv for their outstanding service. We’d also like to encourage you to check out our Ashworth University Television channel on Blip.tv. If you are a video content creator and would like to work with Ashworth University, please feel free to contact me at the following email address to discuss the possibilities. Thank You!
Thanks to Jamie Hladky for permission to use this Photo.
You have to learn how to crawl before you learn how to walk, but once you learn a foundation of IT skills in Ashworth University’s information technology programs and anchor yourself in the IT labor force, here are the ten hottest tech skill sets you should aim to learn in the next five years according to Tech Republic.
Voice over IP - sales of pure IP PBX systems for the first quarter of 2007 increased 76% over the first quarter of the previous year
Unified Communications - the convergence of different communications technologies, such as e-mail, voicemail, text messaging, and fax
Hybrid Networks – Networks are no longer all Windows or all Linux, they are a hodgepodge of different systems and IT pros need to learn more than one of them.
Wireless Technologies – everything’s going wireless it seems.
Remote User Support – with more employees working off-site today, help support personnel must provide remote support to anywhere.
Mobile User Support – more and more organizations are providing blackberries and other smart portable devices for their employees that must be supported.
Software-as-a-Service – or SaaS as it is referred to in technical articles. With the popularity of Web 2.0, the trend is to now provide software applications over the Internet rather than installing them on each and every computer.
Virtualization – With the dominance of VMWare and the soon to be released 2008 Virtual Application from Microsoft, virtualization is THE buzzword today along with its countless benefits.
IPv6 – Although this standard has not grown in popularity as of yet, mostly because the wide usage of NAT has allowed us to not run out of IP addresses on the Internet as fast as predicted, this standard is going to come about within the next five years.
Security - A skill set that will probably always be in the top 10.
It appears as if all the rumors about Flickr’s development of new video sharing applications has finally become a reality. The kings of community based online photo sharing now provide their pro users with the ability to upload and of course share 90 second videostreams within their traditional photopools. Click here to learn more about Flickr’s exciting news. This is an intriuging advancement that I’m going to be following closely, especially since I think there are many innovative ways we can utilize these new video features on our own Ashworth University Flickr page. We encourage all our students to join our Flickr community and begin to share photos and now even videos from your everyday lives! If you need any help getting started on Flickr, just send an email to aublogspot@ashworthuniversity.edu and I’ll show you how everything works. I look forward to hearing from you.
Subscribe to Feed
