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The article is an excerpt from "Instant: The Story of Polaroid" by Christopher Bonanos. The Polaroid is described as 'that thing that happened before Instagram happened' in the comment proceeding the excerpt. The excerpt tells the tale of how the first Polaroid camera was revealed to the public in 1947 at a scientific meeting of the Optical Society of America by Edwin Land. It is a story of innovation and breakthrough. Previously, cameras would produce negatives on film which would be sent to labs, or developed in home-made darkrooms. This process was difficult, time consuming, and could potentially fail. The Polaroid would change all that. Land took a picture of himself and set a 50 second timer for it to develop. He described how a thick chemical reagent was being reacted with the negative, the same stuff that normally went down a darkroom drain. This was one of Land's biggest breakthroughs. With the 50 seconds up, he peeled back the print, revealing a sepia (or as we described it: a browned-up-a-notch) portrait of himself. This was monumental. A process which normally took a week was done in under a minute. The story of the instant camera raced across America, landing Land in the New York Times and Life magazine. This article relates to the present, where cameras are generally smaller and predominantly digital. As a class, we recently watched a video on micro-technology. Over the years, scientists and engineers have been on the constant struggle to make things smaller, faster, and more efficient. The camera is no exception. Today's cameras contain microchips and processors of their own, in a compact space. Recent Polaroids can print in colour. In a world driven by invention and innovation, many new things may be introduced in our life time. Perhaps one will be as impactful as the Polaroid camera.

This article talks about how they are thinking of making ATM machines that can read your palm. It can access your account just by scanning your hand. Then you can easily take out money without scrambling for your credit card. Now you don't need to worry about losing your credit card or even forgetting your pin number. I believe this is a good idea because it can make it easier for everyone to just scan their hands and get the proper amount of money out. I personally like this method better than using credit cards. This relates to the course because it takes a lot of programming to get these ATM machines to work, and also the actual ATM machine is a hardware.

Ogaki Kyoritsu Bank in Japan has revealed that it will introduce the nation's first ATM that lets you withdraw money just by scanning your palm. You wouldn't even need your credit card to verify that you can withdraw money from your account. I think this is a great idea. In Canada, we already have the device where it scans your chip, but it doesn't always work. For example, my dad had to send back his credit card 3 times before he finally got the chip to work. This is also very safe because every person has a different hand shape and "design" on their palms, no one would be able to imitate it. I hope that they come out with this machine in Canada soon, i'm sure it would be less stressful for many people.

This article talks about how in Japan they will soon have ATMs that let you withdraw money just by scanning your palm. This will come in handy when you have lost your card. Customers would first have to show identification for verification then they would scan your palm and can easily withdraw money from the bank. This new type of technology can be convenient because there would be less people stealing credit cards from other, and can withdraw anytime even when you forget your card.

Well, I bet no one saw this one coming! /s  So yes, the new iPad will probably be announced on March 7. People are speculating that it will have double the screen resolution of the iPad and iPad 2 (which can be worrying because it brings more fragmentation into the app store), along with the Quad-Core A5X processor. It's also speculated that this may not have a Home Button, which I really hope does not happen.. Using those multitouch gestures to get back to the homescreen will be a pain in apps that actually use multitouch. It is also said that it will have 4G LTE, which is nice.

Well, I'm guessing time is almost over for selling your iPad 2. March 7th the new iPad 3 is coming out. What makes this ipad much greater is that it has no regular display as the old ipad. It has a higher resolution than the ipad 1 and 2. Apparently it is much darker than the current ipads that are in stock. This is probably going to turn out to be the world's most popular tablet. 

Sir, are you going to go to this event? I bet he secretly will.. OFFICIALS SAY THAT THE IPAD THREE EVENT IS SAID FOR MARCH 7TH IN SAN FRANCISCO! The event will be held at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in S.F at 10AM PST, on Wednesday March 7th, and it will be filmed covers live as it happens. The iPad three will have a higher resolution than the iPad 1 & 2. They say that the product picture looks darker than current iPad models. Many cannot wait till this product comes out. WELL I WAS JUST INFORMED THAT IT CAME OUT TODAY! 

Who doesn't know about the very popular video game: Legend of Zelda. If you don't, you are not a gamer. This was probably one of my favorite games growing up as a kid. P

I found this article interesting because of what Facebook is saying. They are saying that teens don't think Facebook is popular anymore to that age group so with the purchase of WhatsApp, teens will be able to enjoy Facebook again. WhatsApp is this hugely popular cross-platform messaging app that allows users to chat with individuals or groups, as well as sending files and pictures back and forth. The cost for this purchase was $4 billion dollars and $12 billion in Facebook shares. I believe this is a good purchase because this will increase Facebook's popularity even more than what it already is

Facebook has just bought the messaging app Whatsapp for a $16 billion. Whatsapp is a messaging app where people with different phones that having different operating systems such as android, iphone, windows and blackberry, can chat. I personally think Facebook buying this app was a really bad idea. I use this app frequently to talk to friends and family and when Facebook took control of the app on Saturday, it was terrible. The servers crashed and were down for most of the day and I was hardly able to use it. Whatsapp should of stayed as its own company and never should of made a deal with Facebook.

some random stuff 

Costa the killer is back and kidnaps Jason again.

Uhhhhhmmm .... Ok

Pedro Alejandro has created an alarm app that is called "Wake N Shake.' There is no snooze button. The only way to shut off the alarm is by shaking your iPhone. Check out the video above for a  quick demonstration. 

At a minimum we'll probably see Apple TV start using the same A5 processor used in the iPhone 4S and iPad 2 in the future. An A5 processor would make the device work faster, and would allow Apple TV to play back 1080p video.

Electric vehicle technology is nothing new. The earliest carriage manufacturers began toiling with battery-powered cars around the 1830s and in 1899 the Belgium-built "La Jamais Contente" set the land speed world record at 66MPH. But two years prior to that in 1897, the first commercial fleet of EV vehicles were represented as New York City taxis. Back then, drivers had three different engine types to choose from-steam, combustion or electric-and it just so happened that electric was the most popular because of the ease in gear changing and lack of vibration. Also, steam engines could take up to 45 minutes to start in cold weather.

British broadcaster Sky has begun making its 3D content available to users of the Nintendo 3DS following a deal with Nintendo which was announced way back in January. The first 3D content is a trailer for the upcoming Sky series Meerkats 3D, but there is more on the way.

Following its $8.5 billion acquisition back in May, Microsoft has officially welcomed Skype into its family. The world's most popular VoIP service will become a new business division within Microsoft, and will remain focused on its goal of "connecting all people across all devices and accelerating both companies' efforts to transform real-time communications for consumers and enterprise customers."

Blackberry users are mad. And why shouldn't they be? RIM went down. RIM is what MAKES Blackberrys. The outage that lasted more than three days has now been resolved, and to make amends for it, RIM does not only apologize, but also offers 12 free apps. Woo hoo. But, there is also a month of free technical support. So, there is something to gain. Millions of customers worldwide were left without access to various apps, email, etc. Is this a big enough apology?

After a BlackBerry service outage that lasted more than three days, RIM is trying to make fix their mistakes  by offering them a selection of premium apps for free, as well as one month of free technical support. The RIM service outage was the biggest one they have ever had, and alot of customers are starting to switch, but RIM ensures this will never happen again... yeah right...

All Blackberry users including myself were all ticked off after the 3 day service outage. As an apology, RIM (company that makes Blackberrys) decided to offer 12 free apps for Blackberry users. (Bejeweled, Texas Hold'em Poker 2, Bubble Bash and Shazam Encore) On top of that RIM has given us one month of technical support. I admit that RIM is trying hard to get back on track but sadly this isn't going to keep customers from switching phones. :$

It's now been three days since RIM's BlackBerry services went down, leaving users all over the world stranded without BlackBerry Messenger, email, and internet access. Despite promises on Tuesday that services were restored and working normally, millions of users have continued to report issues with their devices.

Ford vehicles got a major upgrade! The vehicle will read you text messages while you drive and you are able to reply back. This was done so that drivers will reduce texting while driving. It will make things THAT much safer. Hopefully people will take advantage of this upgrade and car accidents will be reduced to a certain amount.

When most thieves commit a crime they try to get away from police. However looks like karma got back at a man who stole a woman's cell phone. He tried uploading a picture onto facebook through her phone but the phone was set to automatically post it to her wall. This gives police pretty much all they need to catch him.

There are two main types of jailbreaks - tethered and untethered. Tethered means you have to connect your device to your computer every time it's powered off in order to maintain your jailbreak. Untethered means you can reboot at will without having to jack in that cable. If you update before one of these becomes available, then you will lose all of your Cydia apps and tweaks until you can re-jailbreak. (And even then, you may have to start from scratch if you don't back it all up. More on that below.)

Ok for some reason the comment isn't pooping up... i'll write it again... Now Apple had recently been put in a chokehold by a couple of reasons, so Google has a chance to saddle up and steal the show, but time will tell if they can pull it off or screw up, FOCUS GOOGLE!

 THIS IS SO ODD?! Facebook says it will soon allow you to get help from your friends when you get locked out of your Facebook account. According to a post on Facebook's official Security page, you'll be able to designate three to five friends as "Trusted Friends" who will be sent special codes in the event that you're locked out of your Facebook account and unable to access your email.

A new look for BlackBerry but without RIM? You could do the same amount of things that you can do with your BlackBerry now but its just without RIM. It also has a lot of different features too. With a stainless steel face, leather back, a feeling of tenuous superiority. It also has exclusive BBM pin. So in the end it seems okay with just some minor changes.