Big news today: a ten-year-old lawsuit about Google Book Search has been resolved in Google's favor -- basically, the law has ruled that it was okay for Google to scan in-copyright books because it had no plans to publish the whole version of those in-copyright books online in http://books.google.com. Compare this to what we've heard about celebrity photographs and Pinterest. Here's a quotation from the story:
"When Google started work on its book search engine a decade ago, the company realized that getting the approval of copyright holders would be a logistical nightmare. Not only would major publishers likely demand high fees for permission to scan their books, but for many older works, it would be difficult to even figure out who the appropriate copyright holder was. So Google took a gamble, scanning library books without seeking copyright holders' permission and relying on copyright's fair use doctrine as a justification."
This is an article about the PostgreSQL development team has announced the release of PostgreSQL 9.3, the latest version of the world's leading open source relational database system.
Mostly useful for people who use Chrome, but most of these undoubtedly have analogues or versions in Firefox. A lot of good extensions for news, productivity and research, plus some stuff that's just plain cool.
While this website is helpful, many of the apps do not seem to be useful to everyday browsing, excluding a few in the Education section of the article. Granted, I still went and downloaded a lot of those apps because, as Nathan said above me, they're pretty cool.
Browser extensions are definitely neat -- all the browsers have them now, pretty much. Firefox was the first browser to be extensible like this, so there tend to be a lot of extensions available for it. Zotero, which we're going to learn about next week, started out as a Firefox extension.
I thought about defining "extension" in core concepts, but it's maybe a little more advanced than that. Extensions (also called "add-ons" and "plugins") are basically little apps that "plug in" to a big app.
I think it's done in HTML5, which may be why I don't get any sound for it in Chrome -- not all browsers can manage all features of the new, drastically revised version of HTML yet.