Last fall we wrote about how a company named Ultramercial had sued Hulu, YouTube and WildTangent over patent 7,346,545 for requiring people to watch an ad before being able to access content. It resulted in an interesting discussion in our comments, where some patent system defenders insisted that the patent was perfectly legit. Unfortunately, the court disagrees with those folks. It has ruled that the patent is not valid (the ruling covers Hulu and WildTangent — YouTube was dismissed from the case). Perhaps most interesting is the fact that the court chose to use the “machine or transformation test” for judging the patent. While some have read the Bilski ruling to “reject” the “machine or transformation” test, that’s not quite true. It just said that’s not the only test. The court in this case went through an explanation for why it felt this was still an appropriate test:
It is important to note, however, that even after the Supreme Court’s decision in Bilski, the
machine or transformation test appears to have a major screening function–albeit not perfect– that
separates unpatentable ideas from patentable ones. Indeed, four of the Justices, listed on Justice
Stevens’s concurring opinion, would have taken the machine or transformation test to its logical limit to
hold that business methods are categorically unpatentable. Id. at 3257 (Stevens, J., concurring). Joining
a concurring opinion, Justice Scalia, who signed on to parts of the plurality opinion as well, would not
hold all business methods unpatentable, but would agree with Justice Breyer that “not [] many
patentable processes lie beyond [the] reach [of the machine or transformation test].” Id. at 3258 (Breyer,
J., concurring). In sum, at least five (and maybe all) Justices seem to agree that the machine or
transformation test should retain much of its utility after the Supreme Court’s decision in Bilski.
Therefore, even though the machine or transformation is no longer the litmus test for patentability, the
Court will use it here as a key indicator of patentability.
And, using that test, the court finds this particular invention not patentable subject matter. It also points out that the patent is really just covering an abstract idea (the reasoning used by the Supreme Court to reject the Bilski patent):
At the core of the ‘545 patent is the basic idea that one can use
advertisement as an exchange or currency. An Internet user can pay for copyrighted media by sitting
through a sponsored message instead of paying money to download the media. This core principle,
similar to the core of the Bilski patent, is an abstract idea. Indeed, public television channels have used
the same basic idea for years to provide free (or offset the cost of) media to their viewers. At its heart,
therefore, the patent does no more than disclose an abstract idea.
I’m guessing this will likely be appealed, so it should be an interesting case to follow. You can read the full (quite clear) decision below:
We’ve never quite understood the general fears about Google Street View’s photographs, since they’re photographs of public places. However, many still seem somewhat freaked out by it all, and especially in Europe, they’ve continually put new rules and restrictions on Google’s Street View operation. Apparently, in Germany, people can specifically request that Google remove images of certain buildings. Of course, this is silly, and to prove that point, a German photographer is going to go photograph all of those buildings that have been excluded, then upload them to Google’s Picasa image hosting service, link them up to their GPS coordinates, and then “re-connect” them with Google Maps.
He’s basically doing a good job of pointing out how incredibly silly it is to say that you can’t photograph something that’s in public view. Anyone can photograph it, and with today’s technology, those photographs will likely end up online. Pretending that opting out of Google’s Street View protects any sort of privacy is folly, so congrats to Jens Best, for coming up with a simple and effective way of showing that.
Take a little time with this one, zoom it in and out, especially on big cities. Excluding everything but the labels from the map emphasizes the Powers of Ten-like design of highly effective zoomable online maps. (via waxy)
Keeping a house, or even a modest apartment, in tip-top shape can feel overwhelming. The Hierarchy of Cleaning aims to help you prioritize your cleaning needs.
Small Notebook, a lifestyle simplification and organization blog, has shared a clever hierarchy chart to help you focus on what cleaning tasks are important. Organized in a similar fashion to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, the most basic cleaning requirements are on the bottom. Already took a shower? Good, do some laundry. Laundry in the washer? Worry about the dishes and take out the trash. You can work your way all the way up the hierarchy until your floors are clean and you’ve started on the extras like deep and detail cleaning.
While you’re at it, check out our guide to using procedure checklists for flawless task execution. You’d be amazed how much cleaner your place is when you’ve got a solid procedure list to guide you through routine cleaning chores.
Visit the link below to download a printable version. Disagree with the ranking on the Hierarchy of Cleaning? Sound off in the comments to tell us how you’d rank things.
Tootech writes “Using an iPhone to secretly record a conversation is not a violation of the Wiretap Act if done for legitimate purposes, a federal appeals court has ruled. ‘The defendant must have the intent to use the illicit recording to commit a tort of crime beyond the act of recording itself,’ the 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals ruled. Friday’s decision, which involves a civil lawsuit over a secret audio recording produced from the 99-cent Recorder app, mirrors decisions in at least three other federal appeals courts.”
It’s hard to believe that a year has passed since our last WordPress theme collection, but there you have it — the time has come again. Once a year we feature the most useful and interesting WordPress-themes that we are collecting over months and present them in a nice quick overview. The collections from 2007, 2008 and last year are still useful, but some of the themes are outdated or updated now.
Looking back over these previous theme articles, you can clearly see how and why WordPress has rapidly matured into the CMS powerhouse it is today. With all of the features that have been added and improvements made with every new WordPress version and with its ever-increasing popularity among the design and development community, the quality of free themes is evident. Developers are continually pushing WordPress’ boundaries, giving us today’s outstanding free theme collection.
Today, we present a fresh collection of useful WordPress themes. Please notice that some themes are a bit older, but they are included because we haven’t featured them last time. This round-up picks up where we left off last year: most themes below were released between June 2009 and August 2010. We’ve also split this collection into the following categories: gallery and portfolio themes, themes for bloggers, e-Commerce WordPress themes, clean themes, magazine-style themes, minimal themes, mobile themes; pre-launch themes; and finally “Themes That Take WordPress Beyond.”
Cumulus (Free version) (demo) Cumulus is a very clean and calm portfolio theme. It contains a large block for featured projects and images and a nifty blog posts navigation in the sidebar.
Imbalance (demo) Free wordpress theme in modern-minimalist style. Imbalance is a very user friendly, jQuery powered theme which looks really well under any browser and OS. Perfectly fits for your blog, online magazine or portfolio websites. It is optimized for high-loads, contains WordPress 3.0 menu support, Twitter widget, jQuery-based gallery and WP Post Thumbnails support.
Shaken and Stirred Theme (demo) This theme is perfect for you if you’re in need of a gallery/portfolio website or if you just want a website with a unique grid layout that not many websites have taken full advantage of yet. “Shaken Grid” uses the jQuery Masonry plugin which “arranges elements vertically then horizontally according to a grid.” The result is a gap-less layout even if you have varying post heights.
AutoFocus+ (demo) The theme is designed on an 800px, 8 column grid layout that truly allows your images to shine. The theme boasts a sharp typographic approach with a 22px baseline grid, and a Garamond/Helvetica (Times/Arial for you PC users) font stack that’s much easier to read.
Fotofolio Landscape (demo) A nice dark WordPress theme with sidebar navigation and jQuery-powered lightbox for images. A good choice for photographers who want to feature their works in an online portfolio.
FolioGrid (demo) This theme contains a fluid grid-based layout, jQuery-based transitions and automatically resizing thumbnails. Also, you can choose between various page tamplates, and the theme has a widget-enabled area, too.
Mansion (demo) Mansion is a free photoblogger’s theme for WordPress. It features a flexible-width thumbnail grid for both images and photo journal entries. Mansion is perfect for those who want to primarily showcase their photographs and occasionally write blog posts.
PhotoView (the link is currently unavailable due to server problems of the theme’s author) (demo) PhotoView was designed for displaying photos and videos in a simple and clean manner. The theme has an integrated lightbox. Also, a PSD file is included for easy customization.
SimpleFolio (demo) SimpleFolio is a portfolio theme that includes a blog and a very extensive option page that allows you to exclude all your portfolio items from the blog page. It also includes a front page slider. It has 2 different widget areas and threaded comments, and also supports paged comments and has 2 different page templates for advanced usage. The control of images is done from the post page.
Smashing Multimedia (demo) This theme was designed especially for podcasters, photographers and users who can now easily embed videos and images, rate them and showcase them in their own WordPress-based blog. It has a parent theme and an easily customizable child theme. This WordPress Theme comes with layered PSD source files, a visual help guide and is fully localized ready for you to translate it into your target language.
Fullscreen Photo and Multimedia (demo) Fullscreen is a free one-column photography and multimedia theme for WordPress that can be used for portfolios, photoblogs, videoblogs, and virtually anything else where you want your content to be front and center. It provides visual artists a unique way of presenting their latest work online using a minimalist side-scrolling homepage.
Brave Zeenat (demo) A clean Portfolio Theme ideal for photographers, artists and designers to showcase their portfolios.
Monokrome (demo) This grid-based theme is widget ready and has a Twitter stream and Flickr integration. The column width adapts to the width of the images and the width of the browser viewport.
Portfolio WPESP Theme (live demo) Portfolio – WPESP Theme is a “minimalist” Theme based on the idea of portfolio created by DAILYWP. The Theme is a starting point in the creation of portfolios, using WordPress as CMS.
Selecta (demo, WordPress 3.0+ compatible) Selecta’s rounded edges and bold, modern color palettes make for a fresh theme that’s best suited to blogs where video will be the main focus. The wider-than-usual frames around thumbnails and videos bring to mind the retro-cool of Polaroid photographs and old home movies.
Work-a-holic (demo) Work-a-holic is a free two and three column WordPress theme that focuses mainly on showcasing portfolios for artists, web designers, photographers and illustrators.
BlueBubble WordPress Theme (demo) The theme is clean and simple, contains a theme options page, uses post image thumbnail plugin, has 2 widget ready sidebars and uses jQuery/PHP-based contact form with easy customization. Requires WordPress 2.9+.
WordPress Themes For Bloggers
Lap of Luxury (demo) This theme uses gold in the logo, and white and black are used as the main colors. The 2-col theme contains a sidebar on the right that allows for a large square ad up top, and splitting into 2 columns below that. Comes fully widgetized. A special feature of this theme is the logo changer.
Katana (demo) This theme has a simple layout based on anime or game niche. Theme will be suitable for blogs of such niches. Theme has features like featured post section, post thumbnails, banner ads, adsense, twitter widgets etc. Theme uses custom fonts for various titles. It has an intuitive theme option page which lets you configure the theme.
Koi Theme (demo) Koi is a simplified version of N.Design Studio’s theme (2009 redesign). Key features: multi-level dropdown menus, social media buttons, threaded & paged comments, and sidebar widget plus three footer widgets. This theme includes an option page to manage dropdown menus, favicon, footer tracking code, and social media buttons. Requires WordPress 2.9+.
Bueno Bueno is a clean, minimalistic design which sophistication in both its typography and structure. It uses a grid-based design, has integrated banner ad management, widgetized sidebar and 7 different color schemes. Also, the theme is packaged wth a .po file for easy theme integration.
Notepad Theme (demo) The theme is inspired by the iPhone’s Notes.app. This new theme is widget compatible with threaded comments, social media buttons, and multi-level dropdown menus. It has been tested on WordPress 2.9 with Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and IE7+. It also includes some nice CSS3 enhancement such as rounded corners and drop shadow.
The Side Blog Theme (demo) A free blogging theme with all sorts of customization and content management options.
E-Commerce WordPress Themes
e-Commerce Theme: Kelontong (demo) The theme has a simple layout, clean, professional look, is integrated with WP e-commerce and features a slideshow for products.
Dangdoot (e-commerce theme: free version) (demo) Dangdoot is a free e-commerce theme for WordPress and requires the e-Commerce plug-in.
AppCloud (e-commerce theme: free version) (demo) AppCloud is another free e-commerce theme for WordPress. (It too requires the e-Commerce plug-in).
The Ideal Website The Ideal Website is designed to fit Fibonacci’s Golden Section – otherwise known as the divine proportions. These measurements are said to be the most pleasing to the eye, and have been widely used for everything from judging beauty of a face, to the design of bank notes.
Un.complicated Theme (demo) The layout is minimalist, clean, and organized into three 320px columns. This theme, are built on Starkers and implements the The Golden Grid. here is a wigetized sidebar, which looks like a regular three column row. I have also integrated twitter within the theme, using javascript. All the user has to do is find this line in the index.php page.
Voidy (demo) Voidy is the perfect theme for your great blog. It is clean, clear and beautiful. It is minimalistic two-cloumn theme with the widgets all arranged in the right sidebar. Voidy was designed to make your content stand out and make everything else get out of the way.
Clear (demo) Clear is the perfect theme for great authors. It is clean, clear and beautiful. It is minimalistic one-cloumn theme with the widgets all arranged at the bottom. Clear was designed to make your content stand out and make everything else get out of the way.
Boldy (demo) A free theme that includes support for WordPress 3.0 Menu Management, has in-built slideshows, jQuery-based forms and live form validation as well as a widget for Twitter.
Modernist (demo) The theme is based on the design ideas of Jan Tschichold, Josef Müller-Brockmann, Dieter Rams, and other modernists. Beautifully built yet transparent, it was designed with a focus on optimal typography in order to better showcase your content: text, images and video.
Neutra (demo) Neutra is a simple and elegant theme for WordPress. Grid-based with focus on simplicity and typography.
The Erudite (demo) A theme for writers who want readers, not visitors, traffic, click-throughs, CPMs or what-have-you. Carefully crafted typography and generous use of whitespace lets your writing shine. Version 2 includes a dark theme option.
Magazine-Style Themes
The Columnist The Columnist WordPress theme is inspired by traditional newspaper layouts and the grid structures and typography techniques they employ. It has WordPress thumbnail support, widget support, CSS3 column structure, jQuery animations, custom fields for images and featured latest post area.
The Structure Theme (the link was removed because the pricing was changed after the article was published, demo) The Structure Theme is a free WordPress theme with a modern minimalist design. There are 4 themes included with the Structure Theme download; a white theme, black theme, two column blog and a single column blog design. The theme was created with a simple and clean aesthetic meant to easily adopt the style of the content added to the site. The Structure Theme is also designed with customization in mind. Meaning, with a little work, the theme can be completely personalized to suit your brand.
Manifest The goal with Manifest was to create a clean and streamlined theme that focused on the content and not the distractions. It utilizes a single column, 500 pixel wide layout. No sidebars. No widgets.
Vostok (demo) Vostok is for those who don’t want attention to be distracted from content. Colors and typography have been carefully chosen to achieve maximum legibility with minimum eye fatigue. Also, code has been written with extreme care for web standards and accessibility.
iPhonsta WordPress theme (demo) iPhonsta Theme is made for iPhone but it also looks nice on other mobile phones and gadgets. iPhonsta wordpress theme is an easy way to expand your visitor’s loyality by providing them with a mobile version of your website.
WordPress Mobile Pack The WordPress Mobile Pack includes the following: a mobile switcher to select themes based on the type of user visiting your website; a selection of mobile themes; extra widgets; device adaptation; and a mobile administration panel to allow users to edit the website or write posts while out and about.
WordPress Mobile Theme This is a minimalist theme that can be used to target mobile users. The theme works with any mobile phone of any resolution. And with its light weight, it also drastically reduces loading times.
Möbius Möbius is compatible with iPhone (and iPod Touch), Android, BlackBerry, Windows, Palm Pre and Symbian touchscreen mobile phones.
News Press Mobile The News Press theme is a simple and elegant solution for creating an iPhone-friendly news, blog or other text-centric WordPress website. It comes complete with all the standard WordPress blog features: search, log-in, categories, tags, archives, photos and more.
Carrington Mobile Carrington Mobile is an elegant mobile theme that supports advanced touchscreen browsers (iPhone, Android, BlackBerry, Pre) and that is also backwards-compatible with older mobile devices.
GuruQ (demo) GuruQ is a basic theme designed to be used for Q&A websites. Visitors post questions to the guru, and the guru answers via the WordPress admin screen.
P2 (Like Twitter in a Box) P2 is a theme for WordPress that transforms a mild-mannered blog into a super-blog, with features like inline comments on the home page, a posting form right on the home page, inline editing of posts and comments, real-time updates (to display new posts and comments without reloading) and much more.
Driftwood Contact Manager (demo) Driftwood is a contact manager theme built for WordPress. This easy-to-use theme gives you an effortless way to track interaction with your clients and contacts.
Aggregator (demo) Aggregator is a theme that aggregates feeds of any kind in one place and in an attractive format.
MiniCard (demo) The MiniCard theme supports hCard and vCard microformats, it supports a ton of social networks, it can accommodate some portfolio items (optional), and it does much more, all from the dedicated theme configuration page.
Elastic Theme Editor The awesome Elastic is a visual theme editor and engine for WordPress. It takes a completely innovative approach to theme development. To get an idea of what it can do, check out this video:
Divine (Convert PSD to WordPress) Divine is a Photoshop plug-in that allows you to assign WordPress roles to your main elements (e.g. #footer, #header, etc.). The plug-in then prepares all the files you need. Once you set up FTP access, the tool uploads the theme automatically to your server. Look at this video for insight into how Divine works:
WordPress Debug Theme The WordPress Debug theme allows you to check early on for any possible issues you might have with your WordPress installation. It is quite simple for now, doing only a few things, but it does them very effectively.
Starter And Blank WordPress Themes
Starkers HTML5 WordPress Theme Kit Starkers is a bare bones WordPress theme created to act as a starting point for the theme designer… Free of all style, presentational elements, and non-semantic markup, Starkers is the perfect ‘blank slate’ for your projects, as it’s a stripped-back version of the ‘Default’ theme that ships with WordPress
WP-Constructor WordPress Constructor is a many-in-one theme. It contains 6 sidebar variations and three layouts (and you can create new is easy). You can configure colors and fonts. The theme also has post thumbnails (WordPress 2.9+) and navigation menu customization options (WordPress 3.0+).
Buddymatic Theme Framework Buddymatic is a highly extensible theme framework for WordPress and WordPress MU blogs, including BuddyPress-enabled home and member blogs.
ET Starter Theme for WordPress The ET starter theme lets you easily choose between a one-, two- and three-column layout. It supports the WP-PageNavi, Twitter Tools and Contact Form 7 plug-ins and also includes a built-in jQuery drop-down menu.
WordPress Skeleton Theme The feature-rich WordPress Skeleton Theme has been developed to speed up and streamline your WordPress development. One of its outstanding out-of-the-box features is CSS support for the iPhone and iPad (both portrait and landscape); simply edit the iPhone.css and iPad.css files.
Paintbox CMS (demo) Paintbox CMS is a grid-based CMS theme layered on my actual theme-canvas Paintbox. It comes with a smooth 960 grid layout plus some creative jQuery effects for content loading.
BLANK Blank is a theme with all the functionality of a typical WordPress theme but almost none of the styling. The idea is that using this as your base theme is far easier than using one that is already styled.
Whether you’re a student looking for supplemental learning or you’re in the workforce but thirsty for knowledge, you don’t have to drop thousands of dollars in tuition to enjoy a top-notch education from some of the best schools in the world.
Computer photo by marcopako; university building photo by J-a-x.
While most online resources won’t grant you a college degree, there’s a lot more to the internet than Wikipedia when it comes to learning. Whether you learn best through video or text, want to a year-long course or just to touch up on a few topics, there are more than a few places online that can give you the full experience. In fact, there are enough that it can get quite overwhelming, so we’ve rounded up the best resources to make it all a bit more manageable. Here are some of the best places to get an education without ever leaving your computer.
Video Courses and Lectures
You won’t really notice much of a difference between sitting in front of a screen watching a lecture and sitting in on a lecture in person—apart from the fact that if you do have a burning question, you can’t raise your hand to get it answered. These video sites host lectures and full courses from some of the best schools on the planet.
First Stop: The OpenCourseware Consortium
MIT began their OpenCourseWare initiative and published their first batch of courses online in 2002. In 2005, they formed the OpenCourseWare Consortium, which partnered with other universities to bring free education to the masses via the internet. Most courses offered on OpenCourseWare are available as free audio or video lectures for free, and under open licenses. The easiest way to find a course you’re interested in is to search the OpenCourseWare Consortium site, which aggregates courses from over 22 universities in the US alone, including MIT, Johns Hopkins, Tufts, and the University of Michigan, and features courses on tons of different subjects, from business and economics to architecture and physics. Most universities have their specialities, of course (MIT, for example, has a bounty of resources in engineering), but between them all, you should be able to find pretty much anything you want. It doesn’t include every university participating in the movement—for example, Yale seems strangely absent from the list, despite their open course initiative (which is, of course, yet another option)—but it’s more than enough to get you started.
The Khan Academy
The Khan Academy is a bit more narrow than the others; as it isn’t an aggregator, it’s mostly the work of one man, an electronic chalkboard, and YouTube. It focuses mostly on math, from basic arithmetic to calculus, as well as a bit of science. It has a great reputation for teaching them in an understandable manner, though, so if you’re in the market for those particular subjects, the Khan Academy is a great place to start (and, of course, it’s open source too).
Academic Earth
Previously mentionedAcademic Earth aggregates lectures from 19 different universities on a variety of subjects. The idea is similar to that of the OpenCourseWare Consortium, although it’s slightly smaller and organized differently—they host all of the material on their site instead of merely linking you to other universities’ pages. Its search engine also allows for slightly more specific searching—that is, instead of just searching for courses (such as Calculus II) you can search for a specific topic or class (such as limits). You can also browse by subject, such as Computer Science, Environmental Studies, Literature, or Philosophy and Religion, as well as check out their featured courses and lectures. Each lecture is rated by users of the site, so you know which ones are good sources and which few you might want to steer clear of. Academic Earth also contains some of the universities not listed in the OpenCourseWare Consortium, so while it isn’t necessarily better, it is another good resources to broaden your search a bit.
iTunes U
The last video resource is the ever-growing iTunes U (accessible through the iTunes Store at the bottom of the front page). If you’re an iPod, iPhone, or iPad user, iTunes U is fantastic because you can download these lectures right to your device and take them with you. Furthermore, like Academic Earth, iTunes U allows for searching by specific topic or lecture, not just full courses. It also has a huge database, so if you’re searching for something a bit more niche (like a course on American Presidents or Dead Media), you’re likely to find it—the only problem is that it can get a bit overwhelming if you just want to browse courses. If you’re looking for something more general, you’re probably best off going through OpenCourseWare Consortium or Academic Earth, finding the course you want, and then looking it up on iTunes to download to your mobile device. That said, if you’re looking to broaden your knowledge beyond the more traditional college courses, spending some time browsing iTunes U might yield some very interesting results.
Text-Based Learning
If you find it easier to learn reading at your own pace (rather than watch a professor drone on in front of you), there are a few sites that provide more text-based learning. In addition, if you find yourself getting lost in one of the above video or audio courses, you may find it easier to reference back to a text source. Unfortunately, probably since it’s much easier to just videotape your lectures and put them up on YouTube than it is to write a book, you’ll find less selection in this area—but we’ve still found several sites that can lead you through a number of subjects.
Wikiversity
Wikiversity (and its sister site, Wikibooks) is a fantastic resource for all kinds of information. Users can contribute their own projects or research to the wiki, and it hosts a ton of textbook-like resources, organized in a tree—for example, at the top level you have categories such as Humanities, Life Sciences, Mathematics, or Computer Science. Going to the Humanities portal allows you to choose from subjects like Art & Design, Law, and Language, which then breaks down further into specific courses. Courses can provide you with anything from links to a Wikibook for that subject (which is a very well-done online textbook), courses on other sites (including some of the sites mentioned above), and online textbooks from other universities. If you’re looking for text-based courses, this is the place to go.
Textbook Revolution
We’ve also mentionedTextbook Revolution before, and it deserves a little more attention. Textbook Revolution’s goal is to bring together as many free textbooks on the net as they can. They’ve got a fairly good database too, which is searchable or browsable by subject (such as Biology, Economics, or Health Sciences) and license. Some of the books are pretty good, but it’s a bit of a crapshoot at times—I, for example, only found one statistics book on the site and it left quite a bit to be desired. Other subjects had a few different books of varying quality, so you may find something that works—it’s just not the first site I would go to.
Straight from Universities
It’s also worth noting that a few other universities offer online textbooks, such as Carnegie Mellon’s Open Learning Initiative and the Supplemental Resources section of MIT’s aforementioned OpenCourseWare (in fact, while OpenCourseWare focuses on video, they have a ton of other resources like online textbooks, lecture notes, and assignments for many of their classes—especially the aforementioned engineering classes they are known for). There doesn’t seem to be a large database of which universities offer this, so you may have to search through universities manually (or see whether your chosen video course comes with an online textbook).
Your Friendly Neighborhood Search Engine
We’d be remiss not to mention that, if all else fails, Google is a great portal to finding other sources and putting together your own education. If you’ve mastered your search techniques and obscure tricks, you should be able to find pretty much anything you’re looking for just by doing an internet-wide search. Again, it isn’t the first place I would go—it can get pretty overwhelming—but if you’re looking for something really specific or can’t find what you’re looking for on the above sites, you may be able to find it on Google.
Whether you’re a current student looking for extra resources to help you out or you’re just looking to expand you’re learning, these sites should get you started down the right path. We tried to focus on the best options, but if you’ve got a favorite site that we didn’t mention, share it with us in the comments.
Hypebot points us to the news that in the latest issue of Rolling Stone, the magazine supposedly (can anyone confirm that this is real? — Update: thanks to commenters who pointed out that this is real… but it’s from 2002) has a nice ‘big fat thanks to record execs’ for pretty much screwing up their chance to embrace the way music is being shared and exchanged online:
If you don’t have images turned on, here’s the text:
A big fat thanks to record execs
Thank you for fighting the good fight against Internet MP3 file-swapping. Because of you, millions of kids will stop wasting time listening to new music and seeking out new bands. No more spreading the word to complete strangers about your artists. No more harmful exposure to thousands of bands via Internet radio either. With any luck they won’t talk about music at all. You probably knew you’d make millions by embracing the technology. After all, the kids swapping were like ten times more likely to buy CD’s, making your cause all the more admirable. It must have cost a bundle in future revenue, but don’t worry — computer are just a fad anyway, and the Internet is just plain stupid.
Rolling Stone
Of course, it’s probably worth pointing out that Rolling Stone isn’t exactly known for embracing the internet, either — recently letting a bunch of other publications get the first mover traffic on its story that resulted in a shakeup in the military chain of command. Still, assuming this ad is accurate, it’s only taken the industry’s leading magazine, what, a dozen years to catch up with what many music fans have been saying since Napster came on the scene. Update: Well, now that it turns out this is from 2002, we can give Rolling Stone at least some props for figuring this out earlier — but note that the RIAA execs absolutely did not listen. 2003 was when they ramped up their legal campaign against file sharers directly.
Keeping a house, or even a modest apartment, in tip-top shape can feel overwhelming. The Hierarchy of Cleaning aims to help you prioritize your cleaning needs.
Whether you’re a student looking for supplemental learning or you’re in the workforce but thirsty for knowledge, you don’t have to drop thousands of dollars in tuition to enjoy a top-notch education from some of the best schools in the world.
